Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “I’ve already told you. I like the idea of an Asian being a heartbeat away from the Presidency. And this will also give us the chance to work… closely together. However, we will not make this change for a month or so. I wish you to prepare yourself.”

  Mr. Li’s wristpad bleeped insistently. “What?” he asked crossly. He listened glumly for a moment. “Thank you, Mr. Mui,” he said at last and blanked the man. He touched the pad again, Sumi’s wall screen coming up, bringing with it a shot of Crane and Whetstone. She smiled involuntarily. Crane was out of jail.

  “People call me a fraud,” Crane was saying. “Well, this is your opportunity to profit from my so-called fraudulent nature.”

  Whetstone spoke. “We have put three billion dollars cash into an escrow account. That money talks: It says there will be an earthquake on February 27th in the Mississippi Valley that will cause massive devastation. We are betting on Mr. Crane’s formidable knowledge and scientific genius. We will give two-to-one odds. If anyone wants a piece of the action—”

  “What are they doing?” Li asked.

  Sumi shook her head. “You never believed it, did you?”

  “That Crane could predict earthquakes? Certainly not.”

  “You were wrong, Mr. Li. I tried to tell you about it when you had me sabotage their program, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “But what’s happening now?”

  She was laughing, with relief and with the irony of it all. “Don’t you see? They’ve discovered my treachery and have corrected their calculations. You are going to have your earthquake, Mr. Li. You are going to know the horror of getting what you asked for.”

  “But that… that changes everything!”

  “Yes. Everything.” She laughed. “Life, sir, is change.”

  THE KING PROJECTION

  THE FOUNDATION

  23 JANUARY 2025, 2:00 P.M.

  Running, Crane circled the programmers within the newly built stationary orb around the globe. “Worthless!” he shouted at the globe. “You’re useless. I’m going to sell you for scrap.”

  “Turn off the atmosphere inducers, run in to that globe, and kick the damned thing for me,” Lanie called wearily to him from where she slumped at her console.

  He stopped running after he’d caught sight of her. She was dejected. He was only angry. He trotted over to her. She was staring at her keyboard. When the last of the shutdown bells quieted, he said gently, “It’s just something stupid. Don’t give up.”

  She didn’t even look at him. “Better be something stupid, because we’re fresh out of smart ideas.”

  He turned and stared through the thick ahrensglass at the huge globe. It had shut itself down this time somewhere before the formation of Pangaea during the planet’s watery stage. Some progress at least. Before, during the first two weeks after the bet, they’d reset it twenty times. Twenty times they’d recalibrated, making slight adjustments to the fiery birth of the Earth Mother. And twenty times they’d failed. Then the globe had made a request direct only to Crane—and he’d responded quickly. The globe was transforming itself… Crane knew that, Lanie did, too, though neither of them could predict to what sort of entity.

  The globe had urged Crane to reposition its magnetic poles and to reconform its environmental surround to match Earth’s gravitational field through and beyond the ozone layer. In response to the request, Crane had ordered all the openings of the globe room, the window and door apertures, to be sealed. Then vast numbers of machines had been brought to the Foundation. Huge vacuum tubes and force field impellers, under the direction of the best physicists Crane could hire, had been placed at dome and base to transform the globe room into a chamber that was a piece of the universe in which the globe-Earth revolved on its axis.

  And now, this afternoon, they’d at last been able to test again. And for all the changes—the time, the money, the hard work—they’d got nothing but failure… again. It was maddening.

  “You know, the sad thing,” Lanie said, popping a dorph tab, “is that the damned globe doesn’t even hold out any hope of ever constructing itself. It finds no way of getting from point A to point B.”

  “We’re just not doing something we should be doing.”

  “It’s so simple, though.” She got up and joined him. “We’ve got known factors—a weight of around six and a half sextillion tons of rotating fire. It contains elements we can discern. It rotated faster at the beginning, but we’ve allowed for that.”

