Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  She weighed that. On one side of the scales was something like Okay, fine. Now fuck off, asshole. He’d earned it, too. But a couple of other tourists were coming. Maybe she didn’t want to cuss him out in front of an audience. All she did say was, “Mm, I can see that-I guess.”

  Then fate-or something-lent a hand. The ground shook more than hard enough to need no seismograph to detect. Colin staggered. He was glad to grab the handrail on the boardwalk. For ten or fifteen seconds, he felt as if he were standing on Jell-O. At last, the earthquake stopped.

  “Holy moley!” said one of the approaching tourists. “Nobody told me it was gonna do that! Let’s get outa here, Shirley!” He and Shirley did, at top speed.

  Waves-not big ones, but waves-rolled up onto the beach. The ice farther out cracked with noises that made Colin think of what would happen if the Jolly Green Giant dropped a tray from his freezer. Darker streaks-water-appeared between the remaining chunks of ice.

  Eyeing them and the direction from which the waves had come, Colin said, “That’s gotta be a 5.3, maybe even a 5.5. Epicenter’s that way somewhere.” He pointed northeast.

  One of the woman’s eyebrows jumped. “I was going to ask you where home was, but now I hardly need to. Norcal or Socal?”

  “Socal,” Colin answered. “San Atanasio. L.A. suburb.” Of course he had to come from California. Guessing the Richter scale was a local sport of sorts. “How about you?” he asked. That she knew it was a local sport, and that she used local slang for the two rival parts of the state, argued she was a Californian, too.

  Sure enough, she said, “Some of both. I grew up in Torrance”-which wasn’t far from San Atanasio-“but I’m finishing my doctorate at Berkeley. So I’m Norcal now.”

  In his mind, Colin prefaced Berkeley with The People’s Republic of, the same as he did with Santa Monica. The university was good, though; Marshall, his younger son, had been bummed for weeks after he didn’t get in. He’d followed Rob to UC Santa Barbara instead. He’d followed Rob into smoking pot, too, and still hadn’t graduated. One more thing for his old man to worry about.

  Not the most urgent one at the moment. “I didn’t know you could get quakes that big up here,” Colin said.

  “Oh, yeah,” the woman answered. “This is the second-busiest earthquake zone in the Lower Forty-eight, after the San Andreas. There was a 6.1 in the park in 1975, and a 7.5 west of Yellowstone in 1959. That one killed twenty-eight people and buried a campground. A landslide dammed the river and made what they call Quake Lake. You can still see drowned trees sticking up out of the water.”

  “A 7.5 will do it, all right,” Colin said soberly. How many people would an earthquake that size kill in L.A. or the Bay Area? One hell of a lot more than twenty-eight.

  “It sure will,” she agreed. As Colin had before, she pointed northeast. “I think you’ve got the size just about right, too-”

  “Practice,” he broke in.

  “Uh-huh.” But she hadn’t finished. “You got it right if the quake’s from magma shifting in the Sour Creek dome. But if it’s from the Coffee Pot Springs dome… That’s farther away, so the quake would have to be bigger.”

  “Didn’t feel that far off,” Colin said. “The jolts were sharp, not roll-roll-roll the way they go when they’re a long way out.”

  “Here’s hoping you’re right.” She didn’t sound-or look-happy. And she had her reasons: “The Coffee Pot Springs dome literally just showed up on the map a little while ago, and it’s swelling like a stubbed toe. It’s like the magma’s found some new weak area that gives it a path up toward the surface.”

  Colin knew what magma was: the hot stuff that spewed out of volcanoes. Here in Yellowstone, it was also the canned heat that kept geysers boiling and hot springs bubbling. He had trouble putting those two things together, though. “What would happen if it did?” he asked.

  “Did what? Get to the surface?”

  “Yeah. Would it be… a volcano, like?”

  “Mm, kind of.” Now the look on her face said he’d disappointed her. He’d known something about earthquakes, so she’d hoped he would know something about volcanoes, too. That shouldn’t have bothered him. If anybody’d had practice disappointing women, he was the guy. But, obscurely, he didn’t want to disappoint this one. She went on, “Like a volcano the way a Siberian tiger’s like a kitten, maybe.”

