Eight thousand miles to the east, it was the middle of the night in Golden, Colorado, when the computers of the National Earthquake Information Center registered an atypical seismic disturbance originating from the Pacific basin, just north of the Solomon Islands, and measuring 6.3 Richter. That was a strong quake, but not unusually strong. The peculiar characteristics of the disturbance led the computer to categorize it as an “anomalous event,” a fairly common designation for seismic events in that part of the world, where three tectonic plates met in strange overlapping patterns.

The NEIC computers assessed the earthquake as lacking the relatively slow movement associated with tsunamis, and thus did not classify it as a “tsunami-generating event.” However, in the South Pacific, this designation was being reexamined, following the devastating New Guinea earthquake of 1998—the single most destructive tsunami of the century—which also did not have the classic slow tsunami profile. Thus, as a precaution, the computers flagged the earthquake to the sensors of the MORN, the Mid-Ocean Relay Network, operating out of Hilo, Hawaii.

Six hours later, mid-ocean buoys detected a nine-inch rise in the ocean level consistent with a tsunami wave train. Because of the great depth of the mid-ocean, tsunamis often raised the sea level only a few inches. On this particular evening, ships in the area felt nothing at all as the big wave front passed beneath them. Nevertheless, the buoys felt it, and triggered an alarm.

It was the middle of the night in Hawaii when the computers pinged and the screens came up. The network manager, Joe Ohiri, had been dozing. He got up, poured himself a cup of coffee and inspected the data. It was clearly a tsunami profile, though one that appeared to be losing force in its ocean passage. Hawaii was of course in its path, but this wave would strike the south shore of the islands, a relative rarity. Ohiri made a quick wave-force calculation, was unimpressed with the results, and so sent a routine notification to civil defense units on all the inhabited islands. It began “This is an information message…” and finished with the usual boilerplate about the alert being based on preliminary information. Ohiri knew that nobody would pay much attention to it. Ohiri also notified the West Coast and Alaska Warning Centers, because the wave train was due to strike the coast in early mid-morning of the following day.

Five hours later, the DART buoys off the coast of California and Alaska detected the passage of a tsunami train, now further weakened. Computers calculated the velocity and wave force and recommended no action. This meant that the message went out to the local stations as a tsunami information bulletin, not an alert:

Kenner, who was monitoring the messages on his computer, shook his head when he saw this. “Nick Drake is not going to be a happy man today.” It was Kenner’s hypothesis that they had needed the cavitation generators to extend the effect of the underwater detonations, and to create the relatively long-lasting landslide that would have produced a truly powerful ocean-crossing tsunami. That had been thwarted.

Ninety minutes later, the much-weakened tsunami train struck the beaches of California. It consisted of a set of five waves averaging six feet in height that excited surfers briefly, but passed unnoticed by everyone else.

Belatedly, Kenner was notified that the FBI had been attempting to reach him for the past twelve hours. It turned out that V. Allen Willy had vacated his beach house at two A.M. local time. This was less than an hour after the events in Resolution Bay had taken place, and more than ten hours prior to the tsunami notification.

Kenner suspected that Willy had gotten cold feet, and had been unwilling to wait. But it was an important and telling mistake. Kenner called the agent and started proceedings to subpoena Willy’s phone records.

None of them was allowed to leave the island for the next three days. There were formalities, forms, interrogations. There were problems with emergency care for Morton’s collapsed lung and Jennifer’s massive blood loss. Morton wanted to be taken to Sydney for surgery, but he was not allowed to leave because he had been reported as a missing person in America. Although he complained bitterly about witch doctors, a very good surgeon trained in Melbourne took care of his lung in Gareda Town. But Jennifer had not been able to wait for that surgeon; she had needed three transfusions during five hours of surgery to remove the bullets in her upper body, and then she was on a respirator, near death for the next forty-eight hours. But at the end of the second day she opened her eyes, pulled off her oxygen mask, and said to Evans, sitting at her bedside, “Stop looking so gloomy. I’m here, for God’s sake.” Her voice was weak, but she was smiling.

Then there were problems about their contact with the rebels. There were problems about the fact that one of their party had disappeared, the famous actor Ted Bradley. They all told the story of what had happened to Bradley, but there was no way to corroborate it. So the police made them tell it again.

And suddenly, abruptly, unaccountably, they were allowed to leave. Their papers were in order. Their passports were returned. There was no difficulty. They could leave whenever they wanted.

Evans slept most of the way to Honolulu. After the plane refueled and took off again, he sat up and talked to Morton and the others. Morton was explaining what had happened on the night of his car crash.

