Richter 10

Chapter 1 THE NAMAZU

Slivers of first light poked through the crack around the flap of the tent, and Dan Newcombe, stretched out on his cot and naked except for his shoes and his wrist pad, tried even harder to stop the numbers. They’d been scrolling through his brain for forty-eight hours, keeping him awake and growing edgier by the minute.

Close by, someone began to pound a vent into the ground. The numbers in Newcombe’s head shattered with the harsh metallic clank of each blow, re-formed before the next strike of the mallet, shattered again … until he couldn’t tolerate it for another second and jerked to a sitting position, plugging his ears with his index fingers. No good; he couldn’t keep that sound out and the numbers were still running through his head. Worse, another person was starting on a vent, pounding out of rhythm with the first.

Newcombe got up, walked to his workstation, and turned on the lantern; it barely lit the two chart tables covered with electronic gear, and he glanced at the faceted, jewel-like knob on its top. Dull green. The damned lantern needed recharge. And he needed light, lots of it, now. In a world of lies, he was getting ready to bet his life on the truth. And truth demanded light. He hated lies, which meant he hated the way Lewis Crane did business. But even Crane had to appreciate the truth on some level, because he, too, was betting his life, along with the lives of at least a hundred others, maybe even thousands of others, on Newcombe’s calculations. Crane always thought big.

Newcombe picked up the lantern, carried it to the tent flap, and stuck it out. Immediately pulling it back inside, he blinked at the blinding light it gave off. When he’d adjusted the brightness, he placed it back on the chart table and noted with satisfaction that every corner and fold of the tent was fully lighted, especially the herky-jerky little lines of the seismos. Those lines were a language to him, a language he could interpret like no other human being alive. He trusted seismos. Unlike people, they were dependable, always truthful. They treated every man, woman, and child the same, never changing their readings because of the skin color or gender or age of the reader.

He juiced the computers to a floating holo of seventeen seismograms hanging in the air before him in alternating bands of blue and red; their little white cursors registered the beating heart of the planet.

Heavy seismic activity was crying out on all seventeen graphs, which meant that everything ringing this section of the Pacific Plate was in turmoil. He could sense it right through the floating lines. He knew Crane, wherever he was, could sense it, too—only Crane didn’t need any instruments, just his uncanny instincts … and that dangling left arm of his.

Today could be the day.

Newcombe activated Memory with the lightest touch on the key pad, and the graphs replayed the history of the last eighteen hours. His eyes widened at the sight of perfectly aligned seismic peaks in five places on all seventeen screens. Foreshocks.

He tapped Crane’s icon on his wrist pad and asked loudly, “Where the hell are you?”

“Good morning, Doctor,” Crane said warmly, his voice coming through Newcombe’s aural implant in dulcet tones. “Fine day for an earthquake. Perhaps you should join us for it. I’m down at the mines.”

“I’ll be there in a little while,” Newcombe said, tapping off the pad, disgusted that Crane could sound so hearty, happy even, at such a moment.

He stared at the graphs, back now to current readings and still screaming turmoil.

“And I thought the Moon had set.”

Astonished, Newcombe whirled toward the sound of the droll, sexy voice of the only woman who’d ever challenged his mind, heart, and body at the same time. “Lanie!” he exclaimed.

“In the flesh, lover,” Elena King said, smiling broadly, her sunblock-coated lips gleaming.

Even wrapped head-to-toe to protect herself from the sunshine, she looked appealing and provocative. And despite the opaque goggles covering her eyes, he could tell she was eyeing his nakedness with a mixture of desire and humor. Newcombe felt almost giddy and rushed across the tent to her.

“Oh, Lanie,” he said, dragging her against his body for a long, intense hug. He gently thrust her to arm’s length for a quick inspection, removed her floppy hat and tossed it over his shoulder, then pushed her goggles up like a headband behind which her thick, wavy black hair cascaded down her back. Looking into the hazel eyes that had entranced him for years, he slowly pulled her close again and lowered his head for a lingering kiss.

Savoring her lips, Newcombe realized he’d like nothing better than to lose himself in this woman. But there were the seismos. There were the numbers. And this could be the day. Reluctantly, he broke off the kiss, murmuring, “How did I get so lucky? What brought you here?”

“You don’t know?” Lanie asked incredulously, freeing herself from his embrace and taking a couple of steps back. “Your buddy Crane didn’t tell you he hired me last night?”

Now it was Newcombe’s turn to be incredulous. “Hired you?”

“Yes! Hired me! And ordered me to get my butt down here right away.”

His gut clenching with fear for Lanie and with rage at Crane for putting her in danger, he snapped, “Your transport still on the island?”

“How should I know?” She frowned. “More to the point, what the hell’s wrong with you suddenly?”

He darted to the foot of his cot and snatched up his Chinese peasant pants. “What’s wrong with me?” He stepped into the pants and yanked the drawstring tight around his waist, then located his work shirt. “What’s wrong with me?” he repeated, louder, while thrusting his arm through a khaki sleeve. “Nothing’s wrong with me.” He pointed at the holos. “That’s what’s wrong. This island’s about to crack up … fracture into little pieces!”

“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 u/v 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, major domo… 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 to 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, Lame 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 jump suit; 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. The 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.”

The laughter of the newsies mingled with the whir of dozens of CD cams. Crane merely smiled until his audience settled again into attentive silence. “Attempts to predict earthquakes have been made, I suspect, since man first felt the earth tremble beneath his feet. So long the province of the shaman and the Cassandra, earthquake prediction remained a low priority for the scientific minds of our age … until that fateful, that cataclysmic moment in our history.”

Even before Crane could speak the name of that fearful event, the crowd let out the now ritual response to its mention: a long, low moan, a keening mantra, and the swallowed last syllable. Ahh-hh, men.

“Yes,” Crane dared to continue, “the exercise of the Masada Option caused research on earthquake prediction, like so many other things, to become vitally important and desperately urgent. Yet, until now, precise prediction was not possible. I come before you to make official and firm the prediction I’ve been discussing these four long weeks here: Before this day is out, a quake of between seven and eight on the Richter Scale will destroy a significant portion of this island and all of the village of Aikawa.”

The newsies gobbled like turkeys. Crane let them react for a few moments, then waved them to silence. “How can I make this precise prediction is a long and complex story, only a few highlights of which we have time to share with you now. My chief assistant and valued colleague. Dr. Daniel Newcombe, reminds me to tell you that we are not in a safe place—”

There was laughter again, but it was nervous laughter, edged with hysteria in some.

“We have a few minutes, however, before all of us must leave for the secure location identified by Dr. Newcombe. We’ll use our time here to go over a few things.” Crane could feel minute tremors, but knew he was unique in that. “First, let’s look at the well from which the prisoners who worked, this gold mine over a hundred years ago got their water. As we move to the well, Dr. Newcombe will begin giving you some explanation of what we’re all about today.”

“Science is research,” Newcombe said, Crane noticing the authority that always crept into the man’s speech when he had control of a crowd. “By studying the past, we learn the future. By knowing the geology of a given area and researching past temblors in similar terrain, I’ve developed a system I call seismic ecology, or EQ-eco, the earthquake’s way of remapping any given ecosystem. I have mathematically calculated the effects of a Richter seven epicentered on the Kuril subduction trench twenty K from this island and have mapped an area on the plain above us that I believe will not be affected by the quake. When it happens, we should all be up there, not here in the valley.”

“Some of our techniques may seem like magic,” Crane said, simplifying, always simplifying, “but many are as old as civilization. There are five predictive signs of an earthquake that will show up in a well. Take turns peering in as I describe them to you.”

People lined up, shoving, to check out the well, the sun now rising high enough that light spilled in. Newcombe moved close to Crane.

“We’ve got to get these people out of here right now,” he said, his voice rasping. He grabbed Crane’s good arm. “I think I just felt another foreshock.”

“You did,” Crane replied, smiling. “But it’s still waiting, our big fish, still straining. Another few minutes here, then we’ll lead them out.”

“Sign one … increased cloudiness in the water,” Crane said to murmuring all around. “Then turbulence … then bubbling…”

“It’s doing that!” a woman said, her voice harsh, loud with anxiety.

Good. He had them, Crane thought. Then he said, “Changes in the water level. And for what it’s worth, the level is eighteen inches lower than when we measured yesterday.

“Finally,” he said, drawing up the heavy string to which a cup was attached, “bitterness in the water.”

He handed the cup to a man wearing a 3-D steadicam helmet, gesturing for him to drink. The man took a tentative sip, then gagged and spat out the water.

“Bitterness.” Crane lowered his voice to add, “There is a saying that applies to life and earthquakes; The wheel grinds slowly, but exceedingly fine. The giant wheel of Mother Earth and its massive movements is going to grind up this island today. And there’s nothing all the power of Man can do to stop it.”

“Crane!” Newcombe said sharply. “The sky!”

Everyone looked up. The morning sky was turning a ruddy orange with the increased electrical activity on the ground. It was happening. Crane could feel it pulsating through him, playing him like an instrument. The whole world was changing for them.

“My friends,” Crane said, “you must follow us quickly up to the base camp. It’s the only place you’ll be safe. Those of you in helos might want to view this from the air. It will be … spectacular. Let’s go!”

He ran with Newcombe and King to the truck, Lanie jamming herself between them on the small bench seat.

“God, we’re cutting this close,” Newcombe said. He touched the control pad and the truck peeled out quickly, other vehicles scrambling in disorder behind, mud flying everywhere. He glared at Lanie. “We can still get you on a helo.”

“Don’t concern yourself, doctor,” she said without looking at him. “I have complete faith in your calculations.”

“It’s good drama,” Crane said. “People running for their lives, running to the only safety that exists for them, safety that we have provided. This is going to be great.”

“What about the villagers?” Lanie asked. “Can’t we warn them, too?”

“I’ve done nothing but warn them,” Crane said, turning to face her, smiling when he saw she was flushed with excitement. “They threw me out of Aikawa three days ago and threatened to have me arrested if I came back. Their fate can’t be helped.”

“There must be something we can do.”

Crane looked at his watch. “We’ve got about a hundred and twenty seconds,” he said. “I’m wide open for suggestions. Hit me with an idea.”

Her mind racing, but failing to churn out a single practical suggestion, Lanie put her hand on Newcombe’s shoulder. “Dan?”

The truck was fishtailing up the hillside and demanded Newcombe’s attention. Finally, though, he was able to respond. “We’re here to watch people die,” he said coldly, “so that the Crane Foundation can raise more money for research.”

Lanie gasped as if struck and glanced quickly at Crane to see his reaction. He seemed perfectly composed, untouched by the comment.

“He’s right,” Crane said. But what Crane didn’t say, although he’d realized it at that second, was the extent of the fatalism in his character revealed by Newcombe’s lack of it. It was a quality, Crane suspected, that Newcombe would never develop. Still, he knew there were great similarities between them. While both felt the horror, they also felt the exultation of what was to come. And the latter was as ugly as it was paradoxical.

The truck sped through the camp in the direction of the Sea of Japan. Crane’s left arm throbbed like a beating heart; images swirled through his mind of crashing buildings, trapped people, firestorms. The pain and turmoil threatened to overwhelm him and he summoned all his energies to fight his demons, bring them down to calm, and to swallow the sword of self-doubt.

Newcombe took them within twenty feet of the plain’s sheer dropoff to the sea below, then directed the truck to halt. Crane could hear a distant rumble and knew they had barely a minute. He climbed out, his mind all centered, all controlled, as other vehicles skidded up near them. A jumble of people filled the plain.

He walked with Newcombe and King to the edge of the cliff and looked down. One hundred meters below, nestled between the rock face upon which they stood and the sea beyond, sat the village of Aikawa. Several hundred wooden buildings with colorful red roofs hugged the horseshoe-shaped coastline in picturesque tranquillity. The small fleet of fishing boats had already put out to sea, their sailors, no doubt, wondering about the orange sky. The villagers were approaching the last day of their lives as they had approached every day that had gone before. Children’s laughter, real or imagined, drifted up to him.

“Crane-san.”

Crane turned toward the source of the angry voice. Matsu Motiba, the mayor of Aikawa, impeccably dressed in a black suit and solid silver tie was flanked by men in uniform.

“Good morning, Mayor Motiba,” Crane said, looking past him to the hundred or more people jammed up behind him. Pressing the voice enhancement icon on his wristpad, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen! As you see, yellow lines have been painted on the plain. For your protection, please stay within the lines. I cannot guarantee your safety otherwise.”

“It is time for this charade to end,” Motiba said.

“I quite agree, sir. It is time.”

“What,” the mayor said, uncharacteristically sarcastic, “no desperate pleas for evacuation, no horror stories to frighten us?”

“It’s too late,” Crane said solemnly. “There’s nothing I can do for you now except help with the survivors.”

The mayor sighed deeply and took a piece of paper from a lieutenant in a white parade uniform with a logo that read Liang Int on the shoulders. “This is an urgent official communiqué from the government on the mainland.” He handed it to Crane. “You are to disband your campsite and leave this island immediately. Your credentials and your permits have been revoked.”

Shaking his head, Crane looked up. Hot air balloons filled the skies; the helos zipping around the balloons dipped down like birds of prey to shoot footage of the village. He could certainly understand the mayor’s feelings.

“Do you hear me, Crane-san? You must leave now.”

The paper fluttered from Crane’s nerveless fingers, his gaze going to the sea. The flying fishes, one of Sado’s most famous sights, were jumping crazily, throwing themselves onto the beach.

He glanced at the mayor. “I’m so sorry, sir,” he murmured. “Gomen asai. Fate has decreed that today you will be a survivor. Believe me when I tell you that it is no blessing.” Then he looked past the mayor and addressed the crowd. “You may be able to hear the rumble now. Gather as close as you’re able, because you must stay within the lines.”

Crane then turned back to Aikawa, his body growing tense and still, a trance engulfing him. The noise and commotion around him receded into the void of bleak silence within. Time and again he’d walked to the edge of his own sanity, challenging his fears and his anger, wondering when the monster of the Earth would devour him. He hated what was happening, hated it with a passion that would tear most men to pieces.

The waterspouts began hundreds of meters from shore, the ocean heaving, throwing two dozen geysers fifty feet into the air. Motiba, who’d been grabbing at Crane’s sleeve, had stopped and was staring transfixed. The spouts came closer to land, exploding out of the water as the inhabitants of Aikawa understood at last that Lewis Crane was no madman, no vicious hoaxster, but a seer, a modern-day Cassandra whose warnings they had foolishly, blindly, tragically refused to heed.

The ships in the harbor were tossing and tearing away from their moorings, capsizing, and being hurled into the village streets. Another hand was clutching at Crane. He quickly gazed to his left. Elena King was locked onto his bad arm, her face a study in shocked surprise. He couldn’t feel her touch, though her fingers dug into his clothing and her knuckles were white with strain. The spouts reached land, the rumbling sound growing louder and louder until the roar turned into booming ground thunder. The sea was a maelstrom that spat sand high into the orange sky. And then the quake hit.

Seabed sucked into the subduction zone beneath the Eurasian Plate, then jerked the surface of the ground with it, feeding a chunk of the Pacific Plate back into the furnace of the planet’s core. Bedrock, grinding to dust, collapsed in upon itself; great rents and tears in the skin of the earth widened into mouths that gulped the boulders, people, trees, buildings, and boats near its lips.

The plain danced violently beneath them, and Crane hoped against hope that he hadn’t misplaced his trust in Newcombe to map the paths of destruction—and, thus, the small, safe place upon which they stood. Below, the villagers who had not been crushed and trapped within their houses had escaped to the streets, their screams rising to join those of the people watching in horror with Crane. The mayor was crying out. And behind, Mount Kimpoku was busily rising another twenty meters into the air while the ancient mines Crane had just visited fell in upon themselves, erasing forever the carved records of those who had suffered there. Sheets of volcanic rock slid into the sea, screaming against the morning. Sado Island was disintegrating all around them.

The motion of the earth changed to a wild swivel, hurling the people around Crane onto the hard-packed dirt plain as the village below disappeared in rubble and a fine mist of ocean spray. The rending of the island, Japan’s sixth largest, was stentorian, the sound of a dying animal bellowing in rage and sorrow that brought tears to Crane’s eyes. He remembered … he remembered. And he knew that even worse was to come.

Only Lanie still stood beside him, her death-grip on his arm the sole sign of the ultimate fear that comes with understanding of the true powerlessness of mankind. “Courage,” he whispered to her.

And then perdition stopped. Ninety seconds after it had begun, the Earth had finished realigning itself and deathly quiet reigned. Slowly people began to shake themselves off, to stand up, to look around in awe and shock. The island was half as large now as it had been a minute and a half before. Landmarks had disappeared or moved. Nothing was the same. Nothing would be the same.

Miraculously, there were survivors below. They, too, were shaking themselves off, picking themselves up. Emergency teams began to mobilize for the trip down to what had been Aikawa with fresh water, medical supplies. Motiba stared in stupefied horror at the remnants of his life; his glasses were askew on his face, his eyes distant, unfocused.

“I must … go,” he said softly. “To my people … I must—”

“No,” Crane said. “You cannot go down there yet.”

The man ignored him and ran back through the crowd.

“Stop him!” Crane yelled. “Bring him back! All of you, hold your places. Look to the shoreline!”

They looked. The Sea of Japan had receded hundreds of meters from the island, leaving it high and dry, a seabed full of writhing fish and of boats drowned in mud.

Two Red Cross workers dragged the struggling Motiba back to Crane’s side. “Let go,” he shouted, hysterical now. “Why do you hold me?”

Gently, Crane patted the man’s trembling shoulder, then pointed out to sea. “We hold you because if you go down, you will be killed. See!”

A mountain of water was racing toward the island from several kilometers out… rushing to fill the void caused when the heaving of the Earth had shoved it back.

“Tsunami, ladies and gentlemen,” Crane said calmly, too aware of the cams and very careful not to betray the horror that gripped his soul. There was time now, a few minutes only, perhaps, to speak as if all were normal. “After it subsides, we will go down and look for survivors. I trust that you representatives of the news media will pitch in and lend a hand.”

He turned to see Newcombe putting his arm around Elena King. Crane pulled her hand from his dead arm and gave her completely over to Newcombe. “You did a good job on the location, Dan. Let’s just hope we’re up high enough.”

“How can you be so calm?” Newcombe’s emotions were in shreds, his voice the growl of a hurt animal. “Those are people down there … and they’re dying.”

“Someone has to keep his head.”

“What kind of goddamned Cassandras are we?”

“Get used to it, doctor,” Crane said. “This is merely the beginning.”

“But why?”

Crane ignored him and turned to Motiba, the man completely broken down, crying silently. He took the mayor in his arms, clutching him tightly. “You must be strong, Motiba-san,” he whispered.

“Let me die with them,” the mayor pleaded as the water charged them, roaring, grasping.

“No,” Crane said simply. “Someone must live … to remember.”

Eating the screams of the survivors on the plain, the tsunami assaulted them first … then the water, advancing like a juggernaut from all sides, slamming into Sado Island, reached higher, climbing. The wall of water smacked the land like a monstrous hand of God. The people on the plain turned as one and fled as a pack as far back as they could until the water crested and gushed over the top, reaching them and driving them down onto the ground. Waves carried pieces of broken buildings and bodies, crushed cars and uprooted trees. Churning thick with the debris of life, the water poured over Crane, boards banging against him. After the first deluge, the water proved to be shallow. Crane huddled on the muddy, pool-speckled ground, hands over his head, just as he’d done when he was seven years old.

He hunched there, shivering in fear until the water fully subsided, then climbed to his feet to look with horror at the dead spread over the plain. Many of his own party had been hurt by the tidal scum that had washed so high over the island. And he noticed that the Red Cross workers were tending to their own first.

While most people were dazed, many of the camheads were already up and rolling viddy. And it hit him then that he’d done it. Given the world the show. Everything Sumi Chan had advised him they needed to get the publicity, the funds, the aura of authority to attach to him so that he could do the work that was his life. And in that moment of great tragedy, he knew great triumph. Oh, yes, he thought cynically, horror made sensational copy. And what better than this?

He spotted Burt Hill and called him over. “Organize the aid teams to go down to what’s left of the village,” he ordered. “Pull it all together.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to see the edge of the cliff. Motiba was there, and he joined him. The sea was smooth as glass, unusually beautiful in deepest teal blues and greens. But where Aikawa had stood was only empty beach, not even a boat or shack littering the pristine sand that gleamed in the deadly sunlight.

“I’m sorry,” Crane said, low and hoarse.

Motiba looked up at him, tears working their way down his cheeks. “I know I should not blame you for this,” he said, “but I do.”

With that he turned and walked off, leaving Crane absolutely alone with his demons. No one came near. No one reached out a hand or asked if he were all right. To the people left on the plain he was as distant and as untouchable as the dead that surrounded him. But they were wrong. The dead, at least, knew peace.

Chapter 2 ERUPTIONS

The sun was lowering behind the Washington Monument and Mr. Li Cheun, head of Liang International in this hemisphere, knew that for the last couple of hours the little American bureaucrats who worked for him, though they didn’t realize it perhaps, had been scurrying home. More important to him, the North American headquarters of Liang International was winding down for the evening. Liang Int, the Chinese star ascendant in the world of business, owned America. Ten years before, Liang Int had managed to get a toehold in America, wresting some business away from the Germans who’d owned the country then. The Masada Option had proved to be better than any business plan or ruthless tactics the Chinese might have devised, for the resultant radioactive cloud and fallout from the explosions had swept southern, central, and eastern Europe. When the Fatherland was devastated, suffering a loss of almost half its population, Liang Int was able to move swiftly and turn its toehold into a stranglehold, not only on America, but on German business operations throughout the world.

Now, standing in the secured boardroom, dim save for the glowing virtual map of the Earth that surrounded him, Li contemplated his empire. The diorama was transparent; he could look through it at the Moon, always full, inspiring the fanciful, but much desired, wish that the Liang Int diggers up there were always working.

There were no windows in this room, thus no day, no evening, only shifts. Every decision that mattered to the continuing business (most would say even the continuing existence) of Canada, the US, Mexico, and the Central American franchises was made right here. The rest of Washington—the mall outside running between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and its occupants, the scores of departments, bureaus, agencies stretching to the beltways and beyond—all was show for the tourists. Liang Int owned it all and ran it all… including the so-called government of the United States of America. President Gideon, Vice President Gabler, the Cabinet, the members of Congress and the Supreme Court were little more than mere employees, figureheads and lackeys. Of course they maintained a pretty fiction of government, but that was all it was, a fiction.

Tonight Li was distracted, his thoughts turning tune and again to the viddy-stract his staff had prepared the previous night and shown him first thing this morning on one Lewis Crane and the events on the Japanese Island of Sado. The Japanese. Upstarts all of them, fools most of them. They’d actually shared their ownership of America with Middle Easterners, back when there had been a Middle East. But their tenure was short. Still, from time to time a Japanese combine would try to take a piece of the business away. He sneered, glad that in response to just such an affront his predecessor at Liang Int North America had ordered the chopping down of the two thousand cherry trees around the tidal basin—trees that the Japanese had given to the Americans shortly after the turn of the last century.

“Rain in the midwest,” said Mui Tsao from the soft darkness of his control panel. “It will delay the wheat harvest. I suggest we contact Buenos Aires and siphon their surplus until the harvest catches up.”

Both men spoke English almost exclusively as a show of good faith to the natives, though American business people and officials were expected to speak fluent Chinese.

“Good,” Li replied. “I saw a report of a major anthrax epidemic in the South American branch. See if you can trade them some cattle for the wheat. Bring them in through Houston.”

“Where do we store?”

“We could store in the warehouses where we’ve got the headache chips.”

“And what do we do with the chips?”

“We’ll give them to the Southern franchises as part of the wheat repayment. By the time they’ve figured out what’s happened, they already will have distributed the chips and be forced to try and follow through with a sales campaign.”

Li heard Mui chuckle softly as the man punched deals into the keypad, and smiled himself. The “headache chip,” as they called it, was an endorphin trigger; it sensed muscle tightness in the neck and immediately flooded the cortex with a shot of mood enabling dorph that stopped the headache before it got started. Only trouble was, the brain enjoyed the dorph hit so much it worked on developing headache after headache just to get the dose, wearing out the implant and leaving the user in the worst pain of his life. Once word had gotten around, Liang Int had been stuck with seven warehouses full of worthless chips.

“Done,” Mui said, typing furiously, “and done.”

“Good.”

Li was in charge of the North American branch, and Mui was his control, his Harpy. Second in command of the decision making, the Harpy was responsible for constantly double-checking his superior, questioning his decisions. It could be irritating, but had a positive effect on business decisions, and business was what held all the world, all of life, together. Should Li fail to make the proper percentage of appropriate decisions, Mui would have his position—with his own little Harpy in place then to watch over him. It made for sleepless nights, but it was the very best thing for Liang Int.

And that was what mattered. Li was nothing if not a company man.

The map floated around Li, continents rising out of shimmering oceans, the trade routes of the world pulsing in pink, while areas of harvests and famines glowed in celestial blues. Food was always a problem since only filtered fields were able to withstand the full measure of the sun’s wrath and produce.

Nuclear material storage areas glowed unblinking crimson in thirty different spots, leakage into ground water running like capillaries thousands of miles from their source. Movements of precious metals and ambulatory currency spiked metropolitan areas, while consumer spending showed up as gangs of small people, one per million, flashing their spending areas and products like dust motes dancing on sunlight. Production was tracked worldwide, immediate comparisons were made with other similar operations, and the interior of the office was filled with floating hieroglyphics decipherable only by a handful of Liang’s top management. If any member of the team was to leave for a reason other than death, the entire code would be changed.

The Masada Cloud throbbed in dark black, its bulk covering Europe today, moving ever eastward on the jet stream. And the Masada Cloud led Li back once more to Lewis Crane.

Crane had won the Nobel Prize six years before for work that had flowed from his research on the exercise of the Masada Option, specifically its effect on earthquakes. That work also had led directly to the banning of all nuclear testing on Earth because Crane had showed conclusively that nuclear explosions could cause earthquakes hundreds, even thousands, of miles from the site of detonation. As the staff had pointed out to Li in their presentation, Crane had stated that the quake on Sado was, in fact, a direct consequence of the destruction of the Middle East back in ’14.

Would it be possible, Li mused, for someone armed with Crane’s information and programs to cause earthquakes in chosen, distant locations? He shook off the question. It was tangential to what really interested him about Crane at this time; politics and profits—and the question of why Crane was so eager to contact him through Sumi Chan. Indeed, Chan had left a message only hours ago about a meeting Crane wished to arrange.

Ah, these Americans were bold. But Li rather liked them and their country. It was a Third World country, as was Europe, both with real history. Its own corporate gods long dead, America had a cheap labor pool of hard workers who thought nothing of reinvesting all of their wages back into the company through consumerism. Americans were the world’s best consumers. Except, of course, for the headache chip.

There had been nothing but success in Li’s life, which was why he was having such a difficult time with the coming elections. In the past, Li had been able to tolerate America’s fantasy of representative government because Liang’s candidates always had won. But now, for some reason, its chief competitor in multi-nationalism, the Yo-Yu Syndicate, was making inroads with its own candidates. The off-year elections had cost Liang Int seven representatives. It was a nasty trend that Li needed to nip in the bud. But it was difficult because the fickle voters persisted in believing they needed “change” in government and that change was meaningful. With the American fantasy beginning to get in the way of corporate harmoniousness, Li had to act. Hence, Crane and his earthquakes. He could show the citizens how much he loved them by associating Liang Int and the government with earthquake prediction. That should fix Yo-Yu in the elections.

His diorama beeped and squeaked in a thousand different intervals and tones, Li recognizing them all. So, when he distinguished the delicate alto chirping of the telephone, he decided to make his move. He turned in Mui’s direction, waved off the incoming call, and said, “Get Sumi Chan for me, scrambled and secured. Put him over the west coast.”

While waiting, Li smiled. He knew Mui would be watching and listening very carefully.

Sumi Chan’s disembodied face, five inches high, blipped to life, hanging in midair somewhere over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Li would not address the man face to face, however. He had a computer projection that stood in for him so as never to give anything away through inadvertent gesture or expression.

