Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  It was, as the Godfather might say, an offer I couldn’t refuse. Even though I regarded (and to some degree still do) Internet publication as not really publication at all, because no tangible printed edition results from it, I was being allowed to have it both ways here—get the big Omni fee and still have my story distributed through the print media, where old-guard people like me would be able to find and read it.

  An idea quickly came to me. Los Angeles, a city I have visited often and know very well, is constantly plagued by all manner of natural calamities: earthquakes, fires, droughts (sometimes followed by torrential rains and mudslides), lethal concentrations of smog, and almost everything else imaginable except volcanic eruptions. Well, I thought, why not bring on a volcanic eruption or two as well? There don’t happen to be any active or even inactive volcanoes in the vicinity of the Los Angeles Basin, but an area as geologically unstable as that is could surely generate one, especially if helped along by a science-fiction writer. And then I could examine the ways in which a resilient modern city might cope with the sudden and unexpected arrival of volcanoes in its midst.

  So I postulated volcanoes bursting forth along Los Angeles’ eastern rim, and, since that idea was fantastic enough to carry a science-fiction story by itself, set it in what is essentially today’s Los Angeles rather than choosing to increase the distancing effect by inventing a futuristic one for my story. The work went swiftly. I like Los Angeles, but although I live in California myself I live as far from L.A. as Paris is from Nice, so the city I was destroying was someone else’s, not my own, and that made the imaginative task a little easier. I delivered the story in the spring of 1995; Omni posted it immediately on its on-line site, where, so far as I know, nobody ever looked at it; and a few months later it had its “real” publication in the issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine dated Mid-December, 1995.

  One little irony ensued. After I wrote the story, I realized that it had considerable movie potential: the Hollywood film makers love to make movies about disasters in Los Angeles, and this was a disaster no one had ever thought of before. But apparently a lot of people had thought of it at the same time I did, because within a few weeks of my story’s publication, and before anyone in the movie industry had had a chance to consider it for filming, no less than three movies featuring volcanic eruptions in Los Angeles were announced. (I’m not claiming to be the victim of plagiarism here, just of an untimely coincidence.) All three came out simultaneously; I didn’t go to see them, and apparently nobody else did either, because they all vanished rapidly and even their titles are forgotten today, at least by me.

  My story, though, does find its way into print every few years. And here it is again.

  ——————

  It’s seven in the morning and the big wall-screen above Cal Mattison’s desk is beginning to light up like a Christmas tree as people start phoning Volcano Central with reports of the first tectonic events of the day. A little bell goes off to announce the arrival of each new one. Ping! and there’s a blue light, a fumarole popping open in somebody’s back yard in Baldwin Park, steam but no lava. Ping! and a green one, minor lava tongue reaching the surface in Temple City. Ping! again, blue light in Pico Rivera. And then come three urgent pings in a row, bright splotch of red on the screen. Which indicates that a big new plume of smoke must be rising out of the main volcanic cone sitting up there on top of the Orange Freeway where the intersection with the Pomona Freeway used to be, foretelling a goodly fresh gush of lava about to go rolling down the slope.

  “Busy morning, huh?” says Nicky Herzog, staring over Mattison’s shoulder at the screen. Herzog is a sharp-faced hyperactive little guy, all horn-rimmed glasses and beady eyes, always poking his big nose into other people’s business.

  Mattison shrugs. He is a huge man, six feet five, plenty of width between his shoulders, and a shrug is a big, elaborate project for him. “Shit, Nicky, this isn’t anything, yet. Go have yourself some breakfast.”

  “A bunch of blues, a green, and a red, and that ain’t anything, you say?”

  “Nothing that concerns us, man.” Mattison taps the screen where the red is flashing. “Pomona’s ancient history. It isn’t none of our business, what goes on in Pomona, not any more. Whatever’s happening where you see that red, all the harm’s already been done, can’t do no more, not now. And those blues—shit, it’s just some smoke. Let ’em put on gas masks. As for the green in Temple City, well—” He shakes his head. “Nah. They’ll take care of that out of local resources. Get yourself some breakfast, Nicky.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Scrambled eggs and snake meat.”

