Richter 10 Read online

  Richter 10

  Arthur Clarke

  Mike Mcquay

  Lewis Crane survived the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994, but his family didn’t. At 7 years old, his life was torn apart. Now, at 37, he’s a seismologist with a mission: protect others from that fate. He’s got a unique theory of quake prediction, but in an America split along racial and religious lines, he’ll have to predict the unpredictable to get anyone to believe him. Steeped in the latest discoveries of earth science, this is a near-future story of high-tech suspense and the staggering force of a moving, living earth.

  Richter 10

  by Arthur C. Clarke and Mike McQuay

  Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

  —Charles Caleb Colton

  The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.

  Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes

  To the memory of Mike McQuay,

  who never lived to know what a good job he had done

  —A.C.C.

  PROLOGUE

  NORTHRIDGE, CALIFORNIA

  17 JANUARY 1994, 4:31 A.M.

  Fingertips tingling and toes numb, pajamas damp with sweat, Lewis Crane came wide awake. Every one of his worst night terrors was real! And at that horrible moment he knew he’d been right all along and the grownups had been wrong: The Wild Things did live in the back of his closet; a dragon did sneak in when the sun went down to curl up under his bed. The monsters were invisible in the dusty moonlight seeping through the slats of the blinds, but Lewis knew they were there. They roared hideously and stomped around the room, making his bed wiggle like a trampoline he was trying to climb onto. He screwed his eyes closed and clamped his hands over his ears. But the monsters didn’t go away. They got wilder and made even louder noises. Suddenly pitched out of bed, Lewis screamed for his parents.

  His voice was so little and the noise was so big that his Mama and Daddy would never hear him. He had to get to them. Heart pounding, he tried to make himself stand up, but fear kept him rooted to the floor as it started to buck beneath him and the walls began to undulate like the enormous pythons he’d seen at the big zoo in San Diego. His bookcases were quivering, the chairs trembling, and the video games stacked on top of his computer came tumbling down. Something whirred over his shoulder—the picture that had hung above the little table next to his bed—and landed beside his knee, glass popping out of its frame and spraying his leg.

  “Mama,” he cried. “Mama, Daddy, help me!”

  Everything shook. Everything. Books and Tonka trucks flew off the shelves; his Power Rangers and Ninja Turtle action figures danced as if alive on their way to the rug; matchbox cars and crayons sailed through the air. The mirror over his dresser and the aquarium next to his desk smashed onto bare parts of the floor, glass and water showering him from clear across the room.

  “Daddy,” he wailed again just as his chest of drawers crashed to within an inch of where he sat. He jumped up then, but the floor heaved and he lost his balance, banging down hard on his knees.

  And he plunged into the end of the world.

  His body shook violently, his whole room shook violently, and he heard the most awful noise he’d ever heard in all his seven years. It sounded like the ground for miles around was cracking open and his house was splitting apart and maybe even the sky was getting torn into pieces. Tears ran down his face. He began to crawl to the doorway, cockeyed and funny-looking as if a giant had twisted it sideways. He thought he heard his mother call his name, but he couldn’t be sure. He was sobbing now. He wanted her, wanted his father, too. He had to get to them.

  The hallway was full of dangerous stuff, and he stopped for a second. There were chunks of plaster and metal rods all mixed up with jagged spikes of wood and ugly shards of glass from the furniture and pictures that used to be so neatly strung along the walls. The pile was higher than his knees and he was scared that he was going to hurt himself crawling through it, but the house was rolling around so much that he didn’t dare try to get up and run. He took a deep breath and started to crawl as fast as he could, his arms and hands getting bashed and cut, his thighs and feet feeling stung and torn.

