Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Marshall resented that, but not as much as he might have. He was old enough to have got past the teenage thing of being sure anything his old man said was bullshit just because his old man said it. But he did bristle when his dad suggested—no, ordained was the better word—that he pay a third of whatever he made as rent.

  “What happens if I get a fat book contract?” he asked. Two sold stories, and he had big ambitions—or dreams, anyhow.

  “Then we dicker,” Dad said at once, which tossed a bucket of water on Marshall’s sparking temper. His father went on, “Look, I’m not trying to screw you. I’m just trying to remind you that you’ve got some obligations. You’re allegedly a grown-up, after all.”

  “Thanks for that allegedly. I appreciate it,” Marshall said.

  “Figured you would.” Dad didn’t even blink. Trying to top him at sarcasm was a losing game. He eyed Marshall. “Other thing is, if I get sick of nothing coming in after a while, you’ll start looking for a job or you’ll find yourself somewhere else to stay.”

  “How long is a while? Who gets to decide?”

  “I decide how long it is.” Colin Ferguson answered both questions at once. He even explained why: “After all, I’m the guy paying the mortgage.”

  What am I supposed to say to that? Marshall wondered. He almost asked if Kelly was paying rent. Fortunately, he had the sense not to. For one thing, she was married to Dad. For another, she had a paying job at Dominguez Hills. So all Marshall did say, after that brief pause for thought, was, “Okay.”

  His father had inhaled. Dad was braced for an argument, all right, and ready to blow Marshall out of the water. Now he exhaled again: he’d got dressed up, and he didn’t have any place to go. He sent Marshall a crooked grin. “You are growing up, aren’t you?”

  Marshall was convinced he’d been grown up for years now. Whenever he tried to say as much, his old man gave him the horse laugh. Since they’d come through this exchange without the fireworks that might have soured things between them, he let it go without offering Dad such a juicy target. “Whatever,” he said, and left it right there. The less you came out with, the less you’d regret later on.

  Then his father caught him by surprise: “I bet I know where you’ll be able to make some money, anyhow. Not enough to live on, but some.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?” Marshall wondered what kind of harebrained scheme was dancing through Dad’s beady little mind.

  Only it turned out not to be so harebrained after all. “Taking care of your half-brother, that’s where,” Colin Ferguson answered. “Your mother will be looking for somebody to do that, I’m sure, once she runs through however much maternity leave they give her.”

  “Huh,” Marshall said thoughtfully. Whatever he might have been looking for, that wasn’t it. “I’m . . . not sure I want to do that. I . . . don’t know how much I want to have to do with Mom these days. And taking care of, of that kid?” He didn’t even want to say Teo’s name. Teo, after all, had stolen Mom away from Dad and screwed up the family. That was how he’d seen it at the time, anyhow. Little by little, he’d come to realize things weren’t so simple (which was another part of growing up). The first approximation still ruled his gut, though.

  His father sighed. “Well, it’s your call. If you don’t want to, I sure won’t try and make you. But it’s not like I’d mind or anything. I . . . wish your mother the best in spite of everything. I don’t want her back. Too much water over the dam for that. But I do wish her the best. And she’ll need the help. Better if she gets it from somebody she knows, somebody she can trust, and not somebody she hires off a supermarket bulletin board or from Craigslist or somewhere.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Marshall hadn’t expected to say even that much.

  “Thanks. You do that.” Dad gave him another one of those lopsided grins. “Five gets you ten taking care of a baby gives you something new to write about, too.”

  “Hot shit!” If Marshall sounded distinctly unenthusiastic, it was only because he was. He didn’t let Dad beat him to the punch line, either: “That’s what I’d be writing about, too, isn’t it?”

  “Hot shit and cold shit and piss and spit-up and all kinds of gross stuff,” his father agreed. “But there’d be other stuff, too. Getting to know your half-brother, and him getting to know you, when you’re old enough to be his father.”

