Peter Hernon - 8.4

Lauren figured she’d driven about thirty-live miles since the helicopter had warned them. Surely they were out of danger, but she kept nervously watching the sky for a yellow cloud.

When it was her turn at the pump, the owner asked for cash in advance. Twenty dollars a gallon. Dressed in a soiled hunting jacket, he had a full black beard and was chewing a plug of tobacco.

“Dammit, Tom. This ain’t right and you know it. You’re robbing folks.”

The man who was waiting in line behind Lauren had gotten out of a battered red pickup. His voice was laced with anger.

Lauren had fifteen dollars. She handed it to the man with the rifle.

“Please,” she said. “Just let me have two gallons.” That would be enough to get home.

“You heard the price. That’ll buy you three-quarters of a gallon.” He pumped it out to the nickel.

“Tom, some people are going to die if they can’t drive,” the man behind her said. His words were cold, hard. He was bareheaded, maybe sixty years old, and had a leathery face.

“Mind your own business, Harris,” the man said. “I’ll run my business how I see fit.”

More angry words were exchanged. The bareheaded man took a few steps closer to the station owner, pulled a short-barreled pistol from the pocket of his jacket, and held it to the man’s head. The owner’s eyes bulged. He dropped his rifle.

“Take five gallons, lady,” the man said. “Then you and the boy get the hell out of here.”

THE CLOUD OF DUST SHOWED CLEARLY ON BURKE’S television monitor as he followed Neutron’s progress through the massive building. A piece of the concrete roof had almost fallen on the robot.

“That was close,” Booker said.

Burke nodded, studiously working the controls. Neutron had opened the fire door and moved into another part of the D-4 building. The uranium and plutonium storage areas were divided into dozens of separate vaults.

With Burke operating the control panel, Neutron began pouring a thick spray of foam over the storage bunker. There was just enough left in the canisters for one good soaking.

The ground shook again. Another bad one, the movement was horizontal, a sharp back-and-forth motion. Booker saw the front wall of D-4 start to buckle.

“Get out of there!” the fire captain shouted at them over a loudspeaker. “Pull back!”

The huge building was teetering.

“What about it, Jeff?” Booker asked his friend. If that front wall fell, they’d be crushed.

“I’m not leaving the robot,” Burke said. “I’ve got seven years of work tied up in that machine.”

They were experiencing a swarm of aftershocks, each stronger in intensity. Another part of the roof fell in. Booker heard it crash loudly to the ground.

The walls were starting to sway.

“Come on, Jeff!”

Burke hadn’t moved. Booker doubted he’d even heard him as he hunched over his laptop monitor, manipulating the controls.

Booker was getting ready to grab his friend and pull him to safety when he saw the robot emerge from the rubble. Rolling through a cloud of dust, the machine was using its powerful mechanical arms to clear a path through a pile of concrete and twisted steel that blocked D-4’s front door.

“I was worried about the durability of the metal framing,” Burke said, still staring at his computer keyboard. “I don’t think—”

“Jeff, let’s go!”

Burke started after Booker. Moving quickly on its omnidirectional platform, the robot followed them.

ATKINS GLANCED AT HIS WATCH. IT HAD BEEN WELL over four hours since the quake, and they still didn’t have a seismograph up and running at the epicenter. He clenched his hands on the wheel of the Explorer. It was incredible, from his perspective the geological equivalent to suffering a heart attack and waiting four hours before checking into the hospital for some tests. He could feel his chest tightening, the pressure building at his temples.

Distant seismographs were recording the aftershocks, but there was no substitute for having an instrument right at the epicenter. They wouldn’t miss any of the smaller aftershocks that way, the swarms of magnitude 2 and 3 earthquakes that other seismographs might not pick up. Knowing about those small quakes was important in gauging how much seismic energy remained locked along the fault.

They simply had to get it up and running. It was damned important. Atkins felt like grabbing the seismograph, running out into a field, and setting it up. Just pick a spot. Any spot.

Stop it, he told himself. They needed to find a suitable place or they’d blow everything.

He threw the Explorer into reverse, backed up a couple hundred yards, and turned down a dirt trail he’d noticed a few minutes earlier. He wanted to get off the main highway. He drove slowly, looking for a place. A quarter mile down a muddy path for tractors, he crossed a dry creek bed. A weather-beaten picnic table was off to the side under a stand of poplars. It would make a good platform for the seismograph.

“How about right here?” he said.

“Looks fine,” Elizabeth said. Within minutes, she had the instrument hooked up. She was much more skilled than Atkins with the seismograph. About the size of a briefcase, the rugged device was powered by two small solar panels and also had a backup battery pack. The data was digitally recorded on disk.

Atkins ran a quick field test: the starter, pendulum, and timing circuits were all functional as was the backup analogue recording drum and film. Elizabeth plugged a laptop computer into a port on the side of the machine so they could monitor the data visually. The battery supply was good for forty-eight hours.

Atkins wished they’d brought along a gravimeter, a portable machine that could measure changes in gravitational strength triggered by the rise or fall of the land during an earthquake. The instrument could also detect variations in rock densities and was another tool to try to zero in on how much strain energy remained locked in the ground.

That remained one of their chief objectives. There’d been two big earthquakes on the New Madrid Seismic Zone in three days. The first a magnitude 7.1 event. Then the monster that had struck earlier that morning.

Atkins and Elizabeth both knew the history of the fault. The triple of 1811-1812 haunted them. Three magnitude 8 or greater earthquakes in a little over a month. More than anything, they wanted to know if another major quake was possible. That’s why they were so intent on gathering as much data as they could on latent seismic energy.

Their plan was simple: stay put long enough to get a complete run of seismographic data.

Atkins thought their food supply would last three or four days. Then, somehow, they’d have to find a way back to Memphis. With the telephone lines knocked down and no way to transmit the data in real time by computer modem, they’d have to take it back physically.

Atkins tried to reach Walt Jacobs by shortwave radio. He wanted to report their location, but couldn’t get through to Memphis. There was too much static and background noise, which meant heavy use of the two-band shortwave circuits. With virtually all other means of communication knocked out, the shortwave relay bands were overloaded.

By then it was late in the morning and freezing cold. A ten-mile-an-hour wind was blowing straight out of the north. Atkins and Elizabeth huddled in the back of the Explorer. Worried about running out of gas, they didn’t dare operate the heater, but they were tempted. Atkins could barely feel his feet.