Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

Right behind the first sled came another one. Rob could pick out the exact moment when the passengers saw him-the dogs of the lead sled swerved in his direction. More slowly than he might have, he realized he didn’t have to keep standing there as if frozen by the weather. He waved, feeling stupid.

The people in the dogsleds waved back. As the sleds neared, Rob decided he was glad he had the rifle. The huskies seemed no more than a step removed from wolves, and a small step at that. If they hadn’t been hitched to the sleds, they might have decided to hunt him.

When the sleds stopped, one of the passengers pushed back the hood of his-no, her-furry, Eskimo-style parka. To Rob’s amazement, styled blond hair cascaded out. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Marie Fabianski, from CNN. Can we interview you?”

She spoke slowly, with spaces between her words. She might have been going into a foreign country where the natives couldn’t be expected to speak or understand English very well. A cameraman in the second sled aimed his weapon at Rob’s bearded, none-too-clean face.

“Um, okay,” Rob mumbled. He wasn’t usually thrown for such a loss, but he’d been away from anything wider than small-town gossip since not long after the supervolcano blew.

“Terrific!” Marie Fabianski smiled a multikilowatt smile. She had dazzlingly perfect teeth, whether on her own or thanks to a talented dentist Rob couldn’t even begin to guess. “We’re here to do a feature to show the rest of the country-to show the rest of the whole wide world-how the people in these parts are getting along. Isn’t that exciting?”

Sure as hell, she was treating him like a native, and a dimwitted native at that. “What if we’d rather be left alone?” Rob said. There wasn’t much point to staying on the wrong side of the Interstate if you wouldn’t rather be left alone.

So it seemed to Rob, anyhow. Marie Fabianski’s smile never wavered. “The public has the right to be informed!” she said in ringing tones. “It wants to know what’s going on in these forgotten corners of the country.”

“Oh, horseshit,” Rob said. With luck, that would spoil some of the footage the cameraman was getting, though they might just bleep over it. He went on, “The American public doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us up here. It’s proved that ever since the supervolcano went off. And you know what else? We have the right to remain silent.”

He might as well have saved his breath. She sure kept on with her spiel as if he hadn’t spoken: “Do you know, uh. .?” Then she did pause. She had to look down for a second to check her notes. Nodding to herself, she started over: “Do you know Professor James Farrell, former unsuccessful Republican candidate for the House?”

“Yeah, I know Jim,” Rob answered.

“He is virtually the tsar of this new Siberia, isn’t he?” Marie Fabianski rolled on. She had all her preconceptions neatly lined up in a row. If only they were ducks!

“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “no.”

“Do you know where in this frozen wilderness Professor Farrell is currently residing?” she asked him. “We’d like to get to the bottom of his extraconstitutional authority.”

When everybody with Constitutional authority forgets we exist, what are we supposed to do? But Rob didn’t come out with it. What was the use? What was the point? Marie Fabianski wouldn’t listen to him. Chances were she didn’t intend to listen to Jim Farrell, either. CNN wouldn’t have come up here to listen. It was coming up here to talk. Of course, she’d never met Jim. If she had to make sure she got his name right, she didn’t know much about him. The confrontation might prove interesting, in the matter-antimatter sense of the word. And. .

“As a matter of fact, he’s right over there in Guilford.” Rob pointed in the direction from which he’d set out. “If you give me a lift back to town, I’ll introduce you.”

“That would be wonderful!” Marie Fabianski exclaimed, which definitely proved she didn’t know what she was getting into.

Rob rode with the cameraman and the writer. God forbid he should pollute the talent with his touch, though both Marie and he wore enough layers of clothing to make any contact between them strictly a rumor. He’d never been in a dogsled before. The running huskies pulled it along at an amazing clip. They leaned into their harness for all they were worth. Dogs got off on working. No wonder I like cats better, Rob thought.

When they stopped in front of the Trebor Mansion Inn, the huskies stood there panting, pink tongues lolling out of their mouths. They were ready-hell, they were eager-to run some more.

Dick Barber came out, wearing a Navy peacoat and watch cap. One corner of his mouth turned up slightly as he said, “You brought me some summer people, Rob? Way to go!”

Guilford hadn’t seen much in the way of summer people (or, for that matter, summer) since the supervolcano erupted. Rob snickered. To a Californian, the whole idea of summer people had always seemed bizarre to begin with. The CNN crew looked blank. One of the prerequisites for working in TV had to be a vaccination against irony.

“Who, ah, are your friends?” Barber asked.

“We’re from CNN,” Marie Fabianski said brightly. “We understand that James Farrell is staying here. We’d like to interview him and learn more about current conditions in this part of the country.”

A Maine Coon cat studied the huskies from a safe distance. The dogs saw it and barked furiously. The cat, perhaps a coward but for sure not a fool, decided somewhere else was a good place to be and departed thither at high speed. Dick Barber seemed as bemused by it as he was by the descent of the media. “You would?” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Would we have come all this way if we weren’t?” she returned. All this way was a couple of hours’ drive up from Portland in good weather. Not much of that since the eruption, and Guilford was indeed a long way from the rest of the world.

“Who knows?” Barber said. “But if he wants to talk to you, I won’t try to stop him. Just remember, you brought it on yourselves. Why don’t you come into my parlor? I’m not even a spider.” He didn’t say anything about whether Marie Fabianski was a fly.

A fire burned in the fireplace there. That meant it wasn’t frigid: it was just cold. And just cold, in the middle of a post-eruption winter, felt wonderful to Rob.

While the cameraman photographed the room and set up his tripod and some battery-powered lights across from the couch, Barber whispered, “You went out after moose.”

“Yeah, well, this is what I found,” Rob said defensively. “Or I mean, they found me.”

Jim Farrell swept into the parlor. He was elegant in his trademark fedora and a dark gray topcoat that remained dapper even if it showed it hadn’t been new for a while. Not much clothing north and west of the Interstate had been new any time lately.

“An invasion by the Fourth Estate!” he boomed in his resonant baritone. “How quaint! How outdated!”

He didn’t faze Marie Fabianski. She must have got a double dose of the antisarcasm serum. Before long, they sat side by side on the couch. The lights went on. So did the little red LED on the camera. “I’m CNN correspondent Marie Fabianski, speaking to you from the Trebor Mansion Inn in Guilford, Maine. With me is retired Professor James Farrell, who some call the de facto dictator of half the state of Maine.”

“ Whom , dear. Whom some call the de facto dictator,” Farrell said genially.

“I didn’t think you were an English professor,” she retorted.

“I wasn’t. But I do prize accuracy-which is more than a lot of people and organizations can claim these days.” Farrell named no names. He didn’t even name any initials. The jab went home even so.