Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  So you have to wield your hose like a sculptor, dancing around squirting the water with great precision, topping up the dam here, minimizing its height there, all the while taking into account the slope of the ground, the ability of the subsoil to bear the weight of the new stone, and the possibility that the lava you are working with may suddenly decide to accelerate its rate of outflow from fifty feet an hour to, say, fifty feet a minute, which would send the flow hurtling over the top of your little dam and put you up to your ass in lava, with the hose still dangling from your hand as you become a permanent part of the landscape. Which is why the face-plate of your lava suit is equipped with infrared filters to help you see through all that billowing steam that you are busily creating as you work.

  And there is other stuff to consider. Coming up out of the core of the earth, along with all that lava, are various gases, not all of them nice ones. Chlorine, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, all kinds of miasmas are likely to head swiftly surfaceward as though carried by a giant blowpipe. These are all poisonous gases, although you are more or less protected against that by your suit; however, traveling upward with the gases may be fragments of incandescent lava that will go up like a geyser and come down all over the neighborhood, including right where you happen to be. Therefore you want to listen, as you work, for strange new whooshings and bellowings and hissings, and in particular for the sound of something like an old-fashioned locomotive tooting its horn as it heads your way. Mattison has beaten a quick retreat more than a few times, sometimes taking his pump with him, sometimes abandoning it and running like hell as a highly local eruption starts nipping at his heels.

  However, none of that happens this morning. This Arcadia thing is just a teeny-weeny little isolated lava outbreak with no special complications except for the owner of the burrito stand. Mattison, aided expertly by Marcus Hawks, who is just eight months out of a crack house in El Segundo, and Lenny Prochaska, whose powerful forearms bear needle tracks that look like freeway interchanges, deftly creates a low wall of cooled lava across the front of the outbreak, then adds a limb up its right-hand side and another up the left to form a U, after which they concentrate on hardening the new lava wherever it comes curling up over the boundaries of their wall. The cooling process is very quick. Along the face of the wall, the temperature of the lava has dropped to the 500-degree level, at which heat it is hardly glowing at all, at least not at the outer crust. Mattison figures that the crust he has built is maybe three inches thick, a skin of solid basalt over the hellish stuff behind.

  Of course, lava is still oozing steadily from the ground at the original exit point, and probably will go on doing so for another six or seven hours at this site, maybe even a day or two. But the dam should hold it and keep it from welling out into Colorado Boulevard, which is an important thoroughfare that needs to be kept open. Instead, the lava will go on piling up on the site of the burrito stand, forming a little mountain perhaps fifteen or twenty feet high. Unless, of course, it decides to break through the surface a couple of dozen yards down the street instead, but Mattison doesn’t think that’s going to happen at this site.

  He sometimes wonders what life is going to be like around here when all this is over, the volcanoes have died down, and the whole eastern half of the Los Angeles Basin is littered with new little mountains in the middle of what used to be busy neighborhoods. Are they going to dynamite them all? Build around them? On top of them? And where are they going to put the freeways to replace the ones that are now mired in cooling lava that soon will be solid rock?

  Hell, it’s not his problem. That’s one of his mantras: Not my problem. He has enough problems of his own, currently under control but not necessarily going to stay that way if he borrows trouble from elsewhere. One day at a time is another phrase that he has been taught to repeat to himself whenever he starts worrying about things that shouldn’t matter to him. Easy does it. Yes. First things first. These are absolutely right-on concepts. Somebody else will have to figure out how to repair Los Angeles, once all this is over. His job, which will last him the rest of his life, is figuring out how to operate Cal Mattison.

  The fires in the surrounding buildings are just about out, now. One of the firefighters comes over and asks him how he’s doing. “Under control,” Mattison tells them. “Just a little tidying-up to do.”

  “You want us to stick around, just in case?”

  Mattison thinks for a moment. “You got work nearby?”

  The firefighter points. “There’s a whole line of these things, from the freeway all the way down to Duarte. If you don’t think the lava’s going to pop, we can move on south of here. There’s a bad one going on on Duarte, just at the Monrovia line.”

  “Go on, then,” Mattison says. “We get any problems, I’ll call you back in.”

  Real executive decision-making. He feels good about that. Time was when he never wanted to be the one who made the call about anything.

  But he’s confident of his own judgment right here and now. This job has been handled well. There’s a high in that that feels like half a fifth of Crown Royal traveling through his veins, smooth and fine and warm.

  The firefighters go away, leaving just two of their number posted as supervisors during the wrap-up and report-filing phase of the job here, and Mattison, signaling back down the line to have the hose shut down, moves forward onto the lava dam. It can be walked on, now, at least by someone equipped with tractor treads like his. He tests the crinkly new skin. It holds. Dainty little tinkling sounds are coming from it, the sounds of continued cooling and hardening, but it supports his weight. It’s a little like walking on thin new ice, except that what is behind the fragile surface is molten rock instead of chilly water, and if he falls through he will be very sorry, though not for long. But he doesn’t expect to fall through, or he wouldn’t be up here.

