Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  She looked down instinctively, every gesture reading like a roadmap to him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Ten years is a long time. You didn’t know if I was alive, I—”

  A loud buzzer went off; Khadijah immediately stood up. “It’s time to leave,” she said. “Is there anything you want to say to the people?”

  He laughed. “Today’s the first day I’ve heard a voice other than my own in years. I don’t even live in the same world you live in.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll make up something.”

  Her door clicked and popped open. The children moved toward it. So soon. How could it be over so soon? This was worse than the isolation. “Crane,” he said as she hustled the children out the door. “What’s Crane doing?”

  Her brittle laugh startled him so much that his body twitched.

  “How the mighty do fall. A pariah, that’s what Crane is. An outcast. Reviled… for planning to set off nuclear bombs. The tide turned against him when his insane plan was fully revealed. Then for years he was ranting and raving all over the teevs about some terrible disaster coming in California. Nobody listened to him. And I haven’t heard anything about him in a long time.” Halfway out the door, she turned back and said, “We’re going to get you out of here.”

  “Come back for more visits,” he said, but she was gone. The door closed quickly, he heard the lock snap. “Tell them I must have access to information!” he shouted. “For God’s sake, do something!”

  He slouched in the chair. His door clicked and popped open. Slowly, he got up, then trudged back to his cell. He’d live from visit to visit now, in the hinterlands of hope. He had lost the ability to track time… and he never would get it back.

  Lewis Crane sat in the back seat of the Moonskimmer with Burt Hill. The all-terrain vehicle’s bulbous helium-filled underbelly made it feel as if they were floating over the stark lunar landscape. The stars were brilliant pinpoints above, the crown of Earth just passing over the horizon behind them. The real estate man talked nonstop, continually forcing internal adjustment of the cabin’s carbon-dioxide monitors. A pale trail of light from the Earth’s corona illuminated the landscape, this band of surface getting ready to enter a two-week period of “night.”

  “We don’t get a lot of Darksiders up here,” the real estate man, named Ali, said. “People want the good property lightside, where you get the view of Earth.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want,” Crane said, turning to the windows. They were skimming the Southern Sea, Galileo’s Mare Australe, on their way to YOU-LI’s defunct titanium mining operation in the Sea of Ingenuity. The Jules Verne Crater rose majestically on their left. The mare was dust, though, not water as Galileo had surmised, powdered rock and glass and asteroid scum.

  “I don’t know why you want to look at places on the darkside,” Burt said, wheezing. “A man likes a little sunshine from time to time.”

  “They get as much light over here as on the other side,” Crane said. “You just don’t have to look at the Earth, that’s all.”

  “I got’s lots good property over there,” the salesman said. “Prime Earthrise.”

  Crane ignored the comment. “Now, anything I buy here is mine, right?”

  Ali turned to him, black moustache arching over a wide smile. He formed his fingers into a circle with his thumb. “Absolute sovereignty,” he said, snapping his fingers open. “Many groups buy lands for their religious freedom, you know? Or for their politics. No Earth governments involved, see? It’s good system if you like ’a take care of yourself.”

  “How about access to water?” Hill asked.

  “How about it?” Ali returned. “You make whatever deals you can make to get what water you can. The consortium up here charge a lot, you know? Most people, if they can afford it, truck it up from Earth.”

  Crane grunted. Earth wasn’t the place to find water nowadays. Oh, it was better in a number of respects. The atmosphere was ozone-regenerated, people living in the sun again the way he’d remembered from his childhood, and Masada had disappeared completely five years ago with barely any notice. Everyone was too busy worrying about the amount of radioactivity in their water supplies to care about too much else. The fallout from Masada had contaminated more than water. Waste products had leaked through their safety containments all over the world because nobody was willing to look at the problem until it had become a catastrophe. Tainted water was everywhere.

  He’d begun working it out on the globe at the Foundation, simply inputting rate of leakage data and the presence and speed of movement of underground water supplies. The hope was for a prediction, well ahead of time, as to where and how the disease would spread itself to the body of the planet, so that mankind would know where to entrench to fight the invader. But to some, the poisoning of the Earth’s water supply seemed like a reasonable perdition. Every age has its optimists.

  The globe was a wonder, his wife’s living legacy. Many issues like the radioactivity project had been run through its cogitative senses and resulted in real conclusions. But it had broken down in some ways, which he knew would not have happened had Lanie lived. The result was disappointments, unpredicted quakes, for example, including one in California. Until now, the globe had seemed infallible.

  It always made him think about Lanie’s theories of swimming pools dug in Rome starting quakes in Alaska. In fact, two of the unpredicted quakes had finally been attributed to lakes being dug, one as far as five hundred miles away, water filling the lake, filtering down into the cracks in the rocks and lubricating hidden faults. He wondered if one day, though, it would be possible to know enough to tell people where not to dig lakes… or swimming pools.

  “Here we go, Misters,” Ali said, pointing through the windshield at a glowing area several miles distant. “I had them turn the lights on for you.”

