Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Sumi nodded, feeling that the net that had fallen over everyone at the Foundation was being tightened. “He’ll be traveling under the name Enos Mann. He’ll leave with the dark.”

  “Hmm, gone all night then. The Masada Cloud is scheduled to run in around midnight.”

  “Are your people in place?”

  “Don’t worry about my people,” Li said, a frown settling on his face as Mui approached. “You take care of pushing these people to get me that prediction. Now I suggest you circulate so that we do not make people suspicious.”

  Sumi bowed slightly, holding in the tension and the anger. She moved toward Newcombe, wishing there was something she could say, some subtle way she could get across to the man that he should stay at home tonight. Newcombe’s actions could doom Crane, the Foundation. Kate Masters, dressed in a bright red body stocking and trailing cape, was talking as Sumi arrived, champagne in hand.

  “Oh, Sumi,” Masters said, her red hair in tight curls hanging to her shoulders. “You simply must give me the secret of this sometime.” She held out her glass.

  “Old family recipe,” Sumi said, giving Masters the kind of leer she’d seen men do. “Good for your sex life.”

  “Honey, I got no problems in that department, but fill me up anyway.” She held out her glass, and Sumi poured. In a lot of ways, she felt that Masters played a game of hide-and-seek similar to her own, a game designed for a man’s world. There was more, much more, to Masters than she revealed.

  “Hey, save some of that for me,” Newcombe said, holding out his own glass.

  “I want all of you to know,” Masters said, taking a long drink, “I think what you’re doing here is important. I know that Crane has to sell it to the powers that be and that by its selling it becomes cheapened. But not to me.”

  “We appreciate that,” Lanie said, smiling at her. “We really only want to help people here, but it seems we always have to have an angle.”

  “Nature of the game,” Newcombe said, frowning. “It’s a game I hate, but it’s the only one in town.”

  “You scared me to death, you know, with your speech today,” Masters said.

  “I hope so,” Newcombe said. “It’s got me scared to death.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Masters said, taking another long drink, “we traded the Vogelman Procedure for backing the Crane Foundation, but had the administration declined, we would have backed you anyway. Some things are more important than politics. You people have class.”

  “Hail fellows well met, huh?” Sumi said. “Good for you. I must go get another bottle now. Stay in the shade.”

  Sumi left quickly, Lanie following him with her eyes. There was something terribly lonely, terribly sad about Sumi Chan. She didn’t trust him, but that didn’t stop her from feeling sorry for him. She looked at Masters. “What’s involved in the Vogelman?”

  “You interested, honey?”

  “No,” Newcombe answered for her. “We’ll just—”

  “Yes, I am interested,” Lanie said, looking steadily at Newcombe. “I have a lot to do in the next couple of years and I don’t want to have to worry about children.”

  “Single implant,” Masters said. “Outpatient stuff, over in fifteen minutes. It stays put forever and keeps you from ovulating—no cramps, no periods.” She looked at Newcombe. “A lot of women are having it done.”

  “So much for the world’s population,” he said.

  “You want to get preggie, you take a pill. No sweat. Mothers are having it done on their daughters at puberty. It takes care of one headache.”

  “It’s unnatural,” Newcombe said.

  Masters flashed her toothy smile. “Easy for you to say, buster. Nature is as nature does. There’s a couple of really good doctors in LA who do the procedure, Lanie. You want me to set something up for you?”

  “Yes,” Lanie said.

  “No,” Newcombe said.

  Masters took a long breath, finished her glass of enhanced. “So… maybe you two had better talk it over, eh?”

  “I’ll call you,” Lanie said, glaring at Newcombe. Why did he have to be so overbearing?

  “I’d better mingle,” Masters said, theatrically tossing her long hair. “They don’t pay me to stand here and drink.”

  “Like hell they don’t,” Newcombe said.

  The woman shrugged. “So I know when to make a graceful exit, okay? Thanks again for the show today. I’ll have nightmares for a week.” She shook hands with Newcombe and gave Lanie a lingering hug.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Lanie whispered. When Masters was well away, Lanie turned angrily to Dan. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been more embarrassed,” she said. “How could you do that?”

  “How could I? Isn’t something like this a decision both of us should make?”

  “Not from where I’m standing. It’s my body, my life. And next week I’m going to have the Procedure done whether you like it or not.”

  “We’re not kids anymore,” he said. “Your childbearing years won’t last much—”

  “Childbearing,” she said, taking a long breath to relax herself. “I’m not some earth mother just waiting for fertilization, Dan. Why do you always have to spoil—”

  “It’s a great day!” Crane interrupted. “We set ’em on their asses, didn’t we?”

  “We promised them something we can’t deliver,” Newcombe said harshly. “What’s so great about that? At the very least you should have waited until we took stress readings on site before announcing the quake to the world.”

  Crane looked at Lanie. “What’s his problem?”

  “Babies,” she said.

  “Babies,” Crane repeated, then shivered. “What a horrid thought. Never mind. We’ll have all the loose cannons out of here in a tick. I want to invite both of you up to my house for dinner, a little celebration.”

  Lanie brightened. “That sounds—”

  “I can’t,” Newcombe said.

