It is as if you were in some huge theater, with an audience of millions of people, and someone shouted, “Fire!” What is the mob going to do? There is no way to know—not for sure—unless you go to each single individual and learn everything there is to know about how he will react—for one panicked individual can throw all your computations off.
Of course, that’s not possible.
And it’s not possible to know everything that should be known about the elements involved in quake forecasting. You would need a computing machine the size of the earth, to store and analyze the data—even if you had the data in the first place.
So you work with what you have.The incomplete data available consists of samplings. You can’t measure every bit of rock, so you take a few bits at random, hoping to get a pretty fair average picture. (Sometimes you do.) You have a few instrument readings—of only approximate accuracy, because the instruments themselves are subject to error, working as they do under enormous pressure and temperature—and then you interpret these doubtful read ings, knowing that your interpretation is as important as the figures.
For it is a matter of distance; it’s hard to get down where the quakes start. Hard? Say impossible, and you’ll be very nearly right. Deep-focus quakes originate hundreds of miles beneath the surface. Blindly, with our sonar-sondes, we were able to probe the Earth as far as twenty miles—with luck. The rest was half-proven theory, indirect evidence and sometimes plain guesswork.
Aware of all those sources of error, I went back and did the entire computation over again.
I checked everything that could be checked. I threw out the gravity anomaly figures we had just recorded, because they seemed unreasonably high—and put them back again when a recheck of the records of the last three geosonde runs showed the same rapid increase in negative anomaly.
I substituted my revised figures into the equations of probable time and probable force, and got the same answer.
The way our equations were set up, you never got an answer that said flatly: There will not be a quake. There’s a reason for that—and that reason is, simply, that a quake is always possible anywhere. The equations were based on that fact.
The best you could hope for would be a solution that would show no measurable quake occurring in any foreseeable time. Under those conditions, the solution for probable force will give the answer: Zero. And a solution for probable time will give the answer: Infinity.
But those were not the answers I got.
I looked at Harley Danthorpe, and found him squinting anxiously at me.
“Jim?” His voice was hoarse and dry. “Jim, have you finished?”
I nodded.
“What—what’s your forecast?”
I took a deep breath and gave it to him straight: “Probable force: Ten, with a probable error of plus or minus two. Probable time: Thirty-six hours, with a probable error of plus or minus twenty-four.”
He put his eraser down. He looked almost relieved. “I thought maybe I had lost my ballast,” he whispered. “But that’s the same answer I got.”
For a moment we just sat there. The dead stillness of the quake station was all around us. The walls were sweating water. Water was trickling silently along the little gutters at the edge of the floor. Over our heads were two miles of rock and three more miles of sea.
“That means it could happen in just twelve hours,” Harley said. His voice had a queer, breathless hush. “And it could be as strong as Force Twelve.”
He twisted around on his stool to squint at the station clock. He said, hardly audible: “Nothing can live through a Force Twelve quake.”
13
The Billion-Dollar Panic
We carried our forecasts to Lt. McKerrow.
“Wake up, Lieutenant Tsuya!” he ordered sharply, and, without a word, began to go over our figures. In a moment Lt. Tsuya came groggily in, and the two of them studied and checked the figures interminably.
Then Lt. Tsuya sighed and put down the forecast. He watched Lt. McKerrow, waiting.
At last Lt. McKerrow said, “It’s what we figured, Tsuya.”
Lt. Tsuya nodded. “I’ll see what I can do upstairs,” he said, and hurried out.
Lt. McKerrow turned to face us. He said sourly: “Congratulations. We’ve all made the same observations, and your conclusions confirm Lieutenant Tsuya’s and mine. We can expect a major quake at some time within the next sixty hours.”
For a few seconds nobody said anything else. The station was very still. A drop of falling water went plink. The silent microseismographs quivered faintly, recording the vibrations created by its impact.
Then I heard Harley Danthorpe catch his breath.
“A major quake!” he gasped. “What are we going to do about it?”
Lt. McKerrow shrugged. “Let it happen, I suppose. Do you have any other suggestions?”
Then his thin face stiffened sternly. “But one thing we won’t do,” he said, “is talk about it. Do you understand that? Our work is strictly classified. You will not issue any private quake forecasts. Not to anybody.”
I couldn’t help breaking in. “But, Lieutenant! If the city is in danger, surely the city has a right to know!”
“The city has always been in danger,” Lt. McKerrow reminded me acidly.
“But not like this! Why, suppose it is a Force Twelve quake—can you imagine the loss of life? Surely there should be at least some attempt at evacuation…”
“That,” said the lieutenant grimly, “is not up to us. That’s what Lieutenant Tsuya’s gone up to see about now.”
He looked worriedly at our forecast sheets. “The city government co-operated with the Fleet in setting up this station,” he said. “One of the conditions they made is that we cannot release forecasts without their approval. Lieutenant Tsuya phoned the mayor last night to alert him. Now he’s gone up to see him, to try to get the city council called into emergency session, to approve releasing the forecast.
“But we can’t just sit on the forecast!” I cried. Lt. McKerrow scowled.
“We can’t do anything else,” he said.
For the next two hours we checked and rechecked every figure. They all came out the same.
Then Lt. Tsuya returned to the station.
He had shaved and put on a fresh uniform, but his lean pumpkin face looked pinched and haggard, like a pumpkin winter-killed by being left out too long in the frosts. He hurried without a word to check the instruments himself, stared for a long time at the readings on the microseismograph trace, and then came slowly back to the desk.
Lt. McKerrow was plotting a new cross-section of the forecast fault. He looked up.
“Any change?” Lt. Tsuya demanded.
“No change.” McKerrow shook his head. “How are you doing with the city fathers?”
Lt. Tsuya said bitterly: “They’re too busy to meet! Most of them are also business men. I suppose they feel that they can’t risk the panic. There’s enough panic up there now.”
“Panic?” Lt. McKerrow turned to scowl at Danthorpe and me. Still looking at us, he demanded: “Has somebody talked?”
“Oh, I think not,” said Lt. Tsuya thoughtfully. “No, more likely it’s just a delayed result of that first quake. There was a wave of selling yesterday morning, you know. And today—well, the exchange opened just as I got up to the mayor’s office. It was a madhouse. I can’t even get Mr. Danthorpe on the telephone.” He eyed Harley meditatively. But he shook his head. “I thought for a moment—But no. We’ll have to do this thing in the proper way, through channels. And the mayor says that it will be impossible to get a quorum of the council together until after the stock exchange closes. That will be—” he squinted at his watch—“in just under three hours.”