“Hello, Mr. Li,” Sumi Chan said.

There was something expressed in the man’s eyes that Li didn’t understand. “Hello, Sumi,” he said, the computer matching his voice to its projection’s movements. “Are you well?”

“Yes, and I am also most grateful and most excited,” Sumi replied formally. “You have honored me by your attention.”

“As you have honored me by your invitation to meet with Dr. Crane.” Li paused, allowing Sumi to begin offering up information about the meeting. When the man was not immediately forthcoming, he added, “I assume I am not to meet with him alone.”

“Not unless you desire to do so. Dr. Crane wishes to present you and a number of other distinguished leaders with some of his ideas … and proposals.”

Li nodded. “A very timely meeting. His exploits on Sado are being reported continuously and everywhere, I’m told.”

“Yes, Sado. A great tragedy, but one whose human consequences could have been averted in large measure.”

“Economic consequences, too, of course.”

“Of course,” Sumi echoed. “May we count on your attendance?”

“If my schedule permits, I should certainly like to be a part of such a gathering. I would ask, however, that you coordinate with Mr. Mui Tsao on the guest list, the arrangements, and so forth.”

“That goes without saying, sir. May I tell you how pleased I know Dr. Crane will be?”

Li grunted and waved his hand dismissively. He’d had quite enough of this, and with a smile and a nod, he concluded, “Stay in the shade, Sumi Chan.”

“And you also, sir.”

Sumi’s face instantly blipped off, and Li paced a few steps up and past the Arctic. He could walk freely within the body of his virtual world and literally feel the flow of capital and goods pumped through the beating heart of consumerism. The world was a living network of corporate deities and he was a demigod. Things were as they were supposed to be.

As an official of the Geological Survey, Sumi Chan actually worked for him. Tacitly understood in their conversation was the fact that he, Li Cheun, would call the shots on Crane’s meeting. He would brief Mui on what he wished to accomplish. Yes, things were as they were supposed to be.

“Mr. Li Cheun is, of course, the one on this list who counts, the man to convince if you wish to succeed, Crane,” Sumi said, smiling slightly, “and I trust you will dazzle him. I fear I’m going to use up all my chits on him.” What he left unsaid was that he feared he’d already used up all his chits … with Mui Tsao, to whom he’d been talking until just ten minutes ago. There could be no doubt that Li Cheun had a definite use in mind for Lewis Crane.

“Oh, I’ll dazzle him all right, do a veritable song and dance for him,” said Crane, tilting back his chair and drinking directly from a bottle of very old Scotch.

“You’ve got copies of my paper for everyone who’s agreed to attend?” Newcombe asked, trying to steer the conversation back to his concerns.

Sumi nodded. “There will be copies awaiting each of them in their cabins when they board.”

Newcombe shook his head. Why Crane had chosen to spirit them away from Sado on this yacht to rendezvous with Sumi mid-ocean was beyond him. And out in the stratosphere were Crane’s reasons for wanting to hold his high-powered meeting on a boat. Still, the Diatribe was a helluva craft, luxurious and crammed with technology. Who owned it and how Crane had come by it were mysteries Newcombe was fairly sure would not be solved for him.

“Let’s review the politicos again,” Crane said to Sumi. “We’ve got Kate—”

Sumi’s laughter cut him off. “They’re all politicos, every last one of them, the Vice President of the United States being the least political of them all.”

“Gabler,” Newcombe said scornfully, “a fool … a buffoon.”

“And an important showpiece, Dan,” Crane said firmly. “Just leave all this to Sumi and me.”

“With pleasure,” Newcombe retorted. “So let me get to the area where I am an expert. Why are you planning such elaborate maneuvers? We’ve got a pretty straightforward situation as far as I can see. The data on earthquake ecology is on paper—and proven. Sado came in so close to my projections that you’ve got to go five digits past the decimal to find divergence from the actual event. This is something concrete to sell, Crane. Sell it.”

“I’ll use it,” Crane told him, smoothing his free hand over the bright yellow shirt covering his bathing trunks, “but I won’t marry myself to it.”

Newcombe frowned harshly and Sumi quickly refilled his glass with synthchampagne to which he added two drops from a small green bottle containing his own special dorph preparation. Newcombe knew Sumi urgently wanted him to ingest the dorph, but he didn’t mind. Sumi’s understanding of glandular chemistry was legendary.

“I’ll tell you why I don’t sell your EQ-eco, Danny boy,” Crane said, slightly slurring his words. Crane didn’t face living people very well straight. He put a hand over the mouth of his bottle when Sumi tried to bring the eye-dropper of dorph to it. “First of all, you’re out of line in making your suggestion.”

“You hired me for my talent,” Newcombe said. “Along with that conies my mouth.”

“It’s my foundation,” Crane said, “my decision. Your calculations indeed worked wonderfully … because, Dr. Newcombe, you knew in advance where the epicenter was going to be. You knew it because I told you. Your work is only a small part of what the Crane Foundation represents. To focus simply on the EQ-eco limits the amount of grant money available to us. To be perfectly honest, however, I also see a basic flaw in your perceptions. You expect people to do the right thing. They don’t. All the people in Los Angeles know they live atop faults held together by the thinnest of threads, yet they stay there. Would you convince the government to depopulate LA to the tune of thirteen million people? Where would you put them?”

“My system saves lives!”

Crane sighed and took a long pull from his bottle. “Few would consider that a compelling argument, doctor. Saving money is more to people’s tastes.”

“But it was so successful.”

“Exactly why I want to use it, but de-emphasize it at the same time. I want nobody thinking in those terms alone. We’re looking for much more.”

“Like what?”

Crane leaned closer to Newcombe, Sumi automatically drawing near. He spoke low, dramatically. “Have you gentlemen ever thought about what it would be like if all scientific research in a given area were brought under one banner, in one unifying edifice, and properly coordinated?”

“You want everything!” Newcombe laughed. He couldn’t believe it, the brazenness of the man.

Crane grinned. “Liang Int is omninational. Total control of tectonics is a real possibility.

They just need the right sell job. I could run the whole show from the Foundation, have access to every bit of data extant. Suddenly, true prediction—along with a lot more—becomes reality.”

Newcombe began to understand a great deal. “That’s why you hired Lanie. You want her to sort through and make sense of all the data if you pull this off.”

“And that’s why all the support organizations that have vested interests are being invited to attend the coming meeting,” Sumi said, sitting back and shaking his head. “Audacious! So, when I was speaking just moments ago of Li’s importance, you were laughing at me, weren’t you, Crane? Li Cheun was your target all along.”

“Don’t get mad at me, Sumi, please,” Crane said, boyish and charming. He grew serious again almost at once. “Geological research blankets the Earth, but touches very few lives in an obvious way. Clearly, it should. And clearly Liang Int can amply fund our work, get much out of it, and never feel the slightest pinch. They’ll only see profits from their involvement.”

Newcombe stood, Sumi’s dorph doing its work. Well-being washed over him like a summer breeze and there was a sexual edge to it—oxytocins, PEA?—that made him very glad he and Lanie were together again. The ship was rocking gently side to side. “We’re dead in the water,” Newcombe said, puzzled. “They must have put out the drag anchor.”

“Yes indeed they did,” Crane said, eyes twinkling with mischief. “Merely part of a little surprise I’m preparing for our guests … thanks to you, of course.” He winked broadly at Newcombe, who shuddered involuntarily, feeling oddly cold all of a sudden.

“Why do you want so much power?” Newcombe whispered.

“Great power accomplishes great things,” Crane said, the light of otherworldliness shining from his eyes. That the man was insane Newcombe had no doubt, but what he couldn’t peg was the power of his vision. Crane’s antics always had kept them funded, at least until now. Just how far could Dan Newcombe ride Crane’s hellbound train? He knew the answer: He’d take to the rails with the devil himself if he thought it would make his EQ-eco a reality.

Raymond Hsu, a shift supervisor at the Liang Usine Guerin sugar mill in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique, was trying to place an emergency call to the franchise comptroller on Grand Cayman Island to report a work stoppage due to an attack of thousands of fourmisfous, small yellowish, speckled ants, and betes-a-mille-pattes, foot-long black centipedes—both species venomous enough, in large numbers, to kill an adult human.

They’d attempted to stop the invasion by dumping barrels of crude oil around the mill, the workers flailing away with sugar cane stalks, splashing insect blood all over the mill. At the supervisor’s own house nearby, the maids were killing the ants and centipedes with flatirons, insecticides, and hot oil, while his wife and three children screamed. It wasn’t helping.

The insect invasion was simply the latest in a long string of odd events traceable to Mount Pelee, twenty kilometers to the north. At the end of March there’d been the smell of sulfurous gas lingering on the air. Two weeks later plumes of steam were seen issuing from fumaroles high atop Pelee. The next week, mild tremors rocked Fort-de-France followed by a rain of ash.

The ash had gotten thicker, more unceasing, as the sulfur smell grew over the weeks. In the second week of June the rains had come, filling the myriad rivers that crisscrossed Pelee and its sister mountain, Pitons du Carbet, to bursting and sending boulders and large trees down the mountainside and out to sea in torrents, along with the carcasses of asphyxiated cattle and dead birds. Mountain gorges jammed with ash and created instant lakes in the drowning rains.

As Hsu’s call was being placed in the early hours of June 17, Fort-de-France itself was coming under siege by thousands of fer-de-lance, pit vipers with yellow-brown backs and pink bellies, six feet or more in length and instantly deadly. The population was panicking, taking to the streets with axes and shovels to face the invasion, never realizing the snakes were fleeing in terror from the rumbling mountain. Hundreds would die, mostly children.

The comptroller, a man named Yuen Ren Chao, would tell Raymond Hsu to hire more workers and step up production, even though Pelee was thundering loudly, its peak covered by clouds of ash. Those who could see anything of the long dormant volcano were humbled by Nature’s grandeur—two fiery craters glowing like blast furnaces near the summit, and above them, a cloud filled with lightning.

The mill would not make its quota today. Mr. Yuen would be forced to increase the cane quotas in Cuba while the citizens of Martinique fought the snakes instead of fleeing themselves.

Within two days of Raymond Hsu’s call, an ash-dammed lake would break through its barrier, sending a monstrous wall of lava-heated water down the mountainside and onto the island, crushing the sugar mill and drowning everyone, including Raymond Hsu and his family, in boiling water.

Newcombe climbed the ladder to the forward observation deck, enjoying the southerly breeze and the coolness of the night. He stepped onto the deck. Above, a line of twinkling ore freighters, probably from Union Carbide’s organization, snaked toward the Moon like a conga line of traveling stars. The Liang logo, a simple blue circled L, was displayed in liquid crystal splendor on the surface of the three-quarter Moon.

“Catch your death up here,” he said as he crossed to Lanie, who was moonbathing naked. He plunked down in the chair next to hers. Her eyes were twinkling like the stars as she smiled at him. “The mighty are gathering,” he said, sorry he couldn’t spend the evening up here with this glorious woman, “so Crane wants us to join the party.”

“You look upset.”

“Nothing a little homicide wouldn’t cure—or a fast exit off this boat.” He grimaced. “The ocean’s a good place to meet the people down on the fantail, Lanie. Barracuda, every one of them. So what does that make us, bait?”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “Crane making you crazy?”

He nodded.

She got up and slipped into the party dress lying on the deck beside her. It was white, whiter than her skin, shining under the logoed Moon. “Do I look suitably dressed for cocktails with the Vice President of the United States?” she asked, turning a circle for him.

“Even if he wasn’t a jerk you’d outclass him,” Newcombe said. “You like all this, don’t you?”

She cocked her head and stared at him. “What, the juice? Of course I do. Last week I was just another underemployed Ph.D. in a universe full of them. Today I’m part of the Crane Team, changing the world. In case you haven’t watched the teev, we’re the hottest thing on the circuit right now. Tell me you don’t find that exciting? I can’t sleep at night I’m so pumped up.”

“I noticed.” He stood up. “Just don’t get lost in it. Now that I’ve finally gotten you to come out to the mountain, I want to see you from time to time.”

“All you had to do was hire me,” she said, fitting easily into his arms. She hugged him, her hair smelling of patchouli. “Oh, Dan. Maybe it will work for us this time.”

“I always hope that,” he said, wishing they hadn’t both been worn down from five years of trying to tame their competing egos. “Come on. Let’s get below. There’s someone special I want you to meet.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

They took the ladder, then the elevator, down to the main deck, and walked along the gangway to the fantail, where they found Crane. Half-drunk, he was holding court near the hors d’oeuvres table, recounting a story from the 2016 Alaskan quake that had sent Anchorage sliding into Cook’s Inlet.

The fantail of the yacht was ringed with teev screens showing continuous feed on the tragedy of Sado, focusing often on Crane at the head of the cliff, presiding over the carnage.

Everyone wore clothing of the thinnest silks and rayons, putting as little between themselves and the night as they could. Dangerous daylight made night an obsession. Vice President Gabler was an empty suit, a ceremonial smiling face, his wife, Rita, giggling beside him as he took direction from Mr. Li, who, as always, had Mr. Mui at his side.

“There’s Kate Masters,” Lanie said, as Sumi slipped up beside her, thrusting a champagne glass into her hand.

Newcombe had already noticed. Masters was something else altogether. Chairman of the WPA, the Women’s Political Association, she was a powerhouse. In a fragmented America, she could deliver forty million votes on any issue at any time. The WPA was second in power only to the Association of Retired Persons, which also had a representative on deck, a man named Aaron Bloom. He was fairly nondescript. Masters was short, with long bright red hair and indiscreet green eyes. She wore a filmy lime-green dress that seemed to hover around her like an alien fog. As she moved, parts of her body would slip into view for a second, only to disappear in a wisp of green. She smiled wickedly in their direction, Lanie smiling wickedly back.

“I’ll bet she eats little girls for breakfast,” Newcombe said. Sumi hovered, his eyedropper raised above the champagne glass.

“Something special for the pretty lady?” Sumi asked.

Lanie smiled and held up three fingers. “Private stock?”

Sumi nodded. “For making your own earthquakes, eh?” he said, then narrowed his eyes, studying her with surgical precision. “You don’t like me, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Lanie said. “I’ve never met the real you.”

“Sumi’s the Foundation’s best friend,” Newcombe said, surprised at Lanie’s reaction to the man.

“So I’ve heard,” Lanie said, taking a sip of the synth and smiling at Chan as Newcombe watched Crane disappear into the cabin area. “What do you think of the success of the EQ-eco?”

“I think the Crane Foundation is very lucky to have Dr. Newcombe on staff,” Sumi said, staring at Newcombe. “He is helping to advance science at a critical point.”

“ ‘Critical’ is certainly the word tonight,” Newcombe said, regretting that he’d ever let Crane talk him into making one very special arrangement.

Sumi Chan smiled, then darted over to Kate Masters, who took an entire eyedropper full of dorph in her glass. Naturally distilled from the human’s own glands, dorph was pure and impossible to overdose on.

Lanie leaned against Newcombe, snuggling, his arms going around her immediately. The PEA had kicked in. He nuzzled her neck just as Crane walked to the center of the deck.

“Friends,” he said. “Thank you for indulging me in my secrecy by clandestinely traveling to Guam and boarding there. You are about to see why. But first I must ask that we meet a prearranged condition and shut down any and all transmission equipment.” Crane pulled himself to his full height. The moment was replete with drama, as he intended.

Lanie wriggled away from Newcombe. She was entranced, all her attention on the scene Crane was creating.

Crane tapped his wrist pad. “On my mark, Captain Florio.” His voice boomed through the ship speakers and all the aurals. “Now!”

Diatribe blacked, every form of energy on the yacht dying—all fifty teev screens simultaneously going dead, all the lights and the music and everything else clicking off at once. The people on deck reached into pockets and onto wrists, concurrently shutting down their own devices of endless transmission and reception. In a world where communication was everything, they had all gone straight back to the Stone Age.

Lanie turned off her aural. Suddenly, she felt distressed, almost frightened, and realized she was beginning to hyperventilate. She tossed back the near-full glass of dorph-enhanced synth in her champagne glass, wondering if the others on deck, bathed in moonlight and cloaked in silence, were feeling, too, such profound anxiety at being cut off. If so, they weren’t showing it.

“This is—this is so exciting,” she whispered to Newcombe, whose deep responsive chuckle only tightened the string of her nerves.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” he whispered back.

Her sharp stare at Newcombe was deflected by the sudden movements of Crane. He’d removed a small scanner from his shirt pocket, turned it on, and was whirling around in a circle.

“Nothing,” he announced, stopping and smiling. “We’re alone. And now, I beg your indulgence yet again. There is one more guest on board, a participant you haven’t had the opportunity to encounter.”

A door to the gangway off which the cabins were located slid open, and everyone on deck was caught in a withering blast of charisma as a tall Africk stepped out.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Crane said, “may I present Mohammed Ishmael.”

A harsh collective gasp greeted the head of the militant Nation of Islam, outcast, fugitive, and some said, archcriminal and terrorist. Mohammed was well over six feet tall, and appeared even taller because of the black fez atop his head and the black dashiki that elongated his body in the shimmering moonlight. His stance was princely, the glance he swept over the participants majestic.

Riveted in place, the people on deck merely gaped, the silence astounding. But the tableau was short-lived. Turmoil erupted.

“My God!” Lanie exclaimed amidst the murmurs of outrage and surprise from the others, recovering now. “It’s him!”

Two burly Secret Servicemen threw themselves in front of Mr. Li, who appeared to be laughing. Was it from shock, Lanie wondered, or in glee over the surprise to which he might have been privy? Vice President Gabler was waving his arms and sputtering, while other participants milled and muttered, with Kate Masters’ throaty, nervous guffaws carrying over the sounds of all the others. Sumi Chan was, clearly, astonished, and only Mui Tsao of all the people on deck seemed entirely self-possessed.

Mui stepped forward. “I suggest a recess … a brief recess. Perhaps everyone could retire to his or her cabin?”

It wasn’t a suggestion, but an order, Lanie realized, glancing quickly to Newcombe. She drew in a sharp breath at the expression on his face. Three hundred years of the hatred of the shackled Africk gleamed in his eyes.

“I don’t believe it. You’re part of this,” she said.

He looked down at her, his expression softening. “I helped to arrange to get the good brother to attend, yes, and I helped to spirit him aboard, just shortly after we picked up all our other distinguished guests in Guam. That cutting of engines, the anchor drag, remember?”

Lanie gulped. “After all—after everything—I mean, I—”

“Because of my past support of the Nation of Islam nearly destroying my career?” He nodded grimly. “I’ve got Crane’s support on this now. And it’s important, Lanie, very important—for the Foundation and for every Africk alive.” He took her arm.

Guests were brushing by in the exodus from the deck and Newcombe was drawing her aft toward the spot where she saw that Sumi had backed Crane against the rail. Sumi’s small fist pounded Crane’s chest.

“Disaster,” Sumi shouted. “The man’s a wanted criminal, a total brigand. Such an affront to Mr. Li… He will own me. Own me, I tell you. Why didn’t you let me know about this?” he demanded of Crane, clearly beside himself with anger and fear.

“Would you have drawn the others here had you known?” Crane asked.

“Certainly not!”

Crane merely shrugged.

“Sedition, aiding and abetting—”

“Diplomacy,” Crane said. “Peacemaking. And good politics. You will see, Sumi, you will see.”

“I fear I will see nothing except my head on a plate held by Mr. Li Cheun.”

“Your head? Not likely.” Crane roared with laughter, then quickly sobered. He stared at Sumi, patted his frail shoulders, calming the man. “Is our other little surprise in place?” Sumi nodded. “Very well, then I suggest you start making calls on the occupants of each cabin with your synthchampagne in one hand and your little green bottle in the other, okay? Tell them we will reassemble here in ten minutes.” He glanced at his wrist pad. “Perfect timing.”

“Yesss,” Sumi hissed, turning abruptly and rushing across the deck. He got halfway before he said over his shoulder, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and sink.”

Lanie looked from Newcombe to Crane. She felt way out of her depth, a little lost. She needed her ten minutes alone … to think, and quickly excused herself to make her way back up to the observation deck. Actually, she fled, ran to the sanctuary high atop the ship. There, under the stars, she tried to digest the events of the evening so far. It was painful. She found herself unwilling, as always, to face the troubled world in which she lived. She dealt with the “realities” by trying to avoid them, by throwing herself into her work and personal affairs … or just blanking out. But Crane had launched her into a new orbit with a very high apex and, she knew, she had to face up to some very unpleasant facts, first and foremost, of course, this whole business with Mohammed Ishmael.

The Nation of Islam, the NOI, was dreaded and feared … and had been herded into the War Zones. She remembered that when the zones had first been created, her father had called them “ghettoes,” a word that was chilling to the daughter of a Jew, openly discriminated against during her teenage years after the Masada Option. But she’d been prepared for the discrimination. She’d grown up with terror that had emanated from her father, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. Germans had run the country from the time she was scarcely more than a toddler until she was almost a teenager, and, though they bent over backwards to disassociate themselves from their ancient Nazi past, the Germans nonetheless exhibited the kind of authoritarianism that made her father fear a concentration camp was being built around every corner.

She winced, and kept her eyes closed. Ugly. So ugly, the ways of humankind in its prejudices and hatreds and violence. People had been divided and pitted against each other by racial, religious, or ethnic differences ever since she could remember. She rarely let herself think about all that she and Dan and others had suffered, because it hurt too much. Tears collected in the corners of her still closed eyes.

Dan had told her the worst of his suffering had begun with the Safe Streets Act of 2005, when it had become almost illegal to have dark skin. The Act freed ignorant, prejudiced white Americans from the hypocrisy of political correctness to allow them to express their hatred openly. The curfews, housing restrictions, and other indignities imposed by the law had confined Africks to certain areas of cities and towns throughout the country and curtailed their liberty to a few restricted daylight hours. Along with successive and even more oppressive laws, the Streets Act had been responsible for creating the Zones; the rise of the militant Africk Islamic fundamentalists had been responsible for the modifier before “Zones”—War. No one knew precisely what went on within the War Zones. The NOI was supposed to be indoctrinating Africks, arming them, training them, and, indeed, there were violent skirmishes with the Federal Police Force ringing the zones that gave credence to all the rumors about what went on within.

The most wanted “criminal” of them all? Mohammed Ishmael. The man’s background of forceful resistance against the FPF, his rhetoric—well, everything about him, Lanie thought—made him one of the most wanted, hated, and allegedly dangerous men on the planet. Why had Crane brought him to this meeting? He should have foreseen the disruptive effect. More to the point, why had Dan made the contact with Mohammed Ishmael, who was known not to speak with any white person, and helped to get him here? Dan had supported the idea of NOI at the University of China, San Diego, been booted out, and very nearly ruined all his prospects. It made no sense. For Dan.

Lanie suddenly could see Crane’s strategy. As well as Mohammed Ishmael, he had induced Kate Masters, the head of the Women’s Political Association, and Aaron Bloom, the head of the Association of Retired Persons, to attend. Ishmael, Masters and Bloom represented the voting blocks in the United States of America. They were Crane’s stick with Liang Int, the real power. And the earthquake prediction project was the carrot Crane offered them all, the opportunity to save lives and property and trauma among their constituencies, or at least appear to do so … appear to care. And Liang Int was, of course, interested in the man-hours and buildings and equipment to be saved … protecting profit. Lanie shook her head sadly. Profit was the motivator of almost everyone everywhere in the world. Everyone except Crane and the handful of people like him and like her and Dan.

A gong sounded.

Lanie levered herself out of the deck chair, feeling more ambivalent than she ever had. Part of her wanted to run away from the politicos below; the other half wanted to race toward the excitement that Crane generated and the potential he was gambling everything on to realize tonight.

Chapter 3 THE GREAT RIFT, THE PACIFIC OCEAN

A huge submarine, its bubbled-out glass foresection like a giant, staring eye, sat starboard of the Diatribe, dwarfing the yacht. Deckhands were slipping out of the conning tower to throw lashing ropes to their counterparts on the yacht as the guests reassembled on its deck. VEMA II was emblazoned on the hull of the sub.

“Prepare to spend the rest of tonight beneath the ocean,” Crane announced. “I promise you an experience you’ll never forget.”

“Rift runner,” Newcombe said beneath his breath.

“Rift runner?” Lanie asked.

“Yeah. We’re going to see a mother giving birth.”

“Mother … what mother?”

“Mother Earth,” he replied.

Within minutes they’d all been herded into VEMA II’s observation hall. Crane stood at the head of a long table and smiled at the aggregate of crooks and bastards sitting before him. In all the world, he had determined, these were the people who could best give him what he had to have, and a more intensely self-serving lot of rogues he’d never seen. Camus had said that politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. So be it. If he couldn’t talk sense, he’d put on a show. It was, after all, how he’d survived the thirty years since the death of his parents.

“I must ask that each of you stretch out your hands and touch the person next to you,” he said. “We need to be sure that this is the real thing.” Everyone reached out to perform the ritual, checking to see that the bodies on either side were real. Legal, binding negotiations could not be undertaken by holo projections.

The observation windows were locked down, shuttered tight as Sumi moved fluidly through the crowd, replenishing drinks doctored with dorph. Newcombe sat beside Ishmael, their heads together, talking low as everyone else stared at them.

“Civilization exists,” Crane said, “by geological consent, subject to change without notice. With all the wonders we’ve created for ourselves, we’re still terrorized by the world we live in. The question is why?”

The room was large, perhaps fifty feet long and thirty wide, by far the largest enclosed space ever put on a sub. It was bare, utilitarian, but met the needs of the scientists and sailors who worked this ship on the edge of the rift. Diffuse lighting glowed instead of brightening the room. The ship occasionally shuddered slightly to the sound of a tiny thump, which the audience assumed to be engine noises. Crane knew better; so did Newcombe.

Crane walked slowly around the table. “Our planet is nearly five billion years old and still seems to be primordially forming itself, tearing itself to pieces minute by minute.”

“The nature of life is struggle, doctor,” Brother Ishmael said.

Crane stopped walking and addressed the man. “And the nature of Man is to try and rise above the struggle.”

“To deny God!” Ishmael persisted.

“To make a better world.” Crane returned to his place, his good hand clasping his bad behind his back. His left arm was throbbing. He faced the group again. “There are over a million earthquakes a year, on the average of one every thirty seconds. Most are not felt, but about three thousand a year do make their way to the surface, of which thirty engender appalling devastation. The tendency is to say it has always been so and always will be.” He looked at Mohammed Ishmael. “I disagree. How many of you really know what forces drive these quakes?”

“Please, just continue with the briefing,” Mui, Li’s associate, said.

“This is much more than a briefing,” Crane replied. “The Earth we live on is made up of huge tectonic plates, twenty-six in all, six majors. The plates move fluidly on a cushion of hot, nearly liquid mantle. Ninety-five percent of all earthquakes occur in what are called subduction zones where the moving plates crash into each other, the plates that hold the oceans of the world literally crawling beneath the continental plates.”

The sub shook again, this time more noticeably. “Is there some problem with the boat?” asked Rita Gabler, a hand to her throat.

“No, none at all. Let me return to the subject. The oceanic plates are feeding themselves back into the core once they subduct beneath the continents,” he said, his voice louder now to get over the nearly continual banging and shivering of the VEMA. He could feel the tension thick in the air, smiled at the sweat that had broken out on the faces of those in his audience. “Once the plate subducts, it begins a long process of transformation that results in … this.”

He hit a console button on the table, the metal curtains sliding open immediately. Before them, the ocean glowed red-orange, brilliant. Belches of lava rose between the peaks of undersea mountains in an unbroken line as far as they could see in either direction, and they could see fire for many miles. The participants were hushed to silence in the face of magnificent turmoil on a planetary scale. This was how Crane wanted his audience—humbled.

“Rebirth!” Crane said loudly, moving right up to the window and pointing out with his good hand. “What you are looking at is the Earth repairing itself. Basaltic magma is rising from the asthenosphere and forcing itself between those incredible peaks and valleys beneath you only to cool in the ocean waters, form more peaks, then push the plate thousands of miles into more subduction.”

VEMA shook hard, for the rebirth of the planet was accompanied by continual earthquakes.