  He reached the dining room, and a sob caught in his throat. He could hear his parents. Mama was calling his name—but Daddy was screaming in pain. There was a lot more light out here, but he didn’t like it because it was bluish and kind of winking over everything in a spooky way. He shivered, then turned, put his hands flat on the wall, pushed his legs out, and climbed palm over palm until he was on his feet. The whole room was rolling around, making Lewis suddenly remember the deep-sea fishing boat he’d been on last summer. It had dipped way down and way up, swung side to side, and if he hadn’t been on Daddy’s lap, and if Daddy hadn’t been strapped into the big chair bolted to the deck, they and the chair and everything else would have gone sliding from rail to rail. Could the house be riding a humongous wave? Silly. Their house couldn’t get blown all the way from Northridge out to sea. But that other noise, that sort of rumbling… it sure sounded a lot like a big wind in a bad storm.

  “Lewis!” he heard his mother shout, “Lewis, run. Get outside!” She lurched into the room and started to shuffle toward him. Her nightgown was scrunched around her chest, hanging from the waist in rags that tangled around her knees. Joy and relief flooded him. He let go of the wall, stumbled forward, then froze. Mama was making a grab for the edge of the dining room table coasting toward her, but he could see behind her, see the huge breakfront Daddy had bought her for an anniversary gift slowly toppling away from the wall…

  Glass exploded, splinters of it striking him, shredding his pajamas. And he heard the crash and Mama’s scream and saw the stars through the sudden hole in the dining room ceiling and everything seemed to stop for a second. Then he was scrambling over the wreckage, clawing his way to his mother whose face and right arm were exposed to the night.

  “I’ll get you out, Mama,” he called, tears tracking through the dust coating his face.

  “Run, darling,” she whispered when he reached her. “Run to the street.”

  In vain he pushed on the side panel of the breakfront.

  “Please, Lewis,” she said, strangely calm. “Do what Mama says.”

  “But you … you’re—”

  “Don’t d-disobey me. Do what I say right now.”

  Lewis’ mind was spinning. He couldn’t move that piece of furniture. Not alone. He needed help.

  “I’m gonna go find someone to help me get you out from under there,” he said, taking a step back as the rolling of the floor slowed somewhat. The rumbling was distant now and he realized he couldn’t hear Daddy screaming from the bedroom anymore. “I’ll be right back, Mama. Understand? I’ll be right back for you and Daddy.”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” she said, voice weak. “Hurry … hurry outside.”

  He limped around the rubble, got to the living room, and was just going through the opened front door, when another section of the roof fell in with a great crash. Out on the walk, he smelled gas and saw the beams of flashlights darting around front lawns up and down the block. The street was lumpy and broken, the houses across the way all crumpled in front. Panic shook him, but he didn’t have time for it. He needed to get help fast.

  He heard people, and he headed for the voices and flashlights, screaming as he ran.

  “Help! Help me! Please … somebody!”

  Then he tripped on a new hill on the lawn and fell hard, face-down. He hurt all over … and he cried. But he didn’t stay there. Struggling to his feet, he was suddenly blinded by a beam of light.

  “It’s the Crane boy,” a man looming ov
er him yelled. “Come here quick!”

  People were all around him forcing him onto his back on the ground. He tried to shove them away. “Help, please. My Mama and Daddy are still inside. Mama’s trapped. You’ve—”

  “Easy, son,” came the voice of the man holding him down. “It’s me… Mr. Haussman from across the street. Don’t worry, we’ll get your parents out.”

  “God, look at him,” a woman said as people played their flashlight beams across his tattered pajamas. “He’s bleeding pretty badly. I—Oh, my Lord! Look at his arm!”

  Lewis rolled onto his side to see what she was pointing at. A piece of glass as big as a baseball card was sticking out of his upper left arm. He didn’t even feel it. He didn’t feel the arm at all.

  “My Mama’s trapped,” he said, and a shadow reached down and jerked hard, pulling the shard from his flesh. “Please help her.”

  The woman choked and turned away as Lewis stared at the blood squirting furiously out of his arm where she’d removed the glass.

  “Dammit,” Mr. Haussman muttered. He ripped the rest of Lewis’ pajama shirt off and tied it just above the squirting blood. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

  “My pickup truck,” said Mr. Cornell, the next door neighbor. “We can put him in the back of that.”

