Richter 10

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “We need to stop blaming one another,” Crane said, Lanie startling at the sound of a crowd gathering outside, yelling. “We’ve still got the prediction.”

  “Your arm doesn’t hurt,” Newcombe said.

  “Sir!” came a man’s voice from the tent flap. One of the guards had stuck his head inside. “This is turning into a situation out here.”

  “Tell them we’ll talk in a minute,” Crane said, the guard looking to Whetstone, who nodded.

  “The stress readings don’t lie,” Crane said. “The other signs don’t lie. That’s what makes no sense here.”

  “What about the Ellsworth-Beroza?” Newcombe asked. “Maybe we’re all fools.”

  “No, doctor,” Crane said. “We’re not fools. Suggestions?”

  Everyone stared at him.

  “Crane,” Whetstone said at last, “are you going to stand behind your prediction?”

  “My arm doesn’t hurt,” Crane said, smiling slightly. “It doesn’t lie to me. But you see, it doesn’t matter. We’re married to it one way or the other. We have no choice but to proceed full steam ahead. It’s our roll of the dice, don’t you know? Once the pronouncement is made from on high it cannot be rescinded.” He walked toward the tent flap.

  “Where are you going?” Lanie called.

  He stopped, then turned abruptly, mechanically. “I’m going to go out there and convince those people and the press to ignore what they just heard and believe me instead.”

  “You’re going to deny everything?” Newcombe asked.

  “Easy to do,” Crane said, smoothing his rumpled hair with little result. “I don’t know anything. All of you stay in here and don’t come out. I’ve taken the glory. Now it’s time to take the flak.” He looked at Newcombe. “I’ll protect you as best I can.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” Newcombe replied.

  Crane narrowed his eyes, selected a wide-brimmed hat from those on the rack standing beside the flap, and went into the Tennessee morning. Lanie looked around, realizing all the teevs were showing Crane from the viewpoint of the crowd outside.

  Hundreds of people, most with cams, were filling the dirt street in front of HQ. Crane had moved just outside the tent, Whetstone’s people forming a cordon around him and pushing back the bystanders.

  “I want to talk to you for a minute,” Crane said, putting up his hands to silence them. When the noise level didn’t abate, he padded himself into the tent city’s speaker system.

  Lanie turned to stare at Dan. “I don’t know you anymore,” she said.

  “Maybe you never knew me,” he said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I realize how all this looks. I simply want to say I’m sorry. I love you. I did what I had to do.”

  “Friends!” Crane said, voice booming. “Despite what you may have seen and heard moments ago, the Crane Foundation’s prediction is still active and online. We, here, have no idea what the President was talking about. What I do know about is earthquakes. And you’re going to have one.”

  Lanie pursed her lips angrily. “Destroying my work by connecting yourself to a man who’d as soon see me dead. Is that what you had to do?”

  “Your work?”

  “Good morning, Dan! Surprise! Wake up! The globe is my baby, my EQ-eco. And guess what, I think it could be even more important than your work.”

  “That globe,” he said with a look of distaste, “is simply the physical manifestation of Crane’s insanity. It’s meaningless.”

  She slapped him so hard her hand stung. “Go to hell,” she said, turning on her heel.

  Outside, people were shouting questions at Crane about the Nation of Islam.

  “Nation of Islam is not connected with our earthquake research in any form. Dr. Newcombe has a long-standing friendship with Mohammed Ishmael and has every right to visit the man on his own time.”

  The shouting got louder, Crane still trying to maintain order.

  Newcombe growled. “I don’t need him to defend me.”

  “Don’t—” Whetstone said, but Newcombe was already going out the flap.

  “I’m a free man,” Dan said to the crowd. Proud, the fire in his eyes flared as if he were a lion in a world of hyenas. “Yes, I’ve visited Brother Ishmael. I can visit whomever I damned well please.”

  “Did you talk to him about his call for an Islamic State?” someone in the audience asked.

  “Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.”

