Richter 10

Crane shook it. “I did a structural analysis of the building the first day I was there. On the second day I issued a report through the lawyer Lanie sent in saying the building was unsafe and should be condemned. The lawyer sent the report to every state agency in Tennessee, plus all the legit media. Then he filed a class action suit on behalf of the inmates. By the third day the cops were ready to get rid of me. Could you two join me for a few minutes? I want to talk about what happened.”

  They nodded, Crane noticing that Lanie was carefully keeping distance between her and Newcombe. They walked to the globe room. Burt Hill joined them with a faux-chicken sandwich for Crane.

  “Stay with us,” Crane said, as Hill literally fed a piece of the sandwich into Crane’s mouth.

  “How long since you’ve had a decent night’s sleep?” Hill asked.

  “I’ll get one tonight,” Crane answered, chewing, wondering what was happening between Dan and Lanie.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Newcombe said. He pulled an envelope out of the cinched waist of his trousers and handed it to Crane.

  Crane opened it, pulling out a check made out to the Foundation in the amount of half a million dollars. It was drawn on a Liang Int account out of Beijing.

  “It’s a royalty check on EQ-eco,” Dan said. “As promised, it’s for the Foundation.”

  “And we can use it,” Crane said, handing the check to Hill, who juggled the sandwich to get it into his overalls pocket. “I’m glad… and surprised to see that you haven’t moved on. I’m sure you’ve had offers.”

  “Yeah… some. So far you’re still the best job in town.”

  “What my ex-roommate is trying to tell you,” Lanie said, “is that after his little tirade about the Nation of Islam, he’s in as much disrepute as the Foundation.”

  Crane looked at Newcombe. “I want you to know I don’t blame you for any of that.”

  “I’m not going to stop talking.”

  “Fair enough,” Crane said. “Just keep me out of it.”

  “Done.”

  “That’s it?” Lanie said. “Everything’s in ruins and you two simply move on?”

  “Politics is a shifting breeze,” Crane said. “It’s not real, not substantial. I remember times before Mr. Li, and I remember times before that. I’m still here. Most of them are gone. As for Dan, he’s a man of integrity.”

  Hill stuffed another piece of tasteless sandwich into Crane’s mouth as he sat on a chair in front of the computer banks. Lanie and Newcombe also sat, rolling into a loose circle.

  Crane swallowed, waving off the offer of another bite. “Talk to me. What… exactly happened?”

  “They continued to use tape of me with Brother Ishmael,” Newcombe said. “Liang Int and government officials decided to go on the attack against NOI, talking openly about some unnamed conspiracy between the two of us, making everyone look guilty of something.”

  “Me… it was fraud. But those charges depended upon us actually being frauds, the quake not occurring,” Crane said. “Why would they take a chance like that?”

  “They didn’t take no chances,” Hill said. “When the President read that message he knew there wasn’t going to be no damned earthquake. He was too cocky.”

  “Then where did we go wrong and how did they know about it?”

  Newcombe reached for Crane’s sandwich, but Hill pulled it away. “Maybe the government listened to the other geologists and tectonicists who came down and said we were crazy.”

  “I’m tellin’ you,” Hill said, “Gideon was surer than that.”

  “Where does that leave us?” Crane asked.

  Lanie had been quiet, listening, but Crane could tell she wanted to say something. Finally she spoke.

  “Think about this for a minute,” she said. “It’s been making me crazy ever since it happened. The only thing we predicted on, really, were the stress readings on the failed rift. Everything else certainly pointed to a potential quake, and still does. It’s the stress readings that were out of line.”

  “Equipment failure?” Crane asked.

  “No,” Hill said. “We tested the spike two days ago in the Foundation’s compression chamber. It reads true.”

  “Rules it out, then,” Crane said. “We fed the Reelfoot readings directly into the Foundation’s computers.”

  “Not exactly,” Newcombe said, pointing to his wrist. “We fed into my pad, which fed into the computer in the van. After all the tests at all the sites were completed, I uploaded everything into the Foundation’s computers at the same time from the van.”

