Richter 10

  “I’ll make sure our bags are taken right from here to the plane,” Newcombe said. “Then I’ll get Burt to—”

  Crane interrupted. “You’re not going. I need you at the Foundation looking for another earthquake… any earthquake. The Central American franchises are always a good bet.”

  “You’re taking Lanie and not me?”

  Crane couldn’t understand the puzzlement on the man’s face. “She needs the crash course, doctor,” he said, stern. “And you need to save our fannies. End of discussion.”

  He swiveled away from them, unwilling to deal with Newcombe’s emotional life. He needed Newcombe happy, of course, but more than that, he needed him focused.

  The helo banked slightly to the west, heading toward the Valley. They were crossing hundreds of fault lines now, LA itself riding atop the Elysian Parks system, a crisscrossed pattern of interconnected faults just powerful enough to bring down the whole city. He shook his head. How many of Brother Ishmael’s people would die in such a quake?

  The pilot had descended somewhat after passing the War Zone.

  They were crossing other faults, too. Bigger faults—Santa Susana, Oak Ridge, San Gabriel, Sierra Madre—all capable of producing huge quakes. Then there was the famous one, the San Andreas Fault thirty miles to the east, an eight-hundred-mile slash. It marked the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates and the location where the buildup of pressure from two massive plates going in different directions would eventually rip apart and carry western California northward. It had been a short thrust fault, the Northridge Fault, that had shaped his life. After his Nobel Prize year, it had been renamed the Crane Fault.

  He never understood people asking about the “big one.” The earthquake that would destroy Los Angeles could come from any one of a thousand different fault ruptures, be they tectonic or stress from the tectonics. A thousand ways to rip the earth apart, a thousand ways to die. What was most interesting about California was not that it could die so easily, but that it hadn’t died yet. That’s why Crane had chosen to build his Foundation in the San Gabriel Mountains, mountains formed by thrust fault activity. He wanted to be dead center in the middle of the action. To slay the beast you had to go to its lair.

  The helo banked into the Valley, hurrying them to Mendenhall. “Lanie,” Crane said, pointing through the bay window, “come get your first look at your new home.”

  She moved up beside him and he smiled when she gasped in surprise. The Foundation could be reached only by air. Built halfway up the 4,700-foot peak on a rocky outcropping, the Foundation sat in the center of a honeycomb of ruby laser lines, ranging beams set to specific targets that could detect the most minute earth movements. It was science at its most beautiful. Clear red lines against a starlit night.

  As they slowly closed on the grounds, they could see Whetstone’s supersonic transport circle the mountain once, then dip to the long runway extending out from the working areas of the Foundation.

  “My God,” Lanie said. “It does look like a mosque.”

  “Told you,” Sumi said, then looked at Crane. “Five newsmen are on their way up here now.”

  “How soon?”

  “They’re right behind us. The only people who could get here on your time schedule are the ones who followed us from the docks. Okay?”

  “It’ll have to be. Make sure they have landing clearance.”

  “Why does the main building look like a mosque?” Lanie asked.

  “Architectural Darwinism,” Newcombe replied.

  “I don’t understand.”

  They moved through the mesh of laser lines, zeroing on the pad near the main, stone building, massive and square, a large dome sitting atop it. “I built it like a mosque,” Crane said, “because I’ve never known a mosque to get destroyed in an EQ. Some of the Middle Eastern ones stood for a thousand years. Only the execution of the Masada Option could destroy them. The sixteenth-century Ottoman architect, Sinan, used a system of chain reinforcement to earthquake-proof all the public buildings of the time. It worked.”

  The pilot set the helo down near the mosque, Crane immediately sliding open the bay door, then jumping out. The area was well lit and sprawling. The domed lab was three stories high and set off by itself in the open. A hundred yards away, nestled against the mountain, was the office structure, long and low, like a train. Above the offices, gouged into the side of the mountain, were a series of chalet-style cottages, Foundation residences, built on spring-loaded platforms. There were ten of them, connected up by a series of steel stairways and reaching perhaps a hundred feet above the Foundation grounds. The airstrip, a long glowing tube reaching into the darkness, sat on the other side of the lab. Whetstone’s jumbo jet sat perched in its center, its back bay already open, workers hurriedly loading equipment and medical supplies.

