Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  “Good guess.” Colin had never fixed any for Louise or the kids. Nobody in his family was a bad driver, so he hadn’t had to worry about it much. Once or twice, a cop might have decided not to write them up when he realized who they were, but that was something he didn’t officially have to know about. He found a more interesting topic: “Here comes dinner.” s all. It was enough food for at least half a dozen people. Leftovers in styrofoam boxes would make lunches and dinners for days. Stan Miyamoto had his own kind of stubbornness. He was going to be generous, by God, whether Colin liked it or not. Sensibly, Colin decided he might as well like it.

  Louise Ferguson yawned. She’d been doing that all morning, and she couldn’t figure out why. She’d had a good night’s sleep the night before, but she kept wanting to nod off anyhow.

  Mr. Nobashi started to yawn, too. It wasn’t the first time he’d done it today, either. Yawns were as contagious as the common cold. This time, he caught himself in the middle, and almost dislocated his jaw trying to stop. He frowned at Louise as if that were her fault.

  “You okay, Mrs. Ferguson?” he asked in his heavily accented English. What he did to her last name was a caution, but she’d been deciphering Japanese accents for as long as she’d lived in San Atanasio-the town had always had a sizable Asian population. The ramen company hadn’t put its American headquarters here by accident.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Nobashi, thanks. I really am,” Louise answered, and then made a liar of herself by yawning again.

  “You need more coffee,” he declared. He ran on the stuff the way a car ran on gasoline. If Louise guzzled it the way he did, she didn’t think she’d ever go to bed. He poured himself a fresh cup now. He also poured one for her, and set it on her desk.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Nobashi,” she said in amazement. Subordinates took care of small things for superiors here. It rarely worked the other way around.

  With him watching her, she took a sip. She smiled and nodded and thanked him again. She didn’t yawn, even if she wanted to. He nodded back and took his own refill into his sanctum. He got on the phone there and started barking at someone in Japanese laced with English profanity.

  Louise… yawned yet again. She started to drink some more coffee, but set the cup down. It didn’t taste right somehow; it seemed harsh and metallic. The trouble wasn’t in the brew. She was sure of that. She’d made it herself. Neither Mr. Nobashi nor anyone else noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  If it wasn’t the coffee, it was her. She wondered if she needed to go to the doctor. She hoped like hell she didn’t. She had medical coverage because she worked here, but it wasn’t nearly as good as what she’d got through Colin. You didn’t think about such things when you’d just fallen in love. Unfortunately, they didn’t go away just because you weren’t thinking about them. Deductibles, copays… Seeing Dr. DiVicenzo would cost her more than it had in the old days, dammit.

  What could make her sleepy all the time-and tired, too, because she had been the past few days-and make coffee taste lousy, too? Whatever it was, it seemed unfair. Coffee was the best legal weapon when you got worn out.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like this. And then, all of a sudden, she could. She let out a startled squawk of laughter. She hadn’t even thought about that in twenty-odd years. Yes, her period was a few days late, but so what? Her cycle was getting erratic anyway. Pretty soon, it would stop. She wouldn’t miss tampons and pads and cramps, not even a little bit.

  “It’s nutso,” she said out loud. Had she worn her diaphragm every single time she’d gone to bed with Teo? She knew damn well she hadn’t. When you started making love, pausing to go into the john and smear the contraption (Colin had called it a manhole cover-the kind of thing he thought was funny) with contraceptive goop was a great way to break the mood. She hadn’t thought she was taking a chance, or much of one.

  She still couldn’t believe it. The rabbit died-laughing. That was what the gal on the ’70s TV show said when she found out she was going to have a change-of-life baby. She hadn’t wanted her life to change that way, so she got an abortion instead.

  “Ridiculous,” Louise said. This had to be something, anything, else. Dr. DiVicenzo would tell her she’d come down with a virus. Or he’d tell her it was all her imagination. His fee would be real, though.

  Not long before the lunch break, Louise did nod off. It was only for a couple of minutes, and she was sure she woke up again before anybody saw her, but even so… Sometimes you felt refreshed after a little nap. Louise felt she needed another little nap. A big one would be even better.

