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Authors: Harry Turtledove

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Farther back from the shore, ice still covered much of the lake. That was just too weird for somebody who’d lived most of his life in Southern California. It made Colin think of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. A lot of snow still lay on the ground, too.
It was beautiful—no two ways about that. The beauty and the snow were reason enough for some people to live in these parts. Colin shook his head.
In the forties, the week after Memorial Day? Forget about it!
He worked his way around the boardwalk. A duck swimming in the unfrozen water close inshore eyed him, decided he was dangerous, and taxied along the surface, wings beating, till it got up enough speed to take off.
The Black Pool was a sickly green, not black. Colin had no idea whether the Abyss Pool, on the other side of the planked path, led to the abyss. By the sulfurous steam rising from it, though, he wouldn’t have been surprised
Somebody in a broad-brimmed hat, a rain slicker, and jeans was hunkered down on the narrow lakeside beach, back to Colin, intent on something he couldn’t see. Not six feet away stood one of those
stay-on-the-boardwalk!
signs. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” he growled, a line whose every intonation was honed by years on the beat.
The miscreant jumped and whirled back toward him. Only he—no, she: a woman in her mid-thirties, with short, honey-blond hair and attractively weathered features that said she spent a lot of time outdoors—probably wasn’t a miscreant after all. She wore a picture ID on a lanyard around her neck, the way rangers here did. And she answered, “Checking a seismograph. Why? What business is it of yours?”
Colin felt like a jerk. He wouldn’t have minded vanishing under the oh so thin, oh so hot crust that seemed to have no trouble at all supporting the woman’s weight. “Sorry,” he said, and for once he meant it. “I’m a cop back home. I saw you out there where I didn’t think you were supposed to be, and I jumped to a conclusion, and I went splat.”
She weighed that. On one side of the scales was something like
Okay, fine. Now fuck off, asshole
. He’d earned it, too. But a couple of other tourists were coming. Maybe she didn’t want to cuss him out in front of an audience. All she did say was, “Mm, I can see that—I guess.”
Then fate—or something—lent a hand. The ground shook more than hard enough to need no seismograph to detect. Colin staggered. He was glad to grab the handrail on the boardwalk. For ten or fifteen seconds, he felt as if he were standing on Jell-O. At last, the earthquake stopped.
“Holy moley!” said one of the approaching tourists. “Nobody told me it was gonna do
that
! Let’s get outa here, Shirley!” He and Shirley did, at top speed.
Waves—not big ones, but waves—rolled up onto the beach. The ice farther out cracked with noises that made Colin think of what would happen if the Jolly Green Giant dropped a tray from his freezer. Darker streaks—water—appeared between the remaining chunks of ice.
Eyeing them and the direction from which the waves had come, Colin said, “That’s gotta be a 5.3, maybe even a 5.5. Epicenter’s
that
way somewhere.” He pointed northeast.
One of the woman’s eyebrows jumped. “I was going to ask you where home was, but now I hardly need to. Norcal or Socal?”
“Socal,” Colin answered. “San Atanasio. L.A. suburb.” Of course he had to come from California. Guessing the Richter scale was a local sport of sorts. “How about you?” he asked. That she knew it was a local sport, and that she used local slang for the two rival parts of the state, argued she was a Californian, too.
Sure enough, she said, “Some of both. I grew up in Torrance”—which wasn’t far from San Atanasio—“but I’m finishing my doctorate at Berkeley. So I’m Norcal now.”
In his mind, Colin prefaced Berkeley with
The People’s Republic of
, the same as he did with Santa Monica. The university was good, though; Marshall, his younger son, had been bummed for weeks after he didn’t get in. He’d followed Rob to UC Santa Barbara instead. He’d followed Rob into smoking pot, too, and still hadn’t graduated. One more thing for his old man to worry about.
Not
the most urgent one at the moment. “I didn’t know you could get quakes that big up here,” Colin said.
“Oh, yeah,” the woman answered. “This is the second-busiest earthquake zone in the Lower Forty-eight, after the San Andreas. There was a 6.1 in the park in 1975, and a 7.5 west of Yellowstone in 1959. That one killed twenty-eight people and buried a campground. A landslide dammed the river and made what they call Quake Lake. You can still see drowned trees sticking up out of the water.”
