Michael Crichton - State Of Fear

Up ahead, they no longer saw any taillights. It seemed they were alone on the dark road.

They came around a curve, and saw the next curve a hundred yards aheadobscured by billowing gray smoke.

"Oh no," Sarah said, putting her hand to her mouth.

The Ferrari had spun out, struck a tree, and flipped over. It now lay upside down, a crumpled and smoking mass. It had very nearly gone off the cliff itself. The nose of the car was hanging over the edge.

Evans and Sarah ran forward. Evans got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the cliff's edge, trying to see into the driver's compartment. It was hard to see much of anythingthe front windshield was flattened, and the Ferrari lay almost flush to the pavement. Harry came over with a flashlight, and Evans used it to peer inside.

The compartment was empty. Morton's black bow tie was dangling from the doorknob, but otherwise he was gone.

"He must have been thrown."

Evans shone the light down the cliff. It was crumbling yellow rock, descending steeply for eighty feet to the ocean below. He saw no sign of Morton.

Sarah was crying softly. Harry had gone back to get a fire extinguisher from the limousine. Evans swung his light back and forth over the rock face. He did not see George's body. In fact, he did not see any sign of George at all. No disturbance, no path, no bits of clothing. Nothing.

Behind him he heard the whoosh of the fire extinguisher. He crawled away from the cliff's edge.

"Did you see him, sir?" Harry said, his face full of pain.

"No. I didn't see anything."

"Perhaps amp;over there." Harry pointed toward the tree. And he was right; if Morton had been thrown from the car by the initial impact, he might be twenty yards back, on the road.

Evans walked back, and shone his flashlight down the cliff again. The battery was running down, the beam was weakening. But almost immediately, he saw a glint of light off a man's patent leather slipper, wedged among the rocks at the edge of the water.

He sat down in the road and put his head in his hands. And cried.

By the time the police were finished talking with them, and a rescue team had rappelled down the cliff to recover the shoe, it was three o'clock in the morning. They found no other sign of the body, and the cops, talking among themselves, agreed that the prevailing currents would probably carry the body up the coast to Pismo Beach. "We'll find him," one said, "in about a week or so. Or at least, what's left by the great whites."

Now the wreck was being cleared away, and loaded onto a flatbed truck. Evans wanted to leave, but the highway patrolman who had taken Evans's statement kept coming back to ask for more details. He was a kid, in his early twenties. It seemed he had not filled out many of these forms before.

The first time he came back to Evans, he said, "How soon after the accident would you say you arrived on the scene?"

Evans said, "I'm not sure. The Ferrari was about half a mile ahead of us, maybe more. We were probably going forty miles an hour, so amp;maybe a minute later?"

The kid looked alarmed. "You were going forty in that limo? On this road?"

"Well. Don't hold me to it."

Then he came back and said, "You said you were the first on the scene. You told me you crawled around at the edge of the road?"

"That's right."

"So you would have stepped on broken glass, on the road?"

"Yes. The windshield was shattered. I had it on my hands, too, when I crouched down."

"So that explains why the glass was disturbed."

"Yes."

"Lucky you didn't cut your hands."

"Yes."

The third time he came back, he said, "In your estimation, what time did the accident occur?"

"What time?" Evans looked at his watch. "I have no idea. But let me see amp;" He tried to work backward. The speech must have started about eight-thirty. Morton would have left the hotel at nine. Through San Francisco, then over the bridge amp;"Maybe nine-forty-five, or ten at night."

"So, five hours ago? Roughly?"

"Yes."

The kid said, "Huh." As if he were surprised.

Evans looked over at the flatbed truck, which now held the crumpled remains of the Ferrari. One cop was standing on the flatbed, beside the car. Three other cops were on the street, talking with some animation. There was another man there, wearing a tuxedo. He was talking to the cops. When the man turned, Evans was surprised to see that it was John Kenner.

"What's going on?" Evans asked the kid.

"I don't know. They just asked me to check on the time of the accident."

Then the driver got into the flatbed truck, and started the engine. One of the cops yelled to the kid, "Forget it, Eddie!"

"Never mind, then," the kid said to Evans. "I guess everything's okay."

Evans looked over at Sarah, to see if she had noticed Kenner. She was leaning on the limousine, talking on the phone. Evans looked back in time to see Kenner get into a dark sedan driven by the Nepali guy, and drive off.

The cops were leaving. The flatbed turned around and headed up the road, toward the bridge.

Harry said, "Looks like it's time to go."

Evans got into the limousine. They drove back toward the lights of San Francisco.

Morton's jet flew back to Los Angeles at noon. The mood was somber. All the same people were on board, and a few more, but they sat quietly, saying little. The late-edition papers had printed the story that millionaire philanthropist George Morton, depressed by the death of his beloved wife, Dorothy, had given a disjointed speech (termed "rambling and illogical" by the San Francisco Chronicle) and a few hours later had died in a tragic automobile crash while test-driving his new Ferrari.

In the third paragraph, the reporter mentioned that single-car fatalities were frequently caused by undiagnosed depression and were often disguised suicides. And this, according to a quoted psychiatrist, was the likely explanation for Morton's death.

About ten minutes into the flight, the actor Ted Bradley said, "I think we should drink a toast in memory of George, and observe a minute of silence." And to a chorus of "Hear, hear," glasses of champagne were passed all around.

"To George Morton," Ted said. "A great American, a great friend, and a great supporter of the environment. We, and the planet, will miss him."

For the next ten minutes, the celebrities on board remained relatively subdued, but slowly the conversation picked up, and finally they began to talk and argue as usual. Evans was sitting in the back, in the same seat he had occupied when they flew up. He watched the action at the table in the center, where Bradley was now explaining that the US got only 2 percent of its energy from sustainable sources and that we needed a crash program to build thousands of offshore wind farms, like England and Denmark were doing. The talk moved on to fuel cells, hydrogen cars, and photovoltaic households running off the grid. Some talked about how much they loved their hybrid cars, which they had bought for their staff to drive.

Evans felt his spirits improve as he listened to them. Despite the loss of George Morton, there were still lots of people like thesefamous, high-profile people committed to changewho would lead the next generation to a more enlightened future.

He was starting to drift off to sleep when Nicholas Drake dropped into the seat beside his. Drake leaned across the aisle. "Listen," he said. "I owe you an apology for last night."

"That's all right," Evans said.

"I was way out of line. And I want you to know I'm sorry for how I behaved. I was upset, and very worried. You know George has been acting weird as hell the last couple of weeks. Talking strangely, picking fights. I guess in retrospect he was beginning to have a nervous breakdown. But I didn't know. Did you?"