“Is it … dangerous for us here?” Mr. Li asked, his even tone betraying no emotion.

“Only if we walk outside,” Crane said, laughing. He turned to watch the beating heart of the Earth Mother that had indirectly killed his own mother. They were five hundred yards from the plasmic rift, the Pacific Rift. The sight of the orange-red liquid fire filled him with awe and anger, and he let his emotions spill over before turning back to the people he needed if ever he was to tame that fire.

“Come to the window,” he urged them. “Come look at the open wound that gives much, but causes humanity such pain and heartache.”

They rose tentatively. He wanted them to trust the sub, to trust Man’s ability to control his own environment. It was sucking them in, he could feel it, the temperature rising in the room, bright red light from the eruptions dancing over their faces. It was the primal power of an entire planet unleashed.

“Incredible,” Lanie said, her voice hushed. She moved around to face Crane, her eyes reflecting the fire from without and from within. He smiled, knowing what she was feeling, knowing that she would be the perfect tool to help forge his vision. She was a dynamo, a natural.

So, too, was Kate Masters, who’d moved close and was eyeing him. Finally, she spoke.

“What has any of this to do with me?”

“You’re my hammer, ma’am,” he said. “To make these fine people do the right thing.” He turned and pointed to Brother Ishmael, then to the gray-haired Aaron Bloom of ARP. “So are you … my hammers.”

“I’m not sure,” Gabler said, “but I think we’ve just been insulted.”

“Let me handle the business discussion, Mr. Vice President,” Li said, making no effort to hide his contempt for his front man.

Crane continued around the table, stopping behind Newcombe and King. “With the help of these two able people, plus your assistance, I guarantee you that I can produce within a few years a computer program that will predict to the hour every earthquake that will happen on Earth. The program will tell not only where the quake will occur, but its magnitude, the strength of its P and S waves, the areas of primary, secondary, and tertiary damages. We will be able to tell you where it’s safe to stand and when to get out of the way.”

“Show me the profit,” Li said, Mui nodding his Tweedledum agreement.

There was laughter farther down the table. “Excuse me,” said a bald man with a red beard, a representative from the insurance industry who sat next to a brunette from the Krupp empire. “Such a program would render insurance companies able to write policies on earthquake damage that makes sense. We’ve been studying the figures since we left Guam. With knowledge of the kind you could supply, we could deny insurance in major damage areas, perhaps even pass laws to keep people from building there. In the secondary areas we could legislate building regulation. In existing businesses, foreknowledge enables breakable items to be stored beforehand. It would save billions a year—billions, I might add, that are then available to be loaned to you industrial producers to expand your own businesses which will earn further billions. A perfect circle.”

“Impressive,” Li said.

“You’d know where not to build factories, dams, and power plants,” Crane said. “Armed with my program, you’d lose nothing in a time of disaster, not man-hours lost to casualties, not downtime for rebuilding and repairs.”

“That hurts the building industry, then,” the Wang International spokesman said, and Crane thought of the namazu.

“Wait a minute,” Newcombe said, standing. “You’re stacking the building industry up against the loss of ten to fifteen thousand lives every year. How can you—”

“That’s all right, Dan,” Crane said, nodding the man back to his seat. “We all inherently care about the value in human lives saved, am I right?”

There was a low mumble of semi-agreement around the table. “There … see?” Crane said. “Everyone’s heart is in the right place.” He looked at Li and Mui. “Have you considered the value of exclusive rights to my program?”

“An exclusive.” Li smiled. “An interesting thought.”

“This would be meant for the world,” Newcombe said, a hint of anger in his voice.

“Certainly it is,” Li replied, “but at what price? If we held the cards, we could sell the information to competing countries on major disasters. Or not.”

Mui laughed and took a drink. “We could make the Earth pay for itself.”

“On the yacht you mentioned re-election,” Gabler said, shifting uneasily in his chair.

“Think about it, Mr. Vice President,” Crane said. “It would seem the ultimate humanitarian gesture. The people of the United States see that their government, the government they thought didn’t care about them in this pay-as-you-go world, is willing to go all out to gather the knowledge to protect its citizens. It’d be worth a sweep in California alone.”

“And what would you get out of the deal?” Masters asked.

“I get what it takes to do the job right,” he said. “This sub we’re riding in belongs to the Geological Survey. I want it. I need every bit of knowledge I can get my hands on. I want control of the thousands of seismographs we’ve planted over this globe, and absolute access to everyone else’s. I want the Geological Survey’s Colorado headquarters and their database. I won’t fire anyone. They’ll simply work for me. I want the entire Global Positioning System, satellites doing nothing but working for me for the next five years. And I want an open checkbook to fund my operations. No overseers.”

“You’ve got guts, all right,” Ishmael said. “What makes you think these power boys are going to share anything with you?”

“That’s where you come in, Brother,” Crane said. “You and Ms. Masters and Mr. Bloom. You three control millions of votes in the major metropolitan areas. With your backing, we could—”

“You don’t have my backing,” Ishmael said simply, standing. “We don’t take handouts from white men. We don’t vote for white men. We are self-sufficient.”

“I’m not talking about handouts,” Crane said, incredulous. “I’m talking about disaster planning. Can you imagine what would happen to the War Zone in LA if the San Andreas Fault—”

“You don’t understand me,” Ishmael said, his voice low. “We take nothing from the white animal and we give nothing. Your silly talk about earthquakes makes me laugh.” He pointed to the window with its view of roiling lava. “This is the will of Allah.”

“That’s not sensible, Brother Ishmael,” Crane said. “If it helps you to save lives, why not take advantage of it?”

“There are worse things than death, doctor. Submission is one. Submission brings slavery and degradation, life worse than any animal knows.”

Crane looked sadly at the floor. “Death is pretty bad,” he said. “It ends everything.”

“We all live forever in the kingdom of Allah,” Ishmael said. “But you wouldn’t understand that.”

“I try, sir.” Pain choked Crane’s voice. “I really do.”

“Why are you here?” Gabler asked Ishmael.

“I came here because—” began Ishmael.

Alarms beeped loudly on the Secret Servicemen. “Sirs,” one of them said, ripping a small scanner from his belt, “we’re picking up some form of surveillance … microwave transmission.”

“Isolate,” Li said, everyone talking now, confusion filling the room as the jumpsuited men moved about, trying to read the signal.

“We scanned,” Crane said. “There was nothing.”

A whistle sounded, followed by the voice of Captain Long over the intercom. “Dr. Crane, we’re picking up microwave generation from somewhere in the foresection … in your area.”

“Must have been turned on in the last few seconds,” Crane said, punching up the intercom on the table. “Thank you, Captain. We’re isolating down here.”

“As I was saying,” Ishmael interrupted, “I came here so I could move through your government’s webs of baffles and bullshit and present you, face to face, with our list of demands. Though your government does not recognize our government, we do exist. And we intend to be heard.”

“What are you talking about?” Gabler said, his hands shaking as his men hurried their scan.

“Autonomy,” Ishmael said. “Self-rule … an Islamic State in North America covering the areas now occupied by the states of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.”

“We’re close!” one of the scanners called as he and his counterpart converged near the hatchway.

Ishmael, calm in a growing tempest, took a palm-size disc from his dashiki and slid it down the length of the polished table to Gabler. Li grabbed it.

“Our plan for self-rule is outlined on this disc,” Ishmael said, “which is just now being shown to billions of viewers all over the globe. We demand secession, Mr. Vice President. We demand it now!”

“This isn’t the proper setting,” Gabler said. “I do not accept your words or your disc.”

“Here!” one of the techs yelled, pulling something off the wall with a long pair of tweezers and running back to the table. He dropped the miniature camera, no bigger than a pinhead, on the table in front of Gabler, who promptly picked it up and swallowed it. “This … this scene was transmitted.”

“It certainly was,” Ishmael said. “The world now has heard me and our demands—and seen you in action, Mr. Vice President.”

“I doubt very much if the citizens in the states you mentioned would find your claims very legitimate,” Gabler said.

“Perhaps your forefathers should have thought of that before they kidnapped my people from their homeland in slave boats and brought them here.” Ishmael smiled, then walked to a silent Crane. “I don’t care about you or your earthquakes, but I thank you for giving me the opportunity of meeting with Mr. Gabler and his, ah … handlers. Now, I believe I’ll get some rest in my cabin.”

“You are a cruel man,” Crane said.

“No,” Ishmael said, shaking his head. “I’m a dreamer like you. But I have different dreams.”

“No dream, sir. A nightmare of bloodshed, anguish and uncertainty. Just remember one thing: Your issue is important for a time, mine for all time.”

“This package you’re trying to sell these fools isn’t your game at all. You want more, much more.”

Crane stared coldly at him. “Good night, Brother Ishmael.”

The man strode from the deck, Sumi Chan hurrying to catch him.

“Well, this is wonderful, isn’t it?” Gabler said, petulant. He took the disc from Li and stared at it as if it were a dead rat. “We could have had this meeting in Washington, under my security.”

“At this juncture,” Crane said, “you must take my suggestions if you want to survive. Ishmael just made a fool out of you, Mr. Vice President, before the entire world. You can either leave it at that or rethink the situation. All the latest polls I’ve seen show a large and growing segment of the United States population wanting some sort of closure with its own citizens in the War Zone. Caucasians now form only thirty percent of the total electorate. You can use my plan to make it look as if you have extended the hand of friendship to the Nation of Islam only to have it slapped away. If you follow through with my plan, it shows you have the best interests of all citizens at heart no matter how they treat you. If you don’t, I take the issue to your opposition. They won’t mind looking like humanitarians.”

Gabler had cocked his head like a dog and was, apparently, thinking, or, Crane mused, trying to. “I’ll just bet you Mr. Li understands,” Crane added, the Chinese man smiling in return.

“We have reached a decision, Dr. Crane,” he said.

Crane took a deep breath to calm himself, to not let the facade down. “Yes,” he said.

“I would ask everyone to leave the room.”

Crane nodded and looked at Newcombe, the man’s expression revealing both irritability—he’d get over it—and excitement.

Within thirty seconds, Li and Crane were alone across the table.

“You are an interesting man, Dr. Crane.”

“As are you, sir.”

“You know, of course, that we could never give you carte blanche with the government checkbook.”

“But, I—”

Li raised his hand for silence. “I’ve played with you this far. Now it’s my turn. If, and I emphasize the word if, we’re able to work together, you will need someone to oversee the project. I’m not adverse to someone we’re both comfortable with, say, Sumi Chan, for instance.”

“Sumi?”

“We’re not difficult men to deal with.” His drink sat before him. “We like Americans. You’re all so clever with your hands. You people make the most amazing gadgets. Quite extraordinary.”

“You said if we work together?”

“Well, yes. Certainly.” The man picked up the glass and drank, then poured the rest of Mui’s drink in his and finished that also. “Everyone is very excited about your idea, but you are asking private industry and the government to turn a great deal of responsibility over to you, all on the strength of one demonstration.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Simple, Dr. Crane.” Li smiled, his eyes cunning. “You may have everything you asked for. But we must know, for sure, that you are what you say you are.”

“And how do I do that?”

“Once again—simple. Predict another major quake, something big, high profile. Do it before the election. This is May. It gives you six months. If, indeed, thirty major quakes occur a year, that should be plenty of time.”

“Is that all?”

“No,” Li replied. “Give us something close to home. Something the voters will really understand. And then, Dr. Crane, the world is yours.”

“Of course we’re under surveillance,” Brother Ishmael told Crane.

Newcombe sat between them, listening intently. They were in the yacht’s twenty-foot dining room, paneled and brass-trimmed. Ishmael had stayed on after everyone, including his own bodyguards, had left. Newcombe wondered why.

“Everyone’s under some sort of surveillance all the time. It’s the nature and the chief employment of your white man’s world. People watch, and other people watch them. Machines watch machines. Why?”

“We’re insufferably curious, I suppose,” Crane replied amiably. “Plus, what gets invented gets perfected, then used. It’s human nature. And not everybody gets watched. Those who can afford it hire people who can … outwit the technology.”

Ishmael smiled and pointed a long finger. “Then that person watches you. And don’t forget the person who watches him.”

“You don’t have survie units in the War Zone?” Newcombe asked Ishmael, who treated Newcombe with warmth and respect.

“Yes, we do,” he said. “We use them on the whites, just as the whites attempt to use them on us. Like Dr. Crane, we spend a lot of time outwitting the technology. My people tell me that this conversation is being recorded right now by a device called Listening Post #528, whose low space orbit carried it within our range until…”—he looked at his watch—“two forty-five P.M.”

Lanie sat directly across from Newcombe, her eyes bright. “If we’re being listened to, why are you talking?”

“It’s part of our political agenda. We’re prepared to present to the white population the reasons why we cannot share the same society. You, and the world, are listening to my reasoning. If I have anything private to say, I will say it privately.”

“You are using me shamelessly,” Crane said. He slugged heavily on a glass full of straight bourbon. “Look, Brother Ishmael. I have a great deal of respect for you. I don’t even mind being used by you and your cause right now, but dammit, man, give something in return, a little support. I just want what’s best for everyone.”

“No,” Ishmael said. “You don’t want to help people; you want to slay the beast. I can see it in your eyes when you talk about earthquakes. You hate the earthquakes. God wrought their majesty, but you have the gall to hate His creation. I feel sorry for you and your windmills, and I pray to Allah you never get the power to vent your hatred.”

“You’re a hard kind of fellow,” Crane said. “Sure, I hate the beast. I hate it the way the Cretans hated the Minotaur. Is it wrong to hate a monster? Wasn’t it Malcolm X who said, ‘When our people are being bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs’? I hate it because of the lives and dreams it destroys and I will find a way to blunt its sword with or without your help. There, I’m talking to the world, too.” He snorted. “Do you really think you’ll have your Islamic State?”

Ishmael nodded slowly. “We will have an Islamic nation,” he replied. “In a fractured world, we are the dominant force.”

“It didn’t work that way in the Middle East,” Lanie said.

“The Jewish entity chose to destroy itself rather than face the reality of Islam,” Ishmael said. “The Masada Cloud is the reminder of Allah’s power over the Infidel. There are no more Jews in Palestine.”

“There’s nobody in Palestine,” Crane snapped. “And there won’t be. How can you presume to know who should live and who should die?” He stood. “I want everyone to live.”

“Jungles don’t work that way,” Ishmael returned, “and neither do earthquakes. You can’t bring your parents back, doctor.”

“Please, don’t try to analyze me.” Crane picked up his drink, finished it with a scowl. “I’m going up to observation. Is it safe for you to be on board, Brother Ishmael?”

“I don’t know, is it?”

“I’m not powerful enough to protect you. Anyone want to join me?”

“Sure,” Lanie said, picking up her coffee and adding another spoonful of dorph to it.

As Newcombe started to rise, Ishmael put a hand out. “Stay with me. Brother Daniel. I want to speak with you.”

Newcombe nodded. “Watch the sun up there,” he said to Lanie. “I’ll join you shortly.”

Newcombe watched Lanie and Crane walk to the dining room hatchway where they donned coats, gloves, goggles, and hats, Crane pulling a tube of sunblock from his pocket to smear on their exposed faces. He opened the hatch, bright sunlight pouring in. Lanie waved at him and left.

Newcombe and Lanie spent a good deal of time with each other, and he was cautiously letting himself dream again of home and family, something—anything—besides Crane’s relentless pursuit of his monsters. He’d even talked Lanie into moving in with him when they got back to the Foundation.

“Why are you with the white woman, Brother?”

“I love her.”

“She is your oppressor. Not just a white woman, but a Jewess.”

Newcombe’s jaw muscles tightened. “She’s a Cosmie.”

“Judaism is a race, not a religion.”

“I do not accept the philosophies of the Nation of Islam. I’m an Africk in America and I’m doing very well, thank you. I’m not oppressed; I’m the master of my own fate. Well educated, intelligent, I have risen to the top of my field—and I have chosen the woman I wish to spend my life with.”

“Then why are you working for someone like Crane? Why don’t you have your own labs, your own grants?”

Anger rose like mercury through Newcombe’s body. “Who have you been talking to?”

Ishmael leaned close and spoke in a whisper so low Newcombe had almost to touch heads with him to hear. “I’ve stayed aboard to speak with you. The NOI needs you. Your brothers call out to you.”

“I don’t think so,” Newcombe replied, uncomfortable now.

“Nation of Islam will need men of learning, intelligence and insight into the white society in order to build our new world. Our communities are fragmented, distanced from each other, surrounded in thirty different cities. We need room and we need physical unity desperately. We’re engaged in a literal state of war. We will take what we must have—God’s sharia and a wise caliphate will become a reality. Everyone will have to choose up sides.”

“I’ve nearly destroyed my career once because of my public support for an Islamic state. Since our televised encounter on VEMA, I’ve taken a long step toward destroying it again. The cause of a homeland is just, but you’ve already drained my blood.”

“You have no place in the white man’s world except as his lackey,” Ishmael whispered. “You want a better world. So do I. I’m telling you I can help you accomplish that goal far better than the evil man you work for.”

“Evil? Crane?”

“He is of the Darkness, Daniel. I am of the Light.”

“You’re wrong. Crane’s like me.”

“You don’t believe that for a minute. You know how crazy he is.”

Shaken, Newcombe said nothing.

“Crane is a marked man with no real power base,” Ishmael continued. “Our Jihad has begun. Political affiliation with NOI will bring you power, recognition, respect. You can accomplish. You can call the tune. I will make of you an Islamic hero.”

“Sounds like a jail sentence to me.”

“Hear me out, Brother.” Ishmael, majestic in his midnight-slick dashiki, got to his feet. “Our world will come. It holds a place for you with people who love you. Believe me when I tell you there is no place in the white devil’s world for an Africk with too much education. They’ll make you a glorified shoeshine man. Crane is already doing it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Not about Crane, not about the woman. Brother, I’m the only one you can trust. The righteous anger of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and Saladin the Prophet runs through my veins. Your ‘friends’ hate you and will always hate you. You will reach your full potential only within the Nation of Islam.” He bent low and wrote on a pad of paper on the table: Commit this number to memory. It’s a safe line to me.

Newcombe memorized the number, never expecting to use it, then tore up the paper on which it was written.

Ishmael walked over and stared out of a tinted porthole. The ocean was calm today, reflecting the sun in blinding sabers. He turned to Newcombe. “You think I do not know you,” he whispered. “But you are wrong. I knew you in the jungle, and in the slave boats, and wearing the ox-yoke in the fields. I knew you when they wrenched you from your home and hung you from a tree or buried you in their jails to keep you off their streets. I knew you when they promised you freedom and gave you only the freedom to starve. I knew you, Brother, when they fed you their poisons of alcohol and drugs, and gave you guns to kill yourself. I knew you when they finally got tired of you and turned their backs completely, hoping you’d die in the jungle of concrete that they had built. Don’t ever say I don’t know you. I know you as you’d know yourself, if you’d open your eyes.”

“They’re going to arrest you, you know,” Newcombe said, his voice choked with emotion. “Can’t you get out of here?”

Brother Ishmael merely smiled.

Sumi Chan’s face blipped onto Li Cheun’s screen. “I have called,” he said, “to report, as you have asked, about Dr. Crane. He will be docking this afternoon and returning to the Foundation.”

“Excellent. Have you seen to the planting of the surveillance equipment in his residence and laboratories?”

“Yes, Mr. Li.”

Li watched Sumi’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. “Are you having a problem with this assignment?”

“No, sir,” Sumi said quickly. “It’s simply that I have been a major supporter of Dr. Crane for many years and know him personally—”

“Let me be clear on this point, Sumi,” Li said, gratified to see an element of fear creep onto the face floating a foot from him. “I can elevate or destroy you. If you work for the Geological Society, you work for me. If you issue grants it is I who is doing the issuing. If you do not want this job—”

“Sir, I condemn my thoughts. I am totally committed to you and to Liang International.”

“Crane is your job, not your brother.”

“Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir.”

“Not at all. You’re doing fine work. Please hold.”

Li looked at Mui, who froze Sumi Chan’s face in mid-grimace. “Tell me about Ishmael,” Li said.

“General fear and negative reaction to demand for Islamic state,” Mui said, reading directly from his screen. “Very negative reaction from the southern states he mentioned as location for a new Nation of Islam. Early analysis points to Yo-Yu candidates playing up the fear factor and using it to their advantage in the next elections.”

“I see,” Li said, an idea forming. “Put Mr. Chan back on.”

Sumi’s face re-formed, looking more relaxed. He’d hit the dorph hard while on hold.

“Sir,” Li said, “I have great faith in you. Is Brother Ishmael still on board the Diatribe?”

“He was when I spoke with Crane a few minutes ago.”

Li muted his wrist pad and looked at Mui.

“Put the Federal Police Force on this. See if they can arrest him while he’s still on the boat. Charge him with sedition. We want him alive … tell them that.”

Mui banged on the keypad, then pointed out of the darkness at Li. “Los Angeles elements of the FPF have been notified. The G is en route.”

Li nodded curtly, then rewired Chan. “What I want you to do now is take a helo and pick up Dr. Crane, transporting him to the Foundation with our compliments. We will release enough money to you to keep the Foundation running on-line toward its goal. We’ll give Crane everything he wants … for now. Spend a great deal of time at the Foundation. It is now your main obligation, and we will find someone else to handle your day-to-day activities with the Geological Survey. Understand?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you sir.”

“Stay in the shade, Mr. Chan.”

“Same to you, Mr. Li.”

Mui blanked Chan’s head as Li stared at California. Crane had bullied his way into the arena and made himself a player, Li thought. Fine. Now Crane would have to live with it.

Standing next to Lanie on the observation deck, Crane fidgeted, but not from the heat of his clothing and the brilliant sunlight doubling its force through reflection off the water. He was going stir-crazy, confined to the boat. And his arm throbbed dully. Action somewhere. Not close or the arm would have hurt. Still, there was a rising feeling of pain. He rubbed his arm.

Lanie’s eyes widened. “What is it?”

“Something … just happened,” he said, insides tight. “And I’m stuck here in the middle of the goddamned ocean.”

“Is it close,” Lanie asked, “a deep subduction trench quake, beneath us perhaps?”

Crane shook his head, his full attention on a flock of birds a hundred meters off the port bow. They were too big and were closing fast. “This part of the ocean isn’t subducting. California lies on a transform fault, the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate rubbing against each other as they move in different directions. We’d know if something was going on there. But thanks.”

“For what?”

“Not questioning my intuition.”

The birds had attracted Lanie’s attention, too. She watched them with a frown. “Dan says that you feel it in your arm.”

“What else?”

She turned and smiled at him. “He knows it must work because he can feel your feelings as a sharp pain.”

“In the ass?”

“Yeah. Those birds over there … aren’t they awfully large for gulls?”

“Too big and too noisy. Hear the hum?”

“No.”

He watched as they glided close, their little focus motors whirring—radio-controlled cameras disguised as gulls searching for them. “I think the press corps has ferreted us out.”

The cams swooped low over the deck, news broadcast logos on their sides, then swung gracefully out to sea, making a wide circle around the Diatribe, then tightening the circle.

“We must be getting close,” Lanie said. “Did you see the unmarked birds?”

Crane nodded. “FPF, the G. They’re keeping tabs on Brother Ishmael. My bet is that they’ll try and take him before we dock.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“He should have left when his bodyguards did, right after the meeting. I can’t believe he stayed.”

One of the unmarked birds buzzed the deck, Crane swatting at it as it passed within a foot of him. “Thank you for welcoming us back to America!” he called through cupped hands to the rest of the hovering cams. “We’ll be looking forward to meeting with many of you upon our return.” Then he whispered, “Bastards.”

He waved with his good hand, urging Lame to smile and wave also.

“Look at the clouds,” Lanie said. Crane looked up to see his smiling, waving face projected onto cumulus clouds fifty thousand feet high.

“Those bulges make me look fat,” he said, then raised a finger. “Let’s have some fun with them. Stay here.”

He hurried down the ladder, laughing, and to the lifeboat tethered on the main deck, grabbing the survival kit before hurrying back to observation.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he opened the aluminum box and sorted through it.

“Must be here somewhere,” he said low, then, “Ha!” He pulled a flare gun out of the box and held it triumphantly in the air. “If the world is watching us, then let’s give them a show they’ll remember.”

“You’re not serious,” she said, backing several paces away from him.

“I’m always serious,” he returned and shoved a fat shell into the single chamber. He snapped it closed, and raised the gun with his good hand. He fired right into the midst of the fifteen gulls. A whump, then a pale red tracer tracked upward into the flock, the flare bursting bright red on impact.

“Bulls-eye!” Lanie said, clapping as two gulls, in pieces, went into the ocean, a third moving off, losing altitude by the second. The wounded bird was unmarked, FPF obviously. The bird disappeared behind a swell five hundred meters from the Diatribe, all the other cams turning in that direction to watch.

He reloaded and handed the gun to Lanie. “Want to try one?”

“Can I get into trouble for this?”

“Who cares?”

She pulled the trigger, bringing down a newscam in a white hot rain of shimmering magnesium. The remaining gulls scattered and put more distance between themselves and their hunters.

Crane could see boats dotting the ocean, converging, the curious or the professional turning out to see the earthquake man. Beyond the boats, the distant outline of land filled the horizon. They were home.

“Good shooting!” Crane yelled, the sky now covered with clouds, all of them showing television pictures, people tuning in through their aurals.

“I think you may be right about the FPF coming for Mohammed Ishmael.” Lanie pointed to several innocuous-looking speedboats.

“I’m going to get down there and try and stop them.” Crane dropped the box and hoisted a leg over the ladder.

Boats drew alongside, their decks filled with men in white jumpsuits with white hoods and standard issue face saver masks with built-in goggles. They were armed.

Lanie caught up with Crane as he was about to enter the dining room. “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked, grabbing his bad arm.

“No,” he said. She had beautiful, inquisitive eyes. They told the truth. “I’ve been making it up since Ishmael dropped his bombshell back on VEMA. I took a shot, needed all the cards to fall right. Ishmael screwed it up enough to queer things.”

“But you’ve got the deal.”

“I’ve got nothing.”

Loudspeakers squawked from all around them. “This is the Federal Police Force,” a pleasant female voice whispered like thunder. “We have been authorized to detain Leonard Dantine, a.k.a. Mohammad Ishmael, in accordance with the Safe Streets Control Act of 2005.”

“I think this will play badly in the polls,” Crane said, watching white faced ghosts climb onto Diatribe’s main deck.

The galley door banged open, Newcombe sticking his head out. “Can’t we do anything to stop them?”

“Is stopping them the right thing to do?” Crane replied, then waved off Newcombe’s angry scowl. “I’ll try.”

The gangway was filled with men in white, coming at them fore and aft and from above. Lanie was right on Crane’s heels.

“What do you mean you don’t have a deal?” she asked. “I thought Li—”

“Li told me I’d have to do it again.” He stepped up to address the uniformed person before him. The G was anonymous—the source of their strength and their power to produce fear.

“This ship is outside the territorial waters of the United States,” Crane said. “You are, consequently, outside your jurisdiction and have no right being on board. Kindly leave now.”

The G spoke into his pad, then nodded. “Two point nine miles,” he said pleasantly, then gestured toward the door. “Is this the only way in or out of that room?”

“No,” Lanie said, as Newcombe, angry, made to block entry. “There’s a starboard door also.”

“He won’t run from you,” Newcombe said stepping aside. “He told me.”

The G moved into the room in force. Brother Mohammad Ishmael sat calmly at the dining table, smiling beatifically. “Do you gentlemen have a reservation?” he asked.

“On your feet,” the lead G said. “You’re under arrest.”

Ishmael stood. “I’m not of your country. Even so, I have broken none of your laws. You cannot place me under arrest.”

“You may make an official statement to the booking robot,” said the G, punctiliously polite. “These gentlemen are going to escort you. You may choose the degree of difficulty.”

Six men moved forward. Seemingly unarmed, their sleeves bristled with electronic and microwave bands, deadly defensive weapons. They formed a loose cordon around Ishmael, then moved in quickly, grabbing.

They got empty ah*. Ishmael was transparent as they tried to take him, their arms moving through his body, flailing uselessly.

