Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“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.”