  In lieu of coffee, she went into the ladies’ room and splashed cold water on her face. That did help, some. She had to repair her makeup afterwards. No one walked in on her. Sometimes lucky was better than good: one more notion she’d heard from her ex. You could wash a man right out of your hair, but washing him out of your brain was a hell of a lot harder.

  She gulped her brown-bag sandwich (Swiss and turkey ham on rye) and apple at her desk. Then she drove to the Walgreens a few blocks from the ramen works. Half a dozen brands to choose from. The supervolcano hadn’t kept them from getting here, or maybe they were made locally. When she went to the register, she started to pull out her Visa, then thought better of it and paid cash instead.

  You didn’t have to kill a rabbit nowadays, or mess around with frogs, or anything icky like that. Louise went back into the ladies’ room. In the privacy of a stall, she peed on the Clearblue test strip. She supposed she’d bought that one because this whole thing came out of the Clearblue sky.

  She didn’t wear a watch any more. She used the clock in her cell phone to count off the minutes till the result that showed was reliable. She didn’t, she wouldn’t, she flat-out refused to, look at the strip till then.

  Time. “Ready or not, here I come,” she muttered, as if at hide-and-seek. She looked.

  PREGNANT. The letters were bright red. It didn’t feel like a red-letter day. It felt like… She didn’t know what it felt like. The end of the world as we know it. She heard the bouncy song in her head. She didn’t feel fine, though. She felt-sleepy, dammit.

  No one else had come in while she sat on the pot waiting out the test. No one was in there when she chucked the Clearblue box and the test strip. She covered them with paper towels even so. Afterwards, she scrubbed her hands like Lady Macbeth. Germs wouldn’t trouble her. Like exes, other things were harder to wash away.

  “You better now?” Mr. Nobashi asked her in his telegraphic English as she tried to settle herself at her desk.

  “I think so,” she lied. The rabbit might have died laughing. What would Teo say? She didn’t suppose he’d be so amused. She didn’t think things were very funny herself, for that matter. What am I going to do? she wondered. Have it? Get rid of it? Both prospects seemed equally appalling.

  She checked some inventories for Mr. Nobashi. He waed to figure out why shrimp ramen was selling better in Seattle than anywhere else in the USA. They hated beef ramen there, but it outsold shrimp two-to-one in Chattanooga. Again, he wanted to know why. Louise couldn’t have cared less, but she could scare up numbers for him to plug into his spreadsheets.

  Her cell rang. She fished it out of her purse. “Hello?”

  Colin growled in her ear: “Hi, Louise.”

  “ What is it?” she snapped. Of all the people in the world she wanted to hear from right this minute, he couldn’t have rated higher than next to last.

  He paused for a moment, then said, “Thought for a second there I called Vanessa by mistake.”

  “Sorry.” Again, Louise lied. “Look, whatever it is, make it snappy, will you? I’m pretty busy here.” One more fib.

  “Well”-he breathed out hard, a sure sign she’d pissed him off-“all I wanted to tell you was that I asked Kelly to marry me, and she said yes. If you don’t care about that, I’ll go off and eat worms, I guess.”

  “Sorry.” This time, Louise sounded more like someone who m
eant it. “Congratulations! Or do I say good luck to the groom? I never remember.”

  “You congratulate me and wish her luck. Sounds about right.” Colin still sounded very much like Colin. He went on, “How are things with you?”

  Not bad. I’m going to have a baby. Louise didn’t say it. The only thing she was sure of was that Colin hadn’t had thing one to do with it. Sooner or later, if she decided to keep it, she’d have to let him know. Later. Not sooner. “I’m tired,” she answered: a tiny fragment of the truth, with none of the reason behind it.

  “You sound like it,” he said. Was that a dig, something on the order of You sound like an old lady? Louise wouldn’t have been surprised. You always had to look twice-sometimes three times-at things that came out of Colin’s mouth. You’d be sorry if you didn’t.

  Well, he could dig and jab as much as he pleased. She wasn’t an old lady by the most fundamental way to judge that. Her biological clock wasn’t just ticking. The alarm on the damn thing had gone off. She was alarmed, all right.