  “I guess.” Marshall didn’t want to think of it in those terms. If he was old enough to be his mother’s son’s father . . . Somewhere, a goose was walking on old Oedipus’ grave. The idea creeped him out bigtime.

  Maybe that showed on his face, because his father said, “I’ll let it go. You don’t have to make up your mind right away. One thing you should do, though, if you’re even halfway thinking about it, is poke around online and see what kind of money child-care providers or whatever they call ’em make. If you do decide to take it on, you’ll want to get what you deserve.”

  “Makes sense,” Marshall said. To his relief, Dad did leave him alone then. He chewed on it for a while, chewed on it without deciding one way or the other. He had Mom’s number on his phone, of course. He could count on the fingers of one hand how often he’d used it since his folks broke up. Odds were she wouldn’t even recognize his number if he did call her again.

  The baby might be stillborn. It might be kidnapped by Gypsies—or even by Roma, if you wanted to be PC about baby thieves. All sorts of things might happen to keep him from needing to make up his mind. He might even sell some more stories. If he sold enough, he wouldn’t need to worry about playing nanny to his mother’s bastard.

  Writers find inspiration and incentive wherever they can. Any excuse for sitting down in front of a keyboard and monitor instead of doing something—anything—else is a good one. Marshall was still very new to the game, but he’d already figured that out. And, for the next several days, he wrote a hell of a lot more than usual.

  * * *

  Bryce Miller had a fancy new Ph.D. in classics from UCLA, with all the rights and privileges appertaining to the doctorate of philosophy. Chief among those privileges, it seemed, was the privilege to starve.

  He’d saved money from his TAships and research assistantships. His only real vice was books. As vices went, it was a cheap one. His old car was paid for. His apartment wasn’t expensive. So he starved slowly, an inch at a time, instead of in a hurry.

  He scoured the online Chronicle of Higher Education, Craigslist, monster.com, anything that might possibly land him an academic job. He sent out zillions of résumés, by e-mail and snailmail both. Nobody wanted anything to do with a new-minted classicist, even one who could also teach ancient history.

  He wasn’t fussy. He was desperate. If he ran out of money before he landed something, he’d have to move back in with his mother. Boomerang kids were a phenomenon of his generation before the supervolcano blew. There were more of them now, with the economy still on its back with its feet in the air and X’s where its eyes ought to be. The idea humiliated him all the same. He wasn’t a little boy any more, dammit, no matter how much his mother wanted to keep him one.

  He sent his c.v. to every Catholic school in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. If anybody needed a Latin teacher, a Catholic school was likeliest to. Most of them didn’t answer his queries. The ones that did either already had a Latin teacher they liked or didn’t want any.

  And so his alarm went off before six one morning. He had to get out of bed to turn it off: a sensible precaution for anyone who slept as soundly as he did. He hopped in the shower, gulped bread and jam and coffee for breakfast, and drove downtown to the offices of the Department of Water and Power.

  They had, or so their online ad said, an opening for a grant writer. The requirements were a bachelor’s degree and three years of writing experience. He’d published his first poem almost exactly three years earlier. Fortunately, they didn�
�t ask how much he’d made from his writing. Even if you put a cash value on the copies the journals paid in, his total earnings would barely touch three figures.

  But they didn’t. He’d got through that round of vetting. And here he was, at the DWP, taking a test along with several dozen other worried-looking people. The men and women ranged from his age up to their early sixties. Maybe a civil-service job wasn’t exactly what they had in mind, either. It beat the hell out of no job at all, though.

  They took the test in what looked like the lunchroom, though the food-serving part was closed off. Everyone had a stock of number-two pencils. It might have been the SAT all over again.

  In came a plump woman in a burgundy polyester pantsuit his mother would have loved—he couldn’t think of anything worse to say about it. She carried a fat manila envelope. “I’m Stella Garcia,” she said. “I will be administering this assessment instrument. Before we begin, I want everyone to put their cell phone on the table in front of you, upside down and in the off position.”

  There were more ways to cheat on exams now than there had been back in the day, even if you did call them assessment instruments. Had anyone brought more than one phone? Would it help? Bryce hadn’t. He wasn’t hardened enough to this game. Besides, he had only one.

