Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” Gabe told him. “Now, are you gonna give your new squeeze the good news?”

  That was a more interesting question than Colin really liked. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Don’t you think I’ve got to? If we’re going to make some kind of life together, she needs to know what’s going on with me.”

  “I guess.” Gabe sounded anything but sure. “I don’t know who it’ll be rougher on, though, you or her.”

  “Oh, my God, Colin! How totally awful for you!” Kelly exclaimed when her fiance reached the end of his story. Here and there getting through it, he’d sounded more like a machine running on clockwork than a flesh-and-blood human being. She had the feeling he couldn’t have made it through without shutting down most of what he was feeling.

  “I’ve had lunches I enjoyed more,” he allowed. “Hey, I’ve had teeth pulled I enjoyed more.”

  “I believe you. I wish I could be down there to give you a hug,” Kelly said.

  “That’d be good,” Colin said. “So now I’ve got to set up a skip trace on this clown. Just what I want to do.” He couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  “You could just tell her to forget it. She’s got a lot of nerve, dropping that on you after she sashayed out the door.” Kelly thought she needed to remind Colin of that. If Louise wanted to sashay back into his life, how interested would he be? They’d had a lot of years together. If she could work it so the ones that had passed since she left him somehow didn’t count…

  Carrying her lover’s baby made that harder. But if she decided to visit a doctor, she wouldn’t have to carry it long. Then again, Colin had never struck Kelly as being good at forgetting.

  His electronically transmitted sigh in her ear did everything a real one would have except ruffle her hair. “Hon, if some guy ran out on a woman I’d never heard of before and left her pregnant, I’d put out a skip trace on the so-and-so.” He sighed again. “I wish this were some gal I never heard of. I wouldn’t get all messed up inside dealing with her then.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t!” Kelly exuded righteous indignation. “She gave you one in the eye, and now she wants your help? Some nerve!”

  “Yeah, well, I pretty much told her the same thing.” Colin hesitated, then went on, “In case you’re wondering, like, I wouldn’t take her back on a silver platter. That’s all over now. I’m better off, and I’ve got the sense to see it. Just so you know.”

  The supervolcano had shot global warming right behind the ear. The ice pack in the Arctic Ocean and the one around Antarctica were both spreading and thickening. Kelly had some satellite data on her kitchen table somewhere. She could dig it out…

  Thickening ice packs or no, a glacier in the middle of her chest suddenly melted all at once. Glorious warmth spread from the spot where it had been. “I did know,” she said, which was true and false at the same time in a way scientific data couldn’t be. She’d been pretty sure of the one thing, while still worried about the other.

  “Happens I love you,” Colin added, as if he’d been an innocent bystander when that somehow happened to him.

  “It works both ways,” Kelly assured him. She didn’t like to get mawkish. She had no intention of going Bridezilla when they made things official. She still marveled that he’d got up the nerve to propose, and that she’d had the nerve to say yes, or even sure. The percentage of women who passed thirty single and stayed that way permanently was large, and getting larger by the year. She was bucking the odds.

  “Okay. Good.” He sounded like someone who needed assurance, or at least reminding. Then he said, “Keeping that in mind makes it easier to cope with Louise.” He chuckled harshly. “Teo was always everything I wasn’t. He was sweet. He was caring. He listened to Louise-”

  “You listen!” Kelly interrupted. “Whenever we talk, I always think how I’ve never known anybody who listens like you.”

  “Louise didn’t think so. She wanted out, and Teo was her way out.” Another chuckle. “Then he wanted out, too.”

  “He was everything you weren’t,” Kelly said. “You never would have done anything like that. Even if you had got somebody pregnant, you would have stuck around afterwards.”

  “One more thing I told Louise. I do like to think so,” Colin said. “But who knows? Sometimes you just can’t cope, so you run.”

  Kelly snorted. It was much easier to imagine Colin sticking like glue even when that made him a goddamn nuisance than to picture him breaking and running. She wouldn’t have minded had he run from Louise-just the opposite, in fact. But that wasn’t his style, and never would be.

