Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  “Not much gasoline, either,” Daniel went on. “We chopped down a hell of a lot of trees to get through last winter, and we’ll chop down more this time around. We’ll regret it one of these days, but people are too worried about not freezing now to give a damn about later.”

  “Welcome to America,” Kelly said, and the other geologist spread his hands in resigned agreement. When this quarter’s balance sheet decided whether you got promoted, you wouldn’t care what happened a few years down the line. And when it really was a choice between fuel in the fireplace and a Missoula winter on steroids, you’d chop down the pines now and let the bare hillsides take care of themselves in the sweet bye and bye.

  “So, when are you presenting your paper?” Daniel asked.

  “Morning session tomorrow,” Kelly answered. She was one of the world’s leading experts on everything that led up to the supervolcano blast. Passing on what she knew . . . probably won’t matter one goddamn bit, she thought. By the time another supervolcano went off, odds were they wouldn’t understand English any more. And even if they did, you couldn’t do anything about a supervolcano eruption anyhow.

  “I’ll be there,” Daniel promised.

  Kelly gulped a little; Daniel knew as much about the Yellowstone supervolcano as she did. At least partly to soften him up, she said, “You want to have breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Sure. And when we talk shop in the restaurant downstairs, everybody can look at us like we’re nuts.” Daniel clucked and caught himself. “Nah. Most of the people in there’ll be nuts the same way we are. Say, half past eight?”

  “Sounds good. I’m scheduled for ten thirty. That’ll give us plenty of time to eat, and then I can be nervous afterwards.” Kelly knew she was kidding on the square. She’d critiqued other people’s papers before, but this was her first big presentation on her own. The room would be packed, too. There wasn’t anything more urgent in the field, and there wouldn’t be for years, maybe centuries, to come.

  “Okay. I know that song.” Daniel grinned crookedly. He’d snagged a tenure-track job at Montana State while she was still in grad school. Had she been jealous? Oh, just a little, especially since he was younger than she was. Now he went on, “Let’s meet in the lobby. That way, whoever gets here first can gawp at the ceiling till the other one shows.”

  “You do that, too? Oh, good! I wondered if I was the only one. Isn’t it over the top?” Kelly said.

  As it happened, neither one of them beat the other; they rode down in the same elevator. A couple of people were eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but only a couple. A sharp-faced, officious middle-aged woman in a fuzzy orange sweater waved away other would-be customers. “We can’t serve you now,” she said. “We’re setting up for Sunday brunch.”

  “We don’t want brunch. We just want breakfast,” Kelly protested.

  “There are people in there,” Daniel added.

  “We can’t take you now,” the woman in the orange sweater repeated, and she would not be moved.

  Dejected, decaffeinated, and pissed off, Kelly and Daniel walked up the stairs to the ornate lobby. “Where can we get something to eat in this miserable town?” Kelly growled at a desk clerk. “Your restaurant seems to be under a curse.”

  “A curse in an orange sweater,” Daniel agreed.

  The clerk blinked, but she said, “There’s the Original, a block up Sixth.”

  “Let’s go,” Kelly said grimly. Out the revolving door they strode. Kelly was wearing long johns, and damn glad she’d put them on. The wind had knives in it. Snow crunched under her shoes. It drifted here and there. Not many cars were on the street. Chains made the ones that were rattle as they slowly went by. It was more like a scene from Duluth than anything anyone would have looked for in Portland before the eruption.

  Decor in the Original lived up to its name. The paintings on the walls were of clowns and mayonnaise jars—together, not separately. Contemplating what use the swarms of Bozoids might have for all that Best Foods made Kelly queasy. Coffee and ham and eggs and hash browns worked wonders, though. Daniel had sausage and eggs instead.

  When they were finishing up, he took his iPhone out of his pocket to check the time. Kelly looked a question at him. “Nine forty,” he said. “Unless the grizzlies carry us off between here and the Benson, you’re golden.”

