Richter 10

  “We’ll just see. We—”

  “Everybody!” Kate Masters called from the living room. “Quick… gather around. I’ve got some news for all of you.”

  “I wonder what’s going on?” Lanie asked, turning quickly to avoid Newcombe and walking back into the living room.

  He followed dutifully, not able to gauge the intensity of her words. He didn’t mind her being angry at him. It was the pulling away that hurt. Things had been so good this time. What had happened to drive her so far away? He couldn’t believe it was the NOI stance. She knew he had a big mouth. And the publication? Didn’t his giving the big check to Crane show the goodness of his intentions?

  Crane and Whetstone, who’d arrived only minutes before, joined the group, drinks in their hands. Burt Hill lay half asleep on a sofa near where Masters stood.

  “I’ve been conferencing with my board for the last half hour,” Kate said. “And we’ve made an executive decision.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Whetstone said.

  Kate ran her hands through her red hair. “I’m waiting for the drum roll.”

  Burt Hill pounded rhythmically on his stomach.

  Kate turned to Crane. “As president of the Women’s Political Association, I am pleased to announce that we have reconsidered our decision to take your grant money away and are awarding you, for calendar 2025, a sum of five million dollars for earthquake research.”

  Crane roared with pleasure as everyone applauded. Masters turned to Lanie. “And you have this woman and her eloquent plea to thank for it. I used some frames of Lanie’s talk with me today to show the board. It passed unanimously.”

  Lanie hugged Kate, then turned to Crane, who had made his way to her side. The two of them shared a long, meaningful look before hugging fiercely. Newcombe felt dark vibrations.

  “My thanks to the Women’s Political Association,” Crane said. “You have shown great wisdom.”

  Standing in a loose circle around Kate, everyone laughed, Crane smiling broadly. The jubilation subsided in moments. Whetstone cast a shrewd glance at Dan and Lanie. “Crane tells me,” he said, “that you tracked the sabotage on the Memphis quake. Hard to believe anyone so closely associated with the project would be that malicious, isn’t it?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Lanie sighed heavily, Newcombe was scowling. Crane’s expression was unreadable. The three of them had talked off and on in the last day and a half about the meaning, the possible impact of the sabotage, and the conversations had served only to make them weary and depressed. Finally, Kate spoke up.

  “Do you think Sumi Chan had anything to do with your problems? I like him, but there’s something quite odd going on with that man.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Crane said. He’d fought a hard battle with himself on the subject of the saboteur, triumphed over his rage, and wanted to move on. “The question now is how to repair the damage and make people listen to us again.”

  “Not possible,” Whetstone said with authority. “All you are to people now, Crane, is the crazy man who fooled everyone. You don’t recover from that.”

  “They’ll have to listen,” Crane said, almost shouting.

  Whetstone’s bushy brows arched high. “You’ve recalibrated your figures? You’ve got another date?”

  “February 27th,” Newcombe interjected.

  “You’re kidding,” Kate said, looking sharply at Crane.

  “Unfortunately, no. We’re dead—I repeat, dead—serious,” Crane said, his expression somber.

  “Yes, but are you dead certain?” Kate asked impudently.

  “Dead certain,” Crane bit out.

  “So that’s why you got me here,” Whetstone said. “Okay, what do you want from me?”

  “Check your liquidity lately, Stoney?” Crane asked.

  “I don’t have to check. If I need hard cash, I can get hold of about three billion dollars, give or take a couple of hundred million.”

  “I want to borrow it,” Crane said.

  Whetstone laughed. “I imagine you do. And what would you do with it?”

  “Place a bet.”

  “A bet! I think your jail time has left you completely unhinged. What sort of bet?”

  “I want to place a bet with the American people that an earthquake will take place on the Reelfoot Rift on February 27th, 2025. I want the wager to be run through a third-party accounting firm that will verify the numbers and insure impartiality. We’ll give two-to-one odds. People can take up to fifty dollars of that bet, to be paid off the day after the earthquake is predicted if it doesn’t come off.”

  “You want to bet three billion dollars of my money that you have correctly predicted the day of the quake, is that right?” Whetstone asked.

  “It’ll look like a sucker bet,” Crane said.

  “Look like!” Whetstone said loudly. “It is!”

  “We’re not wrong, Stoney. We can’t miss. At fifty bucks a pop, a lot of people will get in on the action. The teev will love to cover it because you stand to lose so much. We’ll get our exposure again, maybe even convince some people we’re right and get them the hell out of the danger zones. Once we win the bet, our credibility is restored, plus we won’t have to play politics—the Foundation won’t need government funds to keep running.”

  Whetstone just stared at him. “You’re mad.”

  “Am I?” Crane returned. “The stress readings don’t lie, and this time I’ll bet we even have the Ellsworth-Beroza to back us up as we get closer to the time.”

  “Look, Crane. I’m as altruistic as the next person, but I didn’t manage to make billions of dollars by being an idiot. Why should I risk almost all of my cash on a scheme you’ve already failed at once?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Crane said.

  “There’s nothing right about gambling my money away. I’d be ruined. Couldn’t you do it with a million or so?”