  “Huh?” he said brilliantly. To try to salvage things, he added, “I’m not staring at your chest. I’m just trying to read your name badge.”

  That got him a crooked grin. “Well, it’s a story. I’m Kelly Birnbaum.” He gave her his own name. She came up and shook hands over the boardwalk railing. He’d known police sergeants with a less confident grip. She looked west. “I bet you went to Old Faithful before you came here.”

  “Well, yeah.” Colin hated being predictable. Sometimes he was-sometimes everybody was-but he still hated it.

  “Don’t worry. People do that. It’s what the thing is there for, you know?” Kelly said. That made him feel worse, not better. Then she asked, “After you looked at all the stuff there, what did you do?”

  “I had lunch.” He’d testified in court too often to be anything but literal-minded.

  This time, she stuck out her tongue at him, which made her look about twelve. “You sound like a cop, all right. Let’s try it again. What did you do after lunch? Did you drive up to the Black Sand Basin?”

  “Yes, Honor,” Colin answered, deadpan.

  “Okay,” Kelly said in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “You can see the caldera wall-the edge of what fell in the last time the supervolcano erupted-really well from there. I think they’ve got a sign about it, too. Do you remember that?”

  “Uh-huh. As a matter of fact…” Colin took the camera out of his jacket pocket, powered it up, and thumbed back till he found the pictures he wanted. One was of the sign she’d mentioned. The other was of the caldera wall itself: an almost vertical cliff of solidified lava, several hundred feet high, with lodgepole pines growing up out of it here and there.

  Kelly leaned forward to look at the photos in the viewfinder. She nodded. “That’s it, all right. That’s what’s left from the last time it went off, I mean, maybe 640,000 years ago. It shot out about two hundred and forty cubic miles of ash and lava and rock-say, a thousand times as much as Mount St. Helens.”

  “How about compared to Krakatoa?” Colin asked. “Or the earlier one in the 1800s-I forget its name, but the one that made the Year without a Summer?”

  “Mount Tambora.” She beamed at him. People did that when you surprised them by knowing more than they’d expected about what they were interested in. “That was about thirty-five cubic miles. Krakatoa was only a squib next to it: six or seven cubic miles.”

  “Wow.” Colin didn’t need a calculator to do the math. “So this eruption was a heck of a lot bigger than either one of those.” By himself or with his colleagues, he was as foulmouthed as any other policeman. He didn’t like to swear in front of women, though. It wasn’t the only reason he often felt like a dinosaur these days.

  “Right,” Kelly said. “But this one went off 1.3 million years ago, too. Only sixty-seven cubic miles that time.”

  “Only,” Colin echoed. The word seemed to hang in the cold, moist, sulfurous air.

  “Only,” she repeated. “ ’Cause it went off 2.1 million years ago, too, and that was the big one. Something like six hundred cubic miles of junk-enough to bury California twenty feet deep. For real, the ash reached from the Pacific to Iowa and from Canada to Texas.”

  There was a thought alongside which even a hangover didn’t seem such a big deal. Colin did some more math in his head. “Um, 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, 640,000 years ago… Seems like it’s about due. Is it?”

  “Nobody knows,” Kelly answered. “And even if it is about due, that might mean it’s ten thousand years away instead of a hundred thousand. Or it might not. But people here and people back in Berkeley don’t
like the way the Coffee Pot Springs dome is bulging all of a sudden.”

  “What would it be like,” Colin said slowly, “if it did go off for real? I mean, the way it did the biggest time?”

  He wondered if she’d say it would be indescribable. But she didn’t: “Take Rhode Island. Blow out lava and ash all around the edges. Then drop it half a mile-maybe a mile-straight down onto molten rock.” She cocked her head to one side, waiting to see what he’d say to that.

  What he said was, “Best thing that could happen to the lousy place.”

  “Huh?” Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it.

  “For my sins, I got stationed in Providence when I was in the Navy,” Colied lained. “If America ever needs an enema, that’s where you’d plug it in.”

  “Oh.” Kelly laughed-nervously. “I’ve heard the same thing about Buffalo and Syracuse.”

