Robert Silverberg - Hot Times in Magma City

Booming noises come from the southeast. A lot of tectonic garbage seems to be going into the sky back there too; he sees small red lava particles glowing against the dusk, and dark clouds too, ash and pumice, no doubt, and probably some nice-sized lava bombs being tossed aloft. And they experience two small earthquakes as they’re driving back, one while they’re going up Fair Oaks in Pasadena, another fifteen minutes later just as they’re about to get on the westbound Ventura Freeway. Nothing surprising about that; five or six little quakes a day are standard now, what with all that magma moving around under the San Gabriel Valley. But the two so close together are further signs that things are getting even livelier in the Zone just as Mattison and his crew are going off duty. Hoo boy, Mattison thinks. Hot times in Magma City.

It’s beginning to rain a little, out here in Glendale where they are at the moment. Nothing big, just light sprinkles, enough to make the rush-hour traffic a little uglier but not to cause serious troubles. Mattison likes the rain. You get so little of it, ordinarily, in Los Angeles, eight or ten dry months at a time, sometimes, and right now, with everything that’s going on behind him in the Zone, the rain seems sweet and pure, a blessing being scattered on the troubled land.

It’s good to be going westward again, moving slowly through the evening commute toward what is still the normal part of Los Angeles, toward the sprawling city he grew up in. What is happening back there, the lava, the ash, the blue-white lights, seems unreal to him. This doesn’t. Down there to his left are the high-rise towers of downtown, and the clustering stack of freeways meeting and going off in every which way. And straight ahead lie all the familiar places of his own particular life, Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys in this direction and Hollywood and Westwood and West L.A. in that one, and so on and on out to Santa Monica and Venice and Topanga and the Pacific Ocean.

If only they could drop a curtain across the face of the Zone, Mattison thinks. Or build a 50-foot-high wall, and seal it off completely. But no, they can’t do that, and the lava will keep on coming, won’t it, crawling westward and westward and westward until one of these days it comes shooting up under Rodeo Drive or knocks the San Diego Freeway off its pegs. What the hell: we can only do what we can do, and the rest is up to God’s mercy and wisdom, right? Right?

They are practically back at the house, now.

The rain is getting worse. The sky ahead of them is starting to turn dark. The sky behind them is already black, except where the strange light of eruptions breaks through the night.

“McFlynn really pissed me off today,” he tells Donna DiStefano. “I entertained seriously hostile thoughts in his direction. In fact I had pretty strong fantasies about tossing him right into the lava. Truth, Donna.”

The house director laughs. It’s the famous Donna laugh, a big one, high up on the Richter scale. She is a hefty woman with warm friendly eyes and a huge amount of dark curling hair going halfway down her back. Nothing ever upsets her. She is supposed to have been addicted to something or other very major, fifteen or twenty years back, but nobody knows the details.

“It’s a temptation, isn’t it?” she says. “What a pill he is, eh? Was that before or after the Herzog rescue?”

“Before. A long time before. He was bitching at me from lunchtime on.” Mattison hasn’t told her about the pump-moving incident. Probably he should; but he figures she already has heard about it, one way or another, and it isn’t required of him to file report cards on every shitty thing the residents of the house do while he’s looking after them. “There was another time, later in the day, when it would have given me great pleasure to dangle him face first into the vent. But I prayed for patience instead and God was kind to me, or else we’d have had some vacancies in the house tonight.”

“Some?”

“McFlynn and me, because he’d be dead and I’d be in jail. And Herzog too, because McFlynn was the only one in a position to rescue him just then. But here we all are, safe and sound.”

“Don’t worry about it,” DiStefano says. “You did good today, Matty.”

Yes. He knows that that’s true. He did good. Every day, in every way, inch by inch, he does his best. And he’s grateful every hour of his life that things have worked out for him in such a way that he has had the opportunity. As if God has sent volcanoes to Los Angeles as a personal gift to him, part of the recovery program of Calvin Thomas Mattison, Jr.

There’s nothing on the news about unusual stuff in the Zone this evening. Usual stuff, yes, plenty of that, getting the usual perfunctory coverage, fumaroles opening here, lava vents there, houses destroyed in this town and that and that, new street blockages, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the blue-white light he saw was a just tremendous searchlight beam, from the opening of some new shopping mall in Anaheim or Fullerton. This crazy town, you never can tell.

He goes upstairs—his little room, all his own. Reads for a while, thinks about his day, gets into bed. Sleeps like a baby. The alarm goes off at five, and he rises unprotestingly, showers, dresses, goes downstairs.

There are lights on all over the board. Blue for new fumaroles, here here and there, and another red one in the vicinity of Mount Pomona, and a whole epidemic of green dots announcing fresh lava cutting loose over what looks like the whole area. Mattison has never seen it look that bad. The crisis seems to be entering a new and very obnoxious phase. Volcano Central will be calling them out again today, sure as anything.

What the hell. We do what we can, and hope for the best, one day at a time.

He puts together some breakfast for himself and waits for the rest of the house to wake up.