Core, p.1
Core, page 1
7-11-2024
Conversion made from
The William Morrow & Co First Edition
September 1993
The Earth’s magnetic field begins to collapse, leaving the planet unprotected against deadly cosmic rays and solar flares. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children suffer radiation burns and deaths, severe power disruptions, and communication blackouts. If the collapse continues, the ozone layer will be totally destroyed, setting loose plagues of cancer, sterility, mutations, birth defects, and worse.
Scientists, scrambling to understand these savage new phenomena, ultimately realize that unless an answer is found quickly, all life on Earth will be destroyed in a rapidly approaching apocalypse.
Against this frighteningly real near future backdrop, Cyrus and Leiden Hudder—father and son, two of the world’s great scientific minds, separated by an undying hatred and resentment—are brought together through the work of fiercely independent physicist Marta McDougal. Marta has developed one of the greatest technological breakthroughs of the age, a machine to bore through the Earth’s solid crust to reach its very center…but this invention is a two-edged sword. The ultimate weapon, it could be mankind’s salvation—or its destruction!
Packed with explosive action in a world poised on the brink of collapse, this high-tech masterpiece is Paul Preuss’s finest achievement.
CORE
Previous Books by Paul Preuss
The Gates of Heaven
Reentry
Broken Symmetries
Human Error
Starfire
Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime
Volume 1: Breaking Strain
Volume 2: Maelstrom
Volume 3: Hide and Seek
Volume 4: The Medusa Encounter
Volume 5: The Diamond Moon
CORE
A NOVEL BY PAUL PREUSS
A BYRON PREISS BOOK
WILLIAM MORROW AND COMPANY INC. I NEW YORK
Contents
MARRAKESH, 1985
MANHATTAN, 1985
NEW YORK CITY, 1983
WASHINGTON, D.C., OCTOBER 199o
LEAVING HOUSTON, TEXAS, 1990
CORE CITY, LATER IN 1995
AFTERWORD
Copyright © 1993 by Paul Preuss,
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.
It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and affiliates, recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, to print the books we publish on acid-free paper, and we exert our best efforts to that end.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Preuss, Paul, 1942-Core: a novel I Paul Preuss. p. cm.
ISBN 0-688-09662-X
1. Earth—Core—Fiction. 2. Scientists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566. R416C66 1993
813’. 54—dc20 93-12167
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
BOOK DESIGN BY LINEY LI
For Debra
CORE
Scenes from a docudrama broadcast in 1991
EXT NEAR GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE, NIGHT
ANGLE ON AN OLD MAN (an actor), wearing a raincoat, carrying a fat leather satchel, walking downhill through fragrant, dripping masses of black cypress crowning San Francisco s Presidio.
NARRATOR
He might have looked a little off the norm. He might
have been an object of suspicion at this hour, when
the more likely sorts to be found on the bridge were
joggers, and not many of those.
Almost invisible in the fog, the old man crosses an empty parking lot, climbs concrete steps to a sidewalk leading toward the bridge—
NARRATOR
So it s thought that Cyrus Hudder went as briskly as
he could manage in his drenched shoes, acting the
man of purpose—not some deflated soul dragging himself
to extinction.
AT THE TOLL PLAZA
Traffic is sparse; the fog is blowing hard. The lighted windows in the administration building beside the toll plaza are pale yellow cutouts in a gray silhouette of mist. The old man’s shadow passes in front of them—
ON THE BRIDGE
MOVING behind the man—orange streetlights loom suddenly out of the fog, like descending UFOs. Under the center of the bridge, the foghorn BELLOWS.
NARRATOR
At last he reached the middle of the span, where the
water is deepest.
ON THE SURFACE OF THE WATER far below, black and flowing fast, rippling with reflected orange light.
CLOSE ON THE OLD MAN, standing at the railing, expressionless, looking down.
NARRATOR (continuing)
Many people think they know what happened next,
but do they? The case of Cyrus Hudder is far from closed…
SLOW FADEOUT
MARRAKESH, 1985
As Leiden Hudder brought his rented Land Rover to a stop in front of the hotel entrance, a distinguished fellow wearing a dove-gray longcoat and military cap ran up and pulled open the door, before he could dismount.
“Vous restez ici, monsieur?”
“Yeah, oui, soon as I get registered.”
Some signal passed among the hovering attendants. A gang of porters wearing leggings, pink sashes, and fezzes broke from the shade under the portico and surrounded the vehicle, one of them reaching to take Leidy’s canvas book bag.
“I’ll keep this—you guys can have the ones in back.”
