Richter 10

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “I can limit Liang’s exposure to damage and loss in that area, if a quake does occur later. I’ll be prepared.” He stared at Sumi. “Has it ever occurred to you that if the government really got into the prediction business in a serious way that it would end up in court? A mess. That’s what the whole thing is. But as a device for achieving results in the election? Excellent. So, change the numbers.”

  “Sir,” Sumi said, bowing slightly. “I mean no offense, but I can’t implement an order I find immoral, dangerous to so many people.”

  Mr. Li grinned, his cosmetically whitened teeth gleaming. The projection put a ghostly hand on Sumi’s shoulder. “Look what I have here.”

  A holo of her bathroom appeared in the center of the living room. Sumi watched herself emerge from the shower. No doubt about her gender. She flushed with embarrassment. “So you know.”

  “You are a fine-looking woman, Sumi,” Li said, his hands trying to run down her body, but disappearing within her instead. Somehow that made the violation worse. “Does anyone else know?”

  “Just you,” she said, “which I fear is enough.”

  Li laughed. “I do not wish to expose you to public and private humiliation. I wish only to keep using you as my instrument. Now I have the knowledge to hold you. I have many plans for you. I ask you again, will you do as I ask?”

  She frowned heavily. “I’ve worked side by side with these people. They’re good, I like—”

  “I’ve now got the Geological Survey on the line. I am prepared to tell them you’re a liar and a pretender—and to give my recommendation to terminate you immediately. Decide now.”

  Sumi bent over, face in her hands. “I’ll do it,” she said finally, her voice muffled.

  “What?”

  “I’ll do it,” she said louder. She stood and went to the console, sat, and began typing. She finished within a minute and dumped the altered numbers into the mainframe. She had cheated people her entire life. Now she was cheating the purity of science.

  “Done,” she said, turning around. The projection was gone. Sumi went into the bathroom and washed her hands.

  Chapter 9: Sound Waves

  THE CRANE FOUNDATION

  1 OCTOBER 2024, 6 P.M.

  Crane’s office wasn’t really an office. It was a hovel—a large hovel to give him plenty of space to pile his junk. Printouts were stacked all over the floor, many of the stacks wobbled or collapsed and were left as they fell. Books filled cases and overflowed onto the flood of paper. His desk was littered, its wood surface completely obscured. Coffee cups and food wrappers were strewn everywhere, computer terminals and printers crammed onto any surface that could take them. He had a bed in the office, several empty liquor bottles lying beside it. Crane knew exactly where anything he wanted could be found.

  On the wall was a smoke-damaged photo of his parents and a melted toy airplane was stuck on one of the bookcases. They had been the only things recovered from the firestorm that had eaten his childhood home and the only personal items Crane owned. He was a man possessed by his past, a human being only in the biological definition of the word.

  There was a hole cut right through his cinderblock wall so that he could look at the globe whenever he wanted.

  An edge of excitement jangled the room. He had assembled most of his senior staff, who’d dutifully shown up carrying their folding chairs and coffee while he half reclined on the bed. He was about to make the decision of his lifetime and wanted their input, not to help him make the decision of course, but to reinforce what he’d already decided.

  Lanie and Dan hadn’t arrived yet. Newcombe was trying to hurry out his EQ-eco chart, and Lanie was supervising the globe through another attempt at defining the planet beyond Pangaea. But Crane couldn’t see her through the cutout and had heard the failure bells earlier when the system had shut down.

  There was something truly wrong with their conception of the birth of the planet, he had decided. If Pangaea were correct, then everything between it and the Yucatán Comet that began the Tertiary Age would be of finite dimension—some relative form of world, wrong or right, could be set up to connect the two events. But the machine continued to deny the truth of Pangaea, which could mean that their mistakes lay in the far distant past.

