“I assume my new position here is an example,” she said, not liking the look in his eyes.
“On a small scale, yes. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Yes, I do mind.”
Mr. Li laughed. “I’m finding myself intrigued by your lifestyle. What’s it like to masquerade for some twenty-eight years as the opposite sex?”
In absolute defensive mode, she answered carefully. “It’s not like anything, really. I’ve always done it, so it’s … natural.”
“Do you feel like a man or like a woman?”
“I feel like what I am.”
Mr. Li stood and moved behind Sumi, his hands coming up to massage her shoulders.
“You know what I mean,” he said softly. “Sexually. What are you like sexually?”
“Sir. I do not wish to answer questions of this kind.”
His hands moved down to her arms, rubbing softly, as she fought back feelings of nausea. “You will do whatever I tell you to do,” he said. “Answer the question.”
She sighed deeply, her body rigid as he caressed her. “In order for my deception to work,” she said, “I gave up all thoughts of sexuality many years ago. I couldn’t risk exposure. I simply control those feelings.”
“You’ve never had sex?”
“No, sir.”
“My goodness.” He leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head, then walked away from her. Sumi relaxed immediately. In front of the desk again, he looked at her with raised eyebrows. “I think we’re going to have a very interesting association.”
“How so, sir?” She hoped he couldn’t see her shaking hands.
“I have a new job for you, Sumi. How would you like to be Vice President of the United States?”
Sumi Chan laughed out loud. “You are joking.”
“I’m perfectly serious. It soon will be time for Gabler to resign—and time for the face of China to shine forth in American politics. It will bind the cultures closer together.”
“You must surely realize, Mr. Li, that the American Constitution provides that a Vice President be a natural-born citizen of the United States.”
“Ah,” Mr. Li said, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a small disc. “But you are such a citizen, Sumi. It’s all right here.” He dropped it on the desk. “You are the son of an American Marine, an embassy guard, who married a Chinese national. You were born on a Navy ship that was en route to the US. Unfortunately, your parents died in the flu epidemic several years ago—that much is true, eh? The record is complete. I did an excellent job on it.”
“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.”