Santorini (8 page)

'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.'

'Yesterday,' Hawkins said. 'Just yesterday. Casualties?'

'Two-thirds of a million dead, three-quarters of a million injured. Give or take a hundred thousand in each case. If that sounds flippant or heartless, it's not meant to be. After a certain arbitrary figure - a hundred thousand, ten thousand, even a thousand, it all depends upon how much your heart and mind can take - any increase in numbers becomes meaningless. And there's also the factor, of course, that we're referring to faceless unknowns in a far-off land.'

'I suppose,' Hawkins said, 'that that would be what one might call the grand-daddy of them all?'

'In terms of lives lost, it probably is. We can't be sure. What we can be sure of is that Tangshan rates as no more than third in the cataclysmic league. Just over a century ago the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia blew itself out of existence. That was quite a bang, literally  --  the sound of the explosion was heard thousands of miles away. So much volcanic material was blasted into the stratosphere that the world was still being treated to a series of spectacular sunsets more than three years afterwards. No one knows the height of the tsunami caused by this eruption. What we do know is that much of the three great islands bordering the Java Sea  --  Sumatra, Java and Borneo - and nearly all of the smaller islands inside the sea itself lie below an altitude of 200 feet. No tally of the dead has ever been made. It is better, perhaps, that we don't know.'

'And perhaps it's also better that we don't know what you're going to say next,' Talbot said. 'I don't much care for the road you're leading us along.'

'I don't much care for it myself.' Benson sighed and sipped some more gin. 'Anyone ever heard of the word "kalliste'

'Certainly,' Denholm said. 'Means most beautiful. Very ancient. Goes back to Homeric times.'

'My goodness.' Benson peered at him through his pipe smoke. 'I thought you were the electronics officer?'

'Lieutenant Denholm is primarily a classicist,' Talbot said. 'Electronics is one of his hobbies.'

'Ah!' Benson gestured with his thumb. 'Kalliste was the name given to this little lady before it became either Thera or Santorini, and a more singularly inapt name I cannot imagine. It was this beautiful lady that blew her top in 1450 BC with four times the explosively destructive power of

Krakatoa. What had been the cone of a volcano became a circular depression  --  we call it a caldera  --  some thirty square miles in area into which the sea poured. Stirring times, gentlemen, stirring times.

'Unfortunately those stirring times are still with us. Santorini has had, and continues to have, a very turbulent seismic history. Incidentally, mythology has it that there was an even bigger eruption about 1500 BC. However it hasn't done too badly since 1450 BC. In 2.36 BC another eruption separated Therasia from north-west Thera. Forty years later the islet of old Jaimeni appeared. There have been bangs and explosions, the appearances and disappearances of islands and volcanoes ever since. In the late sixteenth century the south coast of Thera, together with the port of Eleusis, vanished under the sea and stayed there. Even as late as 1956 a considerable earthquake destroyed half the buildings on the west coast of the island. Santorini, one fears, rests on very shaky foundations.'

Talbot said: 'What happened in 1450 BC?'

'Regrettably, our ancestors of some thirty-five centuries back don't seem to have given too much thought to posterity, by which I mean they left no records to satisfy their descendants' intellectual curiosity. One can hardly blame them, they had too many urgent and pressing matters on hand at the time to worry about such things. According to one account, the explosion caused a tidal wave 165 feet high. I don't know who worked this out. I don't believe it. It is true that water levels on the Alaskan coast, caused by tsunami, earthquake-related tidal waves, have risen over three hundred feet but this only happens when the sea-bed shallows close inshore: in the deep sea, although the tsunami can travel tremendously fast, two, perhaps three, hundred miles an hour, it's rarely more than a ripple on the surface of the water.

'The experts  --  an expert may be loosely defined as any person who claims he knows what he's talking about - are deeply divided as to what happened. Loggerheads would be too mild a term. It's an archaeological minefield. The explosion may have destroyed the Cyclades. It may have wiped out the Minoan civilization in Crete. It may have swamped the Aegean isles and the coastal lowlands of Greece and Turkey. It may have inundated lower Egypt, flooded the Nile and swept back the Red Sea waters to permit the escape of the Israelites fleeing from the Pharaoh. That's one view. In 19503 scientist by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky caused a considerable furore in the historical, religious and astronomical worlds by stating unequivocally that the flooding was caused by Venus which had been wrenched free from Jupiter and made an uncomfortably close encounter with earth. A very scholarly and erudite work, widely acclaimed at the time but since much maligned. Professional jealousy? Upsetting the scientific apple-cart? A charlatan? Unlikely -man was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Then, of course, there was Edmund Halley, he of comet fame  --  he was equally certain that the flooding had been caused by a passing comet.

'There's no doubt there was a huge natural disaster all those millennia ago. As to its cause, take your pick  --  your guess is as good as mine. Reverting to the situation we find j ourselves in at this moment, there are four facts that can be regarded as certainties or near-certainties. Santorini is about I as stable as the proverbial blancmange. It's sitting on top of I a thermal plume. Thirdly, the chances are high that it is sitting atop an ancient tectonic boundary that runs east-west under the Mediterranean  --  this is where the African and Eurasian plates are in contention. Lastly, and indisputably, we are sitting atop the equivalent of roughly 2.00 million tons of TNT. If that goes up I would say it is highly probable  --  in fact think I should use the word inevitable - that both the thermal plume and the temporarily quiescent earthquake zone along the tectonic fault would be reactivated. I leave the rest

deeply divided as to what happened. Loggerheads would be too mild a term. It's an archaeological minefield. The explosion may have destroyed the Cyclades. It may have wiped out the Minoan civilization in Crete. It may have swamped the Aegean isles and the coastal lowlands of Greece and Turkey. It may have inundated lower Egypt, flooded the Nile and swept back the Red Sea waters to permit the escape of the Israelites fleeing from the Pharaoh. That's one view. In 1950 a scientist by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky caused a considerable furore in the historical, religious and astronomical worlds by stating unequivocally that the flooding was caused by Venus which had been wrenched free from Jupiter and made an uncomfortably close encounter with earth. A very scholarly and erudite work, widely acclaimed at the time but since much maligned. Professional jealousy? Upsetting the scientific apple-cart? A charlatan? Unlikely the man was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Then, of course, there was Edmund Halley, he of comet fame  --  he was equally certain that the flooding had been caused by a passing comet.