Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

Dutifully, she tapped the R line, Mr. Li’s open emergency line. He answered immediately.

“It’s Sumi Chan, sir,” she said. “You asked me to inform you when the New Madrid party started sending back data. I’ve used security access to divert it to me instead of the Foundation’s computers.” Sumi felt ashamed.

“Good initiative, Sumi,” Mr. Li said in an almost humorous tone that was quite unlike him. Something was happening. “Are these the stress readings you told me Crane thought so important?”

“Crane said he’d do a prediction based on the results of the stress tests, yes.” She could feel it coming, the decision of her lifetime. She always had engaged in situational ethics, and she felt she had no inner reserves of strength to draw from in making this decision.

“What are your recommendations?” Li prompted.

Sumi drew a long breath. “I have none,” she said finally.

“You’ve stolen their numbers, yet have no recommendation?”

“Sir,” Sumi said, “any recommendation I could make would be cancelled out by adverse conclusion.”

“Hold on,” Li said, clicking off. A second later, he materialized beside her desk in projection.

“Come … sit with me, Sumi. It’s tune we talked.”

She rose from the computer and followed the projection to her sofa. Li, a wicked glint in his eye, offered her a seat before sitting himself. He hovered two inches above the lowslung couch.

“Now,” Li said. “Suppose you tell me what the recommendation is, then let me judge the ‘adverse conclusion’ for myself. Please.”

Sumi’s mind was melting down. Generation equipment had to be hidden somewhere in her chalet in order to bring off his projection. And he knew that she knew. The noose tightened around her neck. Who watches the watcher?

She cleared her throat. “If you want to have Crane predict before the election, simply change the stress numbers, making them infinitesimally larger, increasing the notion of the stress, making the problem seem more immediate. I know enough about the EQ-eco to work the math and bring the numbers up to rupture point.”

“Wonderful,” Li said, smirking. “What could possibly be the downside of that?”

“You don’t see?” Sumi asked, and reached into the pocket of her work pants for dorph gum. “These people, Mr. Li, are on the verge of predicting the most devastating earthquake in the history of the United States of Liang America. I trust their judgment.” She stuck two pieces of gum in her mouth. “If we intentionally mispredict, you’re leaving a large population base at tremendous risk for when the quake really does come.”

Li shrugged. “We’re trying to win an election here. There have been several destructive quakes in different parts of the country since the last election. People are afraid and they’ll be grateful for our concern whether the prediction turns out to be correct or not. They’ll vote for our candidates.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“I can limit Liang’s exposure to damage and loss in that area, if a quake does occur later. I’ll be prepared.” He stared at Sumi. “Has it ever occurred to you that if the government really got into the prediction business in a serious way that it would end up in court? A mess. That’s what the whole thing is. But as a device for achieving results in the election?

Excellent. So, change the numbers.”

“Sir,” Sumi said, bowing slightly. “I mean no offense, but I can’t implement an order I find immoral, dangerous to so many people.”

Mr. Li grinned, his cosmetically whitened teeth gleaming. The projection put a ghostly hand on Sumi’s shoulder. “Look what I have here.”

A holo of her bathroom appeared in the center of the living room. Sumi watched herself emerge from the shower. No doubt about her gender. She flushed with embarrassment. “So you know.”

“You are a fine-looking woman, Sumi,” Li said, his hands trying to run down her body, but disappearing within her instead. Somehow that made the violation worse. “Does anyone else know?”

“Just you,” she said, “which I fear is enough.”

Li laughed. “I do not wish to expose you to public and private humiliation. I wish only to keep using you as my instrument. Now I have the knowledge to hold you. I have many plans for you. I ask you again, will you do as I ask?”

She frowned heavily. “I’ve worked side by side with these people. They’re good, I like—”

“I’ve now got the Geological Survey on the line. I am prepared to tell them you’re a liar and a pretender—and to give my recommendation to terminate you immediately. Decide now.”

Sumi bent over, face in her hands. “I’ll do it,” she said finally, her voice muffled.

“What?”

“I’ll do it,” she said louder. She stood and went to the console, sat, and began typing. She finished within a minute and dumped the altered numbers into the mainframe. She had cheated people her entire life. Now she was cheating the purity of science.

“Done,” she said, turning around. The projection was gone. Sumi went into the bathroom and washed her hands.

Crane’s office wasn’t really an office. It was a hovel—a large hovel to give him plenty of space to pile his junk. Printouts were stacked all over the floor, many of the stacks wobbled or collapsed and were left as they fell. Books filled cases and overflowed onto the flood of paper. His desk was littered, its wood surface completely obscured. Coffee cups and food wrappers were strewn everywhere, computer terminals and printers crammed onto any surface that could take them. He had a bed in the office, several empty liquor bottles lying beside it. Crane knew exactly where anything he wanted could be found.

On the wall was a smoke-damaged photo of his parents and a melted toy airplane was stuck on one of the bookcases. They had been the only things recovered from the firestorm that had eaten his childhood home and the only personal items Crane owned. He was a man possessed by his past, a human being only in the biological definition of the word.

There was a hole cut right through his cinderblock wall so that he could look at the globe whenever he wanted.

An edge of excitement jangled the room. He had assembled most of his senior staff, who’d dutifully shown up carrying their folding chairs and coffee while he half reclined on the bed. He was about to make the decision of his lifetime and wanted their input, not to help him make the decision of course, but to reinforce what he’d already decided.

Lanie and Dan hadn’t arrived yet. Newcombe was trying to hurry out his EQ-eco chart, and Lanie was supervising the globe through another attempt at defining the planet beyond Pangaea. But Crane couldn’t see her through the cutout and had heard the failure bells earlier when the system had shut down.

There was something truly wrong with their conception of the birth of the planet, he had decided. If Pangaea were correct, then everything between it and the Yucatan Comet that began the Tertiary Age would be of finite dimension—some relative form of world, wrong or right, could be set up to connect the two events. But the machine continued to deny the truth of Pangaea, which could mean that their mistakes lay in the far distant past.

It was troubling to him, but something he couldn’t deal with at the moment. He’d spent thirty years biding his time. Tonight would be the night he’d stick his neck out. He’d always known it would come down to a decision like this, but he never realized the fear connected with it. If he were wrong when he went public in a big way, it would ruin him. It frightened him, but didn’t deter him. Now, he needed to know the extent of the loyalty of his staff.