Her heart was pounding when she stepped inside. The walls to the spacious office were covered with graphs and color-coded maps that showed the earth’s topography in sharp detail. There was also an array of weather charts—rainfall, river stages, and flood projections from the Army Corps of Engineers. The most recent reports were only four days old. And from the way they were filed, it appeared to Holleran that Prable had worked almost up to the time he took his life.
On a table that ran the entire length of the room, eight computer terminals were arrayed. Holleran almost gasped when she saw them. They were all Sun Spare 10s, exceptionally powerful computers with a prodigious megabyte capacity. They cost around $40,000 apiece. Holleran’s department had only two of the machines, and on- line time was at a premium. She’d never seen so many of them in one place.
Prable was linked through his computer network to the National Weather Service forecasting bureau in Kansas City, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, the National Geomagnetic Information Center, and the National Earthquake Information Center.
Most of the data was in real time. His computers—all were in the “sleep” mode—captured the information the moment it was produced by the host computers.
Prable even had his own analogue seismograph, which was mounted in a glass case next to what must have been his principal work desk, a kidney-shaped expanse of polished cherry.
Holleran also noticed the direct computer linkup with the Global Positioning System.
She sat down at Prable’s desk and logged on to his personal computer, using a password he’d provided: GINNY, his wife’s middle name. The first file to appear on screen was a series of color images taken by the Solar Maximum Mission Spacecraft. She remembered Prable’s controversial ideas about the triggering effects of solar activity on earthquakes. The eight photographs arrayed on the computer’s color monitor were a time-lapse chronograph of a recent coronal mass ejection, or CME, from the sun.
It resembled a hazy gas bubble forming on the surface, rapidly expanding frame by frame until it blew up in long tendrils of brilliant white light, the violent birth of a solar windstorm. The CME images were provided by the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
Holleran clicked onto another icon. Prable had plotted the approach of this solar windstorm toward earth.
Peak solar activity was predicted for January 16, one week away. Prable’s computer graphics showed how the winds were expected to affect the earth’s magnetosphere on or about that date. When this solar shock wave hit the earth, Prable had calculated that it would set off a geomagnetic storm strong enough to alter the tides as well as satellite transmissions. And possibly set into motion a chain of events that might result in an earthquake somewhere in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
Holleran scanned the data with increasing skepticism. It had started eating at her even as she watched Prable’s video. The relationship between earthquakes and such phenomena as solar storms, the tides, and gravitational pull was simply too remote and unproven for her to take seriously. She’d never been able to buy into such theories, which were far outside the scientific mainstream. She found herself sitting there wondering how a man of Prable’s brilliance could have gone so far astray from his original discipline of geophysics. The waste of it all saddened her.
One of the files contained his analysis of stress buildup along the fault. Holleran found that data far more interesting.
Using two-dimensional computer graphics, Prable demonstrated how ground in the seismic zone had experienced a gradual uplift that started approximately a hundred miles north of Memphis. In one three-hundred- square-mile sector, the ground had risen as much as seven centimeters over four years. That was a huge, rapid change. The computer’s graphic presentation of this deformation was outstanding. It showed a dome-shaped uplift, which strongly suggested large, horizontal movements deep underground and a buildup of tectonic strain energy.
Holleran switched to a file named: Earthquake Projection Data.
For the rest of the long night, she pored over Prable’s computer analysis of an earthquake risk along the New Madrid Seismic Zone. She was impressed by his marshaling of facts. It was an amazing compilation of data, seemingly disparate, but all focused on a single seismic event.
He’d even provided a statistical analysis of the probability of a major quake on the New Madrid Fault. It was crucial information, for without a probability assessment—an indication of the odds of a quake happening—a prediction was meaningless. Holleran doubted such an assessment was remotely possible based on the data he used, most of which she found seriously flawed. With the exception of uplift along the New Madrid Seismic Zone, it seemed to her the assembled facts had little if anything to do with seismology. She found herself repeatedly questioning his conclusions and much of his data.
Holleran sat in front of the computer monitor, fighting the onset of a headache and wondering if his terminal illness had made Prable irrational, even slightly crazy. His earthquake data, in her opinion, had little or no validity. It was almost pseudo-science.
The one exception, the fact that troubled her, was the degree of deformation he’d found north of Memphis. She hadn’t been aware of that. It was quite large. She was sure seismologists at the University of Memphis—they had several good ones—were tracking it. She’d met one of them, the head of the university’s earthquake center. He was considered the country’s leading authority on the New Madrid Fault. She couldn’t remember where they’d met. Probably some conference. She’d try to run down his name and call him in the morning or send an E-mail.
It was hopeless trying to find it now. She’d been up too long without eating anything and was starting to have trouble focusing.
Holleran was beginning to understand Prable’s last comments on the video—his apology for what he’d done to her. He’d left her with a real mess on her hands—and a disturbing memory. She could still see the look of fear on Prable’s face when he described what might happen on the New Madrid Fault. His fear was genuine.
Holleran downloaded his data onto a disk. She’d been up for twenty hours. Her entire body craved sleep. When she could think more clearly, maybe she could sort some of this out.
NEAR MAYFIELD, KENTUCKY
JANUARY 10
5:00 A.M.
THE ALARM NEXT TO ATKINS’ BED JARRED HIM awake. He could smell the aroma of strong coffee. Within five minutes, he met Ben Harvey in the kitchen. They drove to the hills where they’d seen the strange lights the night before. They got out there just as the sun was coming up. A thin sheet of ice covered the ground and trees.
Atkins wanted to make absolutely sure no power lines or underground cables were buried nearby. They slogged up and down the steep, frozen hillside, their boots crunching through the crusty ice. Atkins was looking for any sign of fissures or grabens, places where the earth had given way to form sinkholes. He didn’t spot anything unusual in the topography.
Harvey urged him to have breakfast and wait for the sun to melt the ice. He’d heard on the radio that driving conditions were treacherous. But by 6:00, after thanking Harvey and his wife for their hospitality, Atkins was heading back to Memphis in his rented Jimmy. He kept the speed under twenty miles an hour on the ice-covered blacktop.
Atkins had a hard time focusing on the road and his driving. He kept thinking about the lights and a possible explanation. If it wasn’t a shorted-out electric line, what about swamp gas? That was probably a stretch, but escaping gas sometimes emitted a shimmery glow that could be detected at night. The problem was he hadn’t smelled anything out in the field. He wondered if some kind of strange electromagnetic discharge might be another possibility.
He didn’t have any good answers. Not about the lights. Not about the rats that had swarmed over his four- wheel-drive in a field or about all those dead frogs and snakes at Kentucky Lake.
Before he left for Memphis, he’d left a message for Walt Jacobs, telling him about the lights and asking him to pull together all of his seismic data on the New Madrid Fault. As soon as he got back to the USGS’s offices at the
