“Maybe two years. Gets a little worse each day.”
Other people were walking toward them along the hall. “This isn’t going to stop,” Newcombe said. “It will eventually destroy this whole section of tunnels.”
“Allah protects,” Ishmael said easily. A crowd of about twenty people, mostly men, surrounded them. Some of them were teenagers. And all of them were armed. “We’ve lost other tunnels.”
A young woman in a black jumpsuit was at his elbow, her face inquisitive, her eyes were Ishmael’s eyes. “You must be Khadijah,” Newcombe said.
“Well, you’ve brought us a mind reader, my brother,” she said, the group laughing.
“This is Daniel Newcombe, the man I’ve told you about.”
“Oh?” Khadijah said. “The man who doesn’t have the courage to join with our Jihad?”
“Yeah,” Newcombe said, staring her down. “That’s me.” He turned to Ishmael. “Have you ever checked the radon levels down here?”
“No.”
“I’ll send you some equipment. Radon can be deadly. Best to know what we’re deal—”
“I trust there are no Elysian Faults and radon emissions in North Carolina,” Ishmael said.
Newcombe stared at him, the true zealot at home with his inventions. Or a visionary. Like Crane. “You want me to butt out… I’ll butt out.”
“I want you to butt in,” Ishmael said, smiling widely and slapping him on the back. He pointed toward the ceiling. “But up there, Brother, not down here. Up there. Come on.”
They went to a pale green door with a crescent moon and single star of Islam painted on it. Ishmael ushered Newcombe inside what looked like a large briefing room with chairs, a stage, small kitchen and break area.
“We’ll meet my brother Martin,” Ishmael said, leading him toward a far door. Khadijah walked with them, a frown on her face, as she sized up Newcombe.
Newcombe saw guns. And ammunition. Everywhere. Boxes of ammunition stacked high against the walls.
He hadn’t seen a gun in fifteen years, ever since personal security had become the national priority. Everyone who could afford bodyguards and security systems had them. Offensive weapons had become easily detectable by X-raydar, automatically marking anyone carrying them as a criminal and, consequently, fair game for legal defensive retaliatory response. Offensive weapons, not surprisingly, had fallen into disuse.
Ishmael took him into an office where a middle-aged man dressed in a white robe and small white fez smiled through his salt-and-pepper beard. He was lean, coiled like a snake.
“I have just heard the reports,” he said. “Allah, in his infinite wisdom, has declined to let it rain on the War Zone tonight.”
“Good news,” Ishmael said. “Brother Daniel, this is my brother, Martin Aziz. It was Martin’s idea to approach you.”
“Asalaamu aleycum,” Aziz said, leaning over a desk that separated them to hug Newcombe fiercely, then kiss him on both cheeks. He pointed to miniature security teevs covering the far wall. “I noticed you had some trouble tonight.”
“My doing, I’m afraid,” Newcombe said, stealing a glance at Khadijah, who was rolling her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Aziz said. “They never got past the phony sewer system. They found another manhole and climbed back out, chasing several projections we planted for them. Sit down, Brother Newcombe. It’s you we must worry about now, since the FPF knows you are with us.”
“What will they do to me?” Newcombe asked, taking a hard-backed chair near the desk, Ishmael and his sister sitting on a couch across from him.
“Impossible to say.” Ishmael shrugged. “They do what they want. Make up the rules as they go. Have you ever known anyone to come out of an FPF jail?”
“No,” Newcombe said, “but I’ve never known any criminals… I mean, not until now.”
Everyone laughed, even Khadijah.
“I think you’re safe,” Aziz said, “as long as you’re associated with Liang. Away from their protection, who knows?”
“Could Crane have planted your bug,” Ishmael asked, “to keep you under control?”
“That’s very unlikely. Brother Ishmael, he and I are scientists. All we’re trying to do is make life a little better on this planet. Is that so difficult to—”
“That’s all you want,” Khadijah said. “From what I’ve heard, Crane is a complex and devious man.”
“He’s a driven man.”
