by Ray Hammond
‘I’m sorry, forgive me,’ he apologized quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just my goddamn lawyer’s habit.’ Then he frowned. This was the second application of a statutory instrument of national secrecy he had heard of in just two weeks – and in a similar field of science.
‘No, I’m the one who should say sorry,’ said Emilia. She reached across the table and gave his hand a quick squeeze. ‘It’s just that I caught something . . . rather, I was exposed to something dangerous while I was up that mountain. I’ve become a bit over-sensitive about it.’
Michael felt in his jacket pocket, then glanced around the restaurant. It was a Tuesday evening, and only three other tables were occupied, all at some distance away from theirs.
‘Have you ever heard of a Professor Robert Fivetrees?’ he asked as he withdrew the prototype miniature holo-projector from his jacket. ‘He works in the Department of Planetary Geophysics at Berkeley.’
‘Of course I have,’ said Emilia. ‘He’s one of this country’s leading geo-scientists. But I’ve never actually met him.’
‘Watch this,’ urged Michael as he flipped open the holo-projector, and initiated the simulation the professor had shown him in the truck-stop bar.
‘That’s amazing,’ exclaimed Emilia as she watched. ‘It’s showing the magnetic fields around the Earth, isn’t it? But they’re oscillating strangely. Now they’re reversing . . .’
She gazed up into his eyes and frowned. ‘Where did you get this thing?’
‘From Robert Fivetrees – he’s a new client of mine. The Pentagon has issued a blanket secrecy order on all his work, and he’s asking me to try and find a way round it – to find a way to get this stuff published. He seems convinced that the planet’s magnetic poles are about to reverse suddenly, which would be very dangerous for . . . well, for all of us.’
Michael glanced at Emilia to see if this was making sense. ‘Not that I’m qualified to know, of course. This might all be just so much nonsense, and . . .’
‘Not if Bob Fivetrees himself believes it.’ Emilia sat back pensively in her chair. ‘But how could he tell you anything, or even give you this, if they’ve imposed a secrecy order on him?’ She frowned at the now-quiescent holo-projector lying on the white table cloth.
‘I agreed to be his legal counsel. That means the law enables him to tell me anything. It’s covered by attorney-client privilege.’
‘You mean that if I asked you to be my counsel, I could then tell you things covered by a National Secrecy Agreement?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely,’ agreed Michael. ‘You have a full legal right to discuss any issues with an attorney of your choosing.’
‘OK. How much do you know about plutonium?’
*
Emilia lay naked in the dark, limply starfished on top of her bedcovers. Despite the lateness of the hour it was still hot in her bedroom and the house timbers were ticking intermittently, like insects signalling to each other. She usually chose not to run the air-conditioning at night but was now debating whether to touch a button and summon up a soothing breath of manufactured cool air to waft across her skin.
Moving her arm, she found the remote control and, as a compromise, rolled up the motorized blackout blind that covered the window. The top sash was still open and she gratefully felt a slight breeze. Now she smelled the sea – the low roar of the surf down below was her constant and welcome companion – then eucalyptus, and then a wave of competing siren scents, almost sexual in their intensity. Outside in her garden the foxgloves, lupines, columbines, lavender and a forest of peonies were all in bloom – or rebloom – thanks to the benefits of climate management.
Emilia turned her head, noticed that it was 2.42 a.m., then directed her gaze towards the window. On this clear night, stars were strewn in indigo, like diamonds glittering on a jeweller’s velvet cloth. A late flight was gliding southwards, towards the airport, like a shooting star falling in slow motion.
Michael’s face appeared in her mind yet again. Since she had left the restaurant, his image had kept on returning, despite her efforts to think of other things.
When asked what it would take for her to appoint him her legal counsel, he had explained, ‘All you have to do is say the words. That’s sufficient.’ So she had said the words. And then she had said a lot more.
She told him all about her find on Mount Māriota, and about Washington’s intention to mine the volcano once its eruption had fully subsided.