  Burt Hill came running up as they stepped out of the helo, others landing all around him. “Doc,” he called, his full beard bushy, hanging to his chest. “We’re getting everything taken care of except the medical people. The ones you took to Sado aren’t ready to go back in the field yet.”

  “I’ll bet,” Crane said, already moving toward the massive front doors of the lab. “Here’s what you do… call Richard Branch at the USC med school and tell him to send up stat a dozen of his top students. Tell him we’ll give them the best training they’ve ever had. Got that?”

  “Got it,” Hill said.

  Lanie had developed a soft spot for Burt on Sado, where his performance in the aftermath of the tragedy had thoroughly impressed her. Burt could have been any age between thirty and sixty, but his large, expressive blue eyes looked ancient.

  “Oh, Burt,” Crane said, “there’s a truck full of picks and shovels on its way here. We’re going to need to be ready to bring it up.”

  “We’ll roll Betsy out of the hangar first thing. What time you figure on getting out of here?”

  “It’s nearly ten,” Crane said. “Ten-thirty tops. Move.”

  “You want me to go?” Hill asked.

  “Not this time, Burt. You stay here with Dr. Newcombe. Facilitate. The minute you get the chance, I want you to run a security sweep for surveillance gear. Do a class A sweep.”

  “You’re not taking Burt?” asked Newcombe, angry. “What the hell kind of trip is this?”

  “I’m not used to having my decisions questioned,” Crane said, searing Newcombe with a look.

  “Get ready for it, then,” Newcombe said. “Because I’m not going to allow Lanie to—”

  “You’re what?” Lanie said, grabbing Newcombe’s arm. Crane held back a smile as he watched the fire climb up her face and ignite her eyes. “You’re not going to allow me to go? Since when are you my parent, my boss, or God?”

  “You don’t understand,” Newcombe said. “This is much more dangerous than Sado. The last time—”

  “Enough!” Crane said, opening the large double doors with the Crane Foundation plaque set in bronze right beside. Nothing mechanical, nothing that could lock up in an emergency. “We’ll talk in the control room.”

  Lanie followed the men into the labs in utter amazement. The Crane Foundation was the most incredible piece of property she’d ever seen, bar none. It was perched like an eagle on a dangerous precipice, daring Nature to challenge it—Crane shaking his fist in the face of God. But even the spectacle of the Foundation didn’t prepare her for the lab.

  The lab was huge, wide open, its center and dome dominated by a three-story-high globe of the world. But it wasn’t just a map. In halos of showering sparks, workers on cranes and tall ladders were welding at the top of the shell. The sphere had terrain, complete with land mass contours and oceans. It was only partially finished, and in its innards she could see millions of tiny wires as well as now empty vacuum tubes and flasks, obviously placed to receive materials at a later date. A central core looked like a small blast furnace. Lanie understood immediately.

  “You’re making the world,” she said, and was s
urprised to find her own voice raspy.

  “This is all yours,” Crane said easily. “This is why you were hired.”

  “Mine?”

  “You’re going to duplicate the historical development of our planet, Ms. King, the current conditions on it—”

  “You’re going to hinge your ability to predict on this?”

  Crane’s eyes were hard and playful at the same time, a gambler’s eyes, Lanie thought.

  “No,” he answered softly, “we hinge it on you. The globe will be your tool, but you’ll have help in forging the tool. Too much help, I’m afraid you’re going to think sometimes.” His eyes were dancing with deviltry and exuberance, and he took Lanie’s breath away. “Ah, those helpers. Now you’ll have botanists, biologists, physicists—”

  Newcombe interrupted. “We can talk about this another time. We have something to straighten out right now.” His tone was harsh.

