Richter 10

  “Hardly a secret, friend. Everybody, everywhere is talking about it.” She grinned. “You trying to tell me you don’t want me?” She’d scarcely had time to blink, when she was in his arms again, being kissed hard and fast.

  “That should answer your question. I want you anywhere I can get you, Lanie—except here.” He pulled her goggles over her eyes and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. “We’re going to get you away from this damned island fast!” He turned back to the end of the camp table, rummaging in the clutter there for his goggles.

  “I guess you didn’t hear what I said.” She caught the hat he’d found on the table and tossed to her. “As of last night I work at this godforsaken place, just like you do. I’m part of the team doing field work until it’s time to go back to the Foundation where I will work right alongside you, lover boy.” She shook her head. “I don’t get it. Crane told me you recommended me for the imager’s job.”

  “A couple of weeks ago he asked if I knew any good synnoetic imagers. Of course I mentioned you, but he never said a word to me about hiring you, much less bringing you here. If I’d known that he—”

  “Stop right there. I’m a professional and an adult, Dan, in case you’ve forgotten. We’re talking about my decisions, my work, my life—”

  He rounded on her. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’ve got yourself into by coming to Sado. Crane calls this operation Mobile One. Everyone else calls it Deathville. Our leader’s nutty as a fruitcake, if you didn’t guess, and he’s surrounded himself with other nuts… crackpots, university rejects, oddballs and screwballs.”

  “Some would say they’re creative, and eclectic, and brilliant. Misunderstood, maybe, but talented and smart—like Crane himself.”

  He snorted, turning back to the camp table. “Yeah, sure.” He found his goggles and put them on, then marched over to take her hat from her hands and jam it on her head. He grabbed her by the hand and ducked with her through the flap. They emerged into the still, wet air of the tent city with its ubiquitous cold mud, or Crane’s Crud as it was termed by insiders.

  Excitement jangled in the very air of the camp, packed with disaster aid workers, grad students, newsies in steadicam helmets, visiting dignitaries, and local hires. All were wrapped like mummies against the sunshine. Newcombe’s Africk heritage provided him with enough melanin to protect against the deadly UV rays of the sun, about the only advantage a black man had in this world as far as he could tell.

  A cart carrying coffee and rice cakes wheeled by, splashing mud. Newcombe stopped the operator and took a cup, adding a big spoonful of dorph. He drank greedily, the hard edge of his anger at Crane blunting immediately. He sighed, glad to have his spiking, dangerous emotions even out. Now he could think, try to understand why Crane had chosen to bring Lanie to Sado. Maybe, in his own way, Crane was trying to improve Newcombe’s attitudes and morale, which had eroded seriously this past year they’d worked together. It was the relentless carnival atmosphere Crane created at his Foundation in the mountains just beyond LA and in these field situations that most disturbed Newcombe, but he could hardly expect the Big Man to understand that. Leave it to Crane also not to understand human nature and believe he was doing a good thing for Newcombe by bringing his lover to the most dangerous spot on planet Earth.

  “It’s so… so colorful,” Lanie said. “Vibrant really. The primary blues and the reds of the tents….” She looked at the cerulean sky, adding, “And the colors of all those hot air balloons and helos up there.”

  “That how you got here, by helo?” he asked, pushing through a cadre of Red Cross volunteers to stare at the source of the clanking that had annoyed him earlier—grad students pounding interlocking titanium poles deep into the ground.

  “A news helo,” she amended, her voice as edgy now as Newcombe’s. The camp dogs began to bay fearfully, and she raised her voice to be heard over them. “Crane has people coming from all over, because of the ‘five signs.’ What are they?”

  He scarcely heard her question. His attention was fixed on the students who were starting to insert long brushlike antennae into the poles sunk into the ground. “This your stuff?”

  “Yes. The brushes are electronic cilia to measure the most minute electromagnetic vibrations in the smallest of particles. Crane wants to understand how the decomposed matter of dirt feels and how water feels and how rocks feel.”