“A projection.” Newcombe laughed. “It’s not really him.”

“Only since this morning,” Ishmael called, walking right through the table and up to Newcombe. He whispered in the man’s ear, “Contact me.”

The G filed out without a word, the last one handing Crane a bill for the downed gull.

Ishmael’s laughing projection turned a circle for the remaining gull cams that were perched on the rails looking in through the portholes. “People of the world,” he called, “this is how the white animal behaves. In savagery. In hatred. I wanted you to see why we must have our own homeland. Nothing will deter us. It is the will of Allah.”

The specter vanished. Crane walked back outside, knowing the government types were going to try and set him up for something with Ishmael to take the heat off themselves. He had to get past it. He moved onto the deck, the gulls flying off, and leaned against the rail, staring out at the G climbing back into their boats. The professional news showed up with the amateur camheads. He sensed Lame at his arm and turned. Newcombe wasn’t with her.

“Li and the others, they made a deal with you,” she said. “They have to keep it.”

“If I can make another earthquake happen,” he whispered, then winked at her.

Scores of boats of all sizes and shapes, a flotilla, surrounded them as they steamed closer to LA. People were waving and calling out to them.

Lanie and he drank in the celebrity, laughing and waving back.

He leaned over the rail and yelled to the closest ship. “Ahoy! What news of earthquakes? I sense something just happened.”

A loudspeaker crackled from one of the news boats. “We received word a little while ago. Martinique has been leveled by an eruption of Mount Pelee.”

“Don’t unpack your bags,” he said to Lanie, then put a foot over the rail and climbed down to the main deck, everything forgotten except the chase, the godalmighty, neverending chase.

Chapter 4 GEOMORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

No one knew Sumi Chan was a woman. No one. The yi-sheng who’d delivered her in great secrecy had died five years ago. Her own parents, who’d engineered the deception after amniocentesis had revealed that their heir would be female, passed away in ’22, victims of the St. Louis flu. The flu virus, brought from America by traveling salesmen, had been far more devastating than the flu of 1918, killing hundreds of thousands of people in cities throughout the Far East, while sparing the North American continent with a relatively mild epidemic.

So, for the last two years Sumi had been alone with the lie of her life. And she’d have to go on alone … even though her twenty-eight-year masquerade had failed completely in its objective: to inherit her ancestral land, a right forbidden to women. But her birthright no longer existed; the land had been forfeited to bankruptcy; her parents had died destitute.

Being trapped was the operative experience of Sumi’s life. She’d come to America to study science abroad, as was the custom. The U.S. Geological Survey position was a patronage job, simply meant to look good in the long-term corporate portfolio. Now it was all she had, and she feared desperately that her deception would come to light and she would lose her job. Dishonored, she would have nothing. All life was a lie. The only truth Sumi Chan really understood was the fear of exposure that ate away at her.

She sat in the denlike interior of a Liang Corporate helo, a silent eggbeater design favored for its smooth ride, and tried to hold herself together. Crane had been good to her, had given her status and generous amounts of credit for her contributions to his projects. She liked him, too, despite his eccentricities, sometimes even because of them. He didn’t deserve what was about to happen to him.

She watched the crowd of perhaps as many as two hundred people approach the Long Beach Harbor dockside landing pad. The sun was down, a clear star-filled night just dripping onto the skyline of the largest city in the western hemisphere. Umbrellas were clasped firmly under arms now as citizens wiped sunblock off their faces and shed their coats and gloves. The freedom of night had arrived.

Newsmen swarming him like gnats, Crane led the long line down the well-lit docks toward her position. Most of the people following Crane were camheads, unemployed or bored citizens who lived to get on the teev, to see themselves projected onto the sites of buildings and clouds. So many people did it that it was no longer an obsession; it was a demographic.

Crane was flanked by Newcombe and the new woman. Why had Crane brought her in? Sumi didn’t know what to make of Lanie King. She seemed to have Crane’s drive and Newcombe’s emotions, a potentially dangerous combination, but more importantly, Sumi feared the woman would see through her ruse, just as she feared all women would see through her.

The crowd arrived, and Sumi opened the bay door fully to admit Crane and his team.

“Hey, Dr. Crane,” called a newsman in a gold mandarin jacket, “when’s the big one going to hit LA?”

“If I told you it would happen tomorrow,”

Crane replied, grabbing the sliding door from the inside as Newcombe and King slipped in, “what would you do? That’s the question you should ask yourself.”

He slid the door closed and fell heavily into a padded swivel chair. He groaned, relaxing for just a second, his good hand coming up to rub slowly over his face. Then the second passed and he snapped up to the edge of the chair and looked at Sumi. “What the hell are we waiting for?”

Sumi touched the small grille in the arm of the chair. “Go,” she said, the helo rising within seconds. She smiled at Crane. “Next stop, the mosque.”

“The mosque?” Lanie asked as she wiped the rest of the sunblock from her face with a towel.

“It’s what Sumi calls the Foundation,” Newcombe said, stretching. “You’ll see when we get there.”

“Do you have updates on the Pelee?” Crane asked.

“Not with me,” Sumi said.

“Give me what you know off the top. Martinique is in the Antilles Chain, right?”

“Yes.”

Newcombe barged in before she could go on. “There could be more eruptions.”

“Already have been,” Sumi said. “Two others … smaller. The real problem right now is the weather. Twenty rivers run out of Pelee, all of them bloated, flooding. The mountain has been crumbling … coming down as mudslides, carrying away entire villages.” Without pause, Sumi asked, “Can I get anyone a drink? Some dorph?”

“No,” Crane answered, tapping his wrist pad to connect his aural. “Sumi, call the news-people. I want to take a few of them with me down there or they’ll forget who I am by tomorrow. And get Burt Hill at the Foundation. Tell him I want a dozen emergency medical personnel and a dozen big men.”

“Big men?”

“Strong men … men who can dig. Good to see you by the way, Sumi.”

“Yes, sir,” Sumi replied, using the Foundation funded comlink on the chair to set up a forty-way conference memo to the major news organizations.

Crane punched up the exclu-fiber for Harry Whetstone on his key pad. He swiveled to take in the night show of Los Angeles through the bay window while waiting for the call to track down the man. He liked his benefactor, Old Stoney. A great guy. Damned shame his cash, all those billions, was being held hostage by the courts. Kill the lawyers, like Shakespeare said. Still, Stoney had things and people galore at his disposal, so he could provide what was needed.

“Whetstone,” came a firm but friendly voice.

“Stoney, this is Crane.”

“Hey, great to hear from you. So how the hell did it go with the Big—”

“No time for that now, pal. I want your plane and I need equipment.”

“Pelee?”

“I should leave within the hour. Can you get the plane to my landing strip in the next thirty minutes?”

“Sorry, I can only give you a big bird. Old jet with no focus. I’ll have to see if it’s gassed up. If so, you’ll have it on your timetable. If not, it’ll take over half an hour just for fueling. I’ve got access to some heavy equipment I can send along if you’d like.”

“God, no,” Crane said. “What I need are picks and shovels. Can you get me those?”

“Are you sure you—”

“Picks and shovels, Stoney. Call me back on the Q fiber when you’ve got an ETA. Hurry.”

The city was alive below him, teev pictures seemingly juicing in liquid crystal from every horizontal surface—buildings, billboards, walls and vehicles—the tallest buildings assuming the veneer of life as huge videos filled all twenty and thirty stories of them. They headed north toward Mendenhall Peak in the San Gabriel Mountains.

“Why did the G come on board my ship today?” Crane asked loudly.

Sumi answered with the obvious. She always had to be careful with the truth around Crane. “There is a great deal of negative reaction to Ishmael’s demands. People want some sort of action taken. They fear what’s stockpiled in the War Zones.”

“How is this affecting us?”

“Too early to tell. There’s damage … we don’t know how much.”

“But Li’s not taking any chances, is he?”

“Mr. Li’s a businessman,” Sumi said immediately. “What would you expect?”

“I would expect him to protect me and the deal we made,” Crane snapped, then waved it off. “This is no surprise.” His mind drifted toward damage control. “I just need to run the action myself. I can survive Ishmael.”

He sighed and shook off a wave of tiredness. He could sleep on the flight to Martinique. The horror was welling in him. He could feel the suffering. He knew the heart-pounding panic of those trapped within their homes under tons of mud and rock. Tears came and he wiped at his eyes, willing himself quickly into emotional detachment, vital to his getting through disasters like Sado and now Pelee.

He tried to focus on the nightshow below, seeing his Liang helo on many of the teev screens. There were reasons for the outside screens. They were mostly to keep occupied people who were waiting in huge lines for basic necessities. Electronics were cheap and entertaining; they kept a person’s mind off the fact that the country’s infrastructure was shaky at best. Dingy apartments, chronic food shortages from too few shaded fields in production, lousy wages made electronic consolation the next best thing to dorph.

Below, one of the helos chasing them had dipped too low, its skid catching on the side of a building, the machine smashing nose first onto the flat roof and tumbling, all the citizens running to the scene with their cams. Within seconds, they had passed the site and Crane followed the wreck on teev screens that filled the night.

Several men with crowbars jumped onto the hulk of the helo to steal the focus. Two pried on the ten-inch disc from three sides as another man squeezed into the smoking cockpit in search of survivors.

“Is there anything good happening?” Crane asked, his chair still turned facing the bay.

“Kate Masters,” Sumi said, “has thrown unconditional support behind your earthquake plan in exchange for the government’s allowing the Vogelman Procedure to be billed out on health insurance.”

“Great,” Crane replied, shaking his head at the thought of the no-pregnancy implant. “Now we’re in the birth control business.”

Of the hundreds of teev screens below them, half still projected the helo crash. As the vandals got the focus off the wreck, the other man emerged with the disoriented pilot in tow. Both men saw the vandals and attacked, fighting them for the focus. One of the powerful liquid electric cells that resided within could run a house for a year. Many would kill for a cell.

His wrist pad blipped, and Crane activated his aural. “Yeah?”

“Stoney,” came the response. “The bird is gassed and ready to take off. I’ve also got a couple thousand picks and shovels in a truck on its way to you from a north LA warehouse.”

Below the lights were fading as they reached the blackness of the War Zone, the entrenched and heavily fortified two-by-four-mile stretch of real estate that had once been called East Los Angeles. Brother Ishmael’s territory.

“You did good, Stoney,” Crane answered. “My best to Katherine.”

“Crane … about the plane…”

“I won’t give it away like the last one. Promise.”

“Thanks.”

Crane blanked as they passed over the perimeter lights of the troops surrounding the War Zone. The Zone itself was totally netted in thick mesh that covered roofs and sides of buildings. No one had seen inside for years. No one had any idea of how many Africk-Hispanics lived within the Zone or what they did to survive. Troops allowed trucks carrying non-contraband material to go inside; so few went in that many speculated the actual number of Ishmael’s followers was quite small. It was a matter of some debate, for a great many children could be born in fifteen years, children with access to nothing but counterculture rhetoric. Young soldiers. The pilot immediately took on altitude when reaching the War Zone.

“We’ll be leaving within thirty minutes of arrival,” Crane said to Lanie. “You’d better call ahead and have them prepare any equipment you want loaded.” He did a quick calculation on his wrist pad. “I’m allowing you fifty square feet of storage with a two-ton weight limit.”

“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 surprised 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 shook 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

“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.

“Every Monday?”

The man looked up at her through a hedgerow of facial hair, reacting warily to the question, Sumi smiling pleasantly to allay suspicion.

“Starts things out fresh for me,” Burt finally said, “gets the routine going. I like the Foundation to run smooth as an engine, smooth and predictable. Guess that’s what Doc Crane appreciates about me.”

“I think he appreciates you for many reasons, especially because you’re dependable.” Sumi hated that she was going to have to come through every Sunday night and remove whatever she planted. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. Ten transmitters were stuck to her hands, one to each finger and thumb tip.

“How so?” They finished the circle. Hill hit the down button, and the gondola swayed silently toward the floor.

“Crane’s not here. You could have put off the sweep until Monday. No one would have been the wiser.” The gondola shuddered slightly as it reached ground level. They climbed out, Sumi walking over to admire Patagonia on the globe, her hand resting on the Malvinas Islands. She could feel Hill’s eyes on the back of her head, tearing at her.

“Couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do it. Being foreman for Doc Crane is the best damned job … the best damned time I’ve ever had in my life. I’m embarrassed to tell you how much he pays me. Hell, he gives me a bungalow on the mountain free of charge … and it’s just as good as his. I’ll tell you, Sumi, when Crane sides with a man, he sticks with him. That means something to me. He’s done the same for you. How do you think you got moved up to Senior Grant Advisor? A Nobel Prize opens a lot of doors. Crane went and talked to the Board for you.”

At his words Sumi’s hands tightened involuntarily. Damn! She accidentally left three transmitters on the globe, two on Gran Malvina and one on Isla Soledad. The size of dust motes, they’d never be seen, but the transfer activated the units. She hoped Hill wouldn’t turn the debugger on again in here. She coughed, turning to him. “Did that not also benefit Dr. Crane?” she said quietly. “My new position certainly enabled him to get grants, and quickly.”

“And what the hell’s wrong with that, Mr. Chan?” he said, now offended and reverting to formality.

Sumi looked at the floor, and despite all rationalization, she was ashamed.

“Here,” Hill said, handing her a dorphed lemon drop. “Even out.”

“Thanks,” Sumi said, tossing the thing in her mouth as Hill turned and walked toward the west wing of labs and storerooms. She’d have to be selective as to where to plant successfully in the west wing. She wanted the places Crane frequented the most.

The dorph took hold quickly, her mood stabilizing as she caught up with Hill, but there were some things even dorph couldn’t cure. One of them was the bitter sting of guilt.

“You want to slug down a couple when I’m done here?” Hill asked as they walked, and she knew he was suspicious. “The view’s pretty goddamned spectacular from my porch. On a really clear night, you can see the Late Show on the side of the Moon.”

“You’ve got a deal, Burt. But may I suggest that we do our slugging from a special bottle I’ve got in my suitcase?”

“A man after my own heart,” Hill said, and Sumi wondered how far they’d get pumping each other for information.

Hill touched his wrist pad. “GET OFF YOUR WIDE LOAD ASSES AND GET BACK TO WORK!” his voice boomed, graveyard-shift welders, programmers, and housekeepers jumping up and hurrying to their workstations.

“Crane usually takes you on his trips, doesn’t he?” Sumi asked.

Hill frowned, genuine concern on his face. “Yeah. Don’t like it when he goes alone.” He shook his head. “Hope somebody reminds him to eat.”

Sumi looked at her watch. “I should imagine that he’s in-country by now.”

The man laughed. “By now he’s in-country and running the whole goddamned show.”

At that exact moment, Lewis Crane stood up to his knees in the midst of a nightmare of ash and mud in what had once been the coastal city of Le Precheur, Martinique, screaming in lousy French, “Silence, s’il vous plait … silence!” to the townspeople who were trying to dig their families out of the mud.

The mountain still rumbled and lightning flashed overhead as Lanie planted her sensors into the side of Pelee, banging the poles in herself with a ball peen hammer.

They were on the eastern face of Pelee; lava flows still bubbled over the southern face. Light and heat reached through the dense curtain of ash that hung over everything. It was sometime before morning; but day or night didn’t matter here. It would be perpetual night until the next big rain washed the ash from the skies. Farther to the south, Fort de France was in flames. Liang Int people were blowing buildings with dynamite trying to re-establish firebreaks.

Though Crane had been pumping data through the SISMA net, he knew it would be days before the international community mobilized to send aid, days before the citizens of Le Precheur had anything but their own meager resources to depend upon. But he also knew that local resources were the heart of all disaster management, local citizens taking care of their own. The fade-away time, the mortality rate for people trapped in collapsed houses under tons of mud, was fifty percent at six hours. Every minute beyond that increased the percentage. Le Precheur already had been buried for nearly eight hours. His guidance was essential if they were to take any of the victims back from the belly of the beast.

“Ecoutez donc!” he called out. The area resembled a junk yard of broken mortar and skeletal wooden beams thrusting out of a sea of oozing mud. “S’il vous plait!”

This whole chain of islands was volcanic in origin, all born of the fire of the earthquake. They’d been called the West Indies at one time, then the European Community had gotten Martinique from the French and called it For Sale. Liang had owned it outright, alone with its citizens, for a number of years.

The living ran helter skelter all around him, some digging into the mud with their hands, others using construction company earth-movers. They screamed and cried while their buried loved ones fought for breath.

A man, crazed, talking to himself, hobbled past dragging the remnants of a bed through the pumice-laden sludge. He was covered with soot and caked mud—like all of them.

Crane moved to the man, bumping him away from the bed, the man continuing on without it, oblivious. Crane pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it, then tossed it onto the bed. Flames rose immediately. He turned and motioned for the trucks of equipment he’d had ferried from the landing strip on Dominica Island to the north.

Five huge trucks literally plowed into what had once been the town square, Crane yelling at the drivers to start beeping their compressed air horns. They did, raising an ear-splitting din that turned all eyes toward the man beside the burning bed.

“Ecoutez donc!” he screamed again; this time the dazed and distraught people listened. “I am here to save you,” he shouted in French, “but you must listen to me. You are making too much noise. You cannot hear the cries of the survivors. You must stop talking. You must shut off the bulldozers; they will only bury your loved ones. My trucks are full of picks and shovels. Get those. Dig where you hear voices—we must all be quiet and listen. If you hear a voice, verify it with someone else, make sure of the location, then dig carefully. Those trapped in the rubble will die if you don’t do what I say. The men should dig. Women and children should help carry away the debris. Use wheelbarrows, planks, doors, anything you can pile up with mud and rock. Move quickly, but silently. Medical personnel are here to help with those who have been hurt. If you find an injured person, don’t pull him from the wreckage until a doctor has checked him out. You are good people; you will understand the wisdom of my words.”

He repeated his message in English, then in Chinese. When he was finished, he was so hoarse he could barely speak.

Wide-eyed Americans climbed out of the trucks. Crane loved and hated people. They were capable of gallantry and ignominy all at the same time. “You were briefed on the plane,” he croaked. “You know what to do. Get with it!”

The area calmed to an eerie silence as the truck drivers turned on their high beams to illuminate the area. Lame joined Crane in the center of the pantomime.

“The sensors are in place,” she whispered. “And you were right. The information we’re pulling out of the ground will be the best education I or your computers could ever have. We’re standing on a living, breathing seismic heart.”

He nodded, looking skyward. “Make sure the data is transmitting to the computers,” he whispered in return, “then see to the satellite transmission back home.”

“You keep looking up,” she said.

He was shaking his head. “My arm,” he whispered. “This bastard’s not finished with us yet. The people have got to be taken from here as soon as possible. We’ll load trucks with the injured and get them right down to the docks.”

“F’ai entendu quelqu’un,” someone called excitedly from farther down the square. Then someone else, “F’ai entendu!”

“Dig!” Crane called through cupped hands. “Becher!”

They worked diligently, quietly, everyone pulling together. Crane moved over the face of the cataclysm, trying to take back the lives that the monster would have for its own. As he went, he spoke with his workers, explaining void-to-volume ratios for air in collapsed buildings and the likeliest places to find survivors. He helped with the unloading and placement of the amplified listening equipment, thermal-imaging cameras, and fiber-optical visual probes stuck directly into wreckage that helped find more people, the living and the dead. Surveillance technology sometimes came in handy. He felt neither good nor bad about what he was doing, only urgent. His obsession brought him here; his anger held him fast.

Soon people—remarkably, many of them alive—were being brought out of the rubble. Her computer work on line, Lanie joined the others to help with the triage of patients, field-dressing wounds, then getting them into the trucks. Weary hours passed. She looked up once and saw Crane through the confusion, giving orders like a general. A woman following two stretcherbearers and their burden, broke away and ran to Crane, throwing her arms around him and hugging and kissing him in gratitude. A look of horror swept over his face and he stiffened, pushing her away as if afraid of the contact.

Lanie labored under the most intense fear she’d ever known. She’d been too naive to be scared at Sado. Here, she knew what they were up against. She felt on knife edge. She wanted to trust Crane’s good sense to see them through, but she had begun to learn that the man had no sense at all, only cunning. His continual looking toward the sky didn’t help her feel any better.

Then she saw it, and her whole body tensed in shock. Lightning, pale pinkish lightning, was jumping from the monolith of the mountainside to the clouds and back again. Suddenly it seemed to be springing from everywhere, crackling loudly, like cannon fire.

She ran through the confusion of increasingly desperate and tired workers, finding Crane amidst the partially cleared wreckage of a large house whose top floor was simply gone, its staircase leading to nowhere. A teenage boy lay at the foot of the staircase, his legs pinned beneath a wooden beam. Several workers were improvising a hoist to raise the beam while Crane and a USC intern knelt beside the boy.

“Crane,” she said. “The sky—”

“Not now,” he said, then turned to the workers who were in the process of levering up the beam with another crossbeam. “Don’t take it off.”

“Why not?” the intern asked. “His injuries seem minor. We can get him on a truck and—”

“Good lesson, doctor,” Crane said. “Ever heard of crush syndrome?”

The young man, smeared with mud and soot, just stared. “In a case like this,” Crane said, “we’ve got to treat in situ before we risk moving him. He’s had almost ten hours under this beam to build up toxins where the blood flow was cut off. You pull him out of here now, he’d walk away fine and be dead of a heart attack in an hour.”

“What do we do?”

“We flood him with fluids and antitoxins intravenously, pump him up. When we move the beam, his body’s prepared to deal with the toxin rush into the system.”

“I’ll get the gear,” the young man said, hurrying off.

“Okay, talk to me,” Crane said to Lanie as he bent to the boy, brushing strands of hair out of his face.

“F’ai peur,” the boy whispered.

“Moi aussi, mais pas trop,” Crane replied, then looked at Lanie.

“The lightning,” she said. “It’s jumping up from the island.”

Crane, his face a mask, rose without a word and moved out of the debris to look upward as the intern hurried back into the wrecked house to start an IV.

Lightning crackled all around them, played up and down the rumbling mountain like fiery rain. “Everyone’s got to go,” he said.

“What is it?” Lanie asked as he walked off.

“St. Elmo’s Fire,” he called over his shoulder. He began shouting at his people to gather up whoever was left and get them to the docks.

Lanie ran to catch up.

“The whole atmosphere’s charged with static electricity,” he said. “Something’s going to happen.”

Suddenly, Le Precheur was all motion; people climbed onto the trucks or simply ran in panic. The rumbling got louder, more intense as heavy ash rained down on them. Lanie focused on Crane to avoid thinking about the danger and ran to keep up as he darted back to the house they’d just come from.

They moved into the wreckage. “Get out of here, doctor,” he said, taking the IV from his hand.

“But my patient—”

“Get the hell out of here now!” He turned to the workers as the doctor left. They were busy propping the lever beam atop a rock, making a fulcrum.

“Sauve qui peut!” he yelled, and the men, frightened already, hurried out.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Crane said to Lanie, his eyes intent on the plastic fluid bag he held. “Go … go!”

“Not without you.”

“I’m giving you an order, lady.”

“You’ve probably seen how well I respond to orders,” she said. “Look, you may as well save your breath.”

His jaw muscles tightened. “Get on that lever. When I give you the word, push with all your strength and I’ll drag him out, okay?”

She moved in the confined space to the crossbeam and waited, listening to the sounds of trucks roaring off for the docks and the mountain snarling and spitting.

“So why are you staying behind?” he asked as he held the boy’s hand.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Maybe I wanted you to see how seriously I take the job.”

He laughed then, deep and genuine. “You’ve convinced me. But I don’t think I’m the person at the Crane Foundation you need to convince.”

She ignored the reference to Newcombe. “Are we going to die?” she asked instead.

“Yeah … probably. Okay?”

“You’re the boss.”

They waited for the slow IV to drain. Crane spoke softly to the boy as the ground rumbled menacingly beneath them, and as soon as the bag was empty, he ripped it out and tossed it away. “Go! Go!” he yelled.

Lanie strained on the beam. The smell of sulfur was overpowering. There was no panic within her, only professional detachment.

She’d do her job. It’s why she came. She surprised herself with her calm. Amazed herself.

She heard Crane grunting even as she strained on the lever and the ash was choking her, making her gag.

“Got him,” Crane yelled, using his good arm to hoist the slight young man over his shoulder then stagger up in the debris. Lanie released her lever and stumbled with him, the square empty as they slogged through sucking, knee deep mud.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we … oh my.” Crane was looking up again, his eyes wide with wonderment.

Above them, the summit of Pelee was suffused with a dull red glow that became brighter and brighter as they watched. Total darkness lit up to brilliant daylight. Without warning the glow broke away from the peak and rushed down the mountainside a hundred yards from them. It wasn’t lava, but a red-hot avalanche of rock with a billowy surface. There were boulders and the remnants of trees within the pulsating destruction, huge rocks which stood out as streaks of throbbing red tumbling and throwing off showers of sparks.

The velocity was terrific, the avalanche rushing down the entire mountain and into the sea in seconds, narrowly missing them.

“I’ve heard of this but never seen it,” Crane said low, his voice hushed with awe, and perhaps with exhaustion too, for he still held the young man on his shoulder.

“Is it over?”

“No.”

Just as the crimson glow from the avalanche faded, it was replaced with a monstrous cloud shaping itself against the now visible sky over the landslide’s site. The cloud rose from the path of the avalanche and moved along its course, gaining momentum, as if lighter particles of volcanic material had begun to rise slightly and continue forward as the heavier particles settled to earth.

The cloud was globular, its surface bulging with masses that swelled and multiplied with a terrible energy. Lanie was hypnotized by it, barely feeling Crane’s bad arm pushing at her. The cloud rushed forward, directly toward them, boiling and changing its form every instant. Ground hugging, it billowed at them in surging masses, coruscating with lightning.

“Back inside the wreckage!” he yelled at her over the terrible hot gale force wind that led the cloud. “Now! Move!”

She moved.

They were being pelted with a rain of stones the size of walnuts. The hot roar moved nearer, nearer. Crane knew he had about twenty seconds to figure out how to protect them from two-thousand-degree temperatures that would suck the oxygen right out of their lungs.

The workers had opened a ten-foot clearance cave to rescue the boy, but it was giving in now, collapsing in upon itself. A beam squeaked loudly, creaking, then snapping. He saw it in terrible slow motion as it swung at them, catching Lanie full force on the side of the head, knocking her to her knees. She began weaving from that position, gagging loudly.

“Come on!” He grabbed at her, but his bad arm didn’t have the strength to pull her up. He lay his burden down; the young man shakily got to his own hands and knees and crawled farther into the collapsing darkness of his house.

Crane seized King around the waist and pulled her up his hip, bearing most of her weight. Behind them, outside, the square was brilliant fire. He could hardly breathe. “Salle de bain,” he shouted to the boy. “Tub! Tub!”

“Id,” the boy called weakly and continued to crawl.

“Good,” Crane said, pulling a moaning Lanie with him as he squat-walked through the wreckage, the heat unbearable. “Are you still with me?”

Her head lolled on her shoulders, her eyelashes fluttering, trying to bring back the eyes that wanted to roll up into her skull. “I’m f-fine,” she mumbled weakly. “I just need to … need to … lie down, I—I—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Crane said, dragging her now. “Dan’s going to kill me if this damned volcano doesn’t.”

The boy had crawled behind the stairs to nowhere and pushed weakly at a splintered doorway half squashed by its own frame. Crane, working at sucking air, dropped King and threw himself against the remnants of the door. It gave way with him, and he tumbled into a bathroom that was half caved in from the side facing the mountain but remarkably intact otherwise.

He reached back and pulled the young man in with him. A free-standing bathtub waited majestically in the middle of an ash-covered floor. He scrambled back over the splinters and took Lanie by her collar to drag her into the room. “You stay awake!” he yelled at her as she bumped over broken mortar and wood. “Do you hear me! Don’t go to sleep!”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” she said, her voice raspy. Blood flowed down her neck, soaking her hah* and shirt.

He dragged her to the tub and placed her flat next to it. “Don’t move,” he said, then pulled the boy by the arm and put him close beside her. He lay atop them both and tipped the tub over them, hoping it would hold enough of an air pocket to keep them alive and be strong enough to protect them from falling debris.

