Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  All of which meant jack diddly in the South Bay, which reliably got the sea breeze. It had topped out in the mid-eighties at San Atanasio City Hall, across the street from the cop shop. By now, it was at least ten degrees cooler than that. Whatever fires the Santa Anas blew up wouldn’t come within miles.

  As usual, the first thing Colin did when he got home was pull the mail out of the mailbox. A pile of catalogues-retailers could smell Christmas from months away-a cable bill, a bill from the pool guy, a statement from his lawyer… and a postcard from Rob. It showed a big apple, with a good-sized worm, iridescent green, sticking out his head and neck. The worm wore a toothy grin and a Yankees cap.

  Colin snorted. That was his older son’s style, all right. Glued to the back of the card was the little New Yorker notice about Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles’ local appearance. The commentary below was in Rob’s spiky script: Still not famous, but we may make it in spite of ourselves. Love from your kid.

  That anyone could want to be famous still mystified Colin. As TV had trained him to do, he associated the word with divorces and court appearances and rehab and jail time. He knew more than he wanted about all of those except rehab, and that was the one famous people blew off anyway.

  He went inside. He had a little steak waiting in the fridge. He’d broil that while he nuked a package of frozen mixed veggies. As usual, not exciting cooking, but functional. A hell of a lot better for him than the fat-and-sodium bombs that masqueraded as frozen dinners. He’d eat the rest of the vegetables tomorrow with whatever meat he defrosted then.

  He thought about a beer. Not without regret, he shook his head. It wasn’t that he never drank alone. But he didn’t do it very often. A drink had a way of turning into a few drinks. A few drinks had a way of turning into a drunk. He’d done too many drunks for a while right after Louise left. He remembered waking up hungover in that Motel 6 in Jackson goddamn Wyoming.

  He’d met Kelly that day. If he’d scored with the waitress the night before… He didn’t think he’d be as happy as he was now. The way thingshad worked out, he counted himself pretty lucky. If Kelly’d been here now, he would have had a beer with her. But she was off in Yellowstone, keeping track of the new volcano.

  Colin dusted the steak with ground pepper and garlic powder and put it in the broiler. The microwave buzzed as the vegetables spun round and round inside. In lieu of that beer, he poured himself water from a pitcher with a Brita filter in the refrigerator.

  He turned on CNN to keep him company while he cooked. Indonesian pirates were saying they’d kill the crew of a Russian freighter if they didn’t get a ransom big enough to suit them. Colin was sorry for the scared-looking sailors, whose images went up one by one. France or Germany might have come through with the cash. The Russians mostly didn’t make payoffs like that.

  A Congresswoman had been caught with her hand in the Federal cookie jar. She was loudly denying she’d done anything wrong, and claimed it was a sexist plot because the investigating committee happened to be all male. “Yeah, right,” Colin said. In a way, it was reassuring to see that corruption crossed gender lines, too.

  A radio commentator was in hot water for making slurs about GLBT people. Colin was a cop, so of course he’d never heard-or told-a fag joke in all his born days. Of course.

  Commercials came next. He hit the MUTE button. The dough-faced brunette shilling for an insurance company was annoying even when he couldn’t hear her, but she wasn’t as annoying. But why did ad men seem convinced the American public had a collective IQ of 9-maybe 11 with a tail wind? Colin grunted as soon as the question formed itself. Like any other cop, he’d seen enough aggressive stupidity in his time to understand exactly why admen thought that way.

  The news finally returned. The young woman reading it was another beauty contest runner-up, or maybe winner. That she was drop-dead gorgeous had nothing to do with her getting the job, of course. Again, of course.

  “Mother Nature is showing off her power again,” she said. “Take a look at this video from an already-beleaguered Yellowstone National Park.” She must have been a college graduate: she didn’t make a hash of beleaguered when it came up on the teleprompter.

