Joel trudged back through the rain, rather content with his life. The fantasies were still there to be tapped when he wanted them. Listening to the horns of the cars on Sunset Strip he heard them as a musical score for the film he would (he knew) never make—not a score, but background—maybe linked with some of those electric tonalities, by somebody like the Barrens (were they still alive?). And perhaps you could get a theme out of it, and the theme could be a hit single, and ...
The sound of Danny yelling dispelled the reverie.
Joel got rid of his sopping coat and tracked the sound to the telephone room. Danny had been in a bad mood ever since he came away from that mobster, Buster Boyma; so mad that sometimes he was even silent, nose pinched white with suppressed fury; not a time to cross him. Now he was not silent, simply inarticulate with rage. He stood in the phone room with that dispatch case cradled in his arms, yelling at his secretary and at the one telephone seller who had managed to get there that morning. All the desks should have been filled by now! But that was not the worst. The electricity was flickering worrisomely, and the one telephone seller was holding a phone pleadingly toward Danny Deere. There would be no soliciting from the office of Danny Deere Enterprises that morning. All the phones were out.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on dams, levees and other projects to reduce damage from flooding over the past few decades. Nevertheless, the losses from flood damage increase at a higher rate each year in the countries which have implemented flood-control measures than in the countries which have not.
Monday, December 28th. 8:20 m.
The fifth or sixth time Tib woke it was daylight. If you could call it daylight; the light was a greasy gray, and he could hear the rain still falling. He slept poorly with another person in the bed, that had been a truth for all of his life, but there was more to it than that. He could not sleep because his churning mind would not allow it.
Slowly and quietly Tib turned the covers back and let his feet down to the floor. It was a pity really that they had spent this night in her home rather than his. His own home was certainly not large, but at least there was a place to go—a very good place; he could have gone down to his workroom. He could even have worked . . . assuming, of course, his fluttering mind had settled on a course of work to do. But at least he could have thought, without the distraction of another person in the room.
He risked turning the light on in the bathroom, with the door almost closed so that only a sort of artificial moonlight came into the bedroom/living room/dining room that was all there was of Rainy's apartment. Moving slowly, barefoot and noiseless, he eased a chair around so that he could watch the rain splashes on the window and, at the same time, see the outline of Rainy under the covers less than ten feet away.
He had set himself for thinking. But the thoughts were stale. What kept coming back into his mind was geology, because geology was what he knew. But the problems were not scientific! They were moral. Tibor Sonderman had never been a religious man, but he had always had a great consciousness of sin. Sin was all around him. If it was not his own—not all his own—he shared the communal guilt, because he did nothing to prevent it.
The sins that troubled Tib Sonderman had nothing to do with theology, and not even much to do with sex. They were social sins, and this city he lived in was Sodom itself by those lights. Los Angeles was a city of three million in a place where there was no reason for it to exist at all except for climate, and it was destroying that. It did not have water, but needed to steal it from the north. It did not have good communications, and so had to pave itself over with noxious freeways. It did not even have land to build on! It had only the valleys—which were not enough, and in any case should not be built on because they were capable of growing food—and the hills, which certainly should not be built on because inevitably, sometime, something would shake down what you built. Especially in California! Viewed in the long time-scale of geology, California thrashed about like a frightened snake. Its string of volcanos popped one after another, like fireflies; the whole state twitched like a horse's hide in fly season with earthquakes. It was not merely that it was certain that a vast earthquake would occur. What was certain was that there would be an endless series of them! forever! or at least for the next ten million years or so, until some great new cycle of fire began in some other part of the world. But by then Los Angeles, and everyone in it, and no doubt the race that had built it would long since have disappeared!
The risk was always there, no risk but a certainty; but there were times that were worse than others. Today was one. The rain exacerbated the geology.
How many days a year like this were there? Perhaps as many as ten? And how often did damaging shocks, say Modified Mercalli VIII or higher, occur? Maybe one every five years? Tib wished for his calculator, but the probability computation was not too hard to do in his head. Say the odds against a damaging earthquake on any particular day were 1800 to one. Say the odds against that day being one when the ground was saturated and ready to be shaken into thin soup—as happened in China, with half a million dead; as happened in Alaska, when buildings toppled into the gruel—were 36.5 to one. Then, cumulating them, once every 65,700 days, say 180 years, the lethal combination should strike.
Once in 180 years did not seem like much. But Los Angeles was over a hundred years old; it was hallway there.
Rainy stirred in the bed. She lifted herself on one elbow and spoke to him; her eyes were open, but she was still asleep and in a moment she put her head down and closed her eyes again. Tib sat immobile until her regular breathing resumed. And he saw his error. Two errors! First, the city of Los Angeles of a hundred years ago was not the city of today, with split-levels and ranch houses dug into every hillside. The second error was more serious. He had been thinking geology again, and the question was still moral.
He was certain of that. But the precise formulation of the question eluded him. His orderly mind was crumbling in disorder; Tommy Pedigrue and the Jupiter Effect, the death of Myrna Licht, and the wickedness of Danny Deere were all spinning around in his head, and tranquility was not even a hope.
"You look," said Rainy from the bed, "like somebody who can't find his car keys." This time she was wide awake, and had been watching him without moving.
"What I think I've lost is my mind."
"Maybe you left it in the bed? You want to come back and look?"
"Oh, my God," he said, "how flattering you are." He came over to sit on the edge of the bed, kissing her good morning. All the turmoil in his head receded to a distant pinwheel whirl, no longer an obsession. "You do cheer me up, dear Rainy. I have noticed that since you got the federal police off your back you have been in a real good mood."
Rainy lay back, regarding him. "Think so? Um." She considered for a moment. "I would point out, my dear colleague, that, first, they are not entirely off my back; they were here last night; so your theory is not sufficient; and, second, that two things happened at the same time, i.e., it also happened that you and I became lovers. So it is not necessary, either; and a theory which is not both necessary and sufficient is no theory."