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By Richard Lacayo

There should be plenty to talk about this week at the annual conference of the Society for Risk Analysis. (Yes, there really is one.) The 800 or so actuaries, social scientists, lawyers and psychologists who are expected to attend will gather in -- what better place? -- San Francisco. They need only step outside their hotels to see a city that has become one vast society for risk analysis. All around the Bay Area these days, amid the tumbled roadways and jolted buildings left by the earthquake, people are asking themselves: Is it crazy to live on a fault line?

Though that question is never entirely out of mind in California, it usually just withers in the sun, overwhelmed by the seductive arguments of the natural beauty and friendly climate. But now the palpable and sometimes painful memories of the Pretty Big One, as the locals are calling the recent quake, have lent a certain sharpness to the prospects of further shake-ups. Last week scientists were telling Californians that the state faces a 50% chance that another quake as strong as the recent one could happen "at any time" during the next 30 years. "And that means tomorrow," says Don Anderson, director of the seismological laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

Even so, few are rushing to catch the next plane east. In Santa Cruz, near the epicenter of the quake, county officials are awaiting the judgment of geologists as to whether homeowners should be allowed to rebuild on the fractured hillsides, where landslides may now become a perennial headache. Many residents are nonetheless eager to rebuild. True to their reputation for mellowness and impregnable cool, Californians are generally unfazed by the fault-line threat.

"The earth shakes and rolls under my feet," shrugs novelist Wallace Stegner, a 40-year resident of Los Altos Hills. "It's never particularly alarmed me." Brokers insist that San Francisco's booming real estate market has not subsided. "Obviously the quake was a drawback," concedes Katherine August of First Republic Bancorp, which specializes in loans for luxury homes. "But I don't think it will have a lasting effect on the market. We closed one deal the day after the quake." Says pollster Mervin Field: "Sure it shook people up. But look at the World Series game that was interrupted at Candlestick Park. A few minutes after the quake, you had 58,000 people chanting 'Play ball! Play ball!' "

Is this the same California that has been sensitive to the risks from every kind of environmental threat? Three years ago, the state's voters approved Proposition 65, a law that mandates warning labels on any substance found to carry a 1-in-100,000 lifetime risk of causing cancer. As a result, cautionary notices now appear on gasoline pumps, in hardware and grocery stores and on the walls of Napa Valley wineries.

In fact, Californians are no different from other Americans when it comes to risk. The national temperament seems to have a fault line all its own. On one side of that psychic divide, Americans shrug off demonstrable threats: they build houses on eroding beaches, speed without wearing seat belts, go hang gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon, nuclear power and DC-10s.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." If so, America has developed a perverse sort of genius. Yet both national moods -- the urge to deny risk and the urge to insist that we can protect ourselves from it entirely -- may be traceable to the same unfailing optimism. In a culture that has long fancied itself a New World paradise, disasters seem impossible either to imagine or to tolerate. People expect to conduct the pursuit of happiness along a road that is straight, well lighted and free of bumps.

But as they swing between imperturbability and panic, Americans leave many experts wondering how to get society to gauge an acceptable risk. Almost a decade of dwindling public confidence in the Environmental Protection Agency, which was treated like an unwanted appendage by the Reagan Administration, has led to a proportionate rise in the attention given to claims made by private consumer and environmental organizations that focus on food safety and risks to health. Dan Howell, the director of the Americans for Safe Food project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that groups like his are flourishing. "Our membership is double what it was a few years ago," says Howell. "New local organizations are emerging across the country. Consumers rely on consumers' groups as much as on the government."

The alarms raised by consumer groups may prove to be a mixed blessing. Some experts complain that a generation that faces fewer real health threats than did their grandparents has become hypersensitive to relatively minor perils. Biochemist Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, points out that naturally occurring carcinogens in many foods -- cabbage, broccoli and oranges -- are much more potent than traces of man-made pesticides. "Most of us are more secure with respect to basic survival than we were a generation ago," says Ann Fisher, manager of the EPA's Risk Communication Program. "We're now in a position where we look with fear at what might once have been thought of as less serious dangers."

Experts on risk perception generally agree that people tend to be less concerned about dangers they incur voluntarily, like cigarette smoking and fast driving. They are more resentful of risks they feel have been imposed upon them, like the threat of mishaps at a nearby nuclear plant. They are more sensitive to risks they can control -- for instance, through laws that ban pesticides or require safety warnings -- than they are to those they feel they can do nothing about -- like acts of nature. "People choose what to fear," says Aaron Wildavsky, co-author of Risk and Culture. "What can you do about an earthquake?"

There is evidence that it takes repeated batterings to shake people's tenacity. Natural disasters do not often occur in so predictable a manner. Mary Skipper is getting ready to replace her mobile home near Charleston, S.C., in a spot hit hard by Hurricane Hugo in September. "I know this is a flood plain," she explains. "But something like Hugo may never happen again for another 100 years."

Californians cannot count on the same lengthy intervals between disasters. , After a moderately powerful quake shook the area around Whittier in 1987, a University of Southern California survey of 235 people in Los Angeles County found that most of those questioned were not interested in leaving. But 30% said they might make plans to go if another quake of the same magnitude shook them.

"Applied to San Francisco, it means that a second quake there in a year or two would have a much greater impact. We could expect to see a significant out-migration from California," says geographer Curtis C. Roseman. "One quake doesn't do the job."

To say that Californians have been willing to tolerate the risks arising from life on a fault line is not to say they have been indifferent to them. The recent quake was comparable in magnitude to the one in Armenia last December, which killed 25,000. "A substantial contributor to the much lower death rate in California was that California was conscious of the risk and made significant investments as a precaution," says M. Granger Morgan, head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie-Mellon University. But after last week, earthquakes are going to be viewed as a much more persistent risk than they were before. That will force many communities to choose which risks to take seriously. Says Bruce Bolt, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley: "If you have only a certain amount of dollars to spend on risk mitigation in a particular area, do you spend it on seismic upgrading or on asbestos removal?"

Californians are starting to calculate their risks a bit differently. Rene and Tony Donaldson live near Stanford University. Their $425,000 home escaped major damage in the Pretty Big One, though the tremors did smash their collection of American Indian pottery. "Now I know why California Indians didn't have a pottery tradition," Rene says with the deadpan cool of a real Californian. "In the future we'll collect baskets instead." But the Donaldsons are also looking into quake insurance, which they turned down when they bought their house four years ago. And while they are still determined to stand their ground, they have a new sense of how it can shift under their feet. Says Rene: "Now when I go out for a run and go under a freeway overpass, I look up and say, 'Not now, please' -- and speed up."

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dennis Wyss/San Francisco