Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Are you saying I did this deliberately?”

  “I don’t know if you did or you didn’t,” she replied. “I only know you had no right to steal Crane’s property just because he wasn’t handling it the way you wanted him to.”

  “I gave it to the world, Lanie,” he said, walking up to touch her shoulder. “You’re going to have to get used to that.”

  She twisted away from him and turned her back. “You like to steamroll over everything, don’t you? If you want to know the real reason I had the Vogelman done, it’s because I knew, once you got it in your head, that you’d steamroll me into having babies and doing what you wanted me to do.”

  He turned her around. “Wait a minute. I thought we’d decided you weren’t going to have that procedure.”

  “It wasn’t your decision to make,” she said, jerking away from him again to face the screen, the wall now filled with a close-up of Dan’s face. “Like that wasn’t your decision to make.”

  “You did it without telling me.”

  She was still looking at his giant face, the eyes so sincere. She had to laugh. “Seems as though you’ve done a few things without telling me, too.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said, softening. “Turn that thing off and let’s go back to bed.”

  She couldn’t face him, knew she couldn’t sleep with him tonight. “You go on,” she said. “I’ll be up later.”

  Lanie stiffened when he touched her. Newcombe grunted and moved away. “Fine,” he said, starting up the stairs. “Do me one favor, though. Don’t let yourself get too caught up in Crane’s fantasies. He’s only a crazy man, that’s all!”

  “My globe is not crazy!”

  He ignored her, moving up to the loft, the light clicking out to the sound of the bedsprings.

  She turned and stared at the front door. “It’s not crazy,” she whispered to the man who wasn’t standing there any longer.

  RUPTURES

  GERMANTOWN, TENNESSEE—NEAR MEMPHIS

  27 OCTOBER 2024, 10 A.M.

  “And then the guy tells me,” Newcombe said, swinging the mallet to pound Lanie’s sensor pole into the black delta soil, “that he’s going to put my name up for the Nobel Prize.”

  “A touch early to open the champagne, don’t you think?” Lanie was good and tired of this subject—in fact, Dan was so full of himself these days that she was getting a little tired of him. “Usually the science prize is given many years after the discovery.”

  “It happened early for Crane.” Newcombe helped Lanie pick up the long brushlike antenna and slide it into the hole. “Give me the opportunity to get a little excited, okay?”

  “You’re the doctor.”

  “Damn right, doctor.”

  She smiled and locked the focus on the top of the apparatus. The red light came on, indicating that data was being transmitted, and she turned and looked back down the line. This was the fiftieth pole, the final one in a neat row that defined the edge of Dan’s calculated zone of destruction. Half a mile beyond lay the tent city, filling many acres of cotton field. Thousands of people had fled here already, and they were preparing for thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand, more. Not that they’d had much help from the authorities.

  Praise be for Harry Whetstone’s lawyers, Lanie had thought a dozen times over the last two weeks. Crane’s benefactor and friend, good old Stoney, had been able to come through for the Foundation because his lawyers had gotten the case against him dismissed, thus freeing up his billions from escrow. The poor performance of the government and of Liang Int in alerting people, providing information, guidance, and assistance to the population, had been nothing short of astonishing at first. Then it had become so frustrating that Crane had said he was going to start howling at the logoed moon every night.

  Still, people poured into their camp, which was now ten times the size of the one on Sado. And there were unending teev pictures of clogged roads and air lanes as people tried to get out of the area. With whole sections of Memphis and nearby towns abandoned, the looters had come, of course, and the FPF was responding. In fact, the FPF seemed to be the only arm of the government that was doing its job properly.

  Lanie shook her head and looked up. The sky was bright, the sun hot for late October. She was sweating in her long coat and heavy gloves; her floppy hat dropped down around the top of her goggles. Clouds floated lazily overhead, broadcasting pictures of the traffic jams all over the Mississippi Valley. Still other pictures showed the hardcases, those who didn’t believe the prediction—all the way down to those who didn’t even know what an earthquake was. Crane had hired a whole staff of historians to document this series of events so that he could draw up a sound set of plans for future quake predictions.

