Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“You’re no different from anyone in here,” Crane whispered harshly. “Commit to our cause or walk out right now.”

“I stood with you on the plain in Sado. I need to prove nothing to you now.”

“Damn you,” Crane said low. But he shut up then and turned back to the desk. He dug the transmission panel out from under. He slid the CD into the slot and without hesitation hit the transmit pad.

“It’s done,” he said. “Now get out, all of you.”

There had never been banging in the dream before. Lanie lay sweating in bed, her mind enflamed with the vision of Crane in the white suit with the bubble helmet. He was yelling, trying to reach out to her, but the banging was so loud she couldn’t hear him… couldn’t hear—

“What the hell?” Newcombe said. Jerking awake, Lanie sat up straight. The banging continued.

“Open this door!” yelled a drunken Crane. “Traitor! Open it!”

Lanie shook her head, glancing at the bedside clock. It was nearly four in the morning. “What does he want?”

“How the hell should I know?” He stood up and walked naked down the stairs.

“I know you’re in there!” Crane screamed. “Open the door!”

“Go away!” Newcombe yelled back. “Go sleep it off!”

As Lanie slid her legs over the edge of the bed, Crane threw himself at their door, the structural aluminum not giving. He tried again.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lanie said, turning on the bedside light. She walked to the loft railing. “Would you let him in before he hurts himself?”

“Monster!” Crane yelled, throwing himself against the door again.

“You’re crazy!” Newcombe yelled back, Lanie hurrying down the stairs, naked herself. She opened the door.

He brushed past both of them, jerking his good arm away when Lanie tried to take his sleeve.

He moved across the room and juiced the full wall screen there. “You’ve betrayed me,” Crane said, his eyes flashing at Newcombe.

“I don’t know what you’re—” Newcombe began, but stopped when he saw his own face on the television screen.

Lanie moved close to take his arm but, as Crane had done before, he pulled it away. “Oh no,” he said low, moving to the couch to slump on it. “They promised me they wouldn’t run this for months.”

“Well, I guess they changed their minds.” Crane’s eyes widened at Lanie’s nakedness. He grabbed an afghan draped over a chairback and tossed it to her. “Cover yourself.”

Embarrassed, she flushed, then wrapped the cover around her and looked at the teev. Dan was presenting a detailed dissertation on his EQ-eco equations, giving up publicly every detail that Crane had kept secret. Newcombe turned off the sound.

“Have you read your contract, doctor?” Crane asked.

“I know the terms of my contract. I give proper credit to the Foundation all through this speech and all monies received from it go to the Crane Foundation.”

“Who cares?” Crane yelled. “This is all part of our package, the thing that is supporting us. When you give out free information, it destroys everything else we’re building.”

“The world needs these theories,” Newcombe said. “I took it upon myself to do the right thing.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Lanie said.

“Stay out of this,” Newcombe snapped, then looked at Crane. “If you calm down, I’ll talk to you.”

Lanie watched Crane’s face. He was totally out of his depth on issues such as these. He sat on a straight wooden chair. “Why?” he asked, his voice low and uncertain.

“You have a dream, Crane, a dream that failed earlier today for the fifteenth time.”

“My dreams go beyond that globe,” Crane returned.

“To where? What are they? What exactly are you looking for?”

Crane just stared at him.

“See?” Newcombe said. “You won’t tell me, or you don’t know, or … what? Well, I’ve got a reality instead of a mere dream. I’ve spent ten years studying and classifying the waves put out by EQs. Maybe it’s not glamorous by your standards, but dammit, after ten years the figures came together and they were right and they’ve enabled me to predict damage areas around fault lines. The equations stand on their own and need to be shared with the world. So, I wrote them up and sent an article to the scientific journals. The Foundation gets credit and royalties. My dream is reality.”

“Your dream is owned by me,” Crane said, pointing to the screen, “which makes this … nothing but stealing. I am under no obligation to share my vision with you, Dan, nor will I until I choose to do so. You don’t have the power to define me or my dreams. If you’re so unhappy with the way I run things, why don’t you quit? I won’t make a man stay with me who wants to go.”

“I don’t quit because I need your money!

Why don’t you fire me?”

Crane took a long breath and stood, all the anger drained out of him suddenly. He shuffled slowly toward the door, turning to them when he’d opened it. “I can’t fire you,” he said. “I appreciate you too much. You’re too damned good. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Crazy bastard.” Newcombe locked the door after him. He strode back to the sofa and struck it with a closed fist. “Dammit! They promised me they wouldn’t run the story without first informing me.”

“I guess Crane’s prediction has made EQ-eco too hot to pass up,” Lanie said, the afghan still wrapped tightly around her. “Cheer up. You’re going to be famous now, too.”

“Are you saying I did this deliberately?”

“I don’t know if you did or you didn’t,” she replied. “I only know you had no right to steal Crane’s property just because he wasn’t handling it the way you wanted him to.”

“I gave it to the world, Lanie,” he said, walking up to touch her shoulder. “You’re going to have to get used to that.”

She twisted away from him and turned her back. “You like to steamroll over everything, don’t you? If you want to know the real reason I had the Vogelman done, it’s because I knew, once you got it in your head, that you’d steamroll me into having babies and doing what you wanted me to do.”

He turned her around. “Wait a minute. I thought we’d decided you weren’t going to have that procedure.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make,” she said, jerking away from him again to face the screen, the wall now filled with a close-up of Dan’s face. “Like that wasn’t your decision to make.”

“You did it without telling me.”

She was still looking at his giant face, the eyes so sincere. She had to laugh. “Seems as though you’ve done a few things without telling me, too.”

“Oh, hell,” he said, softening. “Turn that thing off and let’s go back to bed.”

She couldn’t face him, knew she couldn’t sleep with him tonight. “You go on,” she said. “I’ll be up later.”

Lanie stiffened when he touched her. Newcombe grunted and moved away. “Fine,” he said, starting up the stairs. “Do me one favor, though. Don’t let yourself get too caught up in Crane’s fantasies. He’s only a crazy man, that’s all!”

“My globe is not crazy!”

He ignored her, moving up to the loft, the light clicking out to the sound of the bed-springs.

She turned and stared at the front door. “It’s not crazy,” she whispered to the man who wasn’t standing there any longer.

“And then the guy tells me,” Newcombe said, swinging the mallet to pound Lanie’s sensor pole into the black delta soil, “that he’s going to put my name up for the Nobel Prize.”