Summary

The unnamed first-person narrator, identified only as one of Mitchell Zukor’s fellow undergraduate students in college, describes how the younger Mitchell s/he knew seemed different from the Mitchell s/he knows of in the present. Mitchell, the narrator says, was a mathematician who, among other things, calculated different odds of different disaster scenarios for recreation. The narrator suggests that most people who know Mitchell’s reputation believe that he predicted the disastrous Seattle Earthquake, but adds that they would be wrong – the narrator was with Mitchell the day of the earthquake, and says it came as a surprise to Mitchell as it did to everyone else.

The narrator describes how s/he and Mitchell were in class the day of the earthquake; how the professor refused to stop the lecture, even when students told him what was going on and...