Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  People in the lot were aligning like iron filings scattered across a paper on top of a magnet. They were all facing a little west of north. Vanessa turned that way, too, before she quite realized what she was doing.

  She liked Denver’s western horizon, with the Rockies shouldering their way up into the sky as far as the eye could see-if air pollution let the eye see them at all. This was a clear, bright day; the morning had been downright chilly. She could see the mountains just fine.

  And, towering far above them, she could see what all the other people saw: that enormous column of smoke growing, swelling, every second. “That can’t be Yellowstone. It can’t,” someone said, with the plaintive tones of a man hoping to be contradicted. “It’s too far away

  … isn’t it? I mean, a little ash at the airport, that’s one thing. But this…” His voice trailed away.

  Vanessa wanted to believe it was much too far to be Yellowstone. She couldn’t. You could see the Rockies most of the way to Kansas in good weather. That cloud, obviously, was a hell of a lot taller than the mountains. For all she knew, her father could see it back in San Atanasioiv›

  “It’s getting bigger,” a woman said. “It’s heading this way.”

  Plenty of crap from the little eruptions-though they hadn’t seemed little till now-had headed this way. That was why flights into and out of the airport had been hit-and-miss for so long. Not all of this titanic cloud was heading toward Denver, obviously. Oh, no. There’d be plenty to go around and then some. But what would happen when Denver’s share landed? Nothing good. Vanessa could see that right away.

  “Go home, folks.” That was Malcolm Talbott, who ran Amalgamated Humanoids. “We’re not going to get anything done today. Go home,” he repeated, louder this time. “We’ll see how things are tomorrow. If they aren’t so bad, we’ll work. If they are…” He shrugged. “We won’t be the only one with troubles. You’d best believe we won’t.” One more earthquake put a rolling period under his words.

  Nobody needed to tell Vanessa twice. She made a beeline for her car, fumbling in her purse for the keys. She’d just unlocked the door when the bellow from the blast tore through Denver. Yellowstone was over 400 miles away-she’d found that out. Sound took forty minutes or so to get from there to here. She wondered what that bellow would have been like if she were only, say, fifty miles away. She didn’t wonder long. It would have torn her head off.

  She jumped into the car and slammed the door. That helped a little: less than she would have wished. The car rocked under her. She started it anyway, and punched the radio buttons till she found news. For once, it didn’t take long.

  “-gigantic disaster,” someone was saying in a high, excited voice. “Several states are sure to be severely impacted.”

  Vanessa started a reflexive sneer, then cut it off. Things were going to come down on several states, sure as hell. Things were already coming down on several states. When you used impact as a verb, that was what you were supposed to mean. Maybe this yahoo meant affect, but for once he was literally correct.

  “We’ll be right back after this important message,” he said. The message proved to be important only to the male-enhancement company that put it out and to the radio station’s bottom line. Vanessa hit another button.

  “-will undoubtedly blanket Denver,” an educated-sounding woman was saying. “How deep the ashfall will be, and how serious its effects, no one can yet predict. It is already obvious, though, that removing it will be more challenging than clearing a heavy snowfall. Where can we take it that isn’t also already covered in ash?”

  Wasn’t that also true of snow? But snow eventually melted, and you just had to get it out of the streets. Snow on lawns and parks was beautiful. Volcanic ash would be anything but.

  “How will volcanic ash affect people with respiratory ailments?” a man asked.

  “The only thing I can say right now is, it won’t be good,” the woman answered. “It won’t be good for anyone. And it won’t be good for livestock, and stockraising is particularly important in the eastern half of the state.”

  Colorado had always been uneasily divided between agriculture and mining. Tourism added a third leg to the stand, but now everything was knocked for a loop. Who besides geologists would want to come visit a city blanketed-how deep? — in volcanic ash? Escaped lunatics, maybe.

  “Some of this dust-maybe a lot of it-will reach the upper atmoere and be blown around the world,” the woman added. “Global climate change may be severe.”

