Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  “To us.” Kelly glanced around the kitchen, which was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house. “I still get nervous saying that.”

  “How come?” Alarm bells jangled in Colin’s mind. He was pretty sure he’d found a good one, a keeper. Was she having doubts she’d found one? If she was… idn’t know what he’d do if she was.

  “Because people who go through divorces are usually crazy for a couple of years afterwards,” she answered seriously. “God knows I’ve watched enough grad-school marriages explode.”

  God knew Colin had watched enough cops’ marriages explode, including Gabe Sanchez’s and his own. If you were crazy, did you know you were crazy? If you knew you were crazy, did that mean you weren’t really crazy after all or only that you couldn’t do anything about it? A DA would argue one way, a defense attorney the other.

  He’d seen people do some pretty nutso things after their marriages crashed and burned-no two ways about that. He’d seen guys date women and women hook up with guys they never would have looked at twice if they were in their right minds. Most of them regretted it soon enough. One or two made it work. He’d also seen one guy smash his truck and end up in a wheelchair with gazillions in medical and legal bills because he hopped in while he was drowning his sorrows. And one pretty good cop had got buried in a closed coffin because not even a mortician could make him presentable after he ate his gun.

  Suicide scared cops shitless, not least because it sometimes seemed contagious. If one guy did himself in, it could happen that a couple of weeks later someone else, someone nobody’d thought had any big troubles, also took the long road out. Spooky.

  Colin didn’t want to feel spooky right now, which was putting it mildly. Kelly hadn’t flown down from the East Bay to make him feel spooky. He hoped like hell she hadn’t, anyhow. He put his hand on her shoulder again. She smiled and moved closer to him, the way she had before. That eased his mind.

  “So how’s the supervolcano doing?” he asked casually.

  Her smile winked out like a blown candle flame. Maybe he’d spooked her. “My chairman doesn’t like what it’s doing,” she said, the way Colin might have said The chief wouldn’t like that. She went on, “And I really don’t like what it’s doing.”

  “I’ve seen stuff in the papers,” he said, nodding. “More quakes over 5.0, the geysers’ schedules all fouled up…”

  “Yeah, the tourists get upset when Old Faithful doesn’t go off right on time.” Kelly didn’t bother hiding her scorn. “But that’s only part of what I mean-the part that makes the papers and sometimes even the TV news. The worst things don’t. They only show up in surveyors’ records and satellite radar readings.”

  “How do you mean?” Colin asked.

  “The magma domes are bulging. Pushing up. Especially the new one, the one under Coffee Pot Springs,” Kelly said. “Moving up by feet where they moved by inches even just a couple of years ago.”

  That led to the obvious question, so Colin came out with it: “Is it getting ready to blow, then?”

  “Nobody knows. We’ve never observed a supervolcano eruption before, so how can we tell for sure what we’ve got?” The way Kelly knocked back a big gulp of beer said she sure didn’t like what they had. “Something’s going to happen, though. Maybe it’ll go back down again. It could. Maybe there’ll be ordinary volcanic eruptions. We haven’t had any for seventy thousand years, give or take, and they might relieve the pressure. Or maybe you can drop Rhode Island half a mile straight down.”

  “Your chairman will know people-people in the government, I meanolin said slowly. “So will the other scientists who study this thing. Are they jumping up and down, trying to make the Feds pay attention in case Yellowstone does go kaboom? There ought to be… contingency plans, they call ’em in the service.”

  “I know the geologists are talking to people in the Interior Department,” Kelly answered. “And I know they’re having trouble getting anybody to listen to them. It’s a-” She broke off, groping for the word. “A question of scale, I guess you’d say.”

  She paused again, plainly wondering if she’d have to explain. She didn’t. “The South Bay Strangler’s murdered fifteen little old ladies now. That’s a story. People understand it. It gets splashed all over CNN Headline News,” Colin said, his voice thick with disgust. “But what Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao-you can’t take in numbers like that and what they mean. A good thing, too. Anybody who could feel all those millions of murders would have to go nuts, wouldn’t he?”

