Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “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 government 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 enoug
h 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.

  The other difference was, the lawyer knew bureaucracy and politics and policy. When the Federal government touched this part of Maine only while the roads were open, and when they hadn’t been open much this year, he became a cipher. Jim Farrell knew useful things, like which root vegetables had the shortest growing seasons and how to salt trout or make sauerkraut. He knew, and he talked. Oh, yes-he talked. And talked and talked some more.

  He got to his feet now. Instead of the more common stocking cap, he wore a snap-brim fedora. His pearl-gray topcoat was of a cut reckoned elegant when FDR decided we had nothing to fear but fear itself: some years before he was born, in other words. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t so old as that. He was a dandy with antique tastes.

  He had a ruddy Irish face with a pointed nose and bushy eyebrows. The first time Rob met him, the winter before, he’d been reminded of a smaller version of John Madden, but only till Farrell opened his mouth. Madden had a mouth full of gravel. Jim Farrell’s baritone was a very different instrument. He spoke in sentences that parsed and paragraphs where the sentences followed logically, one upon another. That should have ruled out a successful political career for him, and as a matter of fact it had-till the supervolcano erupted.

  “Here we are again,” he said as he took McCann’s place at the pulpit. “Here we are again, all right, in this, the second winter of our discontent. The first one was pretty easy, as these things go. We chopped down the trees that stood closest, and we shot the nearest and stupidest moose.”

  People chuckled. It wasn’t that Farrell was saying anything that wasn’t so. They’d done exactly that the winter before. They’d got by with it, too, until things thawed out enough to remind the wider world for a little while that they were there.

  “I’m serious,” Farrell insisted, “or as serious as I’m likely to get, anyhow. I’m serious, and the situation is liable to turn critical. If we don’t want to end up burning down our houses to keep warm and eating long pig so we don’t starve, we’d better do some planning first.”

  Rob wondered how many of the men and women in the crowd understood what long pig was. Sitting next to him, Justin quirked an eyebrow, so he got it. Well, Justin knew all kinds of weird things. Knowing weird things was his specialty, maybe even more than playing guitar. And Dick Barber also grinned out of one side of his mouth. But he too was a man of parts, even if not all of them worked all the time. And he would have heard more from Farrell than anybody. For most of these folks, though, long pig would be caviar to the general. Then Rob wondered how many people here knew about caviar to the general. And then he quit worrying about crap like that and listened to Farrell some more.

  “-got to organize and share what we can gather,” the retired history prof was saying. “If we don’t hang together, you can be sure we will hang separately.”

  That was Ben Franklin. Before Rob could even start to wonder how many people in the church knew that much, somebody called, “I thought you were a Republican, not a goddamn Commie!”

  Farrell beamed. He loved hecklers, mostly because he loved demolishing them. Before Mayor McCann could gavel the loudmouth out of order, Farrell waved for him not to bother. “Right this minute, I think Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are a little too cold themselves to worry about Maine north of the Interstate.” He got his laugh. Having got it, he went on, “At least, I don’t think North Korea has a rocket that will reach all the way to such a dangerous place as Guilford.”

  That won him another one. “Washington doesn’t worry about us, either. We’ve seen that. And I am a Republican, so I say that’s a good thing more often than not. I don’t want Big Brother watching me. But I also don’t want my friends and neighbors squabbling like the Kilkenny Cats, and I don’t want them starving or freezing, either. If we can take care of ourselves, we won’t need to cry because Big Brother’s falling down on the job. All politics is local, but some is more local than others. For about nine months out of the year, maybe more, ours looks as though it’s going to be about as local as it gets.”

  He went on to talk about schemes for using the gasoline and fuel oil they did have, and about organizing hunts and woodcutting parties. He talked about parsnips and mangel-wurzels and Andean potatoes that ripened faster than the varieties of spuds Maine had been famous for.

  “What the hell is a mangel-wurzel?” Rob whispered to Justin.

  “You grab a wurzel and you hurt it real bad,” Justin explained, so he had no clue, either.

  “None of this will be exciting,” Farrell finished. “But we’re not talking about excitement now. Excitement is for good times. It’s a luxury. We’re talking about survival. Survival is what we’ll be talking for the rest of my life, for the rest of your lives, and probably for the rest of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I don’t think Washington has figured that out yet, but it looks pretty obviou
s here, doesn’t it?”

  Nobody, not even the guy who’d yelled at him, tried to tell him he was wrong. No one applauded when Farrell stepped away from the pulpit-the bully pulpit, Rob thought-either. The thoughtful silence he got seemed higher praise than any mere handclapping could have been. And the agenda items following his talk seemed even duller than they might have otherwise.

  After the town meeting adjourned, Rob waded through the crowd around Jim Farrell and waited his turn to talk. When it finally came, he asked, “Why aren’t the Feds paying more attention to us? We’re hit harder than any place that didn’t get covered in ash.”

  “Well, for one thing, a lot of places did get covered in ash,” Farrell replied, and Rob nodded. The older man continued, “And Washington is out for what it can get, much more than it is for what it can give. From us, that means it’s out for nothing. You can’t get blood from a turnip, or from a mangel-wurzel. So Washington shines the light of its countenance on the places that are still warm, or at least warmer.”

  That made more sense than Rob wished it did. He was less convinced than Farrell that being forgotten about by Washington was a good thing. But he wasn’t nearly so sure it was a bad thing as he had been when Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles first got stuck in Guilford. He let someone else talk to Farrell and walked out into the sharp-toothed cold outside.

  It was dark outside the church, too-no working streetlamps. Rob stepped on somebody’s foot before he’d gone very far. “Sorry,” he said, wondering who his victim was.

  “No damage,” came the reply: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t see him, either, because she asked, “Who are you?”

  “Rob. I’m one of the fellows staying at the Mansion Inn.”

  “Oh, from the band!” she said. “You guys are good, even acoustic. I like it when you play in the park by the river. I go whenever I can.”