Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  How long they would last wasn’t the first thing in Colin’s mind as he knocked on the door. He wondered if his son had ever used one of those over-the-top sunsets as background music, so to speak, to help get himself laid. If Marshall hadn’t, he’d missed one hell of a chance.

  He opened the door now. He had on slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie: not his usual choice in clothes, but you were supposed to spiff yourself up under your robes. He was an inch taller than Colin’s five-eleven, a good deal slimmer, and also sharper-featured. Of Colin’s three kids, the one who most resembled him was Vanessa. Somehow, though, on her it looked good.

  “Hey, Dad. Hi, Kelly.” Marshall shook hands with Colin and hugged his new stepmother. Then he moved aside. “C’mon in.”

  The apartment was imperfectly neat. A sweater lay across one arm of the sofa. The kitchen table was all over papers. (Kelly worked the same way, which made Colin a little more willing to cut his youngest some slack.) Colin would have bet dishes filled the sink, though he didn’t go check it out. A stretch in the service might have worked wonders for Marshall. It wasn’t the first time that had crossed Colin’s mind.

  His son grabbed one of those papers and held it up. “Here—check this out,” he said.

  Colin tilted his head back to look through the bottom half of his bifocals. Kelly just leaned forward; that indignity of age hadn’t caught up with her yet. The sheet Marshall was showing off looked like a printout of some e-mail.

  It said something called Storytastic was buying a piece called “Sunset Beach” and would be sending a check for $286.65, which was five cents a word. The story would be going up on their Web site as soon as Marshall made a couple of what sounded like tiny changes.

  This time, Kelly hugged him. “Awesome!” she said. “That’s twice now!”

  “Pretty amazing, huh?” Marshall said.

  “It is.” Colin wasn’t kidding. Marshall had sold another short story near the end of the year before. Anybody, Colin figured, could do it once. Well, maybe not anybody, but lots of people. Doing it more than once probably took both talent and stubbornness: a good combination. He said, “This isn’t as much per word as you got for the first one, is it?”

  “Colin!” Kelly sent him a reproachful look.

  “You would remember that, wouldn’t you?” Marshall said. Colin only shrugged; remembering details was part of his job. His son continued. “I sent this one to New Fictions, too, but they turned me down. So I tried some other places, and it stuck here. A nickel a word’s not bad.”

  “Okay. Congratulations, believe me.” Colin set a hand on Marshall’s shoulder. The kid hadn’t let getting rejected keep him from sending his story out again: more than once, by the sound of it. Stubbornness, sure as hell. And Marshall was bound to be right about the pay rate. Colin had stayed friends with Bryce Miller, Vanessa’s old boyfriend, even after she dumped him. Bryce was a published poet, and had yet to be paid in anything more than copies.

  Of course, Bryce’s poems were modeled after Greek pastorals from the third century B.C. That was one way to use the Ph.D. he’d just earned, but not one likely to make Hollywood start banging on his door and seducing him with armored trucks full of cash.

  “What’s ‘Sunset Beach’ about?” Colin asked. It had to have more to do with here and now than the stuff Bryce turned out.

  Sure enough, Marshall answered, “A guy who’s just graduating from college and trying to figure out what to do with himself when he’s got like zero chance of landing any kind of real job.”

  “Sounds cheerful,” Colin said. Marshall’s first sale—which still hadn’t seen print, though he’d gone over the galleys by now—had been about a college student caught in the middle of his parents’ divorce. If he could write about his own life and get paid for it . . . well, that was a real job, if he could do it often enough. Not the smallest if in the world, not even close.

  Still, other prospects were bleak. Nothing like getting the country’s midsection trashed to shoot the economy right behind the ear. The stock market had fallen and couldn’t get up. The crash wasn’t so spectacular as 1929, but things sure didn’t look good. And, with the weather going to hell in a refrigerated handbasket, heaven only knew when, or if, things would ever straighten out.

