Chapter 24: The Empty Chair

The storm over the Pacific took four days to reach the coast, and for three of them nobody believed us.

I stood at the big screen with the director and my lab partner, and the data team sat in a half ring behind us with their coffee going cold.

The model's line bent north, then east, then pointed straight at a bay town of forty thousand people.

"Seventy-two hours," my lab partner said. "Koster, that's the earliest anybody's ever called a landfall."

"The national office won't act on one model."

"They will if it keeps calling the same town."

I ran it again with the sea temperature changed by a tenth of a degree.

The line bent the same way.

I ran it a third time with the wind input cut.

It bent the same way again.

The director picked up the red phone.

He said the name of the town, and the hour, and the height of the surge, in a voice so calm that the whole room went quiet to listen.

"Yes," he said. "It's our model. The student who corrected the inputs is standing next to me. His name is Elliot Koster."

I heard my name go down the line to people I would never meet.

For the next forty hours I did not leave the room.

My lab partner brought me sandwiches, and the man with the beard brought me a pillow, and nobody asked me to carry anything for them.

The first sirens started in the bay town on Wednesday morning.

By noon, the shelters were full and the harbor was empty.

That night, the storm came ashore exactly where the line on the screen had said it would.

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