“There was obviously a problem with Nick and what he was doing with his money. NERF was not doing good things. Nick was very angry—dangerously angry. He threatened me, and I took him at his word. I had established the link between his organization and ELF, and he was threatened, to put it mildly. Kenner and I thought he would try to kill me. Well, he did try. With that girl at the coffee shop, that morning in Beverly Hills.”

“Oh yes.” Evans remembered. “But how did you stage that car crash? It was so incredibly dangerous—”

“What, do you think I’m crazy?” Morton said. “I never crashed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I kept right on driving, that night.”

“But.” Evans fell silent, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Yes, you do,” Sarah said. “Because I let it slip to you, by accident. Before George called me and told me to keep my mouth shut about it.”

It came back to him then. The conversation from days ago. He hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Sarah had said:

He told me to buy a new Ferrari from a guy in Monterey and have it shipped to San Francisco.

When Evans expressed surprise that George was buying another Ferrari:

I know. How many Ferraris can one man use? And this one doesn’t seem up to his usual standard. From the e-mail pictures it looks kind of beat up.

And then she said:

The Ferrari he bought is a 1972 365 GTS Daytona Spyder. He already has one, Peter. It’s like he doesn’t know…

“Oh, I knew all right,” Morton said. “What a waste of money. The car was a piece of crap. And then I had to fly a couple of Hollywood prop guys up to Sonoma to beat the hell out of it and make it look like a crash. Then they flat-bedded it out that night, set it on the road, fired up the smoke pots…”

“And you drove right past a wreck that was already in place,” Evans said.

“Yes,” Morton said, nodding. “Drove right around the corner. Pulled off the road, climbed up the hill, and watched you guys.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry,” Morton said, “but we needed real emotion to distract the police from the problems.”

“What problems?”

“Ice-cold engine block, for one,” Kenner said. “That engine hadn’t run for days. One of the cops noticed it was cold while the car was being put on the truck. He came back and asked you the time of the accident, all of that. I was concerned they would figure it out.”

“But they didn’t,” Morton said.

“No. They knew something was wrong. But I don’t think they ever guessed identical Ferraris.”

“No one in his right mind,” Morton said, “would intentionally destroy a 1972 365 GTS. Even a crappy one.”

Morton was smiling, but Evans was angry. “Somebody could have told me—”

“No,” Kenner said. “We needed you to work Drake. Like the cell phone.”

“What about it?”

“The cell phone was a very low-quality bug. We needed Drake to suspect that you were part of the investigation. We needed him pressured.”

“Well, it worked. That’s why I got poisoned in my apartment, isn’t it?” Evans said. “You guys were willing to take a lot of risks with my life.”

“It turned out all right,” Kenner said.

“You did this car crash to pressure Drake?”

“And to get me free,” Morton said. “I needed to go down to the Solomons and find out what they were doing. I knew Nick would save the best for last. Although if they had been able to modify that hurricane—that was the third stunt they planned—so that it hit Miami, that would have been spectacular.”

“Fuck you, George,” Evans said.

“I’m sorry it had to be this way,” Kenner said.

“And fuck you, too.”

Then Evans got up and went to the front of the plane. Sarah was sitting alone. He was so angry he refused to speak to her. He spent the next hour staring out the window. Finally, she began talking quietly to him, and at the end of half an hour, they embraced.

Evans slept for a while, restless, his body sore. He couldn’t find a comfortable position to rest. Intermittently, he would wake up, groggy. One time he thought he heard Kenner talking to Sarah.

Let’s remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium-size sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time. The Earth is now on its third atmosphere.

The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early on, because the planet was so hot. Then, as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapor condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.

Meanwhile, the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.

And for the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one.

And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.

Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightning bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate.

The reality is, they run from the storms.

“What do we do now?”

“I’ll tell you what we do,” Morton said. “You work for me. I’m starting a new environmental organization. I have to think of a name. I don’t want one of these pretentious names with the words world and resource and defense and wildlife and fund and preservation and wilderness in them. You can string those words together in any combination. World Wildlife Preservation Fund. Wilderness Resource Defense Fund. Fund for the Defense of World Resources. Anyway, those fake names are all taken. I need something plain and new. Something honest. I was thinking of ‘Study the Problem And Fix It.’ Except the acronym doesn’t work. But maybe that’s a plus. We will have scientists and field researchers and economists and engineers—and one lawyer.”

“What would this organization do?”

