Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

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СКАЧАТЬ is too much. Maybe I should do something else, and start to write when my buzz wears off. For a moment, he just sat there, his mind as blank as the morning light. Then he unhooked the phone and plugged the cord into the back of his computer, making sure to deactivate Grace’s call-waiting before dialing America Online.

      At eleven fifty, Charlie entered the ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel and searched out Sterling Caruthers, who promptly fixed his colleague’s tie by tightening its knot. Already, journalists were scurrying around like noxious bugs, bearing press credentials from newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV.

      “Nice of you to join us, Mr. Richter,” Caruthers said, his voice dripping blood. The press conference would begin in ten minutes.

      “I’m sorry. I …”

      “Never mind.” Caruthers dismissed him with the wave of a hand. Charlie would be seated, he was told, at the far end of the dais, where it was unlikely he’d be called upon to speak. Once there, he began an entanglement with a heavy velvet curtain, which not only obstructed part of his chair but obscured his microphone, as well. He tried pushing the curtain backwards, and then forwards; finally, having no other choice, he slung the thing around his neck and wore it like a shawl.

      Charlie’s new employer, the Center for Earthquake Studies, or CES, was endowed with a multimillion-dollar budget rumored to have come about, in part, through a hushed yet symbiotic relationship with the entertainment industry, whose interest lay in the Earthquake Channel, as well as an interactive TV series called Rumble. “If the Big One hits L.A.,” mused an inside source, “the studios will be in on the ground floor.”

      There was dissent; the Caltech people were up in arms. The mixing of science with commerce, they claimed, would make it impossible for pure research to take place. Caruthers begged to differ. As CES’s nonscientific figurehead, he’d engaged the services of Gold & Black, a pair of entertainment publicists who had called this press conference and guaranteed a respectable turnout from journalists and other notables—in return for ten thousand dollars.

      The first difficult question came from Maggie Murphy of the Los Angeles Reader, who asked Caruthers whether CES had enough scientific vision to warrant spending so much money. Caruthers answered feebly. When pressed with a follow-up, he shot back a question of his own: “How much money is too much?”

      “It all depends on what you intend to do with it,” Murphy said. “Do you know that the Caltechies are calling you guys CESSPOOL?”

      “That’s their business,” Caruthers announced. “Ours is to develop techniques that will enable us to predict earthquakes with enough time and accuracy to save the city of Los Angeles and other municipalities considerable expense and loss of human life.” He fixed Murphy with a take-that glare.

      But Murphy had done her homework. She was Lois Lane with a metallic toughness. “I assume Dr. Richter will be involved in this prediction effort?” Caruthers nodded. “Then why,” she went on, “do you have him over there behind a curtain?”

      Embarrassed, Charlie unraveled himself, while a hotel employee held the curtain aside.

      “You’re Charles Richter, right?” Murphy asked in a staccato voice. “Grandson of the Richter scale Richter?”

      “Yes,” Charlie mumbled.

      “And you predicted the quake in Kobe, Japan?”

      Camera crews adjusted their positions, and lights were aimed at Charlie’s eyes. He stared into them, looking for a face, but all that came back at him was an aurora of white.

      It was true, if not very well known, that Charlie, who’d been traveling for research and for escape, had been in Kobe at the time of the earthquake, giving a paper called “Fault Lines: The Mystery of Plate Tectonics” at a seismographic conference in nearby Osaka. Strolling along the banks of Osaka Bay, shoes in hand and trousers rolled to the knee, he’d noticed something irregular about the tide-flow. After testing water samples, Charlie studied the data—blocks of numbers—and felt a sudden nausea. He took a taxi to a grassy hillock and noticed birds flying overhead in strange configurations. Then he removed a stethoscope from his knapsack and, for more than an hour, kept his ear to the ground. At dinner, he mentioned to a colleague in passing that metropolitan Kobe sat on a tectonic boundary in the process of shifting. Later, drinking Burmese whiskey in his room, he noticed an undeniable correlation between two disparate columns of numbers. He dialed his colleague’s extension and arranged to meet him in the hotel bar, where he explained that Kobe could go at any moment. The man laughed in Charlie’s face and spread the word to some other seismologists, who reacted similarly, behind his back. Twenty-four hours later, no one was laughing.

      Maggie Murphy stood now, as did the Times reporter and the guy from ABC. Sterling Caruthers hadn’t opened his mouth in half an hour, as Charlie, blithely sipping from a glass of water, more or less became the subject of these proceedings, deflecting and focusing the debate, explaining technical principles in layman’s terms. Finally, he and Caruthers exchanged a meaningful but complicated glance. Things were winding down.

      “What are your present plans, Mr. Richter?” asked Murphy with a smile.

      “I go where the promise of seismic activity exists.”

      “Yes?”

      “And I’ve just taken an apartment in Los Angeles.”

       THURSDAY NIGHT

      YOU CAN FIND THEM BY THE BAR, OR IN THE BACK booths of the last room at the Formosa on Thursday nights, where there’s no smoking until ten-thirty, after which the waitresses couldn’t care less. Just half a year ago, they went to Dominick’s off San Vicente—slews of them from Fox and Paramount, and from Sony—but when Dominick’s faded out, and the Olive dissolved into Jones, everyone cut to the Formosa. Among studio youngsters, Friday has always been Hangover Day.

      Grace watched Ian peeling off his Budweiser label at a table across the room, while two girls sitting next to her—an agent’s assistant and a VP (in title only)—admitted freely that they’d fuck him at the drop of a hat. Women liked Ian, which exhilarated Grace because it made her nervous, but it disappointed her that, as a result, she felt more attracted to him. Was he better on paper, she thought, or in bed?

      Ian was in good form just then. “Imagine,” he said, “if we had interactive cameras in our living rooms, right?” His whole table listened. “And there was an earthquake, and some computer geek, in Iraq for chrissake, could watch our TVs smashing and our books falling out of the shelves, and paintings coming off hooks; and us walking in, rubbing our eyes, checking our limbs, freaked out but alive, as the car alarms are going off and the dogs are howling and soon everyone around you is awake …”

      “Nobody’s putting a camera in my living room,” announced a former writing partner.

      “Why not? Everybody’ll do it. Or mostly everybody.”

      The others seemed unsure.

      “Look at it this way,” Ian continued, “a hundred years ago, Bell was shouting into this archaic telephone: ‘Watson, can you hear me?’ Now we have voice-mail, and car phones; we hang up on each other, and Star-69. Two hundred years ago”—he was on a roll now—“if you wanted to listen to music you either played it yourself, or you heard someone else playing it. I mean …”

      “That’s СКАЧАТЬ