Goodbye California - Alistair [51]
Ryder and Jeff, seated in the former’s living-room, both felt it and saw it – a ceiling lamp, travelling through an arc of not more than two inches at maximum, oscillated for about twenty seconds before coming to rest. Dunne, still in his office, felt it and paid no attention to it – he had been through many such tremors before and he had more important things on his mind. LeWinter, dressed now as was his secretary, felt it through the open door of his safe, the remaining contents of which he was examining with some anxiety. Even Donahure, despite an aching occiput and a mind somewhat beclouded by his fourth consecutive large Scotch, was dimly aware of it. And, although its foundations were firmly embedded on the very solid rock of the Sierra Nevada, the Adlerheim felt it most acutely of all, for the excellent reason that the epicentre of the earthquake was no more than a dozen miles distant; even more importantly, the ‘quake registered strongly in the seismographical office installed in one of the caves – wine cellars – which Von Streicher had excavated out of the rock and on two other seismographs which Morro had foresightedly had installed in two private residences he owned, each about fifteen miles distant and in diametrically different directions.
And the shocks were registered, too, in institutes which, one would have thought, had considerably more legitimate interest in such matters than Morro. Those were the offices of Seismological Field Survey, those of the Californian Department of Water Resources, in the Californian Institute of Technology and the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research. The last two, probably the most important of the four, were conveniently located where they would be the first to be demolished should a massive earthquake affect either Los Angeles or San Francisco, for the Institute of Technology was located in Pasadena and the Earthquake Research Center in Menlo Park. The nerve-centres of all four institutes were in direct and permanent contact with each other and it had taken them only minutes to pin-point, with complete precision, the exact epicentre of the earthquake.
Alec Benson was a large, calm man in his early sixties. Except on ceremonial occasions, which he avoided wherever and whenever possible, he invariably wore a grey flannel suit and a grey polo jersey, which went well enough with the grey hair that topped the tubby, placid and usually smiling face. Director of the seismology department, he held two professorships and so many doctorates and scientific degrees that, for simplicity’s sake, his numerous scientific colleagues referred to him just as ‘Alec’. In Pasadena, at least, he was regarded as the world’s leading seismologist: while the Russians and Chinese may have disputed this it was noteworthy that those two countries were always among the first to nominate him as chairman of the not infrequent international seismo-logical conferences. This esteem stemmed primarily from the fact that Benson never made any distinction between himself and his world-wide colleagues and sought advice as frequently as he gave it.
His chief assistant was Professor Hardwick, a quiet, retiring, almost self-effacing scientist with a track record that almost matched that of Benson’s. Hardwick said: ‘Well, about a third of the people in the State must have felt the shock. It’s already been on TV and radio