Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “You’ve got an onion on your arm, Daddy? Yuck!” Deborah said.

  “I sure do, sweetie. I’ve got potatoes in my head, too,” Dad answered. That was what he called looking for a word but not being able to find it. He struck a pose, as well as he could with his bad arm back in the sling. “I’m a regular vegetable garden, I am.”

  “You’re silly, you are,” his daughter said.

  “Well, that, too.” He went over to her and ruffled her hair. When he looked up, he said, “Feels funny not having all that weight on my left side. I leaned away from it to keep my balance. Now I’m like this.” He mimed someone leaning back and to the right and about to topple over.

  “Like not having your land legs after you’ve been at sea for a long time,” Marshall suggested.

  “Just like that!” Dad sent him an admiring glance. He felt good—he didn’t win them that often. Dad went on, “You ought to be a writer or something.”

  “Or something,” Marshall echoed. “Would be nice if I could make a living at it, or even come close. Janine’s making noises like I ought to get a real job.”

  Playboy wandered into the front room. Here were a bunch of people who knew him. Obviously, they’d gathered together for no other purpose than stuffing him full of kitty treats. What else were humans good for? God had given them thumbs so they could open the packages He magically provided. Playboy stropped the ankles of each of them in turn. He purred like far-off thunder. The better his routine, the more he got fed.

  Marshall petted Playboy but didn’t reach for the goodies. He wished they hadn’t named the cat after his big sale. Every time he saw the fuzzy beast, he got reminded he hadn’t made another big sale any time lately.

  “Can I, Mommy?” Deborah asked.

  “Okay, but only two,” Kelly said. Deborah fed Playboy. He inhaled the treats and then beat it. Now that the humans had done what he wanted, he didn’t need them any more. Till the next time.

  “What kind of real job would you get?” Dad asked.

  “She’s talking about something in, like, advertising,” Marshall said. “By now, I’ve sold enough stuff that I’ve got kind of a résumé.”

  “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” Dad said thoughtfully. When he looked at a problem, he eyeballed it carefully and from all sides. He looked at it like a cop working on a case, in other words. “Job market’s not what you’d call great, but selling a bunch of stories could make you stick out—and that’s what you want. Nothing wrong with a regular paycheck, either.”

  “I know.” Marshall also knew he wouldn’t have passed his thirtieth birthday without ever getting one if not for the kindness of family and lover. Even so… “I’d rather go on doing what I’ve been doing.”

  “If you’re gonna do that, you’ve got to find a way to make it pay more,” Dad said.

  “We talked about novels a while ago,” Kelly said. “Novels pay better than short stories, huh?”

  They had indeed talked about them. Marshall had thought about tackling one more than once, in fact. Every time he did, the amount of work involved, and the effort to keep all his balls in the air and make everything come out the way he wanted it to, scared him too much to let him keep going. So he said, “Yeah, they do,” and left it there.

  “You’ve got some chops now,” Dad observed. “When you try to sell a novel, you can say you’ve had stories here and there and in Playboy. You’re not Joe Shmo who doesn’t necessarily know the alphabet all the way through.”

  “I guess,” Marshall said. He’d still be trying to crawl out of the primordial slush pile. But his father had a point. He wouldn’t be bubbling up from the reeking ooze at the bottom of that pile.

  “And,” Kelly said shrewdly, “if you can sell a novel or two, it may keep you from trying to write chewing-gum ads or whatever.”

  Somebody had to write chewing-gum ads. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any. What would happen to chewing gum then? No one wanted to find out. But Marshall would have bet that whoever did write those ads didn’t come home from the office feeling proud of himself for having done something cool every day. More likely, the guy gulped a slug of Old Overshoes and figured Well, okay, two more weeks and we can afford to fix the roof.

  Next to that existential—not despair, but resignation, which might have been worse—wasn’t the fear of jumping in over your head by starting a novel a small thing? Mm, not a small thing, but a smaller thing? “Mm, maybe,” Marshall said, as much to himself as to his father and stepmom.

