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straight line during a genuine quake, much less a comparatively wimpy tremor like this.
    Naru, Paul noticed, wasn’t so skilled; he fell off his stool. Kikko helped him back up just as the tremor died down.
    “Cool,” Brandon said.
    Paul grinned. Kids . . .

TWO
    R alph Hale, Ph.D., bolted upright as the alarm on his watch sounded with an insistent beep-beep noise that would not cease until he pushed the tiny button on the watch’s side. Hell and damnation, but that thing’s annoying, he thought as he felt on his right wrist for the watch.
    He couldn’t find it.
    Then, as awareness slowly penetrated his sleepy haze, he remembered that he had put the watch across the room precisely so he couldn’t just switch it off and fall back asleep.
    Gotta stop outsmarting myself, he thought with a chuckle as he clambered off the sofa where he had taken his nap. After a moment, he located the watch on the sideboard that served as his liquor cabinet and switched it off.
    He gazed at the watch’s digital display: 12:30. He still had half an hour before it was time to take the seismograph out from its underground—or under sand, really—hole. Why would I set the alarm early and spoil a perfectly good nap, when—?
    Then his eye caught his battered old computer. Right. Haven’t checked the e-mail in almost two days.
    After switching the machine on—it took almost a full two minutes to boot up—he walked the short distance to the kitchen to turn on the burner under the kettle. He didn’t really need the caffeine. Ralph Hale was a napper; he could go full-bore for four or five hours, crash for two, then be ready to go for another four hours. He had attained enough prominence as a geologist to be able to set his own peculiar hours, which is just how he liked it. Smiling as he dumped some herbal tea leaves into a strainer, he remembered his undergraduate days in Sydney, driving his roommates up the wall with his odd sleeping habits. ’Course, then there were the grad school days in Boston where everyone kept calling me “Oz,” and that lovely tenure at Emory when everyone was browned off ’cause I didn’t sound like Paul blasted Hogan. Not that it was any better when he returned home to Australia. All the endless rules and regulations were enough to drive a man mad.
    So finally he grew fed up and used the money he’d saved over the decades to put together the Hale Institute for Oceanography in Melbourne. He made his own damn rules and regulations.
    One of those rules meant he could pick and choose his projects. The latest had him studying the unusual increase in seismic activity on and around Malau, his favorite of the numerous local islands. He could do what he was best at, do it how he wanted it done, and do it in a pleasant locale. As a result, he did excellent work, which made his Board of Directors at the Institute happy; and he got to take lots of naps, which made him happy. Hale’s philosophy had always been that everyone should be as happy as possible, so this arrangement suited him just fine.
    Eventually, the computer finished going through all eight million stages it needed to go through before it would allow its user to actually use it. Times like this, I miss the old IBM PC. Couldn’t do much more than a crummy word processor and a crummier database, but at least it booted up in thirty seconds.
    Hale double-clicked on the icon for his e-mail program, then single-clicked the CHECK MESSAGES icon. As the modem made the various and sundry awful noises it needed to make to connect Hale’s computer to the Internet (or, at least, to his e-mail provider’s little corner of it), he noticed another icon for the program he checked Usenet with. Better not get into that, he decided. The e-mail alone’ll take the whole time. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered with the various newsgroups that discussed geology (his chosen field) and scuba diving (his favorite hobby), since ninety-eight percent of what was posted there was