Delmar Stevens, obscenely rich oil baron with rigs and drilling platforms throughout the world, is obsessed with theoretical research by an obscure, and now dead, woman scientist at a small college in Iowa, research he believes will give him the power to generate massive earthquakes, or set off equally massive volcanoes, at selected places on Earth. Caught up in this obsession with a potential weapon of mass destruction are a suite of characters, including scientists, detectives from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and an oil field inspector working for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, and a young geologist who holds the key to success, or failure, of Stevens' obsession. Belief in the validity of scientific discoveries drives Stevens' actions, namely an effort to build a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a natural disaster. He dreams of the power at his command if he can use his company's massive inventory of equipment and those Einstein-level equations to prove that his ideas work. The first big experiments are underway in Oklahoma.