An awning of etched glass and wrought iron, ornate as the old Paris Metro, reflected Leidy s crumpled khaki work clothes as he walked up the white marble steps. He passed under tiled Andalusian arches into a shadowed lobby. Porters, dwarfed by his wiry frame, raced silently after him…
Ten minutes later he was up to his whiskered chin in soapy water, in a tub long enough for his long tired bones. La Mamounia was a pink palace set in a tropical garden, built against the medieval city’s mud walls; his room, the cheapest in the place, was setting him back three hundred bucks a night. Rothschilds and Rockefellers had stayed here. Winston Churchill, Rita Hayworth, Erich von Stroheim, a list of French intellectuals longer than your arm had stayed here. Anybody who’d been anybody since 1923 had stayed here. There were lots of other places in Marrakesh, from dirt cheap to the newest and gaudiest, but Leidy wanted the address. The tub alone was worth the price. Besides, come tax time, he’d expense it.
He climbed out of the bath, wrapped himself in a thick pink towel, and spent contemplative minutes in front of the mirror taking his beard off with a hand razor. He checked his watch and sat down in front of the window, still wrapped in the towel. He pulled cardboard folders out of his book bag and spread them on the table.
Personnel files. Maps. He glanced through the file labeled with the name Ahmed Alaoui, who liked to be addressed as Colonel. The man was forty-seven years old, distantly related to the king, an officer in the country’s air force reserve, sometime undersecretary in the Ministry of Energy and Mines, current board chairman of the Royal Moroccan Mineral Corporation. Education Western and technical: Paris for his baccalaureate, Harvard for his MBA. A conservative Muslim, not a fanatic.
The Royal Moroccan Mineral Corporation’s principal product was raw phosphate rock; not coincidentally, the Alaoui family had rights and titles to phosphate-rich lands. The commodity price for raw phosphate rock had long been in decline; these days, the world market for high explosive was soft. Luckily for him, the colonel’s personal fortune was based on a diversified portfolio.
Leidy closed the file and looked at another, containing computer-enhanced satellite photos. Some had plastic overlays, geological maps with stippling and cross-hatching—the Balkans, northwestern Siberia, western Canada. Some were photos of Morocco. Leidy kept the overlays to these in another file, along with paper maps he’d colored with felt-tip pens.
He put most of the files back into his faded canvas bag. Others he slipped into the envelope of Spanish leather he reserved for business occasions. The valet returned his Italian suit, cleaned and pressed, about the time he was ready for it.
An hour later Leidy stood before a weathered wooden door set into a mud-brick wall. He banged hard with the iron knocker. A small grilled window clicked open and shut. The door opened on a white-robed servant, his seamed face so black it was blue in the shadows, who gestured sharply at him to come in. The man’s fingers were impossibly long; his movements were those of a dancer or a deaf man signing.
Leidy stepped across the threshold. Street sounds—the pop-pop of scooters, the grumbling of taxis, the shouts of porters pulling their carts—vanished as the door closed behind him, so completely that he felt a moment’s disorientation. He walked forward under a shadowed archway, through a gate of intricately carved cedar. A jet of water splashed into a marble basin set in the tiled courtyard.
The black man in the white robes led him through the first court into another, filled with flowering lemon trees whose perfume hung lightly in the air. With another expressive gesture he bid Leidy wait, then hurried smoothly away to disappear under a shadowed arcade. Leidy stood alone in t he fragrant garden, listening to the sound of birds—and to the faint murmur of voices, the chortle of telephones, the buzz of fax machines from somewhere unseen.
Alaoui appeared, dressed in a suit and patterned tie not unlike Leidy’s own. “Dr. Hudder, thank you for coming.” They shook hands briskly. “Please, this way…”
Alaoui sat across from his guest at a low round table set with a heavy silver tea service. He was a shadowy figure against the brilliant mosaic patterns of the far wall, which glistened in abstractions of red and gold and blue and white tile in the sunlight that poured through the arches.
Leidy opened his hand and spilled a dozen black pebbles onto the gleaming lemonwood tabletop. “Don’t look like much, do they?”
“You must tell me, Dr. Hudder. I am not a geologist.” Alaoui’s tone betrayed neither disappointment nor much interest in the dusty bits of rock. His face—full, with a firm mouth and a bold nose, distinguished by deep-set brown eyes—was more like a banker’s than a desert sheikh’s. Leidy wished he could have read the man’s expression better.
Leidy was settled on embroidered cushions on a bench built into the wall of the high, open room. A place of honor, despite the glare. “I can tell you this stuff is about the color and texture of soft coal,” he said. He rubbed one of the pebbles between thumb and forefinger, and it crumbled to dirty powder, blackening his skin.
“You have discovered a coal deposit?”
“It’s graphite, not coal. This is from the Rif. But look at the shape.” With a fingernail he pushed one of the pebbles forward. “Like two pyramids, base to base.”
“Curious.”
