Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

Susan had said something. She stood there, waiting expectantly for him to answer. Woolgathering about your ex was not a good thing to do, not when it made you zone out on your current squeeze. “Sorry.” Bryce spread his hands in what he hoped would be apology enough. “Brain fuzz.”

“A likely story,” Susan answered darkly. “I said , how do you want me to make the potatoes tonight?”

“I dunno. Cooking them ought to be good,” Bryce replied. She rolled her eyes. So did he, for different reasons. You could do only so much with potatoes. Whatever you did, they were still potatoes when you got through with them. He supposed he should have been glad they had enough potatoes, and didn’t need to worry about going hungry.

He should have been, and in a way he was. But he remembered better times. So did his whole generation. If the climate didn’t improve by the time they died off, they’d bore the living shit out of the cadre rising behind them by going on and on about the good old days. Well, yeah, every generation did that, so why should his be any different? The difference was, for them the good old days really would have been good.

* * *

There was a joint on Hesperus, a little north of the police station, with a name Colin Ferguson had loved for years. HEINRICH’S HOFBRAU AND SUSHI BAR, the sign over the door declared. It had always drawn a fair number of cops at lunch and dinnertime. The way things were these days, it was crawling with blue uniforms and off-the-rack suits. You could walk there from the station. You could, and the policemen and — women did.

As a waiter led Colin and Gabe Sanchez to a table, Colin remarked, “I always wished this joint served pizza, too.”

“Oh, yeah?” Gabe said. “How come?”

“’Cause then you’d have the whole Axis, all in one place.”

That got the kind of disgusted snort he’d hoped for. They sat down. The waiter set menus on the table in front of them and went away. The menus had two sides-not Column A and Column B but German and Japanese. “More soba noodles than ever,” Gabe said, eyeing the Japanese side.

“Soba’s buckwheat,” Colin answered. “Kasha, if you’re Jewish.”

“Sure, man. Hell of a lot of Hebes named Sanchez.”

“Mm, right.” Colin had to remind himself what he was talking about. “Buckwheat’s one of those grains that grow quick, so you can raise it in the kind of crappy weather we’ve got nowadays.”

“Oh. Is that where you were going with that? I gotcha,” Gabe said. When the waiter came back, he ordered some of the soba noodles. Colin went Teutonic, with sauerkraut, potatoes, and pork.

The dish proved heavy on the spuds and kraut, light on the pork. You could raise pigs anywhere, on almost anything. What meat there was these days was mostly pork. Some chicken remained, though the corn that had fattened hens was mostly a memory.

Beef? Lamb? Rare and even more expensive than everything else. Good fish was scarce, too, which didn’t do the sushi part of this operation any good. Squid, though. . There was lots of squid. By all the signs, squid were oceanic cockroaches. If you dropped an H-bomb on the Marianas Trench, somehow the squid would survive.

“And when you’ve been squid, you’ve been did,” Colin murmured.

“What’s that?” Gabe cupped a hand behind his ear.

“Nothing,” Colin said. “Believe me, nothing. My brains are dribbling out my ears, that’s all.”

“And I’m supposed to notice this on account of. .?” Gabe asked.

“Who said you were supposed to notice it?” Colin returned.

Gabe let out another snort. Then he found a question Colin had been asking himself a good deal lately, too: “What’s it like having your daughter home again?”

“It’s-interesting, anyway.” Colin wished he’d ordered a beer with lunch, even if department regs frowned on such things and even if barley shortages made beer almost as expensive as gasoline. He almost left the answer short and unresponsive. But Gabe had been his buddy as long as they’d both been on the San Atanasio PD. If he could vent to anybody, Gabe was the guy. Sighing, he went on, “I wish to Christ Vanessa and Kelly’d hit it off better.”

“That’s not good,” Gabe said.

Colin clapped silently, applauding the understatement without making everybody in the place stare at him. “It wouldn’t be good even if Kelly wasn’t expecting. Since she is, it’s doubleplus ungood.”

“It’s what?” But then Gabe’s heavy features cleared. “Oh. From that book. 1984 .” He chuckled self-consciously. “Dunno if I’ve even looked at it since 1984. Sometime in high school-I’m pretty sure of that.”

Colin had read it more recently-quite a bit more. The politics were out of date. Nobody could deny that. The politics had been out of date well before the Cold War went bye-bye. But the thoughts on the way corrupt and narrow politics produced a corrupt and narrow language seemed more important than ever in this age of pious bullshit. They did to him, at any rate. Most people, by all appearances, didn’t give a rat’s ass.

If he was going to vent, he was going to vent. Not much point to doing things halfway, was there? With another sigh, he said, “And she’s got herself a new boyfriend.”

“A punk? A gangbanger?” Gabe’s older daughter was in high school. Those were the kinds of boyfriends that gave him nightmares.

But Colin shook his head. “Well, no.”

“Oh,” Gabe said again. As he had with 1984 , he remembered slowly, but remember he did. “Please, Jesus, not another guy older than you are.”

“Not that, either,” Colin admitted. “This one’s, I dunno, maybe forty.”

“Not too bad, not for the age she is now,” Gabe said. Colin nodded this time; that was true. Gabe asked the next logical question: “So what don’t you like about him?”

“It’s not even that I don’t like him,” Colin said, which was also true. . to a point.

“Huh,” Gabe said, as if a perp gave him an unexpected reply in the interrogation room. “He got a record?”

“Not any place I can find,” Colin answered. He wasn’t surprised Gabe would assume he’d checked. He had, as soon as he’d got Bronislav Nedic’s name. Did that mean he didn’t trust his darling daughter’s taste in men? Now that you mentioned it, yes.

“Huh,” Gabe said again. “What is it, then?”

“You wanna know what? I’ll tell you what-he scares the crap out of me, that’s what.” There. Colin had said it. He sure hadn’t said it to Vanessa, or even to Kelly. That was one he’d kept bottled up ever since he’d met Bronislav. He hoped like hell the big Serb hadn’t noticed it, too.

He succeeded in surprising Gabe, anyhow. Sanchez’s graying eyebrows leaped toward his hairline. “ Scares you?” By the way Gabe repeated it, he could hardly believe his own ears. “How come?”

“I did my hitch in the Navy-you know that.” Colin waited for his friend to nod before continuing, “I never saw combat. But I knew some guys-Navy and Marines-who’d been nasty places and done nasty things. Heap big nasty things, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” Gabe nodded again. “This dude is like that?”

“In spades, doubled and redoubled.” Colin tried to put what he felt into words: “Those guys, whatever they were up to, they were doing it ’cause they had orders to do it, whatever it was. And maybe things got hairy, but they got hairy because that kind of stuff was what they did. You with me so far?”

“Yeah. Or I think so.”

“Okay. This fella, he did that kinda stuff, too. He’s got an ugly old scar to prove it, but you don’t need the scar to know. You just need to see the eyes. Only I don’t think he did whatever he did because those were his orders. He did it ’cause he went looking for it and he found it.”