Fear Nothing

all the time.”
        “Well, they shouldn't.”
        “I didn't say they should. I only said they do.”
        “You know, Bobby, maybe life isn't just surf, sex, food, and beer.”
        “I never said it was. I only said it should be.”
        “Well,” I said, studying the darkness beyond the window, “I'm not hairing out.”
        Bobby sighed and leaned back in his chair. “If you're waiting to catch a wave, and conditions are epic, really big smokers honing up the coast, and along comes a set of twenty-footers, and they're pushing your limit but you know you can stretch to handle them, yet you sit in the lineup, just being a buoy through the whole set, then you're hairing out. But say, instead, what comes along all of a sudden is a long set of thirty-footers, massive pumping mackers; that are going to totally prosecute you, that are going to blast you off the board and hold you down and make you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. If your choice is to be snuffed or be a buoy, then you're not hairing out if you sit in the lineup and soak through the whole set. You're exhibiting mature judgment. Even a total surf rebel needs a little of that. And the dude who tries the wave even though he knows he's going over the falls, knows he's going to be totally quashed-well, he's an asshole.”
        I was touched by the length of his speech, because it meant that he was deeply worried about me.
        “So,” I said, “you're calling me an asshole.”
        “Not yet. Depends on what you do about this.”
        “So I'm an asshole waiting to happen.”
        Let's just say that your asshole potential is off the Richter.”
        I shook my head. “Well, from where I sit, this doesn't look like a thirty-footer.”
        “Maybe a forty.”
        “It looks like a twenty max.”
        He rolled his eyes up into his head, as if to say that the only place he was going to see any common sense was inside his own skull. “From what Angela said, this all goes back to some project at Fort Wyvern.”
        “She went upstairs to get something she wanted to show me some sort of proof, I guess, something her husband must have squirreled away.
        Whatever it was, it was destroyed in the fire.”
        “ Fort Wyvern. The Army. The military.”
        “So?”
        “We're talking about the government here,” Bobby said. “Bro' the government isn't even a thirty-footer. It's a hundred. It's a tsunami.”
        “This is America.”
        “It used to be.”
        “I have a duty here.”
        “What duty?”
        “A moral duty.”
        Beetling his brow, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, as though listening to me had given him a headache, he said, “I guess if you turn on the evening news and hear there's a comet going to destroy the earth, you pull on your tights and cape and fly into outer space to deflect that sucker toward the other end of the galaxy.”
        “Unless the cape is at the dry cleaner.”
        “Asshole.”
        “Asshole.”

----

    20
        
        “Look here,” Bobby said. “Data coming down right now. This is from a British government weather satellite. Process it, and you can measure the height of any wave, anywhere in the world, to within a few centimeters.”
        He had not turned on any lights in his office. The oversize video displays at the various computer workstations provided enough illumination for him and more than enough for me. Colorful bar graphs, maps, enhanced satellite photos, and flow charts of dynamic weather situations moved on the screens.
        I have not embraced the computer age and never will. With UV-proof sunglasses, I can't easily read what's on a video display, and I can't risk spending hours in front of even a filtered screen with all those UV rays pumping out at me. They are low-level emissions to you, but considering cumulative damage, a few hours at a computer would be a lightstorm to me. I do my writing by hand in legal tablets: the occasional article, the best-selling book that resulted in the long Time magazine article about me and XP.
        This computer-packed room is the heart of Surfcast, Bobby's surf-forecasting service, which provides daily predictions by fax to subscribers all over the world, maintains a Web site, and has a 900 number for surf information. Four employees work out of offices in Moonlight Bay, networked with this room, but Bobby himself does the final