The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (48 page)

“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.”