  People were shouting at him, trying to drown him out. Lanie watched his pride turn to anger and feared for the outcome.

  Crane spotted real trouble brewing and elbowed his way back to center stage. “If there’s nothing else—”

  “Do you support the forced disenfranchisement of southerners to support an Africk homeland?” came a voice, clear as a bell.

  Lanie took a deep, steadying breath. Dan’s answer would force her to make a decision.

  “For many years,” Newcombe said, “we have kept eight percent of our citizens locked up in ghettoes. Did they do anything? No. Do they deserve the same freedoms and liberties most Americans take for granted… life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? Yes.”

  “But what about forced eviction?”

  “Brother Ishmael wishes to move no one. He only wants an Islamic State where the wisdom of Allah and the Koran prevail. The people who live in the Islamic homeland will be free to do as they choose.”

  Crane walked wearily back into the tent, Sumi rushing over to comfort him. As Lanie listened to NOI rhetoric coming out of Dan’s mouth, she felt as if she were being pushed to the edge. She had waited a long time to let herself love him. And now what was there but pain in the loving?

  “Are you a member of Nation of Islam?” one of Whetstone’s people called, the security force slowly melting into and becoming part of the crowd.

  “That is a decision I have been grappling with,” he responded. “At the moment I’m a citizen of the world. I’m merely speaking my mind and will continue to do so.”

  A cold hand clutched Lanie’s heart. As Dan went on shilling for Brother Ishmael, she went deep into herself. Segregation… the veiling of women… the espousal of violence. Could Dan Newcombe—the man she had lived with and loved—really align himself with a movement that advocated those things? She was very much afraid the answer was yes. Suffused with pain, she clenched her jaw and held herself rigid. She could scarcely bear it…. Crane! She had to concern herself with Crane.

  The moment Crane had realized that with every word Dan spoke the Foundation was losing more and more of its support, he’d located his stashed bottle of bourbon and gone to work on it in earnest. Camheads started to cut away from Dan’s face to show pictures of people leaving the tent city on foot and in vehicles, vandalizing the place as they went. By the time Dan was finished, most of Crane’s dream of saving lives and of positive, collective action at a quake site was either smashed to the ground or stolen. The red tent stood in the midst of rubble. Two days before the date of his prediction that the quake would hit, it was all over….

  Lanie went to Crane’s side. There were tears streaming down his face, and he cradled the bourbon in his bad arm. When she touched his shoulder, she awakened him from some dream of horror. His eyes opened wide.

  “All I ever wanted to do was help people,” he said, his voice low and very small.

  She hugged him. “Maybe we should think about leaving this place.”

  “No. Not me. You. Get Burt and tell him to pack it all in and get himself and the rest of the team back to the Foundation grounds as quickly as possible.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Stay here. Do my job. I’ve still got an earthquake coming that I need to warn people about. Just because the government decided it wasn’t going to happen doesn’t mean it won’t.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. “Crane, I can’t—I won’t let you stay on alone. I’m with you—”

  “No. You’ve got to leave. Get everybody back as fas
t as you can. Work on the globe. Work hard. We’ll do what we can at the Foundation until the money runs out.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’ve never been all right.” He took a drink. “Go on. Get out of here. I don’t need my people getting arrested in Tennessee.”

  “Arrested?”

  “I’m a charlatan, remember? I’ve perpetrated a fraud. Charges and arrests are just around the corner no matter what happens with the quake. I’ll probably be in jail when it hits.” He looked hard at her. “I’m counting on you… on you, Lanie. The globe is everything. Only you can carry on with that work.”

  Tears filled her eyes. Finally, she nodded and was rewarded by one of Crane’s warm, broad smiles, all the more beautiful because it was so rare. “That’s my imager,” he said and patted her on the shoulder. Then he looked away, his gaze on a far horizon no one else would be able to see.

