Between Logan and the clearing lay the emergence site — an area about equal to a city block. As usual, the gravity beam’s coupling with surface matter had been, well, peculiar. This time roughly a quarter of the pines within the exit zone had been vaporized, along with their roots. Those remaining — which had all been either taller or shorter than the missing trees — stood apparently unscathed amid the gaping holes.
Fortunately, no people had been in this remote mountain locale, so it hardly seemed a calamity. Logan would reserve judgment though, till the soil and underlying rocks were scanned by follow-up teams.
But of course, Colonel Spivey was less interested in mineralogical consistency than readouts from his instrument packages, which had been scattered across this mountainside just before the gazer beam was scheduled to pass through. Returning minutes after the event, Logan had dropped in to gather the mud-spattered canisters nearest the center while Redpath and the ’copter crew collected others farther out. Of those at ground zero, two were missing, along with the vanished trees.
The predictions made by Hutton’s teams grew sharper with each event. Soon, we won’t have to retreat so far for safety. Soon I’ll get to witness one happening up close.
The prospect was both chilling and exciting.
This improved predictability was helping keep collateral damage to a minimum, at least in alliance territories. Where the beam couldn’t be diverted to completely uninhabited areas, people could generally be evacuated on some pretext. It was different, of course, when the exit point lay in “unfriendly territory,” where a warning might arouse suspicion. In those cases, the resonator crews could only do their best with aiming alone.
Sometimes, that wasn’t enough. In China, an entire village had sunk out of sight last week, when the ground beneath it turned to slurry. And had the vibrations in an Azerbaijani earthquake been just a few hertz closer to the normal modes of certain large apartment buildings, the damage would not have been “minor,” but horrendous. Logan shuddered to think about that near catastrophe.
Maybe Spivey’s arranging for these close shaves, he pondered as he picked his way past the yawning gaps in the forest loam. After all, when you’re testing a weapon, an intentional “near miss” is just as good as a bull’s-eye.
Only, what if some “near miss” happens to trigger something else? Something unexpected?
New Madrid, he had said to Claire. Not many people knew that Missouri town was distinguished as the site of a particularly stiff seismic jolt back in the early nineteenth century — the most powerful quake to hit the territory of the United States in recorded history, which shook the Mississippi out of its banks and rattled the continent as far away as the Eastern Seaboard. Only a few had died on that occasion, because the population was so sparse. But if something like it struck today, it would make two “big ones” in late TwenCen California look like mere amusement park rides.
Spivey and the others think they can “manage” the monster. But Alex Lustig seemed dubious, and he was the only one with any real understanding.
It troubled Logan that they still hadn’t found the British physicist. Perhaps Lustig and that woman astronaut had been victims of foul play. But if so, who could have profited?
Redpath caught the recovered instrument packages Logan slung into the aircraft. “So where to now?” Logan asked as he clambered aboard. The federal officer with the beaded headband barely shrugged. “Somewhere in Canada. They’re tryin’ to pin it down now. Meanwhile, we ride.”
Logan nodded. This was the thrilling part, heading off to yet another site, somewhere in North America, flitting from one place to the next to see what new, weird manifestations the gazer would wreak. Most of the time it came down to interviewing some eyewitness who saw “a cloud disappear” or reported “a thousand crazy colors.” But then, when the beam coupling coefficients were close, there might be bizarre, twisty columns of fused earth where none had been before, or gaping holes, or disappearances.
We’re saving the Earth, Logan reminded himself dozens of times each day. The gazer is our only hope.
True enough. But Glenn Spivey was right about something else, too. While “saving” the world, they were also going to change things.
The flyer took off, gained altitude, then rotated its jets and swung to the northeast. Logan settled in as comfortably as he could and began reading his mail.
So, he thought, when he perused what Claire had sent him. It was a document of agreement — between his ex-wife and the United States Department of Defense.
I always knew Daisy suffered from selective morality. But it seems she’ll deal with the Devil himself, if it advances one of her causes.
In this case, the rewards were substantial. Military funds would be used to buy up one thousand hectares of wetlands and donate them to the World Nature Conservancy, protecting them forever from encroaching development. Logan had never heard of a whistle blower getting so much for a single tip. But then, Daisy McClennan was a shrewd negotiator. I wonder what she sold them.
Logan frowned as he pieced together that part of the deal. It was me. She sold me I
Daisy had been the one who told Spivey about his Spanish paper… that he was on the trail of the cause of the anomalies. Reading the date, he whistled. His ex-wife had realized the importance of his discovery back when he thought it nothing but another amusing “just-so” story.
Logan read on, in growing astonishment.
Hell, it wasn’t Spivey’s peepers who finally cracked the Tangoparus’ security. It was Daisy! She’s the one who tracked them to New Zealand and gave Spivey the time he needed to get his three-alliance deal worked out.
Logan whistled, in awe and not a little admiration. Of course I always knew where Claire got her brains. Still, Daisy—
He rescaled what he had believed about his former wife and lover who, it appeared, felt at liberty to dictate terms to governments and spies. Of course it was conceited and foolish of her to think she could manipulate such forces indefinitely. But Daisy had grown up a McClennon — and therefore almost as cut off from reality as ancient Habsburg princes. That couldn’t have been healthy for a youngster’s coalescing sense of proportion, or learning to know one’s limitations. Even after rebelling against all that, Daisy must have retained a residual feeling that rules are for the masses, and really only optional for special people. That reflex would only get reinforced in the simulated worlds of the Net, where wishing really made some things so.
Logan recalled the girl she’d been at Tulane. She had seemed perfectly aware of those handicaps, so eager to overcome them.
Ah, well. Some wounds get better, some just fester. So now she had sold him to Glenn Spivey. What next?
Logan erased the screen and put away the plaque. He settled to watch as the aircraft passed beyond moist forests into drier territory and finally dropped out of the Cascade Range. Soon it was reeling its fleeting shadow behind it across a high desert, still visibly contoured and rippled from massive eruptions and floods that took place in ages gone by. To Logan’s eyes, the stories of past cataclysms were as easy to read as a newspaper, and just as relevant. The planet breathed and stretched. And yet it had never occurred to him until recently that humankind might also wreak changes on such a scale.