  “You’d hope so,” Kelly said.

  “Uh-huh. You would,” Colin agreed. “So the Interior Department guys can’t wrap their heads around the supervolcano?”

  “Not even close,” Kelly said. “They see the studies, and they go, ‘It can’t be this bad.’ And what our people give them is always cautious and careful and conservative. Even that’s enough to make them not take it in. Or they say, ‘If it really does what you say it’ll do, what’s the point of planning for it? It’s too big.’ ”

  “Bend over and kiss your behind good-bye.” Colin wasn’t quite old enough to remember drop-and-cover drills in school, but he knew plenty of people who were.

  “Yeah. Like that. Except the supervolcano is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it’s not even funny,” Kelly said.

  “It isn’t radioactive,” Colin pointed out. “No fallout.”

  “Well, no,” she allowed. “Not like you mean. But it would put so much ash in the air…” She laughed, shakily. “We sure have cheerful things to talk about, don’t we? Stranglers and supervolcanoes. Oh, my!”

  “They’re what we do. And it’s better than not talking,” Colin said. After the kids got out of the house, he and Louise had hardly said anything to each other for days at a time. She didn’t care about policework. She’d cared that he hadn’t been chosen chief, but that was because she’d lost face through his failure. And he hadn’t worried about how she got through her days. With any brains in his head, he would have noticed that that was a bad sign. Aerobics class? Hey, why not?

  Kelly held up her empty glass. “I think I could use a refill.”

  Colin’s glass was empty, too. He didn’t recall finishing the beer, but if he hadn’t a drunk pixie was hiding in one of the cabinets. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation,” he said, and opened the fridge.

  She gave him a quizzical look. “You talk funny sometimes, you know?”

  “Too many City Council meetings. They’d make a penguin go jogging in the Mojave, honest to God they would.”

  Kelly snorted. “You do talk funny.”

  He’d heard that before from his fellow cops. He’d also got dressed down by his superiors for writing reports in English rather than police jargon. Jesus! No wonder I never made chief, he thought. If anybody ever came out and just d what goes on in a cop shop, they’d ride him out of town on a rail. They’d have to.

  Some of his bitterness at getting passed over went away. The administrative part of the job would have been a piece of cake. Knowing which asses to kiss and when, on the other hand… Even if he’d tried, he would have made a hash of it. A police chief had to be a pol, too, and that just wasn’t part of his makeup.

  The second beers vanished faster than the first ones had. “What do you want to do now?” Colin asked.

  “Could I take a shower?” Kelly said. “You go through the airport and you sit on a plane, you feel all grubby even if the flight only lasts an hour. And after that, well, who knows?” She grinned at him.

  “Sounds better than anything else I can think of,” Colin said.

  She came out of the bathroom off the master bedroom naked. Colin lay on the bed waiting for her. She grinned again. “Oh, good,” she said. “You turned up the heat.”

  “We aren’t wearing clothes. No insulation,” he said gravely. And he knew damn well that any woman ever born would shiver at temperatures he thought fine. He had no idea why things worked like that, but they did.

  She got down
beside him. It felt a little strange, a little awkward-the more so for him because it was their first time here, in this bedroom full of memories. He’d gone up to Berkeley a few times before, but they were still learning what floated whose boat. With Louise, after all those years, he’d known.

  Or he’d thought so. If he were as smart as that, how come she’d bailed on him? If people generally were as smart as they thought they were, they’d be a hell of a lot smarter than they really were. Cops learned that fast. Most crooks-not all, but most-were crooks because they were dopes.

  All of which went through his head in odd moments when he wasn’t otherwise distracted. Before long, he stopped having moments like that. Much too soon, or so it seemed, he lay on his back, holding an imaginary cigarette between his first two fingers and blowing an imaginary plume of smoke up toward the cottage-cheese ceiling.

  She laughed. The rain tapped softly at the roof. Then, suddenly, there was a much bigger noise up there-something alive running from one side of the house to the other. “What the devil was that?” Kelly said.

