Year's Best SF 1

by David G. Hartwell

  Or else, as Mattison knows all too well, your dam will work very effectively to halt the lava in its present path—thereby inducing it to take up a different path that will send it rolling off toward some still undamaged freeway or still unruined houses, or maybe pouring down a hillside into another community entirely. When you see something like that happening, you need to move your whole operation around at a 90-degree angle to itself and start building a second dam, not so easy to do when you are operating with two-ton pumps.

  Here, just now, everything is going sweetly so far. It's a tough business because of the extreme heat, but they are holding their own and even managing to achieve something. They have been able to maintain themselves at a distance of about half a block from the front edge of the lava flow without the need to retreat, and Mattison can see, whenever the steam thins out a bit, that the color of the lava along the edge is beginning to turn from gray to a comforting black, the black of solid basalt. A pump crew from some other Citizens Service House has arrived, Mattison has been told, and is building a second lava dam on the opposite side of the breakout. The fire crews are at work in the adjacent blocks, hosing down the structures that were ignited by the initial geyser of lava fragments.

  If visibility stays good, if the water supply holds out, if the pump doesn't break down, if the lava doesn't pull any velocity surprises, if some randomly escaping gobbet of hot rock doesn't go flying at them through the air and melt one of the hoses, if there isn't some new eruption right under their feet, or maybe an earthquake, if this, if that—well, then, maybe they'll be able to knock off in another hour or two and head back to the house for some well-earned rest.

  Maybe.

  But things are beginning to change a little, now. The lava is penned up nicely in the middle but the bulk of the flow has shifted to the right-hand stream and that one is gaining in depth and velocity. That brings up the ugly possibility that Mattison's dam is achieving diversion instead of containment, and is about to send the entire flow, which has been traveling thus far from west to east, off in a southerly direction.

  Volcano Central is monitoring the whole thing by satellite, and somebody back there calls the problem to Mattison's attention via his suit radio about a fifteenth of a second after he discovers it for himself. “Start moving your equipment to the right side of your dam,” Volcano Central says. “There's danger now that the lava will start rolling south down San Dimas Avenue into Bonelli County Park, where it'll take out the Puddingstone Reservoir, and maybe keep on going south until it cuts the San Bernardino Freeway in half on the far side of the park. A piece of the 210 Freeway will also be at risk down there.”

  The street and park names mean nothing to Mattison—he has never been anywhere near San Dimas before in his life—and he can form only a hazy picture of the specific geography from what Volcano Central is telling him. But all that matters is that there's a park, a reservoir, and an apparently undamaged stretch of freeway to the south of here, and his beautifully constructed lava dam has succeeded in tipping the flow toward those very things, and he has to hustle now to correct the situation.

  “All right, everybody, listen up,” he announces. “We're making a 90-degree shift in operations.”

  Easier said than done, of course. The hoses will have to be decoupled and dragged to new hydrants, the massive pump has to be swung around, the trajectory of the water stream has to be recalibrated—nor will the lava stand still while they are doing all these things. It's a challenge, but stuff like this is meat and potatoes to Mattison, the fundamental nutritive agent out of which his recovery is being built. He starts giving the orders; and his poor battered bedraggled team of ex-abusers, ex-homelesses, ex-burglars, ex-muggers, ex-whores, ex-this, ex-that, all of it bad, swings gamely into action, because this is part of their recovery too.

  But in the middle of the process of moving the pump, Blazes McFlynn steps back, folds his arms across the chest of his lava suit, and says, “Coffee break.”

  Mattison stares at him incredulously. “What the fuck did you say?”

  “Time out, is what I said. You think it's a snap, hauling this monster around? I'm tired. I'm a crippled man, Matty. I got to sit down for a while and take a breather.”

  “The lava is changing direction. There's a park and a reservoir and a freeway in the path of danger now.”

  “So?” McFlynn says. “What's that mean to me?”

  Mattison is so astonished that for a moment he can't speak. If this is a joke, it's a damn lousy one. He needs McFlynn badly, and McFlynn has to know that. Flabbergasted, Mattison gapes and gestures in helpless pantomime.

