Learning to Swear in America Read Free

hands, stood his puck on its edge for luck, and started reading. An elevator down the hall rumbled, or maybe it was a drink cart going past. Did they do that? And then the puck rolled to the end of his desk, paused, and rolled the other direction. He stared at it. Yuri had studied with brilliant people at one of the best institutions in the world. He understood laws of motion. He didn’t understand this. A body at rest … flew off the edge of the desk. And then the books were shaking, inching forward on the shelves, and falling off, splaying open on the carpet, and he could feel the vibration through his feet, all the way up to his knees. Earthquake.
    He ran from the room. The hall was filled with people standing calmly in their doorways. “Is earthquake, I think!” he shouted, running down the hall. A few doors were closed and he beat on them as he ran by. “Earthquake!” He paused at the elevator and imagined the car swaying on its cable, and he plunged into the east stairwell.
    The shuddering stopped, but he grabbed the railing with both hands and crabbed down sideways, not convinced that the groundwouldn’t move beneath him again. It looked ridiculous to hold on like that, but it beat being buried in rubble for three days and having to drink his own urine. At the bottom he looked up and saw a dozen faces on each of the stairwells above, looking down at him. Idiots. They were all going to die, and he was going to have to stop the asteroid by himself. The ground gave another jolt. He threw his arms up and shook his hands and shouted, “Earthquake!” over the rumble. Then he ran out the stairwell doors and into the lobby.
    He could see the coffee decanters in the conference room bouncing across the table, as though containing that much caffeine had finally gotten to them. A lamp swung overhead, reminding him of Galileo’s pendulum experiments, but, with the unsteady rippling of the earth, the time the light took to complete its arc was not constant. And that was so, so wrong.
    “Help me, Galileo,” he muttered. It was as close to praying as he was going to come. He started for the front door, but it was glass, and he should stay away from glass, right? So he stood in the lobby, hands out at his sides, palms down, as though to calm the earth.
    “Hey.” It was Karl Fletcher, the director. The ground quieted.
    “Is earthquake, I think.”
    “Yeah, we get these.”
    “We need to evacuate building. I banged on doors upstairs and shouted to people, but maybe nobody heard.”
    “Seriously? Okay, let’s get you outside.” He gripped Yuri’s upper arm and pulled him through the plate glass door, down the steps, and into the middle of the street. “Better?”
    Yuri watched the street suspiciously. The rumbling was over, and the pavement was still. Inside, the lamp would be describing normal arcs again, and then be stationary. He took a breath. “Nobody else came out.”
    “Nah, this wasn’t too bad. Enough to get your attention, though, right?”
    Yuri flushed and glanced up. The windows were lined with people looking out into the street. “Perhaps I overreacted?” The director laughed and slapped him between his shoulder blades. “I didn’t want to have to drink my urine,” Yuri said.
    Fletcher was silent for a moment. “We do have beverage alternatives. There’s a vending machine downstairs.”
    Yuri barked a laugh.
    Fletcher led him back upstairs to his office, one hand on Yuri’s arm, the other angrily waving gawkers away.
    “We have asteroid coming in very fast. Would be nice if Earth stayed in same place for little while.”
    “It would be nicer if it moved the hell out of the way,” Fletcher said. He smacked Yuri on the back. “Show’s over. Get to work.” He shut the door and left.
    Yuri picked up the fallen books while his stomach settled, then restored the puck to his desk, sat down, and got to work. It was simple, in a sense, to arrange a killing strike at the asteroid. Getting it right