Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Green Bay lay some distance east of Wayne, Nebraska, but less than a hundred miles farther north. Bryce had discovered more about frozen tundra than he’d ever wanted to know. It was barely autumn, but much of the campus already answered to that description. All you had to do was cross the street from the student union building and there you were, out in the middle of icy whiteness waiting for Jack London to mush past in a sled pulled by White Fang and Buck.

  Frozen tundra. Oh, yeah. The soccer pitch was frozen tundra with nets. The baseball field was frozen tundra surrounded by fences, with dugouts and bleachers on the sides. The softball field was a smaller version of the same thing. Out beyond them was a walking path that skirted a golf course—still more tundra, with skeletal trees sticking up out of the snow and making it drift against their trunks.

  Past the golf course, past the campus, gently rolling Nebraska farm country stretched as far as the eye could see. Before the eruption, it had yielded bumper crops of wheat and corn and soybeans. Cattle had grazed on green grass and fattened in feed lots.

  Again, Bryce remembered the exhibit at the University of Nebraska museum in Lincoln. Ashfall State Park lay west of Wayne. He didn’t need to think of all the rhinos done in 12,000,000 years ago by that earlier supervolcano blast. Most of the livestock and an awful lot of the people across the modern Midwest had already died of HPO, just like those poor, extinct rhinoceroses.

  Except for the small town of Wayne and the anything but enormous Wayne State campus, there was nothing but frozen tundra for miles and miles in every direction. Bryce’s breath smoked as if he were a three-pack-a-day guy. In spite of long johns, jeans, and a heavy coat that came down to his knees, he felt sure he was freezing his balls off.

  For this you left Junipero High? For this you left SoCal? he asked himself, not for the first time. Since he unquestionably had, he asked himself a couple of more questions. Why? Were you out of your ever-loving mind?

  He shook his head. In spite of everything, he didn’t think so. He’d spent a lot of time and a lot of effort making himself as much at home in the Hellenistic world as anyone could who happened to be born 2,300 years too late to see it in person.

  That thought made him laugh, so his breath smoked even more. Vanessa’s brother’s band had that song called “Came Along Too Late,” about not being able to watch Alexander conquer the Persian Empire. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles did all kinds of strange things. That one hit Bryce where he lived.

  A crow cawed harshly. There it was, on the crust of the snow, a lump of coal with wings. Not even post-eruption winter was enough to drive away the crows. A couple of others walked along purposefully, a good bit farther away. Mice, maybe. The cold wasn’t enough to do in the mice, either. They found this and that under the snow, and dug tunnels through it. Every so often, one would pop out for a look around—and some lucky crow would cash in a meal ticket.

  Bryce wondered if he ought to cash in a meal ticket himself, back at the cafeteria in the student union. He was going to teach his class on ancient Greece in an hour. He sometimes thought the cafeteria specialized in ancient grease itself.

  More crows flew up, calling in alarm, as he walked back toward the student union building. They ate what students threw away. But they were also more wary than they had been. In these hard times, eating crow wasn’t always just a figure of speech.

  Some of what the crows, and the people who fed them, got to eat . . . Potatoes. Lots of potatoes. Potatoes grew in cold climates. Turnips and parsnips grew even better. In SoCal before the eruption, Bryce had sometimes eaten sweet-potato fries instead of regular spuds. The cafeteria in Wayne often served turnip and parsnip fries. The parsnip fries turned out to be pretty decent. Bryce didn’t think you could do anything to a turnip that would make it exciting. If french-frying didn’t turn the trick, what would?

  He went inside. It was warmer in there than outside—all the way up into the low fifties. Everybody around here should have been cold all the time. In the clothes Bryce had on, though, the feeble heating felt tropical. A guy walked by in a T-shirt: Midwest bravado. He did have a sweatshirt and a jacket on his arm. Go outside in a T-shirt and you were asking the coroner to call.

  “Thank you,” the gal in charge of such things said when he handed her his faculty meal ticket. She looked like every other oldish woman he’d seen in school cafeterias since kindergarten. There was probably a factory in Elbonia or somewhere that manufactured them preaged.

