Robert Silverberg - Hot Times in Magma City

But he’s confident of his own judgment right here and now. This job has been handled well. There’s a high in that that feels like half a fifth of Crown Royal traveling through his veins, smooth and fine and warm.

The firefighters go away, leaving just two of their number posted as supervisors during the wrap-up and report-filing phase of the job here, and Mattison, signalling back down the line to have the hose shut down, moves forward onto the lava dam. It can be walked on, now, at least by someone equipped with tractor treads like his. He tests the crinkly new skin. It holds. Dainty little tinkling sounds are coming from it, the sounds of continued cooling and hardening, but it supports his weight. It’s a little like walking on thin new ice, except that what is behind the fragile surface is molten rock instead of chilly water, and if he falls through he will be very sorry, though not for long. But he doesn’t expect to fall through, or he wouldn’t be up here.

Mattison isn’t walking around on the dam just to show off. He needs to check out the fine points of the construction job. The dam slopes up and back at a 45-degree angle, and he wants its lip to rise just a little steeper even than that, so he moves along the face of the front, using his suit’s shovel appendage to trim and shape the boundary between new rock and hot lava. He can feel mild warmth, not much more than that, through his suit, at least until he reaches a place where red can be seen crackling through the black, a tiny fissure in the dam, not dangerous but offensive to his sense of craft. He steps back, radios Foust and Herzog to turn the water back on, and has Hawks and Prochaska give the fissure a squirt or two.

Then he checks the far side of the lava front to make sure that there’s no likelihood that the top of the lava dome he has created is simply going to spill back the other way, down into the residential block behind the event. But no, no, the oozing lava is quietly piling itself up, filling in behind the dam, giving no indication that it means to go off in some new direction. Thank God for that much. Because of the way the magma pool lies in relation to the giant subterranean fault line that kicked this whole thing off, the surface flows tend to be consistently directional, rising on a diagonal out of the ground and moving, generally, from east to west only. With some residual slopping around—lava is a liquid, after all—but not, as a rule, with any unpredictable twisting and turning back the way they have just come.

Just as Mattison is wrapping everything up, Gibbons radios him from the truck to say, “They want us to move along to San Dimas when we’re done here.”

“Jesus,” Mattison says. “San Dimas is way the hell to the east. Isn’t everything over and done with back there by now?”

“Apparently not. Something new is about to bust out, it seems.”

“Tell them we’ll need a lunch break first.”

“They said they wanted us to—”

“Right,” says Mattison. “We aren’t fucking soldiers, you know. We’re volunteer citizens and some of us have been working like coolies out here all morning. We get a lunch break before we start busting our asses again today. Tell them that, Barry.”

“Well—”

“Tell them.”

As Mattison has guessed, the San Dimas thing is serious but not catastrophic, at least not yet. The preliminary signs indicate a bad bust-out is on the way out there, and auxiliary crews are being pulled in as available, but one team more or less won’t make any big difference in the next hour. They get the lunch break.

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”

“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue—that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”

“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.

“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.

“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”

“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.

“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer . “What do you need to play around with my head for?”

“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.

“You hooer, I’m going to throw you into the lava,” Prochaska says, getting up and heading toward her. Mary Maude weighs about ninety pounds, Prochaska maybe two-fifty. He could do it with one flip of his wrist.

“Lenny,” Mattison says warningly.

“Tell her to leave me be, then.”

“All of you,” says Mattison. “Leave each other be. Jesus Christ, you think it’s any easier for the others than it was for you?”

It is the tension, he knows, of the morning’s work that is doing this to them. They’re all on the edge, all the time, of falling back into their individual hells, and that keeps them constantly keyed up to a point where it doesn’t take much for them to get on each other’s nerves. Of course, he’s on the edge himself, he always will be and won’t ever let himself forget it, but he is in recovery and they aren’t, not really, not yet, and the edge is thinner for them than it is for him. Each of them has managed to reach the abstinence level, at least, but you can get to that point simply by having yourself chained to a bed; that keeps you out of the clutches of your habit but it doesn’t exactly qualify you as being free of it. Real recovery comes later, if at all, and you can be a tremendous pain in the ass while you’re trying to attain it, because you’re angry all the time, angry with yourself for having burdened yourself with your habit and even angrier with the world for wanting you to give it up, and the anger keeps bubbling out all the time. Like lava, sort of. Makes a mess for everybody, especially yourself.

They calm down, though, as the sandwiches hit their bellies. Mattison waits until they’ve eaten before he springs the San Dimas thing on them, and to his surprise there is no enormous amount of griping. The usual grumblers—Evans, Snow, Blazes McFlynn—do a predictable bit of grumbling, but not a whole lot, and that’s it. They all would rather go back to the house and watch television, of course, but somewhere deep down they know that this volcano stuff is actual worthwhile and important stuff , perhaps the first time in their lives they have ever done anything even remotely worthwhile and important, and some part of them is tickled pink to be out here on the lava frontier. Hollywood is just a dozen miles west of here, after all. They all see themselves as characters in the big volcano movie, heroes and heroines, riding into battle against the evil monster that’s eating L.A. That’s how Mattison himself feels when he’s out here, and he knows it’s the same for them, maybe even more intense than it is for him, because he also has the self-esteem that comes from having made it back out of his addiction to this level of recovery, and they don’t. Not yet. So they need to be heroes in a movie to feel good about themselves.