  “No. The numbers need to be enormous in order to get the exposure and keep interest alive.”

  Whetstone shook his white-haired head. “I respect you,” he said, “but this time—”

  “May I say something?” Lanie asked, everyone turning to stare at her. No one shut her up, so she continued. “I’ve been working the project for over six months now, taking Crane’s idea for the globe and trying to make it reality. It’s forming before my eyes. My job is to talk to it, to make it understand what it’s trying to accomplish, and as I do so, I’m continually struck by the amazing possibilities beyond EQ prediction.”

  “Such as?” Masters asked.

  “Such as long-range weather prediction. The Earth, for all of its largesse, is really a totally closed, self-sustaining system on a huge scale that operates under its own set of rigid principles. The globe can make them understandable. It may be the most important piece of machinery ever devised. If we can predict weather patterns long range, it means we can plot areas of famine and plenty, and we can do it years in advance, planning for them, knowing where and when to grow food, where relief will be needed, when hurricanes, floods, and tornados are going to cause destruction.

  “Mr. Whetstone, do you understand the implications of what I’m saying? You can help make the globe a life-sustaining, nurturing reality. It has the capacity of changing forever life on planet Earth in the most positive of ways. We may never be able to control the Earth, but we can understand it, which is the next best thing. Don’t take this away from the people of the world.”

  “But your globe hasn’t gone online, young lady,” Whetstone said. “It may never work.”

  “It already does to an extent,” Lanie shot back. “I’ve had success going from known event to known event. I believe our problem is a basic one.”

  “Pangaea,” Crane said.

  She pointed to him. “Correct. We’ve based the globe on a possibly erroneous assumption—that Pangaea happened the way scientists have speculated it happened. If that speculation is incorrect, then there’s no way our globe will conne
ct with the realities that we do know about for sure. I’ve thought about this a great deal, and I believe we need to go back farther, beyond Pangaea, for our answers.”

  “Back to where?” Masters asked.

  “All the way, I suppose.”

  “The beginning of time?” Masters asked, amazed.

  “If that’s what it takes,” Crane said. “We can let the globe tell us about Pangaea.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Whetstone said, “except for the fact that starting with the totally unknown could mean that you create an earth that doesn’t really exist, one simply invented by the globe.”

  “No,” Lanie said. “Not possible. My job as a synnoeticist is to communicate with the globe, to talk to it, to form that symbiotic relationship that makes the sum of the parts greater than the whole. We know where our globe ends up. We have real events that must conform. All I have to do is explain to the globe that it must design a world that ends in conformation with what exists. The rest will take care of itself.”

  “You can really do this?” Whetstone asked, his voice hushed.

  “She’s the best,” Crane said. “Of course she can do it.”

  “Mr. Whetstone,” Lanie said, “you can help mankind see the dawning of a new day in which Man and Earth work in conjunction, not opposition. If you turn us down now, you are destroying the hope of humanity rising above its bondage to Nature’s unfeeling destructiveness. You sit in a historic position, sir. How much money do you really need to finish the rest of your life, and how does that stack up against the salvation you can bring?”

  “You can really do this?” Whetstone asked again, his voice small, childlike.

  “I can,” Lanie said. “And with your help, I will.”

  Whetstone was staring at her, his lips quivering soundlessly, his eyes locked on some faraway, internal place. He looked at Crane. “When do we do it?”

  “Right now,” Crane said without hesitation. “Tonight.”

  “Thanks to your imager,” Stoney said, “you’ve just got three billion dollars.”

  “Borrowed,” Crane said. “Borrowed, not ‘got.’ You’ll have every cent of your money back on February 28th.”

  “Let’s shake on it,” Stoney said, extending his hand.

  Burt broke out a small bottle of the cache of Sumi’s famous dorph, and everyone started to celebrate with it except Crane and Newcombe.

  Newcombe felt out of place and wondered what Brother Ishmael was doing right now. He’d stopped drinking alcohol and given up dorph after his visit to the Zone. It was a revelatory experience. He found himself having to deal for the first time with depressions and the kind of minor irritations dorph would take away in an instant. He guessed that he seemed surly to those around him, but inside he felt in touch with his true self at long last. He might suffer petty emotional discomfort, but at least what he felt was for real.

  “What are we waiting for?” Stoney asked. “We’ve got the terms of a wager to figure out, an accounting firm to line up, and, I assume, a broadcast to plan, right?”

  “Right,” Crane said. “Let’s go down to my office.”

  They were off then to pats on the back from Kate, Burt, and Lanie.

  Newcombe couldn’t take his eyes off Lanie. She and Kate had hit the dorph pretty hard and were refilling their glasses with rum. He didn’t like that one bit. It wasn’t like Lanie. That thought encouraged him. He missed her terribly, wanted her in his life and his bed; maybe she was suffering, too. He walked over to where she was standing with Kate.

  “Don’t you think you’d better go a little easy on that stuff?” he asked, taking the glass from Lanie’s hand.

  “I think it’s none of your business how much I drink,” Lanie said, snatching the glass and draining it.

