Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  Trail mix and beef jerky made an uninspiring supper. They beat going hungry, though. Kelly kept listening for thuttering rotors. She kept not hearing them. What if Heinrich hadn’t pulled the right strings?

  Then we’re screwed, that’s what. She wondered how big a traffic jam there was now, heading north from Mammoth Hot Springs into Montana. Park authorities hadn’t been too smart, leaving the northern attraction open. They’d been greedy, was what they’d been. She’d thought so at the time. Had anyone listened to her when she said so? As if! Nobody listened to her, fucking nobody.

  She stopped right there. Colin did. Sometimes he listened so hard, it got scary. He might have been listening to an errogation. Nobody’d ever paid attention to her like that before him. Had she been ten years younger, and less jaded and abraded by the world, she would have been sure he listened to her with a lover’s ears. And, being sure of that, chances were she would have got burned again. As things were, she knew he listened to her like a cop. So what? He listened.

  Aftershocks kept right on coming. Some of them seemed almost as big as that 7, or whatever the hell it was. Both as a geologist and as a Californian, Kelly knew things worked that way. Knowing didn’t stop each new quake in turn from almost scaring the crap out of her. The crashes and thuds as more trees went down didn’t help, either.

  Something very large and just barely visible ran past them. It ignored them-it was heading for the trees on the far side of the lot, no doubt hoping they wouldn’t fall over like the ones it was escaping from.

  “Was that a grizzly?” Ruth asked in a very small voice.

  “That was a grizzly.” Even Larry sounded less cool and collected than usual. If it had been a pissed-off grizzly instead of a terrified one… Bison might kill more people in Yellowstone than bears did, but one reason that happened was that people had an unfortunate tendency to treat them like cows: not really dangerous critters. A lot of years of natural selection warned that bears would chow down on people if they got half a chance.

  Larry’s cell phone went off. His ring tone was classical, but Beethoven, not Wagner: the opening bars of the Fifth. That would get your attention if anything would. “Hey, Heinrich. What’s up?” he said. After listening for a while, he sighed and went on: “Fuck. Are you sure?” Another pause, shorter this time. Evidently Heinrich was sure, because Larry sighed again. “Well, if that’s the best you can do, it’s the best you can do. If we’re still here in the morning, I’m sure we’ll thank you for it. Auf wiedersehen — I hope.” He killed the phone to give himself whatever small charge he got from the last word.

  “Well?” Kelly, Ruth, and Daniel made like a Greek chorus… or, given the reputation scientists had these days, a geek chorus.

  “No helicopter till morning,” Larry said glumly. “Sorry, but that’s the way it goes, or doesn’t go. Heinrich’s a good guy, but he can’t get the government to get anybody airborne before then. Copter pilots don’t like night flying to begin with. When you factor in two erupting volcanoes… It’s hard to blame anybody, you know?”

  Put that way, he had a point. The logical, rational part of Kelly’s mind saw as much. The big aftershock that rocked the parking lot just then made paying attention to that logical, rational part a skosh harder than it would have been in the Geology Department conference room back in Berkeley.

  “What do we do if… if the bottom falls out before sunup?” Ruth asked. Her logical, rational part was feeling the strain, too.

  Larry’s still functioned. Kelly supposed she should admire him for that. But then again, what was that parody of Kipling’s “If”? If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, chances are you don’t understand what the fuck is going on. Something like that, anyhow. Larry proved he did, though, because he answered, “Remember all those liability waivers we had to sign before they’d let us back into the park to study the Ranger Lake eruption? Well, every one of the little bastards is still in force.”

  Kelly remembered that pile of paperwork much too well. What it boiled dowto was, she’d admitted to the U.S. government and the Parks and Wildlife Service that she was out of her ever-loving mind for coming back into Yellowstone, and agreed that anything that happened to her was her own goddamn fault, not the Feds’. At the time, it had just seemed like more forms to sign off on. That was then. This was now. Now was a lot scarier.

  Bleakly, she said, “After all that paperwork, I’m surprised the government will try to get us out of here at all.”

