Earth

The weird effects were ebbing even as Sauvel spoke. Logan blinked. “How bad is it?”

The engineer shrugged, an expressive gesture. “I do not know. Everyone appears to have been affected in some way. Even I sensed something just a moment ago — perhaps sub-sonics from the blast.”

Sauvel leaned to his left and peered. “We’re coming into sight now.”

At first it was hard to see that anything had happened at all. There were no plumes of smoke. No sirens wailed across the sloping shelf overlooking Santa Paula inlet. On both banks the half-finished energy storage facilities looked much as Logan remembered them.

The fjordlike cove began as a wide gap in the coastline that narrowed as it penetrated inland. Crossing it at a chosen point lay rows of monoliths, like gray military bunkers, each linked to the next by a flexible dam. Twice daily, tides would drive up the natural fu

Logan sca

“Over there!” Sauvel pointed to one end of the barrage chain. Emergency vehicles flashed strobe lights, while magnus floaters and police helicopters scoured the surrounding hillsides. Their pilot answered repeated demands for identification.

Logan sought telltale signs of violence but spotted no blackened, twisted wreckage, no sooty debris. When Sauvel gasped, he shook his head. “I don’t see…”

He followed Sauvel’s pointing arm and stared. A new tower had been erected on the shore, reaching like a construction crane fifty meters high. Its nose drooped, heavy with some cargo.

Only as they neared did Logan notice that the spire was strewn with green, stringy stuff — seaweed, he realized, and from the sagging tip there dangled a man! The “tower” was no tower at all, but an important piece of the tidal barrage… the shoreline anchor boom. A horizontal structure. At least it was supposed to be horizontal. Designed to withstand fierce Atlantic storms, it had lain flat in the water, until…

“The devil’s work!” Sauvel cursed. Some force had contrived to stand the boom on end like a child’s toy. Watching rescue vehicles close in to save the dangling diver, they verified by radio that there were no other injuries. Emergency crews could be heard complaining, there was no trace to be found of the purported bomb!

Logan felt a growing suspicion they’d never find any.

He didn’t laugh. That would be impolite to his hosts, whose work had been set back days, perhaps weeks. But he did allow a grim smile, the sort a cautious man wears on encountering the truly surprising. He felt as he had a few weeks ago, when examining those strange Spanish earth-quakes — and the case of the mysterious, disappearing drilling rig. Logan made a mental note to tap the world seismological database as soon as they reached shore. Maybe there was a co

Something new had entered the world all right. Of that much, he now felt certain.

A great reservoir lay under the North American prairie. The Ogallala aquifer spread beneath a dozen states — a vast hidden lake of pure, sweet water that had trickled into crevices of stone through the coming and going of three ice ages.

To the farmers who had first discovered the Ogallala it must have seemed a gift from Providence. Even in those days, the sun used to parch Oklahoma and Kansas, and the rains were fickle. But wells drilled only a little way down tapped a life source as clear and chaste as crystal. Soon circles of irrigation turned bone-dry grassland into the world’s richest granary.

Day by day, year after year, the Ogallala must have seemed as inexhaustible as the forests of the Amazon. Even when it became widely known that it was being drawn down several feet each year, while recharging only inches, the farmers didn’t change their plans to drill new wells, or to install faster pumps. In abstract, to be sure, they knew it could not last. But abstractions don’t pay the bank. They don’t see you through this year’s harvest. The Ogallala was a commons without a protector, bound for tragedy.

So the American Midwest was fated to suffer through another of the many little water wars that crackled across the early part of the century. Still, although bitterness ran high, the casualty figures were lower than from the rioting in La Plata, or the Nile catastrophe. That was probably because, by the time the battle over the Ogallala aquifer was fully joined, there remained little but damp pores, here and there, for anyone to fight over.

Dust settled over brown, circular patches where bounty had briefly grown, coating rusting irrigation rigs and the windows of empty homes.

Following close behind the dust, there blew in sand.

• EXOSPHERE

Twinkle, twinkle, little star… Despite some trepidation, Teresa schooled herself to stay calm during her first trip back into space. She checked frequently, but her beacons didn’t wobble. The continents hadn’t shifted perceptibly. Her old friends, the stars, lay arrayed as she remembered them. Sprinkled road signs, offering unwinking promises of a constancy she had always relied upon. How I wonder what you are…

“Liars,” she accused them. For their promise had proven false once already. Who, after going through what she had, could ever be certain those constellations might not choose to go liquid again, melting and flowing and becoming one with the chaos within her?

“What was that, Mother? Did you say something?”

Teresa realized she’d spoken aloud to an open mike. She glanced outside, where distant, spacesuit-clad figures crawled over a latticework of girders and fibrous pylons. They were too far away to make out individual faces.

“Uh, sorry,” she said. “I was just…”

A second voice cut in. “She’s just cluckin’ to make sure her chicks are okay. Right, Mommy?”

That voice she knew. Traditional it might be, for a work party on EVA to call the watch pilot “Papa.” Or in her case, “Mother.” But only Mark Randall had the nerve to call her “Mommy” over an open cha

“Can it, Randall.” Colonel Gle

“Um… no, Colonel.”

“Very well, then. Thank you for continuing to monitor us, quietly.”

Teresa punched her thigh. Damn the man! Spivey’s version of politeness would spoil fresh-picked apples. She twisted her cheek-mike away so the next stray word wouldn’t draw that awful man’s attention.

I’m not myself, she knew. Extraneous talk on open cha

She glanced toward her left knee. The tiny recorder she’d placed there was tucked well out of sight, tapping the shuttle’s main computer via a fiber barely thick enough to see. It had been almost too easy. The instruments required were already aboard Pleiades. It was just a matter of modifying their settings slightly, so narrow windows of data could be snooped by her little data store.

It helped that this was a construction mission. For hours at a stretch, she would be left alone while Randall and Spivey and the others were outside, supervising the robots that were erecting Erehwon II. Defense wanted the new edifice put in place quickly, which involved using those undamaged portions of Reagan Station, plus parts cobbled from spares and rushed up on heavy boosters.