The Destroyer #5: Dr. Quake

Every man owes God a life. California owes Him a disaster, payable about twice a century.

For those people not hurled hundreds of feet in shifting earth; for those not buried alive in their homes along with the fear-triggered refuse of their bodies; for those not deposited deeper than any gravedigger's plan, these disasters are considered a simple geological adjustment. A releasing of pressure.

They are the result of an earth wound called the San Andreas fault, one of the many faults in California which make it a geological time bomb with a multitude of fuses. All of them burning.

The San Andreas fault runs six hundred miles from Baja California in the south to Mendocino in the north. It is created by the Pacific Plate on the earth's surface going northwest and the North American Continental Plate going southeast at a speed of several inches a year. The seam between those two plates runs the length of California, and when the two plates bump... earthquake.

In one small area, east of Los Angeles, in San Aquino County, the plates lock together every so often, building up pressure. When they unlock, about twice every hundred years, nature pays its bicentennial dues as the plates unleash their tension. For human beings within a few hundred miles, as the earth along the fault lurches, the universe appears to be ending.

For some of them it does.

Many geologists believe the next unspringing of the lock will make any nuclear weapons so far devised look like spears and stones. California is due for a bloodletting unrivaled in recorded history, so say these geologists. It will be in five minutes or in thirty years, but it will be. The earth only waits... with the human sacrifices enjoying the California sun until their moment in the pit... a moment in time known only to God.

It was therefore considered unbelievable when official Washington was approached by a man with a plan to harness this terror. And later, it was considered unthinkable that anyone would purposely trigger this disaster.

Unthinkable, until a government geologist in Washington, D.C. heard a detailed account of something he could not believe.

"But that's impossible," he said. "That's as impossible as... impossible as...."

"Impossible as throwing people into ovens," said the harried visitor from San Aquino County, California.