Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

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.

“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.”