Supervolcano: Eruption (33 page)
Read Supervolcano: Eruption Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
“All we can do is all we can do,” Colin said. “We’ll pick up as many of the pieces as we’re able to, and we’ll try and keep ’em from getting any more broken than they already are.”
“How come the politicians don’t have that kind of sense?” Kelly asked.
“I’m a cop. Picking up pieces is what I do,” he answered. “They sling bull. I get it slung at me. Nobody asks cops what we ought to do about this, that, or even the other thing. And when somebody does ask, he mostly doesn’t pay any attention to what he hears.”
“Nobody paid any attention to the geologists, either,” Kelly said. “I mean, I’m nothing but a grad student. But there are people in my racket with clout. Nobody in Washington wanted to listen to them, though.”
“Then they didn’t have enough clout,” Colin said.
“I guess not.” Kelly laughed a singularly humorless laugh. “You want to know what else? Most of my research is obsolete.”
“How do you figure that? You’re an expert on the Yellowstone supervolcano. What’s more important right now?”
“I’m an expert on what it did the three times it erupted before this one. I’m an expert on what that might have meant. I’m an expert on the complicated geology that used to be under Yellowstone, and on the geysers and hot springs and stuff. Well, the geysers are gone. So is a lot of the geology that made them possible. And now the supervolcano
has
gone off, and everybody can see what it means. And we don’t need to worry about another eruption like this one for the next half-million years. If that doesn’t spell obsolete, what does?”
has
gone off, and everybody can see what it means. And we don’t need to worry about another eruption like this one for the next half-million years. If that doesn’t spell obsolete, what does?”
“You’re here,” Colin said. “Too many people aren’t.” A circle five hundred miles across . . . “Like I told you a minute ago, all you can do is all you can do.”
“Nobody can do anything. It’s too big,” Kelly said.
“Gotta keep trying anyway.” Colin wished he could make love with her again. Back in the day, he would have managed a second round. But that was then. This was now. He had to comfort her with words, and words weren’t such terrific tools for the job.
XIV
A
nother motel room in Maine. But till you opened the curtains—and sometimes afterwards—
it could just as easily have been in Montana or Oregon or Arkansas. The road was simply the road once you’d been on it for a while. By now, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were veteran road warriors.
nother motel room in Maine. But till you opened the curtains—and sometimes afterwards—
it could just as easily have been in Montana or Oregon or Arkansas. The road was simply the road once you’d been on it for a while. By now, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were veteran road warriors.
Justin sat at the desk, doing e-mail on his MacBook. Rob sprawled on the bed, channel-surfing with the remote. HBO was showing a prizefight. The movie on Showtime sucked. The stand-up guy on Comedy Central had only one thing wrong with him: he wasn’t funny.
In a pop-culture course at UCSB, Rob had heard that people were calling TV a vast wasteland a generation before he was born. It hadn’t got better since, only vaster. He checked the laminated guide on the nightstand. On this system, MSNBC was channel 23.
The President and Grand Ayatollah of Iran stood side by side in a mosque in Qom. The President was a skinny, swarthy little guy with black hair and a close-cropped graying beard. He wore a dark Western-style jacket, a dark shirt, and no tie. Omitting the tie was the only place where Rob—who wore them at weddings, funerals, and gunpoint—sympathized with him.
In turban, flowing robes, and even more flowing beard, the Grand Ayatollah looked like a man from another century. As the camera moved in for a close-up of the two of them, though, you saw his heavy-lidded, clever eyes. The President was doing the talking. The President, in fact, was pounding his fist into the palm of his other hand to make his point. The Grand Ayatollah didn’t keep an arm behind the President’s back or anything. But you could make a pretty fair guess about which was the ventriloquist and which the dummy.
Not that the crowd inside the mosque cared. They cheered the President’s impassioned Farsi with passion of their own. To Rob, and to 99.9 percent of other non-Iranian Americans, Farsi was just guttural noise.
A translator who spoke almost unaccented American English spread the word to the wider world: “We have said for many years that the United States is the Great Satan. Now God is punishing the USA for its wicked war against Islam and for its poisonous support of the Zionist entity. It is a great punishment, and a punishment greatly deserved.”
