Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“Even greater lies added to my life,” Sumi said. “Mr. Li, I cannot do this. My ancestral lands—”

“I have acquired them. They were lost to you in the bankruptcy action of your parents. But I knew you would be working to reacquire them, so I did. They are yours when our business is concluded. If you refuse, you will have nothing.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’ve already told you. I like the idea of an Asian being a heartbeat away from the Presidency. And this will also give us the chance to work … closely together. However, we will not make this change for a month or so. I wish you to prepare yourself.”

Mr. Li’s wristpad bleeped insistently. “What?” he asked crossly. He listened glumly for a moment. “Thank you, Mr. Mui,” he said at last and blanked the man. He touched the pad again, Sumi’s wall screen coming up, bringing with it a shot of Crane and Whetstone. She smiled involuntarily. Crane was out of jail.

“People call me a fraud,” Crane was saying. “Well, this is your opportunity to profit from my so-called fraudulent nature.”

Whetstone spoke. “We have put three billion dollars cash into an escrow account. That money talks: It says there will be an earthquake on February 27th in the Mississippi Valley that will cause massive devastation. We are betting on Mr. Crane’s formidable knowledge and scientific genius. We will give two-to-one odds. If anyone wants a piece of the action—”

“What are they doing?” Li asked.

Sumi shook her head. “You never believed it, did you?”

“That Crane could predict earthquakes? Certainly not.”

“You were wrong, Mr. Li. I tried to tell you about it when you had me sabotage their program, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“But what’s happening now?”

She was laughing, with relief and with the irony of it all. “Don’t you see? They’ve discovered my treachery and have corrected their calculations. You are going to have your earthquake, Mr. Li. You are going to know the horror of getting what you asked for.”

“But that … that changes everything!”

“Yes. Everything.” She laughed. “Life, sir, is change.”

Running, Crane circled the programmers within the newly built stationary orb around the globe. “Worthless!” he shouted at the globe. “You’re useless. I’m going to sell you for scrap.”

“Turn off the atmosphere inducers, run in to that globe, and kick the damned thing for me,” Lanie called wearily to him from where she slumped at her console.

He stopped running after he’d caught sight of her. She was dejected. He was only angry. He trotted over to her. She was staring at her keyboard. When the last of the shutdown bells quieted, he said gently, “It’s just something stupid. Don’t give up.”

She didn’t even look at him. “Better be something stupid, because we’re fresh out of smart ideas.”

He turned and stared through the thick ahrensglass at the huge globe. It had shut itself down this time somewhere before the formation of Pangaea during the planet’s watery stage. Some progress at least. Before, during the first two weeks after the bet, they’d reset it twenty times. Twenty times they’d recalibrated, making slight adjustments to the fiery birth of the Earth Mother. And twenty times they’d failed. Then the globe had made a request direct only to Crane—and he’d responded quickly. The globe was transforming itself … Crane knew that, Lanie did, too, though neither of them could predict to what sort of entity.

The globe had urged Crane to reposition its magnetic poles and to reconform its environmental surround to match Earth’s gravitational field through and beyond the Ozone Layer. In response to the request, Crane had ordered all the openings of the globe room, the window and door apertures, to be sealed. Then vast numbers of machines had been brought to the Foundation. Huge vacuum tubes and force field impellers, under the direction of the best physicists Crane could hire, had been placed at dome and base to transform the globe room into a chamber that was a piece of the universe in which the globe-Earth revolved on its axis.

And now, this afternoon, they’d at last been able to test again. And for all the changes—the time, the money, the hard work—they’d got nothing but failure … again. It was maddening.

“You know, the sad thing,” Lanie said, popping a dorph tab, “is that the damned globe doesn’t even hold out any hope of ever constructing itself. It finds no way of getting from point A to point B.”

“We’re just not doing something we should be doing.”

“It’s so simple, though.” She got up and joined him. “We’ve got known factors—a weight of around six and a half sextillion tons of rotating fire. It contains elements we can discern. It rotated faster at the beginning, but we’ve allowed for that.”

“Known factors. You said, known factors.” Something was eating away at Crane, something right in front of his face that he could almost see.

“Maybe Dan was right,” Lanie said. “Maybe both of us are nuts and this is just a fantasy.”

“Dan says a lot of things I don’t agree with.” Newcombe had come out again publicly in support of an Islamic State. True to his word, he’d kept the Foundation’s name out of it both times he appeared on the teev. Instead he billed himself as, “the inventor of EQ-eco.”

It had been a strange month and a half since the night he and Stoney had gone on teev with the wager. The government had viciously attacked him and the bet, calling it a con game meant to bilk the citizens of America. Despite that, the wager had been covered within three days, actually two and a half. It was already out of the news, but that didn’t matter. The closer to the time they came, the bigger an issue it would become. It was a self-generating concept.

To a man, the scientific establishment rang with condemnation, referring to Crane as a “lunatic bent on making himself famous no matter what the cost.” Actually, he’d been glad to hear that. It meant they’d stay away from Reelfoot and leave it to him.

“Cheer up, people,” Newcombe said, moving up to Lanie’s console, a printout in his hand. “It can’t be that bad.”

“The Earth has been keeping her secrets secret,” Crane said amiably. “In line with your speculation.”

Newcombe shrugged. “I’d love to see you succeed. But we’re talking about five billion years of earth history, most of which we know nothing about. It really isn’t possible to expect—”

“You’re wrong in a great many respects,” Lanie said, pointing at her line of programmers, all working fast, inputting data, increasing the globe’s knowledge. “Current data is simply a reflection of the ancient past. In every instance where I’ve worked backward from a known event, I’ve been able to connect it to an unknown event that began the chain. It’s time-consuming, but it works.”

“Then why not apply that to the whole globe?”

“Can’t,” Crane said. “To go backward, an event at a time, would consume the rest of our lives and then some. Each event would be judged independently because we don’t know inherent connections. And when we were done, we still would have made a globe based only on what we know about. What about the geologic eccentricities we haven’t even uncovered?”

“Besides,” Lanie added, “even with the single events I’ve been able to trace backward, I can go only so far. At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, the machine shuts down and says, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ ”

“In other words,” Newcombe said, taking a seat himself, “you can’t go either way with it. Your globe is telling you that the world we have is not the world we had.”