‘If anything goes wrong, sir, I don’t think we’ll be having too much to say to each other when we’re in vaporized orbit.’
‘True. Mine was an unworthy remark. No one likes to bear the responsibility for such decisions. Send the signals.’
‘Very good, sir. Lieutenant Denholm, ask Myers to come here.’
Hawkins said: ‘I understand — I’m not making comparisons — that the President of the United States was faced with a problem similar to the one you’ve just confronted me with. He asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he should pull out the Ariadne which they knew, of course, was sitting over the crashed plane. The Chairman said, quite rightly, that that wasn’t his responsibility, the old and honoured American tradition of passing the buck. The President decided that the Ariadne should stay.’
‘Well, I could come all over bitter and say that’s very noble and gallant of the President, especially as there’s no chance of his being blown out of his seat in the Oval Office when this little lot goes up, but I won’t. It’s not a decision I would care to have to make. I assume he gave a reason for his decision?’
‘Yes. The greatest good of the greatest number.’
Myers came in. Talbot handed him the two messages.
‘Get these off at once. Code B in both cases. To both messages add “Immediate, repeat Immediate, confirmation is requested.”‘ Myers left and Talbot said: ‘It is my understanding, Admiral, that in your capacity as officer commanding the naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean you have the power to overrule the President’s instructions.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you done so?’
‘No. You will ask why. Same reason as the President. The greatest good of the greatest good of the greatest number. Why the questioning, Captain? You wouldn’t leave here even if I gave a direct order.’
‘I’m just a bit puzzled about the reason given-the greatest good of the greatest good of the greatest number. Bringing a rescue vessel, which admittedly is my idea. Will only increase the greatest danger to a greater number.’
‘I don’t think you appreciate just how great the greatest number is in this case. I think Professor Benson here can enlighten you. Enlighten all of us, for I’m rather vague about it. That’s why Professor Benson is here.’
‘The good Professor is not at his best,’ Benson said. ‘He’s hungry.’
‘Most remiss of us.’ Talbot said. ‘Of course you haven’t eaten. Dinner, say, in twenty minutes?’
‘I’d settle for a sandwich. Talbot looked at Hawkins and Wickram, both of whom nodded, He pressed a bell.
‘I’m a bit vague about it myself Benson said. ‘Certain facts are beyond dispute. What we’re sitting on top of at this moment is one of them. According to which estimate of the Pentagon’s you choose to believe. there’s something like a total of between 144 and 225 megatons of high explosive lying down there. Not that the difference between the lowest and highest estimate is of any significance. The explosion of a pound of high explosive in this wardroom would kill us all. What we are talking about is the explosive power of, let me see, yes, four and a half billion pounds. The human mind cannot comprehend, differences in estimates become irrelevant. All we can say with certainty is that it would be the biggest man-made explosion in history, which doesn’t sound so bad when you say it quickly as I’m saying it now.
‘The results of such an explosion are quite unknown but stupefyingly horrendous however optimistic your guess might be, if optimistic is the word I’m looking for, which it isn’t. It might fracture the earth’s crust, with cataclysmic results. It might destroy part of the ozone layer, which would permit the sun’s ultra-violet radiation either to tan us or fry us, depending upon how large a hole had been blasted in the stratosphere: it might equally well cause the onset of a nuclear winter, which is so popular a topic among both scientists and laymen these days. And lastly, but by no means least, are the tsunami effects, vast tidal waves usually generated by undersea earthquakes: those tsunami have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people at a time when they struck low-lying coastal areas.’
Benson reached out a grateful hand for a glass that Jenkins had brought. Talbot said: ‘If you’re trying to be encouraging, Professor, you’re not doing too well at it.’
‘Ah, better, much better.’ Benson lowered his glass and sighed, ‘I needed that. There are times when I’m quite capable of terrifying even myself. Encouraging? That’s only the half of it. Santorini’s the other half. In fact, Santorini is the major part of it. Gifted though mankind is in creating sheer wanton destruction, nature has him whacked every time.’
‘Santorini?’ Wickram said. ‘Who or what is Santorini?’
‘Ignorance, George, ignorance. You and your fellow physicists should look out from your ivory towers from time to time. Santorini is less than a couple of miles from where you’re sitting. Had that name for many centuries. Today it’s officially known, as it was five thousand years ago at the height of its civilization, as Thera Island.
‘The island, by whatever name, has had a very turbulent seismic and volcanic history. Don’t worry, George, I’m not about to sally forth on my old hobby-horse, not for long anyway, just long enough to try to explain what the greatest number means in the term the greatest good of the greatest number.
‘It is commonly enough imagined that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are two faces of the same coin. This is not necessarily so. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary states that an earthquake is specifically a convulsion of the earth’s surface caused by volcanic forces. The dictionary is specifically wrong: it should have used the word “rarely” instead. Earthquakes, especially the big ones, are caused when two tectonic plates — segments of the earth’s crust that float freely on the molten magma beneath — come into contact with one another and one plate bangs into another or rubs alongside it or dives under it. The only two recorded and monitored giant earthquakes in history were of this type — in Ecuador in 1906 and Japan in 1933. Similarly, but on a lesser scale — although still very big — the Californian earthquakes of San Francisco and Owens Valley were due to crustal movement and not to volcanoes.
‘It is true that practically all the world’s 500 — 600 active volcanoes — someone may have bothered to count them, I haven’t — are located along convergent plate boundaries. It is equally true that they are rarely associated with earthquakes. There have been three large volcanic eruptions along such boundaries in very recent years: Mt St Helens in the state of Washington, El Chichon in Mexico and one just north-west of Bogota in Columbia. The last one — it happened only last year — was particularly nasty. A 17,000-foot volcano called Nevada del. Ruiz, which seems to have been slumbering off and on for the past four hundred years, erupted and melted the snow and ice which covered most of its upper reaches, giving rise to an estimated seventy-five million cubic yards’ mudslide. The town of Armero stood in its way. 25,000 people died there. The point is that none of those was accompanied by an earthquake. Even volcanoes in areas where there are no established tectonic frontiers are guiltless in this respect: Vesuvius, despite the fact that it buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, Stromboli, Mt Etna and the twin volcanoes of the island of Hawaii have not produced, and do not produce, earthquakes.
‘But the really bad apples in the seismic barrel, and a very sinister lot those are, too, are the so-called thermal hotspots, plumes or upswellings of molten lava that reach up to or through the earth’s crust, giving rise to volcanoes or earthquakes or both. We talk a lot about those thermal plumes but we really don’t know much about them. We don’t know whether they’re localized or whether they spread out and lubricate the movements of the tectonic plates. What we do know is that they can have extremely unpleasant effects. One of those was responsible for the biggest earthquake of this century.’
‘You have me confused, Professor,’ Hawkins said. ‘You’ve just mentioned the really big ones, the ones in Japan and Ecuador. Ah! But those were monitored and recorded. This one wasn’t?’
‘Certainly it was. But countries like Russia and China are rather coy about releasing such details. They have the weird notion that natural disasters reflect upon their political systems.’
‘Is it in order to ask how you know?’
‘Of course. Governments may elect not to talk to governments but we scientists are an incurably gabby lot. This quake happened in Tangshan province in north-east China and is the only one ever known to have occurred in a really densely populated area, in this case involving the major cities of Peking and Tientsin. The primary cause was undoubtedly a thermal plume. There are no known tectonic plate boundaries in the area but a very ancient boundary may be lurking in the area. The date was July 27, 1976.’