  It was troubling to him, but something he couldn’t deal with at the moment. He’d spent thirty years biding his time. Tonight would be the night he’d stick his neck out. He’d always known it would come down to a decision like this, but he never realized the fear connected with it. If he were wrong when he went public in a big way, it would ruin him. It frightened him, but didn’t deter him. Now, he needed to know the extent of the loyalty of his staff.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Lanie said, stumbling through the open doorway, helping Newcombe carry a four-by-four-foot poster board. “The chart held us up.”

  They got the chart in, a pie graph in rainbow colors, and set it on the open easel before a camera. They plopped down on the floor and leaned against the wall in unison as if joined at the hip. Newcombe watched Crane carefully. The man seemed more agitated than usual. A truly frightening concept.

  “I assume we failed with the globe again?” Crane asked, eyes dark.

  “Fifteenth try,” she said sourly. “Beginning to get discouraging.”

  “The answer’s there,” Crane said dismissively. “We’re just not seeing it. Keep trying.” He dare not look at her as he talked. In their four months of working together, he’d allowed her closer to the real Crane than he’d ever imagined he could allow anyone. He was petrified at giving that kind of power over him to anyone, especially a woman. But he couldn’t help himself, she seemed to understand him so completely.

  “As most of you know,” he said, sitting up straight, his bad arm numb, tingling, “we’ve been seriously considering making a public statement announcing a quake for the New Madrid Fault.”

  General confusion broke out then, everyone talking at once. Crane put his good hand up for silence. Newcombe could see it in all their eyes—the fear. A real prediction meant real commitment and real failure if they were wrong. To outcasts like these it meant the threat of the money train coming off the tracks. They had nowhere else to go.

  “I’ll listen to everything you have to say,” Crane said, “but one at a time. Dr. Franks?”

  A tiny man with short curly hair and a drawn face stood, shaking his head. “We’re hearing a lot of rumors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the Ellsworth-Beroza tests are not in line with a prediction at this time.”

  “That’s true,” Crane said, “and please, sit down, doctor.” Crane looked around the room. “Until the globe is truly operational, I believe all our attempts at trying to use standardized testing procedures will lead to inconclusive, even contradictory data.”

  General turmoil erupted again, Crane once more raising his hand.

  “Let me say this: No test is perfect. That’s why prediction is so difficult. But listen to what we do have. Electrical activity is up, helium emissions up, radon emissions up, foreshocks are occurring, though not directly within our nucleation zone. There has been evidence of dilation. And we’ve got powerful evidence in our stress readings. Dr. Newcombe?”

  “We took a core sample from the rock of that region,” Newcombe said, “and put it in the lateral compression chamber to see how much stress it could take before rupturing. The rock broke apart at 4033.01435 pounds per square inch. The readings from the Reelfoot Rift came out at 4033.01433. The rock in the Embayment, according to our calculations, can’t possibly survive any longer than twenty-nine more days.”

  “What magnitude of quake are you predicting?” asked Sumi, who’d come in a few moments earlier.

  “Because of the location of the stress and the estimated return times,” Crane said, “we’re looking at a Mercalli Level XI quake in the immediate area, which translates to 8.5 Richter, over 9 Moment Magnitude.” r />
  Franks was on his feet again. “An 8.5. That’s… that’s unimaginable!”

  Crane looked grave. “Memphis… gone. Saint Louis… gone. Nashville… gone. Little Rock… gone. Chicago heavily damaged. Kansas City heavily damaged. Indianapolis… gone. The list is scary. All farmland in the grain belt destroyed. Firestorms that will cut the Eastern US off from the rest of the country. Communication and power out over two thirds of the country for God knows how long. Take a look at the chart.”

  Everyone crowded Newcombe’s chart, talking and pointing. “We figure the hypocenter at about thirty miles below the surface,” Newcombe said, “and the aboveground epicenter on the rift fifteen miles north of Memphis. If the pinpointing is correct, my chart will be as accurate as the Sado specs.”

  One of the tectonicists, Loreen Devlin, turned and stared at Crane. “You’ll set off a panic. What if you’re wrong?”

