Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Bring in the bomb truck!” Ishmael yelled. The truck eased forward, men walking next to it through the wide doorway. Talib entered slowly, moving as if in the grip of a dream.

  The bomb truck drove into the center of the elevator, knocking furniture aside, the rest of the men rushing in. It was meant to take out the elevator shaft, to seal the works below into a sarcophagus.

  Ishmael shoved the G’s body out of the way, the door closing immediately. He walked over to Talib.

  “Pull yourself together, Brother,” he said. “Be a man.”

  “If Crane’s down there,” Talib said, “it’s possible that his wife and son are down there, too.”

  Ishmael smiled in satisfaction. “We could clean out the whole nest of vipers,” he said, then turned to the man sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck. “Hit the timer on the truck charge. Brothers, we have exactly one hour until the shaft blows.”

  Talib felt the elevator jerk to a start, then begin its slow descent into the precinct of Hell.

  Lanie Crane heard the elevator’s arrival bell from the computer room, followed by a lot of voices. For a moment she thought the guests had returned for some reason. Then Mohammed Ishmael’s booming voice told her it was the end of the world.

  She grabbed Charlie from where he slept on a blanket on the floor and raced into the hallway to the stairs.

  Charlie awoke and began to cry. She covered his mouth with her hand and turned right at the bottom of the stairs, darted past the line of carts there and ran to the shaft maintenance elevator. She hit the button.

  “I’m sorry,” the pleasant computer voice said, “but the shaft maintenance elevator is in use.”

  She could hear them now in the computer room, hear their gunfire and the crashing of blasted items onto the concrete floor. Large shards of glass exploded out of the observation glass, showering her and Charlie, who screamed in terror.

  She charged back to the carts and grabbed one, tearing off down B Corridor, her child held tightly in her right arm. She fled because she had to… knowing there was nowhere to go.

  Three and a half miles down Tube #63, Crane stood in his sealed elevator cage inspecting the leak. Minimal. It wouldn’t interfere with the blast. He shouldn’t have worn his burn suit. It made maneuvering too difficult. The suit was large and hot, its hard-shelled exterior designed to protect the wearer from falling debris. Even a pebble dropped four miles could be deadly.

  Above he thought he heard a small clicking sound, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a stylus being tapped on a table. He looked around and saw nothing close to him that could produce it.

  He looked upward into an infinity of tubing. If the sound was coming from the cavern, it would have to be damned loud to reach him at this depth. A chill went through him.

  He turned up his bulky helmet’s aural apparatus, amplifying the sounds. Hollow, echoing booms. Explosive booms. They were coming from the cavern.

  His pad was beeping in his ears. He tapped to hear Lanie’s anguished voice. “Crane! Please answer!”

  “What’s happening? Lanie!”

  “Men… with guns! They’re destroying the place, they’ve already shot at me, I—”

  “They’re scanning!” Crane said. “Get off the fiber! Hide!”

  “But wh—”

  He cut her off and levered up, the cage swiftly starting to glide along its track. “Hurry,” he whispered, holding the lever down, trying futilely for more speed. “Hurry.” The cage’s top speed was about thirty miles per hour, over six minutes to the top. Anything could happen.

  He knew it was NOI. He knew it was Newcombe, come to finish their danse macabre. His only hope lay in reaching the cavern and offering his life in exchange for Lanie and Charlie.

  He hit “open signal” on his pad. “Whoever’s listening,” he said, the helmet’s mike transmitting through the pad, “this is Crane. I will surrender myself to you, do whatever you ask. Please, let my wife and son live. They are innocents.”

  “Everyone is innocent,” came Ishmael’s voice in return, “and no one. Life is cruel. God is great.”

  He could hear explosions as he passed the two-mile marker. They were bringing down the whole cavern! Something came falling down his tube, passing him in a blur.

  Ten seconds later, the bottom of Tube #63 exploded, the light flashing, followed seconds later by the sound. The tube rumbled, his cage strained against its rail. Fire burned below, thrown everywhere, phosphorous eating through the lining of lead shielding that covered the hot material.

