Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  The woman paused at the case of secondhand paperbacks. She pulled out a copy of James Michener’s The Source: literature by the pound, because even in mass-market it had to be three inches thick. “How much for this one?” she asked.

  “Three dollars,” Louise answered. “With tax, three thirty-three.”

  “I’ll take it,” the woman said. “Looks like it’s got enough inside to keep me going for quite a while.” She pulled a five from her purse. Louise made change for her. The woman sighed. “Eleven percent sales tax is obscene, but what can you do? The state’s as broke as we are.”

  Almost all the California politicians who’d raised taxes—again—no longer held office. The voters screamed that you couldn’t squeeze blood out of a turnip. But the voters screamed just as loudly for all the services they’d enjoyed before the supervolcano blew. Sometimes you couldn’t win no matter what you did. After a supervolcano eruption seemed to be one of those times.

  Carrying her prize, the woman walked out. A man came in. He bought not one but two of the hideous ceramic ornaments that gathered dust on their glass shelves. Louise took his money in silent amazement. Back when the kids were little, there’d been a Mad Magazine spoof of junk like that. One picture showed Clowns! Another showed Birds! The next hyped Clowns with Birds! And the last one was Clownbirds! The ornaments the man bought were definitely ugly enough to fall into the clownbird range. P.T. Barnum might have had the poor, kitsch-loving fellow in mind when he declared that one was born every minute.

  However much she wanted to, Louise couldn’t joke about that with Jared. He was the one who’d ordered the damn things. As far as she could tell, he doted on them. He carefully brushed away the dust they gathered. And when they sold (every so often, they would), he beamed from ear to ear.

  He was beaming now. “Louise,” he said, not quite out of the blue.

  “Er—yes?” She knew her answer sounded nervous. Was he going to do an I-told-you-so? She’d never made any big fuss about the horrible things—politeness was her middle name. But he wouldn’t have to be a mentalist to know they didn’t float her boat.

  That wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, though. He sounded a little nervous himself as he went on, “I have a couple of tickets to the Galaxy’s match next Saturday. I usually go with a friend, but Dave slipped in a puddle and broke his ankle. So would you, um, like to come with me?”

  She opened her mouth. Then she closed it again without saying anything. She cared about soccer more than she cared about, oh, hunting tigers from elephantback, but not a whole lot more. On the other hand, the last time she’d been out with a man was the last time she’d gone to dinner with Teo before she found out she was pregnant. She’d thought she was done with that scene, not least because she hadn’t met a man since who seemed interested in her. Once you turned fifty, you turned invisible. Only maybe you didn’t.

  When she hesitated, Jared quickly said, “You don’t have to say yes because you work here or anything. I’m not going to fire you for saying no. This is the twenty-first century. I just thought it might be fun.”

  Fun. Louise wasn’t at all sure that was a twenty-first-century concept. But she said, “Let me see if I can land a babysitter for my son. His half-brother’s got a girlfriend these days, so I don’t know. But I’ll try.”

  Jared nodded. “That sounds like a plan.” He didn’t make any fuss. He might be strange some ways, but he was a grownup. He knew life came with complications, and that other people needed to take care of them.

  The electricity returned that evening. Louise called Marshall and told him what she needed. She waited for him to tell her no. She waited for him to enjoy telling her no. Instead, he said, “Well, you got lucky. Janine’s taking the train to Palm Springs Friday after work. Her law firm’s going to some kind of convention there. She won’t be back till Sunday night. So, yeah, I can do that. At the usual rate, I mean.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do it for nothing. I’m glad you can do it at all,” Louise said. She was even gladder he hadn’t laughed in her face, but she kept that to herself.

  The Galaxy (Louise discovered after a little research) played in Carson, which wasn’t far away. She began planning bus routes. But Jared said grandly, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll pick you up in the car.”

  Before the eruption—even for the first couple of years afterwards—she would have taken that for granted. So would he; he wouldn’t have needed to say it. Now . . . Now her own car had sat in its parking space so long, she doubted it would even start. “Hey, big spender!” she exclaimed.