  “Enough of this doom and gloom,” Kelly declared. “Marshall, you’re getting your bachelor’s. Today, we celebrate. We can worry about all the rest of the crap some other time.”

  “Okay.” Marshall raised an eyebrow at Colin. Colin knew what his son wasn’t saying: something like What’s an old cynic like you doing with an optimist? He’d asked himself the same question. Right this minute, he was being happier than he had been in he couldn’t remember how long. If that wasn’t a good enough answer, he had no idea what would be.

  He looked at his watch (that he checked it instead of his phone was another sign he was getting up there). “Ceremony starts at half past ten, right? We better get it in gear. Grab your robe and your fancy hat, kiddo.”

  “It’s a mortarboard,” Kelly said.

  “Fancy hat,” Colin repeated. “I thought the board they used for moving mortar was a hod.”

  Marshall topped him: “Hod-de-ha-ha!”

  “You’ve both hod it if you keep that up,” Kelly said. Groaning companionably, they went down to Marshall’s Toyota in the little apartment lot. It was smaller than the Taurus, but Marshall had a guaranteed parking space when they got back. Either car would have to pay to park on campus. The University of California didn’t give anything away for nothing, not these days it didn’t.

  Marshall drove. He knew the car and the town better than Colin did. His cell phone stayed in his pocket. He also knew better than to talk on it or text where his old man could catch him. Colin hoped like hell he knew better than to do that stuff even when nobody was watching. Texting behind the wheel was asking—begging, really—to wrap your car around the nearest tree or light pole.

  Kids in gowns and mortarboards fled from the parking structure toward the soccer and track stadium, along with parents and siblings and friends. Every so often, there’d be a squeal. Somebody would throw her – or himself into somebody else’s arms. Maybe the tears that flowed were tears of joy. Colin suspected they were more likely to be tears of fear. He kept his trap shut. Better to stay quiet and be thought cynical than to speak up and remove all doubt.

  He and Kelly went up into the stands, which were no more comfortable than they had to be. Marshall took his place among the other graduates from the creative-writing program. He’d changed majors more than once in his erratic academic career, not least to stretch his time here as far as he could. Still and all, two sold stories argued that he hadn’t ended up in the worst of all possible places.

  In due course, the UCSB chancellor came to the mike. Her academic regalia was a hell of a lot more impressive than the cheap polyester crap the undergrads rented. Colin tried to decide whether that made her look imposing or like a pompous jerk. Again, he said nothing about his conclusions.

  After some pious blather of her own, the chancellor introduced the main commencement speaker: the Vice President of the United States. He definitely looked like a jerk in his cap and gown. People said he’d restored the Vice Presidency to its proper insignificance after the excesses at the start of the century. Colin hadn’t voted for him, but he sure agreed with those people.

  “We are on the way back.” The Vice President’s foggy baritone boomed out of the sound system by the podium. “We are on the way back.” As plenty of comics had noticed, he believed in saying things twice, and in repeating himself. “The United States has taken a heavy blow, the heaviest blow in our history, but we will pick ourselves up and get back on our feet.”

  Beside Colin, Kelly made a small but discontented noise. One of the many reasons he loved her was that she knew bullshit when somebody slung it.

&nbs
p; “Natural catastrophes, no matter how large and violent, cannot keep this great country on its knees for long.” The Vice President waved out to the kids in the folding chairs on the soccer pitch. “You are our hope. We know you can overcome whatever Mother Nature throws at us. We know you can, and we know you will.”

  Kelly made another discontented noise, this one not so small. Colin touched her hand. She rolled her eyes. She knew what the supervolcano had done and was doing. Colin often wondered whether anyone back in Washington really did. When he was feeling charitable, he figured the disaster was too damn big for anyone to cope with. When he wasn’t . . .

  One of the new graduates yelled, “Do you know where I can get a job, maybe?” He wasn’t electronically amplified. The whole stadium heard him anyhow.

  The Vice President looked confused. No enormous surprise: get him off-script and he’d stick a foot in his face. Once upon a time, he’d thought about running for President himself. Then his campaign struck the iceberg of his gaffes, and sank faster than the Titanic.