  • • •

  When Vanessa got to the bus to head for another delightful day at the widget works, the driver handed her a small sheet of paper. He had a little pile of them near the fare box; he was giving one to everybody who boarded.

  Vanessa sat down in the first empty seat and read hers. Due to budget constraints, the number of buses traveling each route on a daily basis must be reduced. Effective November 15, the following schedule for this route will be implemented. If this is impactful on your commute, the inconvenience is apologized for. Should more funding become available, we will attempt to facilitate a restoration of service.

  Calling the writing wretched gave it the benefit of the doubt. The bureaucrat who’d cranked it out must have grown up without a native language. If Vanessa thought that was bad, she let out a yelp of pure horror when she looked at the new schedule. Seeing the Mummy or the Wolfman couldn’t have dismayed her nearly so much.

  This bus got her to work about a quarter past eight, which was okay. After November 15, it would go the way of the dodo and of Yellowstone National Park, though less spectacularly than the latter. There would be one that got her to work a little before seven, and one that got her there going on ten. No happy medium.

  “Man, this sucks!” That wasn’t her; it was the African-American woman who’d got on right after her. But she couldn’t have put it better herself.

  Several people swore at the driver. “It ain’t my fault,” he said. “They gonna cut my pay, too, on account of I ain’t drivin’ as much.”

  “That’s terrible! You ought to sue them,” Vanessa exclaimed. She leaped as passionately into causes as she did into everything else.

  “Not me. I ain’t suin’ nobody.” The driver shook his head. “I got two little kids. Ain’t gonna do nothin’ to mess with my job, not when I got them rugrats to feed.” Vanessa had no answer to that. She thought children were a ball and chain, but she didn’t suppose the bus driver would want to hear her say so.

  When she got to the widget works, she showed Mr. Gorczany the bus-schedule change sheet. “Can I change my hours so I can still ride in?” she asked. “Earlier or later—whichever you’d rather.”

  Her boss pooched out his lower lip like a spoiled little boy. “That would be inconvenient, because you wouldn’t be interfacing with the rest of the staff as much,” he said.

  She hadn’t thought anyone used that stupid piece of jargon any more. She’d underestimated him. “I don’t think I’ll be the only one the new schedule affects,” she answered. Try as she might, she couldn’t make herself say impacts, much less impactful.

  “Well, let’s examine some alternative choices,” Nick Gorczany said redundantly. “Could you drive in?”

  That was straightforward enough. It was also more than clueless enough. “Could you double my pay?” Vanessa blurted. He still tooled around in his BMW. Did he think everybody else was made of money, too?

  “No,” he said, which was also straightforward enough. “Could you ride a bicycle? Most people seem to have bicycles these days.”

  “I have a bike. I could ride it in, I guess, but it would be a pain,” Vanessa said. “I don’t live real close to here. That’s why I take the bus.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can work out. I don’t want to inconvenience you too much, but I don’t want to impair our efficiency, either,” he said. The haggle that followed would have made a secondhand-parts dealer in Lagos jealous. They finally agreed she would ride her bike Monday, Wednes
day, and Friday of one week and Tuesday and Thursday of the next, taking the bus and coming in early on the days when she didn’t ride. It was a fifty-fifty split between what she wanted and what he wanted, in other words.

  She supposed she ought to thank her lucky stars she’d got that much. She thought about asking him if she could adjust things when it rained, but decided not to. If she walked in dripping wet one morning, that might flick his conscience—assuming he owned such a critter.

  Back at her desk, she worked out some of her anger at the transit district and at Nick Gorczany by eviscerating a proposal the company was getting ready to submit. She had a red pen run dry in the middle of her edit. She pulled out another one and kept on cutting. The engineers who’d drooled the first draft onto paper would turn fourteen different shades of puce. She didn’t care. This was what Mr. Gorczany paid her—not enough—to do.

  If they wanted to take it to the boss, she also didn’t care. If he backed them and the widget works blew the contract as a result, she didn’t care much about that, either.