  “Known factors. You said, known factors.” Something was eating away at Crane, something right in front of his face that he could almost see.

  “Maybe Dan was right,” Lanie said. “Maybe both of us are nuts and this is just a fantasy.”

  “Dan says a lot of things I don’t agree with.” Newcombe had come out again publicly in support of an Islamic State. True to his word, he’d kept the Foundation’s name out of it both times he appeared on the teev. Instead he billed himself as “the inventor of EQ-eco.”

  It had been a strange month and a half since the night he and Stoney had gone on teev with the wager. The government had viciously attacked him and the bet, calling it a con game meant to bilk the citizens of America. Despite that, the wager had been covered within three days, actually two and a half. It was already out of the news, but that didn’t matter. The closer to the time they came, the bigger an issue it would become. It was a self-generating concept.

  To a man, the scientific establishment rang with condemnation, referring to Crane as a “lunatic bent on making himself famous no matter what the cost.” Actually, he’d been glad to hear that. It meant they’d stay away from Reelfoot and leave it to him.

  “Cheer up, people,” Newcombe said, moving up to Lanie’s console, a printout in his hand. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “The Earth has been keeping her secrets secret,” Crane said amiably. “In line with your speculation.”

  Newcombe shrugged. “I’d love to see you succeed. But we’re talking about five billion years of earth history, most of which we know nothing about. It really isn’t possible to expect—”

  “You’re wrong in a great many respects,” Lanie said, pointing at her line of programmers, all working fast, inputting data, increasing the globe’s knowledge. “Current data is simply a reflection of the ancient past. In every instance where I’ve worked backward from a known event, I’ve been able to connect it to an unknown event that began the chain. It’s time-consuming, but it works.”

  “Then why not apply that to the whole globe?”

  “Can’t,” Crane said. “To go backward, an event at a time, would consume the rest of our lives and then some. Each event would be judged independently because we don’t know inherent connections. And when we were done, we still would have made a globe based only on what we know about. What about the geologic eccentricities we haven’t even uncovered?”

  “Besides,” Lanie added, “even with the single events I’ve been able to trace backward, I can go only so far. At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, the machine shuts down and says, ‘You can’t get there from here.’”

  “In other words,” Newcombe said, taking a seat himself, “you can’t go either way with it. Your globe is telling you that the world we have is not the world we had.”

  Crane snapped to attention. “That’s exactly what it’s telling us,” he said, staring through the ahrensglass and up the three-story height of the globe. “It’s not the same. Something happened to this planet that changed it drastically, altered it forever. So, what could have happened, what—oh my God. I’ve been so stupid.” He turned to Lanie. “Crank it up. We’re going to go from scratch right now.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it. I’ve got an idea and we’re going to try it out.”

  The globe went dark as the computers reset themselves. Within a minute Crane stared at a ball of fire, spinning wildly in its youth. “All right,” he said. “I want you to increase your six-and-a-half-sextillion-ton
mass by one eighty-first.”

  “One eighty-first,” Lanie said. “One eighty-first?”

  “Do it,” Crane said.

  Newcombe laughed. “Crane, you’re batty.”

  “Only if I’m wrong.”

  “The machine refuses to take the extra weight,” Lanie said. “It’s telling me the increase is unstable by its very nature. The globe can’t support the increase in mass and still hold together.”

  “Perfect,” Crane said. “Talk to it, Lanie. Explain to it that it’s all right to build to an unstable state.”

  “It’s not going to want to hear that,” she said.

  “Tell the globe that the instability will resolve itself.”

  “It will?”

  “I think so,” he said, as Lanie turned to the computer and opened a line of discussion with its higher reasoning functions.

  Crane walked up to Newcombe. “What’s the printout?” he asked.

  “Ahh.” Dan smiled, handing him a small stack of seismograms. “Almost forgot. We’ve begun to get Ellsworth-Beroza tremors on the Reelfoot grabens consistent with the beginning phases of a major quake. Also, levels of radon, carbon monoxide, and methane are continuing to rise along with electromagnetic activity.”

