Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Willem was dressed and on his way downstairs before it even occurred to him to wonder whether he and Remi were in danger. The natural and artificial waterways of this country were a maze. Could the floodwaters hook around through central Rotterdam, come north, and inundate Leiden?

Always an important question to ask oneself before surrendering altitude; and it came to him when he was halfway down the stairs. Remigio, who’d helped him pull his things together and get going, was standing at the top of the stairs in gym shorts and bathrobe, watching him quizzically.

“Could we get . . . flooded here?”

There turned out to be advantages in being espoused to a history professor. Remi shook his head. “Leiden predates the reclamation of the Haarlemmermeer.”

“Of course.”

“It was above sea level then. It’s above sea level now . . . probably.”

“Sea level,” Willem said, making air quotes. He glanced down at his cowboy boots. After Texas he would never be able to use the term again with a straight face.

Remi sighed, taking his point. “Well, there is that. But if I had to pick a spot to wait this out, it’d be here or where you’re going.” Meaning The Hague. “Now, go. I’ll stay above ‘sea level.’ Take care of yourself.”

“Don’t—”

“Get trapped in the attic. I know, I follow the queen’s Twitter feed too.”

Willem spent a few minutes comparing wait times on various ride share apps. All disastrous. Then he tried to sort out the train schedules, which had been thrown into disarray. Finally he just got on his bicycle and rode the few kilometers. He didn’t even have to pedal. The wind pushed him there. He went straight to Noordeinde Palace because it was clearly going to be that kind of day. He changed into dry clothes and turned on all the TVs. The predominant image was of the north gate of the Maeslantkering, the barrier arc stove in, the truss crumpled, the whole thing peeled back, the North Sea rushing through the gap with such power that the south gate was bucking and shuddering in the backwash. He’d had time on the ride down to plot out in his head the shape of the waterways around Rotterdam and to form the opinion that, from there, the water was going to generally head south and inundate parts of Zeeland. Not that the flooding of Rotterdam wasn’t a pretty big fucking disaster in and of itself.

In passing he saw a news flash from the BBC. The Thames Barrier had been circumvented by the storm surge and the water was rising in London. The drainage systems meant to handle storm runoff from north of the city had been overwhelmed and were backing up, flooding places inland. The Netherlands, he knew, would soon be facing a similar problem. They had no way to stop the great rivers that flowed in from fucking Germany. Those had to reach the sea eventually. One of their possible outlets was now flowing the wrong way. All the others had been temporarily dammed off to hold back the storm surge.

The question was—now that he’d reached his office, changed clothes, turned on the TVs, and got up to speed—what could Willem actually do ? And the answer was nothing. During his former career he’d have had duties as a member of the States General on various committees. Now he was an aide to a theoretically powerless monarch. And she’d already done everything she could do by going about telling people to be ready for a disaster that was at this moment actually unfolding. There would be no repeat of her impromptu performance on the foam-drowned beach at Scheveningen. In a situation like this she had two jobs: to stay put, and to shut up, with the possible exception of maybe issuing a brief statement later in the day. Once the crisis had abated—tomorrow at the very earliest—they could arrange some photo ops and wreath layings.

So there was literally nothing for him to do. No reason for him to have gotten out of bed. He could watch TV from home.

> HOW COULD IT HAVE GIVEN WAY SO EASILY !? his father wanted to know.

Others would be asking the same question. Willem had a vague idea as to how, but he needed to confirm it.

Alastair had a rock on his desk. It had been there the whole time Willem had known him. Had it been quite a bit smaller, it might have been mistaken for a paperweight. It was an irregular oblong, smoothed by wave action, and totally unexceptional. Willem had asked him about it once and Alastair had explained that it had been retrieved from a lighthouse off the Oregon coast. The lighthouse keeper had heard a loud noise in the middle of the night and climbed the stairs to investigate. Halfway up was a window that had been smashed out by this rock. The window was a hundred feet above sea level. The only way the rock could have ended up there was by being entrained in a huge wave that had broken against the cliff on which the lighthouse stood. Alastair had somehow acquired the rock and kept it “as a memento mori” to focus the minds of shipping company executives who wanted to know (a) why insurance was so expensive and (b) why enormous ships sometimes ceased to exist without warning or explanation.

Alastair was looking as frazzled as one might expect. His extremely short hair required little maintenance but he hadn’t shaved in a while and was just wearing an old T-shirt and a hoodie. “ You’ll be wanting to know why the Maeslantkering caved in” was how he started the conversation. His emphasis on the first word in that sentence, combined with a general air of distraction, suggested that Willem was just one in a long and ever-fluctuating queue of calls. “The fact that you called me hints that you suspect a rogue wave was the murder weapon.”

“And what say you?” Willem asked.

“I say yes. Just by process of elimination.”

“How so?”

“Those gates were engineered to take steady loads. Dead loads. The sea presses against the barrier with a force that gets larger as the storm surge gets higher. We call it a ‘surge,’ which sounds like something fast and violent, but it isn’t. It’s slow and predictable. Engineers can calculate the forces, work with the numbers. Oh, they add in a fudge factor to account for the odd wave. That is a stochastic figure that mostly stays within predictable limits. What hit the Maeslantkering a couple of hours ago was probably orders of magnitude outside the bounds of what those engineers planned for, what, forty years ago. And it was a live load, which just makes it all much worse from a structural engineering standpoint. The thing simply broke. There is not much else to say.”

“And it’s just bad luck,” Willem said.

“That, sir, is my stock in trade. I am the bad luck man. Gandalf Stormcrow.”

“Such a wave could have hit anywhere,” Willem said, mentally organizing the press release. “Today it just happened to hit the Maeslantkering.”

“It probably got funneled, intensified, by the entrance to the channel. We can analyze it later when there’s more evidence. It might have diffracted around the Hook, bounced off the Maasvlakte dike, picked up steam as the channel narrowed. You can’t predict this sort of thing, sadly, but doing the postmortem is easy. Like you can’t predict a car crash but it’s easy to reconstruct it from skid marks.”

“I’ll let you get on with what must be a very busy day,” Willem said, as he saw Alastair reaching for the red button that would terminate the call.

> Rogue wave, Papa. Impossible to predict. Impossible to plan for.

> WHERE IS THE BACKUP SYSTEM !?!?

> You know there isn’t one. There can’t be one.

> THESE DEFENSES ARE ANCIENT

Willem let the exchange lapse. Eventually his father would see that all the other such defenses were doing fine, despite being “ancient.” Though a dike had been overtopped by waves in North Holland and would have to be repaired.