  “Anyway, now you know,” he continued. “You needed to, because I’ll have to give Louise whatever cop-style help I can.” No, he wouldn’t run. He said, “If she ends up having this kid, though, you’ve got to remember it ain’t mine.”

  That made her laugh in surprise. “I promise,” she said.

  “Okay.” Another pause from Colin. Then he said, “Son of a-” and broke off very abruptly indeed.

  Kelly had long since seen that he didn’t like to cuss in front of her. He must have bitten off something juicy. And he must have had reason to bite it off. “What?” she asked.

  He sounded thoroughly grim as he answered, “Somebody’s gonna have to tell the kids about this. Two guesses who draws the short straw. Won’t they be thrilled to find out they’re gonna have a new half brother or half sister?”

  Quite a few words for grown children’s reactions to news like that went through Kelly’s mind. Thrilled didn’t make the list. “Don’t say anything right away,” she urged. “Maybe your ex will take care of it for you-”

  “Ha!” Colin delivered a one-word editorial.

  “-or maybe she’ll decide to get rid of the baby, and in that case there won’t be anything to tell.” Kelly resolutely pretended he hadn’t broken in.

  “No, huh?” he said. “She’ll have to explain-or I’ll have to explain-how come dear, sweet, wonderful, loving Teo isn’t in the picture any more. He just disappeared for no reason at all, right?”

  “If there’s no baby, you don’t officially have to have any idea why he flew the coop.”

  “Maybe.” Colin sounded dubious, and proceeded to explain why: “Way it looks to me is, there’ll be a baby. Teo wanted her to get rid of it. Teo got rid of himself when she didn’t go okey-doke fast enough to suit him. She’d have the kid now just to spite him, even if she wasn’t looking for any other reasons.”

  That made a crazy kind of sense to Kelly: just enough to worry her. It wasn’t something she would do herself, but it was something she could see somebody else doing. “If Louise thinks that way, let her tell your children,” she said again.

  “I won’t spill the beans right away,” Colin said. “If I did, that might look like I was gloating about it. But if she decides-chooses: that’s the word they always use these days, isn’t it? — if she chooses to have the baby, the kids will need to know.”

  “I guess so,” Kelly said unwillingly.

  “And what have you been up to?” he asked. “I hope like anything you had a better day than I did.”

  “I’m working on a paper about increased geyser activity as a warning sign of a supervolcano eruption,” she said. “Whoever’s in charge of Yellowstone three-quarters of a million years from now can dig it out of the archives if their geyser basins start getting frisky.”

  “For a second there, I thought you meant that,” Colin remarked.

  “You never can tell, but I won’t hold my breath,” Kelly said. “This lets me use some of the photos I took at the end of my first hike to Coffee Pot Springs after things started heating up.” Her eyes welled with tears. “All that stuff is gone forever. No one will see Yellowstone again.”

  “I’m glad I got the chance. I’d be glad even if I hadn’t met you there, but I’m especially glad now,” Colin said.

  “Good,” Kelly answered. “Me, too.”

  By the time Squirt Frog and the Evolvi
ng Tadpoles could have got to Greenville, going there had lost its point. The local promoter wasn’t wrong to say that nobody in that part of Maine could have got to their show. People in Maine understood snow, and they understood how to keep roads passable. But even they weren’t used to dealing with weather like this.

  If they weren’t up for it, the guys from California who were stranded in Guilford were, not to put too fine a point on it, freaking out. “Doesn’t the Iditarod start somewhere around here?” Rob asked Dick Barber.

  Before the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn could answer, Justin started doing background vocals: “Rod, rod, ditarod, I ditarod! Ditarodrodrod, I ditarod!” It was as if the Beach Boys had met a denizen of the State Home for the Terminally Loopy.

  “Would you please stick that in the deep freeze?” Rob asked him, in lieu of suggesting that he stick it up his ass. He amplified the request: “Go outside, in other words.”

  “Cold out there,” Justin observed accurately.