“A 7.5 will do it, all right,” Colin said soberly. How many people would an earthquake that size kill in L.A. or the Bay Area? One hell of a lot more than twenty-eight.
“It sure will,” she agreed. As Colin had before, she pointed northeast. “I think you’ve got the size just about right, too—”
“Practice,” he broke in.
“Uh-huh.” But she hadn’t finished. “You got it right if the quake’s from magma shifting in the Sour Creek dome. But if it’s from the Coffee Pot Springs dome . . . That’s farther away, so the quake would have to be bigger.”
“Didn’t feel that far off,” Colin said. “The jolts were sharp, not roll-roll-roll the way they go when they’re a long way out.”
“Here’s hoping you’re right.” She didn’t sound—or look—happy. And she had her reasons: “The Coffee Pot Springs dome literally just showed up on the map a little while ago, and it’s swelling like a stubbed toe. It’s like the magma’s found some new weak area that gives it a path up toward the surface.”
Colin knew what magma was: the hot stuff that spewed out of volcanoes. Here in Yellowstone, it was also the canned heat that kept geysers boiling and hot springs bubbling. He had trouble putting those two things together, though. “What would happen if it did?” he asked.
“Did what? Get to the surface?”
“Yeah. Would it be . . . a volcano, like?”
“Mm, kind of.” Now the look on her face said he’d disappointed her. He’d known something about earthquakes, so she’d hoped he would know something about volcanoes, too. That shouldn’t have bothered him. If anybody’d had practice disappointing women, he was the guy. But, obscurely, he didn’t want to disappoint this one. She went on, “Like a volcano the way a Siberian tiger’s like a kitten, maybe.”
“Huh?” he said brilliantly. To try to salvage things, he added, “I’m not staring at your chest. I’m just trying to read your name badge.”
That got him a crooked grin. “Well, it’s a story. I’m Kelly Birnbaum.” He gave her his own name. She came up and shook hands over the boardwalk railing. He’d known police sergeants with a less confident grip. She looked west. “I bet you went to Old Faithful before you came here.”
“Well, yeah.” Colin hated being predictable. Sometimes he was—sometimes everybody was—but he still hated it.
“Don’t worry. People do that. It’s what the thing is there for, you know?” Kelly said. That made him feel worse, not better. Then she asked, “After you looked at all the stuff there, what did you do?”
“I had lunch.” He’d testified in court too often to be anything but literal-minded.
This time, she stuck out her tongue at him, which made her look about twelve. “You sound like a cop, all right. Let’s try it again. What did you do after lunch? Did you drive up to the Black Sand Basin?”
“Yes, Honor,” Colin answered, deadpan.
“Okay,” Kelly said in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “You can see the caldera wall—the edge of what fell in the last time the supervolcano erupted—really well from there. I think they’ve got a sign about it, too. Do you remember that?”
“Uh-huh. As a matter of fact . . .” Colin took the camera out of his jacket pocket, powered it up, and thumbed back till he found the pictures he wanted. One was of the sign she’d mentioned. The other was of the caldera wall itself: an almost vertical cliff of solidified lava, several hundred feet high, with lodgepole pines growing up out of it here and there.
Kelly leaned forward to look at the photos in the viewfinder. She nodded. “That’s it, all right. That’s what’s left from the last time it went off, I mean, maybe 640,000 years ago. It shot out about two hundred and forty cubic miles of ash and lava and rock—say, a thousand times as much as Mount St. Helens.”
“How about compared to Krakatoa?” Colin asked. “Or the earlier one in the 1800s—I forget its name, but the one that made the Year without a Summer?”
“Mount Tambora.” She beamed at him. People did that when you surprised them by knowing more than they’d expected about what they were interested in. “That was about thirty-five cubic miles. Krakatoa was only a squib next to it: six or seven cubic miles.”