  “Yeah… I’ve heard it all before,” Newcombe said, turning to face her, anonymous now beneath hat and goggles. “Look, Lanie, I told you Crane’s a nutjob. He’s got these crazy notions about becoming part of the planet’s ‘life experience,’ whatever the hell that is.” He swept his arm to take in the long line of poles leading up to the computer control shack mounted on fat, spring-loaded beams. “This is all just so much nonsense.”

  “‘Nonsense’ like this is what makes up my career, doctor,” she said, cold. “The Crane Foundation finances your dreams. It can finance mine, too.”

  “My dreams are realistic!”

  “And you can go straight to hell.” She turned and walked away.

  “All right… all right,” he said, sloshing through the mud to catch up with her. He spun her around by the arm. “I apologize. Can I start over?”

  “Maybe,” she said, with the barest hint of a smile playing on her lips. “You didn’t answer my question. What are the five signs that have everyone so worked up?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said, “and then I’m getting you out of here.”

  Lanie didn’t bother to protest. She was staying, and that was that. Just then a small electric truck pulled silently into the confusion near the computer center, tires spraying mud. A cage full of chickens was on its flatbed. Burt Hill, one of Crane’s staff, according to the badge he wore high on the shoulder of his garish shirt, stuck his heavily bearded face through the window space. “Hey, Doc Dan!” he called. “Get a load of this.” He forked his thumb at the flatbed.

  People immediately crowded around, cams rolling, the tension palpable. Newcombe pushed his way through to Burt, who’d climbed out of the truck, sunblock shining off his cheeks, the only part of him not covered by hair or clothing. The chickens were throwing themselves at the cage, trying desperately to escape. Wings flapped and feathers flew amidst fierce cackling.

  “The animals know, don’t they?” Lanie said, standing at Newcombe’s side.

  “Yeah, they know.” He looked back at Burt. “I need your vehicle.”

  “It’s yours. What else?”

  “Let the chickens go,” Newcombe said, climbing into the control seat. Lanie hurried around to get in the other side.

  Hill moved to the cage and opened it to an explosion of feathers, as the birds flapped and squawked out of the truck and into the startled onlookers who scattered quickly.

  “And Burt,” Newcombe called through the window space, “get things under control here. Don’t let anyone wander outside of the designated safe zones. We lose a newsperson and the whole thing was for nothing.”

  “Gotcha, Doc,” Hill said as Newcombe opened the engine’s focus and turned the truck around. “Stay in the shade!”

  “What does Burt Hill do around here?” Lanie asked, annoyed that Dan hadn’t introduced her.

  “He’s Crane’s ramrod, security chief, majordomo… whatever. Crane and the Foundation couldn’t get along without him.”

  “And where did Crane find this gem?”

  Newcombe laughed. “You’re not going to believe this. Crane picked Burt out of a group of patients in a mental institution. Told the head shrink he needed a good paranoid schizophrenic in his organization. They’re very detail oriented, you know, and extremely security conscious.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  He smiled. “Ask Crane. That’s the story he told me. Whatever’s the truth, Crane is closer to Burt than anybody else on his staff.”

  Mud spewing around its wheels, the truck sped out of Mobile One, as Newcombe added programming t
o head it toward the mines. Despite the dorph, he was keyed up now—and hating himself for getting excited about the disaster to come. Dammit, he wasn’t one bit better than Crane, jolly old Crane. The truck bumped onto a dirt road that cut through a vast field of goldenrod whose beauty made Newcombe feel even more disgusted with himself. If his calculations were right, and he was damned sure they were, then all of this—the throbbing green foliage and vibrant yellow flowers, the ancient swaying trees in the distance, the people on this island—would be so much primal matter within hours. He slumped in the seat, chin on chest, wishing he’d put a second heaping spoonful of dorph in his coffee.

  “Am I supposed to keep my mouth shut,” Lanie suddenly said, “or am I allowed to ask how you’ve been the last six months?”

  He straightened, glancing sheepishly at her. “I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch. Things have been… intense back in LA.”

  “I translate that to mean you’ve been trying to get me out of your system.”

  “I care too much,” he blurted. “I don’t like that kind of weakness in myself.”