  “You there, Louise?” Colin asked when she didn’t say anything right away.

  “I’m here,” she replied.

  “Are you okay? Is Teo treating you the way he ought to? Anything like that, you let me know, you hear? I’ll take care of it.”

  “Teo is treating me fine. Don’t do anything dumb because you’ve got a case of the imaginaries-do you hear me?” she said sharply. He treats me better than you ever did. Louise didn’t come out with it. Vanessa would have. She knew that. But living most of her adult life with Colin left her convinced he’d done his best, at least when he thought of it. Trouble was, his best didn’t come close to being good enough.

  “Okay,” he said. “So long, Louise. Take care.” He hung up.

  Teo was treating her so fine, he’d gone and knocked her up. And what would he say when she told him that? Whatever it was, she expected she could take it at face value. Unlike Colin, he didn’t think sarcasm was a spectator sport.

  At about half past three, Mr. Nobashi came over to her and said, “You want to go home early? Not much going on, and you maybe could use some rest, neh? ” He was, she supposed, doing his best to be tactful in a language not his own. What could that mean but You look like something the cat dragged in?

  “It’s okay, Mr. Nobashi. I’ll make it till quitting time. Thank you, though.” Louise got paid by the hour. She didn’t want her check docked-and it wasn’t as if she were actually sick. She managed a smile, adding “Arigato” so he’d know she was picking things up on the job.

  He grinned in surprise and bobbed his head in what was almost a bow. “You go,” he said. “We not worry about clock, okay?”

  The thanks in Japanese must have done it. That wasn’t a corporate thing for him to say, but maybe a nice guy lurked under the salaryman after all. Louise wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. “Thank you very much, Mr. Nobashi!” she said, and then “Arigato!” one more time.

  She was out of there before he had the chance to change his mind. When she got back to the condo, she lay down on the couch for a little while and closed her eyes. Just to rest them, she told herself. Next thing she knew, Teo was unlocking the door.

  He laughed when he saw her confusion. “Hello, sleepyhead!” he said, hurrying over to kiss her. “You must have had a tough day if you sacked out as soon as you came in.”

  “Mr. Nobashi let me off a couple of hours early,” she said. “On the company’s dime, if you can believe it.”

  The way he blinked said it wasn’t easy. “Why’d he do that?” he asked. Louise explained about arigato. Teo was still puzzled when she finished, wondering, “Okay, but why did he want to let you off early to begin with?”

  “I was all tired, and I guess I looked kind of green around the gills, too,” Louise said. She hoped the morning sickness wouldn’t be too awful this time around. Colin had dubbed her the Duchess of York for the way she kept tossing her cookies when she was pregnant with Rob. She’d hardly been sick at all with Vanessa, and kind of in-between carrying Marshall.

  “You look fine now,” Teo said. “You always look good to me, love.”

  That made her smile. Teo had a knack for making her smile. She wasn’t surprised to hear she looked all right now. She’d been asleep for-what? — close to two and a half hours. She wondered if she’d be able to sleep later on tonight. From what she remembered, she wouldn’t have any trouble at all.

  Teo went on, “But what made you so out of it at work? It must’ve been bad, or he wouldn’t’ve turned you loose like that. You need to go to the doc or something?”

  She would need to see her gynecologist soon. Frank Russell, who’d delivered her babies, had long since retired. Last she’d heard, he was living in Palm Springs, painting watercolors of the desert, and selling some of them for pretty good money. She didn’t like Dr. Suzuki so much, but she thought he knew his business.

  “I think I know what’s cooking with me,” she said.

  “Yeah? Tell, love, tell.”

  You couldn’t be a little bit pregnant. You couldn’t break the news by easy stages, either. Louise wished you could. Her life was about to get more complicated. No. Her life had already got more complicated. Now she had to announce the fact. She wanted a drink-but that wouldn’t be good for her passenger. She took a deep breath instead: as inadequate a substitute as you could find. “I’m going to have a baby, Teo.”

  He giggled. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in I don’t know when! I didn’t know you could do a straight face like that, either. Oh, my God!” He was practically holding his sides.

