Revolution #9 by Peter Abrahams

Author:Peter Abrahams [Abrahams, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, General, Suspense
ISBN: 9780307800787
Google: VLXbKv6E2U8C
Amazon: B0054KMKUY
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1992-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

21

“Hello?” Emily said one more time, but even as she did there was a click at the other end of the line. She put down the phone and got back to work.

Emily was sitting at her desk in the bedroom, overlooking Cosset Pond. On the computer screen columns of numbers attended her next move, like soldiers at inspection. She backed the hurricane ten degrees by typing “37H” on the keyboard and waited to see what it would do to her beach. The desktop computer waited too. The mainframe at MIT was doing all the work.

It wasn’t a quick job, not even for the Cray. If she was right, her beach would now not only be protected by the jetty she’d angled off the shore almost three miles away, but would also widen ten to twelve feet, padded with sand swept in from the offshore bar. The prospect excited her, not for practical or mercenary reasons, but because she liked solving puzzles, especially those of her own devising: the hurricane, the beach, the jetty, and the sandbar were all just numbers in one of her erosion models.

The phone rang again. Emily answered. “Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello?… Hello?”

Silence; perhaps the faint sound of breathing. That made her angry. “Who is this?” she said, her voice rising. “Who is this?”

Click.

Emily hung up. She turned back to the screen, annoyed, uneasy, distracted, found herself staring through the numbers into the blackness beyond. Get a grip, she told herself. It was nothing but a wrong number, two wrong numbers; probably the same careless caller. But misdialers usually hung up as soon as they realized their mistake, didn’t they? And this one hadn’t. This one had listened to her for a while; breathing. She didn’t like the breathing. It meant a crank. Or a sicko. Emily’s imagination ran with that thought, as she sat at her desk, waiting for MIT to do the numbers.

“Get a grip.” This time she said it aloud. She was just jumpy. It was all about Charlie of course, off somewhere with his uncle, dealing with a complicated and difficult family she had known nothing about. Charlie’s Uncle Sam had said it might be a few days. “A few” meant three, but that was a possibility Emily hadn’t really taken seriously. She’d expected Charlie back the next day; that was today, and there wasn’t much of it left. Outside the sun was low in the sky, reddening the surface of Cosset Pond. And if he wasn’t coming back today, wouldn’t he call to tell her? She would in his place. Then she tried to put herself in his place, and could not: there were too many sudden unknowns. Did they make Charlie a puzzle too? Emily shrank from that idea, but she was still thinking about those unknowns when all the numbers on her screen changed.

Emily looked at the new numbers. They would have been meaningless to all but a few dozen people in the world. Emily understood them right away. Her beach was gone.

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