Chapter 17
THE SALTON TROUGH
Lewis Crane took the eggbeater up into the puffy clouds, bright white against a hard blue sky, then dipped quickly down. Charlie, two days shy of eighteen months of age, clapped his hands and giggled. He was sitting on his mother’s lap, a huge, yellow plush elephant in his own little lap.
“You know what clouds are, Charlie?” Crane asked as he banked south, headed for the Project. “They’re water.”
Charlie made a gurgling noise. He seemed to adore his parents, and delighted them by listening intently to every word they spoke to him, responding often with a profound string of gibberish.
“And how much does a cloud weigh?”
The child’s eyes, hazel like his mother’s, opened wide. As if he could understand everything his father said, he looked out at the sky. He was just learning to speak. He pointed a pudgy finger and said, “Coud … coud.”
“That’s right, pal. Cloud,” Crane said. “Bet you think those clouds don’t weigh a thing … like spiderwebs. But a really big cloud weighs a lot. Ten million pounds maybe. Big. Big, huh?”
“Big,” Charlie repeated, opening his arms wide. He held up his stuffed animal. “Ellypant.”
“Yeah,” Crane said, excited. “Maybe two elephants.” Beaming, he looked over at Lanie. “Did you hear that? Two new words—cloud and elephant—and he got the point about size!”
Lanie chuckled, smoothing Charlie’s hair while resisting the temptation to tease Crane. What the heck, though, Charlie was bright, probably not ready to make an acceptance speech in Stockholm, but Crane was justified in the pride he took in their son. How he loved Charlie. And what a terrific father he was. Most important of all, though, Lanie thought, was that Charlie was sweet-tempered, curious, and affectionate. Almost as if he could read her thoughts, Charlie twisted around and planted a wet kiss on her jaw. She was laughing as they spotted the Project hundreds of feet below.
As usual, there were protesters around the outer gates of the Project compound. They’d been there since groundbreaking, which had occurred just a few days after Charlie’s birth. Mohammed Ishmael had enlarged the scope of NOI protests while escalating their violence. Their avowed purpose in picketing Northwest Gemstone was to stop Crane from pursuing what they called “his mad schemes to wreak nuclear havoc to stop earthquakes.” That, Lanie and Crane knew, had come from only one source—Dan Newcombe. Well, Abu Talib, as he called himself now.
They’d feared when Dan had resigned from the Foundation that he’d go public with what he knew about Crane’s dream; they were only surprised he’d waited so long … or that it had taken him such a time to learn about Northwest Gemstone and put two and two together. So far, they hadn’t lied to the public. In fact they hadn’t made any public statements at all. But they didn’t have to lie, because the public was disinclined to believe NOI. After the loss of the referendum on a NOI homeland, Mohammed Ishmael had become much more prominent, often eclipsing Dan in the number and apparent importance of speeches, appearances on teev, and before their people.
And it was no doubt that it was Mohammed Ishmael who had returned the NOI to a warlike regimen of terrorist attacks.
The War Zones had rioted all at once, then moved farther out into the cities themselves—suicide bombers, cars full of gunmen shooting anyone unfortunate enough to be on the streets, full-scale urban warfare.
And every time another shooting, another bombing occurred, Mohammed Ishmael immediately claimed credit and said that the terror would stop the moment that NOI got a homeland—and Crane was stopped.
Liang Int continued to back the project, mainly because they couldn’t afford to lose face to Yo-Yu, whose new logo, the letters YOU done in blood red seemed to speak directly to the common man. Yo-Yu had been a phenomenon. Their chips had become remarkably sophisticated, able to create effects in which the brain couldn’t differentiate between reality and illusion. They’d gotten so good, in fact, that Mr. Tang’s attempts at competing with a similar product were failing miserably due to inferior quality. There was simply too large a technological gap, and Yo-Yu guarded its secrets very carefully.
Then there was the Mississippi Valley. Yo-Yu, flush with chip capital, for chips were indeed superseding dorph in the marketplace, had made an offer for the entire area which Liang had accepted. It had made Mr. Mui happy, since it enabled Liang America to show a profit for calendar ’27. Yo-Yu then had pumped money into the entire midwest, which had energized the area. It had become a frontier boomtown, the disenfranchised moving in from all over, taking the places of those who’d left after the quake and its persistent aftershocks.
Boisterous and beyond the law, the people of the Mississippi Valley had turned it into the hot spot for fast money and easy deals—and that had given Yo-Yu the foothold it needed in basic areas—land ownership, timber, chemical plants, agriculture—so it could make a real run at breaking Liang America.
And they’d gotten the people. The best public relations project the world had seen was the ozone regeneration project, an idea they’d stolen from Liang. Yo-Yu’s project had replenished twenty-seven percent of the atmosphere’s ozone supply, helping everyone without cost. People were once again going out in the sun with no fear of skin cancer. Trees thought long dead were regenerating. In the off-year elections in ’26, Yo-Yu had taken eighty-nine seats in the House of Representatives, so many that a kind of political balance had been established, and actual debate on real issues was heard once more in Congress.
Crane buzzed the protesters, padding to his outside loudspeaker as a small sea of faces cursed and shook their fists up at him. “You are trespassing on private property,” he said, Charlie laughing and clapping again when he heard his father’s booming voice. “Leave the area immediately. We are going to begin riot exercises with a deadly chemical spray. Leave immediately.”
He banked up, watching them scatter below him. He padded onto Project Control. “Turn on the sprinklers,” he said, all of them laughing as the plain water hoses came on, spraying the people. The protesters ran, stumbling and choking, gasping for breath—brought to their knees by the power of suggestion. Crane changed the joke every few days so that word wouldn’t get around.
They cleared the ten-foot fence, their small FPF contingent waving as they passed. For all his bluster, Brother Ishmael had never attacked the compound directly, perhaps afraid to wander too far from a core War Zone. Or he might have been afraid he was right about unstable nuclear material being worked in the compound.
“He said the machines won’t dig?” Lanie asked as they cleared the fence to take the last five miles to the compound.
“Mr. Panatopolous is very upset and wants to change the finish date.”
“So, what’s new? He bellyaches more than any ten people.”
“That’s Mr. Panatopolous’ forte, my love. Our Pany’s creative contribution to the world. I’d kind of miss it if he changed.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d have my wife look into it,” he answered, wiggling his eyebrows. “You will look into it, won’t you?”
She nodded. “It sounds like a calibration problem again. The diggers go off line after awhile and nobody notices until they stop working.”
They bullseyed the two-story containment building, its windowless, domelike construction a concrete wart on the flat desert of Bombay Beach. The site was on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, several miles from a large retirement community. Farther east were the San Bernardino Mountains. Salton gleamed like diamonds under the bright morning sun. Thirty miles long and ten miles wide, it had sprung into being in 1905 when the Colorado River broke through irrigation headgates and flooded the area. Though called a sea, Salton was actually a shallow saline lake. The Project pulled water from it for its reactors.