She wandered off to peer out the window while Rainy unwrapped the little envelope. She recognized the name on the envelope as her own, but who it was from was obscure; even more obscure after she opened it, because all it contained was a Xerox—no, not even a Xerox, one of those oily thermo-copied things—of a typewritten paper. The difficulty was that the typing was in Cyrillic characters, totally opaque to Rainy.
Since the only Russian she had had any contact with was the cosmonaut who was of so much interest to the F.B.I., she supposed it might have been from him. But that did not solve the problem of what was in it.
The sirens were growing louder, very much louder, and then abruptly, right in front of the house, they cut off. "It's the governor," Sam Houston Bradison called from the kitchen. "Do let him in, someone."
Meredith was already at the door, holding it open while the governor's party sorted themselves out in the driveway; besides the governor's own car there were two black- and-whites and one drenched policeman on a motorcycle. Tib joined Rainy at the window to watch. "Look what I got from, I guess, Mihailovitch," she said, handing him the stapled sheets. "Do you have any idea what it is? It's all Greek to me."
Tib unfolded the slick sheets and glanced at the heading. "Yes, I think I can translate—perhaps after we are through with this meeting. It is not Greek, of course, but Russian—but I also read a little Greek, you know."
It took Rainy all the time until the governor was there, introductions had been performed, and they were all seated before she made up her mind that that had been a small joke, or at least a pleasantry; it was good to know that his mood allowed pleasantries! Tib seemed quite interested in what was going on, studying California's trendy governor with his dove-gray, soft leather shirt and his mid-calf boots. But his interest did not extend to taking part in the conversation. He shook the governor's hand politely when they were introduced and retired to a straight-backed chair between the governor's secretary, or whatever he was, and someone who seemed to be a Los Angeles city councilman. He maintained a polite expression while the governor and Sam Bradison told each other how well they remembered each other, and while everyone else in the room told what they thought of the storm, and while Sam Bradison explained what he wanted the governor to do. Which led to Rainy's being asked to recount her experience with Danny Deere, and Meredith to repeat some of the things her grandson had told her about the Jupiter Fulgarians. The governor listened attentively, frowning in the direction of his secretary. "Have you got all that, Jake? I want the A.G. to get on that right away. The only thing, Meredith," he added, turning back to his hostess, "I don't see what this has to do with the storm."
"Not a thing, Governor," Meredith assured him, but her husband was shaking his head.
"It does, you know. There's a climate of fear in this town, and it's been deliberately whipped up by people who make a profit out of it. Not just Danny Deere or the Jupes. I hold the Pedigrues responsible for a good deal of it. The whole committee was a fraud in the first place; there's no way to know whether the so-called Jupiter Effect is real or not, and the publicity given to it is dangerous. Really dangerous. I'm going to send you drafts of three bills I think you may want to offer the legislature, Governor. One to make spreading false warnings a criminal offense; one to make people who do that civilly liable for damages; and one to create a bona-fide commission to examine the risks of catastrophe of all sorts, and recommend appropriate building and zoning ordinances. "
The governor nodded slightly. "You do that, Sam. I'll be looking forward to them. What about you, Dr. Sonderman? Everybody else has had a chance to talk."
For the past ten minutes Tib's eyes had been in his lap, turning over and over the sheaf of papers Rainy had given him without really looking at them, deep in thought. He looked up. "Yes," he said. "Thank you."
And then he was silent, pursing his lips thoughtfully, until Rainy began to fidget and the governor's slight smile grew strained.
"You see," Tib said, "I wish to disagree with most of what has been said here. Not as to facts, but as to implications." Afeefah was passing around the room with a plate of salted nuts, and Tib absently reached out for a handful. "For example," he said, "Dr. Bradison, the Dr. Sam Bradison, concludes that you require better licensing arrangements so that, for example, no one will build a skyscraper that will fall down, and that in my opinion is useless. Nearly useless. One should build well, but it is impossible to build any structure so that it cannot be destroyed. " He chewed thoughtfully for a second, and then went on.
"I wish to try to do something that one does not usually do in public, that is to speak to you in truth in the strong sense. That is to say, not only the absence of untruth but the entire conceptual statement, and with no attempt to manipulate the listener. Do you understand me? I will not tell you what I want you to hear because I have come to certain conclusions of my own and want you to take certain actions. I will tell you what I believe to be objective fact, and then I will tell you the conclusions I, myself, have drawn. What you then choose to do you must decide for yourself. I am open-minded about this," he added fairly, "because I have little expectation that anything you do will matter.
"In the first place, you see, all works of man are transient; nothing survives. Even the pyramids will go within a certain not very large number of thousands of years. They will be survived by a few artifacts, for a time— abandoned open-pit mines, let us say, or radionuclide waste dumps—but in a finite time even those will be subducted down into the magma and cease to exist as organized matter. This is a geologist's point of view; I am speaking, obviously, of the very long term. But it is important to understand this principle, because in the short term it is nearly completely true as well."
The governor's secretary opened his mouth, but the governor shook his head without looking at him and Tib went on. "So to try to achieve permanent safety is impossible over time. The only question is, how much time? While I have been sitting here, I have been trying to calculate some rough risk assessments. I have taken very round numbers to make the mathematics easy, but I think they are not orders of magnitude wrong, at least.
"There is a general distributed risk attached to anything on Earth: a dwelling may burn, or be struck by a nuclear weapon or some other instrument of war, or someone may destroy it in a riot or out of vindictiveness, or it may be destroyed by a large meteorite, or annihilated in many other ways; and all these events may occur regardless of what building codes you enact or what caution the owner displays. I have given a number to this general risk, point zero one, one chance in a hundred of being destroyed in any particular year, so that, on average, one can expect any given building to survive for one century of useful life. I do not know that this estimate is correct, but I would suppose that if anything it is, on the average, quite high.
"But let us now move this hypothetical building to a new location. Say, one of the Hollywood hills. Let us say its back yard is covered with chapparal, like my own house, and subject to the Santa Ana and to mud slides, also like my own house. In certain areas, at least, we can estimate the danger of fire at, again, one per cent per year; and the danger of mud slides also at one per cent a year, and now do you see what has happened? The danger is now three times as great, and the house has now a useful life expectancy of thirty-three years four months. Add to that the risk of earthquake, which I will put at one per cent for certain areas: life expectancy has now been cut to twenty-five years. Add to that that this particular house is, let us say, built in the flood channel of an earthwork dam, and we now have a house which in all seriousness cannot expect to survive until its mortgage is paid off.