Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - Things Fall Apart

“Right,” Dad agreed. “Too right, as a matter of fact. Are you going to take a swing at it, then? It’s your chance to make a living without working for anybody else. Nice work if you can get it.”

“I guess,” Marshall said reluctantly. Kelly had been after him to work on a novel, too. Doing something that somebody else had suggested wasn’t his favorite plan in the whole wide world, though. He had some ideas. He had some notes. He didn’t yet have any firm notion of how they all fit together, though, or even if they did.

And Dad, for a wonder, didn’t keep pushing at him the way he would have when Marshall was younger. All he said was, “Well, either you’ll figure it out or you won’t. And if you don’t, you’ll just have to come up with something else instead.”

“Uh-huh.” To Marshall, something else instead translated into moving boxes from a truck to a warehouse, or maybe from a warehouse to a truck. Or he could stand near a cash register with a mindless smile pasted on his face and go Hi! Are you finding everything you need? to every third man, woman, or zebra that wandered by. If the power was on, a surveillance camera would tape him to make sure he didn’t slack off on the important question. If he did, they’d dock him. If he did it too often, they’d can him.

Dad didn’t try to talk him into following in his own flatfooted footsteps. To give him his due, he’d never tried to do that with any of his kids. Marshall laughed to himself. How many dope-smoking cops were there? Probably more than Dad wanted to admit, even to himself. But no. Dad had got himself a bass player, a graphic artist, and a wannabe writer. And whatever he thought about that, he never bitched where his offspring could hear.

Kelly came downstairs. “She’s asleep,” she said in tired triumph. Then she knocked on the first wood she saw. “With a little bit of luck, she may stay that way. So I get to be a human being for a while.” She yawned. “A sleepy human being, but hey, you take what you can get.”

“Hello, sleepy human being,” Dad said. “We were just psyching out what to do with Marshall’s millions after they make the Johnny Depp movie from his New York Times blockbuster.”

“Hey!” Marshall said. “I wish!” What writer in his right mind—hell, what crazy writer—didn’t wish for the exact same thing? “All we need is the movie. Oh, and the novel to make the movie from.”

“Details, details.” Dad waved them away. He could do that with the greatest of ease—he wasn’t currently not writing a novel. “You should go upstairs and pound on the antique I found you.”

“Dad…” Marshall was the easygoing kid. Rob and Vanessa would have opened fire on full auto. But staying easygoing wasn’t always easy. He tried his best: “I am working on something right now.”

“Get off his case, Colin,” Kelly said, so she saw Dad was on it. She continued, “What did you do when your father gave you a hard time?”

“Me? Along with hating high school, my old man was the other big reason I joined the Navy. Boy, did that show him! Showed me, too, by God,” Dad answered. He held out his wrists to Kelly as if waiting to be cuffed. “Here y’are, Officer. I’ll go quietly.”

He would have barked at Mom if she’d told him to lighten up. But she would’ve been snarky when she did it, where Kelly wasn’t. And maybe he’d learned not to bark all the damn time. They said you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks, but they were full of it as often as not. Marshall had gone through plenty of changes the past few years. Why shouldn’t Dad have, too?

Marshall stopped thinking about his father. Some things in his vague scheme about what a novel might look like that hadn’t fit together all of a sudden did. He jumped up, grabbed a scratch pad and a pencil off the bar, and brought them back to the candle’s small circle of light so he could see what he was doing while he scrawled notes.

“You should—” Dad began. Kelly made a small noise, and he shut up. Kelly got the idea that sometimes someone who was writing needed to get something down without any interruptions. Dad didn’t, not really, but he got that Kelly did, which was enough. Marshall barely noticed the byplay. He scribbled as fast as he could.

Vanessa wondered if getting back her old job at Nick Gorczany’s wonderful widget works was the best idea she’d ever had. True, it let her get out of the house. She would have done almost anything this side of hustling tricks on street corners to achieve that. (Her mouth twitched, there at her window-side desk. She knew too well that the flesh could be made to pay, and that the biggest price was your own disgust every time you got near a mirror. I did that ? you would wonder. But she had, and she knew it too well.) That she couldn’t stand Kelly, and that it was mutual, hadn’t helped, either.

Gorczany, the high honcho, did seem glad to have her back. He’d given her a fancy new title, senior technical editor, and a raise that at least made the wage living. Even a manufacturer of high-tech widgets sometimes needed somebody who could translate between techy and bureaucratese on the one hand and no-shit English on the other. Doing without somebody like that for a while must have rubbed his nose in the lack.

Whether she was glad to be back was a more complicated question all kinds of ways. Sure, a steady, nearly adequate paycheck was a Good Thing. Absolutely. No bout adoubt it. But did earning one require her to suffer fools gladly?

She’d never been the world’s best team player. She knew that. She was proud of it. She knew when she was right, and she wasn’t shy about saying so. Or about sticking to her guns when some subliterate tried to tell her she wasn’t.

Being a team player at all came hard for her now. She’d spent way too much time on her own after the eruption. She’d escaped from Denver alone, one of the few who’d bailed soon enough to make it out. She’d been alone among tens of thousands of refugees in Camp Constitution, one of the many refugee centers that still blighted the fringes of the ashfall zone and probably would for years to come.

And she’d been alone, very much alone, on the team of scavengers that went into the devastated areas to get what could be got before it wasn’t worth getting any more. She hadn’t got along with anyone else on the team, and little by little she’d quit trying. She’d been glad to leave, and they’d been glad to have her gone.

She’d come back to L.A. on her own, too. Till she met Bronislav in that New Mexico truck stop, she’d figured she would stay alone pretty much permanently. That hadn’t happened, and somebody to keep you warm at night was just as much a Good Thing as a paycheck.

Still, hanging out with somebody who kept you warm at night didn’t take the same kind of talents as coping with the idiots who clogged your work day.

Speak of the devil , she thought sourly. Walker Ellis was an engineer who could do brilliant things with transistors and integrated circuits (odds were there hadn’t been a segregated circuit since Brown v. Board of Education became the law of the land). But when he tried to write… Well, it was better when he didn’t.

Which had to be why he was bearing down on her now, an edited progress report on his latest project clutched in his fist. Vanessa edited in red. She could see her marks at long range, like zits on a clueless teenager’s face.

He looked at her over the tops of his wire-rims, which meant he was really and truly pissed off. His mustache was a little lopsided. If he provoked her enough, she’d call him on it. For now she waited, wondering whether he’d provoke her that much.