Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Here and there, hot springs fumed and mud pots bubbled. A lot of them didn’t even have names. There were more features like that in Yellowstone than in the whole rest of the world. A couple of dozen hot spots burned through the earth’s crust. One of them raised the Hawaiian Islands, another the Galapagos chain.

But most of them lay under the oceans. The lava that came from those was smooth-flowing basalt. The Yellowstone hot spot alone sat under continental crust. Rhyolite was like granite, only with bigger crystals. When it melted, it didn’t spread out easily, the way basalt did. It was too viscous. It just sat where it was till the pressure got too great. Then… Then the supervolcano went off.

They tramped along Shallow Creek, getting close to the springs. A coyote eyed them from the edge of the pines, then drew back. Larry said, “If it was along the road, half a dozen cars’d stop so the jerks inside could photograph a wolf to wow Aunt Martha back home.”

He was right once more. Kelly had seen it happen. She knew the difference between the two. Most people these days, though, grew upnd stayed-so isolated from nature that any wild animal seemed exotic to them.

That was one of the things that made Yellowstone so precious. Here was a great big, not too badly disturbed chunk of what North America had been like before Europeans arrived. You couldn’t find anything like this elsewhere, and not just on account of the wildlife.

And if the hot spot sitting under it discharged, then what? Then you’d gone and dropped thousands of square miles of unspoiled wilderness into what was literally the world’s biggest barbecue. You’d never see your bison or your wolves or your grizzlies again.

The really bad news was, that would be the least of your worries.

Steam rose ahead. A small swell of ground kept the geologists from seeing the springs themselves for a little while. Kelly remembered them from the last time she’d come this way, not long before she met Colin. They’d been, well, hot springs. If they’d been anywhere close to a road, people would have stopped and snapped pictures of them and queued up to use a couple of odorous outhouses. They weren’t so showy as the ones in Black Sand Basin or Biscuit Basin, northwest up the highway from Old Faithful, but they weren’t half bad.

They lay within a rough circle of sinter: the grayish white silica that precipitated out of mineral-laden water as it cooled. All things considered, they reminded Kelly of zits on the face of the earth. On a larger scale, that was what the Yellowstone supervolcano was. She wished she knew where she could get her hands on a dab of cosmic Clearasil.

“Remember, folks-watch where you put your feet. No boardwalks here,” Larry said. Fair enough: he had more field experience than the rest of them put together. “Stay off the sinter crust. You can break through. You won’t like it if you do-trust me. Don’t count on animal tracks, either. I’ve seen more parboiled critters than I like to think about. Most places, I’d say the grass was pretty safe. Here, with everything that’s been going on, I’m not sure how good a guide it is.”

“That doesn’t leave much,” Daniel observed as they climbed the low rise. “Maybe we should walk three feet off the ground.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” Larry said. Daniel gave him a sour smile.

Going uphill made Kelly’s thighs and calves ache. Walking gave you great legs. (Better legs, anyhow; Kelly feared hers would never be great.) But you paid a price. Everything you did came with a price. The older she got, the more sure of that she became.

As if defying time (no, not as if-if only!), she pushed the pace the rest of the way. The others didn’t mind letting her forge ahead. They’d all come to Coffee Pot Springs before. It wasn’t as if she were stout Cortez (well, Balboa, if you wanted to be picky-Keats would have got a C- in Western Civ) on that peak in Darien, staring at the newfound Pacific.

Except she was. Coffee Pot Springs had gone nuts. A brand-new geyser threw water at least a hundred feet in the air. Some of the other springs weren’t just pools any more. They boiled and raged, blorping water eight or ten feet high, trying to find their inner geysers, too. Several of them, she was convinced, blorped from places that hadn’t boasted springs before.

Ruth and Daniel and Larry came up beside her. As she had done, they stopped and stood there gaping. “Holy shit,” Ruth said. Larry nodded. Recovering faster than the rest of them, Daniel pulled a camera from a pocket of his windbreaker and started snapping away.

Kelly started to reach for her own little Canon. She knew earthquakes messed with the plumbing systems under Yellowstone. After the Hebgen Lake quake in 1959, Sapphire Pool at the Biscuit Basin went batshit. It erupted so ferociously, it wrecked whatever subterranean channels that supplied it with water. Then it went back to being a pool.

Knowing about such things was all very well. Seeing Coffee Pot Springs totally transformed… that was something else again. And, as Kelly’s fingers closed on the digital camera, yet another sharp but mercifully short quake rattled the ground under her feet.

A voice said, “I’m scared.” Kelly needed a second or two to recognize it as her own.

Marshall Ferguson gripped one end of his sister’s coffee table. He hardly knew the guy on the other end-a shlub named Lemuel Something. Lemuel! Vanessa had dated him for a while in high school, and even in college till she met Bryce.

He did know that, if he weren’t her brother, he wouldn’t have done this for less than a blowjob. The table was about the size of a carrier’s flight deck, and solid wood, with planks at least three inches thick. It weighed as much as a rhino. All her furniture was like that. Why couldn’t she have bought cheap, flimsy crap, the way most people did?

“Ready?” Lemuel asked. He didn’t even go by Lem. Definitely a shlub.

“No, but let’s do it anyway,” Marshall answered. Lemuel needed a few seconds to process that. They lifted more or less together. Marshall swore. The table was even heavier than it looked. And they said it couldn’t be done! he thought. To make matters worse, they had to tilt it sideways to get it out the door.

Dad was here, and a couple of other, younger, guys Vanessa had lured with one blandishment or another. No sign of Bryce, of course. No sign of Vanessa’s current old-fart boyfriend, either. He’d already gone to Denver. And no sign of Rob, dammit. The band was gigging in some college town in-was it Montana?

Since Marshall was taller than Lemuel, he took the bottom position as they lugged the coffee table down the stairs. That kept it more nearly level. It also left him bearing more of the weight. Lucky me, he thought.

Vanessa had been carrying boxes into the U-Haul parked outside. Pickles was already in his plastic cat carrier, and yowling as if he expected them to start vivisecting him any second now. He probably did. Marshall wouldn’t have wanted to drive to Denver with a cat in a carrier on the seat beside him. Vanessa didn’t seem to worry about it. She also wasn’t too busy to play sidewalk superintendent when the coffee-table haulers came up. “Careful,” she said. “You don’t want to ding it.”

“Says who?” Marshall inquired.

“Says me,” his sister snapped. She liked dishing it out. She’d never been so good at taking it.

“C’mon,” Lemuel said-to Marshall, not Vanessa. “Let’s get this fucker into the truck before my arms fall off.”

“Okay.” Marshall was on the bottom again when they toted it up the U-Haul’s ramp. At least the truck was big enough to have one. Getting the table into the cargo space by lifting it wouldn’t have been much fun. Come to think of it, nothing about moving was much fun.