“But driven to what?” Ishmael asked, getting off the sofa and walking over to Newcombe. “Don’t answer. Just think about it.”
“If your association with us becomes public knowledge,” Aziz asked, “what will happen to you and the Crane Foundation?”
“I have no idea…. You asked Brother Ishmael to approach me?”
“Correct,” Aziz replied. “You see, my brother and I have a very different way of looking at things. You may have noticed that I chose Martin, the name of nonviolence, when I rejected my slave name. I believe that the world is ready to hear our righteous demands. We simply need African and Hispanic men of stature in the white world to present them for us. Unfortunately, my brother is the only public symbol we have. People fear him. I want to show America a different side.”
“Whites never give up anything without a fight,” Ishmael said. “Even though outnumbered by other races, they still control the country through the Chinese overlords. The only thing they will listen to is Jihad. We make enough trouble and they will give us what we want to shut us up.”
“Can’t people just vote them out of office?” Newcombe asked. “The teev is right there. Its voting button—”
“Where have you been?” Khadijah asked. “The Chinese will only let whites run for office because they know that whites will maintain the financial status quo. They control the government with money, keeping the whites rich, everybody else beholden.”
“But why should the Chinese fear you?”
Ishmael laughed and returned to his seat. “We are the next wave, Brother. They will have to make way for us. They should be frightened. They walled us up to end their ‘crime’ problem and still our numbers grow, our influence expands. We do not ingest their poisons. We are strong and incorrigible. The Koran is our guide. We are of the world. They are of history.”
“While Leonard rants,” Martin Aziz said, glancing with a slight smile at Ishmael, who was looking angry at the use of his slave name, “I’ve been thinking about your position. You know, Crane is keeping you down, second to him. I’ve learned about your EQ-eco system and wonder why you don’t use it to elevate yourself a bit. Celebrity makes it much easier to absorb controversy such as you find yourself in.”
“Crane doesn’t want to publish yet,” Newcombe said. “What can I do?”
“You’re a free man,” Ishmael said. “Do what you choose. You tell me this will help the world. So, help the world. Achieve your potential.”
“And become a better spokesman for you,” Newcombe replied. “It’s a moot point. I work for the Foundation, which owns intellectual property rights over anything I come up with. My hands are tied.”
Aziz reached out. “Here, Brother. Let me untie you. Your slavery is not becoming.”
“Go against Crane?” Newcombe said.
“Why not?” Aziz asked. “He’d go against you in a heartbeat.”
“He’s done a lot for me, I—”
“No!” Ishmael shouted, pointing a long finger. “You’ve done a lot for him. Don’t you see? What has Crane ever done but use you to make himself look good? Do you think it’s wrong for him to deny the world your discoveries?”
“Yes, it’s wrong,” Newcombe said. This was something he’d stewed about for weeks. “Of that I’m sure.”
Ishmael leaned down close from his perch on the desk, his voice raspy with anger. “You grovel to a man like Crane because an Africk can’t survive in the white man’s inner world without an owner. Are you too lost in the white woman or tied up in your own webs to see that?”
“Damn you,” Newcombe said, standing, pacing.
“But from me,” Ishmael said, “it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Newcombe took a long breath, tried to repress his anger at Crane… and couldn’t. “Yes,” he said, “it makes sense.”
“Then I’ve convinced you?”
“No, but you’ve made some inroads.”
Ishmael slid over to the office door and locked it. He turned back, grinning. “I’m in no hurry.”
GRABENS
THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY—NEAR NEW MADRID
10 SEPTEMBER 2024, LATE AFTERNOON
Gary Panatopolous was a contractor with the Geological Survey. A digger, he was paid by the job, not the depth of the hole he gouged into the earth. He’d been fighting Lanie, Crane, and Newcombe for three straight days up and down the Mississippi about how deep to make the holes. He did not want to dig so much or so deep. His five-year-old son was with him today, standing like his father with hands on hips, scowling at the Foundation team.