  “Squirrel,” Colin answered. “Just a rat with a pretty tail. You can hear crows up there too sometimes. Wildlife.” He made a face. “Not like Yellowstone, even if we do get coons and coyotes and skunks every once in a while. Possums, too.”

  “Yeah, we have possums in Berkeley,” Kelly said. “A guy I dated a few times-grad student in biology-called ’em junk mammals.”

  “Pretty good name,” Colin said, and let it go right there. Of course she’d gone with guys before him. He didn’t want to know all the gory details. He snooped for a living. He didn’t care to do it on his own time. The way she relaxed beside him, just a little, showed he’d passed one more test.

  Was he going to stay crazy for another year and then some? If he was, present company seemed pretty good. He started to tell her so. Before the words came out, he noticed her eyelids had slid shut. He lay there quietly. In a few minutes, her breathing said she’d fallen asleep. He sometimes thought sleeping-really sleeping-with someone was more intimate, more trusting, than merely going to bed.

  And he could tease her for doing what everyone said guys always did. Or he could have, if he hadn’t started softly snoring himself about ninety seconds later.

  If I jump, God, will You catch me? Louise Ferguson remembered wondering about that a few days before she finally nerved herself to walk out on the emptiness that had been her marriage. Which was pretty funny, when you got right down to it, because most of the time religion meant Easter eggs or Christmas presents or a wedding or a funeral. Except for those last two, she couldn’t remember when she’d set foot in a church.

  But you needed to think of something outside yourself-didn’t you? — when you turned your life upside down and inside out. Back in the day, she would have been a scandal. Prominent police officer’s wife runs away with younger man! People would have cut her dead on the street-except for the ones who wished they had the nerve to bail out of their dead marriages, too.

  She rather missed being a scandal. One of Colin’s unen-dearing endearments for her was drama queen. These days, though, anybody who couldn’t stand living with somebody else another second went ahead and quit, and no one got up in arms about it.

  She might even have been a role model for Vanessa, who’d dumped her live-in boyfriend (even having one, much less dumping him, would have been another scandal back in the day) not long after the breakup with Colin. Louise sighed. Now she had a companion fifteen years younger than her daughter’s.

  Louise wasn’t inclined to judge. I’m not a judgmental person, she often told herself. It was an odd way of asserting autonomy, but it worked for her. Colin not only was judgmental, he was proud of it, too. She’d never known a cop who wasn’t, and she’d known a lot of cops.

  Vanessa was also judgmental, and competitive, and several other things her father was. When she set her chin and looked stubborn, she might have been Colin reborn. She’d always had that air, even when she was only three years old.

  Louise’s cell phone rang. Actually, it started playing “Addicted to Love.” The old word stuck, though, even if the noise the phone made had nothing to do with a landline’s boring, squawky ring. She fished the phone out of her purse, which sat on the severely modern couch in Teo’s condo.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello, Vanessa. I was just thinking about you.” Louise wasn’t going to tell her one and only daughter how she’d been thinking about her. Keep it nice if you can had been drilled into her when she was a little girl. She’d tried to drill it into Vanessa, too, but she hadn’t had much luck. “What’s going on?” Something had to be; Vanessa didn’t call her to pass the time of day.

  “Hagop’s moving to Denver.” Her daughter couldn’t have sounded more tragic if she’d just watched a crowded orphanage go up in flames.

  “Is he?” Louise tried to hold her voice as flat as she could. She didn’t know why Vanessa had taken up with a man old enough to be her father. Well, she knew some of the reason: Hagop wasn’t Bryce Miller and wasn’t anything like Bryce Miller. She made no effort to tell that to Vanessa. She knew useless when she saw it.

  “Yeah,” Vanessa said. “The business climate is better there. That’s what he says. Lower taxes, fewer hassles, the whole nine yards.” She paused. Now she’s going to tell me whatever she really calltell me, Louise thought. Vanessa let the pause stretch long enough for the thought to form very clearly. Then she said, “So I’m going with him.”