  Herzog slithers away. He’s sort of like a snake himself, Mattison thinks: a narrow little guy, no width to him at all, moves in a funny head-first way as though he’s cutting a path through the air for himself with his nose. He used to be something in Hollywood, a screenwriter or a story editor or something, a successful one, too, Mattison has heard, before he blitzed out on Quaaludes and Darvon and coke and God knows what-all else and wound up in Silver Lake Citizens Service House with the rest of this bunch of casualties.

  Mattison is a former casualty himself, who once had carried a very serious boozing jones on his back that had a heavy negative impact on his professional performance as a studio carpenter and extremely debilitating effects on his driving skills. His drinking also led him to be overly free with his fists, not a wise idea for a man of his size and strength, because he tended to inflict a lot of damage and that ultimately involved an unfortunate amount of legal expense, not to mention frequent and troublesome judicial chastisement. But all of that is behind him now. Mattison, who is twenty-eight years old, single, good-natured, and reasonably intelligent, is well along in recovery. For the past eighteen months he has been not just an inmate but also a staffer here at Silver Lake, gradually making the transition from victim of his own lousy impulse control to guardian of the less fortunate, an inspiration to those who seek to pull themselves up out of the mud as he has done.

  Various of the less fortunate are trickling into the room right now. Official wake-up time at Silver Lake Citizens Service House is half past six, and you are expected to be down for breakfast by seven, a rule that nearly everybody observes, since breakfast ceases to be available beyond 7:30, no exceptions made. Mattison himself is up at five every morning because getting up unnaturally early is a self-inflicted part of his recovery regime, and Nicky Herzog is usually out of his room well before the required wake-up hour because perpetual insomnia has turned out to be an accidental facet of his recovery program, but most of the others are reluctant awakeners at best. Some would probably never get out of bed at all, except for the buddy-point system in effect at the house, where you get little bonus goodies for seeing to it that your roommate who likes to sleep in doesn’t get the chance to do it.

  Mary Maud Gulliver is the first one in, followed by her sullen-faced roommate Annette Lopez, and after them, a bunch of rough beasts slouching toward breakfast, come Paul Foust, Herb Evans, Lenny Prochaska, Nadine Doheny, Marty Cobos, and Marcus Hawks. That’s most of them, and the others will be along in two or three minutes. And, sure enough, here they come. That muscle-bound bozo Blazes McFlynn is the next one down—Mattison can hear him in the breakfast room razzing Herzog, who for some reason he likes to goof around with. “Good morning, you miserable little faggot,” McFlynn says. “You fucking creep.” Herzog sputters back, an angry, wildly obscene and flamboyant response. He’s good with words, if nothing else. McFlynn drives Herzog nuts; he has been reprimanded a couple of times for the way he acts up when Herzog’s around. Herzog is an edgy, unlikable man, but as far as Mattison knows he isn’t any faggot. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  Buck Randegger, slow and slouching and affable, appears next, and then voluminous Melissa Hornack, she of the six chins and hippopotamoid rump. Just two or three missing, now, and Mattison can hear them on the stairs. The current population of Silver Lake Citizens Service House is fourteen inmat
es and four full-time live-in staff. They occupy a spacious and comfortable old three-story sixteen-room house that supposedly was, once upon a time back around 1920 or 1930, the mansion of some important star of silent movies. The place was an even bigger wreck, up until five or six years ago, than its current inhabitants were themselves, but it has been nicely rehabilitated by its occupants since then as part of their Citizens Service obligation.

