HOW SAFE IS SAFE?

MARVETTE CRITNEY WAS A little uneasy when she went to work Thursday at a federal office building in Washington. Still dwelling on the images from Oklahoma City, the 26-year-old management analyst for the Internal Revenue Service had decided not to put her four-month-old son in the new irs day-care center. Even for herself, working in a federal office building suddenly seemed like a risky proposition. But as the morning went on, she managed to put those thoughts out of her mind. Then the alarm went off.

In her windowless basement office, she heard the abrupt clanging of the building's fire alarm and a message on the public-address system to evacuate. This was not a drill. "People were running everywhere," says Critney. "I wondered if this was connected to the Oklahoma bombing. All I could think of was my two sons. What would they do without their mother?" After she and her co-workers rushed out of the building, they learned that the emergency was not a fire but a bomb threat. That was when it occurred to Critney that she might not be any safer outside the office than she had been in it. "Every car parked in front of the building--I wondered if there might be a bomb in it," she said.

In the aftermath of Oklahoma City, many Americans found it hard to avoid looking at their surroundings in an unsettling new light, in which any abandoned package might be a grenade, any car a bomb. The possibility of domestic terrorism, first raised by the World Trade Center bombing and then dismissed as a big-city phenomenon, may finally be driven home. For some time to come Americans will be struggling with questions that were supposed to draw no closer than Jerusalem or Belfast or, at worst, Manhattan. Just how much can they do to make life safer from terrorist attacks? And to accomplish that, how much should they be willing to give up in convenience, money and the freedoms they take for granted?

The most immediate change in procedures took place at federal buildings. In Denver, uniformed guards were posted at day-care centers, and downtown parking meters around the U.S. courts complex were cloaked with red covers, banning curbside parking. In Nevada, Forest Service officers went on alert, patrolling in pairs out of concern about attacks by radical anti-environmentalists. In Washington, where the Library of Congress removed the Gutenberg Bible from its glass case and locked it in a basement vault, police distributed flyers to federal office workers that suggested questions they might ask callers who phone in bomb threats. In Newark, New Jersey, police blocked off the streets around government buildings.

Though only a few cities, including New York and Los Angeles, have joint task forces that combine federal and city law-enforcement agents to head off terrorist attacks, local police in several other cities were meeting last week with federal investigators. The goal: combing their own intelligence files and strengthening their contacts with street informants who can give them early leads on potential trouble.