  Or maybe she did. Because if that happened, what would they do? Blame her for not editing well enough. Of course they would—otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what were the odds of that?

  The power was on, which was good. She took the edited draft to the copier and made a set for herself. Only after she’d preserved (and stashed) a record of what she’d done did she return the draft to the engineers who’d produced it. Sure enough, they bleated like sheep being sheared.

  “If you’d written it in English the first time, it wouldn’t look like this now,” she said.

  “Did you have to do all that?” one of them asked unhappily.

  “No. I could have left it alone,” she answered. “The agency with the funding would have laughed its ass off if I had, but why worry about things like that?”

  She hoped they would try to argue grammar with her. They’d grown leery of trying that; she won easily but not graciously. One of them plucked up his courage if not his common sense and asked, “What’s wrong with this? The spellchecker didn’t mind it.”

  “That’s because the spellchecker is a moron.” Vanessa didn’t say and so are you, but the suggestion was there. “You wrote ‘We are lead to propose the following goals and objectives.’ Never mind the passive. Never mind the clunky structure. The present tense of the verb is l-e-a-d, pronounced leed. The past tense is l-e-d, pronounced led. L-e-a-d, pronounced led, is the metal that anyone who thinks it’s the past tense of l-e-a-d, pronounced leed, has between his ears instead of brains.”

  “You’re not a good team player.” If the engineer couldn’t come down on her for being wrong, he’d come down on her for being right.

  “If I were playing on a good team, I would be,” she answered, and walked away. If they fixed things, fine. If not, tough titty.

  An hour or so later, Nick Gorczany stopped at her desk. “Try to work on your attitude,” he said. “Try.”

  “When they defend the indefensible, it pisses me off,” she answered.

  “Try anyway,” Mr. Gorczany said. “You know the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

  “I was trying to get rid of the flies,” Vanessa answered. Her boss rolled his eyes and went off to share old sayings with somebody else. That suited her fine.

  XX

  Colin Ferguson looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He whistled a few bars of the Mission: Impossible theme. “Your job, should you choose to accept it,” he said as dramatically as possible, “is to button your shirt with both hands.”

  Kelly was reading on the bed. “Go for it, honey,” she called. “Tom Cruise ain’t got nothin’ on you.”

  Tom Cruise had nothing on him except umpteen gazillion dollars and two good arms. Colin’s left elbow and wrist worked all right. Whenever he tried to move his left arm from the shoulder, it felt as if he’d whacked a hornets’ nest in there with a stick. The physical therapist insisted that time and practice would make it easier, if not necessarily easy. The puckered scar from the 7.62mm AK round and the surgeons’ knife marks (some smaller ones newer and pinker than the rest—they’d gone in again, arthroscopically, to clean out more bone fragments) insisted that the therapist didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Well, he had to try. He did. “Ffffudge!” he said—not quite a slip in front of Kelly, but mighty close.

  “You want help?” she asked.

  “No. What I want is to be able to do this by myself,” Colin answered. “I want it not to hurt so darn much when I do it, too. I can almost manage the first part. The other half isn’t there yet, though. Not even close.”

  “I’m sorry. You got torn up, from what the doctors say,” Kelly told him.

  “Yeah, I know.” He was still trying to decide whether buttoning down from the top hurt more than buttoning up from the bottom. He hadn’t made up his mind. Where he was right now, both seemed equally horrendous. He’d started getting good at doing buttons with just his right hand. Going back to normal felt like more trouble than it was worth. He kept at it anyhow. At last, he said, “There! I did it. And I didn’t age a day over five years.”

  “Want a pain pill?” Kelly asked. “You’ve still got some left.”

  He did want one. He shook his head all the same. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m trying to do without ’em as much as I can, so I don’t get to like ’em too well.”

  “Okay, but they’re there for when you really hurt. You’re making noises like you really hurt,” Kelly said. “You’re also making noises like a cop who’s scared to death of drugs.”