  “Only from people who’ve never been to Providence.” Colin spoke with complete assurance.

  “If you say so.” Kelly hurried on: “Then we’d get the ashfall all over the place, like we did before. And bunches of particles would go twenty or thirty miles up into the stratosphere and block off sunlight. Best estimate-”

  “Guess, you mean,” Colin broke in.

  “Guess. You’re right. It’s not like we can make the experiment. Best guess is, global temps go down about five degrees Celsius-nine degrees Fahrenheit. For years. Ten? Twenty? Two hundred? Nobody knows.”

  Colin thought about that. L.A. nine degrees cooler would be more like Portland or Seattle-different, but not too bad. But Seattle nine degrees cooler would be more like Anchorage. Brr! And Anchorage nine degrees cooler would be like the North Pole. So would London and Stockholm and Moscow and lots of other places. The North Pole would be more like the South Pole. The South Pole… He didn’t want to contemplate what the South Pole would be like.

  “Start of a new Ice Age?” he asked.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any cause-and-effect between supervolcanoes and glaciation,” Kelly said. “But it sure wouldn’t be fun. Back seventy-five thousand years ago, Mount Tabo in Indonesia blew up. It’s Lake Tabo now-that was even a little bigger than the biggest blast here. And, about that same time, genetics studies show Homo sap almost went extinct. We got squeezed down to a few thousand people. Why? The bad weather from the supervolcano makes the best sense.”

  “Happy day. Happy, uh, bleeping day.” Colin almost slipped. “That’ll give me sweet dreams tonight.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, you’re standing in the middle of the last big caldera,” Kelly said cheerfully. “And there’s another caldera-a smaller, newer one-under the water in the West Thumb. There are little calderas all over the place in Yellowstone, if you know where to look.”

  “Oh, boy,” Colin said. An aftershock rattled the boardwalk. Another tourist who’d just set foot on it decided this was a hell of a good time to go somewhere else. She hustled back toward the parking lot.

  “Nothing much.” Now Kelly sounded disdainful. “That wasn’t even a 4.0.”

  “Nope. Not even close,” Colin agreed. He realized he’d just spent fifteen minutes or so talking with a reasonably attractive woman without getting shot down in flames. That was one of the more pleasant novelties he’d run into lately. He asked, “Where does somebody doing research at Yellowstone stay?”

  “In the employee housing at Lake Village, near the Fishing Bridge you can’t fish from any more,” Kelly said. “Not the Black Hole of Calcutta, but not the Ritz-Carlton, either. Makes dorm rooms look good.”

  “Ouch! I’m sorry for you.” Colin remembered the UCSB dorms Rob and Marshall had lived in before they moved to off-campus apartments. (Vanessa had commuted to Long Beach State till she decided she knew it all and quit halfway through her junior year. She’d made a living ever since-he gave her that much.) He also remembered what student housing had given his sons to eat. “I hope the food’s better, anyhow.”

  “Not so you’d notice.” Kelly made a face. Then she asked, “How about you? Where are you staying while you’re visiting here?”

  “Jackson,” he answered. He saw that surprised her. You could go through cash in a hurry in Jackson if you were so inclined, and plenty of people were. What? I don’t look like I just finished a term as ambassador to the UN? he asked himself. Himself answered, You bum, you look like you just started a term for drunk and disorderly. He wasn’t that bad, not after caffeine and painkillers, but Himself could be rougher on him than anyone else. With a sheepish grin, he added an explanation she could hear: “Motel 6.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She laughed. “So you’re not gonna sweep me off my feet, drive me away in a gold-plated Mercedes, and fund my research for the rest of my life?”

  “Now that you mention it, no,” Colin said. But if that wasn’t an opening, he’d never heard one. (If that wasn’t an opening, she’d do unto him as the waitress had the night before.) Trying his best for suave, he went on, “If you’ve got a phone number or an e-mail, though

  …”

  He waited to see if he’d wind up with egg on his face. She pulled a little imitation-leather card case out of a jacket pocket, extracted a card, and started to hand it to him. Then she said, “Hang on.” Second thoughts? She scratched out the phone number on the card and wrote in a different one. “This is my cell. The one that’s printed here is my office back in Berkeley. I won’t be there till fall, and they’re liable to kill all the landlines anyway, to save money. Budgets.” It wasn’t a four-letter word, but she sure made it sound like one.

