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LoveStoryLogic.pdf ©2003 by A. D. Manning 232
Chapter TEN:
September had come around again, but we weren’t in class. We were on vacation instead.
Felix had earned it. For months, he’d crafted and polished Papa’s proposal for a new kind of
nuclear-waste processor. It was a huge success. Felix scripted and delivered the final oral
presentation as if it were one of his class lectures. The Secretary of Energy himself came up
afterwards to shake his hand.
We got out of Washington D.C. the next day, well before dawn. Felix drove our rental
car across Maryland in the early twilight, while I dozed on his shoulder. We might have
reached North Carolina sooner by coming down through the heart of Virginia. I had
memories of a similar trip down to Cape Hatteras. I came with Papa when I was thirteen,
mile after mile with nothing to see but an endless march of leafy trees. These boxed in both
sides of the interstate highway throughout most of the south. I wanted to take a less direct,
more interesting drive down the coast instead.
Felix woke me at the Delaware state line. I yawned and asked him if we’d make it to
the ocean in time to watch the sunrise. His eyes instantly faded into that far look. This look
I’d come to know well. I saw it whenever Felix checked his inner vision. Before this trip, he’d
glanced at some east-coast maps. Now he was remembering one of those. His eyes
refocused and he told me that we’d reach Rehoboth Bay in an hour.
It was then that he mentioned, offhand, how the first light of sunrise could be green
rather than red. A kind of rainbow effect, he said. The curved atmosphere over the Earth’s
horizon split sunlight like a prism. It sounded like the odd sort of fact that Felix would know.
We reached the beach a few minutes before sunrise. I gamely stood with him and
watched for this green flash of his. I didn’t see it that first morning. We saw the sun come up.
To me, it looked the same, plain color as always. I accused Felix of making the whole thing
up to tease me. He explained how the green flash was easy to miss. The horizon had to be
flat and the air very clear before anybody could see it.
It sounded like a great trick to play on gullible people. It was like the late-night snipe