Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“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.