  That didn’t sound good. The hugely towering black cloud off to the west of north didn’t look good. The earthquakes that kept rolling through Denver didn’t feel good. Nothing seemed good-except Vanessa had the rest of the day off.

  X

  Colin met Gabe Sanchez at a familiar spot: in front of the coffeepot. As Colin loaded up more instant brain cells, Gabe said, “Well, it’s finally gone and happened.”

  “What’s gone and happened?” Colin asked, adulterating his java with cream and sugar. He stood aside so Gabe could get at the pot.

  “That superwaddayacallit in Yellowstone went kapow,” Sanchez answered. “I just saw it on a news feed from the Net… Hey, where you going, man?”

  “To find out what’s going on for myself,” Colin said grimly. “Kelly’s still up there, or she was last night.”

  “Oh. Hell. That’s not good,” Gabe said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I hope everything turns out okay.” Sanchez crossed himself.

  Raised a hardshell Baptist, Colin had long since lost his religion. Most of the time, he didn’t miss it. Most of the time, in fact, he forgot he’d ever had it. It was easy not to believe in God, especially a merciful God, when you were a cop. Colin often wondered how guys like Gabe managed. Every once in a while, he envied them the solace their faith could bring. This was one of those times.

  The first thing he did was check his phone. He breathed again when he saw a text from Kelly: On helicopter. On my way out. “Thank you, Jesus,” he muttered. It was as close to a prayer as he’d come in God knew how long.

  One thing the cop shop could boast, and that was fast Internet. When Colin turned to CNN. com, he got live streaming video from a weather satellite. There was a hell of a lot of smoke, and under it patches of fire. The headline was simple: YELLOWSTONE CATASTROPHE! When he noticed the computer-added state boundaries on the video, he realized that was an understatement, but English didn’t come equipped with words to describe anything this big. No language did. No language since the primeval Ook! had ever needed to cope with anything like this.

  There was a story under the video. The great collapse had happened only forty minutes earlier. He shook his head in wonder. The world was a connected place these days, all right.

  Then he remembered he’d had a coffee cup in his hand when he ran back to his desk. He reached for it… and discovered the world was a connected place in more ways than the information superhighway. That gentle rolling motion under his swivel chair could only be an earthquake. By the way it went on and on, it was one doozy of an earthquake, too. Cops and secretaries started exclaiming-he wasn’t the only one who felt it. But it stayed mild, so it was a long way off.

  “Holy crap!” he said. “That’s got to be the supervolcano.”

  Back more than a hundred years before, they’d felt the San Francisco earthquake in Los Angeles. But Yellowstone was a lot farther away than San Francisco. Didn’t that argue that the quake that went with the supervolcano eruption was bigger than the one that had flattened the city bythe bay? How much would this one flatten?

  He wondered what had happened to Denver. Central Colorado suddenly seemed much too close to northwestern Wyoming. He called Vanessa. He got her voice mail, which might mean anything or nothing. At the beep, he said, “You okay? Give me a call and let me know. ’Bye.” He’d done what he could on that front.

  A little fiddling on the computer told him how far from San Atanasio Yellowstone was. It
also told him how fast earthquake waves traveled, even if the Wiki article did say they “propagated” (he tried to imagine fornicating earthquake waves, but his mind rebelled). San Atanasio would feel an earthquake in Yellowstone about forty minutes after it happened, assuming it felt such an earthquake at all. Yeah, assuming, he thought.

  His cell phone rang. He always answered the landline on his desk with some variation on Ferguson. Here he said, “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dad.” It was Vanessa. “I just got home. Could you feel the quake there?”

  “Sure could. What’s it like where you are? You just got home, you said?”

  “Yeah. The building where I work stayed up, but power’s out. It’s out here, too. I don’t know when it’ll come back.” She hesitated, then added, “I don’t know if it’ll come back. And the sky… Oh, my God, the sky! The cloud’s coming this way. You can tell. Pickles is under the bed, and he won’t come out. He’s scared shitless-I cleaned it off the rug.”

