"That if I don't do this someone else will, " he said.
Meredith got up thoughtfully and handed around a bowl of peanuts. Then she said, "I have a different reason, Tib. If there's even a hundred-to-one chance that this is going to happen—"
"Not that much!" Tib protested.
"Even a million-to-one chance, then I think it ought to be investigated. There are ten million people along the San Andreas fault, or at risk from broken dams, or in trouble any way at all. If it happens, I don't want it on my conscience that I could have warned them and didn't."
"Meredith," Tib said courteously, "have you thought about all of the implications of this?"
"Certainly I have," she bristled. "Or—well, I don't know. Are there some implications I haven't thought of?"
Tib picked up a couple of peanuts and rolled them between his fingers. "Let me tell you about the barrier islands in the Atlantic," he said slowly. "Ten years ago or so—no, not that long ago; it was in 1976—there was a hurricane watch along the Atlantic. It was August, the middle of the summer season. All the beaches were full of people—"
She interrupted. "That's my specialty you're talking about," she reminded him gently. "I know, and I think I know what you're going to say. Someone in the national bureau had to make a decision. Should he warn the people on the islands to leave? Or should he not? If he failed to warn them and the hurricane veered a few miles closer to the shore, every one of those islands would be drowned out by the winds and the tides—hundreds of thousands of people. If he did warn them, and they left, and the hurricane stayed offshore, he would have cost the beach merchants millions and millions of dollars. They have to make their year's income in two months. They'd go broke by the thousands." .
"Yes," Tib nodded, "that is what I would have said, but there's more. Suppose he did warn them. Along New Jersey's shore, for instance, there is a whole series of barrier islands, just shifting sands that people have built jetties and dikes and retaining walls for, to try to keep them where they are. And there are only so many bridges. As I understand it, the warning could only be highly probable if it were given no more than a few hours before the hurricane struck?"
Meredith nodded. "In 1976, yes—no more than six hours, really."
"And in six hours there was not time to get everyone across those few bridges, isn't that right? So there would have been total catastrophe. Every bridge blocked. Cars smashing each other out of the way. So even with the warning, many, many people would have died."
Meredith sighed. "What you're saying is that even if we found proof somehow that Los Angeles was going to be destroyed, we couldn't get the people out in time?"
Tib shrugged and didn't answer. From his chair on the sidelines Dennis Siroca spoke up. "It is going to happen, Gram."
In 1976 the core of a burned-out comet, identified by astronomers as Asteroid 1976 UA, came within not much more than half a million miles of the earth. It was a close miss. At Earth's orbital velocity of more than sixty thousand miles an hour, it missed by less than eight hours.
Friday, December 18th. 9:15 AM.
In the week before Christinas both Time and Newsweek carried stories on the latest outbreak of California crazies. All three networks had film clips for the evening news, and the Today show sent Jane Pauley to talk to the group petitioning the mayor of Los Angeles for immediate release of all drug-related prisoners. "It's cruel and unusual punishment, Jane," Saunders Robinson explained to the camera. "They're gonna die, you know? There's no way they'll get out of those cells in time when the earthquakes hit!"
Outside of California, most of the world paid little enough attention. But there were exceptions. Pickets began to appear in front of the White House, most days, except when the weather was too bad, and their placards urged a day of national penitence before Jupiter struck. A farm wife from Wisconsin announced that she had always had a talent for sensing earthquakes before they happened, and agreed to let ABC know when Los Angeles was going to get it. And a man named Jeremy Lautermilch canceled his plans for a week-long psychic seminar in Austin, Texas. There had not been all that much response to the ads, anyway. He made a few long-distance calls to Los Angeles and got on a plane.
Jeremy Lautermilch had learned a number of survival skills that were of benefit in his profession. He was a highly trained person. With three degrees from good universities, he had not expected to need such tricks. But the kinds of careers the degrees opened to him had turned out not to be very interesting. He could have taught in some other fairly good university, or done research for some fairly uninteresting employer like the United States government. He had higher ambitions.
The degrees were not wasted. They were cosmetically wonderful. They became a major part of the "publisher's press release" that Lautermilch himself carefully prepared and updated and made available to everyone who would look at it. The degrees helped. They didn't keep newspaper reporters from calling him a crackpot or a fraud. They only kept them from doing it in public.
One of Lautermilch's survival tricks was being unfailingly polite to everyone in related professions, and so when he arrived in Los Angeles International he made the rounds of colleagues. He had prepared a map showing the locations of six persons with whom he had had previous contact: a phrenologist in Hawthorne, two palmists in Beverly HtHs, a couple of astrologers and, of course, the ashram of the True Believers in Jupiter Fulgaris. In his first four hours in California he had secured the expressed good will of his acquaintances and two firm offers of a place to stay. He turned down the ashram. He chose to accept one of the astrologers. She was not only well off, with a good address and a handsome home, she was herself handsome in a dark, dramatic way. When he moved his bags in from the trunk of his rental car he discovered she was also married, but you couldn't have everything.
The second survival trick he had learned was how to get a turnout for a press conference. It involved the longdistance telephone. No matter who you were, if you called a managing editor from a distant city to announce that you would be available the next day, he would seldom turn you down. So when, that afternoon, he drove up the hill to the Griffith Observatory he was gladdened to see a newspaper panel truck parked in the lot, and four people waiting for him on the terrace above the museum. He had timed it very well. The interest in the future of Southern California was climbing every day. His lecture was going to be a winner.
Since the park was public, there was no problem about getting permission to use it. He placed himself with the observatory domes behind him and began to talk. "Thanks for coming," he said, smiling genially as he handed out his press releases. "Shall I get right into it? All right. I am in Los Angeles to give a public lecture—the place and time are in the material you have—about the situation that confronts Los Angeles. The basic outlines have been known for a long time. According to Edgar Cayce, for example, by the year 2100 AD Los Angeles will no longer exist, because it will be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It will be a long way from land, too. Cayce states that Nebraska will then be a seacoast state on the Pacific. If you will look at the little map on page three of the release, you'll see what that means. Utah and Nevada will be gone completely, along with most of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon. What I am in Los Angeles to discuss is in what way the present predictions relate to this ultimate catastrophe. "