  “What? You got another invitation?” Crane asked.

  Lanie watched Dan avert his eyes. “I’ve got to go down the mountain,” he said. “I’ve been putting off checking the calibration on our San Andreas equipment. It needs to get done.”

  “Tonight?” Crane said. “It’s a Masada night.”

  “I’ll take a burn suit.”

  “Take two,” Lanie said. “I’ll go with you.”

  He shook his head. “You stay here. Enjoy dinner. I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

  “I really don’t mind, I—”

  “I want to do this by myself,” Newcombe said, Lanie surprised at how mad he was. “Nothing personal… I-I need some time to think.”

  “Think about what?” Lanie asked, suspecting that his behavior had nothing to do with her having the Vogelman Procedure, that it was something else he was hiding from her.

  “Doc Dan!” Burt Hill called as he trotted toward them. “It’s getting dark. I got the helo out for you if you still want it!”

  “Coming!” Newcombe said. “I’ll be back in the morning. Enjoy your dinner.”

  With that, he turned and strode across the globe room without a backward glance.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Crane asked.

  Lanie shook her head. “I don’t know, but it had nothing to do with the San Andreas Fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He sent one of his techs to recalibrate that equipment last week.”

  9:10 P.M.

  “Are you ready yet?” Crane called from the cherrypicker as he sped around the globe on the thing, thirty feet in the air.

  “Come down from there!” Lanie shouted. “You’re going to kill yourself.” The crazy man was hanging out of the gondola and waving a bottle of rum at them.

  “I’m too ornery to die!” he yelled through cupped hands. “Get your people’s asses in gear and let’s crank this thing up.”

  “We’re working on it!”

  Sumi was at Lanie’s side. “Crane
seems… exuberant tonight.”

  “That’s one word to describe him, I guess.” Lanie was starving. Crane’s dinner invitation never quite materialized once he got hung up on the idea of trying out the globe for real. Between Dan’s absence and Crane’s childishness, she was beginning to feel more like a mother than an associate.

  She turned to her programmers, then rolled her eyes at Sumi. “Come on, people. You heard the man. Let’s get the thing online.”

  Groans and complaints came from all down the row. Lanie looked at Sumi. “Can you get him down?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t even try.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  She moved away from the terminals set against the wall and out near the globe, the thing rising majestically into its contoured ceiling. They were so small beside such a large dream. “Get yourself down here!” she called up to Crane as his hoist made another circumnavigation. “Or I’ll shut it down!”

  He banged the controls, the hoist jerking to a stop, his gondola swinging wildly. His bottle crashed on the floor near Lanie. “Oops,” he said.

  “Down, Crane… now!”

  He brought the gondola down to the floor and stepped out of it, his face boyishly contrite. “My bottle fell,” he said.

  “I’ll get you another,” Sumi said, hurrying off.

  “Great,” Lanie said, looking at Crane. “How much more of that have you got?”

  “Cases,” Crane said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Cases of rum from the grateful citizens of Le Precheur. What’s the holdup on the test run?”

  “As you may or may not know, doctor,” she said sternly, “we’ve been feeding info, not programs, into the computers. A task, I might add, that we haven’t finished yet. We’re having to open up all the pathways for your little test run tonight. These people have been at work all day and they’re tired. Give them a minute, okay?”

  “You’re angry with me,” he said, pouting.

  “I’m angry at Dan,” she said. “You’re here. One thick-headed geologist is the same as the next.”

  “Dan’s a big boy. He’s got business or something, that’s all.”

  “His life is here. He’s got no business below.”

  “One bottle of Martinique rum.” Sumi said, hurrying up to them and giving Crane the bottle. “Unenhanced.”

  Crane unscrewed the top and took a long drink, turning on his heel to stare at the magnificent globe. “I’m going to go nuts soon if we don’t get this thing running.”

  “You’re already nuts,” Lanie returned. “Look, you can’t expect much this first time out. The intangibles are—”

  “The intangibles are the reason I hired you,” he said, his smile gone. “That’s why the imager is here, to talk to my globe, to synnoetically communicate, to synergize.”

  “It’s not simple, you know. We’re getting in all the historical data, but we’re talking about the life of the planet itself. Somebody digs a pool in Rome, lubricating an unknown fault: Two years later there’s a major earthquake in Alaska. We can’t program in chaos and we don’t know how large, how pivotal, a role it plays.”

  Crane looked at Sumi. “What do you think?”

  “I think you need to predict something before the election or we’re going to lose our funding. If this will advance that cause, then I’m all for full speed ahead.”

  Lanie ignored Crane and looked at Sumi. “What the hell good would it do any of us to mispredict? I don’t get you. You’re as bad as Mr. Li. We can’t make the earth perform to our specs.”

  “We can’t survive without funding either,” Sumi said, then looked at Crane. “You all but predicted an EQ in mid America within the next few months. I didn’t say it, you did.”

  “We were on the spot,” Crane said. “Needed to come up with something, that’s all. The signs are there, but not complete signs.”

  “What else do you need?”

  Lanie felt a chill go through her when Sumi asked the question and she wasn’t sure why.