  “Is that it, then?” Newcombe asked.

  “All I’ve got,” she replied, wishing that she, too, could dash around in a T-shirt and no hat. “It’s going to be interesting taking readings in antediluvial mud. Everything’s going to rearrange itself.”

  Newcombe smiled. He went over to the flatbed truck on which they’d hauled the sensors in and got into the operator’s seat. “The earth turns liquid. You’ll see things, whole houses sometimes, disappear beneath the surface and other things long buried rising back up. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to live in New Orleans right now—they’re going to have the dead rising right out of their graves, both those few still buried in the ground and all those in the mausoleums above ground.”

  “A cheery thought,” Lanie said, climbing into the passenger seat and closing the door. “I wonder how the Ellsworth-Beroza is looking this morning?”

  Newcombe opened the focus, programmed the truck, and it plowed through the black field, the skeletons of stripped cotton plants jutting from the ground all around them. “I’m worried about the E-B,” he said. “Every goddamned rockhead in the world has descended on the Rift and all of them say the same thing: Without the E-B showing positive results, the quake can’t happen.”

  “We were down in those holes, Dan. We saw the stress readings. We felt the tremors.”

  “I agree. So why isn’t the Ellsworth-Beroza showing us some activity?”

  “Maybe this one won’t give any more warnings.”

  Brow arched, he said, “Yeah… maybe. And maybe we stuck our necks out at the wrong time. If that’s the case, Crane’s finished. It only reinforces my decision to go public with EQ-eco. I can cut myself loose from him if I have to and still survive.”

  “Yeah… maybe,” she said sourly. “Somehow I find it difficult to believe that Crane would ever be finished. Only when he’s in his grave. Maybe not even then.”

  “He’s a psycho. They’ll put him away one day.”

  She sat back and watched the clouds and their neverending teev shows. As smart as Dan was, he had absolutely no handle on Crane, on the man’s greatness. Crane might be a psycho, perhaps even delusional, by the definition of ordinary men and women who could not understand or appreciate him. But Dan? He should be the last to label Crane anything but brilliant.

  Dan’s luck had been extremely good lately. Not a week after his public release of the EQ-eco equations, a Chinese team of tectonicists on the verge of discovering a quake in its early Ellsworth-Beroza stage applied Dan’s theory to their estimated epicenter and talked the citizens of Guiyand, the capital of the Guihou Province, into evacuating. Two days later, a 7.2 Richter rocked the area to great devastation, but no one was killed. The scientists credited EQ-eco for helping them define areas of evacuation. And his success was feeding his ego—no, stuffing his ego, making it fat… and rather ugly, she thought. As his own regard for himself grew, his regard for Crane diminished. There was something obscene about Dan’s disdain for Crane now.

  She’d put distance between herself and Dan the night of the prediction and he seemed not to notice. She’d kept it up beyond reasonableness to see if he’d respond; then it simply had become routine. There was no way to breach the emotional gap. They lived every moment now under a micr
oscope, public pressures extinguishing their personal flames. She simply consigned everything to the wind and was living day to day.

  Except for the dreams.

  The dreams were a constant, the swirl of Martinique growing larger to the point that she now thought the nightmares significant in some way beyond simple remembrance, though remember she did. Sections were opening up—the terrible mud, the triage of the wounded, the sound of the trucks all honking at the same time—though the actual event that caused her memory loss was still hazy. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to remember that part.

  “Would you look at the people?” Dan said, driving into the middle of the tent city, no colorful, jammed-together tents like Sado. These were all in military olive drab and spaced in rows wide enough to accommodate passing trucks. And there were thousands of them. A projection of an American flag waved against a perpetual electronic wind above the compound.

  People were everywhere, being directed by tan uniformed employees of Whetstone, Inc., the billionaire’s gun-for-hire service organization.

  Dan pulled up to HQ just as a busload of students from a local boarding school was arriving.

