No. It wasn’t in his nature. His inability to strike a compromise between what was right and what wasn’t, and the accompanying compulsion to hurl himself totally into doing what needed to be done, regardless of the odds, had caused him to give up a career to spend half his life fighting the establishments of a degenerate science in the world that was gone, and to bring a dozen people out to the new world beginning. And the same qualities had emerged again, when the new world he had pledged himself to was threatened.
As Cavan had known he would.
* * *
Keene and Vicki carried on walking slowly between the glinting forms of the domes and structures after Cavan and Alicia had left them. The base didn’t look so much like a construction site these days. With the essentials taken care of, a lot of cleaning up had been going on, and Serengeti center was taking on a little style and color. Sapling trees that had been found in some of the lower regions had been brought in and replanted, and plots of grass and shrubs were being carefully nurtured. In the day, bright streaks and patches of iridescent blue in the thinning cloud were becoming commonplace, and flowers were beginning to appear in greater numbers. Beds of them were being fertilized and planted around and through the residential area.
“So did Vorse try to tempt you today with all that exciting work waiting back on Titan?” Vicki said, glancing at him. It was a veiled way of asking if he was going back to Saturn. Vicki would be staying on, to continue her work with Luthis.
Standing policy was to keep at least one long-range vessel stationed at Earth at all times. Surya had departed for Kronia some time ago with a consignment mainly of flora and fauna, but with Aztec now in orbit, the Varuna was being readied for a return trip, to be refitted to more permanent standards and equipped with Yarbat arrays. A recurring topic between Vicki and Keene had been the question of whether, with Earth’s immediate emergency now over, he would return to resume his work with Pang Yarbat’s group on Titan. Inwardly, Keene had thought he would, since that had been the pattern of his life since coming to Kronia; but he knew too that Vicki had her own personal reasons and hopes for asking, and he hadn’t wanted to deal with the issue until it became necessary. So, he had never voiced a final decision one way or the other.
But as he turned over his feelings in his mind, he became aware that somehow the equations didn’t come out the way they had before. On Earth, before and during the Athena crisis, and all through his years at Kronia, always there had been a sense of an overriding imperative that placed its own demands above personal wants and worldly things. Now, suddenly, he felt . . . free. It was as if some power that had laid first claim on him acknowledged that his dues were paid, and was releasing him from its service.
He was being unusually long in replying. Vicki looked at him. When he answered, it was from a completely different direction.
“Do you still have this Kronian belief that you used to talk about with Sariena, of some intelligence, guiding principle—whatever you want to call it—at work behind what goes on, shaping the way it all unfolds?”
Vicki looked surprised. “Yes—more so than ever, after what we’re finding out about living things. What . . . ?” But her beginning of a question trailed away, as if she saw there was no reason to complete it.
“Do you think it sometimes reaches down to individuals and enlists them to its purpose when it needs to, and lets them go when it’s done? Or do we just project outward something that’s really in ourselves?”
“Does it matter? The outcome’s still the same.”
“We might be building a civilization to go out among the stars looking for something that’s not there,” Keene said.
“Maybe it isn’t where you go, but what you have to do to get there that finds you the answers,” Vicki replied.