After warning Emilia that everything he now told her would also be subject to the same secrecy agreement, Michael had then described Professor Fivetrees’s diligent analysis of Jesuit monastery records, and his belief in a demonstrable link between climatic behaviour and the degree of seismic unrest exhibited by the planet itself.
The lawyer had then asked her to take the miniature holo-projector and to examine its data for herself, to see if she agreed with the professor’s startling conclusions. She had already decided that that would be her first priority, if she could find some time in the Simulation Theater tomorrow.
Then Michael had told Emilia about his own plans to sue the major energy corporations. ‘It’s the same old fossil-fuel energy companies who are now controlling the weather,’ he fumed. ‘It’s as if, after causing global warming in the first place, they’re now charging the whole world millions of dollars every day for managing away its worst effects.’
Before parting outside the restaurant Michael had asked if he might see her again. When he’d kissed her cheek, his lips had lingered tantalizingly close to her mouth.
Emilia yawned. Already three o’clock had tiptoed by. She flipped her pillow over to its cool side again, in the vain hope that sleep would seep up from it, and stared up into the darkness. She considered again Professor Robert Fivetrees’s theory, trying to recall what she herself knew about planetary motion.
As she lay on her bed, Emilia knew that her feet faced north. She also knew that, as the Earth spun, her body was hurtling eastwards, rotating towards the dawn at 1,000 miles an hour. A snippet of information surfaced from her distant memory: artillerymen firing giant guns always needed to allow for the direction and speed of the Earth’s rotation – left in the Northern Hemisphere, right in southern latitudes.
She imagined the sun now beneath her, on the opposite side of the world. Then she tried to imagine the spinning, tilted earth itself – ‘like a pool ball that’s been given plenty of screw’, to quote one of her old college lecturers – flying sideways through space at 64,000 miles per hour, also eastwards in its annual circumnavigation of the sun.
The insomniac starfish fastened her gaze on the square of stars visible through the window, relishing the lick of cool air on her bare stomach. 1,000 miles per hour plus 64,000 miles per hour. As she gazed at the heavens she allowed her body to relax, feeling everything draining out towards the five points of her body. She imagined she could even feel the spin powering herself, the house, the land, the sea – everything – eastwards through time. But is there any ‘east’ out there?
Then, of course, the Milky Way too was rushing headlong through space. She tried to extend her thoughts to encompass that. But she was a child of the Earth and the only model for the tilted, spinning, orbiting, rushing planet that her exhausted mind could summon up was of a Waltzer ride in a long-ago funfair of her childhood.
Her communicator pinged. Emilia woke and glanced at the clock: 3.45 a.m.
‘Em, it’s Steve. I’m at work. There’s a huge swarm of tremors going on right under us. We’re just about to issue a highest-level alert.’
She swung her legs out of the bed. ‘Have you found its centre?’
‘Not yet. We’re just seeing swarms racing along our section of the San Andreas Fault – all the way from Monterey to Mendocino.’
Over 400 miles.
‘Jesus!’ she exclaimed. ‘How strong?’
‘Two rising three. But it’s going to be much bigger when it goes.’
‘I’m on my way
in,’ Emilia said.
Chapter Twelve
Viewed from directly above, the contour map of San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area resembled a giant’s thumbprint.
Swirls of tightly compressed lines clearly indicated where the sharp rises and falls in the land surface had occurred as massive tectonic heavings and shudderings had lifted and depressed rocks countless times since the North American and Pacific continental plates first abutted.
These giant segments of crust, floating on the molten surface of the planet’s mantle, bumped and crushed each other without respite, like two fat schoolboys jammed into the back seat of a compact car.
At 6.02 on the morning of Wednesday, 2 July 2055, Northern California experienced ‘The Big One’ that everybody had been expecting since the earthquake of 1906, which had killed over 700 people. At that time the population of the Bay Area had been around 500,000. Now it was almost ten million.