The rumbling got louder, all encompassing in the stifling darkness beneath the tub. “Retenir votre respiration,” he told the boy, then to Lanie, “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

They did, to the roar of the cloud washing over them, the rest of the house giving way under the heat and mud, falling in on top of them, screaming as it died, screaming as his parents’ house had.

His body cooked dry, robbing him of fluids. He couldn’t breathe or swallow. He could hear Lanie and the boy gasping for breath. Dammit, Pelee would not take his life or the lives of those with him today! By God, the monster had had enough.

“Easy,” he whispered through parched lips, and he found himself stroking Lanie’s hair in the darkness, the terrible roar a distant storm now. He felt her relax under his hand. “It’s over.”

She groaned loudly. “Then c-could you … get your … knee out of my back. You’re … k-killing me.”

“Sorry,” he said, finally able to draw a strong breath as fresh air rushed through the crack around the bottom of the tub, filling the vacuum created by the cloud. Air meant some sort of passage to the outside. A beginning.

He shoved out with his good hand, the tub budging, but stuck. It was pinned under something heavy. The boy reached up and helped, the two of them straining the tub up far enough for Crane to roll out and clear the ceiling off the thing and roll it away from them.

It was black as a deep cave. Crane touched the sloping underside of the staircase. It had collapsed in an inverted V atop them and had probably saved their lives. Unfortunately, it was now their prison.

They were trapped.

The boy moaned. Crane reached for him as he fell heavily to the littered ground and searched for his carotid artery. There was no pulse.

“No!” Crane screamed, the darkness swallowing his words. “You can’t have him!”

He began administering CPR, knowing instinctively that they’d taken the boy off the fluids too soon and that the strain of the fear had sent his heart over the edge.

“Come on,” he pleaded, then pounded the boy’s chest. “Come on!”

He didn’t know how long he’d worked on the boy. He only knew that at some point even Lewis Crane had to give up. His breath was coming in gasps as he fell back atop a pile of masonry. He smelled gas, not knowing if it were real or a memory flashback in the darkness. He felt the heat of flames, but couldn’t see them. Then he cried softly and wished, as he had every day of his life since the Northridge quake, that he’d stayed inside the house with his parents. The peace of death eluded him, but its agony was his constant companion.

“He’s gone, Lanie,” Crane finally whispered into the darkness to no response. He stiffened. “Lanie … Lanie!”

He crawled to her. She was limp. He gathered her to his breast and rocked her gently in their mausoleum of mud and stone. And even as his mind spun into a numbed vortex of falling buildings and bright orange fire, every part of him, rational and irrational, was willing life into the body of Elena King.

Chapter 6 PANGAEA

Newcombe sat before the thirty-by-forty-foot wall screen in the dark lecture hall where Foundation briefings were held on missions. Pictures streamed in from helos hovering above Le Precheur. He saw an ocean of mud, a desert of slime with skeletal signs of civilization poking from its innards. Somewhere, buried beneath the ooze over the crumpled city, were the two most important people in the world to him. He refused to accept their deaths. Refused.

There were lots of people working the site—the Foundation’s people were there out of obligation, the townspeople out of gratitude to the demon saint who’d saved their loved ones. He could see mud-covered workers picking at the wreckage in thirty different places. Damn, it was too loose, too widespread an effort to be truly effective. Those rescuers would never get to Lanie and Crane in time if they kept to that strategy.

“H-hello?”

“Yes, who is this?” Newcombe returned, noting the tension in the man’s voice.

“M-My name is Dr. Ben Crowell and I’d really like to get back to the digging, I—”

“Doctor,” Newcombe said. “We don’t have much time, sir. Were you the last one to see Dr. Crane and Dr. King before the eruption?”

“Yes … I—”

“Have someone put a camera on you, Ben. I want to see … ah, good.”

The grim face of a haggard, filthy man blipped as an insert onto the huge screen.

“You know where they are, Ben?”

“I know where they were, doctor,” Crowell said, “but everything’s shifted. Nothing’s where it was. I can’t seem to get my … bearings. I’m sorry.”

“Calm down,” Newcombe said, his own resolve solid. “Crane’s alive. We’re in contact with him. They still have a little air. We just need to pinpoint them. Are you in the town square?”

“I think so.”

“Did this happen close to the town square?”

“Yes!” the man said, brightening.

Newcombe inserted a detailed satellite photo map in the lower right hand corner of the excavation shot, showing Le Precheur as it was mere days ago. “Have someone give you a monitor … we’re transmitting from this end.”

“Just a moment … I … yes, I see the map.”

“Look at it carefully and draw conclusions.”

He zoomed in on the street leading up to the square, focusing on the masonry houses with the red thatch roofs, French colonial influence.

“This one, this one,” Crowell shouted. “The fifth house from the square on the west side of the street.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“There were stairs going up, but no second floor. Your map only shows one two-story house on the block on that side of the street. It’s got to be the place.”

Newcombe overlaid a ruler on the map. “The square had a flagpole in the center.”

“It’s still there.”

“Due east from the flagpole, 113 feet four inches, is the front door of that house. Measure accurately—okay?—and have everyone dig there … but slowly, carefully, very carefully.”

Crowell darted away and was off-camera for a minute or more, though in audio contact the whole time.

“You’ve got enough diggers there,” Newcombe said brusquely. “I need your attention, Crowell, got to get some more information from you.” Crowell’s tired face popped up again. “Good. Now, tell me, what exactly happened? How was it that the two senior members of the expedition were left behind during an eruption?”

“We were evacuating the city quickly because of the St. Elmo’s Fire. I was giving a patient with crush syndrome an IV, when Crane came rushing in with Dr. King and ordered me and the men on the lever to get down to the docks. Crane took the IV from me and we ran. It was a nightmare, trying to run through the deep mud, getting bogged down in it…”

“Take a deep breath, Ben. Better now?” Crowell wearily shook his head. “Go on,” Newcombe said encouragingly.

Crowell’s expression darkened as he relived his time in hell.

“We … we somehow got down to the docks, lightning, pink lightning, was everywhere. There were fires… rocks were pelting us.” He rubbed his eyes. “Confusion at the ferries, mass chaos with trucks and people shoving. We somehow all got on board, but we couldn’t have been a mile or two from shore when the top blew off the mountain and the damned cloud formed. It came right for us, reaching for us, full of lightning. It roared and flung rocks. I knew we were all dead. Then, it started slowing down. The cloud got kind of pale, then just sailed over us, raining ash. But it started to sort of, well expand … until it filled the sky … except for a sliver of horizon. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that.”

“Hold it, Ben,” Newcombe said, seeing the diggers making some progress. “Tell them to get optical sensors in there,” he said, Crowell disappearing from the screen for several seconds. He came back frowning.

“They sent me back. Everyone’s afraid to talk to you. Most of the surveillance gear was lost in the … did you call it, eruption? It didn’t seem like—”

“Please, Ben.”

Crowell nodded apologetically. “They’re trying to rig something now.”

“If they can hear me, then they know, they’d better hurry! Come back with my people alive or don’t come back. Now tell me, how much time passed between you leaving Crane and King and the eruption?”

The man opened his eyes wide. “Maybe ten minutes, barely enough time to finish the IV.”

“And what time of day was this?”

The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a watch, and held it close for Newcombe to see. Its face was cracked, the time frozen at 7:26. “I smashed it on a truck getting onto the ferry. Can I go now?”

Four hours. Oxygen was the problem—if they’d survived the mud and fire. “One more thing, Ben. You say there was a staircase in the house?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Thanks. We’re finished.” He blanked Crowell’s insert from the screen, replacing it with a revolving tour of the news feeds on the scene. He let his head fall back on the seat and closed his eyes. They’d find them now, hopefully before the air ran out. Crane stayed with the house, the area under the stairs a decent place to trap oxygen and as good a place as any to be. They were there. He refused to let himself think about anything except the prospect of finding them safe, sound.

“Would you rather be alone?”

Newcombe opened his eyes to see a hologram of Brother Ishmael, ten inches high, floating in the air before him, an angelic glow around the image. “I’m not even going to ask how you did this,” he said.

The image looked sheepish. “I planted a homer on your hand back at the boat. It’s that thing that looks like a pimple on your left thumb. Pull it off and I’m gone.”

Newcombe looked at the thumb, noted the device, left it alone. “Have you seen what’s happening?” he asked.

The image nodded. “I thought maybe you could use some support, Brother. Crane’s foolishness has put your woman in danger.”

“Foolishness,” Newcombe repeated. “They dug forty-two living people out of that mud. I’d call that courageous, Brother Ishmael.”

“It takes courage just to live,” Ishmael replied. “I’m not here to argue with you, only to wait with you … to grieve with you if it comes to that.”

“Let’s not worry about the grief yet.”

“Indeed. Are you involved in the S and R mission?”

“In a small way,” Newcombe said, looking past the holo to the diggers.

“What happened on Martinique? They haven’t been able to explain that cloud or anything else on the news—”

“They’ll figure it out eventually,” Newcombe said, angry that no one had taken charge of the surveillance gear on site. A good optical sensor could save them hours. Burt Hill would have seen to the equipment. Damn Crane for not taking him. He looked again at Brother Ishmael. “This kind of eruption happens from time to time. The French call it nuee ardente, ‘glowing cloud.’ A hundred and twenty years of refinement has settled the term at ‘glowing avalanche.’ It’s happened on Pelee before.”

“What is it?”

“A kind of lateral eruption with just enough force to blow the top layer of crater scum straight down the mountain. It acts as a heavy liquid, a mixture of gas, steam, and solid particles. As the heavier particles settle, the gas and steam are free to continue onward, only the smaller particles holding the cloud earthbound. As those are dispersed, the cloud ascends.”

“What’s the thing they’re bringing to the dig now?” Ishmael asked.

Newcombe looked at the screen, his insides tightening up for the big one. An optical sensor. Now they’d see.

Crane and Lanie sat side by side in their muddy tomb, leaning back against the tub that saved their lives. The boy whose name they hadn’t learned lay beside them in the darkness.

It was completely black. Crane had no idea of how much mud separated them from the outside. What air they had, he feared, was dissipating quickly. It was foul and musty.

He tapped his wristpad. “Dan … you there?”

“I’m here, Crane.” There was relief and happiness in Newcombe’s voice. “I think we’ve isolated your location. We’re coming at it with an optical sensor.”

“Get an air tube in here.”

“Okay. Let me talk to Lanie.”

“She’s indisposed,” Crane said, tapping off and sagging against the tub. Beside him, Lanie slid in and out of consciousness. She’d had a nasty cut on the temple; he’d stopped the bleeding by applying mud. He’d torn off the sleeve of his shirt and tied it tightly around her wound, loosening it every few minutes, then retightening. He’d gone through medical school for the field knowledge, never carrying it any further than on-site emergency treatment. Lanie needed a real doctor.

She moaned, regaining consciousness, just as she had fifteen times already. She had the damnedest type of concussion, one with trauma to the deep section of the frontal lobes involving recent memory. She could not capture and hold on to a new thought. Every time she became conscious, the experience was brand new to her. Crane prepared to start with her again at Square One. He heard her sudden intake of breath, knew she was reacting to the darkness and the pain, and quickly put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t panic,” he said low, soothing.

“Crane?”

“Take it easy. You’ve had a blow to the head. Try and relax.”

“Where the hell are we?”

“Trapped,” he said, “in the debris of a house … under a mudslide. In Martinique. They’re coming to rescue us.”

“You’re kidding? Martinique? Is Dan all right?”

“He’s fine … though a little worried. He’s back in California.”

“He is? Why don’t I remember?”

“It’s normal,” he said calmly, patting her shoulder again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What happened to me?”

“A blow to the head.”

“Really? And Dan?”

“He’s all right. He’s not here.”

“We’re not in California, are we?”

“No.” If the circumstances weren’t so grim, he knew he’d find it difficult to keep himself from laughing.

“I’m fine now.”

“I know.”

“Where are we?”

“Martinique.”

“Really? And Dan’s not here, right?”

“Right.”

“We got trapped here, but we’re going to get rescued.”

“That, dear lady, is my sincerest hope.”

She grunted. “I’m fine. Really okay now. My head feels like hell, though. I think there’s some dorph somewhere … I never travel without—”

“I’ve got it,” he said. “You’ve already had some, but if you want some more…”

“Only one,” she said, holding out her hand. He retrieved the dorph from his work shirt pocket and gave her a tablet. They’d repeated this particular scenario six times.

“You take one,” she said, swallowing the pill.

“You know I don’t take dorph.”

“How come? Ow! That hurts.”

“Don’t touch your head.” He drew his legs up. “You know, it just occurred to me I can tell you anything, because you won’t remember it.”

“I’ll remember.” She laughed. “I told you I’m fine. I simply need to know … is Dan all right?”

“He’s fine. He’s back in California.”

“Did I take a dorphtab?”

“Yes,” he said, the most wicked, thrilling sense of freedom stealing through him: no surveillance and perhaps a ton of mud for soundproofing insulation; a listener who would immediately forget what he said. If this were to be his last conversation, he’d make it a winner. “I was about to tell you why I don’t take dorph.”

“Why?”

“I tried it once. It stopped the pain.”

“That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

“That’s why I don’t take it.”

He felt her stir beside him and looked in her direction, imagining her face in the darkness, her wide, inquisitive eyes. “I get it,” she said. “You’re going to be honest.”

“And you’ll forget everything I say. By the way, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“Well, we’re talking … I remember that. I remember being on a boat. Why is it so dark?”

“We’re trapped under a mudslide, but they’re coming to rescue us.”

“Dan’s fine, though. Right?”

“That’s right. You know I’m attracted to you?”

“Whoa … hold it. I’m not looking for a quickie in the rubble.”

“I’ve never met a woman like you. Passionate … intelligent. I can see your mind working as I look into your eyes.” His fingertips came up to brush her face. She pulled away slightly, but only slightly, he noted.

“Right,” she said. “How many times have you trotted that line out?”

“What line?”

“That … you know, whatever you said.”

He smiled. “I’m going to tell you my story. You’re my perfect audience for it. I lived with my mother’s sister, Ruth. My aunt and her husband didn’t have much money, and he didn’t like me. Her own kids came first, so I had to perform to get noticed. I’d read every book ever written on seismology and plate tectonics by the time I was ten. Got my first college degree at age fifteen and went on fast from there.”

“What about your emotional life… friends … girlfriends?”

“I was the outsider,” he said. The rubble shifted and planks fell to the floor nearby. Lanie scooted closer and clutched his arm. “I grew up around people years older than myself. It strengthened my performing, but got me no friends. Nothing was ever expected of me emotionally.”

“Women?”

“None. Not even close. Never been kissed. I’m thirty-seven years old and I’ve never even held hands with a girl I liked.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder. “If we ever get out of here, I’ll give you a first-class kiss to get you started on your way.”

“Promise?”

“You bet, I … it’s so dark. Why are we here?”

“We were trying to save a boy trapped by the volcano—”

“Volcano?”

“—and we got trapped ourselves. And yes, Dan’s all right. He’s not here. Here is Martinique.”

“Have I asked you these questions before?”

“A time or two.”

“Guess I forgot. But I won’t forget now. What happened to the boy we were trying to save?”

“Put your left hand out beside you.”

“Okay, I—Oh God!” She practically jumped onto his lap. “Is that…?”

“The boy. He didn’t make it.”

She went limp, then slumped against the tub. “We’re going to die, aren’t we? We’re going to die in the dark.”

“The possibility exists. I’m sorry. They’re looking for us now. We did get the city evacuated in time, though.”

“City … evacuated?” He heard her take a deep breath. “Can we do anything from in here?”

“Not really,” he said. “In the dark, I’d be afraid to pull on anything for fear of bringing the house down on us.”

“Maybe there’s a lighter or—”

“We’ve already looked … even in the boy’s pocket. Besides, I’m beginning to worry about the oxygen.”

“Scare me, why don’t you?”

“It’s all right, you’ll forget.”

“I resent that. I will not. Is Dan here?”

“No … and he’s fine.”

“Good,” she said, then took a long breath. “Did we predict this one?” she asked.

“I can’t predict anything,” he said, then stared in her general direction. “You want to hear the whole story?”

“What story?”

He drew a deep breath of the fetid air. “I’d been tracking Sado,” he said low, “since the day the Israelis saw the Iranian helos overhead and blew their whole nuclear stockpile, thirty multimegaton bombs. Fifty million people vaporized instantly, ten million more within seconds.” Tears rolled down his cheeks; Lanie was shuddering. “The blasts not only irradiated the entire Middle East and its oil, but it had profound effects below ground—first on the Arabian Plate, which in turn had an effect on the Turkish-Aegean and Iran Plates. It was like watching dominoes fall. By the time the Indo-Australian and Eurasian Plates started to buckle, I was predicting the quakes with a fair degree of accuracy, within, say, a month or two. Finally, years later, the Indo-Aus, Philippine, North American, and Pacific Plates collided roughly, which had a small, but devastating effect on a zone near Sado.” He shrugged. “It was laid out like a road-map.”

“What was?”

“The EQ’s connected to the Masada Option.”

“Why didn’t you predict other quakes before Sado?”

“Two reasons. First, nobody listens anyway. Second, if I was going to take the chance of being wrong and being forever labeled as a crackpot, I’d take the best odds. Sado was the plum, the shot heard round the world.”

“Now … we’re not at Sado now, are we?”

“We’re in Martinique. Dan’s not here. He’s fine. Ask me the next question. If you’ve been listening, you’re probably wondering what I’m selling since you now know that I can’t really predict earthquakes.”

“Yeah. Tell me that. I’ll remember this time.”

“I’m selling the dream of a perfect world,” he said. “This kind of suffering is needless, wasteful.”

“I’m sorry … I lost something back—” She flailed her arms, squealing. “Crawling on me. A thing’s crawling on me. Get it off. Off!”

His hand felt her thigh, running its length. He felt it then, cold, metallic.

“Ha!” He grabbed the optical sensor that had slithered into their lair and held it up to his face. “It’s about time you got here. Dig us out slowly. We’ve got a pocket here, but the whole place is about to go. Tunnel in easy. Try and get us an air tube first. And for God’s sake, get me a drink! They have sugar mills here; there must be rum. If you can get to the air hole, shove a bottle through.”

The sensor slithered away. He relaxed at the sound of the rescue workers pounding a pipeline of fresh air into their musty tomb.

“Is Dan out there?” Lanie asked.

“He’d better not be,” Crane said. “He’s supposed to be at the labs looking for quakes.”

“If you really can’t predict,” she said, “what’s the point?”

He took her hand in the darkness, kissed it. “Dear lady, you don’t give up your life’s dream just because it has no reality.”

Suddenly the barest light shone in the cavern, brightening it to a sickly haze. A rush of fresh air followed, and with it, hope.

“Dr. Crane,” a voice called down the five-inch tube.

“I’m here! Where’s that rum I ordered?”

“Coining!”

The bottle was shoved through the tube, followed by a bottle of water. Crane handed Lanie the water and unscrewed the cap on the rum, taking a long drink. “How far away are you?”

“Ten to fifteen feet,” the voice returned. “We’ll have you out quickly.”

“Are we the only ones?”

“Everybody alive got out … except you three.”

“Two,” Crane said, taking another long swig of rum. “There’s only two of us here.”

He sat back, glancing sadly at the corpse. Lanie had been staring at it ever since the light had entered.

“What happened?” she asked reaching for his bottle of rum after she finished the water.

“We tried to save him. He died. End of story.”

“Was this an earthquake?”

“A volcano … we’re in Martinique.”

“You’re kidding. Where’s Dan?”

“Back home.” He liked having her this way. He was able to be honest without ramifications, sincere without recriminations. “Do you remember your promise?” he asked.

“Promise…”

“Never mind.” He sagged close to her, pressing his lips to her ear. “I love you, you know,” he whispered.

“Don’t say things like that,” she said sternly. “We have enough problems in our lives.”

“Say things like what?”

She took another drink and passed him the bottle. They looked like people made of clay. “You know,” she said, “there’s something I don’t understand.”

“Yes?”

“You want all this funding, all this … power to predict quakes. Didn’t we just talk about that?”

“Yes, we did. You’re probably wondering what I really want.”

“Yeah. Predicting to save lives is a noble cause, but Dan’s the person working those fields. Why not go his way? Define areas likely to be affected and rewrite building codes or make them off limits. You don’t need the detailed information you want to do that.”

He said what he’d never had the guts to say to another human being. “I don’t give a damn about earthquake prediction,” he whispered. “It’s a means to an end.”

“What end?”

“I cannot co-exist with the world the way it is,” he said. “So I intend to change it. I intend to stop earthquakes from happening.”

She laughed and reached for the bottle again. He took another long drink before giving it to her. “And how do you intend to stop earthquakes?”

“By fusing the plates,” he said fierce and low. “This world was once one continent, named Pangaea. It had no earthquakes, no volcanoes. I’m going to make it that way again.”

Lanie drank deep, Crane grabbing the bottle from her and finishing it. She giggled. “You said you wanted to fuse the plates, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He winked at her before murmuring directly into her ear, “By exploding huge thermonuclear bombs right on the fault lines.”

“What?”

Light flooded in, the sound of excited voices echoing all around them. “Come on, Elena King,” he bellowed, grabbing her around the waist with his good arm. “We live to fight another day!”

“Is Dan here?” she asked as hands reached in to pull them to safety.

“No.”

“What about the boy?”

“Leave him. Nothing mars a triumphal rescue like an untimely death. PR, Lanie. We live and die by it.”

Dan Newcombe sat staring at the screen, fists clenched, keeping his mind clear and controlled as he watched the SAR team digging gingerly in the gray-green mud that had once been a two-story house. The image of Ishmael floated just beside him, quiet, contemplative. He could see the icon, but it could not see him. “Are you watching the dig?” he asked, his voice choked.

“Yes,” Ishmael said. “I have a very positive feeling about it.”

“How so?”

“Crane is a madman. He will walk unscathed through tragedy. It is his blessing, Brother, and his curse also.”

“The first time I’ve ever heard you speak well of him.”

“I am not speaking well of him. He is not a man in the normal sense. He is a force moving through my life as I am a force moving through his. We’re glaciers, Crane and I, slowly creeping, rolling over everything in our paths. Crane is beyond definition. Do you see the man in the bright blue coat by the truck?”

Newcombe looked. It was the tech working the monitor for the opticals. He appeared to be excited as he turned the dials.

“I think he’s got them,” Newcombe said, watching the man dance an impromptu jig in the mud. “Look at him jumping! They’re alive!”

The lecture hall door banged open. Burt Hill and several programmers charged in, whooping. A similar scene was being monitored on the huge screen by the crew in Martinique.

“Go,” Newcombe whispered, Ishmael disappearing on Hill’s entry. Newcombe made a mental note to call and thank the man for his friendship during a bad time.

“I ain’t never letting him get away without me again!” Hill shouted. He charged happily down the aisle to watch the excavation with Newcombe; the others scattered through the theater. “They must have lost all the surveillance gear. That thing they used is jerryrigged outta spare parts.”

Newcombe nodded. “Believe me, next time Crane goes into the field, I’ll personally chain him to you.”

“Gawd,” Hill said, shaking his head as the workers shoved a bottle of rum through an air facilitation tube. “He’s getting a drink before he gets out. That’s Crane.”

Newcombe continued to stare as they dug, the workers handing bucketsful of mud along a human chain, shoring up the wreckage as they went. There was life. Now to see if there were injuries.

The team broke through within minutes. The crew in the theater and in Martinique cheered as Crane stumbled out of the debris under his own power, smiling wide for the cameras. He was carrying Lanie in his arms, his good arm taking most of the weight, the nearly empty bottle of rum dangling from his bad hand.

Newcombe’s stomach lurched. Lanie’s head was bandaged, blood covering her entire left side, matting her hair. She appeared to be only semiconscious. Crane didn’t look any the worse for wear.

“She’s hurt,” Hill said.

Newcombe grunted. “They’d better have someone more experienced than interns down there.” He banged on the wrist pad, reopening the contact between him and the team. A muddy figure, barely recognizable as human, blipped onto his screen. “Get Crane over here,” he told the man.

Just then, on the main screen, he saw Lanie throw her arms around Crane and give him a long kiss as she was lowered onto a stretcher. His insides knotted and he clenched his teeth to keep from cursing out loud. Crane seemed more startled than surprised at the kiss. What was happening?

Crane waved heartily at the cameras, holding up his bottle of rum and laughing, one more sumptuous meal at the buffet table of his exciting life. Damn the man. Brother Ishmael was right—he wasn’t human.

Swallowed up by his rescue team, Crane slithered off the screen and disappeared for half a minute, only to blip up on the insert box, finishing the rum.

“Crane,” Newcombe said low.

“Danny boy!” Crane dropped the bottle to wipe his face with a towel. “Did you miss us?”

“Where is she?” Newcombe said. “I’m hoping you haven’t killed her.”

“This is an open line, Danny boy.”

“Where is she?”

Crane had put on his public face and it wasn’t going to budge. He smiled. “We’re getting set to vac her over to Dominica for some doctoring. I think it’s only a concussion. She’ll be fine. Keeps asking for you, by the way.”

“Put her on.”

“Can’t do that, Dan.” He looked off camera for a second. “They’re getting her ready to go. Besides … you don’t need to be having any reunions over an open line. Save it for later.”

“For the love of God, Crane, put her on. I have to know if she’s all right.”

Crane shook his head, the smile still on his face. “Not on an unsecured line,” he said. “We don’t want to give away any trade secrets.”

“Crane—”

“Got to go, Danny boy. My public awaits.” Crane walked away from the screen leaving dead air behind.

Newcombe fell back heavily in his chair, staring at the screen and the workers preparing to leave the site.

“I got to set up for them to come back,” Burt said, standing, quickly putting distance between himself and Newcombe. He got everyone else out with him.

Newcombe sat alone, feeling stupid, feeling used. He hated Crane at this moment, would hurt him if he could. Ishmael had been so right about so many things. He saw with a clarity that defied rationalization.

The Q line was the secure fiber. He tapped it up on his wrist pad and pegged in the number he had memorized in the Diatribe’s dining room.

Sumi Chan sat before her surveillance terminal, juicing right into the wall screen in her Foundation chalet. “Are you receiving the transmission, Mr. Li?” she asked, the wall screen rerunning a scene of Newcombe speaking with a small projection of Mohammad Ishmael.

“Yes, quite clearly, Sumi. Thank you.”

“I felt the subject matter might be of interest to you.”

“More than in passing. Pursue whatever connection between Dr. Newcombe and the outlaw that happens your way. We will do the same. Mohammad Ishmael’s provocative behavior and poor public ratings have forced us to condemn his actions and the existence of the Nation of Islam as an entity.”

“I see,” Sumi said, but she didn’t see at all. “Is there anything else for now?”

“Keep up the good work. We have big plans for you. Zaijian, Sumi Chan. Stay in the shade.”

“Zaijian, Mr. Li.”

Contact broke from Li’s end, though his computers had dumped the entire conversation between Ishmael and Newcombe into its memory. Sumi shut down and pulled the green dorph bottle from the desk beneath the full 3-D wall screen.

She moved to the front door. The chalet was huge and roomy, basically one open room with a loft bedroom beneath an A-frame roof. The entire front was open to the outside and a magnificent vista. Under different circumstances she could have known complete peace here.

She stepped out onto her balcony, the wind warm and playful this high up. A lone condor flew beneath her. She felt Mr. Li was making a mistake in condemning the Nation of Islam whose members were consumers, at least to some degree, and in their own way a part of mainstream life in America. Condemnation set them apart and drew attention. That attention could lead to derision, certainly. It could also lead to support. Americans were used to diverse, individual thought patterns. Unchallenged, they would absorb NOI. Forced to choose, however, Americans were likely to opt for freedom, a concept unknown to Mr. Li.

Feeling suddenly melancholy, she uncorked the green bottle and drank directly from it. Her breasts hurt beneath their bindings, a monthly problem. Her special dorph, containing high concentrations of both oxytocin and euphoric PEA, seemed to help, even if it did burden her with a certain sexual yearning that could never be satisfied. No sexual partner could be trusted. Sex itself could not be trusted.

