Foy grinned as he followed Keene’s gaze from the bleak scene outside, then back to the interior. “I need the window to remind me that there’s still a real universe out there that we need to be concerned about,” he said. “It’s easy to become focused on the immediate and the immaterial if one’s attention is always directed inward—down underground.”
“What’s the farther-away and the material, then?” Keene asked.
“For a start, a whole world to rebuild. The world that you last saw as radar images scanned through a cloud canopy”—Foy gestured at the window—”a bit like that outside. Would you like to see what’s been happening back there?” Before Keene could answer, Foy voiced a command to the room’s house manager and motioned toward the table set at a T with his desk. Keene took a chair facing the display wall as one of the screens came to life. Vorse sat down across a corner from him. Foy himself remained standing.
“This is the latest from the probes that we’ve been keeping in high orbit,” Vorse commented. It sounded as if this had been intended—not something that had just occurred to Foy in response to Keene’s question.
Earth still looked much as it had from the shuttle in orbit after the escape from Mexico—a dark ball of smoke and cloud stirred into whorls and streamers by storms that could still be ferocious in places. But the chasms cutting down into the murk were less pronounced and sharp than they had been, indicating that the winds were dropping. Debris from Athena’s tail was coalescing into the beginnings of a visible ring system. The last time Keene had talked to Charlie Hu, estimates were that the rings would take several centuries or more to decay away.
A pattern in pale blue appeared superposed on the globe, outlining the familiar oceans and continents as they had existed through recorded history. Then a new set in red added themselves, showing the reconstructions from radar mapping of the surface as it had become. Keene still found the implications as stupefying as if he were seeing such images for the first time. Foy and Vorse remained silent, giving him a moment to absorb the meaning fully.
He was looking, literally, at the birth of a new world. It was now no longer questioned that the whole theory of planetary geology as it had been accepted on Earth would have to be rewritten from the beginnings. In the course of three years—and mostly in the early part of that!—Earth’s surface had undergone changes which according to the previous doctrine should have taken hundreds of thousands of years or even more to unfold. But the doctrine had been wrong. What had been taken as evidence of slow processes operating over immense spans of time had turned out to be results of a period of relative quiescence between cataclysmic upheavals during which mountains rose, continents were split asunder, and oceans raged across the landscapes, renewing the world not once but several times within the span of human experience. The trifling measures of erosion, sedimentation, and plate movements wrongly extrapolated back to yield time scales in the order of millions of years were just the final, dying phases of events that had happened with terrifying speed—like shrinking puddles and trickles in ditches as all that remains to tell of yesterday’s storm.
Earth’s passage through Athena’s magnetosphere had induced enormous electrical currents in the metal-bearing regions of the mantle and crust, producing heat that had opened up rifts and poured lava sheets over huge expanses of the surface, melted much of the polar ices, and in some places caused the seas to boil. But then, sudden cooling under the pall of smoke and dust from widespread surface conflagrations fed by Jovian hydrocarbons had caused massive precipitations of snow and ice from the saturated atmosphere, in some areas hundreds of feet deep within days. With the Earth’s axis shifted ten degrees, new polar regions were appearing, centered on northern Alaska and the area south of Africa, and a corresponding shift and tilt was anticipated for the yet-to-emerge climatic bands. Sea level had not altered significantly. The changes that had occurred in coastlines were due mainly to the lateral movements, uplifts and depressions, of land masses.