Robert Silverberg - Hot Times in Magma City

Mattison has never seen anything like it. Herzog can’t weigh more than a hundred forty pounds, but the suit adds maybe fifty pounds more, and McFlynn, though six feet tall and stockily built, probably weighs two-ten tops. And has a gimpy leg, no bullshit there, a genuinely damaged limb on which he has just taken all of Herzog’s weight as the little guy came plummeting down from that Toyota. It must have been some circus-acrobat trick that McFlynn used, Mattison decides, or else one of his stunt-man gimmicks, because there was no other way that he could have pulled the trick off. Mattison, big and strong as he is and with both his legs intact, doubts that even he would have been able to manage it.

McFlynn is coming around the far side of the pump carriage now, no longer carrying Herzog in his arms but simply dragging him along like a limp doll. McFlynn’s face plate is open and Mattison can see that his eyes are shining like a madman’s—the adrenaline rush, no doubt—and his cheeks are flushed and glossy with sweat from the excitement.

“Here,” he says, and dumps Herzog down practically at Mattison’s feet. “I thought the dumb asshole was going to wait forever to make the jump.”

“Hey, nice going,” Mattison says, grinning. He balls up his fist and clips McFlynn lightly on the forearm with it, a gesture of solidarity and companionship, one big man to another. McFlynn’s face is aglow with the true redemptive gleam. That must have been why he did it, Mattison thinks: to cover over the business about refusing to help move the pump. Well, whatever. McFlynn is a total louse, a completely deplorable son of a bitch, but that was still a hell of a thing to have done. “I thought you had gone off on your coffee break,” Mattison says.

“Fuck you, Matty,” McFlynn tells him, and shambles away to one side.

Herzog is conscious, or approximately so, but he looks dazed. Mattison yanks his face plate open, snaps his fingers in front of his nose, gets him to open his eyes.

“Go over to the truck and sit down,” Mattison orders him. “Chill out for a while. You’re off duty.”

“Yeah,” says Herzog vaguely. “Yeah. Yeah.”

And give yourself a couple of good shots of bourbon to calm yourself down while you’re at it, Mattison thinks, but of course does not say. Christ, he wouldn’t mind a little of that himself, just now. It is, however, not an available option.

“All right,” he says, looking around at Hawks, Prochaska, Snow, and a couple of the others, Foust and Doheny, who have come up from the rear lines to see what’s going on. “Where were we, now?”

The hose line that Herzog had been supervising has been obliterated by the new lava stream, of course, and the Toyota van is up to its door-handles now in lava too. But there are other hose lines coming in from other streets, and they still have a dam to build before they can call it a day.

Mattison is getting a little tired, now, after all the stuff with McFlynn and then with Herzog, but he can feel himself starting to function on automatic pilot. Groggily but with complete confidence he gets the water running again, and cuts through another handy alley so that he can set up a second line of lava logs along the new front, about thirty feet south of the Toyota. It takes about fifteen minutes of fast maneuvers and fancy dancing to choke it off entirely.

Then he can devote his attention to building the larger dam, the one that will contain this whole mess and shove the lava back on itself before it does any more damage. He plods back and forth, giving orders almost like a sleepwalker, telling people to move hoses around and change the throwing angle of the pump, and they do what he says like sleepwalkers themselves. This has been a very long day. They don’t usually do two jobs the same day, and Mattison means to have Donna DiStefano say something to the Citizens Service administrators when he gets back.

Big ragged-edged blocks of black stone are forming now all across the middle of the street and curving around toward the south where the runaway lava stream had been. So the thing is pretty well under control. By now another team of Citizens Service people has arrived, and Mattison figures that if he is as tired as he is, then the others in his crew, who don’t have his superhuman physical endurance and are still hampered to some degree by the medical aftereffects of their recently overcome bad habits, must be about ready to drop. He tells Barry Gibbons that he would like him to requests permission from Volcano Central to withdraw. It takes Gibbons about five minutes to get through—Volcano Central must be having one whacko busy day—but finally it comes through.

“All right, guys,” Mattison sings out. “That’s it for today. “Everybody back in the truck!”

They are silent, pretty much, on the way back. The San Dimas thing has been grueling for all of them. Mattison notices that Herzog is standing on one side of the truck and McFlynn on the other, facing in opposite directions. He wonders whether Herzog had had the good grace even to thank McFlynn for what he had done. Probably not. But Herzog is a shithead, after all.

For a long time Mattison can’t stop thinking about that little episode. About McFlynn’s perversity, mainly. Crapping out on the rest of the pump team in a key moment without any reason, nonchalantly stepping to one side and leaving Prochaska and Hawks and Snow to do the heavy hauling without him, even though he must have known that his strength was needed. And then, just as light-heartedly, running into that alleyway to risk his life for Herzog, a man whom he despises and loves to torment. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Mattison pokes around at it from this way and that, and still he doesn’t have a clue to what might have been going on in McFlynn’s mind in either case.

Possibly nothing was going on in there, he decides finally. Perhaps McFlynn’s actions don’t make any sense even to McFlynn.

McFlynn has been a resident in the house long enough to know that everybody is supposed to be a team player, and even if you don’t want to be, you need to pretend to be. Letting the team down in the clutch is not a good way to ensure that you will get the help you need in your own time of need. On the other hand, there was no reason in the world why McFlynn had to do what he did for Herzog, except maybe that he was feeling sheepish about the pump-moving episode, and Mattison finds that a little hard to believe, McFlynn feeling sheepish about anything.

So maybe McFlynn is just an ornery, unpredictable guy who takes each moment as it comes. Maybe he felt like being a louse when they were moving the pump, and maybe he felt like being a hero when Herzog was about to die a horrible death. I don’t know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don’t know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.

It isn’t Mattison’s job to get inside people’s heads, anyway. He’s not a shrink, just a live-in caregiver, still too busy working on his own recovery to fret about the mysterious ways of his fellow mortals. He just has to keep them from hurting themselves and each other while they’re living in the house. So he gives up thinking about McFlynn and Herzog and turns his attention instead to what is going on all around them, which actually is a little on the weird side.

They are almost at the western periphery of the Zone, now, having retraced their route through Azusa and Covina, then through towns whose names Mattison doesn’t even know—hell, most of these places look alike, anyway, and unless you see the signs at the boundaries you don’t know where one ends and the next begins—and are approaching Temple City, San Gabriel, Alhambra, all those various flatland communities. Behind them, night is beginning to fall, it being nearly five o’clock and this being February. In the gathering darkness the new spurts of smoke atop Mount Pomona are pretty spectacular, lit as they are by streaks of fiery red from whatever is going on inside that cone today. But also, a little to the south of the big volcano, something else seems to be happening, something odd, because a glaring cloud of blue-white light has arisen down there. Mattison doesn’t remember seeing blue-white stuff before. Some new kind of explosion? Are they nuking the lava flow, maybe? It looks strange, anyway. He’ll find out about it on the evening news, if they are. Or maybe he won’t.