Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  She’d never been on a private jet. Having enough room to stretch out in her seat made her want to abandon Southwest, American, and United forever. “I could get used to this,” she said as the plane taxied toward takeoff.

  “In that case, what are you doing studying geology?” asked her chairman, who had the window seat beside hers. Geoff Rheinburg was gray-haired and pudgy, but more than plenty sharp. “You should have gone into programming and turned into an Internet billionaire. Then you’d have a jet for every day of the week-two for Saturday, if you wanted.”

  “I spend more time doing geology than flying,” Kelly answered after a little thought. “And I can use computers, but I’m not much for making them sit up and beg. This is more fun.”

  “Then you may possibly be in the right place after all,” Rheinburg allowed. Was he old enough to have started out on a slide rule, back in the days before pocket calculators? If he wasn’t, he came close.

  The plane shot down the runway and zoomed into the sky. Air traffic here and most places in the USA was still screwed up, with flights way, way off their usual level. Maybe that tough black gal had checked out the bagels for no better reason than that she was bored stiff.

  “This is the pilot speaking.” The Learjet’s intercom had better sound quality than a commercial airliner’s. The man’s voice didn’t sound as if it were coming through a tin-can telephone. He went on, “I am going to give you the usual advice-keep your seat belts fastened at all times. I mean it more than usual, though. We will be flying over the crater at forty thousand feet. Look for turbulence all the same. That sucker is enormous, and it is hot. Hot air rises-why do you think old politicians float away and never get seen again?”

  That won him a few startled laughs. Kelly wondered if he’d ever flown for Southwest. She hated the seating stampede, but enjoyed the way the crew sometimes spoofed the usual instructions about seat belts and exit rows and oxygen masks.

  “My brother-in-law told me I needed my head examined when he found out I was making this flight,” the pilot went on. “I told him I needed some help with the down payment on a house I want to buy… That doesn’t necessarily make him wrong, you understand. What’s your excuse, folks?”

  “He ought to be doing stand-up,” Kelly said.

  “We can’t throw things at him when he’s behind that locked door,” Professor Rheinburg said. “Too bad, isn’t it?”

  They flew on. The engines… sounded like engines. Kelly approved. There was still a lot of dust and ash in the air, and the supervolcano’s afterbelches-major eruptions on any normal scale, but the scales weren’t normal now, and wouldn’t be for a long time-kept adding more. The planes that were flying needed much more frequent engine overhauls than anyone had dreamt they would.

  From Oakland to Yellowstone was about an hour and a half. No, not to Yellowstone: to the supervolcano crater. Yellowstone was gone, dead, off the map in the most literal meaning of the words. Yellowstone had either fallen half a mile toward the center of the earth or was buried deep in lava or pyroclastic flows or volcanic ash. Yellowstone was screwed, blued, and tattooed, not to put too fine a point on it.

  People worked on laptops or fiddled with the sensors and other instruments that were the real reason for the flight. The pilot didn’t make the usual announcement about electronic devices. The geologists might have lynched him if he had. Without electronic devices, they fell all the way back to the start of the twentieth century, or maybe even to the nineteenth.

  After a while, the pilot did come on to say, “Folks, we are getting close. I’m going to do what I’m supposed to do when turbulence is likely. I’m going to tell you to make sure you’re in your seats with your belts securely fastened. Don’t be dumb, now. If there isn’t turbulence flying over this critter, then there’s no such animal. We don’t want to have to scrape you off the ceiling-or off your neighbor’s lap.”

  Geoff Rheinburg gave Kelly a wry grin as he checked his belt. “No offense, but the only gal I want on my lap is my wife,” he said.

  “Okay by me,” she answered, tightening her own a little. She knew he was happily married. Nice that somebody was. She figured Colin would get up the nerve to propose one of these days before too long. She also figured she would get up the nerve to say yes when he did. What happened after that was a crapshoot-as far as she could see, just like every other marriage since the beginning of time.

  “Three minutes till we reach the edge of the crater,” the pilot said. “Welcome to the biggest goddamn roller coaster in the world.”

