“But it was so successful.”
“Exactly why I want to use it, but de-emphasize it at the same time. I want nobody thinking in those terms alone. We’re looking for much more.”
“Like what?”
Crane leaned closer to Newcombe, Sumi automatically drawing near. He spoke low, dramatically. “Have you gentlemen ever thought about what it would be like if all scientific research in a given area were brought under one banner, in one unifying edifice, and properly coordinated?”
“You want everything!” Newcombe laughed. He couldn’t believe it, the brazenness of the man.
Crane grinned. “Liang Int is omninational. Total control of tectonics is a real possibility.
They just need the right sell job. I could run the whole show from the Foundation, have access to every bit of data extant. Suddenly, true prediction—along with a lot more—becomes reality.”
Newcombe began to understand a great deal. “That’s why you hired Lanie. You want her to sort through and make sense of all the data if you pull this off.”
“And that’s why all the support organizations that have vested interests are being invited to attend the coming meeting,” Sumi said, sitting back and shaking his head. “Audacious! So, when I was speaking just moments ago of Li’s importance, you were laughing at me, weren’t you, Crane? Li Cheun was your target all along.”
“Don’t get mad at me, Sumi, please,” Crane said, boyish and charming. He grew serious again almost at once. “Geological research blankets the Earth, but touches very few lives in an obvious way. Clearly, it should. And clearly Liang Int can amply fund our work, get much out of it, and never feel the slightest pinch. They’ll only see profits from their involvement.”
Newcombe stood, Sumi’s dorph doing its work. Well-being washed over him like a summer breeze and there was a sexual edge to it—oxytocins, PEA?—that made him very glad he and Lanie were together again. The ship was rocking gently side to side. “We’re dead in the water,” Newcombe said, puzzled. “They must have put out the drag anchor.”
“Yes indeed they did,” Crane said, eyes twinkling with mischief. “Merely part of a little surprise I’m preparing for our guests … thanks to you, of course.” He winked broadly at Newcombe, who shuddered involuntarily, feeling oddly cold all of a sudden.
“Why do you want so much power?” Newcombe whispered.
“Great power accomplishes great things,” Crane said, the light of otherworldliness shining from his eyes. That the man was insane Newcombe had no doubt, but what he couldn’t peg was the power of his vision. Crane’s antics always had kept them funded, at least until now. Just how far could Dan Newcombe ride Crane’s hellbound train? He knew the answer: He’d take to the rails with the devil himself if he thought it would make his EQ-eco a reality.
Raymond Hsu, a shift supervisor at the Liang Usine Guerin sugar mill in Fort-de-France on the Caribbean island of Martinique, was trying to place an emergency call to the franchise comptroller on Grand Cayman Island to report a work stoppage due to an attack of thousands of fourmisfous, small yellowish, speckled ants, and betes-a-mille-pattes, foot-long black centipedes—both species venomous enough, in large numbers, to kill an adult human.
They’d attempted to stop the invasion by dumping barrels of crude oil around the mill, the workers flailing away with sugar cane stalks, splashing insect blood all over the mill. At the supervisor’s own house nearby, the maids were killing the ants and centipedes with flatirons, insecticides, and hot oil, while his wife and three children screamed. It wasn’t helping.
The insect invasion was simply the latest in a long string of odd events traceable to Mount Pelee, twenty kilometers to the north. At the end of March there’d been the smell of sulfurous gas lingering on the air. Two weeks later plumes of steam were seen issuing from fumaroles high atop Pelee. The next week, mild tremors rocked Fort-de-France followed by a rain of ash.
The ash had gotten thicker, more unceasing, as the sulfur smell grew over the weeks. In the second week of June the rains had come, filling the myriad rivers that crisscrossed Pelee and its sister mountain, Pitons du Carbet, to bursting and sending boulders and large trees down the mountainside and out to sea in torrents, along with the carcasses of asphyxiated cattle and dead birds. Mountain gorges jammed with ash and created instant lakes in the drowning rains.
As Hsu’s call was being placed in the early hours of June 17, Fort-de-France itself was coming under siege by thousands of fer-de-lance, pit vipers with yellow-brown backs and pink bellies, six feet or more in length and instantly deadly. The population was panicking, taking to the streets with axes and shovels to face the invasion, never realizing the snakes were fleeing in terror from the rumbling mountain. Hundreds would die, mostly children.
The comptroller, a man named Yuen Ren Chao, would tell Raymond Hsu to hire more workers and step up production, even though Pelee was thundering loudly, its peak covered by clouds of ash. Those who could see anything of the long dormant volcano were humbled by Nature’s grandeur—two fiery craters glowing like blast furnaces near the summit, and above them, a cloud filled with lightning.
The mill would not make its quota today. Mr. Yuen would be forced to increase the cane quotas in Cuba while the citizens of Martinique fought the snakes instead of fleeing themselves.
Within two days of Raymond Hsu’s call, an ash-dammed lake would break through its barrier, sending a monstrous wall of lava-heated water down the mountainside and onto the island, crushing the sugar mill and drowning everyone, including Raymond Hsu and his family, in boiling water.
Newcombe climbed the ladder to the forward observation deck, enjoying the southerly breeze and the coolness of the night. He stepped onto the deck. Above, a line of twinkling ore freighters, probably from Union Carbide’s organization, snaked toward the Moon like a conga line of traveling stars. The Liang logo, a simple blue circled L, was displayed in liquid crystal splendor on the surface of the three-quarter Moon.
“Catch your death up here,” he said as he crossed to Lanie, who was moonbathing naked. He plunked down in the chair next to hers. Her eyes were twinkling like the stars as she smiled at him. “The mighty are gathering,” he said, sorry he couldn’t spend the evening up here with this glorious woman, “so Crane wants us to join the party.”
“You look upset.”
“Nothing a little homicide wouldn’t cure—or a fast exit off this boat.” He grimaced. “The ocean’s a good place to meet the people down on the fantail, Lanie. Barracuda, every one of them. So what does that make us, bait?”
She regarded him thoughtfully. “Crane making you crazy?”
He nodded.
She got up and slipped into the party dress lying on the deck beside her. It was white, whiter than her skin, shining under the logoed Moon. “Do I look suitably dressed for cocktails with the Vice President of the United States?” she asked, turning a circle for him.
“Even if he wasn’t a jerk you’d outclass him,” Newcombe said. “You like all this, don’t you?”
She cocked her head and stared at him. “What, the juice? Of course I do. Last week I was just another underemployed Ph.D. in a universe full of them. Today I’m part of the Crane Team, changing the world. In case you haven’t watched the teev, we’re the hottest thing on the circuit right now. Tell me you don’t find that exciting? I can’t sleep at night I’m so pumped up.”