  Mrs. Garcia—her ring flashed under the fluorescents—passed out the exams facedown. “Do not turn them over and begin until I tell you to do so,” she said. “You will have two hours precisely to complete them.” She checked her own cell phone for the time, even though there was a clock on the wall behind her. “Begin!” It was eight on the dot, or near enough.

  Bryce put his name, address, and e-mail on the front page of the booklet, then dug in. It was like the SAT English test: grammar, analogies, taking the meaning from passages. Only the passages were mind-numbing bureaucratese, not the fairly straightforward stuff on the SAT.

  He didn’t care. He aced standardized tests. He always had. And he could read bureaucratese, even if he didn’t write it well. He filled in bubble after bubble.

  One poor shlub strolled into the lunchroom at half past eight. Mrs. Garcia gave him a booklet and made him put his cell where she could see it. Bryce didn’t figure him for serious competition.

  But what about the woman who handed in her test at five to nine? Was she brilliant or hopeless? She walked out of the room before Bryce could make up his mind.

  He finished about nine twenty. He was the sixth, or maybe seventh, to turn in the exam. Another guy handed his in a moment later. They walked out together. “What did you think?” the other guy asked once the door closed behind them. He was forty-five or so, heavyset, and needed a shave. He hadn’t showered before he came in, either.

  It had been easier than Bryce expected. He didn’t want to say that, so he shrugged and answered, “Who knows? How about you?”

  “I did the best I could,” the older man said, which also might mean anything. He went on, “Hope I land the job. I’m gettin’ awful sick of pork and beans, know what I mean?”

  “Oh, man, do I ever!” Bryce said. “Not much out there these days.”

  “Not much? There’s fuckin’ nothin’,” the other guy said. “Good luck to you, Jack—but not too much, no offense.”

  “Yeah, well, back atcha,” Bryce replied. They swapped wry grins.

  It was raining when Bryce went to his car. The only rain L.A. was supposed to get in later summer was the occasional thundershower when the monsoon slopped over the mountains from the desert to the east. This wasn’t like that. It was chilly. Clouds blanketed the sky. It felt like December or February.

  He turned on his wipers and his lights. He made sure he remembered to turn the lights off again when he got back to his apartment building. Calling AAA to come out and give you a jump was a pain in the ass.

  Waiting in his mailbox were a couple of bills and a letter from a no-account university in Florida. It was a form rejection. He didn’t even remember applying for a job there, but that proved nothing much. He’d sent out a hell of a lot of résumés, all right.

  He carried the depressing snailmail up to his place. If he wanted to apply to some school in Minnesota or the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, he might have a decent chance of landing something. But he wouldn’t have wanted to live in Minnesota or Michigan even before the supervolcano went boom. These days . . . Los Angeles was getting what would have been unseasonable rain. Minnesota and Michigan were getting what would have been out-of-season snow, though not all of what they’d got this past winter had ever melted. If you were into sled dogs, they weren’t bad places to go. Otherwise? He shook his head. Next to those places, even moving back in with his mom looked, well, not so bad.

  When he called Susan, he got her voice mail. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Classes at UCLA had already started. That didn’t matter so much to him, not any more, but it did to her. She was finishing her diss on the eleventh-century Holy Roman Empire. And she had a TAship, so she was probably ramming The Epic of Gilgamesh down the undergrads’ throats right this minute.

  At the tone, he said, “Well, I took the DWP test. I guess I did okay. Call when you get a chance. Love you. ’Bye.”

  As he stuck the phone back in his pocket, he shook his head again, this time in slow wonder. Had they really been going together for three years? Longer than that now. He’d had a few random dates after Vanessa dumped him, but nothing that was going anywhere—till he met Susan Ruppelt. They’d just clicked.

  One of these days, he’d ask her to marry him. He had no doubt she’d say yes. But he wanted to be able to support her before he did. Fathers-in-law with jobs—hers was a mechanical engineer—tended to look down their noses at unemployed sons-in-law.