  “Certainly,” Crane said, turning and walking off. Newcombe followed as if stalking him. Lanie trailed after, walking backward, unable to keep her eyes off the monstrous sphere that was to be hers—hers to do what with? She turned then and noticed that she hadn’t seen glass anywhere in the building. There was nothing on the walls that could fall and cause damage. It was straight stone top to bottom; small working labs full of seismographic equipment and computer gear had open doorways, no windows. Everything seemed to be bolted down, lighting provided by tiny, brilliant spots sunk in the block stone of the walls.

  On the far side of the open room an entire wall a hundred feet long and two stories high was devoted to miniature seismographs that read out their peaks and valleys in both Richter and the more popular Moment Magnitude scales. There must have been several thousand of them, some beeping, some clanging bell-like. Lanie figured that the ones making noises were detecting the continual EQ’s, the louder bells the signals of temblors that had made it to the surface. Far along the wall one of the machines was wailing constantly, almost like a baby. It sent a chill through her—Martinique.

  A set of metal stairs marked Off Limits to Everyone was built into the wall beside the scales. Crane and Newcombe already were climbing them to a small blockhouse jutting out of the stone near the ceiling. She hurried to join them, looking up, not down—vertigo was her weakness.

  She squeezed through a small doorspace and into the control room. Like a wartime bunker it was small and cramped, the walls covered with control panels that, she guessed, could access and run most of the machinery in the labs. A cutout, rather like a large window in the foot-thick stone wall, looked onto the globe.

  Newcombe handed her a set of muffling headphones—both he and Crane were already wearing them—and indicated she should put them on. She did so. Crane, seeming none too happy, punched a button, and a piercing horn blared, the sound painful even through the mufflers. If anyone was listening, they no longer had eardrums.

  They removed their mufflers, Crane hitting a button on the panel that energized the room with static electricity to jam any attempted surveillance. The air around them crackled with tiny blue lightning flashes that occasionally tickled Lanie’s skin and that made her hair stand on end.

  Crane sat heavily on the only chair in the room, then thought better of it and stood. He looked at Newcombe with a blank face. “What?” he said. “Spit it out, Dan.”

  “You’re not taking Lanie to Martinique,” he stated flatly, then turned to her, putting a hand up for silence. “Hear me out. You’re new to this. You’re not trained in lifesaving or survival skills.” He jerked around to face Crane again. “She’s going to get in your way more than she’s going to help.”

  “Don’t be so patronizing, dammit.” She was having a hard time controlling the rage at Dan that threatened to overwhelm her. “How else do I get the experience unless I participate?”

  “Just listen for a minute, all right?” Newcombe told her, his face set hard. “The last time Crane did a volcano we lost seven people.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yeah. Dead. Half the team didn’t come back. We weren’t looking for publicity then, so it never became a big issue.”

  She looked at Crane. “Is that true?”

  “True,” he said without hesitation. “It was in Sumatra, a new volcano that had risen on the island in a month. We were evacuating from the other side of the crater, away from the flow, because I feared a parasitic crater when the main flue collapsed.” He returned her stare and she could detect no regret or sadness in him. “We weren’t fast enough. The new cone blew out half the mountain. We never even found bodies. Still want to come along?”

  She shook with the rush of a momentous and life-changing challenge. “Will I really be able to help?”

  “Working an active volcano will give you more knowledge of tectonics than reading all the books in the world on the subject,” he answered simply. “If you can dress a wound, you’ll be able to help.”

  “Then I’m coming,” she said without hesitation.

  “If she’s on the plane, so am I,” Newcombe said, hard.

  “No,” Crane snapped. “You’ll spend all your time trying to protect her, which will make both of you useless. Besides, I already told you I need you here.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” Newcombe said low, moving up into Crane’s face.

  “To you,” Lanie repeated. “Why does everything come back to you?”