  “We’re going to the site next week to take stress readings. That will tell a more complete story.” Crane drank. “Some increased activity after the period of dilation or a foreshock would be nice. More ground-based electrical activity wouldn’t hurt either. Though with the dilation process, I’d be willing to do some speculation if the seismic activity picked up again. It’s a pretty good sign that lubricating activity has moved the serpentine, the olivine and water mix, into a position to make a major fault slip.”

  “You’d predict on that?” Sumi asked.

  “If push came to shove,” Crane said, then pointed to Lanie with his good hand which also held the bottle. “And I want to tell you something. First of all, I want no negativity. We’ve gotten this far by being positive and bold. Secondly, we’re fulfilling the dream of a lifetime here. Your computers are becoming crammed with more knowledge about planet Earth than any other single source encompasses. Answers will lie there. Maybe, once we’ve assimilated all this knowledge, you might possibly discover a great many things we’ve never realized before, including the notion that there might be a pattern to chaos.”

  “Don’t you ever run down?” she asked.

  “Never!”

  “I think we’re online!” one of the programmers called, a small cheer going up from them all.

  “I thank you one and all.” Crane turned to Lanie. “Would you like to do the honors?”

  She felt it then, the mixture of fear and excitement that she’d held at bay ever since he’d suggested trying the program. She nodded, unable to speak, and walked to the master board, a double-tiered profusion of winking lights, rheostats, and buttons with a single, controlling keyboard below a large monitor.

  She juiced the monitor to a flashing cursor and wished that Dan were here, no matter how things came out. She hesitated at the keyboard.

  “We don’t have any brass bands, Ms. King,” Crane said, and he was staring straight up at the monstrous globe.

  Fingers shaking, she typed: Advance from Pangaea. Then she took a deep breath and hit the enter key.

  With a low groan, the globe started spinning, the continents reforming themselves to the single, great continent of enormous weather variations. It split apart quietly, the continents running red veins of EQs where they broke and sheared against one another.

  “Beautiful,” Crane said. Lanie was far too involved in watching for glitches in the process to appreciate it. She was a bundle of nervous energy as she walked up to join him.

  “What’s our first historical interphase?” he asked, his voice hushed.

  “The Chicxulub meteor, five miles wide,” she said, “sixty-five million years ago.”

  “The K-T boundary,” Crane said.

  She stared, shaking, at the globe. “Yeah. Beginning of the Tertiary, end of the dinosaurs. Look for volcanoes on the antipode. There.”

  The holoprojection of a huge meteor burning in the atmosphere flew through the globe room, slamming into the Yucatán peninsula. A mammoth dust cover rose and spread over the entire globe, the faintest trace of throbbing red lines extending from the impact site showing through the dust as volcanic activity began on the opposite side of the sphere.

  Crane reached out and grabbed her arm, his face transfixed as he watched Earth history create itself before his eyes. “Yes,” he whispered to her own growing excitement.

  And then she heard it: a small bell sound from a distant programming station, then another, and another. The system was shutting down.

  “No,” she said, breaking free of his grasp and turning to her console, error messages flashing, bells clanging loudly all over the huge room. She turned her back and looked. The globe had shut itself down completely. Crane’s head jerked from side to side, and a deep growl issued from his throat.

  She reached for the console, her hands ready to type in damage control, but she stopped when she saw words written on the monitor that she’d hoped never to see:

  No Analog—System Incompatible.<
br />
  Her hands fell to her sides in utter confusion, Crane striding quickly to stand beside her.

  “Get on with it,” he said. “Work the inconsistency.”

  “I can’t,” she said, pointing to the screen. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  He read the words, then spun her by the shoulders to face him. “What does it mean?”

  A horrible confusion took hold of her as other programmers walked slowly to form a loose cordon around her and Crane. “It means that the Mexican crater cannot be made to fit historically with anything else we’ve programmed into the machines. It’s telling us this is impossible.”

  “No,” he said, then louder, “No! I will not accept that. Reset it and let’s do it again.”

  “Look, Crane,” she said. “There are two possibilities. One is that we misprogrammed, which is understandable considering you gave us no time to double-check ourselves. To fix that, we’ll have to go back over everything we’ve done tonight, checking it every step of the way. These people are too tired for that.”

  “What’s the other possibility?”

  She took a long breath. “Events before Chicxulub, perhaps the breakup of Pangaea itself, had already altered the world so much that the meteor’s impact had a different effect than the one shown on our globe.”

  “You told me that the machine could define and correct such inconsistencies by running through the limited possibilities of missed events.”

  She watched him tilt the bottle to his lips and drink half of it in one long pull. He was, as always, a time bomb ready to explode. “That’s between known event and known event,” she said. “Between, say Chicxulub and the walls of Jericho falling. But Chicxulub’s as early as we know about. Anything before that is pure speculation.”

  He pointed at her again, his finger shaking with drunken rage. “Still within a limited scope of possibilities,” he said, turning from her to walk to the globe, staring straight up at it, as if concentration could give him the answers of his life. For the first time since she’d come to work for Crane, she began to wonder how much of his energy carried this project. It wouldn’t be the first time that a crazy man had talked people into believing nonsense.