  “Two transmissions,” Crane said. “Maybe there was a glitch in the transfer. Do you normally doublecheck data feed?”

  “Not if human intervention isn’t a factor,” Lanie said. “Machine to machine we only check file size.”

  Crane frowned and looked at Newcombe. “Is the file still in your pad?”

  Newcombe nodded.

  “Let’s have it, then,” he said, holding out his hand. “We’ll match up your files with the Foundation’s. If they’re the same we rule out the stress readings as a factor.”

  Newcombe removed the three-inch-wide pad, tossing it to Crane, who bobbled it with his bad hand, the thing falling to the floor. Lanie retrieved it.

  “What’s the filename?” she asked while attaching the interface to one of her globe computers.

  “Reelfoot.”

  She typed it in, the file coming up on screen as she scanned the index for the Foundation file.

  “Put them up next to each other,” Crane said. They rolled their chairs to get a better angle on the screen.

  Numbers scrolled beside one another: material density numbers, material type, tensile strength, degrees of dilation. The lists were long, with a separate list for each type of material the spike had touched. The last number in each line was PSI—pounds per square inch. These were the stress numbers that showed exactly how much strain the material was taking.

  “Well,” Crane said, “everything seems to be—whoa! What’s this? Just pull the stress numbers from the two files.”

  Everything disappeared except for the stress numbers. “Do you see anything?” Crane asked.

  “At the thousands place,” Newcombe said, “each number on the Foundation’s computer is one number higher than those on my pad.”

  “You’re right,” Lanie said, excited. “With higher stress readings, no wonder we came up with the wrong conclusion. How did this happen?”

  “Only two ways,” Hill said. “It’s either a glitch or somebody changed the data on purpose—and I’ll be damned if I can think of a glitch that would affect a whole series of numbers so selectively.”

  “Well no one else got near them except me,” Newcombe said. “I loaded it all myself.”

  “Yeah,” Hill said. “It was right around the time you were puttin’ together that paper of yours, wasn’t it, Doc Dan?”

  “Yes it was, Burt,” Newcombe said, angry. “Do you find some particular significance in the timing?”

  “Since you ask me, I’ll tell ya,” Hill said, putting the sandwich on the console, then on the floor when Lanie scowled disapprovingly. “You’re jealous of Doc Crane. You saved your own work just before everything went up in smoke. You controlled the numbers that went haywire.”

  “Enough,” Crane said. “Dr. Newcombe told me he didn’t manipulate the numbers and that’s all there is to it!”

  “Could the signals have been intercepted before they got here?” Lanie asked.

  “Yes,” Crane said. “But it would take someone who not only knew our systems intimately, but also had code access to them.”

  “Someone on the inside,” Lanie said.

  “It was Sumi,” Hill said, slapping his leg. “Had to be Sumi.”

  “A minute ago it had to be Dan,” Crane said. “Let’s worry about a viper in our midst later. Right now let’s try an experiment. Dr. King, would you be so kind as to enter the correct stress readings into the Reelfoot files?”

&nb
sp; “My God,” Newcombe said, falling back in his chair. “This means that we may have been right all along. The timing was just a little off.”

  “Only now,” Crane said, “no one will listen to us when we warn them.”

  “Got the readings,” Lanie said, swinging her chair around and nodding toward the globe. “I’ve put it up there. Ready?”

  “Go,” Crane said. “Take it from the day, from the minute, we made the readings. If we hit a quake, slow it to real time.”

  “Working,” Lanie said, all eyes on the huge globe. A spotlight triggered the motions. For a moment nothing happened, then a rumble issued from the innards of the analog Earth, Lanie calibrating the speed to real time.

  Crane watched the red line form on Reelfoot, just as they’d thought, the quake emanating from the thirty-mile-deep hypocenter and extending upward and out.

  In amazing detail they were watching a preview of a power so destructive as to render even the imagination weak in comparison. The sound, the rumbling, came from the P waves, the Primary or pressure waves, acting like sound waves pulsing through the ground, compressing and dilating the rock, pulling and pushing the earth, manifested as the ground moving violently up and down.

