Crane cleared his throat. “I’ve spent the last year working on a special project, something really big. But to put it over, I need your help.”
“It pains me to admit it, Crane, but government R D money is pretty tough to come by these days. Sadly, someone in Beijing will have the final word on any funding—”
“I don’t want funding. I want permission and sanction. The Foundation’s rich. That three-billion-dollar bet, you know. Also, we started publishing the Report and the world has paid—for the Report itself, for the EQ-eco in predicted areas, for the core assessment of possible damages, and for general advice. We are prosperous beyond my dreams.”
“No funding?” Sumi asked, frowning. “But what can you want from me, if you’re off the teat? What could I possibly have to offer a man who has all the money he needs?”
Crane’s mouth was dry. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny disk. “Take a look at this,” he said, handing it to Sumi. “It will explain a lot.”
Sumi slipped the disk into her wristpad, then looked around for a screen. “May I borrow your goggles, please?”
Lanie handed Sumi the extra goggles from her tote bag, what she called her everything-Crane-needs-to-survive-on-the-road bag. Lanie took a deep, nervous breath, her eyes wide. This was it.
“Try it on the L fiber,” Crane said as Sumi pulled down the goggles and padded on.
“Once you’re through with this job, I could use a good public relations man,” Crane joked.
“Bribery, Crane?” Sumi asked with echoing humor. “This must really be important.”
“It is. But, seriously, a job is always open to you. I hope you know that.”
“The globe,” Sumi said, smiling.
“Yes,” Crane said like a loving father. “We’ve missed you at the Foundation, Sumi.” The globe was spinning quickly. If Sumi only knew, Crane thought, what had transpired with the globe during this past year! It had evolved at an astonishing rate into something beyond his wildest imaginings when he had hired Lanie all those months ago. The globe’s cognitive function was beyond reproach, but more, it was developing awareness and—He forced his attention back to the image of the spinning globe. Its spotlight found and highlighted California as the rotation slowed.
They were staring at California, the view filling their entire vision in the goggles. The world was green and brown, the oceans blue, the cities vibrating in pale, friendly yellow.
“Okay,” Crane said, “you remember where the San Andreas Bumper is?”
“Just South of Bakersfield, right? Mount Pinos.”
“Yes.”
The San Andreas Bumper was an S shaped bend in the Fault Line, a flangelike protuberance or kink where the northbound Pacific Plate and the westbound North American Plate were stuck. Inexorable movement continued, the Plates monstrous, unstoppable Titans shoving against each other, the pressure squeezing ever tighter on the Bumper, straining the rock ever harder.
“There,” Crane said. “Do you see the red zone opening up on the base?”
Bright red blinked just south of Bakersfield and began creeping through a fault line that ultimately encompassed a huge slab of the Pacific Plate, all the way to the Philippines. Los Angeles was on the wrong side of the ripping fault. So was San Francisco. The tear went all the way south, into Mexico, cutting off the Baja Peninsula at the northern end of the Gulf of California.
“The red spot is so large at the Bumper,” Sumi said.
“That’s because the entire Bumper is getting ready to come apart. Watch.”
Sumi gasped.
The entire flange was now throbbing red, straining. Then it simply crumbled as all the strain was relieved at once. The Pacific Plate moved. There were no people pictured on the globe, but as the yellow cities began pulsating in ugly red, any human watching could have heard the screams of hundreds of thousands of hurt and dying people.
“What we’re looking at is the true detachment of Southern California from the North American Plate,” Crane said. “It is becoming an island, containing the carcasses of two of the world’s major cities, not to mention that all of oceanside California, so heavily developed, becomes a cadaver. See? A new mini-continent is born, pushing north.”
The chunk of continent slowly crept toward eventual subduction beneath the northern ridge of the Plate.
“Amazing,” Sumi whispered. “And the year?”
“Keep watching.”
Crane tapped Lanie who yanked her goggles up to stare at him. He shrugged, she returned the shrug, then blew him a kiss before jerking her goggles back into place.
He pulled his on again just as the numbers 6-3-2058 came up on the screen. “I want to remind you, Sumi,” he said, “this is no simulation or set of speculations. You are looking into a crystal ball and gazing directly into the future, the real future.”
“Thirty-two years.” Sumi pressed the pad to pause the disk. They all raised their goggles. Sumi’s face was strained and pale. “What a sadness it must be to watch such horror all the time, to know how inescapable it is.”
“But is it inescapable?” Crane asked, watching Sumi’s eyes narrow.
“You just told me we were gazing into a crystal ball.”
“A crystal ball that shows a future that is real only when it arrives.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Turn your disk back on. I want to show you another future.”
The globe relit inside the goggles. Time rewound. “Look farther south on the Fault, down in the Imperial Valley. Watch for a small red zone to open up.”
As he spoke a small spot along the San Andreas Fault’s southern arm blazed red for several seconds. Then it was gone.
“What was that?” Sumi asked.
“Watch,” Crane said. “The globe is going to pick up speed.”
It spun wildly, chasing the years, finally stopping on California. The numbers 6-3-2058 again, but everything appeared whole and placid. The show ended; its viewers removed their goggles.
Sumi stared at Lanie, then back at Crane.
“All right. What happened … what made the difference?”
“I asked the globe,” Crane said, pausing dramatically, “if it were possible to avoid the destruction of California by fusing the plates.”
“How do you fuse tectonic plates, Crane?”
“Heat. Heat so intense it would melt solid rock and bond it together.”
“And how would you produce such intense heat?”
“A thermonuclear reaction is the only way I can think of. In this particular case a five gigaton explosion along a six-mile stretch of underground twenty miles beneath the Earth’s surface right on the spot indicated by the globe.”
“You’re talking about an explosion thousands of times more powerful than anything previously detonated.”
Nodding vigorously, he said quickly, “But deflected downward, into the thermonuclear core. It wouldn’t even cause a ripple on the surface. We’ve simulated it. It works.”
“But how could you know it would result in anything other than a major break in the fault and the hastening of catastrophic destruction?”
“Sumi, didn’t you tell me that the Crane Report is required reading for heads of state? Well, the Crane Report is based on the globe’s functions and it hasn’t been wrong yet. We’re just using it here in a slightly different way. Think about this: Fusing the plates farther down the fault where there is no strain at the moment will take all the pressure off the Bumper. In fact, this one weld actually slows down the rate of continental drift by joining the two plates back together. For fifty years after the event, we show an eighty percent decrease in drift in these two plates, with a concurrent decrease in EQ activity.”
Sumi jumped up and started to pace. “You’re sure the strain doesn’t come out some place else? Maybe we’d be destroying South America to save LA.”