  Lanie stepped back, feeling an alien yearning to embrace Crane, to hold him close and promise that everything would be all right. But that would be an empty promise, a lie. Nothing might ever be right again. And Crane. He was so alone. Alone and crushed by treachery, its origins and at least some of its perpetrators a mystery. She shook herself. The only positive action she could take was to do as Crane wished. Purposeful then, she crammed a hat on her head and raced out of the tent.

  Dan was standing alone in the middle of the road, people streaming around him, fleeing the camp as quickly as they had made their way to it. Several hundred yards off, the leveled compound was burning steadily. She walked into the human river and waded toward Dan. When she reached him, her mouth gaped in surprise.

  “You’re crying,” she said.

  “It was wonderful! I spoke my mind without fear and without remorse for the first time in my life. It felt good, Lanie, so good—and so free.”

  She glanced at the devastation all around, the fire threatening to blaze out of control as Whetstone’s people tried to put it out. “It freed all of us,” she said, doubting that Dan even would notice the irony of her tone. “You’re going to join them, aren’t you?”

  His answer was a mere shrug. “I want us to spend a lot of time together. It’s all in the open. I can promise you no secrets from now on,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder. She slipped from under it.

  “No, Dan,” she said, backing away from him. “I can’t. I simply can’t….”

  “But I love you.”

  “Whether or not you go back to the Foundation, I am going to move into my own house.”

  “But, Lanie—”

  She spun away then and started off. Dan called her name, but she didn’t turn back. She walked farther into devastation. The site was in ruins. Crane’s reputation was in ruins. The Foundation might be gone in weeks, a month or two at the most. All the bright and wondrous things she’d been envisioning for herself and Dan personally, and for herself and Crane professionally, were extinguished.

  Suddenly, Lanie saw none of the devastation around her. She saw only Crane as she’d left him in the tent, alone, slumped in a chair, swilling bourbon straight from the bottle. The late-afternoon sunshine was brilliant, but for Lanie King and for Lewis Crane the day had turned black as pitch.

  Book Two

  Chapter 10: The Failed Rift

  THE FOUNDATION

  6 NOVEMBER 2024, 8:47 P.M.

  “What do ya think, Doc?” Burt Hill asked as he guided the helo through the gloom up the steep side of Mendenhall to the shelf on which the Foundation stood. “Exactly like ya left it.”

  “It’s the sweetest sight I’ve seen in two long weeks.” Crane drank in the sight of the grounds, the mosque. The ruby laser lines welcomed him back from a trip to hell in the outside world. It was Tuesday night, election night, the night that was supposed to have marked his triumph. Instead he’d had to sneak back into LA in disguise lest camheads recognize him and go on the attack. The first thing he’d done when the helo was far from the City and over open country was throw off that disguise.

  He turned in his seat and looked full at Burt, whose face had a warm glow from the ruddy light rising from the Foundation. “How many have I lost?” he asked in little more than a whisper.

  “A couple. Everybody else is hanging on. They feed you okay in that Tennessee jail?”

  He waved the question away. The local police had stuck him in the Memphis city jail early on October 31 when the quake had failed to materialize on the previous day. He’d been transferred to the Shelby County jail two days later and held without bond on felony fraud, charged with reckless endangerment of millions of lives. He was only thankful that the FPF hadn’t gotten involved. He’d sat it out, all the charges miraculously disappearing this morning, election morning. He had apparently served Mr. Li’s purposes, so he could be set free.

  “You look skinny to me, Doc. I’m gonna make sure you get something in you before the night’s over. And I don’t mean rum. Solid food.”

  Food in jail? Crane didn’t remember eating… or not eating. “I was thinking in jail, Burt. Time passed.”

  The helo rose over the shelf, then banked down toward the mosque through buffeting crosswinds. “Is Sumi here?” Crane asked.

  “Nobody’s seen him since it all came apart,” Hill said, flashing a concerned glance at Crane. “We hear he’s got a cushy administrative job with the National Academy of Science. Sounds like blood money to me, a payoff.”