  His cage kept creaking upward, threatening to jump its rail in the last mile. He finally reached cavern level to see carts retreating around the snaky bend in the distance, back toward the main cavern. At that moment, an explosion went up at the far end of his corridor. Supports tore, hunks of the ceiling fell as a rush of dust and stone fragments blew down the corridor.

  His cart was still parked against the corridor wall. He stumbled to it, feeling his way, protected by his helmet. He jumped in and opened the focus as the next explosion went, shaking the chamber, rock powdering down on him from above, bouncing off his helmet as more dust obscured his vision.

  He raced forward by memory, bumping the right wall to avoid running into the tubes as another explosion went, the entire chamber behind him collapsing as he made an S turn into another corridor.

  Focus open full, he raced through the weaving corridor even as tubes exploded to his left. Crane’s world and his life were disintegrating all around him. None of it mattered except Lanie and Charlie. He had to get to them.

  He hit the main cavern at full throttle, men in black charging toward the stairs, fire pluming out of the computer room, main room tubes rumbling, belching smoke and fire. The whole cavern was shaking, rock shearing from the ceiling to explode on the concrete floor.

  It was perdition, hand-delivered by Brother Ishmael. He drew gunfire as he sped toward B Corridor, slamming his cart into a man running out, hearing distant explosions as that corridor collapsed in on itself from the far end.

  The radiation warning horns were blowing loudly, the wall monitors flashing at the top end of the red zone. His cart popped into a clear space and he saw a full picture of destruction in an instant. A man in a cart was laughing, aiming a weapon down Tube #21. The rail had been knocked away; a cart had fallen in the tube and blocked the descent of the service cage.

  He had only one shot and took it instantly. Foot to the floor, he broadsided the gunman’s cart. The blow knocked man and machine into the tube as Crane turned hard to keep from going in with the enemy.

  And the man exploded.

  Crane jumped out of the cart and ran to the tube. Burning phosphorous was strewn over the cavern floor. Two burning carts were jammed between the tube side and the middle post; fire everywhere threatened to set off the plastique. A cage had torn loose from the track and was balanced precariously atop the wreckage of the two carts five feet down, all of it threatening to lose its fragile wedge and fall the tube’s length. Lanie and a hysterical Charlie were in the cage, fire all around them. Lanie had a death grip on the boy as she crouched fetally within the cage, staring up through its torn back.

  “Climb up!” he called, reaching down. “Grab my hand.”

  “I-I can’t!” she called back. “I’m dizzy… my knees won’t… God, help me, Crane.”

  The word hit him. Vertigo. She was frozen, out of the game. He went to his stomach, leaning into the hole, reaching. Her eyes widened in horror. And Crane realized she was living her dream.

  She reached up with her left hand, Charlie in the crook of her right arm. She couldn’t stand and was shaking uncontrollably. The mass of wreckage creaked loudly, then jerked, Lanie screaming as everything moved.

  He leaned way out and grabbed her wrist with his good hand. The wreckage screeched loudly on the inner tube, then broke free and fell. Crane’s arm jerked hard and nearly dislocated at the shoulder. Lanie was dangling above the abyss. Fire clung to the surface of the t
ube and flared out to burn her.

  “Hang on!” he yelled, but she couldn’t hear him through the helmet. He tried to pull her up, but the weight was too great and he had no leverage. Sweat was pouring from him, dripping on his faceplate, fogging it.

  He had nothing to anchor to. He tried to rise enough to get to his knees, but he couldn’t. She screamed as flames bit her leg.

  “Take Charlie!” she yelled, trying to raise the boy within the embrace of her right arm.

  The sound was loud in the suit, rumbling round and round Crane’s head. He brought his bad arm around, dangled it in the tube. “I can’t!” he shouted in response to the question in her eyes. “My arm! My bad arm!”

  “Take him!” she screamed. “Please, take him!”

  “I can’t!” An explosion farther down the corridor rocked them, and she started to slide from his grasp, his hand cramping as he tried to hold on. Lanie squirmed, trying the impossible—to hand her screaming child up.

  “Oh, God, Lanie… Lanie!”

  She slipped.