  “I’m just utilitizing my employees to their best advantage,” Crane said. “Maybe you should think more about the program than your love life, Dan.”

  “I resent that,” Newcombe said. “I didn’t ask you to bring her here. I didn’t—”

  “Enough!” Lanie said, her arm trailing blue lightning as she moved it in front of her to point at Newcombe. She nodded at Crane. “May we have a moment alone, please?”

  Crane glanced from one to the other, and she could see in his eyes the fear that he’d made a huge mistake in hiring her. If she were to make this work, it would have to happen right now.

  “Certainly,” Crane said at last. “I’ll be down making sure the loading is going all right.” He started for the doorspace, turned back around and said, “Settle this now.”

  There were several seconds of silence after Crane left, Lanie and Newcombe regarding each other from three feet away. “Don’t screw me on this,” she said finally.

  His face took on a pained expression. “I don’t want you hurt… maybe killed,” he said. “You’re untrained. Crane doesn’t care. He’ll do anything when he’s confronting one of his goddamned demons. To lose you like that… I couldn’t stand it.”

  She moved to him, let him take her in his arms. “I want this job, want it desperately,” she said fervently. “This is the greatest challenge, the greatest opportunity, an imager could ever hope for and I don’t want to lose it.”

  He gently stroked her hair. “It’s not worth dying for,” he whispered, the electricity charging slightly wherever their bodies touched.

  “You know me. You know my drives.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then listen, better for me to die in the flash of discovery than to live knowing I’ve missed the chance of my lifetime.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true, Dan, and you know it. If you kept me from doing this, you’d lose me forever.”

  He pulled away from her then, turned his back and moved to the opposite side of the tiny room. There was nowhere to go, no escape from the truth. When he turned back around, there was confusion in his eyes. “I-I don’t want to lose you… that’s all.”

  “You won’t lose me,” she said softly, and knew she was manipulating him the way Crane would. “I’ll be back before you know it. Do this… have my luggage and all my stuff in storage sent up to your bungalow. Make sure I’m all moved in. When I get back, we’ll start our life together.”

  “You mean that?”

  She nodded. “I’m all yours, lover.” She stuck out her hand. “Deal?”

  He sho
ok it vigorously, then grabbed her up off the floor, swinging her around and kissing her. He set her back down, his eyes getting hard again. “You just watch your fanny out there,” he said. “Nothing crazy. Promise?”

  “I promise,” she said, then moved quickly to the door. “I’ve got to tell Crane. Catch up with me at the plane.”

  She was out the door, her feet practically floating down the stairs, her eyes fixed on the globe, her globe. Excitement filled her, the danger only adding fuel to the fire of her drive.

  She found him outside, machinery and people moving all around him as he gave orders and pointed, like a conductor directing the symphony of real life. She walked up beside him.

  “When do we leave?” she asked.

  “In about five minutes,” he answered, one eyebrow raising slightly. He stared out over the edge of the mountain. Lanie heard a slight whine and a huge helo crested the precipice not twenty feet from them. It was dangling a two-and-a-half-ton truck beneath it full of picks and shovels. Crane pointed it toward the transport. In the world of Lewis Crane, nothing was impossible.

  Chapter 5: Fade-Away

  THE FOUNDATION

  21 JUNE 2024, 1 A.M.

  “I guess once a week isn’t good enough,” Burt Hill said, not for the first time. “Now we gotta do special sweeps on Friday nights. It don’t matter that I been here since seven yesterday morning, no indeed. His majesty says to do a Class A sweep on a Friday night.”

  “Saturday morning now,” Sumi said.

  They stood in a shuddering cherrypicker as Burt slowly guided the crane around the top of the globe. He held a palm-size machine with a coil of wire looping from it out in front of him, the debugger bleeping every ten seconds.

  “You say you do this once a week?” she asked.

  “You bet,” Burt said, his brows furrowing as he watched the meter register on the debugger. “Seven in the A of M every Monday of every week.” He turned the meter away from the globe, pointing it back toward the labs.