  “Okay. Thanks. For a while there, I was too mad at that orange bitch to worry about what I’m going to say, you know?” Kelly said. “Maybe I owe her something after all.”

  “A kick in the teeth?” Daniel suggested.

  “I’d love to. People might talk, though.” Kelly sighed, as if to say there was no accounting for society’s foibles. When the tattooed waiter brought the check, she grabbed it. Daniel started to squawk, but she cut him off: “Hey, how long did I spend at your place after things blew up?”

  “I dunno, but I bet it seemed like forever,” he answered, which wasn’t so far wrong. Even so, he let her put it on her Visa.

  They walked back to the Benson through the arctic chill. Kelly changed into business attire. Pants hid the long underwear. A wool turtleneck under a jacket kept her top half tolerably warm. She grabbed the manila folder that held the paper and headed down the hall to the elevator again.

  The packed function room intimidated her less than she’d feared it would. Standing up and lecturing her Dominguez Hills classes had burned the fear of public speaking out of her. And she’d have a much more interested audience here than she did there.

  Her chairperson introduced her as “Somebody who knows the Yellowstone supervolcano better than anyone. If she’d been any closer to it when it did erupt, she wouldn’t be here talking to us now.” Geoff Rheinburg might have been stretching the first part of that. He sure wasn’t kidding about the second half.

  Kelly had to adjust the mike at the lectern before she started talking; Rheinburg was several inches taller than she was. “I am glad to be here—and you can take that any way you want,” she said. In the second row, Daniel nodded emphatically. He knew how she felt, all right. And yes, Larry Skrtel and Ruth Marquez were here, too, farther back in the crowd. They’d also got out in the nick of time. And they were sitting side by side now, which was, or at least might be, interesting.

  Interesting later. Now was business time. Kelly talked about everything the supervolcano had done in the runup to the eruption: the earthquakes all the way back to Hebgen Lake in 1959, the rising magma domes, the hot springs and geysers picking up, the premonitory volcanic outbursts in the southwest and northeast parts of Yellowstone, and finally the big kaboom.

  “Even by supervolcano standards, it proved to be a large eruption: not quite the size of the one 2.1 million years ago, but close,” she said. “Climatic effects have proved at least as severe as the models predicted.” Her shiver underlined that. Even with all these bodies in the room, it was bloody cold. She went on, “So have other environmental impacts. Geologists did everything they could to alert the authorities to what a supervolcano eruption would mean. The authorities, unfortunately, didn’t want to listen to us. At the time, I was furious. In retrospect, I don’t think it mattered much. During the last big recession before the eruption, there was a lot of talk about companies and banks that were too big to fail. The Yellowstone supervolcano was a disaster too big to let us succeed. No matter what we did or didn’t do, we were going to get overwhelmed. We grew up in the Golden Age. It’s gone. It won’t come back for decades or lifetimes, if it ever does.”

  It wasn’t anything her audience didn’t already know. They’d known it before the supervolcano went off, which was more than the rest of the world could say. But hearing it backed up with all the data Kelly’d presented was sobering all the same.

  When she asked for questions, the ones she got were mostly technical—about the order and intensity of the precursor signs, about possible steps the go
vernment might have taken and what those could have accomplished, and the like. It was all academic, and everybody knew it. Yellowstone wasn’t the only supervolcano. The one on Sumatra deserved careful watching, and so did the one on the Kamchatka Peninsula. There was even one near Mono Lake in eastern California. But none of the others seemed likely to erupt for thousands of years. The Midwest had drawn the short straw this time around. Well, so had the whole planet.

  Professor Rheinburg beamed at Kelly as things broke up. “Good job! Very solid!” He clapped his hands with no sound.

  “Thanks.” She gathered up her papers. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

  “I always feel that way, and I’ve been doing this about as long as you’ve been alive,” he said. “So, how’s your job?”

  “Terrific,” she replied. Having one was terrific. She had no doubt he was responsible for it.

  He didn’t let on. He never had. “How’s everything else? How’s your life? How do you like being married?”