  She called back about four that afternoon. “Hi, hon,” she said. “So it went all right?”

  “It didn’t seem that hard. Not as bad as the SAT,” Bryce answered.

  “How many other people were taking it?” she asked.

  “Bunches. Fifty, maybe seventy-five. It was in this big lunchroom thing.” Bryce sighed. Every job that got advertised drew swarms of people. He did his best to stay hopeful: “They’ve got to pick somebody. Maybe it’ll be me.”

  “I hope it is.” Susan paused. “I guess I hope it is. I mean, you worked so hard, doing what you wanted to do. Seems a shame if you don’t get to use it.”

  “Welcome to the real world,” Bryce said. “That’s pretty much what my chairperson told me when I turned in the thesis. Hey, it was fun while it lasted.”

  “Yeah.” Every day brought Susan closer to banging her head against the same wall. She tried to look on the bright side: “Like you said, somebody’s going to get that job. You know how things are at the universities. When somebody retires or dies, half the time they just close the damn position. More than half.”

  “Tell me about it!” Bryce said bitterly. How many times had some classics department’s chair or, more often, boss secretary signed a letter saying their slot wouldn’t be filled after all? More than he cared to remember—he knew that.

  “Well . . . Something good will happen. People got through the Great Depression. We’ll get through this.” Susan had a sunny temperament. She sometimes needed it, too, to put up with Bryce’s spells of gloom.

  “We didn’t have the whole planet screwing us to the wall then, though,” he said now. “It was just bank failures and stuff.”

  “They wouldn’t have called it just,” she said.

  “That’s ’cause they hadn’t seen this,” he returned. But she kept trying to cheer him up, and he let her think she had. Making her worry less about him actually did make him feel—some—better. It was convoluted, but it was there.

  Two days later, he got an e-mail from the DWP asking if he could come back for an interview and more testing on the following Monday. He wrote back that he could. He’d mad
e them think twice about him, anyhow. He’d already sent his confirmation before he wondered how much he honest to God wanted a real-world job.

  More than he wanted to live with his mother ever again. That pretty much settled that.

  * * *

  “Yes, this was a large eruption, even by supervolcano standards—nearly six hundred cubic miles,” Kelly Ferguson told her class at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “This was just about the size of the first Yellowstone eruption, more than two million years ago, and almost as big as the Mount Toba blast in Indonesia seventy-five thousand years ago.” She paused. “Anybody remember how many times the Yellowstone supervolcano blew between that first big boom and this last one?”

  Anybody remember? was a prof’s shorthand for How many of you did your reading? A couple of tentative hands went up. Kelly pointed at one of them. The owner of the hand, a big, broad brown guy she guessed was a Samoan, said, “Uh, two?”

  He didn’t sound very sure, but he was right. She beamed at him. “Good!” she said.

  He looked relieved. If she remembered how he’d done on the last quiz, he had reason to look that way. The State University was California’s second tier, behind the University of California. Students here came in two kinds: the ones who couldn’t get into the UC system, and the ones who couldn’t afford it. Some of the latter bunch were as good as anybody who did get into the University of California. The others . . . mostly weren’t. Kelly’d done enough TAing to know the kind of work UC students did. Too many of these kids couldn’t come close to that standard.

  Well, you did what you could with what you had. She went on, “Both those other eruptions were still enormous. Even the smaller one ejected about sixty-four cubic miles of rock and dust and ash. That’s four times the size of the blast from Mount Tambora, back two hundred years ago, and Mount Tambora’s the volcano that gave the United States and Europe what they called the Year Without a Summer.” She glared out at them. “And anybody who mixes up Mount Tambora and Mount Toba is in big trouble, you hear? Mount Tambora is still there. One of these days, it’ll go off again. What used to be Mount Toba is Lake Toba now—the volcano blew itself to hell and gone. One of these days, it’ll go off again, too, but I pretty much promise we won’t have to worry about it. We’ve got enough other things to worry about.”