But unlike the old mining-supply and harbour town of the early twentieth century, the modern cities in the San Francisco region had been built using earthquake-resistant techniques. Buildings were purposefully constructed to be flexible. Many were seated on top of huge rollers that would allow high-rise office blocks to glide backwards and forwards as the ground beneath them heaved. In addition, the highly trained staff of Geohazard Labs was on hand to warn the region’s inhabitants of any impending quake.
It is difficult, however, to alert a large community to danger in the small hours of the morning. Emilia Knight, Steve Bardini and the rest of Geohazard’s hastily summoned emergency-response team withdrew to the earthquake-proof seismic monitoring and command centre in the company’s Oakland basement. By 5.40 a.m. they had got their urgent warnings out to every emergency service, every radio, TV and press outlet, and to all branches of local government. But the Geohazard team could only watch their monitors with mounting anxiety as the strain gauges broke, the movement meters shattered, and the Bay Area population slumbered peacefully on.
In a video conference with the police chiefs of the region’s nine counties, they debated sounding all the old air-raid sirens that still remained dotted around the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and the outlying areas. But they agreed that the sound of these would only reach a tiny proportion of the total population.
They reasoned that, being a weekday, by 6.30 a.m. many of the region’s inhabitants would be awake and tuning in to the radio and TV stations that were already broadcasting a continuous stream of emergency warnings. So they decided against triggering the sirens and, as the police, firefighters and hospitals began to put their emergency disaster plans into practice, the Geohazard seismologists waited and watched anxiously while pre-quake symptoms accumulated all along the Hayward branch of the San Andreas Fault.
But the earthquake itself would not wait; it woke the millions of Bay Area residents just after six a.m. Its epicentre was at Glossfield, on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay, and its magnitude was later measured by Geohazard’s field instruments as 9.132 – by far the largest and most powerful earthquake ever measured by modern science.
The downtown area of the City of San Francisco was located at the very tip of a thin, finger-like peninsula that separated the Pacific from the wide inland bay. In one gigantic heave and resettlement, the ground level at the southern end of this isthmus, from Daly City down to SFO International Airport, dropped by over thirty feet. The Pacific then surged hungrily inland and San Francisco’s city centre immediately became a new island off the coast of California.
That morning all the world’s civil engineers, designers, architects and builders were forcefully reminded that ‘earthquake-resistant’ does not mean ‘earthquake-proof’, as few structures, old or new, escaped the damage wrought by a three-minute shaking of over Magnitude 9.0.
As its designers had predicted, the Embarcadero Space Needle withstood this buffeting throughout, but the massive concrete platform on which the building was supported rapidly sank into a tectonic-plate fissure at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, tipping the 182-storey tower sideways into the San Francisco Bay.
The exclusive oceanside communities of Sea Cliff, Baker Beach and Land’s End, on the north-western edge of the peninsula, became detached from the main raft of the newly formed island, like a crust being snapped off a hard piece of stale bread. They sank immediately beneath the encroaching waves.
All areas around the bay that were built on reclaimed marsh and landfill – Marina, Mission, Presideo, Embarcadero, the Oakland shores, the Alameda oil refineries, the airports – found their buildings, roads, pipes and bridges shaken to rubble, the soil beneath them adopting the consistency of oil, so violently was it vibrated.
Despite being an outcrop of igneous sandstone bedrock, the shaking of Telegraph Hill levelled every building, new and old, on its flanks during the massive quake. The same elegant French restaurant at which Emilia Knight and Michael Fairfax had dined the previous evening was hurled from its lofty perch to plunge down into Stockton Street, 600 feet below.
Every home on the Filbert Steps was destroyed. Inside Jersey Villa, Lucy Fairfax and her younger son Ben were killed outright when all three floors of the Victorian timber building collapsed at once. Up on the top floor, Matthew Fairfax’s legs were crushed by a falling roof beam, leaving him trapped alive inside the rubble.