  Mattison isn’t walking around on the dam just to show off. He needs to check out the fine points of the construction job. The dam slopes up and back at a 45-degree angle, and he wants its lip to rise just a little steeper even than that, so he moves along the face of the front, using his suit’s shovel appendage to trim and shape the boundary between new rock and hot lava. He can feel mild warmth, not much more than that, through his suit, at least until he reaches a place where red can be seen crackling through the black, a tiny fissure in the dam, not dangerous but offensive to his sense of craft. He steps back, radios Foust and Herzog to turn the water back on, and has Hawks and Prochaska give the fissure a squirt or two.

  Then he checks the far side of the lava front to make sure that there’s no likelihood that the top of the lava dome he has created is simply going to spill back the other way, down into the residential block behind the event. But no, no, the oozing lava is quietly piling itself up, filling in behind the dam, giving no indication that it means to go off in some new direction. Thank God for that much. Because of the way the magma pool lies in relation to the giant subterranean fault line that kicked this whole thing off, the surface flows tend to be consistently directional, rising on a diagonal out of the ground and moving, generally, from east to west only. With some residual slopping around—lava is a liquid, after all—but not, as a rule, with any unpredictable twisting and turning back the way they have just come. Except, of course, when a badly thought out dam is slapped in its path. But Mattison tries to think his work out properly.

  Just as Mattison is wrapping everything up, Gibbons radios him from the truck to say, “They want us to move along to San Dimas when we’re done here.”

  “Jesus,” Mattison says. “San Dimas is way the hell to the east. Isn’t everything over and done with back there by now?”

  “Apparently not. Something new is about to bust out, it seems.”

  “Tell them we’ll need a lunch break first.”

  “They said they wanted us to—”

  “Right,” says Mattison. “We aren’t fucking soldiers, you know. We’re volunteer citi
zens and some of us have been working like coolies out here all morning. We get a lunch break before we start busting our asses again today. Tell them that, Barry.”

  “Well—”

  “Tell them.”

  As Mattison has guessed, the San Dimas thing is serious but not catastrophic, at least not yet. The preliminary signs indicate a bad bust-out is on the way out there, and auxiliary crews are being pulled in as available, but one team more or less won’t make any big difference in the next hour. They get the lunch break.

  Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”

  “I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue—that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”

  “Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.

  “You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.

  “Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”

  “Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.

  “And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”

  “Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.

  “You hooer, I’m going to throw you into the lava,” Prochaska says, getting up and heading toward her. Mary Maude weighs about ninety pounds, Prochaska maybe two-fifty. He could do it with one flip of his wrist.

  “Lenny,” Mattison says warningly.

  “Tell her to leave me be, then.”

  “All of you,” says Mattison. “Leave each other be. Jesus Christ, you think it’s any easier for the others than it was for you?”

  It is the tension, he knows, of the morning’s work that is doing this to them. They’re all on the edge, all the time, of falling back into their individual hells, and that keeps them constantly keyed up to a point where it doesn’t take much for them to get on each other’s nerves. Of course, Mattison’s on the edge himself, he always will be and won’t ever let himself forget it, but he is in recovery and they aren’t, not really, not yet, and the edge is thinner for them than it is for him. Each of them has managed to reach the abstinence level, at least, but you can get to that point simply by having yourself chained to a bed; that keeps you out of the clutches of your habit but it doesn’t exactly qualify you as being free of it. Real recovery comes later, if at all, and you can be a tremendous pain in the ass while you’re trying to attain it, because you’re angry just about all the time, angry with yourself for having burdened yourself with your habit and even angrier with the world for wanting you to give it up, and the anger keeps bubbling out all the time. Like lava, sort of. Makes a mess for everybody, especially yourself, until you understand, really and truly understand in your bones, that until you want to give it up, nothing’s going to happen.

  They calm down, though, as the sandwiches hit their bellies. Mattison waits until they’ve eaten before he springs the San Dimas thing on them, and to his surprise there is no enormous amount of griping. The usual grumblers—Evans, Snow, Blazes McFlynn—do the expectable amount of grumbling, but not a whole lot, and that’s it. They all would rather go back to the house and watch television, of course, but somewhere deep down they know that this volcano business is actual worthwhile and important stuff, perhaps the first time in their lives they have ever done anything even remotely worthwhile and important, and some part of them is tickled pink to be out here on the lava frontier. Hollywood is just a dozen miles west of here, after all. They all see themselves as characters in the big volcano movie, heroes and heroines, riding into battle against the evil monster that’s eating L.A. That’s how Mattison himself feels when he’s out here, and he knows it’s the same for them, maybe even more intense than it is for him, because he also has the self-esteem that comes from having made it back out of his addiction to this level of recovery, and they don’t. Not yet. So they need to be heroes in a movie to feel good about themselves.