“There is so much to do! For example: Nobody knows how to manage wilderness. We would set aside a wide variety of wilderness tracts and run them under different management strategies. Then we’d ask outside teams to assess how we are doing, and modify the strategies. And then do it again. A true iterative process, externally assessed. Nobody’s ever done that. And in the end we’ll have a body of knowledge about how to manage different terrains. Not preserve them. You can’t preserve them. They’re going to change all the time, no matter what. But you could manage them—if you knew how to do it. Which nobody does. That’s one big area. Management of complex environmental systems.”

“Okay…”

“Then we’d do developing-world problems. The biggest cause of environmental destruction is poverty. Starving people can’t worry about pollution. They worry about food. Half a billion people are starving in the world right now. More than half a billion without clean water. We need to design delivery systems that really work, test them, have them verified by outsiders, and once we know they work, replicate them.”

“It sounds difficult.”

“It’s difficult if you are a government agency or an ideologue. But if you just want to study the problem and fix it, you can. And this would be entirely private. Private funding, private land. No bureaucrats. Administration is five percent of staff and resources. Everybody is out working. We’d run environmental research as a business. And cut the crap.”

“Why hasn’t somebody done it?”

“Are you kidding? Because it’s radical. Face the facts, all these environmental organizations are thirty, forty, fifty years old. They have big buildings, big obligations, big staffs. They may trade on their youthful dreams, but the truth is, they’re now part of the establishment. And the establishment works to preserve the status quo. It just does.”

“Okay. What else?”

“Technology assessment. Third world countries can leapfrog. They skip telephone lines and go right to cellular. But nobody is doing decent technology assessment in terms of what works and how to balance the inevitable drawbacks. Wind power’s great, unless you’re a bird. Those things are giant bird guillotines. Maybe we should build them anyway. But people don’t know how to think about this stuff. They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems—because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.”

“Really?”

“Trust me. When you’re my age, you’ll know it is true. Next, how about recreational land use—multipurpose land use. It’s a rat’s nest. Nobody has figured out how to do it, and it’s so hot, so fierce that good people just give up and quit, or vanish in a blizzard of lawsuits. But that doesn’t help. The answer probably lies in a range of solutions. It may be necessary to designate certain areas for one or another use. But everybody lives on the same planet. Some people like opera, some people like Vegas. And there’s a lot of people that like Vegas.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. We need a new mechanism to fund research. Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done. And if they are smart, they’ll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. This is not a good system for research into those areas of science that affect policy. Even worse, the system works against problem solving. Because if you solve a problem, your funding ends. All that’s got to change.”

“How?”

“I have some ideas. Make scientists blind to their funding. Make assessment of research blind. We can have major policy-oriented research carried out by multiple teams doing the same work. Why not, if it’s really important? We’ll push to change how journals report research. Publish the article and the peer reviews in the same issue. That’ll clean up everybody’s act real fast. Get the journals out of politics. Their editors openly take sides on certain issues. Bad dogs.”

Evans said, “Anything else?”

“New labels. If you read some authors who say, ‘We find that anthropogenic greenhouse gases and sulphates have had a detectable influence on sea-level pressure’ it sounds like they went into the world and measured something. Actually, they just ran a simulation. They talk as if simulations were real-world data. They’re not. That’s a problem that has to be fixed. I favor a stamp: WARNING: COMPUTER SIMULATION—MAY BE ERRONEOUS and UNVERIFIABLE. Like on cigarettes. Put the same stamp on newspaper articles, and in the corner of newscasts. WARNING: SPECULATION—MAY BE FACT-FREE. Can you see that peppered all over the front pages?”

“Anything else?” Evans was smiling now.

“There are a few more things,” Morton said, “but those are the major points. It’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be uphill all the way. We’ll be opposed, sabotaged, denigrated. We’ll be called terrible names. The establishment will not like it. Newspapers will sneer. But, eventually, money will start to flow to us because we’ll show results. And then everybody will shut up. And then we will get lionized, which is the most dangerous time of all.”

“And?”

“By then, I’m long dead. You and Sarah will have run the organization for twenty years. And your final job will be to disband it, before it becomes another tired old environmental organization spouting outmoded wisdom, wasting resources, and doing more harm than good.”

“I see,” Evans said. “And when it’s disbanded?”

“You’ll find a bright young person and try to excite him or her to do what really needs to be done in the next generation.”

Evans looked at Sarah.

She shrugged. “Unless you have a better idea,” she said.

Half an hour before they reached the California coast, they saw the spreading brown haze hanging over the ocean. It grew thicker and darker as they approached land. Soon they saw the lights of the city, stretching away for miles. It was blurred by the atmosphere above.

“It looks a bit like hell, doesn’t it,” Sarah said. “Hard to think we’re going to land in that.”

“We have a lot of work to do,” Morton said.

The plane descended smoothly toward Los Angeles.