  Kelly peered out. Unlike a commercial airliner’s, the Learjet’s windows were big enough to give even somebody in an aisle seat a good view of the wider world. She’d looked down into active volcanoes before. She’d gone to the Big Island of Hawaii: yeah, work as a geologist could be rough. But the volcanoes there, which went off pretty much all the time, were as different as you could get from the Yellowstone supervolcano. The supervolcano was like the little girl saving up more spit. It saved and it saved and it saved till its igneous cheeks couldn’t hold any more. Then-

  Then it went and trashed half the continent. And that was only the first act. The follow-up, which did a number on the whole planet, was just getting started.

  Even in the wide-windowed Learjet, she leaned toward happly married Professor Rheinburg to see better. He didn’t wince, so she hadn’t forgotten her deodorant even though she’d crawled out of bed at some heathen hour. Lots of gray and brown down below. Nothing green, not any more. Life would be trying to reboot down there. It had likely already succeeded in a few tiny spots, but not in a way you could see from eight miles high.

  Or eight and a half… The edge of the world fell away, down below. As soon as it did, the plane started bouncing in the air. Yes, the crater was heating things up, wasn’t it? Oh, just a little.

  Here and there, the floor had already crusted over and looked like, well, bare rock. One of these days, one of these centuries, it would form the bottom of the new caldera that would take the place of the one at the heart of Yellowstone. They’d need to give it a new name. Kelly wondered whether they’d still speak English when they got around to it.

  Lava still boiled and bubbled in between the congealed places. It wasn’t as impressive as the stuff in The Return of the King. For one thing, that lava was CG. For another, you were looking at it up close and personal, not from forty-odd-thousand feet. Kelly, who’d first read The Lord of the Rings when she was nine, wondered what would happen if you dropped Sauron’s dread creation right into the middle of this. She expected it’d be gone for good. Hell, if Mount Doom happened to sit on top of a supervolcano hot spot, one of these days it would have been gone for good. That was why there was a big stretch of the Rocky Mountains without any mountains.

  “Some of those patches of molten rock are miles wide,” Rheinburg murmured, most likely to himself.

  Even if he wasn’t talking to her, it was a useful reminder. The scale of this thing was… ridiculous was one of the words that occurred to her. Then the Learjet did some up-and-downs she devoutly hoped it was designed for. As urgently, she hoped the bagels of mass destruction would stay put.

  “For anyone who needs the reminder, you have airsick bags in the pockets of the seats in front of you,” the pilot said. “If you need them, I do hope you’ll use them. We don’t want the next batch of passengers to think we were playing Vomit Comet, now do we?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Professor Rheinburg said under his breath. He looked green around the gills. Kelly suspected she did, too. She’d never been airsick, or even feared she might be. Now she discovered there was a first time for everything. She grabbed her bag, just to stay on the safe side. Next to her, her chairman did the same thing.

  Neither of them needed to use theirs. Horrible noises from behind them and an acid reek in the conditioned air warned that someone hadn’t been so lucky. “Oh, dear,” Rheinburg said sympathetically.

  Kelly kept her mouth shut-kept it clamped shut,
in fact. That sour stink sure didn’t help her stomach. She tried her best not to think about it. Wasn’t lava fascinating? Sure it was!

  Then they were past the great pockmark in the earth’s skin and over more devastation of the same kind they’d seen on the approach. The air smoothed out. Kelly’s insides relaxed-until the pilot said, “We’ll turn around now, and make our second pass over the crater while we’re heading for home.”

  She’d been about to stuff the airsick bag back where it belonged. On second thought, that could wait till they got back to the Idaho side of things-although Idaho, or big parts of it, was an idea that had come and gone.

  “What’s that song about how much do you have to pay to keep from going through all these things twice?” Professor Rheinburg asked.

  “Beats me,” Kelly said. Whatever the song he was thinking about was, it came from his generation, not hers. She added, “What I keep thinking about is, we volunteered for this.”

