Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Once you’re through with this job, I could use a good public relations man,” Crane joked.

  “Bribery, Crane?” Sumi asked with echoing humor. “This must really be important.”

  “It is. But, seriously, a job is always open to you. I hope you know that.”

  “The globe,” Sumi said, smiling.

  “Yes,” Crane said like a loving father. “We’ve missed you at the Foundation, Sumi.” The globe was spinning quickly. If Sumi only knew, Crane thought, what had transpired with the globe during this past year! It had evolved at an astonishing rate into something beyond his wildest imaginings when he had hired Lanie all those months ago. The globe’s cognitive function was beyond reproach, but more, it was developing awareness and—he forced his attention back to the image of the spinning globe. Its spotlight found and highlighted California as the rotation slowed.

  They were staring at California, the view filling their entire vision in the goggles. The world was green and brown, the oceans blue, the cities vibrating in pale, friendly yellow.

  “Okay,” Crane said, “you remember where the San Andreas Bumper is?”

  “Just south of Bakersfield, right? Mount Pinos.”

  “Yes.”

  The San Andreas Bumper was an S-shaped bend in the Fault Line, a flangelike protuberance or kink where the northbound Pacific Plate and the westbound North American Plate were stuck. Inexorable movement continued, the Plates monstrous, unstoppable Titans shoving against each other, the pressure squeezing ever tighter on the Bumper, straining the rock ever harder.

  “There,” Crane said. “Do you see the red zone opening up on the base?”

  Bright red blinked just south of Bakersfield and began creeping through a fault line that ultimately encompassed a huge slab of the Pacific Plate, all the way to the Philippines. Los Angeles was on the wrong side of the ripping fault. So was San Francisco. The tear went all the way south, into Mexico, cutting off the Baja Peninsula at the northern end of the Gulf of California.

  “The red spot is so large at the Bumper,” Sumi said.

  “That’s because the entire Bumper is getting ready to come apart. Watch.”

  Sumi gasped.

  The entire flange was now throbbing red, straining. Then it simply crumbled as all the strain was relieved at once. The Pacific Plate moved. There were no people pictured on the globe, but as the yellow cities began pulsating in ugly red, any human watching could have heard the screams of hundreds of thousands of hurt and dying people.

  “What we’re looking at is the true detachment of Southern California from the North American Plate,” Crane said. “It is becoming an island, containing the carcasses of two of the world’s major cities, not to mention that all of oceanside California, so heavily developed, becomes a cadaver. See? A new minicontinent is born, pushing north.”

  The chunk of continent slowly crept toward eventual subduction beneath the northern ridge of the Plate.

  “Amazing,” Sumi whispered. “And the year?”

  “Keep watching.”

  Crane tapped Lanie, who yanked her goggles up to stare at him. He shrugged, she returned the shrug, then blew him a kiss before jerking her goggles back into place.

  He pulled his on again just as the numbers 6–3–2058 came up on the screen. “I want to remind you, Sumi,” he said, “this is no simulation or set of speculations. You are looking into a crystal ball and gazing directly into the future, the real future.”

  “Thirty-two years.” Sumi pressed the pad to pause the disk. They all raised their goggles. Sumi’s face was strained and pale. “What a sadness it must be to watch such horror all the time, to know how inescapable it is.”

  “But is it inescapable?” Crane asked, watching Sumi’s eyes narrow.

  “You just told me we were gazing into a crystal ball.”

  “A crystal ball that shows a future that is real only when it arrives.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Turn your disk back on. I want to show you another future.”

  The globe relit inside the goggles. Time rewound. “Look farther south on the Fault, down in the Imperial Valley. Watch for a small red zone to open up.”

  As he spoke a small spot along the San Andreas Fault’s southern arm blazed red for several seconds. Then it was gone.

  “What was that?” Sumi asked.

  “Watch,” Crane said. “The globe is going to pick up speed.”