  “Okay, and I guess I translate that to mean you’ve avoided me because you can’t control me.”

  He grimaced. It was the truth. “You wouldn’t move out to the mountain with me. And don’t start giving me your ‘career’ routine.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, settling back in her seat and taking in the countryside. “What’s the line on this island? It seems uninhabited.”

  “Not by a long shot,” Newcombe said slowly, “although there aren’t a whole lot of people here.” He pointed toward a far-off peak. “That’s Mount Kimpoku, where the Buddhist priest Nichiren lived in a hut; he foresaw the Kamikaze, the ‘divine wind,’ which destroyed Kubla Khan’s fleet. There’s also an exile palace someplace, but I haven’t seen it. Too busy. Most of the island’s population lives in a fishing village east of our tent city. It’s called Aikawa, and there’s an adjacent tourist compound with a theater company, demon drummers, the usual. The Aikawans liked us at first, mainly because we brought jobs. Now they hate us.”

  “Hate you?”

  The truck turned onto a dirt roadway leading down from the plain into a cypress and bamboo forest. An old-fashioned jeep passed them going the other way, the driver beeping and waving as his passengers, all camheads, gaped.

  “You’d better start getting it through your head what you’ve bought into,” Newcombe said. “Crane is the prophet of destruction, my love. For four weeks he’s been telling the world that Sado Island is going to be destroyed by an earthquake. After a while, the people who live here began to get the notion that he was bad luck and was ruining what little tourist business they had. They’ve been asking us to leave for days. It’s gotten nasty.”

  Lanie thought about that, shaking her head. “I don’t understand. Why aren’t they glad to be warned?”

  “Can you really expect people to up and leave their homes, their jobs? And where are they supposed to go to wait it out—if there’s anything left to wait for after it’s over?” He directed the truck into a large clearing filled with helos and surface vehicles. “The damned government isn’t convinced this disaster is going to happen, so it won’t relocate them. These simple people can’t do much… except hate the messenger. Since quake prediction isn’t an exact science—”

  “But Crane’s trying to make it exact.”

  Newcombe touched the control pad again and the vehicle pulled up beside a Japanese news helo and shut down its focus. Above, choppers were crowding the sky, angling for better positions. “Crane’s a maniac… a money-hungry, power—”

  “Dan!” Lanie shouted, “what’s gotten into you? You can’t open your mouth without attacking Crane.” She frowned, remembering the voice messages he’d left, the long e-mail dialogues they’d had when Dan had first joined Crane. He’d respected and admired the man then, cherished the total freedom Crane had given him to pursue his research. Perhaps familiarity had bred contempt? Or the two men had become so competitive—

  “That’s the mine where we can find Crane.” Newcombe pointed toward a large cave some fifty feet away, its entrance almost obscured by the throng of people milling around.

  Excited, Lanie quickly got out of the truck and began to walk fast. “I can’t wait to see the tale this day tells,” she said over her shoulder to Newcombe, who was staring darkly as he trotted after her. She stopped and faced him squarely. “I need to ask you one more question. Why, really, do you hate Crane so much?”

  At any other time or place, Newcombe thought, he probably wouldn’t be inclined to give Lanie an honest answer. But today, considering what he knew was to come, he couldn’t be anything less than honest with her. “When I’ve looked in the mirror lately,” he said, “Crane’s face has been staring back.”

  Lewis Crane was alone. He stood with his hands behind his back, studying the stone relief carvings on the walls of the played-out gold mine. The carvings, created a century back by convicts who’d been sentenced to work here, depicted the hardships of a life of punishment in the Aikawa mines—men toiling, struggling, suffering, with no choice but to continue or die. Not so different from his own life, he thought, except that his punishment was self-imposed.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” the low, strong voice of Sumi Chan came through Crane’s aural, “but you really do have to drag yourself away from contemplation of things past.”

  “Oh, do I now?” Crane responded. “You’ve got the motley horde organized, have you?”

  “Absolutely not, but I do have them rounded up, and more than ready to hear from you.”

  “Hear from me… or make a meal of me?”