His machine, which he called Arthro, was large and black, crouching on eight legs like a spider over a hole that was five feet in diameter. His drill bit was bigger than several men and powerful enough to throw the sediment a mile back up and out of the hole. The digger was two stories high and a block long and sent geysers of dirt and mud heavenward. As it finished each section of digging, its spider legs placed pipe to secure and stabilize the hole. Long after Crane and the team were gone, Mr. Panatopolous would be filling the hole in again.
Newcombe walked between the legs of the digger to join the others; the drill was moving up and down, sucking at the lifeblood of the Earth.
“You people are crazy!” Panatopolous was saying as Newcombe arrived, confirming his status as an honest man to Dan. “What’d’ya think you’re gonna find that deep, huh? Buried treasure?”
“If we’re lucky,” Crane said, his hood pushed back while they stood in the shade of the digger’s underbelly. “Dan, have you had any contact with Burt?”
“He supervised thirty seismo setups,” Newcombe said above the eerie growl emanating from the depths of the hole. “Everything’s up and running. All we need is Nature’s cooperation.”
“Nature never cooperates,” Crane said. “Tame it or live with it. Those are the only options.”
“Yeah,” Lanie said, while tapping her wristpad. “It’s me. What?”
“I’m gonna lose money on this whole deal,” Panatopolous snapped.
“Got it,” Lanie said. “Keep juicing.” She glanced from man to man. “Get on the N channel and take a look at this.”
Newcombe punched his wristpad, the inside of his goggles instantly showing a chart of the numbers of known earthquakes in the Mississippi Valley by the months of the year. Fully seventy percent of the earthquakes in this area occurred between the months of November and February.
“We’re on with research,” Lanie said. “Want to ask a question?”
“See what you can find about relationships to lunar phases and solar flares,” Crane said. He turned back to Panatopolous, speaking low. “You do what you can for me, and I’ll do what I can for you. Fair?”
“Fair,” the digger said, nodding firmly just as a horn bleated, signifying completion of the digging of this hole. “We have reached six thousand and… fourteen feet. I’ll get the gondola.”
Newcombe kept the N channel on his aural and listened to the response from research.
“We find no correlation between lunar phases and Mississippi Embayment quakes. However, there does seem to be a close relationship between sunspot activity and Reelfoot displacement. Major quakes have taken place during periods of low sunspot activity. Observe the graph.”
Newcombe didn’t bother putting it on. Instead he watched the hole; the thick cable of the digger rewound quickly, whistling, spooling up inside the digger itself—the spider retracting its web.
“What about this year’s solar activity?” Crane asked.
“Few sunspots,” the researcher said, “the fewest since… 1811.”
Crane was not surprised, but Newcombe’s mouth went dry, and Lanie sucked in her breath.
“There’s the gondola,” Newcombe pointed out.
They cut transmission and hurried to the digger which was wheezing bright white smoke from its open belly fifteen feet above.
Newcombe put on a backpack containing a water drill and climbed into the elevator-size car, followed by Crane and Lanie. Crane cradled the spike like a baby.
They journeyed quickly down the tube, freefalling, interior lights coming on. They pulled off their goggles and headgear. A mile passed, brake skids slowing their descent the last several hundred feet. Finally, the gondola clanged against the rock of the graben.
Lanie knelt to pull off the floor round, so like a manhole cover, Newcombe thought, smiling wryly. They stared down at five-hundred-million-year-old rock.
They sat on the edge of the opening, planting their feet on the rock. It was smooth and flat, polished by the digger. Newcombe got out the drill and attached the gauging armature to the front. “Turn me on,” he told Lanie, who flipped the switch on the backpack that juiced the compressor.
Pressurized water shot from the nozzle in a pencil-thin line, drilling easily into the rock, the nozzle then moving down the armature until it hit bottom after about ten inches.
He released the pressure and pulled away the drill. Crane unwrapped the ten-inch spike and its toy hammer. The spike had a hairlike appendage on the end, the brains of the machine. He looked at Lanie. “Would you like to do the honors?”
She smiled and took the apparatus, leaned forward and slid the spike into the drill hole until barely a half inch protruded. She used the hammer then, tapping the spike gently. An activation hum sounded immediately.