  It spun wildly, chasing the years, finally stopping on California. The numbers 6–3–2058 again, but everything appeared whole and placid. The show ended; its viewers removed their goggles.

  Sumi stared at Lanie, then back at Crane. “All right. What happened… what made the difference?”

  “I asked the globe,” Crane said, pausing dramatically, “if it were possible to avoid the destruction of California by fusing the plates.”

  “How do you fuse tectonic plates, Crane?”

  “Heat. Heat so intense it would melt solid rock and bond it together.”

  “And how would you produce such intense heat?”

  “A thermonuclear reaction is the only way I can think of. In this particular case a five gigaton explosion along a six-mile stretch of underground twenty miles beneath the Earth’s surface right on the spot indicated by the globe.”

  “You’re talking about an explosion thousands of times more powerful than anything previously detonated.”

  Nodding vigorously, he said quickly, “But deflected downward, into the thermonuclear core. It wouldn’t even cause a ripple on the surface. We’ve simulated it. It works.”

  “But how could you know it would result in anything other than a major break in the fault and the hastening of catastrophic destruction?”

  “Sumi, didn’t you tell me that the Crane Report is required reading for heads of state? Well, the Crane Report is based on the globe’s functions and it hasn’t been wrong yet. We’re just using it here in a slightly different way. Think about this: Fusing the plates farther down the fault where there is no strain at the moment will take all the pressure off the Bumper. In fact, this one weld actually slows down the rate of continental drift by joining the two plates back together. For fifty years after the event, we show an eighty percent decrease in drift in these two plates, with a concurrent decrease in EQ activity.”

  Sumi jumped up and started to pace. “You’re sure the strain doesn’t come out someplace else? Maybe we’d be destroying South America to save LA.”

  “I went forward 250 years on the globe and found no activity that wasn’t already destined to happen. Perhaps farther on there might be, but how much insurance do you want? We’ve learned that this one weld decreases worldwide temblor activity by seven percent.”

  “You mean it?”

  “I mean it.”

  Sumi walked out of the rows of seating to stand at the end of their aisle. She pointed at Crane. “This is bigger than California with you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Crane said simply. “The globe has shown me fifty-three weld spots that, when completed, will halt continental drift completely, along with their associated EQs, volcanoes, and tsunamis. I figured that talking the world into doing it will be one hell of a lot easier once we’ve shown it works in one place.”

  “Thirty-two years is two lifetimes for a politician! That presents problems.”

  “It’s tougher than that,” Crane said. “We’ve got only a five-year window, at the most, on the San Andreas weld. By September of 2033 the pressure will have increased enough all along the fault that the weld won’t be possible without starting a major quake.”

  Sumi moved along the aisle and sat beside him, staring up at the justices’ bench. “And what would you need, exactly, from the government?”

  “A lot of things except money. First off, we’d have to figure out a way to get around the ban on detonating nukes. I’d need the right permissions to dig down into the Imperial Valley in the Salton Trough. And, of course, I’d need access to
nuclear stockpiles.”

  “Maybe,” Sumi said, “it wouldn’t be quite so difficult as you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re an expert on nukes,” Sumi answered. “Do you remember the development of the first atomic bomb?”

  “The Manhattan Project,” Crane said. “So what?”

  “It was done in utmost secrecy, the government treating it as a national security measure, not telling anyone about it until it was dropped on the Japanese.”

  “Are you suggesting we could do this whole thing secretly?” Lanie asked.

  Sumi nodded, then looked at Crane, and touched his arm. “I’ve always had faith in you. If you say to me, this is possible, then I believe it is possible. You’re a gracious man. I’ve wronged you badly and I owe you, and you know I do. It’s an obligation.”

  “No, Sumi, I’d never—”

  Sumi put her hand up for silence. “Please. Allow me to retrieve my honor and gain face. Liang Int has suffered a severe blow. They would ultimately approve the project if we could run it right near the next election and succeed—especially if it won’t cost them anything. That’s the ringer here.”