  “So far, so good. Better than so good,” Kelly said. One day at a time. That was how you did anything.

  VI

  Thunk! The axe bit into the pine log. Rob Ferguson raised it and let it fall again. Little by little, trees turned into firewood. You could work up a sweat chopping wood even in a Maine winter. And the way Maine winters were these days, that was really saying something.

  Thunk! Rob got the axe to do what he wanted now. When he’d first started with it, he’d counted himself lucky for not amputating anyone else’s fingers or his own leg. These days, it was just a tool—a tool you had to respect, sure, but a tool all the same. Thunk!

  Biff came out of the Trebor Mansion Inn. He held up his left wrist to display a windup watch. Rob wore one, too. They’d had electricity through what was laughably called the summer in these parts, but it was out again now that the Ice Age had returned. Without it, they had no cell coverage, and without coverage their phones were nothing but little plastic bricks.

  To amplify the message, Biff said, “Town meeting’s in half an hour.”

  “Gotcha.” Rob swung the axe again. Another billet of what would be firewood jumped from the log.

  Biff eyed it and the ones lying in the snow nearby. They were all of pretty much the same size and shape. “Dude, you’re getting to be like Conan the Barbarian with that thing.” The rhythm guitarist jerked a mittened thumb at the axe.

  “Practice makes pregnant, same as with anything else.” Rob hefted his implement of destruction. “What I think is, it’s goddamn funny to be using a genuine axe for a change, instead of—” He mimed pulling hot licks from a guitar.

  “Axe . . . axe . . . Yeah!” Biff grinned. You took the nickname for your instrument for granted until you did a compare-and-contrast with the real Craftsman article.

  Rob went on chopping wood for another ten minutes or so. You had to earn your keep, all right. As soon as the power failed, Guilford and the rest of Maine north of the Interstate fell back in time to the land of Currier and Ives. What those nostalgia-filled prints didn’t tell you was how much goddamn work that nineteenth-century life took. You had to find that out for yourself. Rob had, and his hands had new ridges of callus to prove it.

  He walked to the town meeting with the other guys from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, and with Dick Barber and the swarm of his relations who lived on the family side of the inn. They’d had a couple of paying customers when some of the snow melted, but only a couple. Given that the all-time high summer temperature was sixty-one degrees, and that it snowed on August 3, ten days after that tropical afternoon, having any paying guests at all approached the miraculous.

  Barber didn’t seem to worry about it. “Are they going to foreclose on me and toss me out in the snow?” he asked, and answered his own question: “I don’t think so! That kind of crap is all over, at least for now. Half the country isn’t making any mortgage payments now, probably more. Hell, there are whole states where nobody’s making any mortgage payments.”

  He was bound to be right about that. Nobody was living in Wyoming, for instance, much less keeping the bank happy about the loan on the condo. Montana, Colorado, and Idaho were almost as badly screwed, and it got better only in relative terms as you moved farther away from what had been Yellowstone National Park and was now the world’s biggest, hottest hole in the ground.

  The unwritten rule was that everybody shoveled the snow off the sidewalk in front of his own house or shop. The snow that got shoveled went into the street. Back in the day, plows had kept the roads cleared. They’d mostly given up on that now. If you wanted to go from town to town in wintertime now, you could take a sleigh or ski or snowshoe.

  Children and people like the guys from the band amended the unwritten rule. If you were an old man with heart trouble or a woman with a bad back, you didn’t shovel your own walk. You gave somebody something to do it for you: food or warm clothes or firewood or sometimes even cash. Even with the roads opening up in the alleged summer, it was an economy of scarcity. Things counted for more than money did. And Rob had got some of his calluses with a snow shovel.

  Biff ducked into Caleb’s Country Kitchen and came out with the waitress he’d fallen for. Cindy was a short brunette who hardly ever said anything. That had to appeal to Biff. Rob and Justin and Charlie were all full of themselves and full of their own opinions. So was Dick Barber. With Cindy, Biff could get a few words of his own in edgewise.

