A SLIGHT MISCALCULATION
It is not often that a writer has the pleasure of seeing one of his short stones dramatized. A Slight Miscalculation was so honored by the Penn State Readers’ Theater as one of the highlights of Paracon VI, the 1983 convention of the Penn State science fiction fans. It was great fun to see the characters of the story come to life, and even though most of the audience already knew the story, the final punch line achieved the desired gasp of surprise and laughter.
This story originated over a bowl of Mulligatawny soup in an Indian restaurant in mid-town Manhattan. Judy-Lynn Benjamin (she had not yet married Lester Del Rey), was then the managing editor of Galaxy magazine. She and I threw a few ideas back and forth and came up with “the ultimate California earthquake story.” Unfortunately, the top editor at Galaxy, whose tenure was brief but not brief enough, failed to see the humor in the piece and asked me what scientific foundation I had for the story’s premise. I sent the manuscript to Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He brought it with no questions asked, proving that he has not only a delicately-tuned sense of humor, but a high standard of literary values, as well. Or so it seems to me.
Nathan French was a pure mathematician. He worked for a research laboratory perched on a California hill that overlooked the Pacific surf, but his office had no windows. When his laboratory earned its income by doing research on nuclear bombs, Nathan doodled out equations for placing men on the moon with a minimum expenditure of rocket fuel. When his lab landed a fat contract for developing a lunar-flight profile, Nathan began worrying about air pollution.
Nathan didn’t look much like a mathematician. He was tall and gangly, liked to play handball, spoke with a slight lisp when he got excited and had a face that definitely reminded you of a horse. Which helped him to remain pure in things other than mathematics. The only possible clue to his work was that, lately, he had started to squint a lot. But he didn’t look the slightest bit nervous or highstrung, and he still often smiled his great big toothy, horsey smile.
When the lab landed its first contract (from the State of California), to study air pollution, Nathan’s pure thoughts turned—naturally—elsewhere.
“I think it might be possible to work out a method of predicting earthquakes,” Nathan told the laboratory chief, kindly old Dr. Moneygrinder.
Moneygrinder peered at Nathan over his half-lensed bifocals. “Okay, Nathan my boy,” he said heartily. “Go ahead and try it. You know I’m always interested in furthering man’s understanding of his universe.”
When Nathan left the chiefs sumptuous office, Moneygrinder hauled his paunchy little body out of its plush desk chair and went to the window. His office had windows on two walls: one set overlooked the beautiful Pacific; the other looked down on the parking lot, so the chief could check on who got to work at what time.
And behind that parking lot, which was half-filled with aging cars (business had been deteriorating for several years), back among the eucalyptus trees and paint-freshened grass, was a remarkably straight little ridge of ground, no more than four feet high. It ran like an elongated step behind the whole length of the laboratory and out past the abandoned pink stucco church on the crest of the hill. A little ridge of grass-covered earth that was called the San Andreas Fault.
Moneygrinder often stared at the Fault from his window, rehearsing in his mind exactly what to do when the ground started to tremble. He wasn’t afraid, merely careful. Once a tremor had hit in the middle of a staff meeting. Moneygrinder was out the window, across the parking lot, and on the far side of the Fault (the eastern, or “safe” side), before men half his age had gotten out of their chairs. The staff talked for months about the astonishing agility of the fat little waddler.
A year, almost to the day, later the parking lot was slightly fuller and a few of the cars were new. The pollution business was starting to pick up, since the disastrous smog in San Clemente. And the laboratory had also managed to land a few quiet little Air Force contracts—for six times the amount of money it got from the pollution work.