Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  He stuck out his hand now. “Congratulations, Bryce,” he said in his soft, precise voice. He was heading towards emeritus status, but looked twenty years younger than he was. Maybe, like Dorian Gray, he had a portrait somewhere that was taking a beating.

  He’d been at UCLA since dissertations were typed on Selec-trics, and since the University of California system had money. He’d probably had his plaid jacket about that long, too. His father’s translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles were classics among classicists. He’d never done anything so illustrious himself, but he was more than capable.

  “Thanks,” Bryce said. “I’m only sorry it took so much longer than I thought it would.”

  “They have a way of doing that,” Professor Harriman said. “And it may be agathe tykhe in disguise, you know. Suppose you’d finished when you expected to. Suppose you’d taken a job at the University of Wyoming or Idaho State or some such place.” By the way he spoke, all the colleges and universities in the mountain West interchangeable.

  Even if that was naive, he had a point. It was good luck not to have wound up somewhere like that. Bryce might not have got out if he had. “I had my brush with the supervolcano any which way,” he said.

  “Yes, so you did,” Harriman agreed. “I’m glad you made it back in one piece. And I’m glad to have one copy of the thesis for myself, one for the department library, and one for the University Research Library.”

  How often had Bryce wrestled with Doric verb forms in the classics library? Lots. One whole bookcase was full of bound dissertations going back half a century and more. Did anybody ever look at them? He knew he never had. Some eventually got turned into proper books. The rest… must have seemed important at the time, at least to the shlubs cranking them out.

  And was the world ready for a fat new study of Theocritus and the other leading Hellenistic poets? Would Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard get into a ferocious bidding war over the publication rights? If they did, they might run the advance they paid him all the way up into three figures. But they wouldn’t. Or it sure wasn’t likely.

  As if to underscore that, Professor Harriman asked, “What will you do now that you’ve finished?”

  “Look for work. What else can I do now?” Bryce said.

  “Mm, yes.” Harriman didn’t need to worry about it. He might not have been tenured since the Hellenistic Age, but he seemed as if he had. He coughed delicately now. “The job situation is… difficult at the moment. In the present emergency, classics departments find themselves under unprecedented pressure. Surely you are aware of this.”

  “Surely,” Bryce said, deadpan. Slots opened up only when the current holder dropped dead. Even then, a university was at least as likely to cut a position as to fill it. It wasn’t just positions, either. Whole classics departments were facing the axe. So were French and Italian departments and anything else that didn’t immediately help people dig out from the supervolcano. What kind of world they’d have once they dug out-if they could dig out-they’d worry about later.

  “Well, then…” Harvey Harriman spread his well-manicured hands.

  “Oh, I’ll take any kind of job I can get,” Bryce said. “If somebody wants me to teach Western Civ at a community college, I’ll do that. If a Catholic high school needs a Latin teacher, I can do that. Or if all I can come up with is a job job, if you know what I mean, I’ll do that, too.”

  “I do understand. The wolf at the door is a harsh taskmaster,” Harriman said, as if he knew anything about the wolf at the door. Yeah, as if! His father might have grounded him if he’d messed up too many declensions, but that was about it. Sighing, he went on, “It seems a shame to have to turn your back on what took so long and required so much work and study to accomplish.”

  Bryce thought it seemed a shame, too. But starving seemed an even bigger shame. “You don’t always get to do what you want to do,” he said. “Sometimes you do what you have to do, and pick up the pieces from there.”

  “Will you come back to UCLA in June for the year’s commencement?” Professor Harriman asked.

  “I hope so.” Bryce had blown off the ceremony after his A.B. and M.A. His mother would probably disown him if he did it again. So would Susan, whose opinion mattered more to him-and who was waiting for him right this minute.

  He said his good-byes to Professor Harriman. He wondered when he would ever see the inside of the UCLA Classics Department again. Once upon a time, business weenies had infested the Public Policy building. Now they had a bigger, newer, spiffier one all their own: the Anderson School of Management. Classics got some of their leftovers-or their sloppy seconds, if you were feeling uncommonly cynical.

  Susan called the North Campus Center Maxim’s. Maybe that was a History Department in-joke; Bryce had never heard it before he started hanging out with her. She sat at one of the big tables outside. Unusually in this winter of the earth’s discontent, it wasn’t raining. She got up as he drew near. “Are you official?”

  “I’m done, all right-like a roast,” he answered.

  “Hey, you did something special,” she said. “How do you want to celebrate?”

  “People would talk if we did that right here,” Bryce said.

  Susan made a face at him. “How about coffee and a danish instead?”

  “Talk about second prizes!” he said mournfully. She poked him in the ribs. That didn’t do much-she was far more ticklish than he was. They walked into Maxim’s together.

  Susan did get coffee and a danish. Bryce got a danish and a Coke instead. Susan bought. “You just turned in your diss,” she said. “How awesome is that?”

  “I don’t have a job. I don’t have much chance for a job. I was just talking with my chairperson about what I was gonna do. He didn’t have any terrific ideas, either. How awesome is that?” One more reason for Bryce to let Susan buy.