  Mattison has long since had breakfast, but he usually goes into the dining room to sit with the inmates while they eat, just in case someone has awakened in a testy mood and needs to be taken down a notch or two. Since everybody here is suffering to a greater or lesser degree from withdrawal symptoms of some sort all the time, and even those who are mostly beyond the withdrawal stage are not beyond the nightmare-having stage, people can get disagreeably prickly, which is where Mattison’s size is a considerable occupational asset.

  But just as he rises now from the screen to follow the others in, a series of pings comes from it like church bells announcing Sunday morning services, and a little line of green dots spaced maybe six blocks apart springs up out in Arcadia, a few blocks east of Santa Anita Avenue from Duarte Road to Foothill Boulevard, and then curving northwestward, actually reaching beyond the 210 Freeway a little way in the direction of Pasadena. This is new. By and large the Zone’s northwestern boundary has remained well south of Huntington Drive, with most of the thrust going down into the lower San Gabriel Valley, places like Monterey Park and Rosemead and South El Monte, but here it is suddenly jumping a couple of miles on the diagonal up the other way with lava popping up on the far side of Huntington, practically to the edge of the racetrack and the Arboretum and quite possibly cutting the 210 in half.

  It’s very bad news. Mattison doesn’t need to wait for alarm bells to go off to know that. Everybody wants to believe that the Zone is going to remain confined to the hapless group of communities way out there at the eastern end of the Los Angeles Basin where the trouble started, but what everybody fears is that in fact it’s going to keep right on marching unstoppably westward until it gets to the ocean, like a bad case of acne that starts on a teenager’s left cheek and continues all the way to the ankles. They are doing a pretty good job of controlling the surface flows, but nobody is really sure about what’s going on deep underground, and at this very minute it might be the case that angry rivers of magma are rolling toward Beverly Hills and Trousdale Estates and Pacific Palisades, and heading on out Malibu way to give the film stars one more lovely surprise when the fabulous new Pacific Coast Highway Volcano abruptly begins to poke its head up out of the surf. Of course, it’s a long way from Arcadia to Malibu. But any new westward extension of the Zone, even just a couple of blocks, is a chilling indication that the process is far from over, indeed may only just have really begun.

  Mattison turns toward the dining room and calls out, “You better eat fast, guys, because I think they’re going to want us to suit up and get—”

  And then the green dots on the screen sprout fluorescent yellow borders and the alarm bell at the Silver Lake Citizens Service House starts going off.

  What the alarm means is that whatever is going on out in Arcadia has proven to be a little too much for the local lava-control teams, and so they are beginning to call in the Citizens Service people as well. The whole idea of the Citizens Service Houses is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.

  What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course. And so it was just a matter of two or three weeks after the Pomona eruption before the County Supervisors asked the Legislature to extend the Citizens Service Act to include lava control, and the bill passed both houses the next day. Whereupon the miscellaneous boozers, druggies, trank-gobblers, and other sad substance-muddled fuckupniks who inhabit the Citizens Service Houses now find themselves obliged to go out on the front lines at least three or four times a month, and sometimes more often than that, to toil alongside more respectable folk in the effort to keep the rampaging magmatic flow from extending the grip that it already holds over a significant chunk of the Southland.

  It is up to the dispatchers at Volcano Central in Pasadena to decide when to call in the Citizens Service people. Volcano Central, which is an arm of the Cal Tech Seismological Laboratory with its headquarters on the grounds of Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the hills north of town, monitors the whole Tectonic Zone with a broad array of ground-based sensors and satellite-mounted scanners, trying to keep track of events as the magma outcropping wanders around beneath the San Gabriel Valley, and if possible even to get a little ahead of things.