  “That’s from Sweet Charity,” Jared said, and started singing it in his erratic baritone. Soccer and musicals. Musicals and soccer. They made his world go round—but if she said so, he’d break into the number from Cabaret.

  To Louise’s relief, Marshall got to her condo fifteen minutes before Jared did. To her bigger relief, he was polite to the man who was taking her out—and who was also her boss.

  “You’re the one who writes stories,” Jared said after they shook hands.

  “Afraid so,” Marshall admitted.

  “Well, good. Keep doing it. We all need things to read, Lord knows.” Jared turned to Louise. “Shall we go?”

  “We shall,” she said, and they did. Fastening the seat belt in Jared’s Buick felt funny. No, she hadn’t done it much lately. It was so much easier and more comfortable than a bike or the bus. It was also so much more expensive. She leaned back in her seat. “I could get used to this.”

  “So could I—if I lived at Fort Knox,” Jared said with a wry grin. “But this is An Occasion.” He pronounced the capital letters.

  “It sure is,” Louise agreed.

  Their seats in the StubHub Center were near the midfield stripe. Only it turned out to be called the halfway line—soccer’s jargon was different from American football’s, and mostly imported from England. The Galaxy’s foe was Real Omaha—Real with two syllables. Jared said they’d been Real Salt Lake till the eruption. “It means ‘royal’ in Spanish,” he explained. “Several teams in Spain have royal charters, like Real Madrid. But Real Salt Lake and Real Omaha just sound dumb.” Louise couldn’t very well argue with that.

  The game was . . . men running around in shorts, kicking a ball, and bouncing it off their heads. If you cared, well, you were one up on Louise. The home team (Jared called them a side as often as not, as if they were onion rings) ended up winning, 1–0. One–nil, not one–nothing or one–zero. Jared was pleased. Louise was pleased that Jared was pleased. He drove her back to her condo. Louise saw only a couple of other distant cars. They got back about half past nine. Louise invited him in. Marshall reported, “James Henry crashed maybe fifteen minutes ago, so he may pop out again.” Louise nodded. That sounded like what she’d expected.

  Her son by Colin didn’t hold out his hand, but he would have if Jared hadn’t been there watching. Louise paid him. He bobbed his head and took off.

  James Henry didn’t make a farewell appearance. Louise asked Jared, “Feel like a drink?”

  “One, sure. Bourbon if you’ve got it, whatever if you don’t. Thanks.”

  “I’ve got it.” As Louise made the drinks, she wondered if she felt like a wrestling match. A man who thought a first date was a license to screw wasn’t what she was looking for. No man was better than a man like that.

  But Jared didn’t reach under her blouse or into her pants. He clinked glasses with her and asked, “What did you think of the match?”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever make a big fan, but it was more interesting than I figured it would be.” Louise could say that much without worrying her nose would stretch like Pinocchio’s. She added, “I enjoyed the company.” Rather to her own surprise, she meant it.

  “Good,” the pharmacist said. “So did I, very much. Just so you know, I count myself lucky you walked in looking for work.”

  “Well, thank you. So do I,” Louise said. Yes, she meant it not least for the paycheck. But she’d had
worse bosses. Jared might be strange, but he wasn’t high-pressure strange, the way Mr. Nobashi had been at the ramen works.

  After Jared finished the drink, he said his good-byes. At the door, he pecked her on the cheek like a kid from junior high—middle school, they’d say these days. Then he disappeared into the night. Louise smiled after him. If he asked her out again, she knew she’d say yes.

  XIV

  B

  efore the supervolcano erupted, Kelly Ferguson had never been in Missoula, Montana. She’d been there several times since, though, first to crash on a geologist who’d escaped the eruption with her and who taught at Montana State, and then to use it as a base camp from which to study what the caldera had done and what it was doing. Missoula was the closest functioning city to what had been Yellowstone National Park. It had got a layer of volcanic ash after the eruption, but not a thick layer. All the prevailing winds—even the jet stream—blew from the direction of Missoula toward Yellowstone. Missoula got a layer of ash anyhow. No mere winds could completely defy the supervolcano. But Missoula, unlike a lot of places farther away, didn’t get an incapacitating layer of ash.

