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.
On the spur of the moment, he messaged T.R.
> How do you talk to people about randomness? Stochasticity?
> You don’t. It’s a fool’s errand T.R. answered, as if he had just been sitting there waiting to hear from Willem.
> I guess that makes me a fool :（
> The Chinese had it right. The Mandate of Heaven and all that.
> So . . . wait for the stochastic outlier . . . then turn it into an opportunity?