  “Thanks.” He’d rarely been so sincere about what sounded like ordinary politeness. “And let me borrow that pen a sec, would you?” He scratched out not only the phone number but also the e-mail address on his card. “Here. This is my cell, and this e-mail doesn’t go through the official police system.”

  “Thank you.” She looked at the card before she stowed it away. “You just said you were a cop, not a lieutenant.”

  He shrugged. “All it means is, I wear a suit more often than a uniform. No gold-plated Mercedes. Not even tin-plated.”

  “Oh, it means more than that. It means you’ve spent a lot of time working hard,” Kelly said quietly. “Later on, if either one of us decides this wasn’t such a good idea…” She didn’t go on, or need to.

  To show she didn’t need to, Colin gave back a quick nod. “No harm, no foul. Sure,” he said. If he figured she wasn’t young enough or skinny enough or whatever the hell, he wouldn’t write or phone. If she thought he looked too weather-beaten to stand or that he really was a lush coming off a bender, she wouldn’t call back or return his e-mail. It would all be very clean and civilized.

  He had zero intention of not getting in touch with her again. A drowning man didn’t push away the spar he’d just grabbed, did he? Not likely! What she’d do then… Again, he could only wait and see. And if she didn’t decide he was too strange to deal with, he could only wait and see how they got along, or if they got along at all.

  For now, Kelly said, “You’ll want to do some more exploring, and after the quake I really need to check that seismograph. I got more data than I thought I would.” As if to underline her words, another little aftershock rattled the boardwalk.

  What Colin wanted to do was hang around right here and get to know her as well as he could as fast as he could. But he saw she’d given him a test question. Between the lines, it said If you come on too strong, you blow it. If he couldn’t work that out, he flunked.

  So he said, “Sure. Glad to meet you,” and went on his way. He drove up to Dunraven Pass, which he might have done anyway, and looked south across miles and miles (more than thirty of those miles, he later figured out) to the distant mountains on the far side of the caldera (the middle-sized caldera, he reminded himself). Then he left the park altogether, which he wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t talked to Kelly Birnbaum.

  He drove into the town of West Yellowstone, up US 191 to US 287, and west on 287 to Hebg
en Lake and on to Quake Lake. The visitors’ center there perched high on the debris that had slid down from the far side of the Madison River and dammed it after the 1959 temblor. The rangers at the center seemed impressed he’d ever heard of the quake. They didn’t worry about the supervolcano. Maybe it was too big to worry about. Hoping the world stayed lucky seemed a better way to go.

  II

  Not far from Marshall Ferguson’s apartment in Ellwood was a historical marker. It said a Japanese submarine had fired twenty-five shells at the oil refinery there in February 1942. No need to worry about subs now. The refinery was long gone, too.

  Marshall, by contrast, intended to stay in Ellwood as long as he could. He’d started out at UCSB as an engineering major, the same way his brother had. Rob had stuck it out. Marshall switched to history in the middle of his sophomore year. Calculus was tougher than he was. It landed him on academic probation, but he didn’t quite flunk out.

  He hadn’t stayed a history major long. Ancient Greece interested him most. But if you were going to study ancient Greece in any serious way, you needed ancient Greek. As far as Marshall was concerned, foreign languages were even more poisonous than calculus. He’d counted himself lucky to get a B- in Spanish at San Atanasio High. They held your hand every step of the way in high school. If you fell on your face at the university, that was your problem, not theirs.

  And so… film. Vanessa’d been sweet as usual about it. “That kind of bullshit is what you’re good for, Marshall,” she’d told him.

  “It’s very, um, creative. It’ll put you more in touch with your inner self, your feelings. The right side of your brain-or is it the left?” his mother had said when he told her the news. That would have made him happier if he’d taken Mom more seriously. Getting in touch with her inner self eventually meant walking out on Dad. Marshall might have rolled with it more easily had she acted happier afterwards. But she just seemed confused-more confused than usual, even.