“I’ll tell you why,” Newcombe said from the doorway. “Now that he’s got the power, he’s afraid of it.”
“Not far off,” Crane said, reaching for the printouts in Newcombe’s hand. “I just thought it was time for a little reflection before moving forward. Besides, there’s Memphis…”
He took the schematic Newcombe handed him and stared at it. “Here’s the Memphis jail,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll arrest me and take me here.”
“It’s going to be close,” Newcombe said.
“Yeah. The east side of the building looks like it won’t make it, but the cell blocks are stacked on the west side.”
“That’s a narrow ribbon of safe territory. Too narrow.”
“I trust your calculations.”
“I’m not so sure about the river,” Newcombe said. “I know what will happen to the land around it, but things are going to shift and force it to change course. I’ve got no real eco on that.”
“We’ll take our chances.”
“Will you have access to teev?”
“Yes,” Crane said, Lanie finding herself watching a wall show about the quake on Martinique. As she watched, lights began flashing in her head, recognition. God, she could feel the mud getting through her clothes. She itched.
Crane was still talking, but it was coming to Lanie as something from far away. She held her head, pain flashing. She could feel the scar under her hair, then the heat, the darkness, the overpowering fear of suffocation, the house collapsing all around them, everything else fading away.
Hands shaking her, a distant voice in her ear.
“Dan? Is Dan all right?” she said, but something was wrong. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“Lanie! Get a grip … Lanie?”
Dan was in front of her. They were in Crane’s office in the Foundation. She was gasping for breath, the sadness all over her as she began crying again.
“What is it?” Crane asked gently.
“That boy,” she said, sobbing. “That poor boy. We never even … even knew h-his name.”
Dan moved to comfort her, but she turned instinctively to Crane, who put his good arm around her.
The doorway opened fully to her then, her memories drifting lazily back—the fear, the interminable questions, the rum. And Crane. A smile spread slowly over her face. “I remember,” she said to him. “I remember everything.”
“What’s to remember?” Newcombe asked.
“The rum bottle … being pushed down the breathing tube. That’s right when you were telling me about your plan for ending earthquakes.”
“Ending earthquakes?” Dan asked.
She looked at Crane, instinctively realizing she’d said something wrong, something meant to be kept private.
“If you’ve got a plan for ending earthquakes,” Newcombe said, “I’d sure love to hear it.”
Crane merely looked at him. Newcombe turned to Lanie. “Okay, you tell me.”
“I-I’m still confused,” she said. “I’m just not sure what I … what I…”
“You’re a lot of things, Lanie,” Newcombe said, “but confused isn’t one of them. What are you holding back? Why are you holding back?”
“Dan,” Crane said quietly. “Ask me, not Lanie. I’m the one with the secrets.”
Newcombe stared angrily at him. “You’re nothing but secrets. From the first you’ve had some sort of game plan you kept from the rest of us. We’ve had to pick our way through your self-generated darkness. How about a little truth for a change?”
“Come on,” Crane said. “I’ll show you. I don’t suppose it would do any good to swear you to secrecy?”
“There’s been too damned much secrecy,” Newcombe said, following Crane out of the office.
Lame trailed behind, tense. She’d not meant to blurt anything out. God, why did she have to go and open her big mouth? She was surprised to find Crane moving to her controller’s console. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Crane said to the programmers working at their stations, “you may take a thirty-minute break beginning now. I want all of you out of the building. Go.”
Lanie joined them at the console, Crane’s fingers already busy on her keyboard. There were, apparently, things about the globe that even she didn’t know.
“I’ve been studying quakes my entire life,” Crane said, taking the globe offline and reprogramming. “I’d decided early on that I wanted to heal, not just to define. That’s why I entered into the study of the effects of nuclear testing on surrounding strata.”
“We all know your old news, Crane,” Newcombe said. “You’re still credited as the man whose work made the politicos see the light and stop all nuclear testing.”
“Gave me the Nobel Prize for it,” Crane said, and laughed. “But I never earned, nor wanted, that award. And I certainly never wanted to stop nuclear testing.”
“I don’t understand,” Lanie said. Crane hit the enter key and the globe stopped dead, red lights flashing all over its surface.
“Heat,” Crane said, walking to the globe, “enough heat to melt rock … to weld rock.”
“You want to fuse the plates back together,” Newcombe said, his voice hushed, his eyes narrowed in deep suspicion.
“I asked the machine,” Crane said. “I postulated a temperature of five thousand degrees centigrade and asked if it were possible to reconnect the plates through spot welding.” He pointed to the globe. “This is what it gave me. Fifty-three spot welds that, if done properly, will fuse the continental plates and end drift forever.”
“That’s what the globe was for,” Lanie said. “You wanted back-up for your theories.”
“Correct,” Crane said. “We can end the destructive reign of the earthquake in our lifetime.”
“You want to explode fifty-three nuclear bombs?” Newcombe asked, incredulous.
“Fifty-three gigaton bombs,” Crane said.
“You’re crazier than I thought.”
“Am I?” Crane asked. “Think about it. The world sits on enormous stockpiles of nuclear materials, old warheads, waste matter. Done properly, my bombs could eliminate those stockpiles by exploding them back downward, toward the core, which is simply a decaying radioactive process anyway. We could end EQ’s and volcanoes, and get rid of our nuclear mess all at the same time.”
Lanie cocked her head. There was sense to what he said. Deep underground explosions right on the rifts, if handled properly, could relieve all the push-pull pressure. If the bombs were planted deeply enough, they’d pose zero threat to life above ground.
“Has your ego no limits?” Newcombe asked. “Has it occurred to you that earthquakes are a natural part of our world? That the planet may exist because of them? There would be no life on this planet at all if the volcanoes hadn’t pumped life-sustaining matter into the atmosphere. What you’re proposing is nothing less than destruction of the processes which made us what we are. They’re natural, Crane. Leave them alone!”
“What’s natural about an earthquake?” Crane asked. “People are always so quick to judge. Just because it’s always been this way doesn’t mean it has to stay like that. The globe thinks it will work fine and the globe knows far more than we do.”
“It does not!” Newcombe said loudly. “The globe knows nothing of humanity or of ethics or of common sense. You’re talking about interfering with a basic process of the Earth. God only knows the catastrophe you could cause by trying to make this insanity work!”
“Ask the machine,” Crane said. “See what it thinks.”
“I don’t care about the goddamned machine!” Newcombe shouted. “It’s an extension of your insanity.”
“Wait a minute,” Lanie said. “The globe works. You’ve seen it work. It can be a very useful tool in—”