  “Cold in here, too,” Rob said, which was also accurate, if to a lesser degree. He quickly turned back to Barber. “We’re not looking a gift horse in the mouth, believe me.”

  “I know it’s cold. That’s why God made long underwear,” Barber answered. “I’ve been running the furnace as little as I thought I could get away with, trying to stretch the fuel oil as far as I could. It’ll run dry in the next few days no matter what I do, though.”

  “When does more fuel oil get to Guilford?” Rob asked. He was used to gas or electric heat. As far as he knew, nobody in California used fuel oil.

  “Good question!” Barber said. “The way things are, I have no idea. I have no idea if any fuel oil is getting into the state. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Quite a few people in town are already out.”

  Rob believed that. Barber was one of the more stringently efficient people he’d met. His military background might have had something to do with it. Dad was the same way, only not quite so much.

  He tried a different question: “What if no more fuel oil gets here?”

  Dick Barber clicked his tongue between his teeth. “In that case, things do get more… interesting, don’t they? The way it looks to me is, we have two choices in that case. Either we freeze to death or we start cutting down trees.”

  “That doesn’t sound like two choices to me. More like one,” Justin said.

  “Oh, I agree with you,” Barber replied. “But I promise, there will be folks who don’t. Some people in this state-influential people, too-feel it’s not just wrong but evil to harm a tree for any reason. They feel that way very strongly, and they’re not shy about saying so.”

  “There are people like that in California, too,” Rob said.

  The proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn let one eyebrow climb toward his shock of graying hair. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” Rob had a crooked grin of his own. “I’m kind of a tree-hugger myself, but-”

  “That but suggests you’re young enough to get over it,” Barber said.

  Rob shrugged. “Whenever you can take care of trees without hurting people, that’s a good thing to do, I think. But if people are going to freeze to death unless they’ve got logs in the fireplace, that’s the time to break out the axes and the chainsaws.”

  “Sounds reasonable. Are you sure you’re from California?” Barber said. “The other thing is, all the questions about fuel oil apply to gasoline, too. The Shell station’s closed, in case you hadn’t noticed. So the chainsaws won’t keep working forever, or even through the winter… assuming the winter does eventually end.”

  “I’ve checked out the Year without a Summer online,” Rob said. “Snow in June! That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”

  “No. And the Yellowstone supervolcano is a bigger, nastier beast than the one in the nineteenth century,” Barber agreed. “So it may come down to men working up a sweat even in our lovely winter weather chopping down pines the old-fashioned way. But chances are they won’t be leveling old-growth forest. There’s still quite a bit of that farther north, but not around here. A lot of the woods in these parts have grown up since the war. People stopped trying to farm. They gave up the land and moved to the cities-or else they pulled up stakes and headed for the Sun Belt. There are more people in Maine now than there were in 1950, but there aren’t three times as many or six times as many, the way there are some places.”

  “I believe that,” Justin said. “You’re more settled here than we are on the other coast.”

  “And nobody moves here on account of the weather,” Rob added. “Nobody moved here on account of the weathr even before the supervolcano.”

  “You forget the summer people,” Barber reminded him. “I can’t afford to do that, no matter how tempting it is. I make my living off them. They come to Maine to get away from Boston and New York City and Philadelphia. If there’s no summer next year, there won’t be any summer people. I don’t know what I’ll do then.”

  Rob wondered how many times he’d heard that since the supervolcano erupted. More often than in all the years before then, he suspected. It was too big to plan around. You just had to wait and see what happened next and try to roll with it as best you could.

  “Suppose there isn’t just a year without a summer,” Justin said. “Suppose there are five or six or ten years like that all in a row. What does Maine look like by the end of that time?”

  “Hell,” Barber answered promptly. “Dante’s hell, I mean. The book is called The Inferno, but Satan’s buried in ice. At the end of ten years like that, we’d probably have enough ice to keep Old Scratch from getting loose for quite a while.”