  “As a matter of fact, so am I,” Larry answered, which did nothing to set her mind at ease. He went on, “God only knows how many markers Heinrich had to call in to get as much as he got. I owe him bigtime. Now I hope I last long enough to have a chance to pay some of it back.”

  Something out in the darkness went boom! — splash! — a new noise. It was large, but not very close. The ground shook yet again. “If that wasn’t a hydrothermal explosion, I’ve never heard one,” Daniel said.

  “ Have you ever heard a hydrothermal explosion?” Kelly asked.

  “Well, no,” he admitted.

  “Good,” she said. “Neither have I-till now, I mean.” Somewhere out there, steam bursting through to the surface had just created a new pond near Yellowstone Lake, or maybe taken a new bite out of the lake’s shoreline. With a shaky laugh, she added, “We’ll have a fresh tourist attraction if this turns out not to be the supervolcano after all.”

  “We always wanted to study one,” Ruth said.

  “Sure, from a safe distance.” Kelly pointed up at the moon, which the plume from the Ranger Lake eruption dimmed but didn’t hide. “Right now, I think that would be a pretty safe distance. Nobody’s messed around with the geology there for the past couple of billion years.”

  “Do you think it’s going to blow?” Daniel asked.

  She shrugged. A mosquito buzzed near her left ear. They weren’t so bad as they had been earlier in the summer, but they hadn’t disappeared. The supervolcano meant nothing to them. Probably even the earthquakes didn’t scare them. Except perhaps for squashing one with a toppling pine, what could an earthquake do to a mosquito?

  “I still don’t think anybody know for sure,” she said slowly. “We’re like preachers studying Revelations, trying to figure out if these finally are the Last Days.”

  “If it goes now, these are the Last Days-for us, anyway,” Larry said.

  Kelly was old-fashioned enough to wear a watch in spite of carrying a phone. She brought her left wrist up close to her face to read the glowing hands. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. “What do we do for the rest of the night?” she asked.

  “Assuming we’ve got the rest of the night to do it in,” Ruth said.

  “If we don’t, there’s no point to worrying about it, so we may as well pretend we do.” As usual, Larry made good sense. He continued, “We can try to sleep-”

  “Good luck!” Daniel broke in.

  “We can try,” the older man said. “Or we can stay up and talk. Not a whole lot of other stuff going on.” An aftershock contradicted him. Unfazed, he corrected himself: “Not a whole lot of other stuff going on that we can do anything about.”

  Kelly had sometimes slept through small aftershocks in California. Ifsiz were tired, a 3.2, say, might not wake you up, even if it was centered close by. Sleep through quakes that started at 5.0 and went up from there? Sleep through quakes that felt as if they started six inches under your shoes? In the immortal words of any New York cabby of the past hundred years, fuhged-daboutit.

  She learned more about her comrades that night-and they about her-than she had in all the time since she’d met them. How much she’d remember when the sun came up, if she was still here when it did, was a different question.

  Telling when the sun came up was also a different question. Volcanic ash from the eruption northeast of Coffee Pot Springs darkened the eastern horizon. Little by little, the sky above that mass of tiny rock particles lightened. Somewhere beyond the ash plumes,
the sun still shone. Kelly thought of that reminder in The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien talked about Sauron’s smokes and fumes. Unlike Sauron’s smoke screen, this wasn’t evil. It just… was.

  She was gnawing on more beef jerky when, in lieu of Tolkien’s eagles, two helicopters came down out of the sky and landed on the beat-up parking lot. They were louder than a Me-tallica concert. The wind from their rotors tried to blow the geologists away. The pilots both wore orange suits that made them look like animated carrots. They gestured frantically.

  Along with Larry, Kelly got into one copter. Ruth and Daniel hopped into the other. The cabins didn’t cut the noise at all. Kelly was still fumbling with her uncomfortable seat’s safety harness when the copter took off again. They flew due north, which struck her as a good idea. If the supervolcano erupted, the plume would blow south and west. And…

  “Try to put some mountains between us and the eruption,” Larry bawled, over and over, till the pilot got it. “They may shield us from the worst of the blast.” The pilot swore, but he did it.

