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Executive Decision

by Robert Laughlin

There was no outside noise audible in the makeshift conference room, and Governor Carne was grateful. No one outside could hear what he and the other two people were saying.

“This much seismic activity all at once,” said Ms. Nueva, “could it cause vulcanism?”

“Of course,” said Prof. Kawazu.

“Then we’d have nothing to rebuild on but a lava sheet.”

“Given enough time, that kind of vulcanism can start by itself. How much prodding did Parícutin require?”

The door opened, admitting the sounds of the television studio.

“Two minutes, Tony,” Nueva’s aide said through the door.

“If you’re not ready,” said Carne, “we can delay the broadcast.”

“No, sir. I’ve asked enough questions,” said Nueva as she got up from the table. “I know what I’m going to say.” She walked out, into the studio.

I wish I knew what I’m going to say, thought Carne.

“Well, it’s a long drive and the prime minister wants to see me,” said Kawazu, and the governor followed him out of the room.

“Would you like an air taxi to LAX?” Carne had reserved one for himself, then learned a local station would be up and running in time for his address.

“No, thank you, governor.” Kawazu paused. “My government is going to have an even more difficult decision than yours. A foreign country would have to be persuaded to take in our refugees.” He walked out of the studio.

Carne walked to a corner of the studio with its own camera crew. He sat down behind a desk that tried to resemble his desk at the capitol; US and California flags on short masts stood behind it. Someone straightened his tie and toweled his face while the crew adjusted the lighting.

There was a television monitor slung under the camera facing Carne; the screen was black. He could see Nueva to his right, seated at her anchor desk and giving her hair a quick brush. Kawazu had looked more like a butcher than a genius who made a literally earth-shaking discovery. But Nueva looked exactly her part: a dynamic TV journalist who, for audiences in the Bay Area and Sacramento media markets, was as trusted as Cronkite had been during Vietnam.

Terrell Carne knew he looked his part too: a jut-jawed governor swept into office with a great deal of political capital. And now he would not only spend it all, he would probably go into hock forever.

The station logo appeared on the monitor screen. “We return to the air,” a male announcer said, “after an absence of three days. Transmitter repairs have just been completed. In a few minutes, we will bring you a live address from the Governor of California.” The logo mixed to Nueva, and Carne chose to watch her monitor image, not the flesh and blood newscaster thirty feet away.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “This is Antonia Nueva. A few weeks ago, hardly anyone knew this man.”

The monitor cut to a still of the fat, thick-featured man who had just left the studio. “Keinosuke Kawazu, a Japanese seismologist on a two-year work sabbatical at Stanford. He released his findings, and confirmation from three different laboratories made the news cycle in the last month. Then it happened.”

The monitor cut to a montage of images familiar to the world: the San Francisco skyline with much new rubble and many absent buildings; uncontrolled fires raging in the East Bay hills; the state capitol partly submerged after delta levees and the Folsom dam had failed.

Her off-screen narration continued, becoming more technical, but Carne was too lost in his own thoughts to hear anything but key phrases.

“… tectonic pressure accumulates …”

Carne wished there had been some way of suppressing Kawazu’s discovery. He wished floor leaders in the Senate and Assembly hadn’t pledged to support any decision he made, transferring the onus entirely to him.

“… contact lubricity …”

He had two speeches ready, and they were exactly alike for the first three minutes. Then there was a sentence that read, “We, the present generation, blank make this tremendous sacrifice in the interest of generations we shall never see.” The blank could be filled in with ‘must’ or ‘cannot’, and the two speeches diverged from there.

“… stimulate seismic shifts …”

It’s not a decision I expected to make, thought Carne, but few chief executives get to choose the crises they must cope with.

Carne paid closer attention to the monitor—Nueva was back on-screen and the payoff was coming.

“Apparently it is now in the power of science to discharge seismic pressure pent up over thousands of years. Earthquakes can be made to occur on demand wherever, in California or elsewhere, pressure has accumulated along a known fault line. The threat of future earthquakes would be eliminated, probably for all historic time to come. Whether the people of our great state would have homes to return to after their temporary exile is unknown, but their descendants would never have to live with the same fear.

“And there would be one other difference: nobody would die, ever again, from an earthquake that occurs without warning.”

Carne knew, as most of Nueva’s audience did, that the eighteen thousand killed in fourteen counties included her own teenage daughter. He looked into the unprofessional, welling eyes on the monitor and saw the representative of millions who would damn him to Hell if he did not utilize Kawazu’s discovery.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is six pm—time for our governor’s address.”

Carne saw himself on the monitor.