Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Every Monday?”

  The man looked up at her through a hedgerow of facial hair, reacting warily to the question, Sumi smiling pleasantly to allay suspicion.

  “Starts things out fresh for me,” Burt finally said, “gets the routine going. I like the Foundation to run smooth as an engine, smooth and predictable. Guess that’s what Doc Crane appreciates about me.”

  “I think he appreciates you for many reasons, especially because you’re dependable.” Sumi hated that she was going to have to come through every Sunday night and remove whatever she planted. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. Ten transmitters were stuck to her hands, one to each finger and thumb tip.

  “How so?” They finished the circle. Hill hit the down button, and the gondola swayed silently toward the floor.

  “Crane’s not here. You could have put off the sweep until Monday. No one would have been the wiser.” The gondola shuddered slightly as it reached ground level. They climbed out, Sumi walking over to admire Patagonia on the globe, her hand resting on the Malvinas Islands. She could feel Hill’s eyes on the back of her head, tearing at her.

  “Couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do it. Being foreman for Doc Crane is the best damned job… the best damned time I’ve ever had in my life. I’m embarrassed to tell you how much he pays me. Hell, he gives me a bungalow on the mountain free of charge… and it’s just as good as his. I’ll tell you, Sumi, when Crane sides with a man, he sticks with him. That means something to me. He’s done the same for you. How do you think you got moved up to Senior Grant Advisor? A Nobel Prize opens a lot of doors. Crane went and talked to the Board for you.”

  At his words Sumi’s hands tightened involuntarily. Damn! She accidentally left three transmitters on the globe, two on Gran Malvina and one on Isla Soledad. The size of dust motes, they’d never be seen, but the transfer activated the units. She hoped Hill wouldn’t turn the debugger on again in here. She coughed, turning to him. “Did that not also benefit Dr. Crane?” she said quietly. “My new position certainly enabled him to get grants, and quickly.”

  “And what the hell’s wrong with that, Mr. Chan?” he said, now offended and reverting to formality.

  Sumi looked at the floor, and despite all rationalization, she was ashamed.

  “Here,” Hill said, handing her a dorphed lemon drop. “Even out.”

  “Thanks,” Sumi said, tossing the thing in her mouth as Hill turned and walked toward the west wing of labs and storerooms. She’d have to be selective as to where to plant successfully in the west wing. She wanted the places Crane frequented the most.

  The dorph took hold quickly, her mood stabilizing as she caught up with Hill, but there were some things even dorph couldn’t cure. One of them was the bitter sting of guilt.

  “You want to slug down a couple when I’m done here?” Hill asked as they walked, and she knew he was suspicious. “The view’s pretty goddamned spectacular from my porch. On a really clear night, you can see the Late Show on the side of the Moon.”

  “You’ve got a deal, Burt. But may I suggest that we do our slugging from a special bottle I’ve got in my suitcase?”

  “A man after my own heart,” Hill said, and Sumi wondered how far they’d get pumping each other for information.

  Hill touched his wristpad. “GET OFF YOUR WIDE LOAD ASSES AND GET BACK TO WORK!” his voice boomed, graveyard-shift welders, programmers, and housekeepers jumping up and hurrying to their workstations.

  “Crane usually takes you on his trips, doesn’t he?” Sumi asked.

  Hill frowned, genuine concern on his face. “Yeah. Don’t like it when he goes alone.” He shook his head. “Hope somebody reminds him to eat.”

  Sumi looked at her watch. “I should imagine that he’s in-country by now.”

  The man laughed. “By now he’s in-country and running the whole goddamned show.”

  At that exact moment, Lewis Crane stood up to his knees in the midst of a nightmare of ash and mud in what had once been the coastal city of Le Precheur, Martinique, screaming in lousy French, “Silence, s’il vous plaît… silence!” to the townspeople who were trying to dig their families out of the mud.

  The mountain still rumbled and lightning flashed overhead as Lanie planted her sensors into the side of Pelee, banging the poles in herself with a ball peen hammer.