  He waited for her to explain how the eruption by Ranger Lake was screwing up air traffic over the Rockies this time. More to the point, he waited for her to explain how the eruption was impacting, or even being impactful of, air traffic. To his way of thinking, the only way the eruption could impact air traffic was by pitching a volcanic rock through an Airbus’ windshield. But reporters loved the bullshit jargon even more than cops did, which was saying something.

  She threw him a curve, though, and not one of hers. As he took the steak out of the oven, she continued, “ Another new volcano has started blowing its stack in Yellowstone. This one is a good many miles away from the Ranger Lake eruption. It’s located not far northeast of a set of geysers called Coffee Pot Springs.”

  “Oh, shit,” Colin said softly. The video was taken from a helicopter. It showed the kinds of things he’d seen before: black smoke and ash and dust rising high into the sky while lava set lodgepole pines afire on the ground. After fifteen or twenty seconds, a map replaced the view of the new eruption

  Most people, even people who regularly went to Yellowstone, didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell Coffee Pot Springs were, so the map came in handy. Guidebooks didn’t talk about them, because they were sofar from the roads through the park and you had to hike across bear country to get to them. Colin, anything but a Yellowstone regular, would never even have heard of them if not for Kelly. But he had. Oh, my-had he ever.

  The pretty newsie reappeared on the screen. She said, “Coffee Pot Springs recently showed a dramatic increase in activity. Hot springs turned into frothing geysers and blew boiling water more than a hundred feet in the air. A geologist CNN talked to this afternoon said this was probably related to the new volcanic outbreak.”

  Colin was pouring A-1 Sauce on his steak. He proceeded to pour it all over the place mat, too, because there was Kelly on TV again, a mike shoved in her face. She looked windblown and worried. “Yes, magma-melted rock-in the Coffee Pot Springs dome is moving up toward the surface,” she said, as if she were TAing a Geology 1 section. “It heated the underground water in the springs, and now it’s starting to break through here, the way it did earlier near Ranger Lake.”

  Would the reporter ask her about the supervolcano? How much panic could she sow if he did? He didn’t; the picture cut back to the newscaster. “A porn star claims she’s having a billionaire’s baby,” the woman said brightly. “We’ll be back with the details after these messages.”

  Colin hit the MUTE button on the remote again. If that wasn’t one of the great inventions from the tail end of the last century, he didn’t know what would be. He patted up the spilled A-1 with a paper towel. After a couple of bites of steak and a forkful of the mixed veggies, he discovered his appetite had disappeared.

  He pulled out his cell phone. He didn’t get Kelly; he got her voice mail. He said “Shit” again, but he wasn’t amazed. She’d be really, really busy. And Yellowstone had some of the crappiest cell-phone reception of, well, anywhere. At the beep, he said, “This is what you were worrying about, isn’t it? Sounds like it’s time to get out while the getting’s good. Be careful. Be as careful as you can, anyhow. Love you. ’Bye.”

  For good measure, he sent her a text, too. Get out. Now. Love, Me. It lacked the voice mail’s flavor, but it sure as hell got the message across. She’d check texts before she listened to her voice mail because she could do it faster.

  Which didn’t say word one about whether she’d pay any attention to him. She would if she felt like it. Otherwise, she’d ignore him. He didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. He wished he weren’t upwards of eight hundred miles away from her. She might take him more seriously face-to-face. Then again, she might not. He couldn’t go all caveman on her, bop her over the head with a club, and drag
her away from danger by the hair.

  Again, though, he wished like hell he could.

  By the time he unmuted the TV, the commercials were gone. So was the story about the bimbo and the billionaire. Even in this high-flying Information Age, Colin couldn’t be too sorry about staying ignorant there. The markets had dropped sharply. The man explaining why had to be in his late fifties, maybe even past sixty. He had wrinkles. He was losing his hair, and what he had left was gray. He’d never make anyone mistake him for a movie star. But here he was on TV anyway. From this, Colin concluded that he might even know what he was talking about without a teleprompter for backup.

  He kept hoping Kelly would call him back. She didn’t.

