Ear to the Ground Read Free Page A

minutes.
    â€œI’m sorry. I …”
    â€œNever 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?”
    â€œIt all depends on what you intend to do with it,” Murphy said. “Do you know that the Caltechies are calling you guys CESSPOOL?”
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œYou’re Charles Richter, right?” Murphy asked in a staccato voice. “Grandson of the Richter scale Richter?”
    â€œYes,” Charlie mumbled.
    â€œAnd 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