  Bryce grabbed a tray and approached the food. The rule was that you could take what you wanted but you got only one pass; the powers that be decreed that that cut down on waste.

  Potatoes. Turnips. Parsnips. Rye and oat flour. Beets. Coleslaw—cabbage and carrots didn’t need long growing seasons. Sauerkraut. Kimchi (well, Nebraska kimchi, anyhow, though Bryce didn’t think it would have been anywhere near potent enough for real Koreans).

  He got some chow. They had what they called pizza. The crust was dark enough to show it was mostly rye. The cheese was thinly spread; with so many cows dead, people had stopped taking milk for granted. They’d had to. The sausage . . . There wasn’t much of it, either. And it looked funny.

  Pointing to a round of it, Bryce asked the student dishing stuff out, “Do I want to know what goes into that?”

  “It’s meat,” she answered. “What else do you need to know?”

  “Nothing,” he said after a barely perceptible pause for thought. “Let me have a slice, please.”

  “You got it.” She put it on a plastic plate and handed it to him.

  He found a place, sat down, and ate. The coleslaw was actually pretty good. The french fries had been sitting under a heat lamp too long, but that could happen at a real fast-food joint, too. As for the pizza, well, he’d had worse. He didn’t think he’d ever had stranger, though. If Finns had invented the stuff instead of Italians, it might have come out like this.

  The sausage was definitely mystery meat. As the girl had suggested, some mysteries were better left unsolved. Bryce had read Shogun—he’d raced through it in three or four days, in fact. Because he’d liked it so much, he’d got Tai-Pan and King Rat, too. Tai-Pan was pretty good: not so good as Shogun, but still pretty good. King Rat was nothing like the other two, but also pretty good. Right this minute, remembering what the POWs in King Rat had chowed down on, Bryce wished he’d never found it no matter how good it was.

  He dumped his trash and stowed his tray, dishes, and flatware on the rotating shelves that delivered them to the dishwashers. Then he put his knit cap back on, pulled it down so it covered his ears, and headed out into the cold again to go teach his class. The Peloponnesian War today, or the start of it. He’d done big chunks of Thucydides in the original. Now it paid off.

  What the kids at Wayne State thought of things like the Melian Dialogue, he wasn’t sure. Some of them got it, and saw that that kind of thing applied to any situation where people tried to govern themselves responsibly. More, he feared, didn’t—which was the kind of problem people who tried to govern themselves responsibly had to deal with.

  Or to duck. Washington these days reminded him of a broken-backed man’s brain. It still sent out frantic messages—orders, even—but not all of them got through. He finished the lecture and headed for the bus stop.

  Wayne and Wayne State were better off than a lot of places. The power here stayed on better than it did in Los Angeles. Natural gas got through. There wasn’t a lot of gasoline, and what there was was hideously expensive, but that was worse in SoCal, too. Things here didn’t depend on the port and on one long highway connecting the coast to the rest of the country.

  Then again, this was Wayne, Nebraska. The Frozen Tundra, as he’d thought before. Along with fast food, it had a Chinese place and a pizza place that also did spaghetti. No takeout Thai. No Peruvian. No pupusas from El Salvador. No sushi. No Korean barbecue. No Persian. No Is
raeli. No Moroccan. No . . . no nothin’, except for Chinese and sortakinda Italian.

  Here came the bus. It had studded snow tires, and chains over them, too. That struck Bryce as suspenders and belt, but what did he know? About snow and coping with it, not much. He knew he wouldn’t have wanted to walk or bike back to his place in town, not in weather like this. And he knew he wasn’t rich enough to keep driving back and forth, even for short hauls.

  Body heat warmed the inside of the bus some—enough to prove that some of the bodies warming it hadn’t been washed for a while. One more constant of the new era. You did what you could, and you did what you could afford, and you said the hell with the rest.

  Not much traffic on the road back to town. Bryce guessed there’d never been a whole lot. There just weren’t enough people in these parts to create much traffic. To someone who’d squandered countless irreplaceable hours crawling along the 405 because of a wreck five miles ahead, that was a prodigy.

