Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

He got some chow. They had what they called pizza. The crust was dark enough to show it was mostly rye. The cheese was thinly spread; with so many cows dead, people had stopped taking milk for granted. They’d had to. The sausage. . There wasn’t much of it, either. And it looked funny.

Pointing to a round of it, Bryce asked the student dishing stuff out, “Do I want to know what goes into that?”

“It’s meat,” she answered. “What else do you need to know?”

“Nothing,” he said after a barely perceptible pause for thought. “Let me have a slice, please.”

“You got it.” She put it on a plastic plate and handed it to him.

He found a place, sat down, and ate. The coleslaw was actually pretty good. The french fries had been sitting under a heat lamp too long, but that could happen at a real fast-food joint, too. As for the pizza, well, he’d had worse. He didn’t think he’d ever had stranger, though. If Finns had invented the stuff instead of Italians, it might have come out like this.

The sausage was definitely mystery meat. As the girl had suggested, some mysteries were better left unsolved. Bryce had read Shogun -he’d raced through it in three or four days, in fact. Because he’d liked it so much, he’d got Tai-Pan and King Rat , too. Tai-Pan was pretty good: not so good as Shogun , but still pretty good. King Rat was nothing like the other two, but also pretty good. Right this minute, remembering what the POWs in King Rat had chowed down on, Bryce wished he’d never found it no matter how good it was.

He dumped his trash and stowed his tray, dishes, and flatware on the rotating shelves that delivered them to the dishwashers. Then he put his knit cap back on, pulled it down so it covered his ears, and headed out into the cold again to go teach his class. The Peloponnesian War today, or the start of it. He’d done big chunks of Thucydides in the original. Now it paid off.

What the kids at Wayne State thought of things like the Melian Dialogue, he wasn’t sure. Some of them got it, and saw that that kind of thing applied to any situation where people tried to govern themselves responsibly. More, he feared, didn’t-which was the kind of problem people who tried to govern themselves responsibly had to deal with.

Or to duck. Washington these days reminded him of a broken-backed man’s brain. It still sent out frantic messages-orders, even-but not all of them got through. He finished the lecture and headed for the bus stop.

Wayne and Wayne State were better off than a lot of places. The power here stayed on better than it did in Los Angeles. Natural gas got through. There wasn’t a lot of gasoline, and what there was was hideously expensive, but that was worse in SoCal, too. Things here didn’t depend on the port and on one long highway connecting the coast to the rest of the country.

Then again, this was Wayne, Nebraska. The Frozen Tundra, as he’d thought before. Along with fast food, it had a Chinese place and a pizza place that also did spaghetti. No takeout Thai. No Peruvian. No pupusas from El Salvador. No sushi. No Korean barbecue. No Persian. No Israeli. No Moroccan. No. . no nothin’, except for Chinese and sortakinda Italian.

Here came the bus. It had studded snow tires, and chains over them, too. That struck Bryce as suspenders and belt, but what did he know? About snow and coping with it, not much. He knew he wouldn’t have wanted to walk or bike back to his place in town, not in weather like this. And he knew he wasn’t rich enough to keep driving back and forth, even for short hauls.

Body heat warmed the inside of the bus some-enough to prove that some of the bodies warming it hadn’t been washed for a while. One more constant of the new era. You did what you could, and you did what you could afford, and you said the hell with the rest.

Not much traffic on the road back to town. Bryce guessed there’d never been a whole lot. There just weren’t enough people in these parts to create much traffic. To someone who’d squandered countless irreplaceable hours crawling along the 405 because of a wreck five miles ahead, that was a prodigy.

Bryce got out near the center of Wayne. Nothing was more than three or four stories high. A lot of the buildings were of red or brown brick. To someone from a state where quakes were an everyday worry, that was a prodigy, too, but not such a good one.

The main drags were plowed. That was how the bus had come this far. Bryce walked a block in the street. He had to watch for oncoming cars-not too big a worry, with gas so scarce and so expensive-and he had to be careful not to slip and fall on his ass. Then he had to climb up onto the drifts to go the rest of the way to the apartment he and Susan shared.

Even this recently after the end of summer, it had been cold enough long enough for the snow to have a good solid crust. The drifts bore his weight. Most of the time, anyhow. Falling through into the snow and then struggling to pull himself out again wasn’t the most enjoyable thing he’d ever done. And he didn’t want a repeat performance, so he watched where he put his feet. Once had been an experiment; twice would definitely be perversion.

He made it back to the building without going into the deep freeze. The little rectangular mailbox-just the kind you’d also see in SoCal apartment buildings-was empty when he turned the key in its lock. Either Susan had already got whatever there was or the mailman (or mailwoman, if you needed a word with a built-in oxymoron) hadn’t managed to mush through the snow. The USPS took its adaptation of Herodotus’ version of the pledge of the Persian Empire’s couriers less seriously than it had once upon a time.

He clumped up the stairs. A second-floor unit was better than one down below. You didn’t have herds of shoes migrating over your head. The neighbors on either side of the place weren’t too noisy, either. All that could have been worse, as he knew from experience.

Susan was tapping away on a laptop at the kitchen table when he came in. It wasn’t warm inside, any more than it had been in the student union or his classroom or the bus. But it was warmer, so it felt warm. And the hug she gave him raised his temp several more degrees-or it sure seemed to, anyhow.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“I’m getting there,” she answered. “Long-distance thesis writing. . This way, I get snarky e-mails-sometimes even snarky letters I can barely read when the power in L.A. goes for a while-instead of face-to-face snark. I’m glad stuff stays on most of the time here. I couldn’t finish without the Net. The Wayne State Library tries, it really does, but it doesn’t have most of what I need.”

Bryce nodded. “I know that song.” The classical holdings here were severely limited, too.

“Sure.” She smiled at him. “If you didn’t know what I was going through, I’d drive you totally up the wall instead of just three-quarters of the way.”

“Yeah, right,” he answered. “Like I’m not already up-or off-the wall any which way.” Susan thought that was funny. Bryce wished he could have said it without dredging up uncomfortable memories. Vanessa had had no idea how crazy he’d get when he was studying for his orals. How could she have? She’d never done anything like that. She’d bailed out of college before she graduated and started working instead. That had hassles of its own-Bryce discovered some of them later-but they weren’t the same hassles. The differences had only made for more friction between them.

He wondered how Vanessa was doing. He’d have to ask Colin next time he talked to him or e-mailed him. He hadn’t done that as often as he should have since he moved to Nebraska. Hell, he hadn’t done it as often as he should have after he moved up to the Valley and couldn’t get over to the Ferguson place so easily any more.