The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

It is not only the creatures of the Earth that can turn suddenly from what is known and natural to what is fearful and alien. In some ways, we know less about the ball of rock beneath our feet than about space itself; certainly far less than we should consider safe or reasonable for a house, a car, or spaceship. And for all our terrible armament, for all our incipient Doomsdays, we have not yet created any weapon as potentially destructive as Earth itself.

Gravity alone is the greatest killer we know. Usually, it works its damage slowly and alt but unnoticed. But from time to time—just as the unremitting stress eventually fells the man, brings him to Earth—the slow accumulation of its internal stresses causes the surface of Earth itself to buckle and break.

Mr. Danzig’s detailed “future history” of an Earth spasm is his first published story. The author is an English teacher at City College in New York City.