Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“A touch early to open the champagne, don’t you think?” Lanie was good and tired of this subject—in fact, Dan was so full of himself these days that she was getting a little tired of him. “Usually the science prize is given many years after the discovery.”

“It happened early for Crane.” Newcombe helped Lanie pick up the long brushlike antenna and slide it into the hole. “Give me the opportunity to get a little excited, okay?”

“You’re the doctor.”

“Damn right, doctor.”

She smiled and locked the focus on the top of the apparatus. The red light came on indicating that data was being transmitted and she turned and looked back down the line.

This was the fiftieth pole, the final one in a neat row that defined the edge of Dan’s calculated zone of destruction. Half a mile beyond lay the tent city, filling many acres of cotton field. Thousands of people had fled here already, and they were preparing for thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand, more. Not that they’d had much help from the authorities.

Praise be for Harry Whetstone’s lawyers, Lanie had thought a dozen times over the last two weeks. Crane’s benefactor and friend, good old Stoney, had been able to come through for the Foundation because his lawyers had gotten the case against him dismissed, thus freeing up his billions from escrow. The poor performance of the government and of Liang Int in alerting people, providing information, guidance, and assistance to the population, had been nothing short of astonishing at first. Then it had become so frustrating that Crane had said he was going to start howling at the logoed moon every night.

Still, people poured into their camp, which was now ten times the size of the one on Sado. And there were unending teev pictures of clogged roads and air lanes as people tried to get out of the area. With whole sections of Memphis and nearby towns abandoned, the looters had come, of course, and the FPF was responding. In fact, the FPF seemed to be the only arm of the government that was doing its job properly.

Lanie shook her head and looked up. The sky was bright, the sun hot for late October. She was sweating in her long coat and heavy gloves; her floppy hat dropped down around the top of her goggles. Clouds floated lazily overhead, broadcasting pictures of the traffic jams all over the Mississippi Valley. Still other pictures showed the hardcases, those who didn’t believe the prediction—all the way down to those who didn’t even know what an earthquake was. Crane had hired a whole staff of historians to document this series of events so that he could draw up a sound set of plans for future quake predictions.

“Is that it, then?” Newcombe asked.

“All I’ve got,” she replied, wishing that she, too, could dash around in a t-shirt and no hat. “It’s going to be interesting taking readings in antediluvial mud. Everything’s going to rearrange itself.”

Newcombe smiled. He went over to the flatbed truck on which they’d hauled the sensors in and got into the operator’s seat. “The earth turns liquid. You’ll see things, whole houses sometimes, disappear beneath the surface and other things long buried rising back up. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to live in New Orleans right now—they’re going to have the dead rising right out of their graves, both those few still buried in the ground and all those in the mausoleums above ground.”

“A cheery thought,” Lanie said, climbing into the passenger seat and closing the door. “I wonder how the Ellsworth-Beroza is looking this morning?”

Newcombe opened the focus, programmed the truck, and it plowed through the black field, the skeletons of stripped cotton plants jutting from the ground all around them. “I’m worried about the E-B,” he said. “Every goddamned rockhead in the world has descended on the Rift and all of them say the same thing: without the E-B showing positive results, the quake can’t happen.”

“We were down in those holes, Dan. We saw the stress readings. We felt the tremors.”

“I agree. So why isn’t the Ellsworth-Beroza showing us some activity?”

“Maybe this one won’t give any more warnings.”

Brow arched, he said, “Yeah … maybe. And maybe we stuck our necks out at the wrong time. If that’s the case, Crane’s finished. It only reinforces my decision to go public with EQ-eco. I can cut myself loose from him if I have to and still survive.”

“Yeah… maybe,” she said sourly. “Somehow I find it difficult to believe that Crane would ever be finished. Only when he’s in his grave. Maybe not even then.”

“He’s a psycho. They’ll put him away one day.”

She sat back and watched the clouds and their neverending teev shows. As smart as Dan was, he had absolutely no handle on Crane, on the man’s greatness. Crane might be a psycho, perhaps even delusional, by the definition of ordinary men and women who could not understand or appreciate him. But Dan? He should be the last to label Crane anything but brilliant, Dan’s luck had been extremely good lately. Not a week after his public release of the EQ-eco equations, a Chinese team of tectonicists on the verge of discovering a quake in its early Ellsworth-Beroza stage applied Dan’s theory to their estimated epicenter and talked the citizens of Guiyand, the capital of the Guihou Province, into evacuating. Two days later, a 7.2 Richter rocked the area to great devastation, but no one was killed. The scientists credited EQ-eco for helping them define areas of evacuation. And his success was feeding his ego—no, stuffing his ego, making it fat… and rather ugly, she thought. As his own regard for himself grew, his regard for Crane diminished. There was something obscene about Dan’s disdain for Crane now.

She’d put distance between herself and Dan the night of the prediction and he seemed not to notice. She’d kept it up beyond reasonableness to see if he’d respond; then it simply had become routine. There was no way to breach the emotional gap. They lived every moment now under a microscope, public pressures extinguishing their personal flames. She simply consigned everything to the wind and was living day to day.

Except for the dreams.

The dreams were a constant, the swirl of Martinique growing larger to the point that she now thought the nightmares significant in some way beyond simple remembrance, though remember she did. Sections were opening up—the terrible mud, the triage of the wounded, the sound of the trucks all honking at the same time—though the actual event that caused her memory loss was still hazy. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to remember that part.

“Would you look at the people?” Dan said, driving into the middle of the tent city, no colorful, jammed together tents like Sado. These were all in military olive drab and spaced in rows wide enough to accommodate passing trucks. And there were thousands of them. A projection of an American flag waved against a perpetual electronic wind above the compound.

People were everywhere, being directed by tan uniformed employees of Whetstone, Inc., the billionaire’s gun-for-hire service organization.

Dan pulled up to HQ just as a busload of students from a local boarding school was arriving.

“Tech kids,” he said, climbing out.

Lanie watched as the youngsters, from preschoolers through high-schoolers, got off the bus. They looked frail and frightened.

“Learning” was being reevaluated, and the tech schools represented a new direction in education. Their primary subject was Wristpad 101. It taught children how to manipulate the computer net through their pads, how to access absolutely anything they’d ever need or want to know. The proliferation of voice lines on the pad even precluded the need for reading and writing. The power of the pad was the power of absolute knowledge. But what about discipline? What about memory storage and retrieval? Stealing one last glance at the line of twenty children, Lanie followed Newcombe into HQ. Tech kids—they had a poor ability to synthesize and react to physical demands and emotional situations. They lived in the pad. They thought it gave them everything, all the answers. The problem was, they didn’t know the questions.