  “Proves the Army guys know what they’re talking about when they say that’s a bad idea, doesn’t it?” Rheinburg said.

  A U-turn at upwards of 500 miles an hour took time and space to execute. They didn’t fly back over the supervolcano crater right away, then. They had a little while to brace themselves. Then the plane started bouncing some again. Kelly didn’t think it was quite so bad this time through; she might have been more ready for it. As she had before, she stared down at the broad expanse of what was as close as anyone was likely to see of hell on earth.

  Beyond it lay the ash beds and stuff that would become tuff. “How many towns and farms and roads somewhere under there?” Professor Rheinburg said. “ ‘Vanity of vanities-all is vanity.’ ”

  “Hey, no fair,” Kelly said. “You can’t not build something because the supervolcano goes off every 700,000 years. Besides, they built a lot before they even knew it was there.”

  “They sure did-and it’s gone now, along with everything they built after they knew.” The gray-haired prof spoke with a grim relish that reminded Kelly of Colin. Then he switched gears and grinned at her. “Of course, looking at the bright side of things, you’ve got a straight shot at a tenure-track position. You’re one of the top experts on the world’s biggest problem for at least the rest of your life.”

  “Well, sure, assuming there are any universities left once everything shakes out.” Kelly wouldn’t let anybody outgloom her without a fight.

  “Yes. Assuming,” Rheinburg said, so he probably won that round.

  Marshall Ferguson had long since stopped taking snailmail seriously. When you could e-mail or text or talk on the phone, mail with stamps on it that took days to get from hither to yon seemed downright medieval. And snailmail from the other side of the continent had got slower and more erratic since the supervolcano went off. To think they’d said it couldn’t be done!

  He opened the box on the ground floor of his apartment building only every other day or so. He did need to check every so often, because some bills still came by snailmail. Corporations lacked a sense of humor when you forgot to pay for cable or your utilities.

  Most of the rest of what he got was junk-spam on paper, spam that cost the senders a little something to print and mail. That had dropped off dramatically after the eruption. Paper was scarce and expensive these days, which made junk mail a losing proposition. Even the local restaurants had quit mailing out discount coupons, and that was a goddamn shame.

  He almost chucked the envelope with the bland corporate return address unopened. Somebody back in New York City was trying to get him to do something he likely didn’t want to do. Whoever it was either had a stock of old envelopes or money coming out of his ears, because the paper was uncommonly fine.

  The only reason he did open it was the off chance it might be a fancy bill. Otherwise, it would have gone straight into the recycling bin for paper. He unfolded the crisp sheet inside. It was stationery, with the same address as the one on the envelope. Below that…

  Dear Mr. Ferguson, he read, We are pleased to accept your story titled “Well, Why Not?” for a future issue of New Fictions. A contract and a check for $327.00-the appropriate payment at our standard rate of eight cents a word-are forthcoming. I look forward to working with you on the story. Cordially, — and an editor’s scribbled signature below.

  He read it again, and then one more time. By the end of the third go-round, he began to believe it. “Holy shit,” he said softly.

  Then he started to giggle. He’d sent out the story because that was part of his assignment. Hell, he’d written it because that was his assignment. If he hadn’t been in Professor Bolger’s class, he never would have done it. And now somebody wanted to pay him money for it? How funny was that?

  A moment later, he said “Holy shit” again, on a different note this time. If he’d sold once, chances were he could sell more than once. Having some cash coming in that wasn’t straight out of his old man’s wallet would be nice, which was putting it mildly. He didn’t think you could get rich writing stories-eight cents a word wasn’t bad, from everything he’d heard, but it would never make you a millionaire, either-but that might set the stage for bigger and better (which is to say, more profitable) things.

  He went up to his place and sent Bolger an e-mail announcing the sale. If that didn’t do good things for his grade in there, nothing ever would. Then he fished his phone out of his pocket and called his father.