  “I believe that. Should you get out now, while the getting’s good?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking about it. Will you let Mom and the brothers know I’m okay? I don’t want to run my battery any more than I have to-I don’t know when I’ll be able to charge it again.”

  “Okay,” Colin said, though he looked forward to calling Louise the way he looked forward to losing a tooth. “Take care.”

  “You, too. ’Bye.”

  He started to add Good luck, but she’d hung up by then. Sighing, he called Louise’s cell. Maybe he’d luck out. Maybe he’d get her voice mail and not actually have to talk to her.

  But no. That familiar voice, once loved, now… not, said, “Hello?” in his ear.

  “Hi. It’s me.” His own voice was hard and flat. “I just talked to Vanessa. She’s okay, but it sounds like the quake hit Denver a lot harder than it did here.”

  “The same quake?” Louise said incredulously, so she wasn’t with it at all.

  Colin filled her in in words of one syllable. “Power’s down in Denver, and the ash cloud is heading that way,” he finished. From what Kelly’d said, the ash might even dust Los Angeles. Louise didn’t need to worry about that right now, though.

  “Good God!” she said. “I’d better call the poor baby.”

  “Don’t,” Colin said sharply. “She’s trying to save her battery till power comes back, if it does. She told me to call you. She’s being sensible.” For once in her life. He didn’t say that. What good would it do?

  What good would anything do? “She talked to you instead of me, Mister High and Mighty? How did that happen?” Louise demanded.

  “Because I found out what was going on and called her,” Colin answered. “That’s m…” He was talking to a dead line again.

  He powered off his own phone. Chances were Louise would call Vanessa, just to show him. Chances were she’d talk the kid’s ear off, too. Well, Vanessa could tell her to shut up. Vanessa could try, anyway.

  He scrolled down the story under the wound in the earth. It said the ash plume would top out at over 100,000 feet. Twenty miles, he thought. None of the Rockies was even three miles high. You couldn’t see the Rockies from L.A. Even imagining you could was silly. But something seven times as high? He didn’t know. He didn’t think he had enough trig left to find out, either. His long-ago high-school math teachers would be pissed off that he didn’t, but that was how the cookie bounced or the ball crumbled. His high-school math teachers had been a bunch of bores.

  Rob was on the other side of the country, touring with his band. If anybody was okay, he was. Marshall was up in Santa Barbara, getting ready for a new quarter and another new major. The eruption wouldn’t trash Santa Barbara. Colin didn’t think trashing Santa Barbara was possible. The only thing that convinced him Santa Barbara wasn’t heaven on earth was the real-estate prices there. Heaven wouldn’t have been anywhere near so expensive.

  The CNN news feed said the President was urging everyone to stay calm during the present emergency. How calm could you stay when a quake knocked down everything you had or when boulders or ash fell out of the sky on you? Colin routinely despised Democrats in the White House, and Republicans routinely disappointed him. But hadn’t this clown’s advisors briefed him about what a supervolcano eruption would mean?

  Or maybe they had. As Kelly’d said, some disasters were just too big to plan for. You hoped they didn’t happen. If they happened all the same, what could you do but duck and cover and roll with the punches and try your best to come out the other side, if there turned out to be any other side to come out to?

  Half the country must have felt this punch, maybe more. And the eruption itself was only the first part of the combination the supervolcano would throw at civilization. Under those circumstances, urging calm on people might not be so bad. It wouldn’t hurt, and it might do a tiny bit of good.

  Something rumbled outside, and went on rumbling. During the big war, the Germans on the Eastern Front must have heard noise like that when the Russians shelled them before sending in the tanks. Colin knew about naval gunnery, but it was never this continuous. For this, you’d have to line up guns of every caliber hub to hub, shoot them all off at once, and have enough ammo to keep shooting and shooting and shooting.

  Or you’d have to have a supervolcano go off eight hundred miles away. This sound had been traveling for more than an hour, and it was still loud enough to shake the building almost as hard as the earthquake had. In another hour or hour and a half, the President would hear it in the Oval Office.