She let the feelings spill over her, warming her, evening her out. Bilious clouds filled the sky, running tapes of Nation of Islam supporters being arrested by the G just outside the beefed-up security checkpoints into East LA. Below, Burt Hill was supervising the setup of a buffet under a large awning for the returning team. There was also a bar, a small aid station, and a stage for a press conference. Sumi would skip the press this time. All she wanted to do was unbind and hide under the covers in the loft bed. She drank from the dorph again. Maybe today, for once, she could lose herself in bliss.

Chapter 7 BIG BANGS

A condor flew high above the defensive perimeter of the Crane Foundation. Keeping lone watch over the intruder alarms and electromagnetic jammers, the compound and its occupants, the bird circled and swooped endlessly, perched and glided continuously. The condor’s sleek beauty was surpassed only by its complexity, for it was completely electronic and its ganglia were connected directly into the brain of Mohammed Ishmael. Fitting, he thought, that a huge black American vulture should be his spy from above. Soon, if all went as he believed it would, he’d have another spy, almost as reliable, within the Foundation itself.

In Brother Ishmael’s opinion, Lewis Crane needed careful watching, for he was the only person on the planet who presented a serious threat to him. Crane challenged Brother Ishmael’s apocalyptic vision of the world. He’d known the first moment he’d set eyes on Crane that somehow their fates were linked, and, so, it did not trouble him overmuch that his intense preoccupation with the man and the work of his foundation might be entirely irrational, wholly personal… and far too time-consuming. It was necessary, though he could not be at all certain why or how.

The eyes of the condor zoomed in on the helo landing zone near the primary building in the Foundation complex. Crane called it “the mosque,” which did not amuse Brother Ishmael at all, though it did amuse him considerably to note that the guests arriving at this minute had been at the meeting at sea in June. Everyone had been invited back except him. He threw back his head and laughed.

Lanie King was spectacular in every way, Crane thought as he looked around the central lab or, as he was encouraging everyone to call it now, the globe room. The last three months Lanie had proved herself time and time again. She lived computers, breathed them … and she wholeheartedly shared his goal for the globe. She’d hired the programmers, moved them out of the dank back rooms and into the main room so they could be close to the object of their work and appreciate at all times the immensity of the project. Good management that, Crane reflected.

The only thing with which he was dissatisfied was his public role. He ricocheted from one performance to the next … song-and-dance man, comic, P.T. Barnum and Cecil B. deMille. By nature introverted, he was depleted by these performances, though he doubted anyone guessed how much they took out of him. This little show today was one of the most crucial of his career. The politicos and money people wanted to see progress; most importantly, Li demanded a quake, and by God he was pretty sure he had one to deliver.

The work of Newcombe and Lanie showed that ground-based radon levels were up by nearly thirty percent all through the Mississippi Valley. Electromagnetic charges were also occurring in the region. Both phenomena possibly came from fault-line stress on rocks: When rocks cracked, radon escaped; when they fractured, they allowed electricity to flow more easily through ground water. Precursors. Probably.

In July, Lanie’s computers had used the seismic gap theory of rate of return to predict a major quake on the New Madrid fault line in Missouri. The last big one there had occurred in 1812. He was going to tell all his guests about that historic quake as a preview of coming attractions. His divided soul felt glee and despondency. He needed the quake to go on with his work and, ultimately, save millions of lives. He felt utter dejection, deep grief at the thought of a quake along the 120-mile New Madrid fault line which could destroy everything from Little Rock to Chicago—including Memphis, St. Louis, Natchez. He needed to be right; he hoped he would be wrong … at least about the extent of the devastation. He looked around the dramatically lighted room. A small stand of plush stadium seating had been built near the front doors for the VIPs. They were there, chatting and drinking Sumi’s enhanced champagne. Even Mr. Li seemed in good spirits, as did Vice President Gabler, sans wife today, and President Gideon. How these people could be so cheerful was beyond Crane. There had been riots for the last two months in the War Zones, backing the NOI demand for a homeland. Heightened security and the curtailment of food shipments were doing little to keep the occupied territories in line. The Islamic fundamentalists in Paris, Lisbon, Algiers, and London supported their American brethren with rioting. Boycotts of Liang Int products were forcing Mr. Li to capitulate in many areas, particularly relenting on withholding food.

A new sex plague was sweeping the Indian subcontinent, once more confounding dire predictions of overpopulation. Genetic plagues and antibiotic resistant strains of viruses and bacteria—as well as the ancient enemy of mankind, famine—were proving the Malthusians wrong every day. The food supply was dismal. Very little grew well in the wild anymore; the UV bleaching of crops destroyed everything that wasn’t grown beneath the cheap sun shields developed under exclusive patent by Yo-Yu, Liang’s major competitor.

In July the President had announced that the government—that is, Liang Int—was funding a major study into the possibility of ozone regeneration, prompting Yo-Yu officials to accuse the administration of attempting to destroy competitive marketing by attacking them directly on the sunblock and sunshield fronts. They called the government study “political terrorism.” Crane could only shake his head at the antics of Man. In opposition to the antics of Nature, however, he was prepared to act … even now. He stepped up onto the platform where Lanie sat at a computer console and Newcombe at the long table with imbedded microphones that projected even a speaker’s whisper through the vast room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice godlike and booming theatrically from dozens of speakers burrowed into the walls.

The room darkened. Crane waited until his audience grew silent, then said simply, “The universe.”

Brilliant light flashed for ten seconds. “The universe,” Crane continued, “began with a clap of hydrogen and helium, vomiting fiery matter at fantastic speeds in all directions.”

The globe burst into holoprojection flame, vibrant reds and yellows swirled about the globe. “Our planet was born into fire about 4.5 billion years ago. Spinning, its contracting clouds of dusts and gases gradually congealed.” The globe changed as Crane spoke, holographically showing the formation of the planet from gas to solid. The massive scale of the sphere and the changes it demonstrated overwhelmed the people sitting in the darkness. Crane could hear their appreciative muttering.

“At first we were a planet of molten rock. Slowly, the heavier elements, nickel and iron, settled into a dense inner core. Some of the lighter rocky materials, such as basalt and granite, melted, floated upward, and cooled into a thin crust. There was mantle around the core.”

Lanie’s fingers flew over the keys of her computer, and the globe projection transmogrified into a barren, rocky sphere.

“Then it began to rain…”

Thunder reverberated through the room. Holo rain fell on the globe from dense clouds filled with lightning.

“It rained for thousands of years until the planet was covered completely by water. At last the sky cleared.”

The globe became a ball of spinning water.

“Cooling at a leisurely pace, the water evaporating, the planet developed land, floating land.”

Continental chunks appeared on Lanie’s globe, all of them slowly navigating the water world. Everyone watched, rapt, as the continental mass moved toward the equator, finally joining together in a mammoth, still-barren supercontinent.

“Pangaea,” Crane said, “Greek for ‘all lands,’ the starting point for the world we know today. The breakup of Pangaea due to unknown forces, probably convection, brought volcanoes—and the gasses of the volcanoes brought the beginning of biological life.” Crane paused. “And the breakup of Pangaea brought earthquakes.”

Crane looked down at Lanie. “Program the last New Madrid quake into the globe,” he said quietly. Newcombe scribbled on a piece of paper, and Lanie hurried to her programmers. She needed more input than she could manage alone to pull this off. Newcombe held up the paper. It read: Don’t stick your neck out! Crane merely shook his head, smiling wryly.

When Lanie signaled that she and her crew were ready, Crane said, “I call your attention to the United States and the Mississippi River.” All the lights went out except for one spot, focused on Middle America.

“It is May of 1811,” Crane went on. “The rainfall is bad this spring and rivers overflow. Although people hear a lot of thunder, they note that, strangely, there is no lightning. In the fall, the citizens of New Madrid, in southeast Missouri near the border with Kentucky and Tennessee, are surprised to find tens of thousands of squirrels leaving their forest homes and moving in phalanxes to the Ohio River where they drown themselves. In September, the Great Comet of 1811 passes overhead, shedding a brilliant and eerie glow over the forests—an omen to many.”

Crane walked slowly down the stairs. The globe was no longer spinning, but had stopped before the grandstand, showcasing the Mississippi Valley.

“America is a lawless frontier. Tecumseh rules the Indian tribes near New Madrid and all through the fall leads many a battle against the forces of General William Henry Harrison. Pirates and robbers ply their trade on the river, forcing cargo boat captains to form convoys for mutual protection. But in the early morning hours of December 16, a Monday, all that becomes secondary.”

Crane stepped into the spotlight. “At 2 A.M., Hell comes for a visit.”

A loud crack echoed through the room as a huge scar appeared on the globe. “The ground shakes violently, knocking down log houses. A hideous roar, mixed with hissing and a shrill whistling sound, emanates from the ground which opens. Noxious sulfurous odors envelope the surviving settlers. Flashes of light burst from the ground as it rolls. The ground erupts like a volcano, spraying water, rock, sand, and coal as high as the treetops. Twenty-six of these events occur during this one night. Horrendous. But only foreshocks. The twenty-seventh is the day of the quake and its power is felt in thirty states. Entire forests are leveled. The ground sinks, reforming itself, as huge fissures open up, swallowing everything. The Mississippi River reroutes hundreds of times; caught in huge ground-swells it turns into a nightmare of whirlpools and waterfalls, killing everything alive on the river. At one point it flows upstream. As the banks collapse, the river rises, flooding the whole valley, drowning anything not already dead.

“In Jackson, Mississippi, fifty miles from the epicenter, trees snap and buildings fall. In St. Louis, far upriver, lightning shoots up from the ground, chimneys topple, houses split in two. A thick haze envelopes the city for days. Ruin is extensive in Arkansas. Memphis is devastated by landslides. As far away as Nashville, buildings rumble and quake. A lake just north of Detroit bubbles like a boiling pot. The shocks are felt heavily in Richmond and Washington D. C. The statehouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, is rocked during a late-night legislative session. In Charleston, the church bells clang and residents experience nausea from shaking.”

Lighted branches on the globe extend out from the quake zone to include most of the United States.

“What has this to do with us, doctor?” Li called.

“A great deal, Mr. Li, because our calculations indicate that another major quake on the New Madrid fault line is years overdue.

Many of the precursors of such an EQ are already in place and we are attempting to pinpoint an exact time for this catastrophe. Dr. Newcombe, do you have anything to add?”

Newcombe sat for a moment. He wasn’t sure it was time to sound the alarm, but he couldn’t very well keep silent after Crane’s presentation.

“The Rocky Mountains tend to soak up western quakes,” he said at last. “Any quake to their east is going to be devastating. Our initial findings put the death toll at over three million people and the damages somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred and fifty billion dollars. The inherent chaos would affect the country’s ability to provide goods and services well beyond the quake areas and onto the international stage. The blow to the economy might doom it, and the country might never recover, much as Great Britain was unable to recover from its Twentieth Century wars.”

The entire room fell into a deep, hushed silence. Newcombe took a long breath. “Does that answer your question, Mr. Li?” he asked without rancor.

Crane liked the looks of President Gideon. His concern seemed genuine and he gazed into your eyes when he talked to you. He had an air of command about him that the Vice President lacked. Of course, that didn’t make him any more autonomous than Gabler, just easier to deal with.

“I hope you were merely trying to scare us all, Dr. Crane,” Gideon said, a drink firmly lodged in his hand. “I surely don’t know that I would want to preside over a disaster as all-encompassing as the one you describe.”

Mr. Li, standing beside Gideon, leaned up close to the President. “The good doctor doesn’t have that kind of a sense of humor,” he said. “I think he truly believes the prediction he made today.”

“I’m not conjuring spells, gentlemen,” Crane said, “if that’s what you mean. We’re merely building a reasonable scientific hypothesis.”

The President cocked his head. “You’re not sure this will occur?”

Crane raised his glass, Burt Hill hurrying over to refill it with bourbon. “Oh, it will occur, Mr. President. The Earth will not be denied.”

“But the timing, Crane.” Li smiled. “This is all about the timing.”

“We’re working on it,” Crane replied, watching both men carefully. “The signs are there. We’re trying to put a date on it now. If the globe were finished—”

“But it’s not,” Gabler said. “And your predictions are so much talk.”

“Like Sado was just talk, Mr. Vice President?” Crane replied, staring the man down. “My team is filled with highly skilled professionals who have spent their entire lives building to this moment. What are your credentials, sir?”

Gabler’s face turned red as Gideon put a hand to his mouth to hide his smile.

“We really must pin this down,” Mr. Li said. “The election is only two months away.”

“I’m doing my best,” Crane said. “To hurry into a wrong prediction wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

“True enough,” Li said. Sumi walked up to pour enhanced champagne into his glass. “Remember that it’s in your best interests to come up with something before election time.”

“Could you see it?” Gideon said, holding his own glass out to Sumi. “We announce, in advance, a major disaster … save millions of lives and billions in property. The Yo-Yu people wouldn’t have a chance.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. President, I fear that precisely the opposite might happen,” Li said, catching Sumi by the arm. “We announce a major disaster, evacuate, shut down factories, protect inventory, only to have it never happen.”

“Bite your tongue,” Gideon said.

“Those are the stakes,” Li said. He turned from the President to Crane, his sober expression changing chameleonlike to one of warm affability. “Is Sumi working out to your satisfaction, Dr. Crane?”

Crane and Sumi shared a smile. “Sumi Chan is the best overseer a project could ask for,” Crane replied. “He’s on site most of the time, understands the priorities, and writes the checks accordingly. A first-rate associate.”

“Excellent,” Li said, smiling broadly. He put an arm around Sumi. “Liang Int could use more men like Sumi. You know, doctor, I’m fascinated by your globe. I have one, too.”

“I’ve heard,” Crane said. “You’ll have to show me sometime.”

Li laughed. “I’m afraid that would be impossible. Regulations, you know.”

“Of course. Sumi, President Gideon seems to have emptied his glass.”

“We can’t have that,” Sumi said, bringing the bottle around to give Gideon a refill. “At the Foundation, no glasses are allowed to go empty.”

Gideon nodded happily. He seemed loose and comfortable, his bodyguards, too, at ease. He raised his glass. “To you, doctor.”

They all drank, then Gideon said, “What are the chances of getting a tour of your facility? I find it amazing. If someone’s free, I’ll—”

“No one knows this place like I do,” Crane said. “Come on. Anybody else interested?”

“You two get acquainted,” Li said. “I have some business to discuss with Mr. Chan.”

“Fair enough,” Crane said, leading Gideon off.

Li turned to Sumi. “How close are they really on this New Madrid thing?” he asked, sharp, the foxlike smile with which he’d gifted the others completely gone now.

Sumi shook her head. “I’m not sure. There’s a lot of information coming in. I know they’ve settled on it, but they’re still in the process of pinning it down. They might find it won’t happen for years.”

Li frowned. “I want them to find a quake that’s going to happen before the election.”

“They can only do what they can do.”

“No, Sumi. They can find a quake—if Crane’s theories are at all on the mark. But to do so, these people must apply themselves to getting what I want—not indulging themselves playing with their data and their toys—” he sneered “—their basic research. Speaking of research, how is yours on Dr. Newcombe? Is his little journey still on for tonight?”

Sumi nodded, feeling the net that had fallen over everyone at the Foundation was being tightened. “He’ll be traveling under the name Enos Mann. He’ll leave with the dark.”

“Hmm, gone all night then. The Masada Cloud is scheduled to run in around midnight.”

“Are your people in place?”

“Don’t worry about my people,” Li said, a frown settling on his face as Mui approached. “You take care of pushing these people to get me that prediction. Now I suggest you circulate so that we do not make people suspicious.”

Sumi bowed slightly, holding in the tension and the anger. She moved toward Newcombe, wishing there was something she could say, some subtle way she could get across to the man that he should stay at home tonight. Newcombe’s actions could doom Crane, the Foundation. Kate Masters, dressed in a bright red body stocking and trailing cape, was talking as Sumi arrived, champagne in hand.

“Oh, Sumi,” Masters said, her red hair in tight curls hanging to her shoulders. “You simply must give me the secret of this sometime.” She held out her glass.

“Old family recipe,” Sumi said, giving Masters the kind of leer she’d seen men do. “Good for your sex life.”

“Honey, I got no problems in that department, but fill me up anyway.” She held out her glass, and Sumi poured. In a lot of ways, she felt that Masters played a game of hide and seek similar to her own, a game designed for a man’s world. There was more, much more, to Masters than she revealed.

“Hey, save some of that for me,” Newcombe said, holding out his own glass.

“I want all of you to know,” Masters said, taking a long drink, “I think what you’re doing here is important. I know that Crane has to sell it to the powers that be and that by its selling it becomes cheapened. But not to me.”

“We appreciate that,” Lanie said, smiling at her. “We really only want to help people here, but it seems we always have to have an angle.”

“Nature of the game,” Newcombe said, frowning. “It’s a game I hate, but it’s the only one in town.”

“You scared me to death, you know, with your speech today,” Masters said.

“I hope so,” Newcombe said. “It’s got me scared to death.”

“For what it’s worth,” Masters said, taking another long drink, “we traded the Vogelman Procedure for backing the Crane Foundation, but had the administration declined, we would have backed you anyway. Some things are more important than politics. You people have class.”

“Hale fellows well met, huh?” Sumi said. “Good for you. I must go get another bottle now. Stay in the shade.”

Sumi left quickly, Lanie following him with her eyes. There was something terribly lonely, terribly sad about Sumi Chan. She didn’t trust him, but that didn’t stop her from feeling sorry for him. She looked at Masters. “What’s involved in the Vogelman?”

“You interested, honey?”

“No,” Newcombe answered for her. “We’ll just—”

“Yes, I am interested,” Lanie said, looking steadily at Newcombe. “I have a lot to do in the next couple of years and I don’t want to have to worry about children.”

“Single implant,” Masters said. “Outpatient stuff, over in fifteen minutes. It stays put forever and keeps you from ovulating—no cramps, no periods.” She looked at Newcombe. “A lot of women are having it done.”

“So much for the world’s population,” he said.

“You want to get preggie, you take a pill. No sweat. Mothers are having it done on their daughters at puberty. It takes care of one headache.”

“It’s unnatural,” Newcombe said.

Masters flashed her toothy smile. “Easy for you to say, buster. Nature is as nature does. There’s a couple of really good doctors in LA who do the procedure, Lanie. You want me to set something up for you?”

“Yes,” Lanie said.

“No,” Newcombe said.

Masters took a long breath, finished her glass of enhanced. “So … maybe you two had better talk it over, eh?”

“I’ll call you,” Lanie said, glaring at Newcombe. Why did he have to be so overbearing?

“I’d better mingle,” Masters said, theatrically tossing her long hair. “They don’t pay me to stand here and drink.”

“Like hell they don’t,” Newcombe said.

The woman shrugged. “So I know when to make a graceful exit, okay? Thanks again for the show today. I’ll have nightmares for a week.” She shook hands with Newcombe and gave Lanie a lingering hug.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Lanie whispered. When Masters was well away, Lanie turned angrily to Dan. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been more embarrassed,” she said. “How could you do that?”

“How could I? Isn’t something like this a decision both of us should make?”

“Not from where I’m standing. It’s my body, my life. And next week I’m going to have the Procedure done whether you like it or not.”

“We’re not kids anymore,” he said. “Your childbearing years won’t last much—”

“Childbearing,” she said, taking a long breath to relax herself. “I’m not some earth mother just waiting for fertilization, Dan. Why do you always have to spoil—”

“It’s a great day!” Crane interrupted. “We set ’em on their asses, didn’t we?”

“We promised them something we can’t deliver,” Newcombe said harshly. “What’s so great about that? At the very least you should have waited until we took stress readings on site before announcing the quake to the world.”

Crane looked at Lanie. “What’s his problem?”

“Babies,” she said.

“Babies,” Crane repeated, then shivered. “What a horrid thought. Never mind. We’ll have all the loose cannons out of here in a tick. I want to invite both of you up to my house for dinner, a little celebration.”

Lanie brightened. “That sounds—”

“I can’t,” Newcombe said.

“What? You got another invitation?” Crane asked.

Lanie watched Dan avert his eyes. “I’ve got to go down the mountain,” he said. “I’ve been putting off checking the calibration on our San Andreas equipment. It needs to get done.”

“Tonight?” Crane said. “It’s a Masada night.”

“I’ll take a burn suit.”

“Take two,” Lanie said. “I’ll go with you.”

He shook his head. “You stay here. Enjoy dinner. I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

“I really don’t mind, I—”

“I want to do this by myself,” Newcombe said, Lanie surprised at how mad he was. “Nothing personal … I-I need some time to think.”

“Think about what?” Lanie asked, suspecting that his behavior had nothing to do with her having the Vogelman Procedure, that it was something else he was hiding from her.

“Doc Dan!” Burt Hill called as he trotted toward them. “It’s getting dark. I got the helo out for you if you still want it!”

“Coming!” Newcombe said. “I’ll be back in the morning. Enjoy your dinner.”

With that, he turned and strode across the globe room without a backward glance.

“What the hell was that all about?” Crane asked.

Lanie shook her head. “I don’t know, but it had nothing to do with the San Andreas Fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sent one of his techs to recalibrate that equipment last week.”

“Are you ready yet?” Crane called from the cherrypicker as he sped around the globe on the thing, thirty feet in the air.

“Come down from there!” Lanie shouted. “You’re going to kill yourself.” The crazy man was hanging out of the gondola and waving a bottle of rum at them.

“I’m too ornery to die!” he yelled through cupped hands. “Get your people’s asses in gear and let’s crank this thing up.”

“We’re working on it!”

Sumi was at Lanie’s side. “Crane seems … exuberant tonight.”

“That’s one word to describe him, I guess.” Lanie was starving. Crane’s dinner invitation never quite materialized once he got hung up on the idea of trying out the globe for real. Between Dan’s absence and Crane’s childishness, she was beginning to feel more like a mother than an associate.

She turned to her programmers, then rolled her eyes at Sumi. “Come on, people. You heard the man. Let’s get the thing online.”

Groans and complaints came from all down the row. Lanie looked at Sumi. “Can you get him down?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t even try.”

“That’s what I thought.”

She moved away from the terminals set against the wall and out near the globe, the thing rising majestically into its contoured ceiling. They were so small beside such a large dream. “Get yourself down here!” she called up to Crane as his hoist made another circumnavigation. “Or I’ll shut it down!”

He banged the controls, the hoist jerking to a stop, his gondola swinging wildly. His bottle crashed on the floor near Lanie. “Oops,” he said.

“Down Crane … now!”

He brought the gondola down to the floor and stepped out of it, his face boyishly contrite. “My bottle fell,” he said.

“I’ll get you another,” Sumi said, hurrying off.

“Great,” Lanie said, looking at Crane. “How much more of that have you got?”

“Cases,” Crane said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Cases of rum from the grateful citizens of Le Precheur. What’s the holdup on the test run?”

“As you may or may not know, doctor,” she said sternly, “we’ve been feeding info, not programs, into the computers. A task, I might add, that we haven’t finished yet. We’re having to open up all the pathways for your little test run tonight. These people have been at work all day and they’re tired. Give them a minute, okay?”

“You’re angry with me,” he said, pouting.

“I’m angry at Dan,” she said. “You’re here. One thick-headed geologist is the same as the next.”

“Dan’s a big boy. He’s got business or something, that’s all.”

“His life is here. He’s got no business below.”

“One bottle of Martinique rum.” Sumi said, hurrying up to them and giving Crane the bottle. “Unenhanced.”

Crane unscrewed the top and took a long drink, turning on his heel to stare at the magnificent globe. “I’m going to go nuts soon if we don’t get this thing running.”

“You’re already nuts,” Lanie returned. “Look, you can’t expect much this first time out. The intangibles are—”

“The intangibles are the reason I hired you,” he said, his smile gone. “That’s why the imager is here, to talk to my globe, to synnoetically communicate, to synergize.”

“It’s not simple, you know. We’re getting in all the historical data, but we’re talking about the life of the planet itself. Somebody digs a pool in Rome, lubricating an unknown fault: Two years later there’s a major earthquake in Alaska. We can’t program in chaos and we don’t know how large, how pivotal, a role it plays.”

Crane looked at Sumi. “What do you think?”

“I think you need to predict something before the election or we’re going to lose our funding. If this will advance that cause, then I’m all for full speed ahead.”

Lanie ignored Crane and looked at Sumi. “What the hell good would it do any of us to mispredict? I don’t get you. You’re as bad as Mr. Li. We can’t make the earth perform to our specs.”

“We can’t survive without funding either,” Sumi said, then looked at Crane. “You all but predicted an EQ in mid America within the next few months. I didn’t say it, you did.”

“We were on the spot,” Crane said. “Needed to come up with something, that’s all. The signs are there, but not complete signs.”

“What else do you need?”

Lanie felt a chill go through her when Sumi asked the question and she wasn’t sure why.

“We’re going to the site next week to take stress readings. That will tell a more complete story.” Crane drank. “Some increased activity after the period of dilation or a foreshock would be nice. More ground-based electrical activity wouldn’t hurt either. Though with the dilation process, I’d be willing to do some speculation if the seismic activity picked up again. It’s a pretty good sign that lubricating activity has moved the serpentine, the olivine and water mix, into a position to make a major fault slip.”

“You’d predict on that?” Sumi asked.

“If push came to shove,” Crane said, then pointed to Lanie with his good hand which also held the bottle. “And I want to tell you something. First of all, I want no negativity. We’ve gotten this far by being positive and bold. Secondly, we’re fulfilling the dream of a lifetime here. Your computers are becoming crammed with more knowledge about planet Earth than any other single source encompasses. Answers will lie there. Maybe, once we’ve assimilated all this knowledge, you might possibly discover a great many things we’ve never realized before, including the notion that there might be a pattern to chaos.”

“Don’t you ever run down?” she asked.

“Never!”

“I think we’re online!” one of the programmers called, a small cheer going up from them all.

“I thank you one and all.” Crane turned to Lanie. “Would you like to do the honors?”

She felt it then, the mixture of fear and excitement that she’d held at bay ever since he’d suggested trying the program. She nodded, unable to speak, and walked to the master board, a double-tiered profusion of winking lights, rheostats, and buttons with a single, controlling keyboard below a large monitor.

She juiced the monitor to a flashing cursor and wished that Dan were here, no matter how things came out. She hesitated at the keyboard.

“We don’t have any brass bands, Ms. King,” Crane said, and he was staring straight up at the monstrous globe.

Fingers shaking, she typed: Advance from Pangaea. Then she took a deep breath and hit the enter key.

With a low groan, the globe started spinning, the continents reforming themselves to the single, great continent of enormous weather variations. It split apart quietly, the continents running red veins of EQ’s where they broke and sheared against one another.

“Beautiful,” Crane said. Lanie far too involved in watching for glitches in the process to appreciate it. She was a bundle of nervous energy as she walked up to join him.

“What’s our first historical interphase?” he asked, his voice hushed.

“The Chicxulub meteor, five miles wide,” she said, “sixty-five million years ago.”

“The K-T boundary,” Crane said.

She stared, shaking, at the globe. “Yeah. Beginning of the Tertiary, end of the dinosaurs. Look for volcanoes on the antipode. There.”

The holoprojection of a huge meteor burning in the atmosphere flew through the globe room, slamming into the Yucatan peninsula. A mammoth dust cover rose and spread over the entire globe, the faintest trace of throbbing red lines extending from the impact site showing through the dust as volcanic activity began on the opposite side of the sphere.

Crane reached out and grabbed her arm, his face transfixed as he watched Earth history create itself before his eyes. “Yes,” he whispered to her own growing excitement.

And then she heard it: A small bell sound from a distant programming station, then another, and another. The system was shutting down.

“No,” she said, breaking free of his grasp and turning to her console, error messages flashing, bells clanging loudly all over the huge room. She turned her back and looked. The globe had shut itself down completely. Crane’s head jerked from side to side, and a deep growl issued from his throat.

She reached for the console, her hands ready to type in damage control, but she stopped when she saw words written on the monitor that she’d hoped never to see:

Her hands fell to her sides in utter confusion, Crane striding quickly to stand beside her.