  “Get it,” Mr. Haussman said, and Mr. Cornell went charging off.

  “My parents…” Lewis said, trying to get up, only to have Mr. Haussman push him back down.

  “We’ll get them out,” the man said, then turned to the others, specters behind the beams of their flashlights. “Can somebody get into the house and look for the Cranes?”

  The ground shook again, everyone reacting loudly, one lady even moaning as if in pain.

  Several men ran toward his house, Lewis noted with relief. “What’s happening?” he asked, grabbing Mr. Haussman’s shirt-sleeve.

  “Earthquake, son,” the man said, tightening the knot on his makeshift tourniquet. “A big one.”

  “I-I smelled g-gas,” Lewis said, trying to rise once again.

  “Gas?” Haussman looked alarmed. “Oh, no.”

  He lowered Lewis to the ground and stood, directing his beam at Mr. Cornell in the pickup truck next door. “George!” he shouted, “don’t start the—”

  A monstrous explosion turned the pitch night into bright day. Lewis, propped up on his elbows, watched a giant fireball engulf his house, Mr. Cornell’s house, and the pickup truck itself.

  Agonized screams tore the air. Burning men ran from his house; Mr. Cornell was a fiery, writhing twig in the cab of his truck. Lewis lay stupefied as smoldering debris fell all around him, his mind frozen in pain and horror.

  He was a child, but he understood that he had just lost everything … that the love and protection of home and family were gone forever. Fires crackled and raged barely fifty feet from him, causing sweat to spring out of every pore, and making the grass, already slick with his blood, become slippery as ice. Both elbows glided out from under him. Flat on his back, he stared up at a starfield that was startlingly brilliant and cold and very far away.

  Lewis Crane was alone.

  BOOK ONE

  THIRTY YEARS LATER

  Chapter 1

  THE NAMAZU

  SADO ISLAND, JAPAN 14 JUNE 2024, DAWN

  Slivers of first light poked through the crack around the flap of the tent, and Dan Newcombe, stretched out on his cot and naked except for his shoes and his wrist pad, tried even harder to stop the numbers. They’d been scrolling through his brain for forty-eight hours, keeping him awake and growing edgier by the minute.

  Close by, someone began to pound a vent into the ground. The numbers in Newcombe’s head shattered with the harsh metallic clank of each blow, re-formed before the next strike of the mallet, shattered again … until he couldn’t tolerate it for another second and jerked to a sitting position, plugging his ears with his index fingers. No good; he couldn’t keep that sound out and the numbers were still running through his head. Worse, another person was starting on a vent, pounding out of rhythm with the first.

  Newcombe got up, walked to his workstation, and turned on the lantern; it barely lit the two chart tables covered with electronic gear, and he glanced at the faceted, jewel-like knob on its top. Dull green. The damned lantern needed recharge. And he needed light, lots of it, now. In a world of lies, he was getting ready to bet his life on the truth. And truth demanded light. He hated lies, which meant he hated the way Lewis Crane did business. But even Crane had to appreciate the truth on some level, because he, too, was betting his life, along with the lives of at least a hundred others, maybe even thousands of others, on Newcombe’s calculations. Crane always thought big.

  Newcombe picked up the lantern, carried it to the tent flap, and stuck it out. Immediately pulling it back inside, he blinked at the blinding light it gave off. When he’d adjusted the brightness, he placed it back on the chart table and noted with satisfaction that every corner and fold of the tent was fully lighted, especially the herky-jerky little lines of the seismos. Those lines were a language to him, a language he could interpret like no other human being alive. He trusted seismos. Unlike people, they were dependable, always truthful. They treated every man, woman, and child the same, never changing their readings because of the skin color or gender or age of the reader.

  He juiced the computers to a floating holo of seventeen seismograms hanging in the air before him in alternating bands of blue and red; their little white cursors registered the beating heart of the planet.

