Goodbye California - Alistair [52]
For once, Alec Benson wasn’t smiling. He looked thoughtfully round the half-dozen scientists in the room, the vastly experienced nucleus of his research team, and studied their expressions, which were neither helpful nor unhelpful: clearly, they were all waiting for him to give a lead. Benson sighed. He said: ‘No one admires George Washington more than I do – but, no, we don’t tell them the truth. A little white lie and it won’t even rest uneasily on my conscience. What’s to be gained if we tell the truth other than scaring our fellow Californians even further out of their wits than they are now? If anything major is going to happen then it’s just going to happen and there’s damn all we can do about it. In any event, we have no evidence that this is a prelude to a major shake.’
Hardwick looked doubtful. ‘No intimation, no warning, nothing?’
‘What point would it serve?’
‘Well, there’s never been a ‘quake there in recorded history.’
‘No matter. Even a major ‘quake there wouldn’t be of great importance. Devastation of property and loss of life would be insignificant, because the area is so sparsely populated. Owens Valley, eighteen-seventy-two, the largest recorded earthquake in Califomian history – how many people died there? Maybe sixty. The Arvin-Techapi ‘quake of nineteen-fifty-two, at seven-point-seven the largest in Southern California – how many died there? Perhaps a dozen.’ Benson permitted himself his customary smile. ‘Now, if this latest jolt had happened along the Inglewood-Newport Fault I’d take a different view entirely.’ The Inglewood-Newport Fault, which had been responsible for the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, actually ran under the city of Los Angeles itself. ‘As it is, I’m in favour of letting sleeping dogs lie.’
Hardwick nodded. Reluctantly, but he nodded. ‘So we blame it on the poor old blameless White Wolf Fault?’
‘Yes. A calmly reassuring release to the media. Tell them again, briefly, about our ESPP, that we are cautiously pleased that it seems to be going according to plan and that the intensity of this shake corresponds pretty closely to our expected estimate of fault slippage.’
‘Release to the TV and radio stations?’
‘No. General. Wire service. We don’t want to lend anything that smacks of undue urgency or importance to our – ah – findings.’
Preston, another senior assistant, said: ‘We don’t let ethics creep into this, huh?’
Benson was quite cheerful. ‘Scientifically indefensible. But from the humanitarian point of view – well, call it justifiable.’
It said much for the immense weight of Benson’s prestige that the consensus of opinion was heavily on his side.
In the refectory hall in the Adlerheim Morro was being equally cheerful and reassuring to the anxious hostages who had gathered there. ‘I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that there is no cause for alarm. I grant you, it was quite a nasty shake, the worst we have experienced here, but a shake of a thousand times that magnitude would leave us completely unharmed. Apart from the fact that you will probably have already learned from your TVs that there has been no damage throughout the State, you must all be intelligent enough and widely-read enough to know that earthquakes spell danger only for those who live in dwellings on made-up filled land, marshy land whether drained or not and on alluvial soil. Damage rarely occurs to dwellings that have their foundations on rock – and we have our foundations on thousands of feet of rock. The Sierra Nevada has been here for millions of years: it is not likely to disappear overnight. It is unlikely that you could find any safer or more desirable – from the earthquake point of view – residence in the State of California.’ Morro glanced smilingly around his audience, nodding his approval when he saw that his words seemed to have had the desired calming effect. ‘I don’t know about