  “I’m sure something will turn up for you,” he said now, and tried to get back to his speech.

  That seemed safe enough. It shouldn’t have been another gaffe. It shouldn’t have been, but. . . . “What? Where? When? How?” the graduates shouted, and variations on all those themes. They knew their prospects were rotten. How blind was the Vice President, if he didn’t?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please!” The chancellor came to the microphone to try to quiet them down. “Let’s give our speaker the chance to finish his address.”

  They booed her, and they booed the Vice President. A couple of them made paper airplanes out of program pages and flung them toward the podium, but that was as far as it went. Back when Colin was a kid, rioting UCSB students had wrecked Isla Vista and burned down the Bank of America there. These kids had better reason to rise up than their elders could have imagined. So it seemed to Colin, at any rate. But they subsided after some more jeers and catcalls. In due course, the Vice President did finish, and sat down. He got a lot of applause when he did, along with more derisive hoots.

  He said something to the dean or vice chancellor next to him. They both chuckled. Why not? They didn’t need to worry about where their next paycheck would come from. The kids, on the other hand . . .

  Colin noticed something odd when the chancellor finished the ceremony by formally awarding the degrees. She announced each group separately: the A.B.s from the College of Letters and Sciences, the B.S.s from the College of Letters and Sciences, and so on. Each group in turn whooped and cheered and hollered as it turned its mortarboard tassels from left to right to show it was now full of graduates (to say nothing of those B.S.s).

  Each group in turn . . . till the chancellor awarded the Ph.D.s. The newly minted holders of doctorates turned their tassels silently and without any fuss. “Same thing happened when Rob graduated here a few years back,” Colin told Kelly in a low voice. “Isn’t that funny?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me one bit. When I finally get my diss done, I’ll be too tired to feel like making a fuss even if I do go to the ceremony,” Kelly said. Right now she was teaching geology at Cal State Dominguez Hills, not far from San Atanasio. The slot was probably a wedding present from her chairman up at Berkeley, and a very welcome one. She kept working on the dissertation in her copious spare time.

  “Huh,” Colin said thoughtfully. “Hadn’t looked at it like that. Sure makes more sense than any of my guesses.”

  “Trust me,” Kelly said. Most of the time, few phrases set off more alarm bells in Colin’s head than that one. He nodded now.

  Along with the rest of the graduates’ relatives, he and Kelly went down onto the pitch to meet up with their hero of the moment and to immortalize that moment in ones and zeros. Marshall duly pantomimed turning his tassel. He started to do it again, but paused in midturn to hug a pretty Asian girl. “Sorry about that,” he said as he went back to posing. “She was in my writing class this past quarter.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Colin answered. “If I’d come up here by myself, I would’ve wanted to hug her, too.”

  Kelly poked him in the ribs. “You want to tell me some more about that, mister?” she said in a mock-fierce growl.

  “Didn’t say I would’ve done it. I said I would’ve wanted to,” Colin explained. “I’m married, but I’m not blind.”

  “Hmm. Let’s see how much deeper you can dig yourself in here,” Kelly said. “What you’re telling me is, it’s all a question of impulse control. You can have the impulse, but as long as you don’t do anything about it, you’re golden.”

  After some thought, Colin cautiously nodded. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. An awful lot of policework is catching the jerks who go ahead and do the first thing that pops into their heads. If they’d stop for five seconds to wonder what happened next, half the cops in the country’d be out of work. But they don’t. Chances are, they can’t.”

  Marshall made vague waving motions. “Listen, guys, I gotta go give the gown back and get my receipt for it. See you in a few.” He headed off towards an exit already crowded with new graduates. Eyeing that crowd, Colin suspected returning the gown would take more than a few. Waiting till tomorrow, though, would bring on a fee. The University of California system missed few tricks when it came to revenue enhancement.

  The UC system did let you keep your mortarboard and tassel. Colin prayed such untrammeled generosity wouldn’t bankrupt it.

