Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  Yes, that was better. She could inspect herself here at a distance her eyes were able to handle on their own. Okay, she had fine lines at the corners of those eyes. Okay, some of the lines on her forehead weren’t so fine. Time went by, no matter how little you wanted it to. And she’d spent a lot of afternoons tanning when she was younger. She’d looked terrific then. Her skin would be smoother and softer now if she hadn’t.

  Her hair was perfect. That was a line from an old song, but she couldn’t come up with the rest of it. She was, by God, still a honey blonde. If she had some gray roots, that was between her and the Clairol people. And she kept the bottle with her tampons and pads, where Teo wouldn’t stumble over it.

  What she really hated was the sag under her chin. It wasn’t bad, not yet, but it was there. And her upper arms flopped sometimes. She’d had a high-school English teacher whose arm did the shimmy whenever she wrote on the board. The kids, heartless with youth, had laughed at her. It didn’t seem so funny any more.

  “My boobs sag, too,” Louise said sadly. With a bra, it didn’t show. But there were times, important times, when you weren’t wearing a bra. And Teo’s mouth and fingers would know her flesh was less resilient than it had been when Colin started pawing her. Nurse three kids and that was what happened.

  She turned around and looked back at herself over her shoulder. Her ass was too damn wide. That also came from having three kids… and from having all the years she did her best not to think about.

  She was what she was. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. With as many miles as she had on her, and some of the bumpy roads her life had banged over, how could she ask for more? How? Simple. She wanted everything to work the way it had when she was Vanessa’s age. That wasn’t gonna happen, but she wanted it anyhow. Who didn’t?

  When she went back to the front room, she turned on the Food Network. She wasn’t a great cook-Colin had once accused her of being able to burn water-but she liked watching whizzes put meals together. I could do that, she’d think, even if she was one of the people for whom God cn Hamburger Helper. They made everything look so easy, though. If TVs came with smell attachments… Wow!

  After a while, she punched the remote. She didn’t flip through channels the way a man would, but she wasn’t locked in. MSNBC said the Iranians were doing something or other the President didn’t like. Louise went back to the Food Network, and then on to Oxygen. The Iranians had been doing things Presidents didn’t like for, well, for ever.

  Footsteps on the stairs. Louise brightened. She knew those light, bright steps. A key went into the lock, and then into the dead bolt. The door opened. In bounced Teo, as fresh as when he’d left this morning-literally, because he’d showered again at the gym.

  Louise smiled a thousand-watt smile. “Darling!” she said, and all but threw herself into his arms.

  “So how are those Greek poets?” Colin asked Bryce Miller. They sat across the dining-room table from each other, a chessboard between them. Colin had a cup of coffee in front of him; Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend, a Coke.

  “I’m getting there-diss’ll be done next year, maybe year after next,” Bryce answered. He was tall and skinny and pale almost to translucence, with curly red hair and a wispy little beard. After due consideration, he pushed a pawn.

  Colin took it. He played chess the way he approached most problems: with straightforward aggression. He simplified ruthlessly and tried not to make too many dumbass mistakes. Against a lot of opponents, that was plenty good enough. Against Bryce, he won maybe one game in five: enough to keep him interested, not enough to let him imagine they were in the same league.

  Bryce moved a knight. Colin wagged a finger at him. That nasty horse would fork his queen and a rook if he didn’t do something about it. He moved the queen to threaten the knight and the forking square. Bryce covered it with a bishop.

  Okay, Colin thought. Now I can get on with my own attack. He moved a bishop of his own, over on the other side of the board.

  Bryce had long, thin fingers. He picked up the knight the way a surgeon might lift a scalpel. He took a pawn with it. “Check,” he said regretfully.

  One of Colin’s pawns could wipe it from the board. But as soon as he did that, Bryce’s bishop would assassinate his queen. He eyed the board for a moment, considering his chances after losing the queen. He saw only two, bad and worse. He tipped over his king.

  “You got me good that time,” he said. “I saw the bishop defending, but I didn’t see it would turn to attack as soon as you unmasked it. And the check meant I couldn’t just ignore the lousy knight.” Everything was obvious-after the fact. It usually worked that way.