  They were on the eastern face of Pelee; lava flows still bubbled over the southern face. Light and heat reached through the dense curtain of ash that hung over everything. It was sometime before morning; but day or night didn’t matter here. It would be perpetual night until the next big rain washed the ash from the skies. Farther to the south, Fort de France was in flames. Liang Int people were blowing buildings with dynamite trying to re-establish firebreaks.

  Though Crane had been pumping data through the SISMA net, he knew it would be days before the international community mobilized to send aid, days before the citizens of Le Precheur had anything but their own meager resources to depend upon. But he also knew that local resources were the heart of all disaster management, local citizens taking care of their own. The fade-away time, the mortality rate for people trapped in collapsed houses under tons of mud, was fifty percent at six hours. Every minute beyond that increased the percentage. Le Precheur already had been buried for nearly eight hours. His guidance was essential if they were to take any of the victims back from the belly of the beast.

  “Écoutez donc!” he called out. The area resembled a junkyard of broken mortar and skeletal wooden beams thrusting out of a sea of oozing mud. “S’il vous plaît!”

  This whole chain of islands was volcanic in origin, all born of the fire of the earthquake. They’d been called the West Indies at one time, then the European Community had gotten Martinique from the French and called it For Sale. Liang had owned it outright, along with its citizens, for a number of years.

  The living ran helter skelter all around him, some digging into the mud with their hands, others using construction company earthmovers. They screamed and cried while their buried loved ones fought for breath.

  A man, crazed, talking to himself, hobbled past dragging the remnants of a bed through the pumice-laden sludge. He was covered with soot and caked mud—like all of them.

  Crane moved to the man, bumping him away from the bed, the man continuing on without it, oblivious. Crane pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it, then tossed it onto the bed. Flames rose immediately. He turned and motioned for the trucks of equipment he’d had ferried from the landing strip on Dominica Island to the north.

  Five huge trucks literally plowed into what had once been the town square, Crane yelling at the drivers to start beeping their compressed air horns. They did, raising an earsplitting din that turned all eyes toward the man beside the burning bed.

  “Écoutez donc!” he screamed again; this time the dazed and distraught people listened. “I am here to save you,” he shouted in French, “but you must listen to me. You are making too much noise. You cannot hear the cries of the survivors. You must stop talking. You must shut off the bulldozers; they will only bury your loved ones. My trucks are full of picks and shovels. Get those. Dig where you hear voices—we must all be quiet and listen. If you hear a voice, verify it with someone else, make sure of the location, then dig carefully. Those trapped in the rubble will die if you don’t do what I say. The men should dig. Women and children should help carry away the debris. Use wheelbarrows, planks, doors, anything you can pile up with mud and rock. Move quickly, but silently. Medical personnel are here to help with those who have been hurt. If you find an injured person, don’t pull him from the wreckage until a doctor has checked him out. You are good people; you will understand the wisdom of my words.”

  He repeated his message in English, then in Chinese. When he was finished, he was so hoarse he could barely speak.

  Wide-eyed Americans climbed out of the trucks. Crane loved and hated people. They were capable of gallantry and ignominy all at the same time. “You were briefed o
n the plane,” he croaked. “You know what to do. Get with it!”

  The area calmed to an eerie silence as the truck drivers turned on their high beams to illuminate the area. Lanie joined Crane in the center of the pantomime.

  “The sensors are in place,” she whispered. “And you were right. The information we’re pulling out of the ground will be the best education I or your computers could ever have. We’re standing on a living, breathing seismic heart.”

  He nodded, looking skyward. “Make sure the data is transmitting to the computers,” he whispered in return, “then see to the satellite transmission back home.”

  “You keep looking up,” she said.

  He was shaking his head. “My arm,” he whispered. “This bastard’s not finished with us yet. The people have got to be taken from here as soon as possible. We’ll load trucks with the injured and get them right down to the docks.”

  “J’ai entendu quelqu’un,” someone called excitedly from farther down the square. Then someone else, “J’ai entendu!”

