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 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.
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, Lanie,” 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.
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 wristpad 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 dump truck 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.
“Lanie?”
“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?