  “Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded-a spider encouraging a fly. “Want to play again?” He tried not to look too hopeful.

  But Colin shook his head. “Not right now. That one kinda stings.” He leaned back in the dining-room chair. Something in his shoulder crunched. Bryce could sit forever in any position and never get uncomfortable. Colin hadn’t been able to do that even in his twenties. He tried a different tack: “How’s the world treating you these days?”

  “Oh, fair to partly cloudy, I guess you’d say,” the younger man answered. “Maybe a skosh better than that. Writing your thesis leaves you hostile. And having a relationship blow up in your face doesn’t exactly make you want to go out and party, either.”

  “Tell me about it!” Colin said with more feeling than he’d intended.

  Bryce nodded. “Yeah. You know what I’m talking about, all right. So I ought to be down in the Dumpster, right?”

  “Hadn’t heard anybody put it like that before, but it seems like a possibility,” Colin said. “You aren’t, though?”

  “I aren’t,” Bryce agreed. “I had another poem accepted by a pretty good journal. Theocritus updated, you might say.”

  Theocritus was one of the 2,000-plus-years-dead poets he studied. Colin knew that much, and not a nickel’s worth more. Still, he brought his hands together in one silent clap. “Not bad,” he said. “That’s two in a few months.”

  As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have left them in there. Bryce had got the first acceptance just before Vanessa threw him out. Cause and effect? Jealousy? Vanessa made a hell of an editor. She had all the tools she needed to be a writer herself except the nerve. She would rather submit to a root canal without Novocain than to an editor.

  Bryce said “Uh-huh” again. He owned a pretty fair poker face. Colin couldn’t tell what he was thinking. That might have been just as well.

  “They pay you anything for this one?” Colin asked.

  Now Bryce snorted: derision for a silly question. “Copies.” By the way he said it, he figured he was lucky not to have to buy them. “My mom will be happy-she’ll have something to put on her shelf and show my aunts and uncles. But you can’t make a living as a poet. Or I sure as hell can’t, anyway, not with the kinds of things I write. So I do ’em as well as I can, for me. If anybody else likes ’em, cool. If nobody does, I can live with that.”

  Colin wondered whether he was kidding himself or knew he was blowing smoke. You didn’t sit down and write poems if you didn’t want other people to see them. You probably wanted to end up on the New York Times bestseller list. Bryce was right about one thing, though: if you modeled your poems on ones from some ancient Greek, you damn well wouldn’t.

  “Other thing is…” Bryce hesitated, perhaps almost as carefully as he would have while building and polishing one of his poems. He usually wasn’t shy about telling Colin what was on his mind. Which meant… No sooner had Colin realized what it meant than Bryce confirmed it: “I’ve met somebody I like. She seems to like me, too. We’ll see where it goes, that’s all.”

  “Good for you!” Colin was glad he could say it quickly. He didn’t want Bryce thinking he liked him only because he’d been attached to Vanessa. “So have I-but you’ve heard about that.”

  “Right.” Bryce raised an eyebrow. “We’ll all run f
or the hills when the super-duper volcano pops its cork.” Said in a different tone of voice, that would have made Colin want to punch him in the snoot. As things were, and accompanied by a disarming grin, it wasn’t so bad.

  “Something’s gonna happen there. I don’t know what. I don’t know when. Neither does anybody else, including Kelly,” Colin said. “Nobody knows when the Big One’ll hit, either. I’ve got an earthquake kit in the steel shed out back, though, and a little one in my trunk. Don’t you?”

  “I have one in the car. Harder to put one in the shed when you’re in an apartment,” Bryce said.

  “Could be,” Colin admitted. “So who’s your new friend? What’s she do? How’d you meet her?”

  “Her name’s Susan Ruppelt. She was moving into the TA office I was clearing out of. We got to talking, and I got her e-mail, and one thing kind of led to another. She’s working on the Holy Roman Empire. Tenth-century stuff, maybe eleventh-.”

  “AD, you mean, not BC.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Too modern for you, then.”