  “To Denver?” Louise exclaimed. “To live?” Vanessa had lived in or near San Atanasio her whole life. She thought a shopping expedition to South Coast Plaza in Orange County was like a safari in Burkina Faso.

  But she said, “That’s right. I’ve already started looking for jobs online. I’m sick of working for this idiot, anyway-am I ever.”

  Are you sick of your paycheck? Louise had had some sudden, painful lessons about money since she’d stopped banking Colin’s checks on the tenth and twenty-fifth of every month. But Vanessa was good with computers. She’d find something with more certainty to it than arranging dried flowers. Louise was liable to have to find something like that herself, dammit.

  “I thought I should probably tell you,” Vanessa said, and by her tone of voice she’d been in some doubt.

  “What does, uh, Hagop”-funny name! — “think about you packing up and moving to be with him?”

  “He was surprised,” Vanessa said. I’ll bet he was, her mother thought. She went on, “But he got used to the idea okay.”

  “Did he?” Louise had wondered if the older man was leaving town not least to get away. Maybe not. Something else occurred to her: “Have you told your father yet?”

  “Oh, sure,” Vanessa said carelessly. “He doesn’t want me to do it.”

  “I know he’s not crazy about Hagop…” Louise wasn’t, either, but didn’t want her opinions associated with Colin’s.

  “It wasn’t that.” Now her daughter sounded impatient. Vanessa was good at that. “He kept going on that Denver was too close to what’s cooking under Yellowstone Park. Is he okay? He sounded kind of, I don’t know, loopy about it.”

  “Oh.” Now Louise understood what was going on. “You don’t need to lose any sleep about him, I don’t think. He’s got a, ah, lady friend who studies volcanoes, so no wonder he’s all excited about them.”

  “But there aren’t any volcanoes in Yellowstone, are there?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what this woman, girl, whatever she is, studies.” Louise’s spies-people from the old neighborhood-were sure about that. Come to think of it, Marshall had said something about it, too. Louise hadn’t put it together with the other till now.

  Vanessa went on with her own train of thought, the way she often did: “Besides, Denver’s, like, four hundred miles from Yellowstone. More, even. I looked on a map. Dad must not have. He doesn’t usually freak out over nothing, but he sure did this time.”

 
; “Okay.” Louise was thinking about Denver a different way. It was one more milepost marking how the family was fragmenting, with all the people going their own way. Modern families did that. It was part of how things worked. Rob spent so much time on the road with his silly band, he was like a stranger when he did drift back into town.

  “Listen, Mom, I’ve gotta go. Break’s about over,” Vanessa said. “I’ll try to come by before I move, or maybe we can have lunch or something. ’Bye.”

  “ ’Bye,” Louise echoed, but she was talking to a dead phone. She sighed again and stowed hers in her handbag. She’d spent upwardsf twenty years- the best years of my life, she thought, sincerely if not originally-raising the kids. And for what? To see them scatter to the winds, the way kids did. From their point of view, it was as if she hadn’t done a goddamn thing.

  Which meant… what? She frowned. Thinking about What Stuff Meant-in capital letters-wasn’t something she did every day, or every week, either. Her style had always been more along the lines of do whatever you do, then see what happens next.

  Besides, frowning wasn’t a good plan, not if the man in your bed was younger than you were. Wrinkles stayed. Deliberately, she made her face relax. Teo was so sweet. He said he appreciated all the things she knew, all the things she did with a lack of inhibition that amazed her when she noticed it. Had Colin ever noticed? Had he cared? Not likely!

  Well, if she wasn’t going to live for her kids, who was she going to live for? She surprised herself by answering the question out loud: “For me, that’s who. And you know what else? It’s about time!”

  She started to pull the compact out of her purse, then stopped. To scope herself out at close range with that teeny-tiny mirror, she’d have to put on her reading glasses. She didn’t want to be reminded that she needed reading glasses, not right now she didn’t. She walked into the bathroom instead.