  “Well, if I am, I’ve earned the right,” Colin retorted. “I don’t know how many people I’ve seen who messed up their lives ’cause they found out how much they liked getting loaded.”

  “I can’t see you knocking over a pharmacy next week,” Kelly said.

  “No, and I want to make sure you can’t see me doing anything like that,” Colin said. “Anyway, it’s kind of eased off now that it’s just hanging again.”

  “Okay.” By the way she said it, it was anything but. She didn’t push it any further than that, though. One of the things wives—and husbands—needed to learn was when to back off.

  Putting on jeans wasn’t such an ordeal—his left arm didn’t need to do as much. “I’m only glad I’m not a southpaw, and that the punk didn’t get me in the other shoulder,” he said. “Then I really would’ve been wrecked.”

  “I’m not glad about any of it, not even a little bit,” Kelly declared.

  “Well, neither am I,” Colin said. The more he tried to make his wounded arm work, the more he wondered if he’d ever be able to go back to the cop shop. He could do the part of the job that involved sitting at a desk. In the field, though, he’d be a liability—hell, a danger—to himself and to whoever was with him.

  For that matter, he’d be a danger going to and from the station. You could ride a bike with one good arm as long as nothing went wrong. The second anything did, you were screwed. The same held true in a car, even one with automatic. You couldn’t even think about it if you had a stick.

  He carefully went down the stairs. He could use the banister climbing them. It was on his bad side descending. If he slipped, he’d either fall or try to catch himself with his left arm and then fall. Stairs were dangerous. They got more dangerous when a cat fell asleep on them.

  “Move your fuzzy butt,” Colin told Playboy. Playboy ignored him. Colin stepped around the cat. One of these days, he wouldn’t see the lazy beast. Then they’d both be sorry.

  He ran water into a Pyrex measuring cup to nuke it to make coffee. As long as they had electricity, he’d enjoy it. When he finished his joe, Kelly fixed some. He went into the front room and turned on the TV. He’d developed a new tolerance for it since he got hurt. Watching cost no effort, and he could work the remote with one hand.

  Which he did, as soon as the picture came on: it was Barney and Baby Bop. PBS was fine most
of the time, but not all the time. He switched to CNN. A Viagra commercial was running. He muted it. It was at least as irksome as the sappy purple dinosaur. A commercial for backyard chicken coops followed it. He wouldn’t have seen that before the eruption. But meat and eggs, these days, were more do-it-yourself than they had been for many years.

  “Hey, hon!” he called.

  “What?” Kelly answered from the kitchen. The microwave hadn’t dinged again yet.

  “If I do retire, what do you say I start raising chickens? We could use the poop to fertilize the garden.”

  “If that’s what you want to do,” she said. “Make sure it is before you start, that’s all.” He nodded, though she couldn’t see him. It sounded like good advice. So did most of what she said.

  At last, a newswoman came on. “A bill to construct seven new nuclear plants has passed the House,” she said. “Fierce debate is expected in the Senate. Polls show that most Americans want more energy, no matter how it is produced. But less than one person in four wants a nuclear power plant built within a hundred miles of his or her home.”

  Colin sipped his coffee. “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” he said.

  “Say what?” Kelly brought in her cup. She hadn’t heard the story. He explained. She nodded. “Oh. Yeah. One of the things I haven’t heard many people say is that the supervolcano coughed out a lot of radioactive crud. Not by percentage, of course, but when over six hundred cubic miles of junk come out, even a tiny percentage makes a fair-sized raw number.”

  “If the EPA finds out about that, I bet they declare the eruption illegal,” Colin said. “Then all our troubles are over, right?”

  “Right.” She sent him a severe look. He grinned back.

  On the TV, the newswoman said, “The Administration hopes the disastrous outages in the Northeast last winter will allow this bill to pass both houses at last. The nuclear plants will add to the grid a large part of the power lost as a result of the freezeup in Quebec. Environmental groups vow to fight construction through the courts if the bill does pass.”