  “Dig!” Crane called through cupped hands. “Bêcher!”

  They worked diligently, quietly, everyone pulling together. Crane moved over the face of the cataclysm, trying to take back the lives that the monster would have for its own. As he went, he spoke with his workers, explaining void-to-volume ratios for air in collapsed buildings and the likeliest places to find survivors. He helped with the unloading and placement of the amplified listening equipment, thermal-imaging cameras, and fiberoptical visual probes stuck directly into wreckage that helped find more people, the living and the dead. Surveillance technology sometimes came in handy. He felt neither good nor bad about what he was doing, only urgent. His obsession brought him here; his anger held him fast.

  Soon people—remarkably, many of them alive—were being brought out of the rubble. Her computer work on line, Lanie joined the others to help with the triage of patients, field-dressing wounds, then getting them into the trucks. Weary hours passed. She looked up once and saw Crane through the confusion, giving orders like a general. A woman following two stretcherbearers and their burden, broke away and ran to Crane, throwing her arms around him and hugging and kissing him in gratitude. A look of horror swept over his face and he stiffened, pushing her away as if afraid of the contact.

  Lanie labored under the most intense fear she’d ever known. She’d been too naive to be scared at Sado. Here, she knew what they were up against. She felt on knife edge. She wanted to trust Crane’s good sense to see them through, but she had begun to learn that the man had no sense at all, only cunning. His continual looking toward the sky didn’t help her feel any better.

  Then she saw it, and her whole body tensed in shock. Lightning, pale pinkish lightning, was jumping from the monolith of the mountainside to the clouds and back again. Suddenly it seemed to be springing from everywhere, crackling loudly, like cannon fire.

  She ran through the confusion of increasingly desperate and tired workers, finding Crane amidst the partially cleared wreckage of a large house whose top floor was simply gone, its staircase leading to nowhere. A teenage boy lay at the foot of the staircase, his legs pinned beneath a wooden beam. Several workers were improvising a hoist to raise the beam while Crane and a USC intern knelt beside the boy.

  “Crane,” she said. “The sky—”

  “Not now,” he said, then turned to the workers who were in the process of levering up the beam with another crossbeam. “Don’t take it off!”

  “Why not?” the intern asked. “His injuries seem minor. We can get him on a truck and—”

  “Good lesson, doctor,” Crane said. “Ever heard of crush syndrome?”

  The young man, smeared with mud and soot, just stared. “In a case like this,” Crane said, “we’ve got to treat in situ before we risk moving him. He’s had almost ten hours under this beam to build up toxins where the blood flow was cut off. You pull him out of here now, he’d walk away fine and be dead of a heart attack in an hour.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We flood him with fluids and antitoxins intravenously, pump him up. When we move the beam, his body’s prepared to deal with the toxin rush into the system.”

  “I’ll get the gear,” the young man said, hurrying off.

  “Okay, talk to me,” Crane said to Lanie as he bent to the boy, brushing strands of hair out of his face.

  “J’ai peur,” the boy whispered.

  “Moi aussi, mais pas trop,” Crane replied, then looked at Lanie.

  “The lightning,” she said. “It’s jumping up from the island.”

  Crane, his face a mask, rose without a word and moved out of the debris to look upward as the intern hurried back into the wrecked house to start an IV.

  Lightning crackled all around them, played up and down the rumbling mountain like fiery rain. “Everyone’s got to go,” he said.

  “What is it?” Lanie asked as he walked off.

  “St. Elmo’s Fire,” he called over his shoulder. He began shouting at his people to gather up whoever was left and get them to the docks.

  Lanie ran to catch up.

  “The whole atmosphere’s charged with static electricity,” he said. “Something’s going to happen.”

  Suddenly, Le Precheur was all motion; people climbed onto the trucks or simply ran in panic. The rumbling got louder, more intense as heavy ash rained down on them. Lanie focused on Crane to avoid thinking about the danger and ran to keep up as he darted back to the house they’d just come from.