  McFlynn says, “Not my park. Not my freeway. I don't even know where the fuck we are right now. But my bad leg is aching like a holy son of a bitch and I want to sit down and rest and that's that.”

  “I'll sit you down, all right,” Mattison says, recovering his voice finally. “I'll sit you down inside a volcano, you obstreperous lazy son of a bitch. I'll drop you in on your head.” He knows that he is not supposed to speak to the inmates this way, and that everybody else is listening in and someone is bound to talk and he will very likely be reprimanded later on by Donna, but he can't help himself. He doesn't pretend to be a saint and McFlynn's sudden rebellion has pissed him off almost to the breaking point. Almost. What he really would like to do now is put one hand under McFlynn's left armpit and one hand under the right one and pick him up and carry him to the lava and dangle his feet over the fiery-hot flow for a moment and then let go.

  Very likely that is exactly what Mattison would have tried to do two years ago, if he and McFlynn had found themselves in this situation two years ago; but it is a measure of the progress he has been making that he merely fantasizes tossing McFlynn into the lava, now, instead of actually doing it. The fantasy is so vivid that for a dizzy moment he believes that he is actually doing it, and he gets a savage rush of glee from the mental spectacle of McFlynn disappearing, melting away as he goes under, into the blazing river of molten magma.

  But actually doing it would be extremely poor procedural technique. And also McFlynn is not exactly a weakling and Mattison is aware that he might find himself involved in a non-trivial fight if he tries anything. Mattison has never lost a fight in his life, but it is some time since he has been in one, and he may be out of practice; and in any case there's no time now, with the lava about to overflow his dam, to fuck around getting into fights with people like Blazes McFlynn.

  So what he does, instead, is turn his back on McFlynn, swallowing the rest of what he would like to say and do to him, and indicate to Prochaska, Hawks, and Snow, who have been watching the whole dispute in silence, that they will have to finish moving the pump without McFlynn's help. They all know what that means, that McFlynn has shafted them thoroughly by dumping his share of this tremendous job on their shoulders, and they are righteously angry. A certain amount of venting occurs, which Mattison decides it would be best to permit. Hawks tells McFlynn that he's a fucking goof-off and Prochaska says something guttural and probably highly uncomplimentary in what is probably Czech, and even Snow, not famous for hard work himself, gives McFlynn the hand-across-bent-forearm chop. McFlynn doesn't seem to give a damn. He replies to the whole bunch of them with an upthrust finger and a lazy, contemptuous smirk that makes Mattison think that the next event is going to be a crazy free-for-all; but no, no, they all ostentatiously turn their backs on him too and continue the job of guiding the pump toward its new position.

  It's a miserably hard job. The pump is on a wheeled carriage, sure, but it isn't designed to be moved in an arc as narrow as this, and they really have to bust their humps to swing it into its new position. The men, clumsy within their bulky suits, grunt and groan and gasp as they bend and push. Mattison, who as the biggest and strongest of the group has taken up the key position, can feel things popping in his arms and shoulders as he puts his whole weight into the job. And all the while McFlynn stands to one side, watching.

  The pump is
more than halfway into place when McFlynn comes limping over as though he has graciously decided that he will join them in the work after all.

  “Well, look who's here,” says Hawks. “You fucking son of a bitch.”

  “Can I be of any assistance?” McFlynn says grandly.

  He tries to take up a position against the side of the pump carriage between Hawks and Prochaska. Hawks turns squarely toward McFlynn and seems to be thinking about throwing a punch at him. Mattison, who has been worried about this possibility since McFlynn made his announcement, poises himself to step in, but Hawks gets his anger under control just in time. Muttering to himself, he turns back in Prochaska's direction. There is just enough room for McFlynn to shove his way in between Hawks and Mattison. He braces himself and puts his shoulder against the carriage, making a big show of throwing all his strength into the task.

  “Hey, be careful not to strain yourself, now!” Mattison tells him.

  “Fuck you, Matty,” McFlynn says sulkily. “That's all I have to say, just fuck you.”