  The Secondary waves moved slower than the P waves and whipped through the rock, shaking the ground sideways. On the globe, the earth was rocking hundreds of miles from the thin red line of Reelfoot, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers reforming over and over, looking like huge writhing snakes.

  Then came the two L waves, the surface originating waves, counterpointing what was going on deeply underground. Raleigh waves rolled across the planet like ocean waves while the Love waves vibrated wildly at a right angle to their path, the two waves in unison creating a corkscrew motion that no building, tree, or dam could withstand. With nothing to absorb the waves, they spread farther and farther outward. The ground on the globe buckled. Fissures opened; hills rose only to sink again; the Mississippi continued to jerk wildly, a living thing. They called it a failed rift because it had never succeeded in breaking apart from the continent. Now that small geologic notion was getting ready to cause untold suffering two hundred million years later.

  Crane heard Lanie gasp as the area of destruction grew wider and wider. Inside of him, tension knotted his muscles, his arm aching involuntarily. He was staring into the sallow mirror of his own fears and anger. It was happening here and it would happen in reality. He could see it, right before him, but he was powerless to stop it.

  “Give me a day,” he said low, in almost a whisper.

  Lanie turned her body to the console, her gaze glued to the globe. An aftershock rocked the land again no sooner than the first had stopped. She typed with one hand. A second later, blood-red letters five feet high hung suspended in the air before them:

  27 February 2025, 6:00 P.M. + or −

  “Oh, my God,” Newcombe said. “Three and a half months. Crane, I… dammit, this is scary.”

  “Yeah,” Crane said, standing, pacing. “And we’ve got zero credibility. They’ve threatened to arrest me if I even set foot in Tennessee or Missouri.”

  “What do we do?” Lanie asked.

  “Cry wolf again,” Crane said. “Make enough of a pest of myself that if they don’t listen to me at least they’ll remember that I said it.” He paused. “It will re-establish me so they’ll listen next time.”

  “Trouble is,” Burt Hill said, “everybody thinks you’re crazy, Doc. Nobody’s gonna listen to you.”

  “You think I don’t know? Wait a minute.” Crane ran to Hill and hugged him. “You’ve just given me the idea of a lifetime.”

  “I have?”

  Crane punched up the Q fiber on his pad, hoping that Whetstone hadn’t deleted him from the preferred list. “Come on, Stoney,” he whispered. “Come on.”

  “Am I going to be sorry I answered this call?” came Whetstone’s voice through Crane’s aural.

  “You’re a good man.”

  “I’m a laughingstock.”

  “Maybe. But are you also a gambler?”

  “Crane….”

  “Meet me tomorrow…. Can you?”

  “I can do anything I want.”

  “Then meet me. I can make you a hero.”

  “Not tomorrow. Day after. But tell me something, Crane, why do I listen to you?”

  Crane chortled. “Because you’re as crazy as I am.”

  Li stood inside his globe, basking in election night victory. Numbers flickered all around him like electronic fireflies. They’d held the presidency easily and won the contested Congressional seats, though some of those races were closer than he’d wished. The bottom ledger line: Liang had retained complete power for another two years at least. He credited the last-minute attacks on Crane and Ishmael—the conspiracy theory—for his success.

  “So are you satisfied?” Mr. Mui asked from outside the glowing world. Only the COO was allowed inside the sphere.

  “Of course I’m satisfied,” Li said, surprised at the question.

  “Then you found tonight’s results a success?”

  “Why are you asking me these questions? We were victorious, were we not?”

  “According to my figures,” Mui said, “we lost over three hundred seats in state houses around the country. Yo-Yu now has a major foothold.”

  “Inconsequential. We retain the power.”

  “The political power springs from beneath in this country… through local laws, local statutes. Yo-Yu has outright control of fifteen legislative houses, which means fifteen venues from which to attack our economic base and expand their own.”

  “You’re making too much of this,” Li said.

  “My reports will mirror my thoughts. Others will judge. Also, my polls show you made a major mistake with the Islamic issue.”