  A cat wandered in, a cat almost big enough to be a bobcat. The Barber family semiprofessionally bred Maine Coons. They handled the weather in these parts as well as a critter was likely to. And they were also uncommonly good-natured. Vanessa would go gaga over them, at least at first. Rob suspected she’d get bored with them, though; they weren’t contrary enough to suit her.

  This beast rubbed his leg. It made motorboat noises when he bent down and stroked it. “I ought to keep one or two in the bedding, the way the Australian Aborigines did with their dogs,” he said. “They’re like hot-water bottles with ears, you know?”

  Justin nodded. “A three-dog night was really cold. That’s how that turkey of a band got its name.”

  “Once upon a time, I liked them,” Barber said. “I got over it.”

  Thinking about warmth made Rob think about electricity. He rather wished he hadn’t. “How long will the power stay on?” he wondered out loud. “Won’t storms start knocking the lines down? And if even the utility companies can’t get gas to send out repair crews…”

  “In that case, we welcome back the nineteenth century in all its glory.” Barber made his tongue-clicking noise again. “Whether that level of technology can support this level of population… Well, we’ll all find out, won’t we?”

  “Won’t be as much fun playing acoustic sets all the time,” Justin said.

  Rob stabbed a forefinger at him. “I was just thinking the same thing! You came out with it before I could.”

  “You two might as well be married. I was married once upon a time,” Barber said. “I got over that, too, but it was expensive.”

  That only reminded Rob of his own parents’ divorce. And he didn’t know what was up with Teo suddenly running out on Mom after such a long stretch of not-quite-wedded bliss. He had the feeling more was going on than Mom was telling. If Dad knew what, and chances were he did, he wasn’t talking. All he said about it was Ask your mother. He wanted to know what the chances were for Rob’s coming back to California when he tied the knot with Kelly.

  Rob feared those chances were anything but good. Getting from Guilford to Dover-Foxcroft was a major undertaking these days. Getting from Guilford to Bangor or Portland might not be impossible, but it sure wldn’t be easy. Rob would have liked to go to his father’s second wedding
. If he did, though, how would he make it back here? He didn’t want to run out on the band. Justin and Charlie and Biff and the polymorphously perverse thing that was Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles seemed more like family these days than did the people connected by arbitrary ties of flesh and blood.

  Justin said, “I’m getting hungry. You want to go down to Calvin’s Kitchen for breakfast?”

  “Do I want to?” Rob echoed. “Not so you’d notice. But we’ve got to eat, don’t we? Are Biff and Charlie up yet?”

  As if to prove they were, they chose that moment to thunder down the stairs. Off to the diner they all went. It was only about a five-minute walk. The place just didn’t cut it for dinner. Despite Dick Barber’s opinion, Rob didn’t think it was all that wonderful for breakfast, either.

  Still, you couldn’t mess up eggs and sausages and bacon and hash browns too badly. What got to Rob more than the food was the isolation. The waitress and the cook behind the counter were polite enough, but they were serving strangers. They knew the locals-and vice versa-the way Rob and Charlie and Biff and Justin knew one another. A black Baptist family moving onto a street full of Chasidim could have felt no more cut off from the neighborhood.

  He was almost done with his breakfast when it occurred to him that isolation could have more than one meaning. If fuel oil and gasoline had trouble reaching rural Maine north and west of the Interstate, how about food? You could cut down trees and burn them, and maybe you wouldn’t freeze, yeah. But could you feed half a state’s worth of people on moose and ducks and whatever else you could shoot?

  It didn’t seem likely. What were people going to do if the food ran low, though? All the L.L. Bean gear in the world didn’t help against hunger. Only eatables could. But where would they come from?

  XXI

  Bryce Miller dropped three copies of his dissertation-thump! — on his chairperson’s desk. The physical copies were a formality, left over from the days when theses were actually typed. Professor Harvey Harriman had had his finger in every chapter of the Word file from which the diss was printed. There seemed to be two kinds of chairpersons: the ones who didn’t do enough and the ones who did too much. Harvey Harriman was of the second school.