  Another earthquake shook Yellowstone. Kelly had lost track of how many she’d felt he past couple of days. Some of them were barely there-just enough to startle you and disappear. Some were mean mothers, getting up toward 6 on the Richter scale. A quake that size would do considerable damage in a built-up area, even one with strong building codes like San Francisco or L.A. What was it going to knock down here? Trees? So what?

  Oh, the Yellowstone Inn and the other fancy places in and around the park would never be the same. But that was the least of Kelly’s worries right this minute. If the supervolcano went kablooie right this minute, the United States would never be the same, for crying out loud.

  If the supervolcano went kablooie right this minute, she would turn into a tiny part of that kablooie, too, because she was at the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, smack in the middle of what would be the new caldera: a red-hot zit on the face of the earth big enough to see from the moon.

  “That one was about a 5.0.” As usual, Larry Skrtel seemed inhumanly calm.

  “Feels about right,” Kelly agreed. “The more often they come, the more rattled I get.” She didn’t see how you could avoid that. Human beings hadn’t evolved to stay calm during earthquakes. Staying calm wouldn’t help keep you alive while things were falling on you. Panicking might.

  She sure felt like panicking now. Too many earthquakes took it out of anybody, the same way too many body shots made any boxer fold up. Maybe Larry wasn’t anybody. Maybe he didn’t have that earthquake = panic gene. He pulled out his phone, checked to see if he had bars-a better bet here than most places in Yellowstone, but no sure thing-and must have found he did, because he started dialing.

  “I hope that’s somebody who can get us out of here,” Kelly said. She had Colin’s messages, along with a slew of others that said the same thing in different words. They left her more annoyed than anything else. Didn’t people think she could see it was sayonara time all by herself?

  Maybe not. Maybe she’d given them reason not to. She didn’t feel like worrying about that, so she didn’t.

  “I hope so, too,” the USGS geologist answered. “I-” He broke off and started talking into the phone: “Heinrich? Larry. Listen, mein Freund, things are getting a little more interesting than I really like right now. I’m at the West Thumb Geyser Basin, and all the pools are going batshit like you wouldn’t believe… Batshit… It’s a technical term… Fliedermausscheisse, okay?”

  Fliedermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better-not good, but better-stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays.

  Not that it didn’t fit. It did, like a skintight glove. The pools around here had just sat and steamed for as long as anyone could remember. They weren’t sitting and steaming any more. At the moment, four of them were flinging water into the air like Super Bowl champs spraying one another with champagne. One was the Fishing Cone, out past the edge of Yellowstone Lake. The air, unfortunately, smelled of flatulence, not of bubbly.

  Daniel Olson was on his phone, too, talking with somebody from Montana State. He didn’t look very happy. No, scratch that-he looked about as unhappy as any one man could. Whatever he’d been counting on, the person on the other end of the line couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver. That was bad news.

  Standing where Kelly stood, there was no good news to see. Off to the southwest, the Ranger Lake volcano was still doing its thing. Prevailing winds blew most of the ash across Wyoming and down into Colorado and even Kansas, not up this way, but the relevant word was most. She and her geologist comrades wore surgical masks. Gray grit coated the pines. Your feet crunched in it when you walked across the parking lot here.

  And, up to the northeast, the new Coffee Pot Springs eruption was also going great guns, sending another huge plume of volcanic ash high into the sky. Most of that was blowing away from Yellowstone Lake, too, but it blotted out another big chunk of darkening blue. Anybody would guess that those two eruptions marked opposite edges of what was liable to turn into a caldera any time now. And anybody could see that the passel of geologists were in the middle of the frying pan, waiting to drop into the fire.

  Snatches of songs and poetry ran through Kelly’s head. It was much too liable to be the end of the world as she knew it-the REM tune had been all over the radio when she was much younger-but she was anything but convinced that she felt fine. And if this was the way the world ended, it wouldn’t be with a whimper. This would be a bang to top all bangs. TS, Eliot. You missed that one.