  Just like that. He watched her fall, clutching Charlie. In his mind’s eye, she froze in that position, forever hanging in midair like the imprint on the event horizon of a black hole. Forever pristine. Forever alive. He had a single goal: to follow Lanie and his son into the well of death.

  “So,” came a voice behind him, and Crane turned. Mohammed Ishmael kicked him down and stood over him with a shotgun. “The seed is gone. Now we must uproot the weed from which it sprang.”

  “Thank you,” Crane said, for he understood that, finally, this man would give him lasting peace.

  Then Ishmael half turned. Crane saw Burt Hill running toward them, his eyes crazed, his shovel already half through its slashing arc.

  He caught Ishmael on the back with the sharp edge of the shovel, the man going down hard, his body vibrating wildly.

  Hill raised the shovel again, high over his head.

  “No!” Talib shouted from behind. Hill swung around to go after him. “Don’t, Burt!”

  Burt charged. The gun in Talib’s hand coughed twice, scored twice. Hill stumbled, collapsed face forward as another explosion, very close by, rocked the chamber, a support beam crashing down between Crane and Newcombe.

  “Are you satisfied?” Crane screamed, rising to his knees, thick dust blowing through the chamber, Newcombe trying to cover his face with his free hand. “You’ve killed her! You’ve killed the baby….” Crane broke down, bending at the waist, crying, his face buried in his hands.

  “Crane,” Talib said, moving closer. “I never meant… for this… I never—”

  “Kill me!” Crane screamed, looking up at him. “Would you have the human decency to spare me this pain?”

  “Crane,” Talib whispered.

  “For God’s sake, kill me! Kill me!”

  Talib raised the gun, his lips sputtering. His hand began to shake uncontrollably and his breath came in sobbing gasps. He dropped the gun. Tears running down his face, he grabbed Ishmael by the collar and dragged him into the thick dust clouds blowing through the corridor.

  Crane quavered on his knees, crying. As he turned to jump into the tube he heard the moans.

  A dust-and-blood-covered Burt Hill grabbed his shoulders. “C-Crane,” Hill said in a rasp. “We’ve got to… got to….” He stumbled, fell to one knee.

  Crane stared down the tube, then turned reluctantly from it. “Damn you for being alive,” he muttered. Tearing himself from the lip, not selfish enough to force Burt to die with him, he cursed before he climbed over the fallen beam, got to Burt, and levered him to his feet.

  “C-can’t hardly breathe,” Hill said.

  “Dust,” Crane said, knowing the man couldn’t hear him. “You’ve probably got a punctured lung.”

  Somehow he got Hill in his cart, negotiated the crossbeam in their path. He took off, the area of Tube #21 collapsing behind them, burying his entire life for all time.

  He got them back to the shaft service elevator, large chunks of cavern wall and ceiling crashing to the ground. He clumsily unbolted his helmet and carried Hill to the elevator, stumbling inside with him.

  The door closed. He hit the Up arrow as the cavern ceiling gave way completely. They were moving.

  Crane didn’t remember the trip up. Hill had a sucking chest wound and a superficial wound in the forearm. The sucking sound meant the wound had to be closed quickly.

  He removed the burn suit’s plasteel gloves, using one to cover the wound. A container of lead putty was in his utility bag. He used it around the edges of the glove to seal it to Hill’s skin and create a vacuum. Then he rolled Burt onto his injured side to ease the breathing in his good lung. If he were to survive, he’d need help quickly.

  He sat with the groaning man, cradling his head, crying. It was over. Everything. Over. What kind of a fool had he been to think he could change the course of history? What arrogance. Life was pain and nothing else. His mind held one image only—Lanie and Charlie frozen on their event horizon, his wife’s eyes filled with a kind of celestial disappointment.

  He heard a bell and realized they’d reached topside. The door slid open into the equipment shed. As he rose, dragging Burt with him, a massive explosion blew them both out of the elevator, collapsing the shaft completely, the equipment shed shaking to rubble all around them.

