"We have a chance to save two thousand lives," she said. "Are you telling me that's enough for us but not for them?"
"That's what I'm telling you. I don't think numbers impress these fellows very much; they clean us up not just by the tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions. And they're used to seeing the Random or the Purpose swat us in job lots."
"Disasters like the fire at the Cocoanut Grove," Lois said. "Or the flood here in Derry eight years ago."
"Yes, but even things like that are pretty small beans compared to what can and does go on in the world every year. The Flood of '85 here in Derry killed two hundred and twenty people, something like that, but last spring there was a flood in Pakistan that killed thirty-five hundred, and the last big earthquake in Turkey killed over four thousand. And how about that nuclear reactor accident in Russia? I read someplace that you can put the floor on that one at seventy thousand dead. That's a lot of Panama hats and jump ropes and pairs of... of eyeglasses, Lois." He was horrified at how close he had come to saying pairs of earrings.
"Don't," she said, and shuddered.
"I don't like thinking about it any more than you do," he said, "but we have to, if only because those two guys were so goddamn anxious to keep us from doing just that. Do you see what I'm getting at yet?
You must. Big tragedies have always been a part of the Random; why is this so different?" - Insomnia
Probability Manipulation?