“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.”
Crane snapped to attention. “That’s exactly what it’s telling us,” he said, staring through the ahrensglass and up the three-story height of the globe. “It’s not the same. Something happened to this planet that changed it drastically, altered it forever. So, what could have happened, what—oh my God. I’ve been so stupid.” He turned to Lanie. “Crank it up. We’re going to go from scratch right now.”
“What?”
“Just do it. I’ve got an idea and we’re going to try it out.”
The globe went dark as the computers reset themselves. Within a minute Crane stared at a ball of fire, spinning wildly in its youth. “All right,” he said. “I want you to increase your six-and-a-half-sextillion-ton mass by one eighty-first.”
“One eighty-first,” Lanie said. “One eighty-first?”
“Do it,” Crane said.
Newcombe laughed. “Crane, you’re batty.”
“Only if I’m wrong.”
“The machine refuses to take the extra weight,” Lanie said. “It’s telling me the increase is unstable by its very nature. The globe can’t support the increase in mass and still hold together.”
“Perfect,” Crane said. “Talk to it, Lanie. Explain to it that it’s all right to build to an unstable state.”
“It’s not going to want to hear that,” she said.
“Tell the globe that the instability will resolve itself.”
“It will?”
“I think so,” he said, as Lanie turned to the computer and opened a line of discussion with its higher reasoning functions.
Crane walked up to Newcombe. “What’s the printout?” he asked.
“Ahh.” Dan smiled, handing him a small stack of seismograms. “Almost forgot. We’ve begun to get Ellsworth-Beroza tremors on the Reelfoot grabens consistent with the beginning phases of a major quake. Also, levels of radon, carbon monoxide, and methane are continuing to rise along with electromagnetic activity.”
Crane nodded, not surprised. He’d make his three billion dollars, but it would be at a cost beyond belief. It was happening, a cycle of real horror beginning its relentless harvest of life and property. And no one was going to listen to his warnings.
“Got it,” Lanie said, swinging her chair around. “However, the globe will only do it if you tell it to, Crane. Would you step over here?”
Crane moved to her console as Lanie typed the command that would start the globe. “The machine refuses to take responsibility for what happens,” she said. “It’s looking for authority from higher up.”
He looked at the screen. It read:
He hit the Y. The screen faded, then read:
“Speak your name into the C channel of your pad,” Lanie said.
Crane did so, and the globe lights immediately came on. The sequence was initiated.
The globe spun quickly, but off balance. All the lights went down. Lanie’s programmers stopped work to watch the spectacle. The Earth is not perfectly round, but this one was obviously way off, its equatorial bulge huge and moving, throwing the planet on a wobbly orbit.
“You’re going to break your toy,” Newcombe said.
Warning lights were flashing up and down the consoles, the screens warning of imminent breakup.
A huge lump of fire now appeared on the globe, threatening to destroy it as centrifugal force drew the fireball slowly away from the globe.
“We’re going to have to shut it down, Crane!” Lanie called.
“You do and you’re fired!” Crane yelled over the warning bells sounding up and down the line.
“It wants to go into shutdown sequence.”
“But it hasn’t, has it?” he returned. “It’s smarter than we are. Let it go!”
The globe was wobbling horribly. It creaked as it tore itself apart, but Crane watched it with a satisfied smile.
Then it happened. The globe, now a lopsided dumbbell shape, was no longer able to sustain the hold on itself and the bulge broke free, spinning off, only to get captured in the larger mass’s gravitational pull. What was left began to spin normally again, all the warning bells and flashers shutting off up and down the line.
They were looking at a planet and its moon, a real chunk of the globe, dancing in synchronous orbit, and the globe was just as happy as it could be.
Newcombe sat staring, his mouth hanging open.
“Is that the Moon?” Lanie asked.
“Well,”—Crane shrugged—“now we know where that came from. Bully. Let’s keep watching.”
“It seems to be orbiting so closely,” Lanie said.
“I think we’ll find,” Crane answered, “that as the Earth’s rotation slows, the Moon will move farther away. Right now, imagine not only the effect the Moon will have on sea tides at this distance, but land tides as well.”
“I can’t believe it’s still working,” Lanie said as the planet cooled and holorains began, the Moon now a bit farther away.
“This is weird,” Newcombe said. “This isn’t some kind of trick, is it, Crane?”