  “Something will turn up for you,” she said. “Something will turn up for me when I finish, too. Would you have put all that time and effort into it if you really thought you’d never get the chance to use it?”

  They sat down at a couple of chairs facing the brickwork around a circular gas fire. The warmth was welcome. No doubt Susan had meant the question rhetorically. Bryce gave it serious consideration all the same. At last, he said, “You know, I think I would. What else would I have been doing instead? Retail? Real estate? I might have made more money in real estate-”

  “The way the roller coaster goes, you might not have, too,” Susan broke in.

  “You’ve got that right,” Bryce said. “Whatever I did, I wouldn’t have had much fun doing it. Here I am, close to thirty, and I’ve got away with not working for a living yet. Can’t go on forever, not unless you inherit or something, but I’ve had a pretty good run.”

  One of the reasons he’d got away with not working for a living was that Vanessa had dropped out and did work. Add her real salary to the dribs and drabs he brought in, and they’d done tolerably well. He’d had more trouble staying afloat since the breakup. But he didn’t want to remember Vanessa now.

  “You’re-not practical,” Susan said. Vanessa had told him the same thing. He seemed to have to remember her, like it or not. She’d said it with intent to wound, though, if not with intent to condemn. With Susan, it was just a statement of fact.

  “Guilty,” he said. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know it himself. “I’m afraid nobody who writes poems modeled after ancient pastorals will get a lot of ink in the Wall Street Journal.”

  “That nevot what I meant. You’ve published them. I think that’s wonderful,” Susan said.

  Bryce thought it was wonderful, too. Of course, he’d made exactly no money from any of them. And here, out of the blue, Vanessa’s brother sold-really sold-a story. If that made Bryce jealous (and it did), he was sure it drove Vanessa nuts. He said, “But no one should hang out with me because she expects to get rich doing it. Or even eat, necessarily.”

  “I’m hanging out with you because I want to, silly,” Su
san said. “One way or another, we’ll make ends meet. Who needs more than that?”

  Plenty of people did, or thought they did. Vanessa had always had filet mignon tastes, even when the budget yelled for ground chuck. She was never happy with what she had. He sometimes thought, especially toward the end, that she couldn’t be happy without something to be unhappy about.

  Susan wasn’t like that. For a while, Bryce had wondered if something was missing in his relationship with her. Before long, he’d figured out what it was: tension. Once he realized that, he quit missing it.

  “I wonder what’s out there in the big, wide world,” he said. The big, wide, ugly world, he thought, but he didn’t come out with that. “I don’t have any excuses left now. I’ve got to find out.”

  Selling his story gave Marshall fifteen McLuhan minutes of fame at UCSB. Because of paper shortages, the campus rag was down to a weekly, but it ran a story about him. The photographer who snapped him holding up a printout of “Well, Why Not?” was seriously cute. She seemed impressed with him, too: impressed enough to let him have her cell number, with the air of an aid worker handing out sacks of wheat to pipe-cleaner-legged famine victims in Zimbabwe or somewhere like that. But when he tried it, it turned out to be bogus. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all.

  Professor Bolger gave him an A in the course, which he was glad to have, and advice, which he found as welcome as the phony phone number. “Congratulations. You’ve sold to a market I’d-mm, maybe not kill, but commit armed robbery, anyway-to break into,” Bolger said. “Now you have to figure out where you go from here.”

  Where Marshall wanted to go was away from the prof’s journal-crowded office. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem practical for the next few minutes. “Uh-huh,” he said, and tried to keep looking interested while he tuned out.

  “If you’ve got anything else you like, you should send it to the editor there right away,” Bolger went on. “Anybody-well, lots of people, anyhow-can get lucky once. Being able to do it over and over is what marks the difference between a writer and somebody who just writes, if you know what I mean.” He waited expectantly.

  Thus prompted, Marshall nodded and went “Uh-huh” again, for all the world as if he’d been listening.

  “The other side of the coin is, you don’t want to get a swelled head because somebody sent you a check,” Bolger said. “Twenty-five years ago, when I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine sold two stories to a magazine that’s long since gone under. He decided he knew everything there was to know, the way you can when you’re that age. He dropped out of the University of Washington halfway through his freshman year to become a writer, and he sold a couple of novels, too. But he’s made his living moving stuff from here to there at Sears ever since.” Another pregnant pause.

  “I’m not gonna drop out now,” waitid, “not with my degree right around the corner.” He’d avoided it as long as he could, but they were going to pitch him out into the real world no matter how little he liked it.

  “I should hope not,” Professor Bolger said, politely horrified at the mere idea. “If you work hard at it, and if you don’t expect too much, writing is a good trade in difficult times. There’s not much overhead-hardly any. And you can do it part-time, to add to your income from a more ordinary job. I’ve been doing that for a long time now.”

  “Right. Makes sense,” Marshall said. Of course, the prof was bound to have some fancy degree piled on top of his bachelor’s. You didn’t get to teach at a university without one; Marshall was sure of that. One sold story, or even several sold stories, wouldn’t win him possession of the office next door here.

  “Students in my classes don’t often place pieces. It happens, but not every quarter. Nowhere near,” Bolger said. “You have a right to be proud of yourself.” He glanced at the clock on the wall across from his desk. “And do keep writing. I always hate it when people who have the ability don’t use it.”