  “Give him the benefit of the doubt,” Crane said just as Hill set the helo down gently about thirty feet from the door of the mosque. “Sumi’s been a good friend.”

  Hill only grunted.

  Crane hated to think that any of the people near him had been treacherous, but his time in jail had given him opportunity to think, to put it all together. The paths along which his thoughts had led were thorny… his final destination a mean and barren place.

  “Newcombe still here?” He was out of the helo, walking fast.

  “Far as I know.” Hill hurried to catch up with Crane. “Wondered when you’d get around to asking.”

  Crane hit the wristpad on the P fiber, his line to the tectonicist. “Where are you, Danny Boy?” he asked.

  “Crane?” came the startled response. “Are you out?”

  “I’m down,” Crane said, “but I’m not out. Where are you people hiding?”

  “We’re in the briefing room watching election returns.”

  “Well, I haven’t voted yet. I think I’ll join you.”

  He padded out and walked into the mosque, his breath catching at the sight of the globe. God, it was good to be home. When he’d been in jail, he’d spent the first day or two contemplating suicide, but the Foundation and all its unfinished work pulled him back. He wasn’t through yet. Despite Mr. Li. Despite the other people who’d betrayed him and the cause. There was so much to do and he’d barely started. He might be broke, he might be a pariah, but he still had his brain and all that beautiful, beautiful data he’d collected. Besides, death wasn’t an option. It would end the pain that was his heritage and the sole origin of consciousness. His pain could be relieved only by experiencing his pain fully.

  He’d lost everything, had taken the worst, and was still on his feet. He knew now that nothing could stop him or turn him aside. There was power in that insight.

  He hurried through the globe room then, and hit the theaterlike briefing room at a trot. Fifty heads turned toward him; a hundred pairs of eyes focused exclusively on him. He’d either get them or lose them right here and now.

  Smiling, Crane waved and hurried down the aisle to take the stage. The huge screen behind him ran a collage of coverage from twenty different sources, always changing, always devoted completely to the election.

  A “Vote Now” light was flashing at the bottom of the screen. Crane logged on via the pad and entered his voter’s code. He accessed, pushed one button, then transmitted.

  “Straight Yo-Yu ticket!” he announced loudly to the audience, scattered laughte
r coming back to him. He could see by the constantly tallying numbers on the board that Liang had won the major national races. Interestingly, though, Yo-Yu had made considerable inroads in local elections, which the teev analysts were downplaying as a fluke.

  Crane held his arm high above his head, made a fist, and shook it. “I will fight anyone who has the guts to walk up here and tell me to my face that we’re through.” He looked around. “I’m still alive, so I’m not through. You’re still sitting here. If you’re through, get out. I don’t want to see you again.”

  He waited. No one left. “Here’s what I can do: If we cut worldwide ops and hunker down, I can keep us going for about ten to twelve months with everyone at full salary. That gives us another year to get respectable again. We gathered a great deal of information before the government pulled the plug. Now we can put it to good use.

  “My areas of interest are twofold: getting the globe online and getting a blanket reading on the tectonics of southern California. To that end I am reassigning all our field personnel to in-state sites.”

  He walked toward the stairs at the end of the stage. “If you still work for me, get to it. Don’t sit around here.” He forked his thumb at the screen. “Somebody turn that damned thing off.”

  He took the stairs down from the stage as almost everyone left the room. Lanie sat in the first row, smiling up at him, confidence still strong in her eyes. Newcombe was walking toward him from several rows back. Interesting, Crane thought, that the two hadn’t been sitting together.

  Lanie came up and gave him a quick hug. “Welcome back.”

  “I appreciate all you did in trying to get me out of jail,” he said. “I heard you were dogged.”

  “I just hope it wasn’t too horrible for you.”

  He smiled. “I had some very personable cellmates in the county jail,” he said, loving the liveliness in her eyes. “They taught me how to make a shiv out of a spoon.”

  “I figured they’d throw away the key with you,” Newcombe said, moving closer and offering his hand.