  “Old home week,” she remarked to Geoff Rheinburg as they met for dinner before setting out into the eruption zone.

  “Well, yes and no,” answered the man under whom she’d studied at Berkeley. “Back in the day, you didn’t need to worry about how your husband and your little girl would like it when you disappeared into the wilderness.”

  “Colin’s okay with it,” Kelly said, which didn’t stretch the truth . . . too far. “Deborah . . . I didn’t have to worry about how much I’d miss her, either.”

  Rheinburg chuckled and scratched his mustache. It had more white in it than it had the last time Kelly saw him. “I remember those days,” he said. “Enjoy ’em while you’ve got ’em, because they don’t last. If I see my kids twice a year these days, I figure it’s been a good year.”

  Kelly nodded. Colin’s grown children went their own way and lived their own lives. Even Marshall was out of the house at last, though he was in someone else’s and not his own. Kelly didn’t dislike Janine, though she was damned if she understood what Marshall saw in his new squeeze.

  The next morning, she stopped worrying about what was going on back home. Three helicopters thuttered out of the sky. They kicked up leftover dust as they landed in an empty parking lot at the edge of the Montana State campus. Parking lots, these days, were broad, flat spaces people used for almost anything but parking.

  Geoff Rheinburg eyed the whirlybirds. “Before the eruption, people around here would have thought they were black helicopters from the UN, come to steal their liberty and lock it in a jail in Bulgaria. They would’ve started shooting first and asked questions later.”

  “They may yet—if they haven’t got one or two other things to worry about in the meantime,” Kelly answered.

  She had one or two other things to worry about herself. The last time she’d jumped into a helicopter, it had snatched her out of Yellowstone half a jump ahead of the eruption. She hadn’t told Colin she’d be flying in this one. I can tell him after I get home, she thought. Then he won’t have anything on his mind. Man is, always has been, and always will be the rationalizing animal.

  Daniel Olson waved to her as he climbed aboard another chopper. He’d escaped from Yellowstone with her. He was the geologist with the slot at Montana State. She’d stayed with him till a cop buddy of Colin’s found a way to get her back to California.

  When she strapped herself into her seat, the pilot gave her a helmet with an intercom connection. She was glad to put it on. Helicopters were godawful noisy. Flying in one without protection was too much like taking up residence inside the world’s biggest Mixmaster.

  The pilot’s voice came through her headphones: “Good morning, folks, and thank you for flying Off the Map Airlines today.” Everybody thought he was a comedian. As if he’d read her mind, the man went on, “You may think I’m kidding, but it ain’t funny. Where you’re going, the supervolcano erased pretty much everything that was on the map, right? I mean, that’s why you’re going there. So for God’s sake be careful, and try not to do anything too dumb while you’re poking around in the middle of nowhere.”

  His opinion of geologists was about the same as Kelly’s of three-year-olds. Kelly had her reasons. Well, maybe the pilot had his, too. This might not have been the first scientific expedition he’d flown into what was literally terra incognita.

  Here be dragons, Kelly thought as the rotors began to spin. In spite of the helmet, the noise was bad. But the dragon under Yellowstone had always belched fire. Now it was asleep again. She hoped.

  Up went the helicopter. Missoula dropped away and disappeared to the west. For a while, the pilot followed the line of I-90. The Interstate hadn’t completely disappeared from the map, at least this far from the eruption site. In fact . . .

  “Doesn’t the road look a little clearer than it did when we came this way in Humvees?” Kelly’s throat mike would carry her words to Geoff Rheinburg’s headphones. Without the intercom, she would have to scream, and even then he wouldn’t hear much.

  “You know, I think maybe it does,” the older geologist answered. “I didn’t want to say anything, for fear I was seeing more with my heart than with my eyes.”

  “Makes sense that it should,” Kelly said. “That was a few years ago now. Enough time for the wind and the rain to get rid of some more dust, anyhow.” They’d made the trek to the edge of the caldera before Deborah was born. In anybody’s life, few dividing lines are sharper than the one between childlessness and children.

