The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  Nathan happened to be walking down a corridor when one of the research physicists—a new man, from a department Nathan never dealt with—bumped into him.

  “Oh, excuse me,” the physicist said hastily, and started to head for the door down at the end of the hall.

  “Wait a minute,” Nathan said, grabbing him by the arm. “Can you program the computer?”

  “Uh, no, I can’t.”

  “Where is everybody today?” Nathan wondered aloud, still holding the man’s arm. “Is it a national holiday?”

  “Man, haven’t you heard?” the physicist asked, goggle-eyed. “There’s going to be an earthquake this afternoon. The whole damned state of California is going to slide into the sea!”

  “Oh, that.”

  Pulling his arm free, the physicist scuttled down the hall. As he got to the door he shouted over his shoulder, “Get out while you can! East of the Fault! The roads are jamming up fast!”

  Nathan frowned. “There’s still an hour or so,” he said to himself. “And I still think the computer’s wrong. I wonder what the tidal effects on the Pacific Ocean would be if the whole state collapsed into the ocean?”

  Nathan didn’t really notice that he was talking to himself. There was no one else to talk to.

  Except the computer.

  He was sitting in the computer room, still poring over the stubborn equations, when the rumbling started. At first it was barely audible, like very distant thunder. Then the room began to shake and the rumbling grew louder.

  Nathan glanced at his wristwatch: two-thirty-two.

  “I knew it!” he said gleefully to the computer. “You see? And I’ll bet all the rest of it is right, too. Including equation fourteen.”

  Going down the hallway was like walking through the passageway of a storm-tossed ship. The floor and walls were swaying violently. Nathan kept his feet, despite some awkward lurches here and there.

  It didn’t occur to him that he might die until he got outside. The sky was dark, the ground heaving, the roaring deafened him. A violent gale was blowing dust everywhere, adding its shrieking fury to the earth’s tortured groaning.

  Nathan couldn’t see five feet ahead of him. With the wind tearing at him and the dust stinging his eyes, he couldn’t tell which way o go. He knew the other side of the Fault meant safety, but where was it?

  Then there was a biblical crack of lightning and the ultimate grinding, screaming, ear-shattering roar. A tremendous shock wave knocked Nathan to the ground and he blacked out. His last thought was, “I was right and the computer was wrong.”

  When he woke up, the sun was shining feebly through a gray overcast. The wind had died away. Everything was strangely quiet.

  Nathan climbed stiffly to his feet and looked around. The lab building was still there. He was standing in the middle of the parking lot; the only car in sight was his own, caked with dust.

  Beyond the parking lot, where the eucalyptus trees used to be, was the edge of a cliff, where still-steaming rocks and raw earth tumbled down to a foaming sea.

  Nathan staggered to the cliff’s edge and looked out across the water, eastward. Somehow he knew that the nearest land was Europe.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said with unaccustomed vehemence. “The computer was right after all.”