More applause from the crowd. The Grand Ayatollah nodded in approval. Rob got the idea that he might have smiled if he hadn’t had his smile muscles surgically cut to make sure he couldn’t.
“If only the Americans, mired in ignorance and disbelief, had had the wisdom to embrace the teachings of the glorious Prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him . . .” the President went on.
“Hey, Justin, you listening to this bullshit?” Rob asked.
“Now that you mention it,” answered the band’s front man, “no.”
“Guy’s been channeling Pat Robertson,” Rob said, and summarized the President’s remarks.
“Nice to see we don’t have the loony market covered,” Justin observed.
“There you go,” Rob said. “You know we’re screwed when the Iranians can laugh at us. When North Korea starts, it’s
All hope abandon, ye who enter here
.”
All hope abandon, ye who enter here
.”
“Yeah, that’d be something, wouldn’t it?” Justin was about to say something more when his cell phone rang. He put it to his ear. “Hello? . . . Speaking . . . Yes, we’re looking for gigs right now. The volcano’s thrown everything for a loop.... In Greenwood, you say? . . . Green
ville
. Sorry. We’re from the other side of the country, remember. Where exactly is Greenville? . . . At the south end of Moosehead Lake. Okay . . . When would you want us to play there, and what are you offering?”
ville
. Sorry. We’re from the other side of the country, remember. Where exactly is Greenville? . . . At the south end of Moosehead Lake. Okay . . . When would you want us to play there, and what are you offering?”
They were in Orono now. They’d played several shows on and near the University of Maine campus here. Rob grabbed a Rand McNally road atlas. You couldn’t get much more Maine-sounding than Moosehead Lake, could you? But Greenville was just a little dot on the map. He checked its population—a bit over 1,300. Greenville Junction, right next door, added another 850 or so. Given that the band was and intended to be caviar to the general, where would they find a crowd?
Rob circled Greenville and Greenville Junction in the atlas, then wrote
2100 people, total
next to them. He showed Justin the Rand McNally.
2100 people, total
next to them. He showed Justin the Rand McNally.
Justin nodded. He held out his free hand for Rob’s pen. When he got it, he wrote a number with a dollar sign in front of it. It wasn’t an enormous number, but it could have been worse. They’d done what they could do around Orono and Bangor. Money coming in instead of going out would be nice.
“We’ll want cash up front when we get there—assuming we can get there,” Justin said. “Like I told you, we’re from California. I’ve never seen as much snow as this in my whole life before.”
Rob t just kept coming down and coming down and coming down. It came down early enough and often enough to bemuse the locals, and if you weren’t used to snow in Maine you had to be one of the loved-and-hated summer people. He’d heard people arguing about whether they’d ever seen so much snow so early in the season. Some said yes, and said it was just one of those things. The naysayers were inclined to blame it on the supervolcano.
No matter what caused it, it was real. Even people who’d been driving in snow since they’d got behind the wheel were having trouble. Snow plows had already started coming out. So had rock salt and grit to try to keep roads passable. And so had anguished howls from every agency that deployed snow plows and rock salt and grit. Doing so much so early, they wailed, would wreck their carefully crafted budgets.
Justin wrote a date beside the proposed fee: Saturday after next, ten days away. He put a question mark by it. Rob nodded without great enthusiasm. The lead time would let the people in Greenville promote the show—assuming they tried, assuming anyone paid attention.
“Well, Mr. Walters, we’ll all give it our best shot, and we’ll see how it turns out,” Justin said. “Thanks for calling. So long.” He high-fived Rob. “A gig!”
“Uh-huh.” Rob still wasn’t thrilled. “Biff’ll love leaving Orono. That Nicole he’s found . . .”
“How many girls have all of us left behind?” Justin countered. “It goes with what we do.”
“I know.” Rob nodded. “But sooner or later you meet a girl who counts more than the band. Even Lennon met Yoko.”
“That goes with what we do, too,” Justin said. “I don’t think Nicole’s the one like that for Biff. If she is, well, it’s not like nobody on this side of the country ever played rhythm guitar.”