  Caleb, the guy who ran and cooked for the diner, also came out. He turned the sign on the front door to CLOSED. “Won’t do no business till the meetin’s over, anyways,” he said. He’d stayed open where the Subway, more dependent on outside supplies, went under. He raised chickens and a couple of pigs, and cooked lots of eggs. That improved the overall level of his cuisine; eggs were harder to screw up than some of the things that had been on the menu.

  Guilford held its town meetings in the Episcopalian church, one of the few buildings big enough for the crowds. Everybody came; no one made noises about the separation of church and state. Locals nodded to the guys in the band as they came up. They were tolerated just fine, though they’d stay outsiders forever. Dick Barber had lived here for years. He remained an outsider, too, though not one who was shy about speaking his mind. As far as Rob could see, Dick wasn’t shy about anything.

  A fancy sleigh was hitched outside the church. Rob turned accusingly on Barber. “Why didn’t you tell us Jim was in town?”

  “Because I didn’t know till just now,” Barber answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. “The landline’s out. I can do all kinds of things, but I don’t read minds.”

  “It’ll liven up the meeting, anyway,” Charlie said, and no one was rash enough to try to contradict him. They walked inside.

  “Boy, anybody’d think there were people here or something.” Justin made like Phil Collins: “I can feel it in the air tonight. . . .”

  Feel it wasn’t quite right. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Regular baths and showers were modern luxuries that had gone by the wayside along with so much else. If you wanted to get clean, you heated a basin of water over your fire and washed one body part at a time till the stuff in the basin got too frigid to stand. If you had the patience to do that once a week, you were about average.

  Rob didn’t notice how he smelled when he was by himself. He hardly noticed how the other people at the Trebor Mansion Inn smelled, either; he’d got used to them. But he sure did notice a whole bunch of strangers gathered together in one place. He noticed them for about five minutes, anyhow. After that, his nose forgot about them. When everybody was funky, nobody was funky.

  The mayor of Guilford was a stocky, middle-aged fellow named Josh McCann. He also ran the local independent hardware store. Rob gathered that, before the eruption, it had been one step this side of a junk shop, and a small step at that. Since the supervolcano blew up and
Maine north of the Interstate was mostly forgotten by the rest of the country, junk and being able to do things with junk suddenly became worth their weight in gold—sometimes, even worth their weight in pork spare ribs.

  Swaddled in a bulky wool sweater, McCann took his place at the pulpit, where the minister usually stood. He brought down his gavel: once, twice, three times. People packing the pews quieted down, the way they would have at a church service. Democracy here was a secular faith, and the folks took it much more seriously than they did in SoCal. These towns were small enough that everyone knew or knew about everyone else. Money and slick advertising didn’t matter the way they did in the big city.

  “Meeting will come to order,” the mayor rasped in a two-pack-a-day voice. Rob wondered how his habit was holding up. Tobacco had as much trouble getting here as everything else did. McCann went on, “First order of business is a little talk by Jim Farrell. He’s come a ways to call, so it seems only fair to let him speak his piece.”

  Rob snorted under his breath. Nor was his the only amused or dubious voice rising to the heavens—or at least to the rafters. The next little talk from Farrell would be the first. He was a retired professor of Greek and Roman history who’d moved back to Maine after teaching for a million years at SUNY Albany. He was used to speaking in front of other people, in other words. And he was a man of strong opinions, and far from shy about letting the world know what they were.

  Not long before the eruption, he’d run for Congress up here as a Republican. He’d got trounced. Dick Barber had helped run his campaign, and still grumbled about the way it turned out. The winner, a lawyer with an expensive haircut (Farrell’s words), was down in Washington, where it was . . . well, warmer, anyhow.

  Maybe he was doing what he could for his district. You never could tell. What he could do, in this ravaged, ravished country, seemed vanishingly small. Farrell, who’d stayed behind, was the biggest cheese north and west of the Interstate.