  Before they went too much farther, though, the dust began to obliterate the line of the Interstate and everything else. The supervolcano had belched forth too much of it around here for the weather to have cleaned it away. Most of the landscape went brownish gray. The part that wasn’t brownish gray was grayish brown.

  They weren’t flying very high. Kelly snapped a few photos. She eyed the ground first with her Mark I eyeballs, then through 8x42 Bushnell binocs. She hoped to see a bush pushing up out of the ashfall or a jackrabbit hopping across the dun-colored ground. She saw . . . the dun-colored ground. Maybe she was still too high and going too fast. Maybe there was nothing like that to see this far east of Missoula.

  Here and there, the crowns of dead lodgepole pines did stick up through the ash. When Kelly remarked on them, Professor Rheinburg said, “Five gets you ten they aren’t altogether dead. They’re probably full of wood-boring beetles chomping away and having the time of their lives.”

  Kelly nodded. “You’ve got to be right.” Those beetles had been pests in Yellowstone before the eruption. The acres and acres of lodgepole pines they killed helped fuel the enormous fires of the 1980s.

  Where I-90 dipped, or would have dipped, south toward Butte (or what would have been Butte), the pilot kept flying due east. “This is the line of US-12,” he said, though only his GPS could have told him so. “We’re about forty miles from Helena—say, half an hour.”

  Helena was not a big city. No cities in Montana had been big even before the supervolcano blew. The relative handful of people who’d lived in the state—under a million despite almost the area of California—had liked it that way. Now only the western fringe was even remotely habitable. The rest . . . Well, this exploration party was going in to see what had happened to the rest.

  “I would have liked to try somewhere like Salt Lake City before we hit Helena. It was farther away, and it should be in better shape.” Geoff Rheinburg shrugged. “The Mormons discouraged it, which is putting things mildly.”

  Utah hadn’t been hit so hard as Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but it had taken a beating. “What do you want to bet that, if we did go into Salt Lake City, we’d meet some Mormons already there?” Kelly said.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Rheinburg said. “Some people would rather worry about the wrath of God than HPO. Me, I’d sooner keep breathing.”r />
  “Me, too.” Kelly nodded. The progressive, fatal lung disease, caused by inhaling too much volcanic ash, had already killed more than a million people—how many more, no one even seemed to want to guess. It had certainly killed more by now than the direct effects of the eruption. And it had killed most of the livestock from Calgary down to Chihuahua. North America would be years getting over that, if it ever did. Beef and lamb prices had shot up even higher and faster than gasoline.

  The helicopter pilot pointed. “There’s Helena, dead ahead. I’m going to look for a place where I can set us down without kicking up too big a dust storm when I do it.”

  You could tell human beings had built Helena. The shapes of buildings persisted in the dust. Some of them, the bigger ones, stuck out of it. The state capitol was only three stories high, but its dome—modeled, like so many, after the one back in Washington—had shed dust and ash better than many newer, taller structures with flat roofs.

  Also thrusting up from the dust was what looked like a mosque’s minaret. Kelly hadn’t dreamt Helena had held enough Muslims to need such a grand house of worship. And, as things turned out, it hadn’t. Professor Rheinburg pointed to the minaret. “That’s got to be the Shriners’ temple,” he said.

  “Oh.” Kelly felt foolish.

  “Can you put us down anywhere near there?” Rheinburg asked the pilot.

  “I’ll see.” Cautiously, the man brought the chopper toward the ground. The rotors kicked up some dust, but less than Kelly would have expected. As if it were landing on snow, the helicopter had skis rather than wheels. They spread its weight over a larger area.

  The copter crunched as the skis took up the weight. Kelly both felt that and heard it. The pilot cut the rotor. The blades windmilled to a stop. In the sudden quiet, Kelly took off her helmet and put on a surgical mask that covered her mouth and nose and a pair of tight-fitting goggles. She wanted to study the ash and dust. More intimate contact, she could do without.