  “I understand,” Crane said.

  “It would be in absolutely no one’s interest to let this leak to the world. I can just hear the outcry now, especially with the Masada Cloud circumnavigating the globe every seventeen days to remind people of the nuclear terror. This may be an historic period for you, the chance at last to realize your dream. I assume this is what you’ve been aiming for all this time?”

  “You assume correctly.”

  “It will be the greatest sell job in the history of the world, but I’m ready to undertake it. The aspects are as good as they’ll ever get. I’ll need more from you than this disk to sell the program, though. You’ll fund it all, every cent?”

  “I’m prepared to do that.”

  “Then I only have to convince the right people of its feasibility. Get it all on paper. I assume you’ve red-teamed it?”

  Crane nodded. “That’s what I’ve spent the last year doing. I know every argument against it and each counterargument.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out another disk. “It’s all on here.”

  Sumi took the disk. “You are a feared and respected man at Liang Int. They landed on your wrong side once and paid the price. They’ll want to listen.” She pocketed the disk and stood. “I’ll get on it right away.”

  Crane also stood. “You’ll do it, really do it?”

  “Absolutely. It may be why I was put on this planet… solely to do this job.”

  Lewis Crane, hard as rock and focused as an epicenter, fell back in his seat, stupefied. “I-I don’t know how to thank you, I—”

  “No,” Sumi said, shaking her head vigorously. “It is I who thanks you. I may recoup my honor now.”

  She bowed and hurried out of the chamber. Crane was shaking, nearly delirious.

  Lanie squealed and threw her arms around his neck. “You did it! You… did… it! How do you feel?”

  Crane wiped his eyes and kissed his bride to be. “I feel like the weight of five billion years has been lifted from my shoulders.”

  RECOMBINATIONS

  NEW CAIRO

  16 JULY 2026, 2:00 P.M.

  Abu Talib, also known as Daniel Newcombe, stood in a huge cotton field with representatives from the Islamic republics of Algeria and Guatemala. Daily, Islamic dignitaries came to pay their respects or to negotiate trade deals with New Cairo. Right now, cotton was king.

  Upon conversion to Islam, Newcombe had taken the name of Abu Talib. It was the name of Mohammed’s uncle and greatest lifelong supporter, who also had not believed in the prophet’s mission, as Newcombe/Talib did not believe in the tenets of Islam or in the philosophy of Brother Ishmael. It was the godless man’s way to embrace religion.

  The field stretched out for hundreds of acres, the Yo-Yu screens, ten feet overhead, casting a slight bluish glow over everything. In the far distance Liang’s wall split the horizon. Hundreds of people worked in the field around them. Right now the cotton plants resembled small dead bushes, but the earth was black and rich, the spring rains mere weeks away.

  Ali Garcia, the trade rep from Guatemala, was kneeling by a plant, frowning at it. “This will be American Upland cotton?” he asked, his fingers playing with a twiggy branch.

  “Best in the world,” Brother Talib said. “It doesn’t look like much now, but the flowers will start forming after the rains come. Once they wither, the boll forms and matures in a couple of months. You’ll be able to take delivery in mid-August.”

  “What can you produce from a field like this?” asked the Algerian, Faisal ben Achmed.

  “We got eight hundred thousand bales of cotton from these fields last year without knowing what we were doing. This year we’ll double that. Interested?”

  “Of course we’re interested,” Garcia said. “What are you looking for in return?”

  “Investment capital, farm machinery, livestock, and building materials,” Talib said. “We’re digging in, entrenching until the rest of our people are welcomed to the homeland. We want to establish a strong base from which to grow.”

  “Kwiyis.” Faisal nodded. “Your people are strong, your soil blessed. You will make a good addition to our international family.”

  “We must go,” Garcia said, standing, “if we wish to catch the shuttle to Belize.”

  “Sure you can’t stay and have a meal with me?” Talib asked. “The food is delicious, and all raised right here in New Cairo. Let me extend my full hospitality.”