  Heavy seismic activity was crying out on all seventeen graphs, which meant that everything ringing this section of the Pacific Plate was in turmoil. He could sense it right through the floating lines. He knew Crane, wherever he was, could sense it, too—only Crane didn’t need any instruments, just his uncanny instincts … and that dangling left arm of his.

  Today could be the day.

  Newcombe activated Memory with the lightest touch on the key pad, and the graphs replayed the history of the last eighteen hours. His eyes widened at the sight of perfectly aligned seismic peaks in five places on all seventeen screens. Foreshocks.

  He tapped Crane’s icon on his wrist pad and asked loudly, “Where the hell are you?”

  “Good morning, Doctor,” Crane said warmly, his voice coming through Newcombe’s aural implant in dulcet tones. “Fine day for an earthquake. Perhaps you should join us for it. I’m down at the mines.”

  “I’ll be there in a little while,” Newcombe said, tapping off the pad, disgusted that Crane could sound so hearty, happy even, at such a moment.

  He stared at the graphs, back now to current readings and still screaming turmoil.

  “And I thought the Moon had set.”

  Astonished, Newcombe whirled toward the sound of the droll, sexy voice of the only woman who’d ever challenged his mind, heart, and body at the same time. “Lanie!” he exclaimed.

  “In the flesh, lover,” Elena King said, smiling broadly, her sunblock-coated lips gleaming.

  Even wrapped head-to-toe to protect herself from the sunshine, she looked appealing and provocative. And despite the opaque goggles covering her eyes, he could tell she was eyeing his nakedness with a mixture of desire and humor. Newcombe felt almost giddy and rushed across the tent to her.

  “Oh, Lanie,” he said, dragging her against his body for a long, intense hug. He gently thrust her to arm’s length for a quick inspection, removed her floppy hat and tossed it over his shoulder, then pushed her goggles up like a headband behind which her thick, wavy black hair cascaded down her back. Looking into the hazel eyes that had entranced him for years, he slowly pulled her close again and lowered his head for a lingering kiss.

  Savoring her lips, Newcombe realized he’d like nothing better than to lose himself in this woman. But there were the seismos. There were the numbers. And this could be the day. Reluctantly, he broke off the kiss, murmuring, “How did I get so lucky? What brought you here?”
r />   “You don’t know?” Lanie asked incredulously, freeing herself from his embrace and taking a couple of steps back. “Your buddy Crane didn’t tell you he hired me last night?”

  Now it was Newcombe’s turn to be incredulous. “Hired you?”

  “Yes! Hired me! And ordered me to get my butt down here right away.”

  His gut clenching with fear for Lanie and with rage at Crane for putting her in danger, he snapped, “Your transport still on the island?”

  “How should I know?” She frowned. “More to the point, what the hell’s wrong with you suddenly?”

  He darted to the foot of his cot and snatched up his Chinese peasant pants. “What’s wrong with me?” He stepped into the pants and yanked the drawstring tight around his waist, then located his work shirt. “What’s wrong with me?” he repeated, louder, while thrusting his arm through a khaki sleeve. “Nothing’s wrong with me.” He pointed at the holos. “That’s what’s wrong. This island’s about to crack up … fracture into little pieces!”

  “Hardly a secret, friend. Everybody, everywhere is talking about it.” She grinned. “You trying to tell me you don’t want me?” She’d scarcely had time to blink, when she was in his arms again, being kissed hard and fast.

  “That should answer your question. I want you anywhere I can get you, Lanie—except here.” He pulled her goggles over her eyes and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. “We’re going to get you away from this damned island fast!” He turned back to the end of the camp table, rummaging in the clutter there for his goggles.

  “I guess you didn’t hear what I said.” She caught the hat he’d found on the table and tossed to her. “As of last night I work at this godforsaken place, just like you do. I’m part of the team doing field work until it’s time to go back to the Foundation where I will work right alongside you, lover boy.” She shook her head. “I don’t get it. Crane told me you recommended me for the imager’s job.”