“Get on with it,” he said. “Work the inconsistency.”

“I can’t,” she said, pointing to the screen. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

He read the words, then spun her by the shoulders to face him. “What does it mean?”

A horrible confusion took hold of her as other programmers walked slowly to form a loose cordon around her and Crane. “It means that the Mexican crater cannot be made to fit historically with anything else we’ve programmed into the machines. It’s telling us this is impossible.”

“No,” he said, then louder, “No! I will not accept that. Reset it and let’s do it again.”

“Look, Crane,” she said. “There are two possibilities. One is that we misprogrammed, which is understandable considering you gave us no time to double-check ourselves. To fix that, we’ll have to go back over everything we’ve done tonight, checking it every step of the way. These people are too tired for that.”

“What’s the other possibility?”

She took a long breath. “Events before Chicxulub, perhaps the breakup of Pangaea itself, had already altered the world so much that the meteor’s impact had a different effect than the one shown on our globe.”

“You told me that the machine could define and correct such inconsistencies by running through the limited possibilities of missed events.”

She watched him tilt the bottle to his lips and drink half of it in one long pull. He was, as always, a time bomb ready to explode. “That’s between known event and known event,” she said. “Between, say Chicxulub and the walls of Jericho falling. But Chicxulub’s as early as we know about. Anything before that is pure speculation.”

He pointed at her again, his finger shaking with drunken rage. “Still within a limited scope of possibilities,” he said, turning from her to walk to the globe, staring straight up at it, as if concentration could give him the answers of his life. For the first time since she’d come to work for Crane, she began to wonder how much of his energy carried this project. It wouldn’t be the first time that a crazy man had talked people into believing nonsense.

He turned to her. “Crank it up again,” he said. “We’ll check the program as we go.”

“No,” she said. “My programmers are tired. I’m tired. Let’s try it again in the morning.”

“I gave you an order!”

“And I refused it.”

“Damn you!” he yelled, flinging his arm up. The half-finished bottle went flying into the globe, smashing on Siberia. Acrid smoke rose where the rum had drenched the wiring. “You’re fired!”

“Fine,” she said, and turned to the group of programmers huddled around her. “Go on home. We’re through here for the night. Your new boss will tell you what to do tomorrow.”

“I think we need to get him home,” Sumi said.

“The hell with him.”

“Lanie…”

Lanie nodded wearily and moved to take Crane by his bad arm while Sumi took his good. “Come on, we’ll get you home,” Sumi said. “You need sleep.”

“I don’t need sleep,” Crane said, reluctantly letting them lead him out, watching the globe as they dragged him away. “I need to sit down and work.” He turned and kissed Lanie on the cheek. “Ah, perhaps it’s a matter of weight. How much did you add to Earth’s total?”

“A thousand short tons a day because of meteor impacts.”

“Try adding in more weight than that in earlier times. Meteor activity is far less now than it was a billion years ago.”

“Whatever you say,” she returned, and they got him outside, Crane brushing them off to stand on his own.

He looked up at the sky, the Moon three-quarters full, running scenes of bloody car wrecks on its side. “That’s where I need to live,” he said, pointing, then looking at both hands for a bottle that was no longer there. “Up there I could watch the lunacy rise in the morning and set in the evening.” He guffawed.

They walked toward the staircases set into the mountainside. “At least you wouldn’t have to worry about earthquakes on the Moon,” Lanie said.

Crane and Sumi laughed. “The Moon has earthquakes,” Sumi said.

“Really?”

“About three thousand a year,” Crane said, weaving.

“Is there a core?”

“Yep,” Crane answered. “A nine-hundred-mile diameter. They’re little quakes though, Richter 2s. Very seldom break the surface. Almost like a quake memory.”

“A memory of what?” Sumi asked.

“I don’t know.” Crane stared again at the Moon. “A man could build a world to suit himself up there. Not like the mining companies, the takers, but a world of truth.”

“You’re starting to sound like Dan,” Sumi said. “There is no truth.”

“Science is truth,” Lanie said quickly. “Love is truth.”

“There is no such thing as love,” Sumi replied bitterly, the first time Lanie had ever heard the man expose anything of himself. “Love is simply a disguise for pain.”

“That’s not true,” Lanie said.

Sumi looked at her, eyes inscrutable. “Then where is your man tonight?”

“The lie of freedom,” Crane said, quoting Newcombe. “The lie of security. The lie of politics. The lie of religion.” He turned to Lanie. “You’re not fired.”

“Thank you … I think.”

“You must make the globe work. Do you understand what I’m saying? This can’t stop here; it just can’t. The dream … the dream…”

Lanie shuddered, thinking of dreams and realizing why she was so upset that Dan was gone. She’d have to face the night alone. “I’ll do everything I can to make the globe work,” she said. “Trust me.”

“I do trust you. I trust you as much as I trust Dan … or Sumi, here.” He patted the small man on the back, Chan looking uncomfortable. It made Lanie sad to think Crane’s world was so small he had to trust Sumi Chan, though she could think of no reason for the feeling.

A bell sound drifted on the warm breeze across their plateau, followed by the compound computer’s voice saying: “The radiation levels have risen to an unacceptable range. Please take shelter and appropriate precautions immediately.”

The immediate response was the sound of closing doors and snapping window-shields.

“The cloud,” Crane said, pointing to the west. The Masada Cloud. “We’d better get indoors. Let’s go up to my place for a drink. What do you say?”

“Crane,” Lanie said, “if you’d ever open your eyes you’d realize that I can’t go up to your place.”

He stared at her, face slack, then his eyebrows shot up. “Vertigo,” he said. “I remember now. You’re afraid of heights.”

“Petrified, is more like it,” she said. “My knees weaken and I simply shut down physically.”

Crane laughed. “I always wonder why you and Dan never come up to visit me. You’re just full of surprises.”

They had arrived at the stairs; Lanie walked up to the first landing, the lowest level where the bungalow she shared with Dan was located. Crane, using Sumi for support, straggled behind. “If you think that’s something,” she said, “wait until you hear about the nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” he said, reaching the landing.

“I dream about Martinique every time I go to sleep.”

“What are you dreaming?” he asked.

“I’m remembering little things,” she said and shivered. The wind blowing in with the Cloud was cold. “Pieces. I remember sitting in the dark and touching that poor boy’s body. I remember … rum.”

“What else?”

She frowned. Crane seemed upset about her dream. “You’re in the dream,” she said slowly. “You’re wearing a big, bulky suit… all white like a burn suit, only bigger … more solid. You’re all excited about something, but I can’t hear you through all the bulky clothing, I … I’m not sure. There’s screaming and explosions all around me, and that dead boy is there … and all the men covered with mud. I-I guess the worst of it is the feeling it makes me have.”

“What feeling?”

“Like I’m waiting to die.” Tears came rolling down her cheeks. She reached for the knob on her front door.

“Lanie, I—”

“I’ve got to go in,” she said abruptly. She went inside quickly before Sumi and Crane could see her fall apart.

“Dan,” she cried softly, burying her face in her hands. “Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?”

She went to bed and cried herself to sleep—and had the nightmare again, only this time Crane was reaching for her in his bulky suit, trying to make her take his hands. This time, she could hear the word he was yelling: Pangaea.

Chapter 8 CHAOS THEORY

Newcombe walked slowly through the carnival on the edge of darkness, two blocks from the leveled ground surrounding the Zone. The sidewalks, even the streets were clogged with people rushing to beat the Cloud and with off-duty federal cops killing time.

Lines were long at the dorph and food markets, customers nervously watching the skies while residents bolted steel shutters and doors to their homes and business establishments, preparing for Masada. Everyone was hoping it wouldn’t rain. As always, the broken streets were camouflaged with the eye candy of swirling light and color as teev played on the blank walls and holoprojections wandered aimlessly through crowds or talked to their owners, keeping them company in line.

Newcombe was, quite literally, looking for trouble. Brother Ishmael had finally talked him down off the mountain. He was excited. Being with Brother Ishmael, even if it had been only his projection and only twice a week, had made Newcombe feel a part of a larger life force. But the meetings had intensified his internal conflict. He wanted success and acceptance in the white and Asian world, while he also wanted the wholeness of identity and comfort that came from solidarity with his Africk brothers and sisters.

He stopped a dorph street vendor, a little white man, and bought a liquid dose.

“You know where the Horizon Parlor is?” he asked as he took the small bottle that the vendor had poked a straw into.

“One block … right down there.” The vendor pointed into a kaleidoscopic mass of bright light and motion. “You don’t look the type.”

“What type is that?”

“Head jobs… chippies, whatever you want to call them.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at the sides of Newcombe’s head, trying to spot interface ports. “First time?”

“What’re you, a cop?” Newcombe asked.

The man’s eyes widened. “You don’t have to insult me!” He marched away with his cart, and Newcombe started to work his way through the mob. Security cams were everywhere, but he always wondered who monitored their output. There were ten times more cameras than people in Los Angeles, with the G there to back them up, their smiling face masks making them look like benign Golems, their small booking robots toddling along with them. But there was to be no trouble tonight. The crowd was polite, evened out. Business as usual.

“There!” someone called. Newcombe tightened up, but was immediately relieved to see that people were pointing upward at the night sky. The first wisps of black cloud were drifting overhead. He needed to get indoors.

He picked up the pace, relieved to see the word HORIZON in blood-red gothic print, drifting in the air in front of an unmarked steel two-story building. He hurried to the sole door he could see in its windowless facade and got inside.

He’d never been in a chip club before, had no idea what to expect. Liang had condemned the use of direct access brain chips long ago because chip addicts didn’t consume much except chips. But free enterprise was not to be denied and Yo-Yu had moved in to fill the void left by Liang, opening chip clubs despite bans against advertising and aggressively restrictive zoning laws.

He passed through a narrow, dark foyer, then through another door into a wide white beach looking out into an endless ocean. He could smell the ocean and feel the hot, salty breeze. He could barely hear the noise of the outside world, the warning horns bleating, telling the citizens to get off the streets.

A Chinese man in a swimsuit was walking toward him from way down the beach. Newcombe sat on a canvas chair and waited.

The man came close. “Excuse me … sir!” he called.

The man stopped and turned. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“I’m wondering if you could help—”

“I’ve got to go. I’ve lost my dog,” he said.

A gull flew down to perch on Newcombe’s shoulder. “Sorry,” the gull said. “I was tied up in back. Someone didn’t want to vacate when their time was up. Waiting long?”

“I’m supposed to meet someone here,” Newcombe said carefully.

The gull took to the skies, flying circles around Newcombe. “If you don’t have a reservation,” it said, “you won’t be doing anything. We’re always booked solid on Masada nights.”

“My name is Enos Mann.”

The bird squawked, then landed on his head. “Ah, Arabian adventure,” it said. “We’ve been expecting you. Follow me.”

The gull flew out over the ocean, Newcombe followed, stepping into the water without getting wet. He felt a curtain in his face, and parted it to find a hallway filled with doorways. A man was staring at him. “This way please,” he said in the gull’s voice.

Moans and cries issued from behind the closed doors. Newcombe had seen chippies on the teev, but Liang always had them portrayed as emaciated shells, living only for the brain fix. He had no idea of what it was really like to interface directly with a computer, though the thought of joining with the Foundation’s machines struck him as a marvelous notion.

The man opened the next to last door, ushering him into a bare utilitarian room containing bed and a recliner, with a small table set between them. An inch-square chip sat in the center of a tiny red pillow. Alongside on the formica of the table was a box with flashing numbers, its meter.

“You heard the horns?” the man asked as he slid the bed aside to reveal a manhole cover in the floor.

“Yeah.”

“You’re here for the night.” The man stomped twice on the manhole, then left, the steel door clicking locked behind him.

His heart beating fast, Newcombe stared around the room. He picked up the chip, studied it, wondered about the moans and laughter he’d heard. If he were to change his mind, this would be the last possible instant in which he could get out. He looked at the door, then at the manhole in the floor.

It moved. Newcombe jumped back as it lifted, a smiling face peering out of the darkness. “Brother Daniel!” Mohammad Ishmael said and chuckled, “how pale you’ve turned.”

“You make a grand entrance.” Ishmael climbed out of the hole and hugged Newcombe. Two young men eased over the rim and into the room. They had scanners and came close to examine Newcombe.

“I see there was a big meeting today at the Foundation,” Ishmael said, straightening his dashiki.

“How did you know that?” Newcombe asked, raising his hands up so they could scan under his arms.

“I keep tabs on my brother,” Ishmael said. “He moves in elite circles. How is President Gideon? What’s he like?”

Newcombe shrugged. “He’s a politician.”

“Who isn’t? Is Liang still insisting on a quick prediction?”

“Very quick.”

Ishmael fixed him with bright eyes. “It’s a rollover, Brother. Remember I told you that. Watch out.”

The scanners were buzzing. “Two transmitters,” one of the young men reported. “One on the right hand, the other on the left sleeve.”

“The one on the hand is mine,” Ishmael said, moving to look at Newcombe’s sleeve.

“I don’t know anything about this,” Newcombe said, suddenly frightened at the position he’d put himself into. “I would never—”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Ishmael said, pulling the bug, scarcely bigger than a mite, off his sleeve and stomping on it. “This could have come from anyplace. They float on the breezes outside.”

“We must go,” one of the bodyguards said.

Ishmael nodded and moved to the manhole. “Follow me, Brother.” He started climbing down.

Newcombe was really scared now. The bug queered everything. Not only was he consorting with the enemy, but also there was someone who knew about it. Gently pushed from behind by one of the bodyguards, he realized as he walked to the opening in the floor that he was no longer in control of his life, and wondered if Ishmael had planned it this way.

A metal ladder led down into darkness. He looked over his shoulder at the bodyguards, one climbing down on his heels, the other locking the manhole over them. He reached ground about thirty feet later, Ishmael right beside him, his face glowing faintly in the haze of a red dry cell light in the brick sewer.

He started to speak but was interrupted by a menacing buzzer. “Uh-oh,” Ishmael said loudly over the noise. “The G is at the door. Come on, you’ll get to see what it’s like to be a revolutionary.”

They strode through a long tunnel, lit with the same bloody haze. It seemed to stretch on forever. They were moving fast, the bodyguards always right behind.

“This doesn’t look like the sewer system,” Newcombe said as they hurried along.

“It’s not. We built it.”

“How?”

“Prisoners dig. That’s what they do.” He took a sharp right turn and walked into, then through, a wall. Newcombe followed, the wall a projection. He found himself in another hallway, this one tiled and well lit. It branched off to either side at ten-foot intervals. “We will fight in these tunnels and escape through them, should it come to that,” Ishmael said.

He turned into another wall, and Newcombe, confused, followed closely. They were at the top of an ornate winding staircase. They descended. Or was it an illusion?

“I didn’t mean how did you dig them,” Newcombe said. “I meant how did you afford to dig them?”

“Money is not a problem for us. Space is. We have many benefactors, people like you who have found their way to us and are sympathetic to an Islamic State on this continent. There is much you don’t understand.”

“Apparently. And, by the way, I really didn’t lead the G here intentionally. I have no idea how that—”

“Nature of the white man’s world,” Ishmael said, waving it off as he reached the bottom of the stairs.

They were in a vast echoing cave honeycombed with tunnels. It was lit by torches, hundreds of them. Ishmael moved quickly across the chamber.

“Are we going to be caught?” Newcombe called from behind as he hurried without prompting now.

“Hope not!”

They ran for nearly a minute before reaching rock walls. Ishmael pulled on a ground-level boulder, the cave face creaking open to reveal an elevator within.

Once they were all inside, Ishmael pushed a button to close the rock doors. They moved through the virtual back of the machine and into another hallway whose walls, ceiling, floor were tiled in ceramic squares of the palest blues and yellows. There were no doors. Ishmael slowed his pace, Newcombe realizing they were close to their destination. The beauty of the elevator was that its function motor could disguise the virtual projection equipment.

“Does the elevator go down?” he asked.

“And up,” Ishmael said. “It leads into a myriad other passages, even into the real sewer system. You’re the one who’s in trouble, you know.”

Newcombe knew. “Whoever owns that bug owns my ass,” he said bitterly. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

Ishmael looked Newcombe dead in the eye and shook his head. “We’re on the same side, Brother.”

“I hope so,” Newcombe said. The hallway was well lit now and twisted sharply to the right.

The hallway was cracked all the way around, the walls out of line. “How far down are we?” Newcombe asked.

“Fifty… seventy-five feet. The earth shifts a bit, eh?”

“This is part of the Elysian system of faults,” he said, excited to look at a transform fault. He ran his hand over the jagged, angry crack. “How long has it been like this?”

“Maybe two years. Gets a little worse each day.”

Other people were walking toward them along the hall. “This isn’t going to stop,” Newcombe said. “It will eventually destroy this whole section of tunnels.”

“Allah protects,” Ishmael said easily. A crowd of about twenty people, mostly men, surrounded them. Some of them were teenagers. And all of them were armed. “We’ve lost other tunnels.”

A young woman in a black jumpsuit was at his elbow, her face inquisitive, her eyes were Ishmael’s eyes. “You must be Khadijah,” Newcombe said.

“Well, you’ve brought us a mind reader, my brother,” she said, the group laughing.

“This is Daniel Newcombe, the man I’ve told you about.”

“Oh?” Khadijah said. “The man who doesn’t have the courage to join with our Jihad?”

“Yeah,” Newcombe said, staring her down. “That’s me.” He turned to Ishmael. “Have you ever checked the radon levels down here?”

“No.”

“I’ll send you some equipment. Radon can be deadly. Best to know what we’re deal—”

“I trust there are no Elysian Faults and radon emissions in North Carolina,” Ishmael said.

Newcombe stared at him, the true zealot at home with his inventions. Or a visionary. Like Crane. “You want me to butt out … I’ll butt out.”

“I want you to butt in,” Ishmael said, smiling widely and slapping him on the back. He pointed toward the ceiling. “But up there, Brother, not down here. Up there. Come on.”

They went to a pale green door with a crescent moon and single star of Islam painted on it. Ishmael ushered Newcombe inside what looked like a large briefing room with chairs, a stage, small kitchen and break area.

“We’ll meet my brother Martin,” Ishmael said, leading him toward a far door. Khadijah walked with them, a frown on her face, as she sized up Newcombe.

Newcombe saw guns. And ammunition. Everywhere. Boxes of ammunition stacked high against the walls.

He hadn’t seen a gun in fifteen years, ever since personal security had become the national priority. Everyone who could afford bodyguards and security systems had them. Offensive weapons had become easily detectable by X-ray-dar, automatically marking anyone carrying them as a criminal and, consequently, fair game for legal defensive retaliatory response. Offensive weapons, not surprisingly, had fallen into disuse.

Ishmael took him into an office where a middle-aged man dressed in a white robe and small white fez smiled through his salt-and-pepper beard. He was lean, coiled like a snake.

“I have just heard the reports,” he said. “Allah, in his infinite wisdom, has declined to let it rain on the War Zone tonight.”

“Good news,” Ishmael said. “Brother Daniel, this is my brother, Martin Aziz. It was Martin’s idea to approach you.”

“Asalaamu aleycum,” Aziz said, leaning over a desk that separated them to hug Newcombe fiercely, then kiss him on both cheeks. He pointed to miniature security teevs covering the far wall. “I noticed you had some trouble tonight.”

“My doing, I’m afraid,” Newcombe said, stealing a glance at Khadijah, who was rolling her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Aziz said. “They never got past the phony sewer system. They found another manhole and climbed back out, chasing several projections we planted for them. Sit down, Brother Newcombe. It’s you we must worry about now, since the FPF knows you are with us.”

“What will they do to me?” Newcombe asked, taking a hard backed chair near the desk, Ishmael and his sister sitting on a couch across from him.

“Impossible to say.” Ishmael shrugged. “They do what they want. Make up the rules as they go. Have you ever known anyone to come out of an FPF jail?”

“No,” Newcombe said, “but I’ve never known any criminals … I mean, not until now.”

Everyone laughed, even Khadijah.

“I think you’re safe,” Aziz said, “as long as you’re associated with Liang. Away from their protection, who knows?”

“Could Crane have planted your bug?” Ishmael asked, “to keep you under control?”

“That’s very unlikely. Brother Ishmael, he and I are scientists. All we’re trying to do is make life a little better on this planet. Is that so difficult to—”

“That’s all you want,” Khadijah said. “From what I’ve heard, Crane is a complex and devious man.”

“He’s a driven man.”

“But driven to what?” Ishmael asked, getting off the sofa and walking over to Newcombe. “Don’t answer. Just think about it.”

“If your association with us becomes public knowledge,” Aziz asked, “what will happen to you and the Crane Foundation?”

“I have no idea… You asked Brother Ishmael to approach me?”

“Correct,” Aziz replied. “You see, my brother and I have a very different way of looking at things. You may have noticed that I chose Martin, the name of nonviolence, when I rejected my slave name. I believe that the world is ready to hear our righteous demands. We simply need African and Hispanic men of stature in the white world to present them for us. Unfortunately, my brother is the only public symbol we have. People fear him. I want to show America a different side.”

“Whites never give up anything without a fight,” Ishmael said. “Even though outnumbered by other races, they still control the country through the Chinese overlords. The only thing they will listen to is Jihad. We make enough trouble and they will give us what we want to shut us up.”

“Can’t people just vote them out of office?” Newcombe asked. “The teev is right there. Its voting button—”

“Where have you been?” Khadijah asked. “The Chinese will only let whites run for office because they know that whites will maintain the financial status quo. They control the government with money, keeping the whites rich, everybody else beholden.”

“But why should the Chinese fear you?”

Ishmael laughed and returned to his seat.

“We are the next wave, Brother. They will have to make way for us. They should be frightened. They walled us up to end their ‘crime’ problem and still our numbers grow, our influence expands. We do not ingest their poisons. We are strong and incorrigible. The Koran is our guide. We are of the world. They are of history.”

“While Leonard rants,” Martin Aziz said, glancing with a slight smile at Ishmael, who was looking angry at the use of his slave name, “I’ve been thinking about your position. You know, Crane is keeping you down, second to him. I’ve learned about your EQ-eco system and wonder why you don’t use it to elevate yourself a bit. Celebrity makes it much easier to absorb controversy such as you find yourself in.”

“Crane doesn’t want to publish yet,” Newcombe said. “What can I do?”

“You’re a free man,” Ishmael said. “Do what you choose. You tell me this will help the world. So, help the world. Achieve your potential.”

“And become a better spokesman for you,” Newcombe replied. “It’s a moot point. I work for the Foundation, which owns intellectual property rights over anything I come up with. My hands are tied.”

Aziz reached out. “Here, Brother. Let me untie you. Your slavery is not becoming.”

“Go against Crane?” Newcombe said.

“Why not?” Aziz asked. “He’d go against you in a heartbeat.”

“He’s done a lot for me, I—”

“No!” Ishmael shouted, pointing a long finger. “You’ve done a lot for him. Don’t you see? What has Crane ever done but use you to make himself look good? Do you think it’s wrong for him to deny the world your discoveries?”

“Yes, it’s wrong,” Newcombe said. This was something he’d stewed about for weeks. “Of that I’m sure.”

Ishmael leaned down close from his perch on the desk, his voice raspy with anger. “You grovel to a man like Crane because an Africk can’t survive in the white man’s inner world without an owner. Are you too lost in the white woman or tied up in your own webs to see that?”

“Damn you,” Newcombe said, standing, pacing.

“But from me,” Ishmael said, “it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

Newcombe took a long breath, tried to repress his anger at Crane … and couldn’t. “Yes,” he said, “it makes sense.”

“Then I’ve convinced you?”

“No, but you’ve made some inroads.”

Ishmael slid over to the office door and locked it. He turned back, grinning. “I’m in no hurry.”

Gary Panatopolous was a contractor with the Geological Survey. A digger, he was paid by the job, not the depth of the hole he gouged into the earth. He’d been fighting Lanie, Crane, and Newcombe for three straight days up and down the Mississippi about how deep to make the holes. He did not want to dig so much or so deep. His five-year-old son was with him today, standing like his father with hands on hips, scowling at the Foundation team.

His machine, which he called Arthro, was large and black, crouching on eight legs like a spider over a hole that was five feet in diameter. His drill bit was bigger than several men and powerful enough to throw the sediment a mile back up and out of the hole. The digger was two stories high and a block long and sent geysers of dirt and mud heavenward. As it finished each section of digging, its spider legs placed pipe to secure and stabilize the hole. Long after Crane and the team were gone, Mr. Panatopolous would be filling the hole in again.

Newcombe walked between the legs of the digger to join the others; the drill was moving up and down, sucking at the lifeblood of the Earth.

“You people are crazy!” Panatopolous was saying as Newcombe arrived, confirming his status as an honest man to Dan. “What’d’ya think you’re gonna find that deep, huh? Buried treasure?”

“If we’re lucky,” Crane said, his hood pushed back while they stood in the shade of the digger’s underbelly. “Dan, have you had any contact with Burt?”

“He supervised thirty seismo setups,” Newcombe said above the eerie growl emanating from the depths of the hole. “Everything’s up and running. All we need is Nature’s cooperation.”

“Nature never cooperates,” Crane said. “Tame it or live with it. Those are the only options.”

“Yeah,” Lanie said, while tapping her wristpad. “It’s me. What?”

“I’m gonna lose money on this whole deal,” Panatopolous snapped.

“Got it,” Lanie said. “Keep juicing.” She glanced from man to man. “Get on the N channel and take a look at this.”

Newcombe punched his wrist pad, the inside of his goggles instantly showing a chart of the numbers of known earthquakes in the Mississippi Valley by the months of the year. Fully seventy percent of the earthquakes in this area occurred between the months of November and February.

“We’re on with research,” Lanie said. “Want to ask a question?”

“See what you can find about relationships to lunar phases and solar flares,” Crane said. He turned back to Panatopolous, speaking low. “You do what you can for me, and I’ll do what I can for you. Fair?”

“Fair,” the digger said, nodding firmly just as a horn bleated, signifying completion of the digging of this hole. “We have reached six thousand and … fourteen feet. I’ll get the gondola.”

Newcombe kept the N channel on his aural and listened to the response from research.

“We find no correlation between lunar phases and Mississippi Embayment quakes. However, there does seem to be a close relationship between sunspot activity and Reel-foot displacement. Major quakes have taken place during periods of low sunspot activity. Observe the graph.”

Newcombe didn’t bother putting it on. Instead he watched the hole; the thick cable of the digger rewound quickly, whistling, spooling up inside the digger itself—the spider retracting its web.

“What about this year’s solar activity?” Crane asked.

“Few sunspots,” the researcher said, “the fewest since … 1811.”

Crane was not surprised, but Newcombe’s mouth went dry, and Lanie sucked in her breath.

“There’s the gondola,” Newcombe pointed out.

They cut transmission and hurried to the digger which was wheezing bright white smoke from its open belly fifteen feet above.

Newcombe put on a backpack containing a water drill and climbed into the elevator-size car, followed by Crane and Lanie. Crane cradled the spike like a baby.

They journeyed quickly down the tube, freefalling, interior lights coming on. They pulled off their goggles and headgear. A mile passed, brake skids slowing their descent the last several hundred feet. Finally, the gondola clanged against the rock of the graben.

Lanie knelt to pull off the floor round, so like a manhole cover, Newcombe thought, smiling wryly. They stared down at five- hundred-million-year-old rock.

They sat on the edge of the opening, planting their feet on the rock. It was smooth and flat, polished by the digger. Newcombe got out the drill and attached the gauging armature to the front. “Turn me on,” he told Lanie, who flipped the switch on the backpack that juiced the compressor.

Pressurized water shot from the nozzle in a pencil-thin line, drilling easily into the rock, the nozzle then moving down the armature until it hit bottom after about ten inches.

He released the pressure and pulled away the drill. Crane unwrapped the ten-inch spike and its toy hammer. The spike had a hairlike appendage on the end, the brains of the machine. He looked at Lanie. “Would you like to do the honors?”

She smiled and took the apparatus, leaned forward and slid the spike into the drill hole until barely a half inch protruded. She used the hammer then, tapping the spike gently. An activation hum sounded immediately.