“An octahedron. The characteristic shape of natural diamonds.” Leidy launched into a lecture which had become polished with practice. “Typically, diamonds form a hundred and fifty kilometers deep in the earth’s mantle, where the temperature is almost twelve hundred degrees centigrade. The question is, how do they get to the surface? Toward the surface, pressure lets up fast, but if the pressure lets up while the heat is still on, the diamonds shift back to graphite. For a long time people assumed that only volcanic explosions could bring diamonds up fast enough to keep them from reverting to graphite—bring them straight through the earth’s crust in shaped charges of lava, like an armor-piercing shell. South Africa was where they first made that assumption. In the Kimberley Mine they’ve found twenty million carats of diamonds, so far. Now all such volcanic deposits are called kimberlite pipes.”
Alaoui munched on almonds from a bowl on the table. “So. Not a coal deposit. You’ve found a kimberlite pipe.”
“No. If there were pipes here they would all have been found a couple of decades ago. I’ve found something more interesting.”
“Do go on.”
“The Atlas Mountains are perhaps the most spectacularly folded belts of rock on earth, mixed-up chunks of continents and seabed going back to the Precambrian. Consider a slab of ancient seabed, rich with pure carbon. Things were moving fast then. The slab takes a nosedive under a continent, sinks right down into the hot plastic mantle. It cooks. The continents move apart, collide again, move, collide. Eventually the cooked slab is extruded—like squeezed meat loaf. Sits in the Atlas for fifteen million years until erosion finally lays a slice of it bare.”
“Meat loaf. A charming story.”
“There are units like this in the Rif and across the Mediterranean in Spain, in Beni Bousera and Ronda. Those beds are rich in octahedral carbon crystals—but the crystals are graphite. Soft as pencil lead. I just showed you one of those. They are pseudo-morphs; their shape is telltale: once upon a time those crystals were diamonds. The beds they came from are huge in extent, thick with carbon. If those slabs had made the trip to the surface just a little faster than they did, they would not be barren today, they would be ten thousand times richer than the richest kimberlite.”
“Alas, they are not.”
“No. Not those. But there are other carbonaceous beds in the Atlas—other parts of the Atlas.”
“A phenomenon of great interest to scientists,” Alaoui said politely, not bothering to add that it was of less than compelling interest to businessmen. “Will you have some more tea?”
Leidy nodded, although he was awash in the sweet green liquid. Alaoui refilled his glass with steaming, aromatic mint tea, and Leidy sipped it loudly and murmured his appreciation.
He set the glass down and took another plastic bag from his leather envelope, spilling its contents on the table beside the graphite crystals. “These don’t look very different, Colonel, but there is a difference.”
“Yes?”
“Take one. Do what I did.’
“You mean crush it?”
Leidy nodded.
Alaoui picked up one of the black pebbles and rolled it between his thumb and index finger. Sooty powder fell to the table. But as the colonel continued to roll the stone, squeezing harder with his strong fingers, he gradually laid bare an irreducible mineral core—octahedral like the rind that had covered it, but palely translucent, with an oily glimmer on its surface.
“You could take a rasp to that, Carborundum even, and not make a scratch,” Leidy said.
“Diamond?”
Leidy nodded. “Not from the Rif.”
Alaoui indicated the other pebbles from the second bag. “They are all like this?”
“Nine out of ten that I’ve inspected have a diamond core under the graphite crust. I confess there was only a ninety percent chance you’d get a diamond.”
Alaoui thought a moment. “I am naturally curious about one or two things.”
“Go ahead.”
“For example…forgive me, Dr. Hudder, this is not meant personally…how difficult would it be for some clever person to take a handful of raw diamonds and encrust them in graphite?” Leidy smiled. “If I were buying these things, that’s surely something I’d want to know. I don’t know the answer, though.”
“I’m afraid it is difficult to be satisfied by…” He let the sentence dangle.
“I’m not selling a salted mine, Colonel.”
“Salt is of no interest to me.” Alaoui raised a wry eyebrow. Alaoui knew very well what he meant, but Leidy explained anyway. “I mean I’m not going to take somebody out and show him a hunk of rock with diamonds in it that I put there myself. What I’m offering is basic geological knowledge. A map. Like these.”
He pulled out the satellite photos and their overlays. “The Greek government paid me for these—gold-bearing structures in Macedonia. And here, these are nickel deposits in the Northwest Territories of Canada; a consortium of Canadian mining interests sponsored these surveys. Naturally my references—names, phone numbers, all nonproprietary details—are yours for the asking.” He pulled out exquisitely detailed false-color images of the southern ranges of the Atlas Mountains, the High Atlas and the Anti-Atlas, taken from Landsat-1. “What I’m offering is similar pieces of plastic to go over these.”
“What did the Greek government pay for the map to the gold mines?” Alaoui inquired.