  Crane wondered what Lanie would think of this—him buying a piece of the Moon with Stoney’s three-billion-dollar endowment. Stoney had told him to use it to buy another dream; now, ten years later, he was taking the man at his word.

  Ali reversed the thrust fans to slow them, the skimmer bumping rudely into the middle of a small ghost town of interconnected domes and square, metal prefab buildings stacked like the holoblocks Charlie had used to play with on the elevator ride in the Imperial Project.

  “Are the mine shafts still open?” Crane asked as he looked at a series of abandoned restaurants with familiar names.

  Ali hesitated. “We can discuss the shafts. I’m not sure how much happiness it will bring YOU-LI to come in and fill—”

  “I want the shafts,” Crane said. “I’m going to tap the core for heat and power.”

  “You want shafts,” Ali said happily, twirling his hand in the air. “You got shafts. They’re everywhere… all over this damn place. The man wants shafts. He wants them!”

  Ali eased them to the lock, bumping up, magnetic clamps catching and sealing tight. “You’ve got to put on the helmet,” he said. “I can’t afford to turn on the life support in here just to show the place.”

  “How much space does the entire operation cover?” Crane asked, as Ali put on his helmet, then pointed to Crane’s.

  Crane let Burt help him into the helmet. “Think of these constructions as the center point,” Ali said. “The operation extends for a thousand square miles all around us. You’ll own the Van de Graaff Crater, the Leibnitz Crater, and the Von Karman Crater. The Sea of Ingenuity is yours, all of it.”

  “The price?”

  “Three point two billion,” Ali said. “Now, I know that’s a whole lot’a money. I got smaller plots on the lightside that—”

  “Make it three billion even and you’ve got a deal,” Crane said.

  “You’ve got that kinda collateral?” Ali asked. “Not to be blunt, sir.”

  “We’ll be paying cash.”

  “My friend!” Ali said. “You have made an old camel trader very happy. Nobody wants the darkside.”

  “I insist on
it. Shall we tour the facility?”

  The tour lasted less than an hour, Ali anxious to get back to the lightside and Crane not all that interested in the accommodations. The YOU-LI camp had been a typical mining operation, spartan and barely supported from corporate. Crane would be tearing down the buildings in due time, constructing his own. But the existing construction would house the initial planners and engineers whose task it would be to turn a darkside mining camp into a new civilization. It would be a long and difficult project, but Crane had undertaken many such projects before.

  Later, back at the Moonbase Marriott, Crane and Hill sat at a table in the bar, Crane’s back to the magnificent Earthrise shining through the huge, thick windows. The hotel was full, the area around the hotel beginning to look like a small city of domes and skydecks. The Moon was new territory, optioned for quick sale by YOU-LI, the previous owners. The Chinese were consolidating their holdings and the Moon didn’t figure in their future. So, a piece at a time, it was being developed by the people who always open new territories and settlement—rogues and heroes. Crane wasn’t sure which category he fit into.

  Hill, frail and quiet since being wounded years before, raised a beer. “I guess this is to you,” he said. “I’m not sure what you did, but congratulations.”

  “We’re taking advantage of an opportunity while we can,” Crane said, touching his glass of Scotch to the beer bottle, then sipping. “I always wanted to run my own government.”

  “Bullshit,” Hill said. “All you ever wanted to do was kill EQs. All of a sudden we’re buying up the Moon.”

  “It’s not sudden. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time… years. It was never feasible until now. I don’t tell you everything on my mind, Burt.”

  “That’s a fact. You never told me Sumi was a woman.”

  “I figured that if you were dumb enough not to know,” Crane said, “I wasn’t going to be the one to tell you.”

  It was an old joke between them. Truth to tell, neither of them had had the vaguest idea about Sumi. Her story had been fascinating and most nearly tragic. So much had happened over the years.

  Barely a month after the attack on the Imperial Project, President Gideon had slipped on a bar of soap in the bathtub and promptly died—at least that was the story released by the White House. Sumi had become President, immediately appointing Kate Masters as her VP. Because Liang Int and Yo-Yu had split the electorate, Sumi was able to beat both companies’ tickets and get elected President without affiliation in the November ’28 elections.

  It was Sumi who’d laid the groundwork for what had ultimately resulted in the Islamic State. Because of what she termed “health reasons” she chose not to run again in ’32, even though she’d been a balanced and respected Chief Executive during her term in office. Then, at the same news conference, she’d revealed her true gender, saying she could “no longer pretend” to be a male.

  Kate Masters had run and won big, leapfrogging from her already huge power base and cashing in on anti-Chinese sentiment. The economy continued to falter because of a barrage of sanctions imposed upon Chinese business interests by a worldwide Islamic movement whose global view was ethnocentric, to say the least.

  The reasons for Sumi Chan’s declining to run again then became immediately apparent when she was checked into a mental institution. Paul, the lover devolved from her chip, had managed to take over her life completely, making all her decisions, choosing her advisors, and drawing her into an ever-downward spiral of xenophobia and closed-mindedness. She’d become the entire loop of humanity all within herself. No one else was allowed in by Paul.