“I’m already tied to the van’s system,” Newcombe said, pulling the tiny interface out of his wristpad to hook to the top of the spike. He married the units, then hit enter, the wristpad bleeping as it measured the amount of compression stress being exerted on the rock of the graben.

He ran some of it through his goggles as it fed to the van. “What’s the slippage on this a year?”

“Couple inches,” Crane said, “accumulated over two hundred years.”

Numbers in red and blue flashed past Newcombe’s eyes. “That’s over thirty-three feet in slip built up. A lot of pressure. I’m looking at stress numbers here that exceed anything I’ve ever seen. We’re getting damned close to the rupture threshold.”

The numbers stopped. “There’s going to be an earthquake here,” Newcombe whispered, “and soon.”

“I know,” Crane said, holding his left arm and grimacing.

At that moment a wall of noise rumbled through the rock, their cavern shaking for several seconds, dirt cascading down and coating them.

“Real soon,” Newcombe said. Lanie clutched his shoulder.

Crane calmly tapped his wrist pad. “Take us up, Mr. Panatopolous,” he said. “We’re finished.”

Sumi listened to the down link bleep on her console and knew she was hearing a grace note in the long sonata that had begun several months before in VEMA’s observation deck at the bottom of the Pacific. Her swan song.

Outside it was raining. Most of the crew at the Foundation had taken the day off since both Crane and Burt Hill were in Missouri. Everyone from techs to department heads were outside, their voices drifting happily up to Sumi’s perch.

Dutifully, she tapped the R line, Mr. Li’s open emergency line. He answered immediately.

“It’s Sumi Chan, sir,” she said. “You asked me to inform you when the New Madrid party started sending back data. I’ve used security access to divert it to me instead of the Foundation’s computers.” Sumi felt ashamed.

“Good initiative, Sumi,” Mr. Li said in an almost humorous tone that was quite unlike him. Something was happening. “Are these the stress readings you told me Crane thought so important?”

“Crane said he’d do a prediction based on the results of the stress tests, yes.” She could feel it coming, the decision of her lifetime. She always had engaged in situational ethics, and she felt she had no inner reserves of strength to draw from in making this decision.

“What are your recommendations?” Li prompted.

Sumi drew a long breath. “I have none,” she said finally.

“You’ve stolen their numbers, yet have no recommendation?”

“Sir,” Sumi said, “any recommendation I could make would be cancelled out by adverse conclusion.”

“Hold on,” Li said, clicking off. A second later, he materialized beside her desk in projection.

“Come … sit with me, Sumi. It’s tune we talked.”

She rose from the computer and followed the projection to her sofa. Li, a wicked glint in his eye, offered her a seat before sitting himself. He hovered two inches above the lowslung couch.

“Now,” Li said. “Suppose you tell me what the recommendation is, then let me judge the ‘adverse conclusion’ for myself. Please.”

Sumi’s mind was melting down. Generation equipment had to be hidden somewhere in her chalet in order to bring off his projection. And he knew that she knew. The noose tightened around her neck. Who watches the watcher?

She cleared her throat. “If you want to have Crane predict before the election, simply change the stress numbers, making them infinitesimally larger, increasing the notion of the stress, making the problem seem more immediate. I know enough about the EQ-eco to work the math and bring the numbers up to rupture point.”

“Wonderful,” Li said, smirking. “What could possibly be the downside of that?”

“You don’t see?” Sumi asked, and reached into the pocket of her work pants for dorph gum. “These people, Mr. Li, are on the verge of predicting the most devastating earthquake in the history of the United States of Liang America. I trust their judgment.” She stuck two pieces of gum in her mouth. “If we intentionally mispredict, you’re leaving a large population base at tremendous risk for when the quake really does come.”

Li shrugged. “We’re trying to win an election here. There have been several destructive quakes in different parts of the country since the last election. People are afraid and they’ll be grateful for our concern whether the prediction turns out to be correct or not. They’ll vote for our candidates.”

“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

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 Yucatan 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 Reel-foot 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.”

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 wooden 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.”

“Are you saying I did this deliberately?”

“I don’t know if you did or you didn’t,” she replied. “I only know you had no right to steal Crane’s property just because he wasn’t handling it the way you wanted him to.”

“I gave it to the world, Lanie,” he said, walking up to touch her shoulder. “You’re going to have to get used to that.”

She twisted away from him and turned her back. “You like to steamroll over everything, don’t you? If you want to know the real reason I had the Vogelman done, it’s because I knew, once you got it in your head, that you’d steamroll me into having babies and doing what you wanted me to do.”

He turned her around. “Wait a minute. I thought we’d decided you weren’t going to have that procedure.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make,” she said, jerking away from him again to face the screen, the wall now filled with a close-up of Dan’s face. “Like that wasn’t your decision to make.”

“You did it without telling me.”

She was still looking at his giant face, the eyes so sincere. She had to laugh. “Seems as though you’ve done a few things without telling me, too.”

“Oh, hell,” he said, softening. “Turn that thing off and let’s go back to bed.”

She couldn’t face him, knew she couldn’t sleep with him tonight. “You go on,” she said. “I’ll be up later.”

Lanie stiffened when he touched her. Newcombe grunted and moved away. “Fine,” he said, starting up the stairs. “Do me one favor, though. Don’t let yourself get too caught up in Crane’s fantasies. He’s only a crazy man, that’s all!”

“My globe is not crazy!”

He ignored her, moving up to the loft, the light clicking out to the sound of the bed-springs.

She turned and stared at the front door. “It’s not crazy,” she whispered to the man who wasn’t standing there any longer.

“And then the guy tells me,” Newcombe said, swinging the mallet to pound Lanie’s sensor pole into the black delta soil, “that he’s going to put my name up for the Nobel Prize.”

“A touch early to open the champagne, don’t you think?” Lanie was good and tired of this subject—in fact, Dan was so full of himself these days that she was getting a little tired of him. “Usually the science prize is given many years after the discovery.”

“It happened early for Crane.” Newcombe helped Lanie pick up the long brushlike antenna and slide it into the hole. “Give me the opportunity to get a little excited, okay?”

“You’re the doctor.”

“Damn right, doctor.”

She smiled and locked the focus on the top of the apparatus. The red light came on indicating that data was being transmitted and she turned and looked back down the line.

This was the fiftieth pole, the final one in a neat row that defined the edge of Dan’s calculated zone of destruction. Half a mile beyond lay the tent city, filling many acres of cotton field. Thousands of people had fled here already, and they were preparing for thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand, more. Not that they’d had much help from the authorities.

Praise be for Harry Whetstone’s lawyers, Lanie had thought a dozen times over the last two weeks. Crane’s benefactor and friend, good old Stoney, had been able to come through for the Foundation because his lawyers had gotten the case against him dismissed, thus freeing up his billions from escrow. The poor performance of the government and of Liang Int in alerting people, providing information, guidance, and assistance to the population, had been nothing short of astonishing at first. Then it had become so frustrating that Crane had said he was going to start howling at the logoed moon every night.

Still, people poured into their camp, which was now ten times the size of the one on Sado. And there were unending teev pictures of clogged roads and air lanes as people tried to get out of the area. With whole sections of Memphis and nearby towns abandoned, the looters had come, of course, and the FPF was responding. In fact, the FPF seemed to be the only arm of the government that was doing its job properly.

Lanie shook her head and looked up. The sky was bright, the sun hot for late October. She was sweating in her long coat and heavy gloves; her floppy hat dropped down around the top of her goggles. Clouds floated lazily overhead, broadcasting pictures of the traffic jams all over the Mississippi Valley. Still other pictures showed the hardcases, those who didn’t believe the prediction—all the way down to those who didn’t even know what an earthquake was. Crane had hired a whole staff of historians to document this series of events so that he could draw up a sound set of plans for future quake predictions.

“Is that it, then?” Newcombe asked.

“All I’ve got,” she replied, wishing that she, too, could dash around in a t-shirt and no hat. “It’s going to be interesting taking readings in antediluvial mud. Everything’s going to rearrange itself.”

Newcombe smiled. He went over to the flatbed truck on which they’d hauled the sensors in and got into the operator’s seat. “The earth turns liquid. You’ll see things, whole houses sometimes, disappear beneath the surface and other things long buried rising back up. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to live in New Orleans right now—they’re going to have the dead rising right out of their graves, both those few still buried in the ground and all those in the mausoleums above ground.”

“A cheery thought,” Lanie said, climbing into the passenger seat and closing the door. “I wonder how the Ellsworth-Beroza is looking this morning?”

Newcombe opened the focus, programmed the truck, and it plowed through the black field, the skeletons of stripped cotton plants jutting from the ground all around them. “I’m worried about the E-B,” he said. “Every goddamned rockhead in the world has descended on the Rift and all of them say the same thing: without the E-B showing positive results, the quake can’t happen.”

“We were down in those holes, Dan. We saw the stress readings. We felt the tremors.”

“I agree. So why isn’t the Ellsworth-Beroza showing us some activity?”

“Maybe this one won’t give any more warnings.”

Brow arched, he said, “Yeah … maybe. And maybe we stuck our necks out at the wrong time. If that’s the case, Crane’s finished. It only reinforces my decision to go public with EQ-eco. I can cut myself loose from him if I have to and still survive.”

“Yeah… maybe,” she said sourly. “Somehow I find it difficult to believe that Crane would ever be finished. Only when he’s in his grave. Maybe not even then.”

“He’s a psycho. They’ll put him away one day.”

She sat back and watched the clouds and their neverending teev shows. As smart as Dan was, he had absolutely no handle on Crane, on the man’s greatness. Crane might be a psycho, perhaps even delusional, by the definition of ordinary men and women who could not understand or appreciate him. But Dan? He should be the last to label Crane anything but brilliant, Dan’s luck had been extremely good lately. Not a week after his public release of the EQ-eco equations, a Chinese team of tectonicists on the verge of discovering a quake in its early Ellsworth-Beroza stage applied Dan’s theory to their estimated epicenter and talked the citizens of Guiyand, the capital of the Guihou Province, into evacuating. Two days later, a 7.2 Richter rocked the area to great devastation, but no one was killed. The scientists credited EQ-eco for helping them define areas of evacuation. And his success was feeding his ego—no, stuffing his ego, making it fat… and rather ugly, she thought. As his own regard for himself grew, his regard for Crane diminished. There was something obscene about Dan’s disdain for Crane now.

She’d put distance between herself and Dan the night of the prediction and he seemed not to notice. She’d kept it up beyond reasonableness to see if he’d respond; then it simply had become routine. There was no way to breach the emotional gap. They lived every moment now under a microscope, public pressures extinguishing their personal flames. She simply consigned everything to the wind and was living day to day.

Except for the dreams.

The dreams were a constant, the swirl of Martinique growing larger to the point that she now thought the nightmares significant in some way beyond simple remembrance, though remember she did. Sections were opening up—the terrible mud, the triage of the wounded, the sound of the trucks all honking at the same time—though the actual event that caused her memory loss was still hazy. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to remember that part.

“Would you look at the people?” Dan said, driving into the middle of the tent city, no colorful, jammed together tents like Sado. These were all in military olive drab and spaced in rows wide enough to accommodate passing trucks. And there were thousands of them. A projection of an American flag waved against a perpetual electronic wind above the compound.

People were everywhere, being directed by tan uniformed employees of Whetstone, Inc., the billionaire’s gun-for-hire service organization.

Dan pulled up to HQ just as a busload of students from a local boarding school was arriving.

“Tech kids,” he said, climbing out.

Lanie watched as the youngsters, from preschoolers through high-schoolers, got off the bus. They looked frail and frightened.

“Learning” was being reevaluated, and the tech schools represented a new direction in education. Their primary subject was Wristpad 101. It taught children how to manipulate the computer net through their pads, how to access absolutely anything they’d ever need or want to know. The proliferation of voice lines on the pad even precluded the need for reading and writing. The power of the pad was the power of absolute knowledge. But what about discipline? What about memory storage and retrieval? Stealing one last glance at the line of twenty children, Lanie followed Newcombe into HQ. Tech kids—they had a poor ability to synthesize and react to physical demands and emotional situations. They lived in the pad. They thought it gave them everything, all the answers. The problem was, they didn’t know the questions.

Housing block leaders were moving in and out of the tent, bringing requests and questions. Crane was frowning heavily, shaking his head as he talked to Sumi and white-haired Stoney Whetstone, dressed in the same uniform his men wore. Teevs filled the sides of the thirty-foot-square room, showing the same things the clouds were showing.

“You’re a boob, Parkhurst,” Crane said as they approached. He shook his head and tapped the man off.

“Got a busload of tech kids outside who are going to need special handling,” Lame told him. Crane looked at Sumi.

“Would you take care of it?”

“Of course,” Sumi said, immediately moving off.

“What about the E-Bs?” Newcombe asked Crane, who was staring vacantly at the floor.

“No activity,” Stoney said.

Stoney was impressive, Lanie thought. Tall, commanding, and down-to-earth, he had a weathered, still-handsome face. He was enough of a man at sixty-seven to make her wonder what he’d been like at forty.

“Something very strange is going on around here, I think,” Stoney added.

This wasn’t new. Stoney had been frowning more as each day passed, voicing suspicions and questioning everything that was going on with the government and Liang Int. “What do you mean this time?” Lanie asked, somewhat wearily.

“The government is dragging its heels on what aid it’s providing—which is damn little. And wasn’t the whole point of them buying into Crane’s prediction how much hay they could make for the electorate—the publicity they’d get for being good guys? I assumed this place would be a madhouse of pols and newsies, with Li and his buddies trotting every one of their candidates through here, giving each of those clowns a chance to sound off for the electorate. Do you see any of that? In fact, have you seen a single candidate or elected official or Liang Int big shot around here?”

Lanie slowly shook her head.

“No, of course not, because something’s fishy, that’s why.”

“Let’s not add paranoia to our list of problems,” Newcombe said. “We’ve still got a couple of days until Q-day. Maybe something will—”

“My arm isn’t hurting,” Crane said. “This close to a quake my arm should be throbbing.”

The teevs flickered, casting eerie images over all their faces. The pictures died, then the Presidential seal blossomed on every screen. Lanie tapped her pad to the K channel, though it wouldn’t have mattered which fiber she chose. They’d all been pre-empted.

“—ident of the United States,” came the voice through her aural. President Gideon sat at his desk, Mr. Li by his side.

“My fellow Americans, I address you today to right a terrible wrong. With great effort and at enormous cost, your government has undertaken a massive investigation and uncovered an egregious fraud. Lewis Crane is a charlatan. Unprincipled, publicity hungry, he is misleading the country into believing the entire middle and southern area of the United States is on the verge of catastrophe. Thankfully, we have discovered this is not the case, and denounce his prediction of a quake on the 30th of October as fantasy. Further, we are immediately cutting off all federal grant money to the Crane Foundation.”

Crane was standing now in front of the largest screen, shaking his head. “What are they doing?” he whispered. “Why?”

“Couldn’t you smell the screw job in the air?” Stoney asked. “I knew something was up.”

The President continued, “We have proof that the Crane Foundation has continuing contact with Nation of Islam leader, Mohammad Ishmael, since Ishmael proclaimed an Islamic State while in Crane’s company. We, the people, are victims of some kind of conspiracy.”

A viddy came up of a man walking along a city sidewalk, arms swinging, everything from the viewpoint of his coat sleeve. The man stopped at a dorph vendor and bought a bottle. When he swung his arm around to pay the man, the face of Dan Newcombe filled the screen.

“What is this?” Crane whirled on Newcombe. “What the hell are we about to see?” he shrieked.

“Me and Ishmael,” Newcombe said, his face blank as he stared Crane down.

“What else?”

Newcombe nodded at the screen, the tape blipping pictures in rapid succession of him being led down a hallway in what seemed to be a chip parlor. Lanie watched in amazement, her pulse speeding up and a sense of dread making her stomach queasy. Dan had gone to the Zone the Masada night that he’d disappeared … that was perfectly clear now. Betrayal. Personal and professional too, she suspected. She began to tremble. Tense, Dan avoided her gaze, steadfastly looking at the teev. He was being taken into a cubicle, a bed moved to reveal a manhole, Ishmael coming out of the hole to embrace Newcombe like long-lost, beloved kin. Lanie glanced around.

Everyone was rapt—and horrified.

Newcombe and Ishmael were staring intently, malevolently out at the audience through the lens of a camera that must have been in Ishmael’s palm.

“Stoney,” Crane said, a shocked expression on his face, “would you get a couple of your biggest men to guard the tent flap? I don’t want any reporters around until we’re ready for them. And get Sumi back in here.”

Whetstone nodded, then grasped Crane’s shoulder consolingly before leaving the tent.

“Look, Crane,” Newcombe said, “that trip to the Zone had nothing to do with you or the Foundation. It’s personal. It’s about me.”

“And me?” Lanie asked. “It sure as hell has something to do with me. I know how the NOI feels about race … about what they call the ‘purity’ of the races.”

Wristpads were bleeping on every arm as media tried to communicate with the members of the Crane team. They’d have only a few minutes, tops, before they were overwhelmed by outsiders.

“Lanie,” Dan said. “I didn’t tell you for the same reason you didn’t tell me about the Vogelman—”

“Please,” Crane said, trying to calm himself with long, slow breaths. “Let’s worry about the immediate problem first.” He pointed at Newcombe. “Do you promise me your contact with Ishmael is not related to your activities with the Foundation?”

“My word,” Newcombe said.

“Your word,” Lanie snapped, feeling her whole world slipping away.

“How did they wire you?” Crane asked, nodding to Sumi who’d returned with Stoney.

Newcombe showed empty palms. “I have no idea. It may have been random.”

“Freelanced to Liang,” Sumi said. “It happens all the time.”

“Does that really matter now?” Stoney asked.

“No,” Crane answered, his gaze going to the burly guards stationing themselves at the tent flaps. “As long as there are no other surprises.”

“I had a visit and a personal chat with Brother Ishmael,” Newcombe said. “We talk sometimes, ask each other for advice.”

“Did he give you ‘advice’ about illegally going public with your paper?” Lanie asked, unable to check herself.

“Not now,” Crane said, walking closer. “Do you swear to me that you don’t know anything about Gideon canceling the program?”

“Of course not!” Newcombe said, indignant. “I’ve got as much to lose in this as you do.”

That’s not what you said earlier, Lanie thought.

“You saved your program,” Stoney said.

Newcombe turned to face him. “What is that sup—”

“No,” Crane said. “Low blow, Stoney. I don’t … I won’t question Dan’s integrity. What we’ve got to do now is figure out what’s going on and how to counter it.”

Newcombe laughed ruefully. “What’s going on is that we’ve just been shot down. They lasered us from stem to stern, Captain.” He saluted, then turned to Sumi. “What about you? Why didn’t you see this coming?”

Sumi looked startled. “When our relationship began with Mr. Li, I was assigned to an onsite job. I have no contact with the government. I’ve been here with you.”

“We need to stop blaming one another,” Crane said, Lanie startling at the sound of a crowd gathering outside, yelling. “We’ve still got the prediction.”

“Your arm doesn’t hurt,” Newcombe said.

“Sir!” came a man’s voice from the tent flap. One of the guards had stuck his head inside. “This is turning into a situation out here.”

“Tell them we’ll talk in a minute,” Crane said, the guard looking to Whetstone, who nodded.

“The stress readings don’t lie,” Crane said. “The other signs don’t lie. That’s what makes no sense here.”

“What about the Ellsworth-Beroza?” Newcombe asked. “Maybe we’re all fools.”

“No, doctor,” Crane said. “We’re not fools. Suggestions?”

Everyone stared at him.

“Crane,” Whetstone said at last, “are you going to stand behind your prediction?”

“My arm doesn’t hurt,” Crane said, smiling slightly. “It doesn’t lie to me. But you see, it doesn’t matter. We’re married to it one way or the other. We have no choice but to proceed full steam ahead. It’s our roll of the dice, don’t you know? Once the pronouncement is made from on high it cannot be rescinded.” He walked toward the tent flap.

“Where are you going?” Lanie called.

He stopped, then turned abruptly, mechanically. “I’m going to go out there and convince those people and the press to ignore what they just heard and believe me instead.”

“You’re going to deny everything?” Newcombe asked.

“Easy to do,” Crane said, smoothing his rumpled hair with little result. “I don’t know anything. All of you stay in here and don’t come out. I’ve taken the glory. Now it’s time to take the flak.” He looked at Newcombe.

“I’ll protect you as best I can.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” Newcombe replied.

Crane narrowed his eyes, selected a wide-brimmed hat from those on the rack standing beside the flap, and went into the Tennessee morning. Lanie looked around, realizing all the teevs were showing Crane from the viewpoint of the crowd outside.

Hundreds of people, most with cams, were filling the dirt street in front of HQ. Crane had moved just outside the tent, Whetstone’s people forming a cordon around him and pushing back the bystanders.

“I want to talk to you for a minute,” Crane said, putting up his hands to silence them. When the noise level didn’t abate, he padded himself into the tent city’s speaker system.

Lanie turned to stare at Dan. “I don’t know you anymore,” she said.

“Maybe you never knew me,” he said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I realize how all this looks. I simply want to say I’m sorry. I love you. I did what I had to do.”

“Friends!” Crane said, voice booming. “Despite what you may have seen and heard moments ago, the Crane Foundation’s prediction is still active and online. We, here, have no idea what the President was talking about. What I do know about is earthquakes. And you’re going to have one.”

Lanie pursed her lips angrily. “Destroying my work by connecting yourself to a man who’d as soon see me dead. Is that what you had to do?”

“Your work?”

“Good morning, Dan! Surprise! Wake up! The globe is my baby, my EQ-eco. And guess what, I think it could be even more important than your work.”

“That globe,” he said with a look of distaste, “is simply the physical manifestation of Crane’s insanity. It’s meaningless.”

She slapped him so hard her hand stung. “Go to hell,” she said, turning on her heel.

Outside, people were shouting questions at Crane about the Nation of Islam.

“Nation of Islam is not connected with our earthquake research in any form. Dr. Newcombe has a long-standing friendship with Mohammad Ishmael and has every right to visit the man on his own time.”

The shouting got louder, Crane still trying to maintain order.

Newcombe growled. “I don’t need him to defend me.”

“Don’t—” Whetstone said, but Newcombe was already going out the flap.

“I’m a free man,” Dan said to the crowd. Proud, the fire in his eyes flared as if he were a lion in a world of hyenas. “Yes, I’ve visited Brother Ishmael. I can visit whomever I damned well please.”

“Did you talk to him about his call for an Islamic State?” someone in the audience asked.

“Yes, I did, as a matter of fact.”

People were shouting at him, trying to drown him out. Lanie watched his pride turn to anger and feared for the outcome.

Crane spotted real trouble brewing and elbowed his way back to center stage. “If there’s nothing else—”

“Do you support the forced disenfranchisement of southerners to support an Africk homeland?” came a voice, clear as a bell.

Lanie took a deep, steadying breath. Dan’s answer would force her to make a decision.

“For many years,” Newcombe said, “we have kept eight percent of our citizens locked up in ghettoes. Did they do anything? No. Do they deserve the same freedoms and liberties most Americans take for granted … life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? Yes.”

“But what about forced eviction?”

“Brother Ishmael wishes to move no one. He only wants an Islamic State where the wisdom of Allah and the Koran prevail. The people who live in the Islamic homeland will be free to do as they choose.”

Crane walked wearily back into the tent, Sumi rushing over to comfort him. As Lame listened to NOI rhetoric coming out of Dan’s mouth she felt as if she were being pushed to the edge. She had waited a long time to let herself love him. And now what was there but pain in the loving?

“Are you a member of Nation of Islam?” one of Whetstone’s people called, the security force slowly melting into and becoming part of the crowd.

“That is a decision I have been grappling with,” he responded. “At the moment I’m a citizen of the world. I’m merely speaking my mind and will continue to do so.”

A cold hand clutched Lanie’s heart. As Dan went on shilling for Brother Ishmael, she went deep into herself. Segregation … the veiling of women … the espousal of violence. Could Dan Newcombe—the man she had lived with and loved—really align himself with a movement that advocated those things? She was very much afraid the answer was yes. Suffused with pain, she clenched her jaw and held herself rigid. She could scarcely bear it… Crane! She had to concern herself with Crane.

The moment Crane had realized that with every word Dan spoke the Foundation was losing more and more of its support, he’d located his stashed bottle of bourbon and gone to work on it in earnest. Camheads started to cut away from Dan’s face to show pictures of people leaving the tent city on foot and in vehicles, vandalizing the place as they went. By the time Dan was finished, most of Crane’s dream of saving lives and of positive, collective action at a quake site was either smashed to the ground or stolen. The red tent stood in the midst of rubble. Two days before the date of his prediction that the quake would hit, it was all over…

Lanie went to Crane’s side. There were tears streaming down his face, and he cradled the bourbon in his bad arm. When she touched his shoulder, she awakened him from some dream of horror. His eyes opened wide.

“All I ever wanted to do was help people,” he said, his voice low and very small.

She hugged him. “Maybe we should think about leaving this place.”

“No. Not me. You. Get Burt and tell him to pack it all in and get himself and the rest of the team back to the Foundation grounds as quickly as possible.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Stay here. Do my job. I’ve still got an earthquake coming that I need to warn people about. Just because the government decided it wasn’t going to happen doesn’t mean it won’t.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. “Crane, I can’t—I won’t let you stay on alone. I’m with you—”

“No. You’ve got to leave. Get everybody back as fast as you can. Work on the globe. Work hard. We’ll do what we can at the Foundation until the money runs out.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ve never been all right.” He took a drink. “Go on. Get out of here. I don’t need my people getting arrested in Tennessee.”

“Arrested?”

“I’m a charlatan, remember? I’ve perpetrated a fraud. Charges and arrests are just around the corner no matter what happens with the quake. I’ll probably be in jail when it hits.” He looked hard at her. “I’m counting on you … on you, Lanie. The globe is everything. Only you can carry on with that work.”

Tears filled her eyes. Finally, she nodded and was rewarded by one of Crane’s warm, broad smiles, all the more beautiful because it was so rare. “That’s my imager,” he said and patted her on the shoulder. Then he looked away, his gaze on a far horizon no one else would be able to see.

Lanie stepped back, feeling an alien yearning to embrace Crane, to hold him close and promise that everything would be all right. But that would be an empty promise, a lie. Nothing might ever be right again. And Crane. He was so alone. Alone and crushed by treachery, its origins and at least some of its perpetrators a mystery. She shook herself. The only positive action she could take was to do as Crane wished. Purposeful then, she crammed a hat on her head and raced out of the tent.

Dan was standing alone in the middle of the road, people streaming around him, fleeing the camp as quickly as they had made their way to it. Several hundred yards off, the leveled compound was burning steadily. She walked into the human river and waded toward Dan. When she reached him, her mouth gaped in surprise.

“You’re crying,” she said.

“It was wonderful! I spoke my mind without fear and without remorse for the first time in my life. It felt good, Lanie, so good—and so free.”

She glanced at the devastation all around, the fire threatening to blaze out of control as Whetstone’s people tried to put it out. “It freed all of us,” she said, doubting that Dan even would notice the irony of her tone. “You’re going to join them, aren’t you?”

His answer was a mere shrug. “I want us to spend a lot of time together. It’s all in the open. I can promise you no secrets from now on,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder. She slipped from under it.

“No, Dan,” she said, backing away from him. “I can’t. I simply can’t.”

“But I love you.”

“Whether or not you go back to the Foundation, I am going to move into my own house.”

“But, Lanie—”

She spun away then and started off. Dan called her name, but she didn’t turn back. She walked farther into devastation. The site was in ruins. Crane’s reputation was in ruins. The Foundation might be gone in weeks, a month or two at the most. All the bright and wondrous things she’d been envisioning for herself and Dan personally, and for herself and Crane professionally were extinguished.

Suddenly, Lanie saw none of the devastation around her. She saw only Crane as she’d left him in the tent, alone, slumped in a chair, swilling bourbon straight from the bottle. The late-afternoon sunshine was brilliant, but for Lanie King and for Lewis Crane the day had turned black as pitch.