  “What if I’m right?” he returned. “I can’t, in all conscience, keep this knowledge to myself. In four thousand years of recorded history, thirteen million people have died as a direct result of earthquakes.”

  “You waited in Sado for weeks,” she said. “How are you going to do it in Memphis?”

  “I believe I learned something in Sado. This time I’m going to give them a specific date, not an approximation, not a range of dangerous days. I’m saying October 30th, at sometime after 5 P.M. when the late afternoon chill seeps in.”

  “You realize what you’re letting yourself in for?” Sumi asked. “Who’s responsible once you speak? The government? The media? What should businesses do—shut down and lose their revenue, or stay open and risk lawsuits by those hurt within that business when it collapses? If you’re wrong, are you financially culpable for socioeconomic downturns in the affected areas? Will your prediction start a panic, Loreen’s scenario, complete with National Guard troops and looters?”

  “A little late in the game for cold feet, isn’t it, Sumi?” Crane said. His voice had taken on an odd timbre.

  Sumi approached him tentatively, like a penitent. She got right beside Crane and whispered, Lanie straining to hear the words. “I simply worry about you, Crane.”

  “I have to make this prediction,” Crane answered, “and you know it. Don’t desert me now. It doesn’t have anything to do with funding anymore. I can’t keep this information to myself.”

  Sumi nodded, a bit sadly Lanie thought, and moved to the far end of the room.

  “Does anyone have any suggestions or comments?” Crane asked.

  “Yeah,” Franks said. “Don’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the bearer of tidings this bad. Besides, do you really think people will pay attention to you?”

  “I can only lead them to the trough, doctor,” Crane said. “I can’t make them drink. The whole point of Sado, of all the publicity, has been to build my credibility as a predictor in order that people will listen seriously to me. The moment is never going to get more ripe.”

  “Are you going to disseminate through a government agency?” Mo Greenberg, the resident vulcanologist, asked.

  “No,” Crane said. “I’d still be fighting red tape long after the quake had hit.”

  He moved to his desk, scattering junk, to retrieve a CD the size of a large faucet washer. “I’ve put it all on here,” he said, voice hoarse, expression somber. “We’ll broadcast from here, cutting back and forth between my talk and Dan’s graph. We’ll rebroadcast every hour.”

  “I’d like to put this before the Geological Survey,” Loreen Devlin said.

  “No!” Crane yelled. “You want to bury it because you’re weak! I will not have divided loyalties. We have a quest, a mission, one that we are not going to shy away from. What I demand is your hearts and souls bonded to me. We’re entering the fight of all time, Man against Nature. I will have no quavering allegiance, no equivocation. You will support me now or leave. Are we on the same page, ladies and gentlemen?”

  There was halfhearted response, Crane’s face turning red with anger. Newcombe felt Lanie’s hand tighten on his arm.

  “Join me now or go!” Crane yelled. He grabbed an open bottle of rum from beside his bed, waving it around as he spoke. “I will slay this beast! Are you with me?”

  He went to each person in turn, burning them with his eyes and asking the question. One by one they fell into line. Then he reached Newcombe, who said, “I will not act your slave by vowing this form of allegiance.”

  “You’re no different from anyone in here,” Crane whispered harshly. “Commit to our cause or walk out right now.”

  “I stood with you on the plain in Sado. I need to prove nothing to you now.”

  “Damn you,” Crane said low. But he shut up then and turned back to the desk. He dug the transmission panel out from under. He slid the CD into the slot and without hesitation hit the transmit pad.

  “It’s done,” he said. “Now get out, all of you.”

  There had never been banging in the dream before. Lanie lay sweating in bed, her mind enflamed with the vision of Crane in the white suit with the bubble helmet. He was yelling, trying to reach out to her, but the banging was so loud she couldn’t hear him… couldn’t hear—

  “What the hell?” Newcombe said. Jerking awake, Lanie sat up straight. The banging continued.

  “Open this door!” yelled a drunken Crane. “Traitor! Open it!”