  “Do you mind, Kate, if I steal her away for a couple of minutes?” Newcombe asked rhetorically. He took Lanie’s elbow, none too gently steering her toward Crane’s bedroom.

  “I’ll be right back!” Lanie called over her shoulder. “Don’t get ahead of me!”

  He nudged her into the room and closed the door.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lanie asked. “You embarrassed me back there.”

  “We weren’t finished with our talk.”

  “We were as far as I was concerned. Don’t you get it, Dan? We’ve been tearing each other to pieces for five years now. It’s time to stop the pain, to staunch the bleeding. Dan, it’s over.”

  “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  She sat heavily on the bed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Crane,” he said. “You’ve got something going with that madman.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “But even if you weren’t, it’s none of your business.”

  “You’ve completely sold yourself out to his insane program,” he charged. “I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of your mouth a few minutes ago. How could you say them with a straight face?”

  She jumped up and stared him down. “I meant every word of what I said. How dare you belittle my life and my work!”

  “Look, you’re good with computers,” he said. “Kudos. But Crane is selling fantasy. How can you possibly believe that globe will ever work?”

  “It will work. I’m going to make it work.”

  “Then you’re just as crazy as he is.”

  She glared at him, and for the first time he saw meanness there, focused anger. “Are you finished?” she asked quietly.

  “No, I’m not finished. I’m just getting started.”

  “Well, I’ve heard enough, Dr. Newcombe. You’ve got to excuse me. There are two people in the other room who don’t think I’m insane. I’d prefer to be with them.”

  “I’m not going to let you go that easily,” he said. “Crane’s infected you somehow with his insanity. I can wait, Lanie. I love you and I’ll always be there for you.”

  “Do yourself a favor, Dan,” she said. “Move on.”

  Newcombe’s gut was on fire, dorphless rage and despair settling over him as he watched Lanie leave.

  Sumi sat at her new desk at the National Academy of Science and tried to concentrate on the grant requests stacked up before her. She was having a difficult time keeping her mind on the job. They’d put Crane in jail—jail!—and it was all her fault. He had always treated her with respect and friendship. And how had she repaid him? With the basest deceit. She wondered how much of herself she could give up and still remain human.

  “You seem deep in thought,” came a voice, jerking her back into the here and now.

  Mr. Li stood before her desk, smiling beatifically down at her. “Sir,” she said, rising. “Is it you or a projection?”

  He reached across the desk and touched her arm, his touch lingering. “I’m real and I’m here. What I’m going to say is very private.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sit down, Sumi.” She did as she was told.

  Li moved fluidly, snakelike, around to her side of the desk and sat on its edge. “Sometimes,” he said, “life has a way of altering our… circumstances in the most astounding fashion without our having to do anything to precipitate the changes. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “I assume my new position here is an example,” she said, not liking the look in his eyes.

  “On a small scale, yes. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “Yes, I do mind.”

  Mr. Li laughed. “I’m finding myself intrigued by your lifestyle. What’s it like to masquerade for some twenty-eight years as the opposite sex?”

  In absolute defensive mode, she answered carefully. “It’s not like anything, really. I’ve always done it, so it’s… natural.”

  “Do you feel like a man or like a woman?”

  “I feel like what I am.”

  Mr. Li stood and moved behind Sumi, his hands coming up to massage her shoulders. “You know what I mean,” he said softly. “Sexually. What are you like sexually?”

  “Si
r. I do not wish to answer questions of this kind.”

  His hands moved down to her arms, rubbing softly, as she fought back feelings of nausea. “You will do whatever I tell you to do,” he said. “Answer the question.”

  She sighed deeply, her body rigid as he caressed her. “In order for my deception to work,” she said, “I gave up all thoughts of sexuality many years ago. I couldn’t risk exposure. I simply control those feelings.”

  “You’ve never had sex?”

  “No, sir.”

  “My goodness.” He leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head, then walked away from her. Sumi relaxed immediately. In front of the desk again, he looked at her with raised eyebrows. “I think we’re going to have a very interesting association.”

  “How so, sir?” She hoped he couldn’t see her shaking hands.

  “I have a new job for you, Sumi. How would you like to be Vice President of the United States?”

  Sumi Chan laughed out loud. “You are joking.”

  “I’m perfectly serious. It soon will be time for Gabler to resign—and time for the face of China to shine forth in American politics. It will bind the cultures closer together.”

  “You must surely realize, Mr. Li, that the American Constitution provides that a Vice President be a natural-born citizen of the United States.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Li said, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a small disc. “But you are such a citizen, Sumi. It’s all right here.” He dropped it on the desk. “You are the son of an American Marine, an embassy guard, who married a Chinese national. You were born on a Navy ship that was en route to the US. Unfortunately, your parents died in the flu epidemic several years ago—that much is true, eh? The record is complete. I did an excellent job on it.”

  “Even greater lies added to my life,” Sumi said. “Mr. Li, I cannot do this. My ancestral lands—”

  “I have acquired them. They were lost to you in the bankruptcy action of your parents. But I knew you would be working to reacquire them, so I did. They are yours when our business is concluded. If you refuse, you will have nothing.”

  “Why are you doing this?”