Earth

The whole episode — from breakaway to the moment officers applied the spray sedatives they should have used in the first place — took little more than a minute. When the trussed-up mucker looked back at him through a crowd of snapping True-Vu lenses, Alex had a momentary feeling that he understood the fellow… far better, perhaps, than he did the gawking tourists around him. There was something desperately fearful and yet longing in those eyes. A look reminding Alex of what he sometimes saw in a mirror’s momentary, sidelong glance.

It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.

After wading through congratulatory backpats to his car, Alex looked down and saw for the first time that his clothes were smeared with blood. He sighed. Why does everything happen to me? I thought academics were supposed to lead boring lives.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good old-fashioned British boredom about now…

No sooner was he seated than the driver behind him blew his horn. So much for the rewards of heroism. Edging around a final tourist bus he saw open lanes ahead at last. Carefully Alex fed the engine hydrogen, spun up the little car’s flywheel, and gradually built up speed. Soon the northern reaches of the Mamaku range sped by as he left Rotorua behind and set off across the central plateau.

This highway shared the chief attribute of Kiwi roads — a stubborn resistance to straight lines. Driving entailed carefully swooping round hairpin bends and steep crags, intermittently staring over precipices into gaping, cottony nothingness.

It was easy to see how New Zealand had got its Maori name — Ao Tearoa — Land of the Long White Cloud. Mist-shrouded peaks resembled recumbent giants swathed in fog. The slumbering volcanoes’ green slopes supported rich forests, meadows, and over twenty million sheep. The latter were kept mostly for their wool nowadays, though he knew George Hutton and many other natives ate red meat from time to time and saw nothing wrong with it.

In this land of steam geysers and rumbling mountains, one never drove far without encountering another of Hut-ton’s little geothermal power stations, each squatting on a taproot drilled near a vein of magma. Mapping such underground sources had made George wealthy. The network of sensors left over from that effort now helped Alex’s team define what was happening in the Earth’s core.

Not that anyone expected the scans to offer hope. How, after all, do you get rid of an unwanted guest weighing a million million tons? A monster ensconced safely in a lair four thousand kilometers deep? You surely don’t do it the way the Maori used to placate taniwha… demons… by plucking a hair and dropping it into dark waters.

Still, George wanted the work continued, to learn how much time was left, and who was responsible. Alex had wrung one promise from George, in case they ever did find the culprit. He wanted an hour with the fellow… one hour to talk physics before George wreaked vengeance on the negligent genius with his own hands.

Thinking about the poor man he had encountered so roughly back in Rotorua — remembering the sad yet bloody look in the mucker’s eyes — Alex wondered if any of them really had a right to judge.

He had always liked to think he had a passing education in fields outside his own. Alex had known, for instance, that even the greatest mountains and canyons were mere ripples and pores on the planet’s huge bulk. Earth’s crust — its basalts and granites and sedimentary rocks — made up only a hundredth of its volume and half a percent of its total mass. But he used to picture a vast interior of superdense, superhot melt, and left it at that. So much for geology.

Only when you truly study a subject do you find out how little you knew all along.

Why, just two months ago Alex had never heard of Andrija Mohoroviĉić!

In 1909 the Yugoslav scientist had used instruments to analyze vibration waves from a Croatian earthquake. Comparing results from several stations, Mohoroviĉić discovered he could, like bats or whales, detect objects by their reflected sound alone. On another occasion he found a thin layer that would later bear his name. But in 1909 what he heard were echoes of the Earth’s very core.

As instruments improved, seismic echolocation showed other abrupt boundaries, along with fault lines, oil fields, and mineral deposits. By century’s end, millions were being spent on high-tech listening as desperate multinationals sought ever-deeper veins, to keep the glory days going just a little longer.

A picture took shape, of a dynamic world in ceaseless change. And while most geologists went on studying the outer crust, some curious men and women cast their nets much deeper, beyond and below any conceivable economic reward.

Such “useless” knowledge often makes men rich — witness George Hutton’s billions. Whereas Alex’s own “practical” project, financed by money-hungry generals, had turned unprofitable to a rare and spectacular degree.

It just goes to show … he thought. You never can tell what surprises life has in store for you.

Even as Alex admitted his ignorance of geophysics, it was his own expertise that Hutton’s techs called upon as they struggled to improve their tools. The gravity ante

It was fun exchanging ideas with others… building something new and exciting, out of sight of the suspicious bureaucrats of the scientific tribunals. Unfortunately, each time they laughed together, or they celebrated overcoming some obstacle, someone inevitably stopped short and turned away, remembering what it was all about and how futile their work was likely to be in the long run. Alex doubted that even his great-grandparents’ generation, during the awful nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war, had ever felt so helpless or hopeless.

But we have to keep trying.

He switched on the radio, looking for some distracting music. But the first station he found carried only news bulletins, in Simplified English.

“We now tell you more news about the tragedy of Reagan Station. Two weeks ago, the American space station exploded. The ambassador to the United Nations, from Russia, accuses that the United States of North America was testing weapons on Reagan Station. The Russian ambassador does say that he has no proof. But he also does say that this is the most likely explanation…”

Most likely explanation indeed, Alex thought. It just goes to show… you never can tell.

□ In olden times, to be “sane” meant you behaved in ways both sanctioned by and normal to the society you lived in.

In the last century some people — especially creative people — rebelled against this imposition, this having to be “average.” Eager to preserve their differences, some even went to the opposite extreme, embracing a romantic notion that creativity and suffering are inseparable, that a thinker or doer must be outrageous, even crazy, in order to be great. Like so many other myths about the human mind, this one lingered for a long time, doing great harm.

At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions.

“What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?”

The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack—

flexibility — to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.

satiability — the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.

extrapolation — an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.

This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic pla

So far so good. This is, indeed, an improvement.

But where, I must ask, does ambition fit under this sweeping categorization? When all is said and done, we remain mammals. Rules can be laid down to keep the game fair. But nothing will ever entirely eliminate that will, within each of us, to win.