  “How so?”

  “In the local elections, Yo-Yu candidates took a soft wait-and-see line on the issue of an Islamic state as soon as we came out strongly against it. They favored negotiations over confrontations. Their success in state races is directly attributable to that factor.”

  “I disagree.”

  “You gave them fear,” Mui said, “but that simply tied them to the greater fear of the global Islamic movement, which people feel is too large to challenge.”

  “I did what had to be done to win the election. All I need to do to remedy the situation is to sacrifice someone on the altar of Islam, put the blame on him, then become more compromising. By the time the next elections come around, this will no longer be an issue.”

  “Who shall you sacrifice?”

  “President Gideon has let the Vice President make most of the anti-NOI speeches. Perhaps it’s time for Mr. Gabler to step down.” Li smiled. “After all, we can’t have a racist as Vice President, now can we?”

  “And who would you put in his place?”

  Li smiled again, thinking of the frames of Sumi Chan in her bath. With Sumi, control would never be a problem. “I’ve been thinking that it might be time for an Asian-American to step into the forefront of American politics,” he said. “I’ll study the issue in the next few days.”

  “Do you have someone in mind?”

  “Perhaps. Are you finished attacking me?”

  “Sir,” Mui said respectfully. “It is my job to question your decisions, just as it was your job to question your predecessor’s decisions. I respectfully submit that you owe me an apology. Your attitude must also go in my reports, I’m sure you know.”

  Li nodded. All they needed were knives to make the bloodletting more public. “I am sorry to have offended you. Is there anything else that will go into your report?”

  “Yes,” Mui said, and Li could see the shine of his smiling teeth in the outer darkness. “I’m going to tell them that your deliberate falsification of earthquake prediction figures could potentially destroy the economic viability of this entire sector.”

  “Oh, come now,” Li said. “You cannot really believe that clown Crane can predict earthqua
kes?”

  “Why not?”

  Li felt anger well up. “Because it’s impossible, that’s why!”

  “Ah,” Mui said easily. “Your knowledge and certitude are obviously much more advanced than mine. I would say, wait and see, just like Yo-Yu. But you, Mr. Director, are willing to bet your life on the impossibility of Crane making predictions. Bravo.”

  “You’re mocking me,” Li said.

  “Yes, sir,” Mui replied. “I am doing just that.”

  Chapter 11: The Wager

  THE FOUNDATION

  8 NOVEMBER 2024, 4:45 P.M.

  “You know,” Lanie said from the doorway to the living room of Crane’s chalet, cleaned and spiffed up for the occasion, “we’ve all got to drink rum because that’s what Crane has stocked.”

  Newcombe smiled at her. Her eyes were glinting. She was pumped up, energized by her success in lobbying Kate Masters all day. When Kate had heard from Stoney that he was coming to the Foundation, she’d decided they should meet up there. But she’d come early, way early, and sought out Lanie immediately. Newcombe wasn’t thrilled. He didn’t like Kate Masters. Something about her showy clothes, her brashness, her mouth bothered him. And he hated the fact that she’d struck up a friendship with Lanie. The Vogelman Procedure was Kate’s fault… and it had been the first rupture in his renewed relationship with Lanie. She came closer to him now. “I’m glad you’ve decided to talk to me, Lanie,” he murmured.

  “I had a couple drinks. Makes things easier. I don’t mean to avoid you, really. I just don’t handle this kind of thing very well.”

  He wanted to reach out and touch her hair, but wouldn’t allow himself to do it. “Maybe, if it bothers you so much, it means you’ve made a mistake.”

  “No, Dan, really. Things are better this way.”

  He closed the distance between them and seized her by the arms, the drink she held spilling on them both. “Things are not better and you know it.” He put his arms around her, but she stood stiffly in his loose embrace. “Dammit, Lanie,” he whispered, “come home. We’ll forget everything that’s happened and start over.”

  She pushed away. “And forget everything that’s going to happen? You’ve chosen a path for yourself, Dan, that I can’t travel with you.”