  Bryce got out near the center of Wayne. Nothing was more than three or four stories high. A lot of the buildings were of red or brown brick. To someone from a state where quakes were an everyday worry, that was a prodigy, too, but not such a good one.

  The main drags were plowed. That was how the bus had come this far. Bryce walked a block in the street. He had to watch for oncoming cars—not too big a worry, with gas so scarce and so expensive—and he had to be careful not to slip and fall on his ass. Then he had to climb up onto the drifts to go the rest of the way to the apartment he and Susan shared.

  Even this recently after the end of summer, it had been cold enough long enough for the snow to have a good solid crust. The drifts bore his weight. Most of the time, anyhow. Falling through into the snow and then struggling to pull himself out again wasn’t the most enjoyable thing he’d ever done. And he didn’t want a repeat performance, so he watched where he put his feet. Once had been an experiment; twice would definitely be perversion.

  He made it back to the building without going into the deep freeze. The little rectangular mailbox—just the kind you’d also see in SoCal apartment buildings—was empty when he turned the key in its lock. Either Susan had already got whatever there was or the mailman (or mailwoman, if you needed a word with a built-in oxymoron) hadn’t managed to mush through the snow. The USPS took its adaptation of Herodotus’ version of the pledge of the Persian Empire’s couriers less seriously than it had once upon a time.

  He clumped up the stairs. A second-floor unit was better than one down below. You didn’t have herds of shoes migrating over your head. The neighbors on either side of the place weren’t too noisy, either. All that could have been worse, as he knew from experience.

  Susan was tapping away on a laptop at the kitchen table when he came in. It wasn’t warm inside, any more than it had been in the student union or his classroom or the bus. But it was warmer, so it felt warm. And the hug she gave him raised his temp several more degrees—or it sure seemed to, anyhow.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I’m getting there,” she answered. “Long-distance thesis writing . . . This way, I get snarky e-mails—sometimes even snarky letters I can barely read when the power in L.A. goes for a while—instead of face-to-face snark. I’m glad stuff stays on most of the time here. I couldn’t finish without the Net. The Wayne State Library tries, it really does, but it doesn’t have most of what I need.”

  Bryce nodded. “I know that song.” The classical holdings here were severely limited, too.

  “Sure.” She smiled at him. “If you didn’t know what I was going through, I’d drive you totally up the wall instead of just three-quarters of the way.”

  “Yeah, right,” he answered. “Like I’m not already up—or off—the wall any which way.” Susan thought that was funny. Bryce wished he could have said it without dredging up uncomfortable memories. Vanessa had had no idea how crazy he’d get when he was studying for his orals. How could she have? She’d never done anything like that. She’d bailed out of college before she graduated and started working instead. That had hassles of its own—Bryce discovered some of them later—but they weren’t the same hassles. The differences had only made for more friction between them.

  He wondered how Vanessa was doing. He’d have to ask Colin next time he talked to him or e-mailed him. He hadn’t done that as often as he should have since he moved to Nebraska. Hell, he hadn’t done it as often as he should have after he moved up to the Valley and couldn’t get over to the Ferguson place so easily any more.

  Susan had said something. She stood there, waiting expectantly for him to answer. Woolgathering about your ex was not a good thing to do, not when it made you zone out on your current squeeze. “Sorry.” Bryce spread his hands in what he hoped would be apology enough. “Brain fuzz.”

  “A likely story,” Susan answered darkly. “I said, how do you want me to make the potatoes tonight?”

  “I dunno. Cooking them ought to be good,” Bryce replied. She rolled her eyes. So did he, for different reasons. You could do only so much with potatoes. Whatever you did, they were still potatoes when you got through with them. He supposed he should have been glad they had enough potatoes, and didn’t need to worry about going hungry.

  He should have been, and in a way he was. But he remembered better times. So did his whole generation. If the climate didn’t improve by the time they died off, they’d bore the living shit out of the cadre rising behind them by going on and on about the good old days. Well, yeah, every generation did that, so why should his be any different? The difference was, for them the good old days really would have been good.