  IX

  The helicopters flew like jinking halfbacks, using the peaks of the Rockies for blockers. But they were running from, not towards. And what they were running from would flatten them more mercilessly than any middle linebacker ever hatched. Kelly found a whole new reason to be glad she liked football; the comparison never would have occurred to her otherwise.

  By the time they were zooming down the canyon between Prospect Peak and the slightly lower Folsom Peak to the west, she and Larry both wore helmets like the pilot’s. They cut the din in the cabin a little, and let the geologists talk by shouting instead of by screaming. Most of what Kelly and Larry had to say amounted to variations on the theme of Go like hell!

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” the pilot said when they banged on that drum once too often. “I’m going flat out now, and there’s no guarantee the sumbitch’ll go off while we’re airborne. There’s no guarantee the sumbitch’ll go off at all, right?”

  Every word he said was gospel truth. But he hadn’t spent the night on the ground in that potholed parking lot. He hadn’t felt the earth shudder under him only God knew how often. He also hadn’t been studying the Yellowstone hot spot for his whole career.

  Maybe it wouldn’t blow now. Maybe it wouldn’t blow at all. Maybe the two eruptions would do whatever they did and then subside, leaving Yellowstone changed and damaged but still a place someone in his right mind-someone not a geologist, in other words-might want to visit. big explosion wouldn’t happen for another few thousand years or another few tens of thousands of years.

  Maybe. But Kelly couldn’t make herself believe it.

  While she stewed, the pilot talked with people who weren’t in the helicopter. At last, he said, “Okay. This is what I’ve cooked up. A car’ll be waiting for you at the Butte airport. That’s about as far as I can go on my fuel load. One of you people has a place in Missoula, right?”

  Daniel was in the other whirlybird. Somebody out there had a feel for what was going on. Missoula was about 120 miles northwest up I-90 from Butte. If the supervolcano blew, most of what it blasted into the air would go in the other direction. Missoula might get some, but probably wouldn’t get a lot.

  And if the eruption held off, Kelly could head back to California. Ruth could go to Utah… assuming anyone would want to go to Utah in the shadow of the big blast. Larry mostly hung out in and around Yellowstone. Knowing him, he might be me-shuggeh enough to head back if he got some kind, any kind, of excuse.

  Meanwhile… “Thanks,” she said, a whisker ahead of Larry. She had no idea what Daniel’s place was like. If they couldn’t crash on him… Well, Missoula was bound to have motels. Hotels, even. Times like this were why God made plastic. She might even get the Berkeley Geology Department to reimburse her. Then again, given California’s never-ending budget woes, she might not.

  One more thing she could worry about later, if she was still alive to worry about it.

  Once they got over the Gallatin Range, they were out of the mountains and forests and roaring along above ranch country. The copter flew much lower than the airliners that had been Kelly’s only source of views of the ground from on high. She could see individual cows and even sheep from the herds, and individual cars scattered along the pale asphalt of country roads that hadn’t been repaved in a long time and got so little wear that they wouldn’t need to be for quite a while yet.

  There was I-90 up ahead. Kelly had wondered if it would be packed solid with cars and RVs full of people fleeing Yellowstone, but it wasn’t. Probably weren’t that many left to flee any more.

  The Interstate was two lanes wide in each direction. But for the lack of traffic lights, that would have been a boulevard in L.A. or the Bay Area. When your whole state was almost the size of California but held fewer than a million people, you could have a four-lane main highway and go like hell instead of sitting stuck in traffic on a freeway twelve lanes wide.

  “Bert Mooney Airport coming up,” the pilot said in due course. Kelly idly wondered who Bert Mooney was or had been. The pilot did things with his stick-with the collective, he called it, as if it were a farm in the extinct Soviet Union. The helicopter descended. Not far away, so did the one carrying Ruth and Daniel.

  Whoever Bert Mooney might have been, the two helicopters were his airport’s only current business. Kelly was used to airports like LAX and San Francisco and Oakland. That green Ford sitting there near the terminal couldn’t be the car they’d take away… could it?