  “Tech kids,” he said, climbing out.

  Lanie watched as the youngsters, from preschoolers through high-schoolers, got off the bus. They looked frail and frightened.

  “Learning” was being reevaluated, and the tech schools represented a new direction in education. Their primary subject was Wristpad 101. It taught children how to manipulate the computer net through their pads, how to access absolutely anything they’d ever need or want to know. The proliferation of voice lines on the pad even precluded the need for reading and writing. The power of the pad was the power of absolute knowledge. But what about discipline? What about memory storage and retrieval? Stealing one last glance at the line of twenty children, Lanie followed Newcombe into HQ. Tech kids—they had a poor ability to synthesize and react to physical demands and emotional situations. They lived in the pad. They thought it gave them everything, all the answers. The problem was, they didn’t know the questions.

  Housing block leaders were moving in and out of the tent, bringing requests and questions. Crane was frowning heavily, shaking his head as he talked to Sumi and white-haired Stoney Whetstone, dressed in the same uniform his men wore. Teevs filled the sides of the thirty-foot-square room, showing the same things the clouds were showing.

  “You’re a boob, Parkhurst,” Crane said as they approached. He shook his head and tapped the man off.

  “Got a busload of tech kids outside who are going to need special handling,” Lanie told him. Crane looked at Sumi.

  “Would you take care of it?”

  “Of course,” Sumi said, immediately moving off.

  “What about the E-Bs?” Newcombe asked Crane, who was staring vacantly at the floor.

  “No activity,” Stoney said.

  Stoney was impressive, Lanie thought. Tall, commanding, and down-to-earth, he had a weathered, still-handsome face. He was enough of a man at sixty-seven to make her wonder what he’d been like at forty.

  “Something very strange is going on around here, I think,” Stoney added.

  This wasn’t new. Stoney had been frowning more as each day passed, voicing suspicions and questioning everything that was going on with the government and Liang Int. “What do you mean this time?” Lanie asked, somewhat wearily.

  “The government is dragging its heels on what aid it’s providing—which is damn little. And wasn’t the whole point of them buying into Crane’s prediction how much hay they could make for the electorate—the publicity they’d get for being good guys? I assumed this place would be a madhouse of pols and newsies, with Li and his buddies trotting every one of their candidates through here, giving each of those clowns a chance to sound off for the electorate. Do you see any of that? In fact, have you seen a single candidate or elected official or Liang Int big shot around here?”

  Lanie slowly shook her head.

  “No, of course not, because something’s fishy, that’s why.”

  “Let’s not add paranoia to our list of problems,” Newcombe said. “We’ve still got a couple of days until Q-day. Maybe something will—”

  “My arm isn’t hurting,” Crane said. “This close to a quake my arm should be throbbing.”

  The teevs flickered, casting eerie images over all their faces. The pictures died, then the Presidential seal blossomed on every screen. Lanie tapped her pad to the K channel, though it wouldn’t have mattered which fiber she chose. They’d all been pre-empted.

  “—ident of the United States,” came the voice through her aural. President Gideon sat at his desk, Mr. Li by his side.

  “My fellow Americans, I address you today to right a terrible wrong. With great effort and at enormous cost, your government has undertaken a massive investigation and uncovered an egregious fraud. Lewis Crane is a charlatan. Unprincipled, publicity hungry, he is misleading the country into believing the entire middle and southern area of the United States is on the verge of catastrophe. Thankfully, we have discovered this is not the case, and denounce his prediction of a quake on the 30th of October as fantasy. Further, we are immediately cutting off all federal grant money to the Crane Foundation.”

  Crane was standing now in front of the largest screen, shaking his head. “What are they doing?” he whispered. “Why?”

  “Couldn’t you smell the screw job in the air?” Stoney asked. “I knew something was up.”

  The President continued, “We have proof that the Crane Foundation has continuing contact with Nation of Islam leader, Mohammed Ishmael, since Ishmael proclaimed an Islamic State while in Crane’s company. We, the people, are victims of some kind of conspiracy.”