“Wow.” Colin didn’t need a calculator to do the math. “So this eruption was a heck of a lot bigger than either one of those.” By himself or with his colleagues, he was as foulmouthed as any other policeman. He didn’t like to swear in front of women, though. It wasn’t the only reason he often felt like a dinosaur these days.
“Right,” Kelly said. “But this one went off 1.3 million years ago, too. Only sixty-seven cubic miles that time.”
“Only,” Colin echoed. The word seemed to hang in the cold, moist, sulfurous air.
“Only,” she repeated. “ ’Cause it went off 2.1 million years ago, too, and that was the big one. Something like six hundred cubic miles of junk—enough to bury California twenty feet deep. For real, the ash reached from the Pacific to Iowa and from Canada to Texas.”
There was a thought alongside which even a hangover didn’t seem such a big deal. Colin did some more math in his head. “Um, 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, 640,000 years ago . . . Seems like it’s about due. Is it?”
“Nobody knows,” Kelly answered. “And even if it is about due, that might mean it’s ten thousand years away instead of a hundred thousand. Or it might not. But people here and people back in Berkeley don’t like the way the Coffee Pot Springs dome is bulging all of a sudden.”
“What would it be like,” Colin said slowly, “if it did go off for real? I mean, the way it did the biggest time?”
He wondered if she’d say it would be indescribable. But she didn’t: “Take Rhode Island. Blow out lava and ash all around the edges. Then drop it half a mile—maybe a mile—straight down onto molten rock.” She cocked her head to one side, waiting to see what he’d say to that.
What he said was, “Best thing that could happen to the lousy place.”
“Huh?” Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it.
“For my sins, I got stationed in Providence when I was in the Navy,” Colied lained. “If America ever needs an enema, that’s where you’d plug it in.”
“Oh.” Kelly laughed—nervously. “I’ve heard the same thing about Buffalo and Syracuse.”
“Only from people who’ve never been to Providence.” Colin spoke with complete assurance.
“If you say so.” Kelly hurried on: “Then we’d get the ashfall all over the place, like we did before. And bunches of particles would go twenty or thirty miles up into the stratosphere and block off sunlight. Best estimate—”
“Guess, you mean,” Colin broke in.
“Guess. You’re right. It’s not like we can make the experiment. Best guess is, global temps go down about five degrees Celsius—nine degrees Fahrenheit. For years. Ten? Twenty? Two hundred? Nobody knows.”
Colin thought about that. L.A. nine degrees cooler would be more like Portland or Seattle—different, but not too bad. But Seattle nine degrees cooler would be more like Anchorage. Brr! And Anchorage nine degrees cooler would be like the North Pole. So would London and Stockholm and Moscow and lots of other places. The North Pole would be more like the South Pole. The South Pole . . . He didn’t want to contemplate what the South Pole would be like.
“Start of a new Ice Age?” he asked.
“There doesn’t
seem
to be any cause-and-effect between supervolcanoes and glaciation,” Kelly said. “But it sure wouldn’t be fun. Back seventy-five thousand years ago, Mount Tabo in Indonesia blew up. It’s Lake Tabo now—that was even a little bigger than the biggest blast here. And, about that same time, genetics studies show
Homo sap
almost went extinct. We got squeezed down to a few thousand people. Why? The bad weather from the supervolcano makes the best sense.”
“Happy day. Happy, uh, bleeping day.” Colin almost slipped. “That’ll give me sweet dreams tonight.”
“If it makes you feel any better, you’re standing in the middle of the last big caldera,” Kelly said cheerfully. “And there’s another caldera—a smaller, newer one—under the water in the West Thumb. There are little calderas all over the place in Yellowstone, if you know where to look.”
“Oh, boy,” Colin said. An aftershock rattled the boardwalk. Another tourist who’d just set foot on it decided this was a hell of a good time to go somewhere else. She hustled back toward the parking lot.
“Nothing much.” Now Kelly sounded disdainful. “That wasn’t even a 4.0.”
“Nope. Not even close,” Colin agreed. He realized he’d just spent fifteen minutes or so talking with a reasonably attractive woman without getting shot down in flames. That was one of the more pleasant novelties he’d run into lately. He asked, “Where does somebody doing research at Yellowstone stay?”

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