Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Asking her wouldn’t be so real smart, either. Again, Marshall kept his mouth shut.

Besides, he could make a shrewd guess about the subject line on that hair-flipping head toss. Five got you ten Dad was going on about the time bomb ticking under Yellowstone. Marshall had poked around online. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the supervolcano was there. Whether it was likely to go off day after tomorrow-or a week from Tuesday at the latest-was liable to be a different question.

That was how it looked to him, anyhow. He knew how much he didn’t know about volcanoes in general and the Yellowstone supervolcano in particular. By what Google and Wiki told him, though, nobody knew much about supervolcanoes. Not one had gone off in the past umpteen thousand years.

And if none went off in the next umpteen thousand years, that would suit him fine.

Vanessa stuck Pickles on the U-Haul’s front seat and fastened the belt around his carrier. Then she climbed into the cab. She started the truck. It sounded like the beater it was. How far from L.A. to Denver? A thousand miles, plus or minus. After so many thousands already on the odometer, why worry about one more?

Another clunk meant she’d released the hand brake. The emergency brake, Dad still called it. Hardly anybody younger than Dad ever did. But the way the U-Haul farted as it rolled off made Marshall think that wasn’t such a bad name after all. If you needed to use the hand brake in that truck, you might be in an emergency.

He displayed the hundred. “Do we eat dinner, or do we drink it?”

What they did was spend the next ten minutes knocking it back and forth and then splitting the difference. Kirin and cheap tempura went mighty well after moving, and they were all grubby enough that any place fancier than a Japanese greasy spoon wouldn’t have wanted their business anyhow.

“Could be worse.” Marshall didn’t remember he was echoing a book his folks had read to him when he was little. The sentiment seemed to hit the spot as well as the food and the beer.

It did to him, anyhow. His father said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

You knew you were starting to make it in the music business when o uuldn’t fit the whole band and everything you needed for your show into one big old SUV. The members of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were all bemused to be traveling with two, but there it was. Rob Ferguson knew he was the band cheapskate, but not even he’d said boo when they bought the second vehicle. When it was railroad time, it was railroad time, and that was all there was to it.

They didn’t go out of their way to look outrageous or even flamboyant; Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wasn’t that kind of band. They were just four tired guys in their twenties when they pulled off I-90 and drove south toward the place where they’d crash tonight.

Rob was sitting in the lead SUV’s front passenger seat, which made him navigator and lookout. “There it is!” he said, pointing to the sign on the west side of the street. “Ruby’s Inn.”

“Sweet,” said Justin Nachman, who was driving. The band tried not to stay at the big national chains. With them, you knew what you were getting, all right. That was the good news. More to the point, it was also the bad news. Justin slowed down. Then he muttered under his breath: “Where’d they stick the stupid driveway?”

Rob was about to suggest where they could stick it when Justin found it. Ruby’s turned out to share an entrance with the next motel farther south. The little convoy pulled into the lot.

One of the girls behind the desk, a blonde who’d be porky in another five or ten years, had not a clue concealed anywhere about her person. The other, a skinny brunette, not only knew about the band’s reservations but whistled the start of “Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” one of the tracks from the new album.

Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey would have committed seppuku if an album sold the way Out of the Pond was doing. Well, Michael Jackson was already dead, but you get the picture. For a band like Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, numbers that would have been disastrous for a big act looked terrific instead. They were making more money on sales from iTunes and the physical CD than they were from live shows, which had never happened before. They’d be able to afford to take some extra time getting their next release just right.

So maybe it wasn’t an enormous surprise that the registration clerk knew one tune or another from Out of the Pond. Nice, yeah. Egoboo, for sure. But maybe not an enormous surprise. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast” wasn’t a single, though. Never had been, never would be. If you knew that one, you not only had the album but you really liked it.

“Are you going to the show tomorrow night?” Rob asked her.

She shook her head. “Can’t afford it,” she said regretfully.

“What’s your name?”

“Tina Morton.”

He wrote it down. “Show up at will-call. They’ll have a seat for you.”

“Thanks!” She beamed at him. That might turn into something promising later on, or it might not. He wouldn’t worry about it now. Tickets were only twenty-five dollars, but he wasn’t far from the days when twenty-five dollars weren’t only himself. And if the next album tanked instead of taking off from what Out of the Pond was doing, he’d go right back there again.

The rooms, next door to each other, were, well, rooms. Rob had been in a lot of different rooms in a lot of different places. He’d had some that were better than these, more re worse. These were on the ground floor, as the band had requested. They wouldn’t have to shlep stuff up and down stairs.

After everything was out of the cars, Justin stretched and grimaced, miming an unhappy back. “We’re gonna be too old for all this hauling one of these days. One of these days soon,” he amended, so maybe he wasn’t faking the sore back. “What do we do then?”

“It’s not what we do then. It’s what we do in the meantime. We’ve gotta make ourselves a big enough deal so we can pay roadies to take care of all the heavy, sweaty shit for us,” Rob said. “What I want to know is, where do you go for dinner when you’re in Missoula, Montana?”

“Go ask Tina at the desk,” Justin answered. “Or I will if you don’t want to. She’s not half bad.”

“My old man always tells me Never volunteer, but I’ll do it. Not half bad is right,” Rob said. “And she knows ‘Impossible Things Before Breakfast’! How impossible is that?”

“Pretty much so, most places, but every once in a while they do let the brain-damaged ones out of the Home for the Terminally Inane,” Justin said. Rob shot him the bird and went back to the front desk to chat up Tina. When he came back, Justin gave him a sardonic hand. “Twenty minutes, man. What were you doing?”

“Like, talking.”

“Like, right! I’ve never heard anybody call it that before. That long, you probably did it twice.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Rob replied with dignity. “Some people don’t blow their load too quick the first time. Anyway, about dinner-”

“You mean you remembered dinner, too?”

Rob took no notice. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. “Back toward the Interstate half a block is something called the Stone of Accord. ‘Where the Gaelic meets the garlic,’ it says on the menu-she showed me one.”

“Corned beef and linguini! Cabbage pizza! Oh, boy!”

“Menu looked pretty good. And they’ve got Moose Drool on tap. Maybe a block and a half the other way is the Montana Club. If you haven’t lost all your money gambling, you can eat dinner there.” Rob knew about poker clubs that doubled as restaurants; San Atanasio had several. When he was little, they’d paid the town a lot in tax revenue. Now, thanks to the big Indian casinos, they’d fallen on hard times. And, without that tax loot, so had San Atanasio.