  Every new outbreak, be it simply a puff of smoke rising from a new little fumarole or a full-scale barrage of tephra and volcanic bombs and red-hot lava pouring from some new mouth of Hell, is duly noted by JPL computers, which constantly update the myriad of data screens that have been set up all over town, like the one above Cal Mattison’s desk in the community room of the Silver Lake Citizens Service House. It is also Volcano Central’s responsibility, as master planners of the counteroffensive, to summon the appropriate kind of help. The Fire Department first, of course: that has by now been greatly expanded and reorganized on a region-wide basis (not without a lot of political in-fighting and general grief) and firefighters are called in according to a concentric-circles system that widens from the Zone itself out to, eventually, Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach. Their job, as usual, is to prevent destruction of property through the spreading of fires from impacted areas to surrounding neighborhoods. Volcano Central will next alert the National Guard divisions that have been put on permanent activation in the region; and when even the Guard has been stretched too thin by the emergency, the Citizens Service Houses people will be called out, along with other assorted civilian volunteer groups that have been trained in lava-containment techniques.

  Mattison has no real way of finding out whether it’s true, but he believes that the Silver Lake house gets called out at least twice as often as any of the other Citizens Service Houses he knows of. He may actually be right. The Silver Lake house is located in an opportune spot, practically in the shadow of the Golden State Freeway: it is an easy matter for its inhabitants, when summoned, to take that freeway to one interchange or another and zoom out via the Ventura Freeway to the top end of the Zone or the San Bernardino Freeway to the southern end, whereas anybody coming from the Mar Vista house or the one in West Hollywood or the Gardena place would have a much more extensive journey to make.

  But it isn’t just the proximity factor. Mattison likes to think that his particular bunch of rehabs are notably more effective on the lava line than the bozos from the other houses. They have their problems, sure, big problems; but somehow they pull themselves together when their asses are on the line out there, and Mattison is terrifically proud of them for that. It might also be that he himself is considered an asset by Volcano Central—his size, his air of authority, his achievement in having pulled himself up out of very deep shit indeed into his present quasi-respectability. But Mattison doesn’t let himself dwell on that angle very much. He knows all too well that what you usually get from patting yourself on your
own back is a dislocated shoulder.

  The bell is ringing, anyway. So here they go again.

  “Can we finish breakfast, at least?” Herzog wants to know.

  Mattison glances at the screen. Seven or eight of those green-and-yellow dots are blinking there. He translates the cool abstractions of the screen into the probable inferno that has burst out just now in Arcadia and says, glancing at his watch, “Gulp down as much as you can in the next forty-five seconds. Then get your asses in motion and head toward the suiting room.”

  “Jesus Christ,” somebody mutters, maybe Snow. “Forty-five fucking seconds, Matty?” But the others are smart enough to know not to waste any of those seconds bitching, and are shoveling the food down the hatch while Mattison is counting off the time. At the fifty-third second, for he is fundamentally a merciful man, he tells them that breakfast is over and they need to get to work.

  The lava suits are stored downstairs, in a room off the main hallway that once might have been an elegant paneled library. The remains of the paneling is still there, rectangles of mahogany or some other fancy wood, but the panels are hard to see any more, because just about every square inch of the room is packed with brightly gleaming lava suits, standing upright elbow to elbow and wall to wall like a silent congregation of robots awaiting activation.

  What the suits are, essentially, is one-person body-tanks, solid sturdy shells of highly reflective melnar that are equipped with tractor treads, shovel appendages, laser knives, and all sorts of other auxiliary gadgetry. Factories in Wichita and Atlanta work twenty-four hours a day turning them out, nowadays, with the Federal Government paying the not insignificant expense as part of the whole ongoing disaster relief program that Los Angeles’s latest and most spectacular catastrophe has engendered. Mattison sometimes wonders why it was considered worthwhile to keep fifteen or twenty of these extremely costly suits standing around idle much of the time at each of the Citizens Service Houses, when it would be ever so much more efficient for the suits to be stored at some central warehouse at the edge of the Zone, where they could be handed out each day to that day’s operating crew. But that is a question he has never bothered to raise with anybody, because he knows that the Federal Government likes to operate in mysterious ways beyond the capacity of mere mortals to comprehend; and, anyway, the suits have been bought and paid for and are here already.