  They moved into the wreckage. “Get out of here, doctor,” he said, taking the IV from his hand.

  “But my patient—”

  “Get the hell out of here now!” He turned to the workers as the doctor left. They were busy propping the lever beam atop a rock, making a fulcrum.

  “Sauve qui peut!” he yelled, and the men, frightened already, hurried out.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Crane said to Lanie, his eyes intent on the plastic fluid bag he held. “Go… go!”

  “Not without you.”

  “I’m giving you an order, lady.”

  “You’ve probably seen how well I respond to orders,” she said. “Look, you may as well save your breath.”

  His jaw muscles tightened. “Get on that lever. When I give you the word, push with all your strength and I’ll drag him out, okay?”

  She moved in the confined space to the crossbeam and waited, listening to the sounds of trucks roaring off for the docks and the mountain snarling and spitting.

  “So why are you staying behind?” he asked as he held the boy’s hand.

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Maybe I wanted you to see how seriously I take the job.”

  He laughed then, deep and genuine. “You’ve convinced me. But I don’t think I’m the person at the Crane Foundation you need to convince.”

  She ignored the reference to Newcombe. “Are we going to die?” she asked instead.

  “Yeah… probably. Okay?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  They waited for the slow IV to drain. Crane spoke softly to the boy as the ground rumbled menacingly beneath them, and as soon as the bag was empty, he ripped it out and tossed it away. “Go! Go!” he yelled.

  Lanie strained on the beam. The smell of sulfur was overpowering. There was no panic within her, only professional detachment. She’d do her job. It’s why she came. She surprised herself with her calm. Amazed herself.

  She heard Crane grunting even as she strained on the lever and the ash was choking her, making her gag.

  “Got him,” Crane yelled, using his good arm to hoist the slight young man over his shoulder then stagger up in the debris. Lanie released her lever and stumbled with him, the square empty as they slogged through sucking, knee-deep mud.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now we… oh my.” Crane was looking up again, his eyes wide with wonderment.

  Above them, the summit of Pelee was suffused with a d
ull red glow that became brighter and brighter as they watched. Total darkness lit up to brilliant daylight. Without warning the glow broke away from the peak and rushed down the mountainside a hundred yards from them. It wasn’t lava, but a red-hot avalanche of rock with a billowy surface. There were boulders and the remnants of trees within the pulsating destruction, huge rocks which stood out as streaks of throbbing red tumbling and throwing off showers of sparks.

  The velocity was terrific, the avalanche rushing down the entire mountain and into the sea in seconds, narrowly missing them.

  “I’ve heard of this but never seen it,” Crane said low, his voice hushed with awe, and perhaps with exhaustion too, for he still held the young man on his shoulder.

  “Is it over?”

  “No.”

  Just as the crimson glow from the avalanche faded, it was replaced with a monstrous cloud shaping itself against the now visible sky over the landslide’s site. The cloud rose from the path of the avalanche and moved along its course, gaining momentum, as if lighter particles of volcanic material had begun to rise slightly and continue forward as the heavier particles settled to earth.

  The cloud was globular, its surface bulging with masses that swelled and multiplied with a terrible energy. Lanie was hypnotized by it, barely feeling Crane’s bad arm pushing at her. The cloud rushed forward, directly toward them, boiling and changing its form every instant. Ground hugging, it billowed at them in surging masses, coruscating with lightning.

  “Back inside the wreckage!” he yelled at her over the terrible hot gale force wind that led the cloud. “Now! Move!”

  She moved.

  They were being pelted with a rain of stones the size of walnuts. The hot roar moved nearer, nearer. Crane knew he had about twenty seconds to figure out how to protect them from two-thousand-degree temperatures that would suck the oxygen right out of their lungs.

  The workers had opened a ten-foot clearance cave to rescue the boy, but it was giving in now, collapsing in upon itself. A beam squeaked loudly, creaking, then snapping. He saw it in terrible slow motion as it swung at them, catching Lanie full force on the side of the head, knocking her to her knees. She began weaving from that position, gagging loudly.