Both the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge collapsed almost immediately. In the Bay Area over half a million people were to die during the first day following the initial shock.
Two stacks of aircraft, patiently waiting their turns to land at Oakland and SFO airports, suddenly lost all contact with their air-traffic controllers while signals from the airport-landing beacons also disappeared. Although the flight crews had already received notification of Geohazard’s warnings, highly alarmed pilots were all trying at once to contact the Regional Air Traffic Control Center at Sacramento to report the outages and request instructions.
Gerry Castlemain, captain of an American Airlines wide-body flight returning home from Sydney, which was at the front of the long landing queue for SFO, suddenly saw the runway on which his plane was scheduled to set down disappear beneath the foaming Pacific Ocean. So did most of his passengers with starboard window seats. Many other passengers elsewhere in the aircraft were still struggling with their personal communications systems as they tried to restore lost contact with the ground.
Captain Castlemain switched to manual control, boosted engine power, lifted the nose of his plane, retracted the undercarriage, turned right, and began a climb back towards 2,000 feet. His path took him west, out over the churning ocean, before he turned right once more to fly up what had recently formed the coastline of the San Francisco peninsula.
The plane arrived over the island that had lately been the city’s downtown area, and the captain slowed his aircraft to 200 knots, just above stall speed. Then, in the clear dawn light, the crew and the passengers on the starboard side of the plane could see that all three spans of the Golden Gate Bridge were missing. Beyond it, massive columns of black smoke were starting to rise from the hills of the city centre.
Gerry Castlemain double-checked that the passengers’ seat-belt sign was still illuminated. He knew that if panic broke out and the 600 passengers without a starboard window rushed to the right-hand side of the plane in an attempt to see the devastation for themselves many of them might be injured.
But the captain did not find himself able to press his microphone button and speak to the passengers personally – he didn’t trust his own voice. His wife and four children lived down there in the sea-level waterfront district near the Palace of Fine Arts, two miles east of the now wrecked suspension bridge, and he was fighting an overwhelming urge to break every FAA rule and dive his huge jet down to wavetop level in order to fly past his home to check on the damage.
Castlemain did turn right once again, over the top of the ruined Golden Gate Bridge and on into the rising sun. He reached for his sunglasses, chec
ked his immediate airspace for other aircraft, and flew eastwards across the bay and towards his native city’s new and wholly unfamiliar skyline. Then he banked the plane to the right – at a sharper angle than was authorized by either his airline or the aviation authorities – and gazed down on his own home area.
Everything in the Marina district looked fuzzy, as if it were out of focus, and he could not even make out a distinct shoreline. It was no longer clearly defined by the broad sea walls, and the green on which he jogged and often picnicked with his wife and children was under water; the famous bay had seeped inland. He could not make out his own house, nor locate any of the ruler-straight avenues that had run up from the waterside to broad Lombard Street. Most of the houses seemed to have collapsed, and vast accumulations of wreckage were already floating on the flecked and foaming seas. He levelled out his aircraft once again.
Castlemain’s co-pilot and close friend, First Officer Anne Mackowski, held out her open communicator for him to see: No Signal. He flipped open his own: No Signal.
Anne reached across the cockpit and squeezed his forearm hard. Then she touched the flight-control computer and summoned the new heading that would take them on to Sacramento, ninety miles to the east and two hours back by road.
But the bridges were out and there was now no overland route to the city from the south.
The captain returned flight control to the computer and as they started to climb he noticed that Telegraph Hill had shaken the Coit Tower from its summit – a monument that had been erected in tribute to the firemen of the 1906 earthquake. Beyond, he saw the mighty Embarcadero Space Needle now lying completely on its side in the bay, stretching almost out to Treasure Island.
On the other side of the bay, enormous columns of black smoke mushroomed upwards from the naval dockyard and the oil refinery and storage depots.
The devastation seemed total.
*