  That had to be Okay, I’ve used up as much office time on you as I’m going to. Marshall said his good-byes and got out. It was late afternoon. The sun was sinking in one of those ridiculously over-the-top sunsets people had started taking for granted since the supervolcano erupted. Oranges, reds, purples, sometimes greens… The light show usually started a good hour and a half before actual sundown. You didn’t even have to be loaded to enjoy it, though that sure didn’t hurt.

  As Marshall walked to the bike rack, somebody behind him said, “Hey, isn’t that the guy who-?”

  He walked a little taller, a little straighter, for a few steps. After all, he was the guy who. He was right this minute, anyhow. Before long, somebody else would do something worth noticing. Then, for a little while, he’d be the guy who.

  Marshall unlocked his bike and climbed aboard. How did you keep it going once you weren’t the guy who any more? How did you keep it going when you never got to be the guy who? His brother’s band had always had to deal with that. More hype stuck to the third runner-up from American Idol, who was only almost the guy who, than Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had seen in their whole career.

  One good way to keep it going was not to let the jerk in the Lexus flip you over his-no, her-fender. “You dumb asshole!” Marshall said. The Lexus’ driver went on her way with the lordly indifference of those who didn’t need to use their own muscle power to get from hither to yon.

  A moment later, though, Marshall had his Come the revolution moment as he pedaled past two gas stations on opposite sides of the street. Prices had been zooming up and up since the eruption. One of the stations had topped six bucks a gallon the other day-and it wasn’t a tourist trap by the 101, either. A sign in front of the other said

  SORRY-NO GAS TODAY.

  Lots of the petroleum that got made into gasoline came from the Middle East and other distant places. Israeli nukes on the Iranian oil fields hadn’t done that supply any good. But some of it was homegrown. The supervolcano hadn’t done domestic production any good, which was putting it mildly. And some of the big refineries in Texas and Oklahoma were still out of action, while transportation between the West Coast and anything east of Yellowstone remained totally screwed.

  Which meant high prices and shortages. Here were both of them. Pretty soon, gas prices would get to the point where they pinched a bitch in a Lexus. Or else even her Majesty wouldn’t be able to fill up at all. Then she’d have to stick her rich ass on a bicycle like the peasants or damn well stay home.

  Come the revolution… When Marshall got back to his place, he drank a Coke (they were plugging them as Better than ever with real sugar! because you couldn’t get high-fructose corn syrup when the corn crop lay under volcanic ash) and fired up his computer. He did his e-mail first.

  After that, though, he started working on a new story, one about somebody who was rich enough to drive a Lexus and live in Santa Barbara, but who found that her money was buying her less and less, and that it couldn’t buy some things at all. He knew a bit about failed relationships; all he had to do was think of the one that had blown up on his folks.

  He stopped after a couple of hours and a thousand words and went back to reread what he’d written. He cleaned up some clumsy phrasing and put in foreshadowing to show that Ms. Lexus didn’t have it as together as she thought she did. Then he nodded to himself. It… felt good. He didn’t know how to put it any better than that. If he stayed at it and finished it, he thought he had a chance to sell it somewhere.

  So much he still didn’t know, not just about writing but about finding markets and everything else that had to do with the business. He was at least as surprised as anyone else that somebody’d bought one piece. Could lightning really strike twice? Could he be, or become, a creative-writing major who’d got lucky?

  How could you know something like that? The only answer that occurred to him was, by writing and seeing if anything else stuck. He was no more diligent than he’d ever had to be. You needed that stuff if you were going to go anywhere in this racket. That seem
ed obvious.

  Did he have it in him? That seemed much less so. All he could do was give it his best shot, whatever that turned out to be. If he didn’t decide to do something else in the meantime, maybe he’d find out.

  The nurse took Louise Ferguson’s temperature with a gadget she stuck into her ear. The old under-the-tongue thermometer was as antique as a Victorian thundermug. Measuring blood pressure still involved a cuff around the upper arm and a stethoscope, though. After writing the data on Louise’s chart, the nurse said, “This all seems fine. How are you feeling today?”

  The only way she could have made that more patronizing would have been to ask How are we feeling today? But we was, or were, involved, or Louise wouldn’t have been sitting impatiently in this patient room. “Pregnant,” she answered, her voice nothing but grim.

  “Well, yes.” Nothing dented the nurse’s good cheer. “Dr. Suzuki will see you in a few minutes.” She bustled out and almost closed the door behind her.

  “Happy day,” Louise said, but not very loud.

  Travis Suzuki was several years younger than she was. He always seemed bright and self-assured; she’d rarely met a doctor short on self-confidence. By the way he swept into the examination room, he expected her to genuflect. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m doing all right,” Louise said.

  He glanced at her chart. “Your numbers look good. None of the tests we’ve run show anything abnormal about the fetus. If you proceed with the pregnancy, chances are you’ll have a healthy baby. If you don’t… Well, you’re approaching the end of your first trimester. If you wait longer than that to decide to terminate, things get more complicated, as I’m sure you know.”