The computer room, large and glassed-in, overlooked the cavern. “Wave to your mother, pal. She expects it.”
Crane and Charlie waved up to the window, Lanie smiling warmly and returning the wave. They were symbiotic, Crane and Lanie, meshing perfectly in every aspect of their lives. They shared the duties of caring for Charlie, worked when they wanted to or needed to. More than anything, they understood and respected what drove the other. Neither was subservient. For the first time in his life, Crane understood the saying, “Man was not meant to be alone.”
He put Charlie on the floor. The boy made a beeline for the three-wheeled carts used in the caverns. Crane hurried after him and they climbed in. “Call Mommy,” he said, holding his wrist pad out to Charlie, who immediately reached over and hit the P fiber. Lanie came over Crane’s aural. “Hey, we’re working up here.”
“Yeah, yeah. Would you tell me where Panatopolous is?”
“Corridor A,” she replied. “All the way down.”
“Thanks, love. Bye.”
He padded off and keyed the focus, the vehicle jerking off to purr along the poured concrete floor. As they made their way through the cavern toward corridor A, the power came into view. Holes the size of swimming pools and spaced every thirty feet were cut straight down into the rock. They were surrounded by rails. Each hole went down four miles, and running up its center was a tube with a one-foot diameter, packed with nuclear material. There were one hundred tubes.
The cart veered to the left, taking A corridor, which twisted and turned by the holes with their packed tubes meant to weld the widely divergent faults that crisscrossed the area. They were so far beneath Salton now, the lake so shallow the explosions below would barely ripple the water.
Large readouts posted every half mile kept track of the radiation in the chamber. There were occasional small leaks, easily plugged in a system not meant to last beyond the week after next. With the amazing amounts of radioactive material they’d been using the last eighteen months, it was remarkable they’d never had a real problem. It was what enabled them to finish ahead of schedule and before the elections, which, it was universally expected, would result in a Yo-Yu sweep victory and, since word about the Project was spreading and gaining credence with the public, it might mean the cancellation of the Project.
The corridor kept twisting, fault stress, shearing, and compression fractures evident everywhere on the rock walls, a geological treasure trove of Nature’s possibilities. This entire landscape would become molten rock when the devices were triggered.
They hit a straight stretch of corridor, and spotted Mr. Panatopolous’ rockeater about one hundred feet ahead at the end of the line. The little man paced back and forth angrily, as always. True to his word, Crane had thought of the man who’d helped them dig through the alluvial mud in Reelfoot when it came time to award the digging subcontract, hiring Panatopolous for the entire job and offering him a fifty percent incentive if he brought it in by the end of March.
“It’s about time you got here,” Pany said as they drove up, relaxing into a smile the moment he saw Charlie.
“Hey, there’s my big boy,” Panatopolous said, pulling him out of the cart to hold him in the air. Charlie laughed but his eyes were fixed on the ten-foot digger that looked like a praying mantis. “You’re growing every day.”
Charlie was the unofficial mascot of the Project, having literally grown from a sprout to a toddler under the watchful eyes of sixty employees.
Crane walked to the machine, its snout dipped down into the half-dug hole, the hole’s terminus too far below to see. A man-size cage hung just inside the lip of the hole. These cages were designed to carry a worker down to check for leakage in the core, and eventually to trigger the thousands of pounds of plastique built into the tube that would begin the nuclear reaction.
The digger had a powerful drill bit on the end that literally chopped up the rock below. The rubble was then sucked back up the tube and into the machine’s innards, a long, cylindrical chamber that powdered the rock to dust with ultrasound, then spewed it into the back of a waiting dumptruck for transport to the man-made mountain aboveground.
Panatopolous carried Charlie over to his father. “I could’a been finished with this if I wasn’t tied in to your damned computers. A hole’s a hole. Why do you have to check my holes?”
“You know a great deal about holes,” Crane said. “I know about what’s in them.”
“There’s nothing in a hole. It’s empty.”
Crane smiled at him. “How much does a cloud weigh?” he asked.
“What?”
Crane’s pad bleeped on Lanie’s fiber. He tapped on. “I’m looking at a non-op digger,” he said. “Talk to me.”
“Don’t you dare let Charlie down on the floor near that open hole,” she returned in his aural.
“Roger.”
“Tell our unhappy friend that he has to recalibrate his digger point oh nine five centimeters at twenty-three degrees…”
“Point oh nine five centimeters at twenty-three degrees,” Crane said, Panatopolous cursing, then excusing himself to Charlie.
“…he’s making the fault part of his tunnel. The computers won’t deal with the inherent incongruity of a moving tunnel.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
She was silent for several seconds.
“Lame?”
“There are two groups here for a scheduled tour.”
“So?”
“One of them is a small group from the Nation of Islam.”
“What? I never authoriz—”
“I’m sorry, Crane,” she said softly. “Sumi called me yesterday and asked if we could do this as a personal favor, a way, perhaps, of curtailing the violence. You weren’t available; I was up to my ears … I said, yes, then forgot to tell you.”
“Don’t let anybody past reception. I’m on my way,” Crane said, already moving to take Charlie from Panatopolous. Crane was so famous that he commanded great attention. At the onset of digging, people had clamored to come to the site to meet Crane. The best public relations, they’d decided, was to accept a few groups for limited tours focusing on the geology of the cavern. All part of the cover, too, to keep the project secret.
“Crane,” Lanie said. “Dan’s part of the team.”
Anger burst inside him. “I can’t believe he’d have the nerve to come here.”
“I’m looking right at him,” Lanie said.
Abu Talib stood uneasily in the locker-filled visitors’ lounge with Khadijah, who was pregnant with their second child, and Martin Aziz. He could feel the hatred for Crane that he knew now he had felt from the first, but had suppressed totally in the early days.
Here, in the caverns of Crane’s insanity, he knew the structure of Evil. A gaggle of fifth graders from Niland Elementary charged around the room, chased by their teacher trying to calm them down. Talib noticed none of it. He listened to the sounds: mechanical sounds, workers’ voices, the drone of the circulation systems. They were the sounds of an online operating system, the reality of Crane’s exercise in playing God. If he’d had the slightest doubt about his suspicions before, it was gone now. He didn’t even have to look around. He knew there would be shafts below, many of them, and all packed with nuclear explosives.
Though godless himself, Talib was very sensitive to the notions of natural law. The Earth was good, a product of all that had gone before. Its processes were sacrosanct. Study them, certainly, try to live in harmony with them, absolutely. Control them? Blasphemy. He thought about Newton’s laws of motion—every action causing an equal and opposite reaction. How would the Earth react to Crane’s assault?