  “You're welcome,” says Mattison, as with the aid of McFlynn's added strength they finally manage to finish swinging the big pump around and lock it on its track.

  The men step back from it, wheezing, sucking in breath after their heavy exertions. But the incident isn't over. Prochaska goes up to McFlynn and says something else to him in the harsh language that Mattison assumes is Czech. McFlynn gives Prochaska the finger again. Maybe there's going to be a fight after all. No. They are content to glare, it seems. Mattison glances at McFlynn and sees, through the face-plate of his suit, that the expression on McFlynn's face has become unexpectedly complicated. He looks defiant but maybe just a little shamefaced too. An attack of conscience? A bit of guilt over his stupid dereliction kicking in at last, now that McFlynn realizes that he actually was needed badly just now and fucked everybody over by crapping out? Better late than never, Mattison figures.

  Prochaska still isn't finished letting McFlynn know what he thinks of him, though: he throws in a couple of harsh new Slavic expletives, and McFlynn, who probably has no more of an idea of what Prochaska is saying to him than Mattison does, dourly gives him back some muttered threats salted with the standard Anglo-Saxonisms.

  Things are starting to get a little out of hand, Mattison thinks. He needs to do something, although he's not sure what. But he has a lava flow to worry about, first.

  The lava, in fact, is getting a little out of hand also. Not that it has started to flow in any serious way toward Whatchamacallit Park and Whozis Reservoir, not yet. A thin little eddy of it has begun to dribble off that way over the right-hand edge of Mattison's dam, but nothing significant. The main flow is still traveling from east to west. The real problem is that new flows are starting to emerge from the ground alongside the original source, and there are now six or seven streams instead of three. Red gleams are showing through the gray and black of the dam in a number of places, indicating that the hot new lava is finding its way between sections of the hardened stuff. That means that what is coming out now is thinner than before.

  Thin lava moves faster than thick lava. Sometimes it can move very fast. The direction of the flow can get a little unpredictable, too.

  The pump is in place in its new location and ready to start throwing water, but it needs to have the water, first. Mattison is still waiting for confirmation that the hoses behind him have been moved and hooked to different hydrants. He can see Nicky Herzog a short distance down one of the side streets to his right, kneeling next to a section of thick hose as he fumbles around with a connector.

  “Are we okay?” Mattison asks him.

  “Just about ready,” Herzog replies. He straightens up and begins to give the hand signal indicating that the water line is completely set up. But suddenly Herzog seems to freeze in place, and starts swinging around jerkily in a very odd way, going from side to side from the waist up without moving his legs at all. Also he has begun flinging his arms rigidly above his head, one at a time, as though he is suddenly getting tickled by an electric current.

  For a moment Mattison can't figure out what's going on. Then he sees that the rightmost lava stream, the one that had already begun to escape a little from the dam, has been joined by one of the newer and thinner streams and has greatly increased in volume and velocity. It has changed direction, too, and is running straight at Herzog in a great hurry, traveling at him in two prongs separated by a green Toyota utility van that somebody has abandoned in the middle of the street.

  Herzog is in the direct line of the flow, and he knows it, and he is scared silly.

  Mattison sees immediately that Herzog has a couple of choices that make some sense. He could go to his left, which would involve a slightly scary jump of about three feet over the lesser prong of the new lava stream, and take refuge in an alleyway that looks likely to be secure against the immediate trajectory of the stream because there are brick buildings on either side of it. Or he could simply turn around and run like hell down the street he's in, hoping to outleg the advancing flow, which is moving swiftly but maybe not quite as swiftly as he could manage to go. Both of these options have certain risks, but each of them holds out the possibility of survival, too.

  Unfortunately Herzog, though a quick-witted enough fellow when it comes to sarcastic quips and insults, or to laying out a million-dollar story line for some movie-studio executive, is fundamentally a clueless little yutz as far as most normal aspects of life are concerned, and in his panic he makes a yutzy decision. Apparently Herzog perceives the Toyota as an island of safety in the middle of all this madness, and, breaking at last from his paralysis, he jumps the wrong way across a segment of the narrower lava stream and with a berserk outlay of energy pulls himself up onto the hood of the green van. From there he clambers desperately to the Toyota's roof and begins to emit a godawful frightened caterwauling, high-pitched and strident, like an automobile burglar alarm that won't turn off.