“Mpf.” Rob wouldn’t give that more than a grunt. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles was what it was because of all four people who made it up. The band wouldn’t be the same without Biff . . . would it?
If they could get along without him, could they also do without a bass player who wrote some of their quirkier songs? Rob really didn’t care to contemplate that. It was too much like contemplating your own death after your best friend got killed in a car crash.
Instead of contemplating it, he looked at the practical side of things: “That’s still a week and a half from now, you said? In the meantime, how do we make some money come in for a change instead of going out?”
“Good question,” Justin said. “If this were the ’90s, we could set up a free concert in a record-store parking lot. They’d sell their albums, we’d sell ours—for cash, too—and everybody’d be happy. But”—he sadly spread his hands—“where you gonna find a record store these days?”
“That’s a good question, too. I wish I had a good answer for you,” Rob said. “Which is a more endangered species, record stores or secondhand bookstores?”
“All of the above?” Justin suggested. “People get most of their music online nowadays.”
“Especially the people who listen to us,” Rob said. “Our bottom line would be better off if they didn’t.”
“Fuckin’ tell me about it,” Justin said. “And when they want used books, they hit Alibris or AbeBooks or even good old Amazon.”
“So we don’t play in a record-store parking lot, or in a bookstore lot, either,” Rob said sadly. “We ought to play somewhere, though. You can still move CDs if you sign ’em when people buy’em.”
“Not in Orono. Not in Bangor, either. We’ve done all the business we can do around here.” Justin had a keen sense for how much of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles any given area could support—or stand, if you looked at it that way.
Maybe Rob believed the lead guitarist had that keen sense because he thought the same thing about these parts. “We already played Bar Harbor,” he mused aloud. “We don’t want to go back there. And there isn’t much if we head north.”
“There isn’t
anything
if we head north,” Justin said with relentless precision. “You end up in Canada, and not the part of Canada with lots of people—the part of Canada with lots of moose.”
anything
if we head north,” Justin said with relentless precision. “You end up in Canada, and not the part of Canada with lots of people—the part of Canada with lots of moose.”
“How do you tell that from Maine?” Rob asked. They were going to play by Moosehead Lake (which, on the map, really did look like a moose’s head), and they’d already seen one of the big critters lumbering across a road deserted by everything except the moose and their wheels.
But Justin knew what was what. “You head north from here, you end up in Quebec,” he explained. “In Quebec, the moose—mooses? meese?—speak French.”
“There you go.” Rob clapped his hands. “I never would’ve figured that out on my own.”
“I knew I was good for something,” Justin said, not without pride.
Also not without pride, Rob answered, “Not me. I’m good for nothing. If you don’t believe me, ask my father.”
“Hey, at least your dad knows what rock is and probably likes some of it,” Justin said. “My grandfather is like ninety-four. He’s still got his marbles, but he’s so old, he’s on the other side of the line. He was grown up when rock ’n’ roll started, and it’s just kids’ noise to him.”
“Like my dad with hiphop,” Rob said.
“Yeah, just like that,” Justin agreed. “If you decide it isn’t for you the first few times you hear it, you’ll never get it.”
“So where can we play between now and Greenville?” Rob asked, reaching for the road atlas once more. “Some place where we haven’t been, and where there’ll be enough people who haven’t heard us yet and might want to.”
“Is there any place like that left in Maine?” Justin asked. “And if there is, can we get there and get back through the snow?”
“Boy, you ask a lot of questions,” Rob said. “Come have a look—see what you think.” They both bent low to study the small print that showed town names.
Bryce Miller gravitated to university campuses the way bees went for flowers. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the university dominated the town in a way UCLA couldn’t begin to in Los Angeles. Too many other things went on in L.A. Without the University of Nebraska, though, Lincoln hardly had any reason to exist.
Not only that, Bryce had met a few of Nebraska’s classicists and their grad students at conferences. They were the only people in the whole state he knew even slightly. He hadn’t expected to end up here with only the clothes on his back. That he’d ended up anywhere at all alive and in one piece was something close to a miracle—and a testimony to the endless training pilots put in, getting ready for emergencies they might er see in their whole career.
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