The cane moved on.
‘Here we have our — let me see — sixth drilling-hole. It’s on the White Wolf Fault. It was the scene —’
He broke off as the phone rang. One of his assistants answered, looked round the seated men. ‘Which one of you is Major Dunne, please?’
Dunne took the phone, listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up. He said: ‘The Adlerheim has quite a transport fleet. Not one but two helicopters, two unmarked plain vans and a jeep.’ He smiled at Ryder. ‘Two more pointers you can tick off, Sergeant.’ Ryder nodded. If he experienced any satisfaction he didn’t show it — more probably, he had been so convinced in advance of what Dunne had just said that the confirmation hardly called for comment.
Benson said: ‘What’s all this about pointers?’
‘Routine investigative checks, Professor.’
‘Ah. Ah, well, I suppose it’s none of my business. I was saying — yes, the White Wolf. Seven-point-seven, nineteen-fifty-two, the biggest in Southern California since eighteen-fifty-seven. The epicentre was somewhere between Arvin and Tehachapi here.’ He paused and looked at Ryder. ‘You frown, Sergeant? Quite heavily, if I may say so.’
‘Nothing, really, Professor. Passing thoughts. Please carry on.’
‘Well. This is a very tricky area. It’s all conjecture, really. Anything happening in the White Wolf could affect both the Garlock Fault and the San Andreas at Tejon. We don’t know. There could be a link with the Santa Ynez, Mesa and Channel Islands Faults. Very attractive earthquake area, reports going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, last big one at Lompoc in nineteen-twenty-seven. It’s all so uncertain. Any major disturbance in the Santa Ynez area would certainly cause a major disturbance in Los Angeles.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor old Los Angeles.’ Benson wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s ringed by earthquake centres — apart from having its own private and personal one at Long Beach. Last time I saw you I talked about the monster earthquake. If it were to hit San Jacinto, San Bemadino, San Fernando, the White Wolf, Tejon Pass, Santa Ynez — or, of course, Long Beach itself — the western hemisphere would be one major city less. If our civilization vanishes and another arises then that new one will be talking about Los Angeles as we today talk about the lost city of Atlantis.’
Barrow said: ‘You are in a jovial mood today, Professor.’
‘Alas, events happening around me and people asking me the questions do tend to make me less than my optimistic sunny self. Forgive me. Next, up here in the central San Andreas, we are digging an interesting hole between Cholame and Parkfield. We know we’re smack on the San Andreas there. Very active area, lots of shaking and banging going on most of the time but, again ominously, no great earthquake has ever been recorded in this area. There was a pretty big one some way to the west, back in the ‘eighties, at San Luis Obispo which could have been caused by the San Andreas or the Nacimiento Fault which parallels the coast west of the San Andreas.’ He smiled without any particular mirth. ‘A monster striking in either fault would almost certainly dump the Morro Bay nuclear reactor station into the sea.
‘Further north, we’ve drilled deep down between Hollister and San Juan Bautista, a few miles to the west, partly because this is another dormant area — again there have only been comparatively minor shakes in this area — and because it’s just south of Hollister that the Hayward Fault branches off to the right to go to the east of San Francisco Bay, cutting up through or close by Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond then out under the San Pablo Bay. In Berkeley the fault actually runs under the university football stadium, which can’t be a very nice thought for the crowds of people who attend there regularly. There have been two very big earthquakes along this fault, in eighteen-thirty-six and eighteen-sixty-eight — until nineteen-o-six San Franciscans always referred to the latter as “the great earthquake” — and it’s there that we’ve drilled our ninth hole by Lake Temescal.
‘The tenth one we put down at Walnut Creek in the Calaveras Fault, which parallels the Hayward. Our suspicions about this fault are in the inverse proportion to what we know about it, which is almost zero.’
Barrow said: ‘That makes ten and that, I take it, is all. You spoke a few minutes ago about poor old Los Angeles. How about poor old San Francisco?’
‘To be thrown to the wolves, it would seem, the orphan left out in the snow. San Francisco is, geologically and seismologically, a city that waits to die. Frankly, we are terrified to tamper with anything up there. The Los Angeles area has had seven what you might call historic ‘quakes that we know of: the Bay area has had sixteen, and we have no idea in the world where the next, the monster, may hit. There was a suggestion — frankly, it was mine — that we sink a bore-hole near Searsville Lake. This is close by Stanford University which had a bad time of it during the nineteen-o-six earthquake, and, more importantly, just where the Pilarcitos Fault branches off from the San Andreas. The Pilarcitos, which runs into the Pacific some six miles south of the San Andreas may, for all we know, be the true line of the San Andreas and certainly was some millions of years ago. Anyway, the nineteen-o-six shake ran through many miles of unpopulated hill regions. Since then, unscrupulous property developers have built cities along both fault lines and the consequences of another eight-plus earthquake are too awful to contemplate. I suggested a possible easement there, but certain vested interests in nearby Menlo Park were appalled at the very idea.’
Barrow said: ‘Vested interests?’
‘Indeed.’ Benson sighed. ‘It was in nineteen-sixty-six that the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research was established there. Very touchy about earthquakes, I’m afraid.’
‘Those bore-holes,’ Ryder said. ‘What diameter drills do you use?’
Benson looked at him for a long moment then sighed again. ‘That had to be the next question. That’s why you’re all here, isn’t it?’
‘Well?’
‘You can use any size within reason. Down in Antarctica they use a twelve-inch drill to bore through the Ross Ice Shelf, but here we get by with a good deal less — five, perhaps six inches. I don’t know. Find out easy enough. So you think the ESPP drillings are a double-edged weapon that’s going to turn in our hands? Limit to what you can achieve by tidal waves, isn’t there? But this is earthquake country, so why not harness the latent powers of nature and trigger off immense earthquakes and where better to pull the triggers than in the very ESPP sites we’ve chosen?’
Barrow said: ‘It’s feasible?’
‘Eminently.’
‘And if —’ He broke off. ‘Ten bombs, ten sites. Matches up a damn sight too well. If this were to happen?’
‘Let’s think about something else, shall we?’
‘If it
‘There are so many unknown factors —’
‘An educated guess, Professor.’
‘Goodbye California. That’s what I would guess. Or a sizeable part of it — bound to affect more than half of the population. Maybe it will fall into the Pacific. Maybe just shattered by a series of monster earthquakes — and if you set off hydrogen bombs in the faults monster earthquakes are what you are going to have. And radiation, of course, would get those the sea and earthquakes didn’t. An immediate trip back east — and I mean immediate — suddenly seems a very attractive prospect.’
‘You’d have to walk,’ Sassoon said. ‘The roads are jammed and the airport is besieged. The airlines are sending in every plane they can lay hands on but it’s hardly helping: they’re stacked heaven knows how many deep just waiting for a chance to land. And, of course, when a plane does land there’s a hundred passengers for every seat available.’
‘Things will be better tomorrow. It’s not in human nature to stay permanently panic-stricken.’
‘And it’s not in an aircraft’s nature to take off in twenty feet of water, which is what the airport might be under tomorrow.’ He broke off as the phone rang again. This time Sassoon took it. He listened briefly, thanked the caller and hung up.
‘Two things,’ he said. ‘The Adlerheim does have a radio telephone. All quite legal. The Post Office doesn’t know the name or the address of the person who answers it. They assume that we wouldn’t want to make enquiries. Secondly, there
‘Well, that’s it, then,’ Ryder said. If he was surprised or gratified no trace of those feelings showed. ‘Morro