  And, three or four hours after that, they might hear it in Europe. They’d heard Krakatoa a couple of thousand miles away, and this thing made Krakatoa look like Vanessa’s Pickles next to a sabertooth.

  “Gabe!” Colin said through the rumble that wouldn’t quit.

  “Waddaya need?” Sergeant Sanchez answered.

  “C’mere a sec,” Colin said. Gabe got up from his own desk and ambled over. Colin went on, “We had better secure a supply of gasoline for the department, and I mean right now. This thing will screw transport like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “So why are you telling me? Why aren’t you telling the chief, or else the mayor? Have we got the money in the budget to do anything like that? Can the city get it for us if we don’t?” Gabe was full of reasonable questions.

  Or rather, he was full of questions that would have been reasonable a little more than an hour earlier. The chief and the mayor would be full of it, too. Colin had no doubts on that score. The difference was, he could-or he hoped he could-make Gabe see sense. His superiors wouldn’t want to listen… as if they ever did.

  “This has to be unofficial,” Colin said. “No refineries in San Atanasio, but there are some over in El Segundo and down in Lomita. Talk to the managers there. Tell ’em we’re gonna have problems. Tell ’em the whole state’s gonna have problems. Do it now-get there ahead of their own cops. Show ’em we’re on the ball. See what you can do to get ’em to lend us a hand.”

  “I got you,” Gabe said. “You want ’em to think we know more about what’s going on than their local people do.”

  “Uh-huh.” Colin nodded. Thanks to Kelly, he did know more about what was liable to go on than most of the local competition. The problem with that was, the more you knew, the worse things looked. You could tell a refinery manager that California would have problems for a while. You couldn’t tell a guy like that that the world had just walked into a sucker punch. If he didn’t already know it for himself-and chances were he wouldn’t-he wouldn’t believe you.

  “Okay. I’ll do it,” Sanchez said. “Better get moving, while those guys’re still shook up by the quake and the boom and shit.”

  “Good plan,” Colin agreed. The refinery managers would be shaken-literally and otherwise. They might be more inclined to listen to bulky, imposing Sergeant Sanchez. Colin would have bet his last quarter that things would get worse, not better. But you didn’t want to tell civilians too much too soon. T
hey couldn’t always handle bad news.

  And he knew he was a cynical cop, ready to look on the gloomy side both by training and by temperament. He had to put that in the equation, too. Kelly might not understand supervolcanoes as well as she thought she did. It wasn’t as if geologists had ever had a live one to study.

  So maybe this wasn’t a catastrophe after all, CNN. com notwithstanding. Maybe it was just a disaster. Colin laughed at himself. Only a cynical cop could have a thought like that and actually find consolation in it.

  Bryce Miller had a window seat on the flight from O’Hare back to LAX. He couldn’t stand LAX. He didn’t know anyone who could. O’Hare was even busier. It seemed to run more smoothly, though.

  Or maybe that was just his imagination. The conference on the Hellenistic world at the University of Chicago had gone as well as he’d dared hope. He hadn’t given a paper, but he’d critiqued one. He thought his remarks were to the point. The professors who’d listened to him seemed to think so, too.

  Something might come of that. No guarantees-there were never any guarantees-but something might. If he could get his thesis done… Or why think small? They did hire people who’d done all but the dissertation. There was even a name for them: ABDs. They got paid less, of course, but after a TA’s money any real salary looked terrific.

  The guy in the middle iggled. He wasn’t deliberately annoying, but he was there, right there. And the woman in front of Bryce had reclined her seat as far as it would go. She wasn’t trying to kneecap him, which didn’t mean she wasn’t doing it.

  He got out the pastrami on rye and the big chocolate-chip cookie he’d bought in the airport. The bastards weren’t about to feed you. He counted himself lucky the flight attendants had doled out a Coke. Such extravagant generosity had to be bad for the bottom line.

  Somebody somewhere in the plane was eating something smellier than airport pastrami. Bryce was forcibly reminded of the modern fable about the Stinky Cheese Man. You’d think whoever was chowing down would have more regard for everyone else trapped in the flying cigar with him. But no.