  “I’m not kidding,” Louise said. “I’m pregnant. I’m sleepy like you wouldn’t believe, my coffee tastes weird-tastes lousy-”

  “That stuff doesn’t mean squat,” Teo broke in. He didn’t want to believe it. Well, how could she blame him when she didn’t want to believe it herself?

  “I wasn’t done,” she said. “My period’s late. I know it’s getting erratic”- I know I’m getting old lay behind that-“but still. And today at lunch I got a pregnancy test at the drugstore, and I peed on it in the head at work. I’m pregnant, all right.”

  He stared at her. For the very first time since they’d been together, his dark eyes seemed opaque. She couldn’t tell what was going on behind them. “You mean it,” he said slowly, and his voice was as guarded as his expression.

  “I sure do.” Louise nodded. “You’re going to be a daddy, Teo.”

  “Well…” If he was pleased, he did a mighty good job of not showing it. He licked his lips. He’d never been a father before, and he hadn’t looked to be a father now. She’d already been through pregnancy three times. Not out of wedlock, though, she thought. Maybe this would make him do something about that. Louise hadn’t worried about a piece of paper, but it mattered when a child was involved. He pulled in a deep breath of his own, then expelled it in a sigh. “It’s still real early, right? You could, um, dispose of it, like?”

  “Yes. I could.” Louise didn’t know why she was so disappointed. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had the same thought. But she hadn’t looked for it to be the first thing she heard from him. “I don’t know that I want to, though. It’s something we made together, after all, something wonderful.”

  “It’s an oops. We didn’t intend to do it,” Teo said.

  “No, we didn’t,” she agreed. And if that didn’t win next year’s Oscar for Best Understatement, whoever did take the statuette home was bound to have cheated. “But it happened, and we’ve got to deal with it.”

  “Getting rid of it is dealing with it,” Teo said. “Then we don’t have to worry about it any more.”

  “I’m not sure I want to do that,” Louise repeated. “You shouldn’t make up your mind right away, either. We don’t have to decide anything tonight. We’ve got some time to think about it.”

  “What’s to think about? It just messes everything up. You ought to know that better than I do,” Teo said.

&nbs
p; Kids did mess up your life. Louise sometimes thought that was their sole function in life. They didn’t stop when they got to be self-winding, either, the way you thought they would. Even so… “They give back more than they take away,” Louise said. “Ask your folks.”

  “What do they know?” Teo said. His father was a carpenter, his mother a housewife. They weren’t educated people, but they were plenty nice enough. “They went crazy trying to keep us all fed and in shoes and like that. Who needs the hassle if you don’t have to put up with it?”

  “Let’s talk about it later.” Louise had never seen Teo like this. Plainly, he needed some time to get used to the idea. He didn’t want to look at it yet, much less to like it. She could see him outside jogging with a little boy who looked just like him. She could see the little boy staring up proudly at the great big man who was his daddy. How sad Teo couldn’t picture it, too.

  Later didn’t happen the rest of the evening. They slept together, the way they always did, but it didn’t feel as warm and loving as usual to Louise. Teo might have been on the far side of the country, or on the far side of the moon. Louise tried to tell herself she was having the vapors, but she had trouble convincing herself. She also didn’t have long to do the telling; she fell asleep as if someone had slipped a Mickey Finn into the water she drank after she brushed her teeth.

  Next morning was no better. She staggered around like a zombie, awake but not alive. She made coffee, but she couldn’t get more than a third of the cup down. It tasted nasty, so nasty she wondered if she’d give it back.

  And Teo was out the door in nothing flat. He did remember to kiss her good-bye. She didn’t think he’d missed a day since they got together. But if ever anyone was going through the motions, he was then. Again, Louise tried to think she was seeing things that weren’t there, or it was nothing but her hormones running wild (which they were, and would be), or-anything. Again, she had trouble believing it.

  Mr. Nobashi greeted her at Ramen Central with, “You better today?”

  “I sure hope so,” Louise answered. “Thanks again for giving me some time off yesterday. It helped a lot.”