  “Hey, what are thirteen hundred years between friends?” Bryce grinned again. He looked as happy as a cat lapping up cream. He hadn’t looked that way while he was with Vanessa, not after the first few months. Maybe it would last longer this time. Or maybe not. Even if it did, things might fall apart years later. Colin had learned more on that score than he’d ever wanted to find out.

  “Luck,” he said, and meant it.

  “Thanks. You, too.” Bryce’s mouth twisted. “It’s as much as you can hope for, isn’t it? Luck, I mean. You grow together, or else you grow apart. I think Susan’s on the sheltered side, you know? Otherwise, she’d have more sense than to mess with a guy on the rebound.”

  “Well, bring her by here one day,” Colin said. “If I can’t scare her away from you, nothing will.”

  “I may take you up on that,” Bryce said. “You have been warned.”

  IV

  Between two and three million people came to Yellowstone every year. In July and August, they all seemed to be there at once. Cars and RVs and tour buses clogged the roads till they made California freeways at rush hour look wide open by comparison.

  Kelly Birnbaum knew how to beat the crowds. Go a quarter of a mile off the asphalt and you shed way more than nine-tenths of the visitors. Go a couple of miles from the highways and you were pretty much on your own. That was bad news as well as good. Cell-phone reception in the vast park was spotty at best. If you got into trouble, you might not be able to let anybody else know.

  The idea, then, was not to get into trouble. Kelly was a city girl. She didn’t hike the wilderness because she particularly loved hiking the wilderness. She went out there because that was what you did if you were a geologist working in the field.

  What did the gravedigger in Hamlet say? Something about familiarity lending a quality of easiness. That was as much as she remembered. Considering that she hadn’t needed to worry about Hamlet since her undergrad days, she was moderately pleased to come up with even so much.

  One of the basic lessons was never to hike alone. Since she was part of a team of researchers trudging out to Coffee Pot Springs, that wasn’t an issue. Ruth Marquez came from the University of Utah. Daniel Olson, who was younger than she was, had just landed a tenure-track job at Montana State, in Missoula. Kelly didn’t know whether to be jealous or to remember it was Missoula. And the calm, unhurried fellow who needed to buy a vowel was Larry Skrtel. He’d been with the U.S. Geological Survey the past twenty years, and headed up the team.

  He enjoyed hiking. “The critters are less likely to bite you or run over you than the damn tourists are,” he declared.

  “Except for the bison, maybe,” Daniel said. /They’re as dumb as the morons who bought Hummers when gas was cheap.” He was at least six-three, but Kelly had seen his car: a fire-engine red Honda the size of a roller skate.

  “Keep your distance and they won’t bother you,” Larry said. “Well, usually.”

  “Famous last words,” Daniel said. The other hikers laughed, as if he didn’t mean it. Bison knew they were the biggest critters in the neighborhood, and expected everything else to get out of their way. Some of the males weighed as much as Daniel Olson’s little car. They were dumb as rocks, and lots of those males had testosterone poisoning. Not a good combination.

  The geologists had set out from Indian Pond. One of their colleagues took the car that brought them that far back to Lake Village. A train led towards Astringent Creek, which guided them most of the way north. Indian Pond was a good place to start. It lay near the northernmost edge of Yellowstone Lake. It was about a quarter of a mile across, and round as Charlie Brown’s head. A hydrothermal explosion had gouged it out of the ground about 3,000 years before-that was what the radiocarbon dates said, anyhow.

  A bigger hydrothermal explosion had formed Mary Bay, the nearby part of the lake. Down below Mary Bay, the temperature got up over 250 degrees. The hot spot under Yellowstone might still sleep, but it was a long way from dead. Kelly shivered, though it was a nice day.

  She was slathered in Deet. Mosquitoes buzzed around her just the same. Repellent or no repellent, she knew she would pick up bites. She’d even been bitten through thick socks. Now she sprayed her ankles, too. But all you had to do was miss a couple of square inches anywhere, and the mosquitoes would find them.

  Larry Skrtel pointed to half a dozen lodgepole pines that lay tumbled like jackstraws. When his hand went up, a woodpecker that had been drumming on one of the trunks flew away. “Those trees weren’t down two years ago,” Larry said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Five gets you ten one of the quakes knocked them over.”