  * * *

  There was a joint on Hesperus, a little north of the police station, with a name Colin Ferguson had loved for years. HEINRICH’S HOFBRAU AND SUSHI BAR, the sign over the door declared. It had always drawn a fair number of cops at lunch and dinnertime. The way things were these days, it was crawling with blue uniforms and off-the-rack suits. You could walk there from the station. You could, and the policemen and – women did.

  As a waiter led Colin and Gabe Sanchez to a table, Colin remarked, “I always wished this joint served pizza, too.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Gabe said. “How come?”

  “’Cause then you’d have the whole Axis, all in one place.”

  That got the kind of disgusted snort he’d hoped for. They sat down. The waiter set menus on the table in front of them and went away. The menus had two sides—not Column A and Column B but German and Japanese. “More soba noodles than ever,” Gabe said, eyeing the Japanese side.

  “Soba’s buckwheat,” Colin answered. “Kasha, if you’re Jewish.”

  “Sure, man. Hell of a lot of Hebes named Sanchez.”

  “Mm, right.” Colin had to remind himself what he was talking about. “Buckwheat’s one of those grains that grow quick, so you can raise it in the kind of crappy weather we’ve got nowadays.”

  “Oh. Is that where you were going with that? I gotcha,” Gabe said. When the waiter came back, he ordered some of the soba noodles. Colin went Teutonic, with sauerkraut, potatoes, and pork.

  The dish proved heavy on the spuds and kraut, light on the pork. You could raise pigs anywhere, on almost anything. What meat there was these days was mostly pork. Some chicken remained, though the corn that had fattened hens was mostly a memory.

  Beef? Lamb? Rare and even more expensive than everything else. Good fish was scarce, too, which didn’t do the sushi part of this operation any good. Squid, though . . . There was lots of squid. By all the signs, squid were oceanic cockroaches. If you dropped an H-bomb on the Marianas Trench, somehow the squid would survive.

  “And when you’ve been squid, you’ve been did,” Colin murmured.

  “What’s that?” Gabe cupped a hand behind his ear.

  “Nothing,” Colin said. “Believe me, nothing. My brains are dr
ibbling out my ears, that’s all.”

  “And I’m supposed to notice this on account of . . . ?” Gabe asked.

  “Who said you were supposed to notice it?” Colin returned.

  Gabe let out another snort. Then he found a question Colin had been asking himself a good deal lately, too: “What’s it like having your daughter home again?”

  “It’s—interesting, anyway.” Colin wished he’d ordered a beer with lunch, even if department regs frowned on such things and even if barley shortages made beer almost as expensive as gasoline. He almost left the answer short and unresponsive. But Gabe had been his buddy as long as they’d both been on the San Atanasio PD. If he could vent to anybody, Gabe was the guy. Sighing, he went on, “I wish to Christ Vanessa and Kelly’d hit it off better.”

  “That’s not good,” Gabe said.

  Colin clapped silently, applauding the understatement without making everybody in the place stare at him. “It wouldn’t be good even if Kelly wasn’t expecting. Since she is, it’s doubleplus ungood.”

  “It’s what?” But then Gabe’s heavy features cleared. “Oh. From that book. 1984.” He chuckled self-consciously. “Dunno if I’ve even looked at it since 1984. Sometime in high school—I’m pretty sure of that.”

  Colin had read it more recently—quite a bit more. The politics were out of date. Nobody could deny that. The politics had been out of date well before the Cold War went bye-bye. But the thoughts on the way corrupt and narrow politics produced a corrupt and narrow language seemed more important than ever in this age of pious bullshit. They did to him, at any rate. Most people, by all appearances, didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  If he was going to vent, he was going to vent. Not much point to doing things halfway, was there? With another sigh, he said, “And she’s got herself a new boyfriend.”

  “A punk? A gangbanger?” Gabe’s older daughter was in high school. Those were the kinds of boyfriends that gave him nightmares.