  “Alfshukre,” Faisal said. “But no, and with regrets. Abu Talib’s hospitality is renowned.”

  Talib nodded, then led them toward the main road through the fields, the three of them climbing, under a fat, warm sun, into the vehicle waiting there.

  “How large are the occupied territories?” Garcia asked as the driver opened the focus and sped off.

  “We are the northwestern corner of the territories,” he said. “The Mississippi divides us from Arkansas and Louisiana, and provides us a natural boundary all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico. We will extend east to the Atlantic Ocean. There will be enough room.”

  “For now,” Faisal said, all of them laughing.

  “Will the Americans capitulate?” Garcia asked.

  “I hope so,” Talib answered. “I truly hope so.”

  They drove through the cotton fields, then the soybean fields… the rice fields… past the dairies… past the chicken farms. Housing was mixed throughout the fields, workers living close to their jobs. The housing came in the form of three-story blocks of apartments made from brick fired in New Cairo. Building was a major concern and always on full throttle. Lacking the proper equipment early on, the building industry was nearly biblical in its methods, something Talib wanted to rectify as quickly as possible.

  He loved the respect with which he was treated these days. With Crane he had lived in the shadows. Here, he cast the shadow, and it was a large one. Most everyone thought of him, not Brother Ishmael, when the Islamic State was mentioned. It put the two men on a strange footing, especially since Talib didn’t regard Ishmael as his spiritual leader.

  Dead magnolia trees and live people lined the roadway leading up to the pre-Civil War plantation house that served as the governmental and religious headquarters for New Cairo. Yo-Yu had been given permission to build a shield plant in the walled state and in exchange they were designing tree shields so that regeneration of the thousands of magnolia and cottonwood trees in New Cairo could get underway.

  He wished his guests sahbah innoor, had the driver move them along, then began to push his way through the crowd thronging the front entrance to the government house. There were always crowds, either people complaining or, most often, refugees seeking asylum. As soon as he was able to put up another building, he was going to have Immigration moved to the farthest geographical point in New Cairo from where he was standing.


  The people parted for him the moment they recognized him. He was a Presence, thought of as Ishmael’s word made flesh, and was treated accordingly. And he was NOI’s only statesman. Brother Ishmael refused to assume that role and refused, even, to visit New Cairo until, as he said, “all my brothers are free to journey home.”

  So, to the citizens here, it was Abu Talib who ruled New Cairo. To date no request of his had been denied, so his overlord status was unchallenged. New Cairo’s first year had been full of hardship, emotional, physical, financial. But they had survived and the colony was succeeding, and he had been a large part of it.

  It had made sense, when he’d decided to go on sabbatical, to come here. He was close to the action and respected, and he could work with the very soil that had thrown his EQ-eco out of synch to begin with. Also, Crane and Lanie were far away. He was working hard to forget both of them—with little success.

  His lab had been a large bedroom with a wide veranda. He worked and slept there, leaving the French doors open to the breeze all night. Now he coded in and locked the door behind him.

  “Assalamu ahlaykum,” came a voice from amidst his computers and seismos.

  He turned in surprise. Khadijah was staring at him.

  “Wiahlaykum issalam,” he said, crossing the distance between them to kiss her on both cheeks. “What brings you down here to Africktown? You’re a long way from the city, girl.”

  “My brother has sent me. He wants me to ‘get used to the alluvial plain.’ Is it always this hot?”

  “Most of the time,” he said and laughed. “I hate to say it, but it’s good to see you.”

  “Thank you. I’m actually glad to be here.”

  “Well, if you intend to stay for a while,” he said, “remember to wear a veil when you go outside. This is an Islamic state.”

  She smiled. “I found out the hard way. Someone threw a rock at me when I was coming in.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Threw it back.”

  He chuckled. “You’ll have to be put to work, too,” he said. “That’s the rule here. You gotta work.”