  Crane had maintained a loose contact with her through this period, buying from YOU-LI, at Kate’s insistence, Sumi’s ancestral lands, which he then leased back to her at the price of one dollar per year in perpetuity. Sumi needed—and was granted—a legal divorce from Paul. So strong was his presence that he was even there when the chip was removed. She wasn’t the only one with a problem. Millions had become addicted to Yo-Yu’s chips, and an entire branch of medicine called Personality Replacement had sprung into existence to deal with the fallout.

  Sumi Chan spent four years locked away, Yo-Yu doling out billions in hospital and damage payments for addicted chippies, taking enough of a hit that it was forced into a worldwide merger with its struggling rival, the YOU-LI Corp. The Companion Chip went the way of the dinosaur, even as educational chip implants were increasing in popularity. Crane himself was ported in ’35 and found the device invaluable for research.

  Kate Masters, meanwhile, had been re-elected in ’36 and was now serving out the last two years of her second term. Sumi lived quietly on her ancestral lands in China.

  Stoney had died within a year of the Imperial catastrophe.

  For Crane, though, the last ten years had been a waking nightmare. Shortly after Talib’s arrest and imprisonment, when the story was out about the Imperial Valley Project, public sympathy turned sharply. Quickly, he, Crane, became the villain for daring even to think of detonating nuclear devices… for daring even to believe he could change the very substructure of the Earth or had any right to do so.

  His became the voice crying in the wilderness. Over and over again through the long years he tried to warn his countrymen of the terrible catastrophe to come in California. Worse than the insults, worse than the laughter greeting his recorded, written, and live messages, was the deafening silence with which his warnings were met. And, finally, he had given up hope.

  And he had become more hollow… and more hollow still.

  Then the Moon had gone up for sale and he’d felt something down in the pit of his stomach, a spark. He’d pounced on it.

  “You’re really going to put in… buildings and stuff up here, huh?” Hill asked.

  “Plan to,” Crane said, “I want to build a whole city up here, Burt. A place where people would want to live.”

  “You gonna be livin’ up here, too?”

  Crane smiled. “No, friend. I think we’re both a little too long in the tooth and cantankerous for this kind of pioneering.”

  Hill sat back and sighed heavily. “That’s a relief. I just couldn’t imagine myself in one of those damned helmets all the time. What happens if you gotta sneeze, or blow your nose?”

  “We will visit sometimes, though. There’s a lot of work to be done, decisions to be made.” Crane took a sip of the Scotch, watching a crew of construction workers in their muscle exo’s walking into the bar and sitting at a back table. “I don’t like the idea of being dependent upon Earth for my water supply,” he said. “Wonder if we could dredge permafrost on Mars and ship it here ourselves? Whoever controls the water, controls the environment.”

  “How many people you want to put out there?”

  “A few thousand at least, I’d say.”

  “You’ve been all fired up about this project for months. It seems crazy to me. Why do it? What’s the point?”

  Crane grimaced, finished his drink. He held up the glass and got the bartender’s attention, the man nodding and going for the Scotch bottle. “It’s all that money Stoney left me,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything worthwhile enough… lasting enough, to spend it on. Then this opened up.”

  “Why this?”

  “I had an aquarium once… well, twice, actually, but the one I’m thinking about I had when I was a kid living with my aunt,” Crane said. “I’d saved up for it myself. I had a lot of different kinds of fish in it over the years, but once I put a shrimp in, a delicate, beautiful little thing. I couldn’t find anything to feed it that it wanted to eat. After a while it began eating itself, day after day, a piece at a time just to stay alive. Eventually it hit a vital organ.”

  He turned then and looked at the Earth, huge and blue and cloud-shrouded through the viewports. He pointed to it. “That’s what I think they’re doing, eating themselves alive. They murder in the name of God and blindly destroy the very ecosystem that sustains them.”

  “People
are people.” Burt shrugged.

  “What you’re really saying is that people are animals,” Crane replied. “And I say to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a civilization, a real civilization, built on real understanding of ourselves and our universe. I bought property on the darkside because I don’t want my people seeing the Earth die before their eyes. My… city may be the last best hope for the human race, Burt. That’s why I’m doing it. Is that dream enough for you?”

  “You couldn’t save the Earth, so you want to make a new world?”

  “I’ll accept that interpretation.”

  “What’re you gonna call this place?”

  “Charlestown. I’m going to call it Charlestown.”

  Burt nodded, his eyes misting. “I think that’s real nice, Doc. Real nice.”

  Chapter 21: Firestorm

  SHIRAHEGA FIREBREAK—TOKYO, JAPAN

  1 SEPTEMBER 2045, NOON

  From the air, the Shirahega firebreak was impossible to miss, even in the world’s largest city. It was an apartment building, or rather a length of apartments, designed to cut off the firestorm resulting from a major quake, designed to protect the northernmost districts from the poorer southernmost ones. It was the Great Wall of Tokyo.

  Crane and Burt Hill were riding in the passenger section of a Red Cross relief helo, a dozen or so white-garbed medtechs, young people mostly, filling the benches beside and across from them. They didn’t know who Crane was, had no connection to the aging countenance that had once held a world in thrall with his exploits and his tragedies.