  He stared into the night. The sound of distant sirens provided music. Helos overhead danced spotlights all around him. Beauty in the midst of horror. He stared up at a starfield that was startlingly brilliant and cold… and wondrous through the haze of his tears. The Moon was round, full, the letters YOU printed on its surface in blood red. You. YOU.

  FOREST LAWN CEMETERY—LOS ANGELES

  5 JULY 2028, MID-MORNING

  The mausoleum was very old. It was marble with pillars like the Parthenon and decorated with cherubs whose faces were dark from years of exposure to the elements. There was some lateral fracturing near its base, and a couple of large jagged cracks on the vault itself indicated some seismic meandering in the area. Crane had chosen this mausoleum because it was directly across from the memorial graves of Lanie and Charlie, and he could sit scrunched up on its steps below ground level without being seen. He sat perfectly still, like one of the cherubs, wearing sunglasses and a mild sunblock.

  The funeral for Lanie and Charlie had been large and ostentatious. Crane saw to that. Their bodies were lost, of course, so empty coffins had been ceremoniously paraded through town and brought here for burial before a large gathering. People felt as if they knew the Cranes, so public had been their lives. Thousands had turned out. All camheads, of course. Even a Yo-Yu representative had given a eulogy that had rivaled Liang’s for sheer triteness and empty condolence.

  Lanie would have hated every minute of it just as Crane did, but he was putting on a show for one, and if it worked, the sham funeral and all the agony it had caused him would have been worthwhile.

  NOI had gotten away. Talib and his ilk apparently rat-holed in their maze of underground passageways, sitting out the furor. And quite an amazing furor there was. Brother Ishmael had miscalculated public reaction to his savage attack on the compound; the viddy of the G being cut in half and going through the windshield of Ishmael’s truck was replayed over and over around the world. But worse, a cam attached to Brother Ishmael showed him standing happily by as Lanie and Charlie died. Everyone’s heart, regardless of their position on the Imperial Valley Project issue, went out to the baby. The public was clamoring for Liang to mete out the most severe justice to the “holy” man and his henchman, Abu Talib, the only two faces the public had seen.

  Crane crept slowly up the stone stairs and looked at Lanie’s and the baby’s memorial graves fifty feet away on the gently rolling hills of Forest Lawn. In the far distance, he could see a figure moving slowly in his direction, constantly checking over his shoulder.

  The dead, hollow shell that had once been Lewis Crane felt a spark ignite within. Hatred, pure and simple
. He was surprised that he still could feel any emotion.

  He padded the P fiber and wished the answering voice a belated happy Independence Day. Then he padded off and climbed the stairs.

  The figure reached the graves and stood, head bowed. He was dressed in the green coveralls of the cemetery’s groundskeepers. A wide-brimmed hat was pulled down over his face, but Crane would recognize Abu Talib/Daniel Newcombe if the man were covered with fur and barking like a dog.

  Talib looked up, his eyes betraying no emotion as Crane stopped in front of him.

  “I’ve never in my whole life wished anyone dead before,” Crane said. “But you I could kill with my own hands.”

  “I loved her, Crane,” Talib said, tears filling his eyes. “I wouldn’t have hurt her… or your child for the world. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you, you know.”

  “I knew the risk when I came here. I-I just couldn’t stay away. Maybe I’m weak… I don’t know.”

  “If it was me you wanted, you could have killed me any time. Why did you have to do it the way you did?”

  The man looked at the ground. “We felt it was important to stop your work, not just you.”

  “To stop science, Dan, is that what you were trying to do?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a difference to me!” Crane screamed. “You’ve taken my life from me.” He grabbed the man’s coveralls with his good hand. “You’ve got to tell me why… you’ve got to!”

  Talib’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. Finally, he said, “I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve got this b-blood on my hands and I… I don’t know what to do to make it go away. You ask me how it all came to this? I don’t know. I keep trying to put it together, to… figure out… why. But it’s like I can’t think anymore, can’t g-grasp hold of a concept without it slipping away. I shot Burt. I-I shot him. Me! Is he… is he….”

  “He’ll live,” Crane said, noticing helos overhead, white-clad G making their way through rows of headstones to reach them. “Where’s Ishmael?”