  They clean up the lunch mess and Mattison goes back to check his lava dam, which is holding good and true, and then off they go to San Dimas for whatever is to be required of them there.

  To get there they have to travel through the heart of the Zone, the very belly of the beast, the place where it all started.

  No. Where it all started was fifty or sixty miles down in the crust of the earth, and maybe fifty miles east of where Mattison and his pals are now: out in Riverside County, where the tremendous but hitherto unknown Lower Yucaipa Fault had chosen to release its accumulated tension about sixteen months ago, sending a powerful shock wave surfaceward that went lalloping through the Southland at a nifty 7.6 on the Richter. The earthquake made a serious mess out of Riverside, Redlands, San Bernardino, and a lot of other places out there in the eastern boondocks, and caused troubles of lesser but not inconsiderable degree as far west as Thousand Oaks and the Simi Valley.

  Californians don’t enjoy big earthquakes, but they do expect and understand them, and they know that after you get one you wait for the lights to come back on and then you sweep up the broken crockery and you call all your friends in the affected area as soon as the phones are working so that, ostensibly, you can find out if they are okay, but really so that you can trade horrendous earthquake stories, and sooner or later the supermarket will reopen and the freeway overpasses will be repaired and things will get back to normal.

  But this one was a little different, because the Yucaipa thing had evidently been so severe a fracture that it had shattered the roof of a colossal and previously unsuspected pool of very deep subterranean gases that had been confined under high pressure for ten or twenty million years, and the gas, breaking loose like a genie that has been let out of a bottle, had taken hold of a whopping big column of molten magma that happened to be down there and pushed it toward daylight, causing it to come up right underneath the San Gabriel Valley, which is just a little way east of downtown L.A. You expect all kinds of troubles in L.A.—earthquakes, fires, stupid politics, air pollution, drought, deluges and mudslides, riots—but you don’t seriously expect volcanoes, any more than you expect snow. Volcanoes are stuff for Hawaii or the Philippines, or southern Italy, or Mexico. But not here, thank you, God. We have our little problems, sure, but volcanoes are not included on the list.

  Now the list is one item longer.

  The first volcano—the only one, so far, that had built a real full-size volcano-style cone for itself—had popped up at that freeway interchange near Pomona, a couple of days after the big Yucaipa earthquake. First there was thunder, never a common thing in Southern California, and the ground began to shake, and then it began to puff up, making a blister two or three yards high that sent the freeway spilling into pieces as though King Kong’s big brother had bashed it from below with his fist, and smoke and fine dust started to spurt from the ground. After which came a hissing that you could hear as far away as Long Beach, and showers of red-hot stones went flying into the air, a pretty good indication that this wasn’t simply an aftershock of Yucaipa. Then came the noxious gases, a gust of blue haze that instantly killed half a dozen people who were standing around watching; and then a thick column of black ash decorated by flashes of lightning arose; and then, seven or eight hours later, the first la
va flow began. The sky was bright as day all night long from the bursts of incandescent gas and molten rock that were coming forth. By the next morning there was a gray volcanic cone forty feet high sitting where the interchange had been.

  If that had been all, well, you would watch it on the news for the next few nights, and then the Federal disaster teams would come in and the people in the neighborhood would be relocated and the National Geographic would publish an article about the eruption, and somebody would start a class action suit complaining that the governor or the president or somebody had failed to give proper warning to home buyers that a volcano situation might develop in Pomona, and the religious crazies in Orange County would deliver sermons about sin and repentance, and after a while the impacted area would become a new tourist attraction, Pomona Volcanic National Park or something like that, and life would go on in the rest of Los Angeles as it always did once the latest catastrophe had turned into history.

  But the Pomona thing was only the beginning.

  That great column of magma, rolling upward from the depths of the earth on a long slant to the west, began breaking through in a lot of other places, bursting out like an attack of fiery pimples across a wide, vaguely triangular strip bracketed, roughly, on the east by the Orange Freeway, on the north by Las Tunas Drive and Arrow Highway, on the south by the Pomona Freeway, and on the west by San Gabriel Boulevard. Within the affected zone anything was likely to happen. Volcanic vents opened in completely random patterns. Lava flows the size of small creeks would crop up in people’s garages, or in their living rooms. Fumaroles would sprout in a front lawn and fill a whole neighborhood with smoke and ash. Houses suddenly began to rise from the ground as subsurface bulges formed beneath them. A finger of fierce subterranean heat would whiz along a street and fry the roots of every tree and shrub in your garden without harming your house. All this would be accompanied by almost daily earthquakes—not big ones, just nerve-wracking little jiggles of 3.9 or 4.7 that drove you crazy with fear that something gigantic was getting ready to follow. Then things would be quiet for a couple of weeks; and then they would start again, worse than before.