  Lanie shook her head, glancing at the bedside clock. It was nearly four in the morning. “What does he want?”

  “How the hell should I know?” He stood up and walked naked down the stairs.

  “I know you’re in there!” Crane screamed. “Open the door!”

  “Go away!” Newcombe yelled back. “Go sleep it off!”

  As Lanie slid her legs over the edge of the bed, Crane threw himself at their door, the structural aluminum not giving. He tried again.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lanie said, turning on the bedside light. She walked to the loft railing. “Would you let him in before he hurts himself?”

  “Monster!” Crane yelled, throwing himself against the door again.

  “You’re crazy!” Newcombe yelled back, Lanie hurrying down the stairs, naked herself. She opened the door.

  He brushed past both of them, jerking his good arm away when Lanie tried to take his sleeve.

  He moved across the room and juiced the full wall screen there. “You’ve betrayed me,” Crane said, his eyes flashing at Newcombe.

  “I don’t know what you’re—” Newcombe began, but stopped when he saw his own face on the television screen.

  Lanie moved close to take his arm but, as Crane had done before, he pulled it away. “Oh no,” he said low, moving to the couch to slump on it. “They promised me they wouldn’t run this for months.”

  “Well, I guess they changed their minds.” Crane’s eyes widened at Lanie’s nakedness. He grabbed an afghan draped over a chairback and tossed it to her. “Cover yourself.”

  Embarrassed, she flushed, then wrapped the cover around her and looked at the teev. Dan was presenting a detailed dissertation on his EQ-eco equations, giving up publicly every detail that Crane had kept secret. Newcombe turned off the sound.

  “Have you read your contract, doctor?” Crane asked.

  “I know the terms of my contract. I give proper credit to the Foundation all through this speech and all monies received from it go to the Crane Foundation.”

  “Who cares?” Crane yelled. “This is all part of our package, the thing that is supporting us. When you give out free information, it destroys everything else we’re building.”

  “The world needs these theories,” Newcombe said. “I took it upon myself to do the right thing.”

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Lanie said.

  “Stay out of this,” Newcombe snapped, then looked at Crane. “If you calm down, I’ll talk to you.”

  Lanie watched Crane’s face. He was totally out of his depth on issues such as these. He sat on a straight w
ooden chair. “Why?” he asked, his voice low and uncertain.

  “You have a dream, Crane, a dream that failed earlier today for the fifteenth time.”

  “My dreams go beyond that globe,” Crane returned.

  “To where? What are they? What exactly are you looking for?”

  Crane just stared at him.

  “See?” Newcombe said. “You won’t tell me, or you don’t know, or… what? Well, I’ve got a reality instead of a mere dream. I’ve spent ten years studying and classifying the waves put out by EQs. Maybe it’s not glamorous by your standards, but dammit, after ten years the figures came together and they were right and they’ve enabled me to predict damage areas around fault lines. The equations stand on their own and need to be shared with the world. So, I wrote them up and sent an article to the scientific journals. The Foundation gets credit and royalties. My dream is reality.”

  “Your dream is owned by me,” Crane said, pointing to the screen, “which makes this… nothing but stealing. I am under no obligation to share my vision with you, Dan, nor will I until I choose to do so. You don’t have the power to define me or my dreams. If you’re so unhappy with the way I run things, why don’t you quit? I won’t make a man stay with me who wants to go.”

  “I don’t quit because I need your money! Why don’t you fire me?”

  Crane took a long breath and stood, all the anger drained out of him suddenly. He shuffled slowly toward the door, turning to them when he’d opened it. “I can’t fire you,” he said. “I appreciate you too much. You’re too damned good. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Crazy bastard.” Newcombe locked the door after him. He strode back to the sofa and struck it with a closed fist. “Dammit! They promised me they wouldn’t run the story without first informing me.”

  “I guess Crane’s prediction has made EQ-eco too hot to pass up,” Lanie said, the afghan still wrapped tightly around her. “Cheer up. You’re going to be famous now, too.”