Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

They took the test in what looked like the lunchroom, though the food-serving part was closed off. Everyone had a stock of number-two pencils. It might have been the SAT all over again.

In came a plump woman in a burgundy polyester pantsuit his mother would have loved-he couldn’t think of anything worse to say about it. She carried a fat manila envelope. “I’m Stella Garcia,” she said. “I will be administering this assessment instrument. Before we begin, I want everyone to put their cell phone on the table in front of you, upside down and in the off position.”

There were more ways to cheat on exams now than there had been back in the day, even if you did call them assessment instruments. Had anyone brought more than one phone? Would it help? Bryce hadn’t. He wasn’t hardened enough to this game. Besides, he had only one.

Mrs. Garcia-her ring flashed under the fluorescents-passed out the exams facedown. “Do not turn them over and begin until I tell you to do so,” she said. “You will have two hours precisely to complete them.” She checked her own cell phone for the time, even though there was a clock on the wall behind her. “Begin!” It was eight on the dot, or near enough.

Bryce put his name, address, and e-mail on the front page of the booklet, then dug in. It was like the SAT English test: grammar, analogies, taking the meaning from passages. Only the passages were mind-numbing bureaucratese, not the fairly straightforward stuff on the SAT.

He didn’t care. He aced standardized tests. He always had. And he could read bureaucratese, even if he didn’t write it well. He filled in bubble after bubble.

One poor shlub strolled into the lunchroom at half past eight. Mrs. Garcia gave him a booklet and made him put his cell where she could see it. Bryce didn’t figure him for serious competition.

But what about the woman who handed in her test at five to nine? Was she brilliant or hopeless? She walked out of the room before Bryce could make up his mind.

He finished about nine twenty. He was the sixth, or maybe seventh, to turn in the exam. Another guy handed his in a moment later. They walked out together. “What did you think?” the other guy asked once the door closed behind them. He was forty-five or so, heavyset, and needed a shave. He hadn’t showered before he came in, either.

It had been easier than Bryce expected. He didn’t want to say that, so he shrugged and answered, “Who knows? How about you?”

“I did the best I could,” the older man said, which also might mean anything. He went on, “Hope I land the job. I’m gettin’ awful sick of pork and beans, know what I mean?”

“Oh, man, do I ever!” Bryce said. “Not much out there these days.”

“Not much? There’s fuckin’ nothin’,” the other guy said. “Good luck to you, Jack-but not too much, no offense.”

“Yeah, well, back atcha,” Bryce replied. They swapped wry grins.

It was raining when Bryce went to his car. The only rain L.A. was supposed to get in later summer was the occasional thundershower when the monsoon slopped over the mountains from the desert to the east. This wasn’t like that. It was chilly. Clouds blanketed the sky. It felt like December or February.

He turned on his wipers and his lights. He made sure he remembered to turn the lights off again when he got back to his apartment building. Calling AAA to come out and give you a jump was a pain in the ass.

Waiting in his mailbox were a couple of bills and a letter from a no-account university in Florida. It was a form rejection. He didn’t even remember applying for a job there, but that proved nothing much. He’d sent out a hell of a lot of resumes, all right.

He carried the depressing snailmail up to his place. If he wanted to apply to some school in Minnesota or the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, he might have a decent chance of landing something. But he wouldn’t have wanted to live in Minnesota or Michigan even before the supervolcano went boom. These days. . Los Angeles was getting what would have been unseasonable rain. Minnesota and Michigan were getting what would have been out-of-season snow, though not all of what they’d got this past winter had ever melted. If you were into sled dogs, they weren’t bad places to go. Otherwise? He shook his head. Next to those places, even moving back in with his mom looked, well, not so bad.

When he called Susan, he got her voice mail. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Classes at UCLA had already started. That didn’t matter so much to him, not any more, but it did to her. She was finishing her diss on the eleventh-century Holy Roman Empire. And she had a TAship, so she was probably ramming The Epic of Gilgamesh down the undergrads’ throats right this minute.

At the tone, he said, “Well, I took the DWP test. I guess I did okay. Call when you get a chance. Love you. ’Bye.”

As he stuck the phone back in his pocket, he shook his head again, this time in slow wonder. Had they really been going together for three years? Longer than that now. He’d had a few random dates after Vanessa dumped him, but nothing that was going anywhere-till he met Susan Ruppelt. They’d just clicked.

One of these days, he’d ask her to marry him. He had no doubt she’d say yes. But he wanted to be able to support her before he did. Fathers-in-law with jobs-hers was a mechanical engineer-tended to look down their noses at unemployed sons-in-law.

She called back about four that afternoon. “Hi, hon,” she said. “So it went all right?”

“It didn’t seem that hard. Not as bad as the SAT,” Bryce answered.

“How many other people were taking it?” she asked.

“Bunches. Fifty, maybe seventy-five. It was in this big lunchroom thing.” Bryce sighed. Every job that got advertised drew swarms of people. He did his best to stay hopeful: “They’ve got to pick somebody. Maybe it’ll be me.”

“I hope it is.” Susan paused. “I guess I hope it is. I mean, you worked so hard, doing what you wanted to do. Seems a shame if you don’t get to use it.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Bryce said. “That’s pretty much what my chairperson told me when I turned in the thesis. Hey, it was fun while it lasted.”

“Yeah.” Every day brought Susan closer to banging her head against the same wall. She tried to look on the bright side: “Like you said, somebody’s going to get that job. You know how things are at the universities. When somebody retires or dies, half the time they just close the damn position. More than half.”

“Tell me about it!” Bryce said bitterly. How many times had some classics department’s chair or, more often, boss secretary signed a letter saying their slot wouldn’t be filled after all? More than he cared to remember-he knew that.

“Well. . Something good will happen. People got through the Great Depression. We’ll get through this.” Susan had a sunny temperament. She sometimes needed it, too, to put up with Bryce’s spells of gloom.

“We didn’t have the whole planet screwing us to the wall then, though,” he said now. “It was just bank failures and stuff.”

“They wouldn’t have called it just ,” she said.

“That’s ’cause they hadn’t seen this,” he returned. But she kept trying to cheer him up, and he let her think she had. Making her worry less about him actually did make him feel-some-better. It was convoluted, but it was there.

Two days later, he got an e-mail from the DWP asking if he could come back for an interview and more testing on the following Monday. He wrote back that he could. He’d made them think twice about him, anyhow. He’d already sent his confirmation before he wondered how much he honest to God wanted a real-world job.