  “What is it, Marshall?” came the familiar growl. Of course Dad would know who it was-he could see the number on his screen, after all-and of course he’d be busy at the cop shop. He’d likely be surprised to get a call in the middle of the afternoon, too. Sure enough, the next thing he said was, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Marshall was just starting to realize how fine he was. Once the amazement wore off, what replaced it was, well, more amazement. “Guess what?”

  “Chicken butt,” Dad answered, as Marshall had known he would. That had cracked Marshall up when he was little. Dad still did it, though. Did he do it with other cops, too? Marshall wouldn’t have been surprised. After a couple of seconds, Dad did add, “Well, what?”

  “I sold a story.” Marshall couldn’t remember the last time he’d sounded so proud of himself.

  “Sold?” Dad pronounced the word with care, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard it right. “As in, for money?”

  “As in. Three hundred and twenty-seven dollars of money.” Marshall was sure he’d remember the size of his first check as long as he lived, even if he hadn’t seen it yet.

  “How about that?” his father said-one of the few phrases, as Dad himself noted, you could use almost anywhere. Then his voice warmed: “Congratulations, son. That’s something, all right. What’s the story called? What’s it about?”

  “It’s called ‘Well, Why Not?’ I never know what to call things.” Marshall hated titles. He had no idea how anybody ever came up with a good one. “It’s about… a guy going to college while his folks get a divorce.”

  “Oh.” Dad chewed on that for a little while. “They do say you’re supposed to write about things you know, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they say that. They say the opposite, too. The way it looks tme is, you can get away with anything when you’re writing, as long as you do it well enough.”

  “Huh.” That didn’t sit well with Dad. Marshall had known it wouldn’t. Dad believed in Rules with a capital R. He wasn’t a cop by accident. As if to prove as much, he went on, “Just remember it doesn’t work that way in real life.”

  “If I can get them to keep paying me, maybe writing will turn into real life,” Marshall said.

  “Maybe it will.” His father sounded surprised at the idea. But getting paid resonated with him. “Here’s hoping-and congratulations again. Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to it.”

  “I know you’re working. I did want to call and tell you, though.”

  Marshall checked his e-mail. He had an answer from Bolger. WTG! the message said. I ho
ped somebody in the class would make a sale. Now you’ve given the others something to shoot for.

  “Yeah,” Marshall said. How jealous would the rest of the class be? Bigtime jealous, that was how. They’d have to compete against a real, live published (well, to be published) author. And the girls in there would think anyone who could sell was freaking awesome. He could hope they would, anyhow.

  In the meantime… In the meantime, Marshall rolled himself a doobie about the size of Pittsburgh. Even triumph went better with weed. He was happily wasted when the sun went down towards another ridiculous, gaudy, over-the-top beautiful sunset. Did dope improve that, too? He smoked some more to find out.

  XVII

  Camp Constitution. Vanessa wondered what dumbshit adman or bureaucrat got himself a bonus for coming up with the name. Whoever the bastard was, she would have bet her life he not only didn’t live here but had never got within a thousand miles of the place. Camp Hole in the Ground would have come a lot closer to the truth.

  Truth? You can’t handle the truth! What movie was that from? She couldn’t remember. Back a long time ago-she couldn’t think of exactly when, either-swarms of people trying to get away from the Dust Bowl packed up whatever they had and headed for California. Some places in the state, being of Okie blood still mattered.

  Well, the supervolcano had made a bigger, more horrible Dust Bowl now. The only reason even more people hadn’t washed up in these camps was that a hell of a lot of would-be refugees ended up corpses instead. As things were, tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people from at least half a dozen states wound up in Camp Constitution and others like it on the eastern fringe of the supervolcano eruption, and more streamed in every day.

  And there were more refugee centers in the West. The biggest-imaginatively tagged Camp Independence-was somewhere near Pasco, Washington. People who’d gone west, young man, instead of east to flee the ash and dust wound up in them. Again, those camps would have been larger if a lot of the folks who tried to get away from the supervolcano hadn’t gone west for good. Fewer refugees squatted in the western camps, because the population in those parts hadn’t been much to begin with.