  A viddy came up of a man walking along a city sidewalk, arms swinging, everything from the viewpoint of his coat sleeve. The man stopped at a dorph vendor and bought a bottle. When he swung his arm around to pay the man, the face of Dan Newcombe filled the screen.

  “What is this?” Crane whirled on Newcombe. “What the hell are we about to see?” he shrieked.

  “Me and Ishmael,” Newcombe said, his face blank as he stared Crane down.

  “What else?”

  Newcombe nodded at the screen, the tape blipping pictures in rapid succession of him being led down a hallway in what seemed to be a chip parlor. Lanie watched in amazement, her pulse speeding up and a sense of dread making her stomach queasy. Dan had gone to the Zone the Masada night that he’d disappeared… that was perfectly clear now. Betrayal. Personal and professional too, she suspected. She began to tremble. Tense, Dan avoided her gaze, steadfastly looking at the teev. He was being taken into a cubicle, a bed moved to reveal a manhole, Ishmael coming out of the hole to embrace Newcombe like long-lost, beloved kin. Lanie glanced around. Everyone was rapt—and horrified.

  Newcombe and Ishmael were staring intently, malevolently out at the audience through the lens of a camera that must have been in Ishmael’s palm.

  “Stoney,” Crane said, a shocked expression on his face, “would you get a couple of your biggest men to guard the tent flap? I don’t want any reporters around until we’re ready for them. And get Sumi back in here.”

  Whetstone nodded, then grasped Crane’s shoulder consolingly before leaving the tent.

  “Look, Crane,” Newcombe said, “that trip to the Zone had nothing to do with you or the Foundation. It’s personal. It’s about me.”

  “And me?” Lanie asked. “It sure as hell has something to do with me. I know how the NOI feels about race… about what they call the ‘purity’ of the races.”

  Wristpads were bleeping on every arm as media tried to communicate with the members of the Crane team. They’d have only a few minutes, tops, before they were overwhelmed by outsiders.

  “Lanie,” Dan said. “I didn’t tell you for the same reason you didn’t tell me about the Vogelman—”

  “Please,” Crane said, trying to calm himself with long, slow breaths. “
Let’s worry about the immediate problem first.” He pointed at Newcombe. “Do you promise me your contact with Ishmael is not related to your activities with the Foundation?”

  “My word,” Newcombe said.

  “Your word,” Lanie snapped, feeling her whole world slipping away.

  “How did they wire you?” Crane asked, nodding to Sumi who’d returned with Stoney.

  Newcombe showed empty palms. “I have no idea. It may have been random.”

  “Freelanced to Liang,” Sumi said. “It happens all the time.”

  “Does that really matter now?” Stoney asked.

  “No,” Crane answered, his gaze going to the burly guards stationing themselves at the tent flaps. “As long as there are no other surprises.”

  “I had a visit and a personal chat with Brother Ishmael,” Newcombe said. “We talk sometimes, ask each other for advice.”

  “Did he give you ‘advice’ about illegally going public with your paper?” Lanie asked, unable to check herself.

  “Not now,” Crane said, walking closer. “Do you swear to me that you don’t know anything about Gideon canceling the program?”

  “Of course not!” Newcombe said, indignant. “I’ve got as much to lose in this as you do.”

  That’s not what you said earlier, Lanie thought.

  “You saved your program,” Stoney said.

  Newcombe turned to face him. “What is that sup—”

  “No,” Crane said. “Low blow, Stoney. I don’t… I won’t question Dan’s integrity. What we’ve got to do now is figure out what’s going on and how to counter it.”

  Newcombe laughed ruefully. “What’s going on is that we’ve just been shot down. They lasered us from stem to stern, Captain.” He saluted, then turned to Sumi. “What about you? Why didn’t you see this coming?”

  Sumi looked startled. “When our relationship began with Mr. Li, I was assigned to an onsite job. I have no contact with the government. I’ve been here with you.”