Michael Crichton - State Of Fear

Then there were problems about their contact with the rebels. There were problems about the fact that one of their party had disappeared, the famous actor Ted Bradley. They all told the story of what had happened to Bradley, but there was no way to corroborate it. So the police made them tell it again.

And suddenly, abruptly, unaccountably, they were allowed to leave. Their papers were in order. Their passports were returned. There was no difficulty. They could leave whenever they wanted.

Evans slept most of the way to Honolulu. After the plane refueled and took off again, he sat up and talked to Morton and the others. Morton was explaining what had happened on the night of his car crash.

"There was obviously a problem with Nick and what he was doing with his money. NERF was not doing good things. Nick was very angrydangerously angry. He threatened me, and I took him at his word. I had established the link between his organization and ELF, and he was threatened, to put it mildly. Kenner and I thought he would try to kill me. Well, he did try. With that girl at the coffee shop, that morning in Beverly Hills."

"Oh yes." Evans remembered. "But how did you stage that car crash? It was so incredibly dangerous"

"What, do you think I'm crazy?" Morton said. "I never crashed."

"What do you mean?"

"I kept right on driving, that night."

"But." Evans fell silent, shaking his head. "I don't get it."

"Yes, you do," Sarah said. "Because I let it slip to you, by accident. Before George called me and told me to keep my mouth shut about it."

It came back to him then. The conversation from days ago. He hadn't paid much attention at the time. Sarah had said:

He told me to buy a new Ferrari from a guy in Monterey and have it shipped to San Francisco.

When Evans expressed surprise that George was buying another Ferrari:

I know. How many Ferraris can one man use? And this one doesn't seem up to his usual standard. From the e-mail pictures it looks kind of beat up.

And then she said:

The Ferrari he bought is a 1972 365 GTS Daytona Spyder. He already has one, Peter. It's like he doesn't know amp; "Oh, I knew all right," Morton said. "What a waste of money. The car was a piece of crap. And then I had to fly a couple of Hollywood prop guys up to Sonoma to beat the hell out of it and make it look like a crash. Then they flat-bedded it out that night, set it on the road, fired up the smoke pots amp;"

"And you drove right past a wreck that was already in place," Evans said.

"Yes," Morton said, nodding. "Drove right around the corner. Pulled off the road, climbed up the hill, and watched you guys."

"You son of a bitch."

"I'm sorry," Morton said, "but we needed real emotion to distract the police from the problems."

"What problems?"

"Ice-cold engine block, for one," Kenner said. "That engine hadn't run for days. One of the cops noticed it was cold while the car was being put on the truck. He came back and asked you the time of the accident, all of that. I was concerned they would figure it out."

"But they didn't," Morton said.

"No. They knew something was wrong. But I don't think they ever guessed identical Ferraris."

"No one in his right mind," Morton said, "would intentionally destroy a 1972 365 GTS. Even a crappy one."

Morton was smiling, but Evans was angry. "Somebody could have told me"

"No," Kenner said. "We needed you to work Drake. Like the cell phone."

"What about it?"

"The cell phone was a very low-quality bug. We needed Drake to suspect that you were part of the investigation. We needed him pressured."

"Well, it worked. That's why I got poisoned in my apartment, isn't it?" Evans said. "You guys were willing to take a lot of risks with my life."

"It turned out all right," Kenner said.

"You did this car crash to pressure Drake?"

"And to get me free," Morton said. "I needed to go down to the Solomons and find out what they were doing. I knew Nick would save the best for last. Although if they had been able to modify that hurricanethat was the third stunt they plannedso that it hit Miami, that would have been spectacular."

"Fuck you, George," Evans said.

"I'm sorry it had to be this way," Kenner said.

"And fuck you, too."

Then Evans got up and went to the front of the plane. Sarah was sitting alone. He was so angry he refused to speak to her. He spent the next hour staring out the window. Finally, she began talking quietly to him, and at the end of half an hour, they embraced.

Evans slept for a while, restless, his body sore. He couldn't find a comfortable position to rest. Intermittently, he would wake up, groggy. One time he thought he heard Kenner talking to Sarah.

Let's remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium-size sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time. The Earth is now on its third atmosphere.

The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early on, because the planet was so hot. Then, as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapor condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.

Meanwhile, the planet's land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.

And for the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we're due for the next one.

And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.

Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightning bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can't control the climate.

The reality is, they run from the storms.

"What do we do now?"

"I'll tell you what we do," Morton said. "You work for me. I'm starting a new environmental organization. I have to think of a name. I don't want one of these pretentious names with the words world and resource and defense and wildlife and fund and preservation and wilderness in them. You can string those words together in any combination. World Wildlife Preservation Fund. Wilderness Resource Defense Fund. Fund for the Defense of World Resources. Anyway, those fake names are all taken. I need something plain and new. Something honest. I was thinking of Study the Problem And Fix It.' Except the acronym doesn't work. But maybe that's a plus. We will have scientists and field researchers and economists and engineersand one lawyer."