  Crane nodded, not surprised. He’d make his three billion dollars, but it would be at a cost beyond belief. It was happening, a cycle of real horror beginning its relentless harvest of life and property. And no one was going to listen to his warnings.

  “Got it,” Lanie said, swinging her chair around. “However, the globe will only do it if you tell it to, Crane. Would you step over here?”

  Crane moved to her console as Lanie typed the command that would start the globe. “The machine refuses to take responsibility for what happens,” she said. “It’s looking for authority from higher up.”

  He looked at the screen. It read:

  Initiate Globe (Y/N)

  He hit the Y. The screen faded, then read:

  Project Leader Confirm

  “Speak your name into the C channel of your pad,” Lanie said.

  Crane did so, and the globe lights immediately came on. The sequence was initiated.

  The globe spun quickly, but off balance. All the lights went down. Lanie’s programmers stopped work to watch the spectacle. The Earth is not perfectly round, but this one was obviously way off, its equatorial bulge huge and moving, throwing the planet on a wobbly orbit.

  “You’re going to break your toy,” Newcombe said.

  Warning lights were flashing up and down the consoles, the screens warning of imminent breakup.

  A huge lump of fire now appeared on the globe, threatening to destroy it as centrifugal force drew the fireball slowly away from the globe.

  “We’re going to have to shut it down, Crane!” Lanie called.

  “You do and you’re fired!” Crane yelled over the warning bells sounding up and down the line.

  “It wants to go into shutdown sequence.”

  “But it hasn’t, has it?” he returned. “It’s smarter than we are. Let it go!”

  The globe was wobbling horribly. It creaked as it tore itself apart, but Crane watched it with a satisfied smile.

  Then it happened. The globe, now a lopsided dumbbell shape, was no longer able to sustain the hold on itself and the bulge broke free, spinning off, only to get captured in the larger mass’s gravitational pull. What was left began to spin normally again, all the warning bells and flashers shutting off up and down the line.

  They were looking at a planet and its moon, a real chunk of the globe, dancing in synchronous orbit, and the globe was just as happy as it could be.

  Newcombe sat staring, his mouth hanging open.

  “Is that the Moon?” Lanie asked.

  “Well”—Crane shrugged—“now we know where that came from. Bully. Let’s keep watching.”

  “It seems to be orbiting so closely,” Lanie said.

  “I think we’ll find,” Crane answered, “that as the Earth’s rotation slows, the Moon will move farther away. Right now, imagine not only the effect the Moon will have on sea tides at this distance, but land tides as well.”

  “I can’t believe it’s still working,” Lanie said as the planet cooled and holorains began, the Moon now a bit farther away.

  “This is weird,” Newcombe said. “This isn’t some kind of trick, is it, Crane?”

  “This is history, my fine fellow,” Crane said. “Earth history as no one’s ever seen it before. If this thing keeps working, we may all be obsolete.”

  And work it did, half holo, half “real.” Land emerged from the evaporating waters, the closeness of the Moon causing major havoc on land and sea—quakes, tsunamis, and tidal waves rattling the globe in ways none of them could have anticipated. If there had been a Pangaea as such, they never saw it. For an hour that was hundreds of millions of years, the continental masses seemed to form and reform in a continual dance with the Moon, which moved ever so slowly away.

  The globe stopped many times during these early periods, adding holo comets, asteroids, and meteorites to the mix in order to conform to known life later on, but it didn’t shut down—it continued. The farther it went, the more excited the programmers became, until they were shouting and cheering every time the machine hit a glitch and reset itself to continue onward.

  The Moon finally distanced itself enough to lose its major impact on sea and land. Here, they saw the beginnings of a stable world, more stable, at least, than the frenzy of its earlier years. The seas calmed. The continents emerged in roughly the same form as today.