“I’m already tied to the van’s system,” Newcombe said, pulling the tiny interface out of his wristpad to hook to the top of the spike. He married the units, then hit enter, the wristpad bleeping as it measured the amount of compression stress being exerted on the rock of the graben.
He ran some of it through his goggles as it fed to the van. “What’s the slippage on this a year?”
“Couple inches,” Crane said, “accumulated over two hundred years.”
Numbers in red and blue flashed past Newcombe’s eyes. “That’s over thirty-three feet in slip built up. A lot of pressure. I’m looking at stress numbers here that exceed anything I’ve ever seen. We’re getting damned close to the rupture threshold.”
The numbers stopped. “There’s going to be an earthquake here,” Newcombe whispered, “and soon.”
“I know,” Crane said, holding his left arm and grimacing.
At that moment a wall of noise rumbled through the rock, their cavern shaking for several seconds, dirt cascading down and coating them.
“Real soon,” Newcombe said. Lanie clutched his shoulder.
Crane calmly tapped his wristpad. “Take us up, Mr. Panatopolous,” he said. “We’re finished.”
Sumi listened to the down link bleep on her console and knew she was hearing a grace note in the long sonata that had begun several months before in VEMA’s observation deck at the bottom of the Pacific. Her swan song.
Outside it was raining. Most of the crew at the Foundation had taken the day off since both Crane and Burt Hill were in Missouri. Everyone from techs to department heads were outside, their voices drifting happily up to Sumi’s perch.
Dutifully, she tapped the R line, Mr. Li’s open emergency line. He answered immediately.
“It’s Sumi Chan, sir,” she said. “You asked me to inform you when the New Madrid party started sending back data. I’ve used security access to divert it to me instead of the Foundation’s computers.” Sumi felt ashamed.
“Good initiative, Sumi,” Mr. Li said in an almost humorous tone that was quite unlike him. Something was happening. “Are these the stress readings you told me Crane thought so important?”
“Crane said he
’d do a prediction based on the results of the stress tests, yes.” She could feel it coming, the decision of her lifetime. She always had engaged in situational ethics, and she felt she had no inner reserves of strength to draw from in making this decision.
“What are your recommendations?” Li prompted.
Sumi drew a long breath. “I have none,” she said finally.
“You’ve stolen their numbers, yet have no recommendation?”
“Sir,” Sumi said, “any recommendation I could make would be cancelled out by adverse conclusion.”
“Hold on,” Li said, clicking off. A second later, he materialized beside her desk in projection.
“Come… sit with me, Sumi. It’s time we talked.”
She rose from the computer and followed the projection to her sofa. Li, a wicked glint in his eye, offered her a seat before sitting himself. He hovered two inches above the lowslung couch.
“Now,” Li said. “Suppose you tell me what the recommendation is, then let me judge the ‘adverse conclusion’ for myself. Please.”
Sumi’s mind was melting down. Generation equipment had to be hidden somewhere in her chalet in order to bring off his projection. And he knew that she knew. The noose tightened around her neck. Who watches the watcher?
She cleared her throat. “If you want to have Crane predict before the election, simply change the stress numbers, making them infinitesimally larger, increasing the notion of the stress, making the problem seem more immediate. I know enough about the EQ-eco to work the math and bring the numbers up to rupture point.”
“Wonderful,” Li said, smirking. “What could possibly be the downside of that?”
“You don’t see?” Sumi asked, and reached into the pocket of her work pants for dorph gum. “These people, Mr. Li, are on the verge of predicting the most devastating earthquake in the history of the United States of Liang America. I trust their judgment.” She stuck two pieces of gum in her mouth. “If we intentionally mispredict, you’re leaving a large population base at tremendous risk for when the quake really does come.”
Li shrugged. “We’re trying to win an election here. There have been several destructive quakes in different parts of the country since the last election. People are afraid and they’ll be grateful for our concern whether the prediction turns out to be correct or not. They’ll vote for our candidates.”
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