  What he has achieved by this is to strand himself in the middle of the lava flow. Maybe he expects that Mattison will now call in a police helicopter to lower a rope ladder to him, the way they would do in a movie, but there are no helicopters in the vicinity just now, and the lava that surrounds the Toyota isn't any special effect, either: it's a fast-flowing stream of actual red-hot molten magma, a couple of thousand degrees in temperature, which is widening and widening and very soon will be lapping up against the Toyota's wheels on both sides. At that point the Toyota is going to melt right down into the lava stream and Nicky Herzog is going to die a quick but very unpleasant death.

  Mattison doesn't like the idea of losing a member of his crew, even a shithead like Herzog. He knows that his crew is made up entirely of shitheads, himself included, and the fact that Herzog is a shithead does not invalidate him as a human being. Too much of the human race falls into the shithead category, Mattison realizes. If nobody in the world ever lifted a finger to save shitheads from their own shitheadedness, then almost everybody would be in trouble. He himself, as Mattison is only too thoroughly aware, would still be compulsively cruising the bars along Wilshire and waking up the next morning under somebody's carport in Venice or Santa Monica. So he resolved some time back, quite early in his sobriety, to do whatever he could to help the shitheads of the world overcome their shitheadedness, starting with himself but extending even unto the likes of McFlynn and Herzog.

  Nevertheless, Mattison is helpless in this instance. He is cut off from Herzog now by the larger of the two lava flows and he doesn't see a damned thing that he can do by way of rescuing him in time. A couple of minutes ago, maybe, yes, but now there's no chance. Even with an armored suit on, he can't just wade through a stream of hot fresh lava. He is going to have to stand right where he is and watch Herzog melt.

  All of this analysis, the sizing up of the somber situation and the arriving at the melancholy conclusion, has taken about 2.53 seconds. Roughly 1.42 seconds later, while Mattison is still glumly making his peace with
the idea that Herzog is screwed, a lava-suited figure unexpectedly appears in the street where Herzog is trapped, emerging from the alleyway into which Herzog had failed to flee, and calls out, extending his arms to the terrified man on top of the van, “Jump! Jump!” And, when Herzog does nothing, yells again, angrily, “Come on, you prick, jump! I'll catch you!”

  Mattison isn't sure at first who the man who has come out of the alleyway is. Everybody looks basically like everybody else inside a lava suit, and it's not too easy to distinguish one voice from another over the suit radios, either. Mattison glances around, taking a quick inventory of his crew. Hawks right here, yes, and Prochaska, yes—

  Can it be Clyde Snow who is out there by the mouth of that alleyway? No. No. Snow is right over there, on the far side of the pump carriage. So it has to be Blazes McFlynn who at this very moment is standing almost at the edge of a diabolically hot stream of lava and stretching his arms out toward the gibbering and wailing Nicky Herzog. McFlynn, yes, who has found some sort of detour between the adjacent buildings and made his way as close to the Toyota as it is possible to get. Incredible, Mattison thinks. Incredible.

  “Jump, will you, you nitwit faggot?” McFlynn roars once more. “I can't stay here the whole fucking day!”

  And Herzog jumps.

  He does it with the same grace and panache with which he has handled most other aspects of his life, coming down in McFlynn's approximate direction with his body bent in some crazy corkscrew position and his arms and legs flailing wildly. McFlynn manages to grab one arm and one leg as Herzog sails by him heading nose-first for the lava, and hangs on to him. But, slight as Herzog is, the force of his jump is so great and the angle of his descent is so cockeyed that the impact on McFlynn causes the bigger man to stagger and spin around and begin to topple. Mattison, watching in horror, comprehends at once that McFlynn is going to fall forward into the lava stream still holding Herzog in his arms, and both men are going to die.