  “Crane, this is serious. It will happen today, won’t it?” Sumi asked anxiously.

  “This isn’t the time to lose your nerve. Not now. A show, you said, a show to raise money for the Foundation, for the work.” Sumi Chan was one of Crane’s greatest allies. As an executive of the US branch of the World Geological Survey, the small young man had championed Crane’s proposals and gotten funding for the Foundation, often with surprising speed and under the most difficult circumstances. “We’ve got a show that’s going to bring down the house.”

  Sumi groaned. “But will the house come down today?”

  “Have faith, and cheer up. We’re on the verge of realizing a dream. Soon no one will be able to think about EQs without thinking about me.”

  “Not as history’s joke, I hope.”

  “We’re all history’s joke,” Crane muttered. “You going to watch from the ground?”

  “I’ll stay in my own helo,” Sumi said, clearing his throat.

  Crane laughed. “You love me. You think I’m a genius, but you don’t trust me.” He turned and started walking along the narrow shaft of the mine toward daylight. “Someday you will have to commit completely to something.”

  “I’ve consulted with my ancestors, Dr. Crane, and they have advised me otherwise. I’ll be watching from the air.” Crane thought he heard Sumi chuckle. “Besides, I have a large insurance policy on you.”

  Reaching the mouth of the cave, Crane stopped in the concealing gloom and looked out at the sea of wrapped bodies. “You ready to become famous?”

  “I shall be the first to take credit for your success.” Sumi did laugh aloud then, letting the sound die only slightly before he padded off.

  Crane settled into the posture he used with newsies, the benign dictator, then moved out into the morning light pulling down his goggles and pulling up his hood. He stuck his left hand into the pocket of his white jumpsuit; he had only thirty percent use of that arm and to have it dangling at his side might give him the appearance of weakness.

  The press was out in force, perhaps forty different news agencies represented. Forty accesses to the world… and the world would be amazed and dazzled before the end of the day. He was about to step out when he spotted Newcombe with a woman he didn’t recognize, probably the imager he’d hired; they were pushing through the crowd. T
he woman reached him first.

  “Ms. King, isn’t it?” Crane asked, reaching out to shake her gloved hand.

  “Is it really going to happen today?” she asked, skipping conventional courtesies and revealing how excited she was.

  He pushed up his goggles and winked. “If it doesn’t, we’re in a lot of trouble. Good to have you on board.”

  Newcombe moved between them, nose to nose with his boss. “Why did you bring her here?”

  “To work for me,” Crane said. “Now—”

  “Put her in a news helo. I don’t want her on the ground when the Plate goes.”

  Goggles back in place, Crane said, “She’s part of the team, she shares the life of the team.”

  Lanie jerked Newcombe’s arm. “Dan—”

  “Then she quits. She’s not a part of the team.”

  Crane smiled. “Don’t trust your own calculations, Dan?” Without waiting for Newcombe’s response, he asked, “Do you quit, Dr. King?”

  “I most certainly do not.”

  “Bravo,” Crane said. “End of discussion.” He pointed at Newcombe. “You know there’s no time to argue. Can you feel it?”

  Newcombe nodded, jaw muscles clenched. “This is the worst place to be,” he mumbled.

  “Right.” Crane said dismissively. He quickly stepped forward, facing the crowd. “The ancient Japanese,” he said without preamble to the large group, “called earthquakes the namazu. Namazu… a giant catfish. The Kashima god kept it pinioned under a mighty rock with divine powers called the keystone. When the god relaxed a moment, or for any other reason loosened his grip, the namazu would thrash around wildly. An earthquake.” He paused, his hushed audience rapt. “Of course there were plenty of people who weren’t about to be passive in the face of disaster, so they’d start doing battle with the fish. Unfortunately, the namazu was not only powerful in his own right, but he had allies. Very good allies, as it turns out, who would rush to his defense. Does it surprise you to learn that the namazu’s allies were the local carpenters and artisans—all those who stood to profit from a quake?” Crane’s expressive brows rose over his narrow goggles. “Which only goes to prove that nothing much has changed over the last few thousand years.”