If he hadn’t known otherwise, he might have thought he was inside an old Terran ocean liner rather than a spacecraft, Jansinick Wernstecki thought to himself as he looked around the aft cargo hold. He had come back to inspect the securing of the “rafts” of massive lithofracture exciters that the ship was carrying. Commander Reese had advised that new orders changing their flight plan were expected from Saturn. With the prospect of course changes and maneuvering, such a check on the heavy cargo was routine. What wasn’t routine, of course, was to be anticipating orders to slow down or stand off after all the hurry to get Aztec and its payload to Earth as soon as possible.
A call tone sounded from his compad. It was Merlin Friet, Wernstecki’s colleague who had come with him from the Tesla Center on Titan. “Jan, how’s it going there?” he queried.
“I’m just about done. Nothing amiss. What’s up?”
“I’m with Vicki and Luthis in the dining mess. Vicki’s been talking about how their planetary theory has been coming together. It’s fascinating. I thought you might like to join us.”
“Sure. I’m on my way.” Wernstecki cut the connection and began making his way forward out of the hold and through the ship.
It was obvious to all by now that something ominous was happening on Earth. Communications were still spasmodic, and then always with the same people. Wernstecki had sent several messages for Keene, but no replies had been forthcoming. The responses to his questions were evasive or nonsensical. The claim of interference from electrical disturbances in Earth’s vicinity was wearing thin.
Few now doubted that there had to be some connection with the disappearance at the same time of Valcroix and the Pragmatist leaders at Saturn, and the prevalent guess was that some kind of attempt was being made to seize the Terran base as the beginnings of an independent political system. Many thought that the Trojan had to be involved also, although the mechanics of how the different units scattered over such vast distances were to be brought together was unclear.
Wernstecki was unable to relate to the motives or psychology that would drive men to act in such ways. Born on Enceladus, a Kronian, he had grown up in tune with the internal pulse and rhythm of the new cultural organism that was coming into being, expressing its inner imperative to expand both through space, by encompassing and eventually leaving the Solar System, and through time by becoming the Future of the human species. Just as the previous high cultures that had been born, flourished, and then when their span was over, like any other organism, died—Babylonian, Chinese, Hindu, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Arabian, Central American, European, North American—had been driven to their highest achievements in thought, art, technical mastery, and social organization by their religion, so Kronia was an expression of a religion, though not expressed in the same terms as the earlier ones. Wernstecki was very conscious of the life-force emanating from the collective Kronian soul that was in the process of awakening, that united him and all others who shared it.
It wasn’t a geographical or territorial thing that had to do with any place of origin. The pioneers who founded Kronia had come from every place. What they shared was a world view that rejected the soulless battlefield of economics that Earth had become, with life itself reduced to a pointless mechanical process with no other purpose that the accumulation of money, carrying in them instead the vision of what could be.
But the forces that had been brought to Kronia when Earth died, and which were now revealing themselves, had no place in such an organism. Products of an age that had already been dead, they would reduce all of life to the level of animal subsistence and the mechanical caricature that their sciences had created. Because they comprehended nothing beyond, the aliens wanted to raise once more to eminence the accumulation of material wealth as sole object of existence, and if that were resisted, to impose it by force, because that was the only way they knew how. And, indeed, that was the only term to describe the phenomenon, Wernstecki reflected: Alien. A foreign invader in the Kronian organism, living to a different imperative that was in conflict with the host. He worried that the host might have recognized the threat and reacted to it too late.