  “There’s your wheels, I expect,” the pilot said, pointing to it. Sometimes simplicity had advantages.

  Touchdown on the tarmac a moment later was surprisingly gentle. The other chopper landed three or four seconds after Kelly and Larry’s. A fuel truck pulled up and waited for their rotorsto stop spinning.

  Kelly took off her helmet. Now, with the motor cut, it wasn’t deafening in here. “Thanks more than I know how to tell you,” she said.

  “Amen,” Larry agreed.

  “Not a big deal. Might not’ve been anything at all,” the pilot answered. “Sometimes you’d sooner be safe than sorry, is all. Good luck to you guys.”

  “You, too,” Kelly said as he opened the canopy and she scrambled out. Larry followed her. Ruth and Daniel got out of the other helicopter. They all started dogtrotting across the tarmac toward the car. Kelly presumed it was a rental. She didn’t know for sure, but that was one more thing she could worry about later. After they got to Missoula seemed a pretty good time.

  Halfway to the green Ford, Larry suddenly stopped. Intent only on getting to the car and getting onto I-90, Kelly sent him an annoyed glare. “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped.

  Instead of answering with words, he pointed southeast, over the top of the low, flat-roofed terminal building. Kelly’s gaze automatically followed his index finger. That great, black, swelling, leaping cloud hadn’t been there when they touched down a minute before. It grew every second. Even across a couple of hundred miles, Kelly could see the lightning bolts lashing around its edges. Which meant they were how big? How bright? Some questions either answered themselves or didn’t really need answering, one.

  “Oh, my God,” Kelly whispered. Ruth crossed herself. Kelly hadn’t known she was Catholic. With a last name like Marquez, it was a good bet, though. Maybe Ruth hadn’t thought about being Catholic herself any time lately. Seeing… that ahead was the kind of thing that would remind you.

  “Why isn’t there any noise?” Daniel asked. “Why isn’t the ground shaking?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll feel it. We’ll hear it, too,” Larry answered. “The earthquake waves and the sound waves haven’t got here yet. But they will.” He looked as grim as a phlegmatic person could. “Oh, boy, will they ever. People heard Krakatoa two thousand miles away, and Krakatoa was only a fart in a bathtub next to this.”

  “What would have happened to us if we’d been in the air when the sound wave or shock wa
ve or whatever you want to call it hit us?” Ruth said.

  Kelly looked back at the helicopter pilot. He was staring toward Yellowstone, too. Even through the chopper’s Plexiglas canopy, she could see his mouth hanging open. “What happens to a fly when the swatter comes down?” she said. If you hit a fly with a swatter the size of a house, that probably came closer to describing the force matchup.

  None of them went any closer to the car. Out here in the open, they were about as safe as they could be. Even if the terminal building fell over, it wouldn’t fall on them. “I think we ought to get down,” Larry said. “You guys are too young to remember ‘Drop!’ drills, but you know about ’em, right?”

  An officious fifth-grade teacher from days gone by would have yelled at Kelly for bad form, but she didn’t care. She assumed the classic position on the pavement, which was much smoother than the parking lot where she’d spent the night before-the parking lot that was now one tiny puff in that insanely huge mass of smoke and dust. Drop drills were designed to protect you against Russian H-bombs. What did you do when something way, way bigger than an H-bomb went off not nearly far enough away?

  “Whoa, Nelly!” Larry yelled when the shaking started. Getting down was a good idea, because Kelly knew she couldn’t have stayed on her feet. She’d wondered what the Richter reading for a supervolcano would be. It was enormous, or whatever one step higher than enormous was. She’d put all this distance between herself and the epicenter, and she was still getting tossed around like a rag doll.

  It didn’t want to ease up, either. Like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and… How much energy was being released all at once? The calculator inside her head said TILT.

  Windows in the airport terminal broke. One of the helicopters that had flown the geologists out of Yellowstone went over onto its side. Luckily, the pilot was still in his safety harness, so he might be okay. Even more luckily, neither copter had started refueling. Everybody’d stopped to gape at the cataclysm off in Yellowstone.