  No one did argue with him. Kelly wouldn’t have dreamt of it. Arguing with somebody who was obviously right was a loser’s game.

  Up the eastern side of Astringent Creek they went. They were near the eastern edge of the caldera. Kelly shook her head. Of the last caldera, she corrected herself. This one stretched most of the way across the park. The eastern edge of the one from two million years ago was also somewhere around here. That one’s western edge, though, lay well over into Idaho.

  Quakes… Was that a brief rumble underfoot? Kelly had almost convinced herself she was imagining things when Ruth Marquez laughed self-consciously and said, “Did the earth move for you, too?”

  Everybody groaned. But Daniel said, “Yeah, I think so. That was only a little one-maybe a 3.3.” Larry nodded.

  Kelly smiled, remembering Colin guessing the magnitude of the stronger quake the year before. They might never have got together if he hadn’t. Life could be seriously strange sometimes.

  “Harder to be sure when you’re outdoors,” she said. “Not as much stuff to rattle and shake. When you’re indoors somewhere, there’s less room for doubt.”

  Larry paused thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been indoors for an earthquake,” he said. Daniel and Ruth both nodded.

  “Only proves you guys aren’t from California,” Kelly said. As far as the other geologists were concerned, that made them lucky. They teased her. She sassed them back.

  As the crow flies, Coffee Pot Springs was between twelve and fifteen miles north of Yellowstone Lake. There were more ravens than crows in Yellowstone, and the land route was longer than the aerial one would have been. They hadn’t got an early start. They weren’t hurrying, either. They were fit enough, but none of them except possibly Daniel was really fit. Kelly guessed they wouldn’t get there before nightfall, and she turned out to be right.

  Along with the Deet, she smelled of her own sweat and the sunscreen she’d also used liberally. Up around 8,000 feet, sunburn came easy. She also smelled the chemical odor rising from Astringent Creek. Yellowstone was full of such hellish reeks. Fire and brimstone had shaped this land, and were a long way from gone even now.

  Freeze-dried food could have been worse. That was as much as she could say about it. But a million stars blazed in the night sky
, and the Milky Way glowed bright and ghostly. You never saw-you never imagined-the heavens like this in L.A. or Berkeley. Too much air (too dirty, too), too many lights. Too many people, was what it boiled down to.

  Kelly would have enjoyed the view more if she’d stayed up longer. But she soon sought her sleeping bag, and she wasn’t the only one. Her last conscious thought was I hope the bears stay away.

  They must have. She woke up undisturbed just before sunrise. Almost undisturbed: an itchy bump on the inside of her left wrist said at least one mosquito had found a place to eat.

  Larry had real coffee, and was willing to share. Kelly and Ruth were glad to partake of his bounty; they’d only brought instant. Daniel declined. “I don’t drink it,” he said.

  “My God!” Kelly exclaimed. “How did you get through grad school?”

  “Crank,” he answered calmly. She didn’t know him well enough to tell if he was kidding.

  They buried their trash, doused the fire, and went on. “I want to put in for a new set of legs,” Ruth said as she worked out the kinks.

  “Oh, good. I’m not the only one,” Kelly said. Neither Daniel nor Larry complained. Maybe they weren’t feeling it the same way. Then again, they were guys, so maybe they were just being macho. Testosterone didn’t addle male bison alone.

  Here and there, hot springs fumed and mud pots bubbled. A lot of them didn’t even have names. There were more features like that in Yellowstone than in the whole rest of the world. A couple of dozen hot spots burned through the earth’s crust. One of them raised the Hawaiian Islands, another the Galapagos chain.

  But most of them lay under the oceans. The lava that came from those was smooth-flowing basalt. The Yellowstone hot spot alone sat under continental crust. Rhyolite was like granite, only with bigger crystals. When it melted, it didn’t spread out easily, the way basalt did. It was too viscous. It just sat where it was till the pressure got too great. Then… Then the supervolcano went off.

  They tramped along Shallow Creek, getting close to the springs. A coyote eyed them from the edge of the pines, then drew back. Larry said, “If it was along the road, half a dozen cars’d stop so the jerks inside could photograph a wolf to wow Aunt Martha back home.”