Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

He’d lost everything, had taken the worst, and was still on his feet. He knew now that nothing could stop him or turn him aside. There was power in that insight.

He hurried through the globe room then, and hit the theaterlike briefing room at a trot. Fifty heads turned toward him; a hundred pairs of eyes focused exclusively on him. He’d either get them or lose them right here and now.

Smiling, Crane waved and hurried down the aisle to take the stage. The huge screen behind him ran a collage of coverage from twenty different sources, always changing, always devoted completely to the election.

A “Vote Now” light was flashing at the bottom of the screen. Crane logged on via the pad and entered his voter’s code. He accessed, pushed one button, then transmitted.

“Straight Yo-Yu ticket!” he announced loudly to the audience, scattered laughter coming back to him. He could see by the constantly tallying numbers on the board that Liang had won the major national races. Interestingly, though, Yo-Yu had made considerable inroads in local elections, which the teev analysts were downplaying as a fluke.

Crane held his arm high above his head, made a fist, and shook it. “I will fight anyone who has the guts to walk up here and tell me to my face that we’re through.” He looked around. “I’m still alive, so I’m not through. You’re still sitting here. If you’re through, get out. I don’t want to see you again.”

He waited. No one left. “Here’s what I can do: if we cut worldwide ops and hunker down, I can keep us going for about ten to twelve months with everyone at full salary. That gives us another year to get respectable again. We gathered a great deal of information before the government pulled the plug. Now we can put it to good use.

“My areas of interest are twofold: getting the globe online and getting a blanket reading on the tectonics of southern California. To that end I am reassigning all our field personnel to in-state sites.”

He walked toward the stairs at the end of the stage. “If you still work for me, get to it. Don’t sit around here.” He forked his thumb at the screen. “Somebody turn that damned thing off.”

He took the stairs down from the stage as almost everyone left the room. Lanie sat in the first row, smiling up at him, confidence still strong in her eyes. Newcombe was walking toward him from several rows back. Interesting, Crane thought, that the two hadn’t been sitting together.

Lanie came up and gave him a quick hug. “Welcome back,”

“I appreciate all you did in trying to get me out of jail,” he said. “I heard you were dogged.”

“I just hope it wasn’t too horrible for you.”

He smiled. “I had some very personable cellmates in the county jail,” he said, loving the liveliness in her eyes. “They taught me how to make a shiv out of a spoon.”

“I figured they’d throw away the key with you,” Newcombe said, moving closer and offering his hand.

Crane shook it. “I did a structural analysis of the building the first day I was there. On the second day I issued a report through the lawyer Lanie sent in saying the building was unsafe and should be condemned. The lawyer sent the report to every state agency in Tennessee, plus all the legit media. Then he filed a class action suit on behalf of the inmates. By the third day the cops were ready to get rid of me. Could you two join me for a few minutes? I want to talk about what happened.”

They nodded, Crane noticing that Lanie was carefully keeping distance between her and Newcombe. They walked to the globe room. Burt Hill joined them with a faux-chicken sandwich for Crane.

“Stay with us,” Crane said, as Hill literally fed a piece of the sandwich into Crane’s mouth.

“How long since you’ve had a decent night’s sleep?” Hill asked.

“I’ll get one tonight,” Crane answered, chewing, wondering what was happening between Dan and Lanie.

“I’ve got something for you,” Newcombe said. He pulled an envelope out of the cinched waist of his trousers and handed it to Crane.

Crane opened it, pulling out a check made out to the Foundation in the amount of half a million dollars. It was drawn on a Liang Int account out of Beijing.

“It’s a royalty check on EQ-eco,” Dan said. “As promised, it’s for the Foundation.”

“And we can use it,” Crane said, handing the check to Hill, who juggled the sandwich to get it into his overalls pocket. “I’m glad … and surprised to see that you haven’t moved on. I’m sure you’ve had offers.”

“Yeah … some. So far you’re still the best job in town.”

“What my ex-roommate is trying to tell you,” Lanie said, “is that after his little tirade about the Nation of Islam, he’s in as much disrepute as the Foundation.”

Crane looked at Newcombe. “I want you to know I don’t blame you for any of that.”

“I’m not going to stop talking.”

“Fair enough,” Crane said. “Just keep me out of it.”

“Done.”

“That’s it?” Lanie said. “Everything’s in ruins and you two simply move on?”

“Politics is a shifting breeze,” Crane said. “It’s not real, not substantial. I remember times before Mr. Li, and I remember tunes before that. I’m still here. Most of them are gone. As for Dan, he’s a man of integrity.”

Hill stuffed another piece of tasteless sandwich into Crane’s mouth as he sat on a chair in front of the computer banks. Lanie and Newcombe also sat, rolling into a loose circle.

Crane swallowed, waving off the offer of another bite. “Talk to me. What … exactly happened?”

“They continued to use tape of me with Brother Ishmael,” Newcombe said. “Liang Int and government officials decided to go on the attack against NOI, talking openly about some unnamed conspiracy between the two of us, making everyone look guilty of something.”

“Me … it was fraud. But those charges depended upon us actually being frauds, the quake not occurring,” Crane said. “Why would they take a chance like that?”

“They didn’t take no chances,” Hill said. “When the President read that message he knew there wasn’t going to be no damned earthquake. He was too cocky.”

“Then where did we go wrong and how did they know about it?”

Newcombe reached for Crane’s sandwich, but Hill pulled it away. “Maybe the government listened to the other geologists and tectonicists who came down and said we were crazy.”

“I’m tellin’ you,” Hill said, “Gideon was surer than that.”

“Where does that leave us?” Crane asked.

Lanie had been quiet, listening, but Crane could tell she wanted to say something. Finally she spoke.

“Think about this for a minute,” she said. “It’s been making me crazy ever since it happened. The only thing we predicted on, really, were the stress readings on the failed rift. Everything else certainly pointed to a potential quake, and still does. It’s the stress readings that were out of line.”

“Equipment failure?” Crane asked.

“No,” Hill said. “We tested the spike two days ago in the Foundation’s compression chamber. It reads true.”

“Rules it out, then,” Crane said. “We fed the Reelfoot readings directly into the Foundation’s computers.”

“Not exactly,” Newcombe said, pointing to his wrist. “We fed into my pad, which fed into the computer in the van. After all the tests at all the sites were completed, I uploaded everything into the Foundation’s computers at the same time from the van.”

“Two transmissions,” Crane said. “Maybe there was a glitch in the transfer. Do you normally doublecheck data feed?”

“Not if human intervention isn’t a factor,” Lanie said. “Machine to machine we only check file size.”