  In due course, Marshall made it back. He was usually the most even-tempered of Colin’s children, even when he wasn’t stoned. Now, though, he looked and sounded irked. “Boy, that was fun,” he muttered darkly.

  “I bet,” Colin said.

  “Sure looks like they could’ve organized it better,” Kelly said. A beat later, she corrected herself: “Sure looks like they could’ve organized it.”

  “There you go!” Marshall said. He turned to his father and spoke in serious tones: “You should keep this one.”

  “That’d be nice.” Colin could hardly have sounded dryer. All the same, he was most sincere. He wasn’t sure how he’d survived one divorce. If he had to try to survive two . . . He shivered as if a goose had just walked over his grave. An awful lot of cops’ marriages failed. That was one reason why eating your gun was an occupational hazard of the trade.

  “I think so, too,” Kelly said pointedly, and took his hand. Colin didn’t need to worry about things falling apart right this minute, so he didn’t.

  “Where do we go now?” Marshall asked. He’d got done with college at long, long last. Too much to hope for to expect him to have any real notion of what came next.

  “Well, I got us reservations for the China Pavilion, but they aren’t till six,” Colin answered. “We have some time to kill first.”

  “You did? How?” Marshall, cool Marshall, actually seemed impressed. The China Pavilion was downtown Santa Barbara’s best Chinese restaurant, and the race wasn’t even close. The place was always jammed.

  “I’ll tell you how—I did it three months ago, as soon as I was sure you really would get your sheepskin,” Colin replied. Marshall just gaped. Advance planning was almost as alien to him as it was to a drive-by shooter with a head full of crack.

  To use up the afternoon, they went to the Santa Barbara Zoo. It wasn’t the kind of place that would drive the San Diego Zoo or even the one in Los Angeles out of business any time soon. It was small and funky: one of FDR’s swarm of WPA projects. Nobody nowadays would built a zoo like this, but nobody in the 1930s had worried about that. Animals prowled or dozed in concrete enclosures. Peanut shells littered the walkways (the signs at the concession stands warning about peanut allergy were relatively new, though). You weren’t supposed to toss the monkeys peanuts, but people did anyhow. Colin thought it was terrific.

  When they got t
o the China Pavilion just before six, it was as crowded as usual. More crowded than usual, in fact: along with prosperous locals (almost a redundancy if you weren’t going to school here—prices knocked the China Pavilion out of most starving students’ price range), the restaurant was full of parents celebrating with their kids.

  Sure enough, though, the receptionist ran a perfectly manicured finger down her list and nodded. “Yes, your table is waiting, Mr. Ferguson. Please come this way.” She grabbed menus and led Colin, Kelly, and Marshall to a table by the window. “Is this all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” Colin said.

  “Someone will be along to take your drink orders soon.” The receptionist swayed back to her station.

  Colin asked for Laphroaig over ice. Kelly and Marshall both chose Tsingtaos. If you were going to drink beer with Chinese food, why not Chinese beer? And the brewery in Tsingtao dated from the days before the First World War, when the Germans ran the town. Say what you wanted about Germans, but they knew how to make beer.

  Marshall eyed the menu with astonished respect. “Boy, this place is even more expensive than I remembered,” he said, and looked a question at his father.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like you graduate every day,” Colin said. For quite a while there, it hadn’t been as if Marshall graduated any day. Now Colin wouldn’t have to worry about tuition or rent or utilities at the apartment. He’d got to like the Armenian couple who owned the building (and several others in Ellwood), which didn’t mean he’d be sorry to quit writing them checks every month.

  A waiter—a Hispanic guy, like most people in his line of work in Southern California—brought the drinks. “You folks ready to order dinner yet?”

  “I think so,” Colin answered. Courses revolved around crab and duck. Marshall grinned in anticipation. His old man hadn’t been kidding about ignoring the cost for a night. After the waiter hustled off to the kitchen, Colin said, “This is why God made plastic.”