But that wasn’t why they’d built here. Salton was 232 feet below sea level, so they could dig from a low point. More importantly, the Salton Trough sat squarely atop California’s most important fault convergence. Just beneath the Sea, the San Andreas and Imperial Faults became one, the Imperial Fault the final tear all the way to the Gulf of California. The joined faults then moved north, interconnecting with other faults and inactive volcanoes. Not only was the Salton Sea the place to bottle up San Andreas, but also to coldcock at least three other faults at the same time. The globe showed how important it was to get at these other faults, because, it demonstrated that by 2070, thirteen years after Southern California would become the island of Baja, the rest of the state would crack right up through the Salton from the Mexican border to Oregon, turning California into a jutting peninsula, the shores of the Pacific lapping against Arizona and Nevada.
Crane was planning to stop all of that in one bold action two weeks hence.
He landed on the blacktop next to the containment building, where workers were hosing it down after a Masada pass over the night before. Masada was finally beginning to dissipate and would be gone in the next few years. Endings and beginnings. Three months earlier a group of forty Jewish scientists had braved the still intense radiation of Israel to set up a closed-environment settlement in the leveled city of Jerusalem. Their dome abutted the remnants of the western wall, all that was left from Solomon’s temple built three millennia previously. The Islamic world complained mightily and made threats. The Jews stayed in Jerusalem. Two babies already had been born in the land of their forefathers.
Turn of the wheel, Crane had thought at the time. Take that, Brother Ishmael.
They set down next to Containment, climbing out and walking toward the profusion of small buildings scattered across the flat plain. There were barracks for the permanent troops, a cafeteria and amusements building, equipment sheds, and the motor pool area where all of Mr. Panatopolous’ bizarre anthropomorphic digging machines lived. In the distance on the salt flats, a two-hundred-foot hill of excavated rock and dirt stood as the highest point in the immediate area.
The elevator to the cavern looked just like another building. Three stories tall, it also had no windows. Yellow dust blew through the camp on the hot desert air. They hurried to the entryway, Lanie carrying Charlie. She pulled his brimmed cap down over his face to keep the dust out of his mouth, he pushed it back up. Charlie took naturally to the desert.
They voiceprinted into the entry, then walked the fifteen feet in darkness to the inner door, equally large to get heavy equipment in and out. Here all three went through optical scan and fingerprint.
The elevator doors came open with a hydraulic whoosh, and they stepped into a plain metal cylinder twenty feet high with a thirty-foot radius. It could carry a hundred people or sixty tons of equipment. The elevator was a giant electromagnet that used the earth’s own magnetic field as propulsion. The elevator hovered at the top of a twenty-mile abyss with no external apparatus to hold it in place and with no brakes. There were two buttons just inside the door—an up arrow and a down arrow.
The center of the cylinder was carpeted, comfortable seating and amusements awaiting guests for the twenty-minute ride down. Lanie plopped heavily onto a couch. Charlie went right for the holobuilder, a handheld projection machine that created blocks that could be stacked and arranged to construct almost anything. Charles Crane enjoyed stacking them up to the top of the room, then knocking out the bottom one to see them tumble.
Crane watched his son, doting only the way an older father could. At forty-one, he didn’t feel especially old, but he’d led an eventful life, enough for any ten people, and his recent mellowing had made him glad he was seeing his dream through now. He feared losing the manic energy that had driven him before. This was too important to the world to take off the pressure. He was becoming damned civilized; and soon, he suspected, would come acceptance … then complacency … then the death of creativity.
“Are you going to have to put back the date?” Lanie asked as Charlie’s tower of blocks toppled into their midst, much to the boy’s glee.
“We’ll be fine,” Crane answered from an easy chair, Charlie zapping his blocks and beginning again, this time with pyramids. “I’m just glad we’re getting this done before the next elections.”
“Maybe all that horrid violence will stop then, too.” She stretched out on the sofa. The elevator moved soundlessly except for a small contact point clack every ten seconds.
“Are you all right?” Crane asked.
“It’s nothing … I’m a little tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Bad dreams?”
“It’s nothing, I said.”
“Lanie…”
She sat up, on the edge of the couch, tensed.
“Do you remember that dream I used to have?”
“The Martinique dream? Sure. It went away after your memory returned.”
“It’s back,” she said. “I had it last night.” She shook her head. “So … real. I could feel the fire burning my legs, and the screaming and—”
“It’s just a dream, Lame,” he said, moving to the sofa to sit next to her. He put his arms around her and held her tight.
She melted against him. “The crazy part is … the place, the place where it happens in the dream looks a lot like where we are right now.”
He kissed her on the cheek. “Your brain is simply putting what you know into the dream, that’s all.”
“No,” she said, stiffening in his grasp. “It hasn’t changed. It’s always looked like that in the dream.”
He turned her face to his. “What are dreams?” he asked.
“Random electrical impulses in the cerebral cortex. The brain interprets them as it chooses.” She held his gaze. “So how come I saw this place in a dream four years ago?”
“Coincidence,” he said. “One cavern’s pretty much like another.” The Project had been a strain on everyone, and he’d be glad when this was done. When he sold the package to the world, it would be with someone else as coordinator. He was ready to rest, to spend some time enjoying his family.
“Maybe.”
They were getting closer. Crane could feel the deceleration in his stomach. The elevator disgorged them in a large lobby of concrete walls and steel supports, well lit. Several hallways ran off the lobby, going to different parts of the Project. They took the administrative hallway past visitor reception/processing and down to the computer room.
They stopped at the doorway, Lanie handing Charlie to Crane. “Here, go with your daddy to visit Mr. Panatopolous while Mommy puts the big project back on stream.”
“Come on, pal,” Crane said. “We’ll go watch the diggers.”
“Dig-gers!” Charlie said, excited.
The hallway ended at a set of metal stairs, an Authorized Personnel Only sign tacked beside it. They took the stairs and entered the cavern.
It was huge, over fifteen hundred feet across. The natural cave’s ceiling was one hundred feet overhead. Branching out on either side of the main cavern were Mr. Panatopolous’ caverns. Wide enough for trucks and equipment, they stretched for three miles in either direction. Brilliant lighting made the place glow, though it stayed cool at the natural sixty-nine degrees of the earth’s underground.