Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“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.”