  For Crane, time did not exist during this exercise. First to last passed in an instant for him. He thought of all the men of science from its beginnings who had measured, timed, and speculated about the nature of their Earth. Without their observations, the globe would not have been possible. For thousands of years, scientists had meticulously recorded their findings with no notion of where those findings would lead. This was one of the places. There would be others.

  Five hours later, he emerged from his thoughts to the sounds of cheering. The globe stood proudly online, up to date, turning slowly. Dead even with them.

  Everyone was still there, including Newcombe, and they had been joined by the rest of the staff. It was a spectacle none of them could pull away from. The addition of new information would continue, but this was the core unit from which ever more knowledge would spring.

  “Do you realize what we’ve just done?” Crane called to the applauding group. “However much information we’ve put into this system is merely a grain of sand on the seashore in comparison to what the globe has invented on its own to make our data compatible. Every hairline fissure, every graben, every underground stream or unconfirmed nuclear explosion that has occurred on planet Earth is now ours to know. Information is power, ladies and gentlemen. And we have the power.”

  Another cheer. He turned to Newcombe. “Still think I’m crazy?”

  “Crazy for trying,” the man said. “Brilliant for succeeding.”

  Lanie moved to the two men. “I’m still in shock.” She put her arm around him as Newcombe stiffened.

  “You did it,” Crane said, hugging her close then moving away when it felt too good. “We’re going to call your globe the King Projection.”

  “You’re naming it after me?”

  “You’re its mama,” Crane replied, then raised his voice for all of them to hear.

  “We’ve done the impossible,” he said. “Now let’s try the unthinkable. Dr. King, would you be kind enough to program ahead on the Reelfoot and see what it gives us? Take us forward to a quake, a big quake.”

  Lanie hurried to the keyboard. As if it were a monstrous crystal ball, they were using the globe to try and look into the future. It was heady and scary. This was different from the prediction they’d made on the stress readings. This was the Earth simply winding out the certitude of its own history. To the sound of a loud buzzer the globe stopped turning, the spotlig
ht zeroing on the Mississippi Valley, the familiar red lines of a Valley quake jagged as a gash.

  “Time,” Crane said, his mouth dry.

  Lanie punched up the blood red numbers again. This time they read:

  27 February 2025, 5:37 P.M. + or −

  Twenty-three minutes sooner than their earlier calculations.

  “We’ve done it,” Crane said. “We’ve conquered the future.”

  He looked to Newcombe again. “This is our research source,” he said. “All our answers lie here.”

  Newcombe looked hard at him. “All we need now is the guts to use it. Do we really want the responsibility of knowing the future?”

  “It’s moot,” Lanie said from the console. “Want it or not, it’s here.”

  Newcombe stood and walked to Crane. “Now that you’ve got it,” he whispered, “what are you really going to do with this goddamned thing?”

  “Anything I want, doctor.”

  The Masada brought rain that night, which meant radioactivity flushing down the streets and into the water supplies. Some sickness and death would result, the greatest toll taken on outdoor life. But it used to be worse, and would continue to be a decreasing threat until it would dissipate in the mid-2030s and be remembered ultimately as a scourge falling somewhere between the Black Plague and the Spanish Inquisition on the scale of suffering of humanity.

  This particular night, it was a godsend for Crane. He had celebrated the globe with his people, then drifted to his office when the alarms had driven everyone to shelter. Now, as the rains fell outside, he would have the globe to himself for a while.

  He sat at Lanie’s console, explaining exactly what it was he wanted to accomplish. As he finished inputting, Burt Hill came over his aural.

  “Where the hell are you, Crane?”

  “I’m staying in my office tonight,” Crane replied on the P fiber. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “You’re only wantin’ to play with that globe.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Not at all. Got to tell you something, though. An announcement just came through all the teev stations—Vice President Gabler has resigned. Everybody thinks it’s because he’s got blamed for all the problems with the War Zone.”