  The earth shook one more time. Next thing Kelly knew, she wasn’t standing in the middle of the potholed, ash-gritty parking lot any more. She was sitting on her ass. The involuntary yelp that came through her mask said she’d landed hard, too. Ruth Marquez also screeched as she went down. Kelly wondered how long her left cheek would be black and blue. Rending crashes from in amongst the trees said not all of them were standing any more, either.

  Somehow, Daniel had managed to keep his feet. “Hello?” he shouted into his phone. “Hello?” He put it away. “Shit. Some of the relay towers must be out.”

  “If that wasn’t a 7…” Kelly left it there. A 7 was very bad news. For a couple of horrifying seconds, though, she’d feared a massive earthquake was the least of her worries.

  Did the Richter scale even begin to measure the magnitude of the quake there’d be if a state-sized chunk of crust collapsed? Goes to eleven, man. In spite of herself, Kelly giggled as she got to her feet. If she could think of This Is Spinal Tap now, she had to be well and truly deranged.

  Well, of course you are, you idiot, she thought, slapping ash and random dirt off herself as best she could. If you weren’t, what would you be doing here?

  Aftershocks kept trying to knock her off her feet. She hoped like hell they were aftershocks, anyhow. If that big quake had been a foreshock, the one it was warning of would send her half a mile straight down.

  Larry still had cell-phone reception. He could do a commercial for whichever wireless company he used. “Listen, Heinrich, that last one made all the others feel like love pats. We don’t have a lot of time to waste… Yes, I know it’s getting dark. We’ve got flashlights. We’ll set fires in trash cans to mark the parking lot… Yes, I know that’s against regulations. We’ll do it anyway.” He rolled his eyes and lowered the phone for a one-word editorial: “Germans!” Then he was talking into it again. “Come on. Get moving. My will says you can’t have my desk if you let me cook instead of pulling me out… Yes, Heinrich, of course I’m joking. You hope.”

  He lowered the phone again. “Any luck?” Daniel asked.

  “Some,” the USGS geologist answered. “Some time tonight or tomorrow morning, two helicopters will come and take us away from all this. If they can land. If Heinrich really can pull the right strings. If, if, if…”

  “If this stretch of terrain is still in working order by the time they get here,” Kelly put in.

  “Yeah, that, too.” Larry whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Anything that can happen can happen to you. That’s what they say. I wish
to hell they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  “Fires in trash cans, you said?” Kelly looked around. There were plenty. The people who ran Yellowstone didn’t like litter. Unlike volcanic eruptions, they could actually do something about that. “Let’s start filling ’em up with dry branches and stuff.”

  “Drop zones,” Ruth said. “It’s like something out of a World War II movie.”

  “No choppers in World War II,” Larry observed.

  Ruth sniffed. “Okay. Fine. A Vietnam movie.”

  Kelly and Daniel said the same thing at the same time: “ Apocalypse Now!” Kelly cocked her head to one side, listening for the strains of “The Ride of the Valkyries.” She was half disappointed when she didn’t hear Wagner’s fierce, churning music.

  “I love the smell of hydrogen sulfide in the morning,” Daniel intoned. “Smells like… tenure.”

  “Hydrogen sulfide does smell a lot like tenure sometimes,” Kelly said. The others laughed, so she must have got the tone right. A good thing, too. Was she jealous of Daniel? Oh, just a little.

  “Wonder what happened to that CNN crew that interviewed you earlier in the day,” Larry said.

  “ They’ll have helicopters,” Kelly said. Like most academics, she was positive corporations had more in the way of money and everything money could buy than they knew what to do with. That only proved she’d never worked for one.

  “Sure they will,” Ruth agreed-she was an academic, too. “But will they have the sense to use them?” Like most academics, she was convinced people who worked for corporations were none too bright in spite of all that money. Like Kelly, she’d never examined the paradox. And exactly how bright did that make academics?

  Pine branches and old refuse made lovely fires. If another earthquake knocked over the metal trash cans… Well, they were on asphalt. If a grass fire started all the same, Kelly told herself she just wasn’t going to worry about it. A grass fire was the least of what Yellowstone had to worry about.