Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

He knocked on her door. She did have a little spy-eye so she could see who was there. And she had a dead bolt. It snicked back. Then she threw the door wide. The smile on her face was bottled sunshine. “Hey!” she said, and threw her arms wide, too.

They hugged with the door open. Then he went all the way in, and she closed it behind him. Phone calls and e-mails and texts kept them up on what they were doing. But not being able to get together all the time made the times when they could that much sweeter.

In between kisses, they went through variations on How are ya? How ya doin’? for some little while. Colin bragged about his parking fu. Kelly looked suitably impressed. She knew how lucky you needed to be to cadge a space anywhere in the Bay Area.

Kelly’s place looked quite a bit like Bryce’s-quite a bit like most grad students’ apartments, Colin suspected. Books and papers and printouts were scattered everywhere. She wasn’t compulsively neat about things the way he was. That didn’t mean she couldn’t find whatever she needed, though. He’d seen her pluck a journal out from under a blizzard of papers so she could check something in an article. He had no idea how she knew it was there, but she did.

She pulled Anchor Porters out of the refrigerator. They clinked bottles. “What’s the latest on the park?” he asked. Unless you had to fly cross-country, the volcano was old news by now. It wasn’t on CNN much any more. Even the late-night talk-show hosts left it out of their monologues.

“Still massively fucked,” Kelly answered-she was much easier swearing around himan he was around her. “I mean massively.”

“Is the road down to Jackson still closed?”

“Oh, you bet. The whole Pitchstone Plateau is going back to being a lava field,” she said. Colin must have looked blank, because she explained: “When you drive down-drove down-from Yellowstone Lake to the park’s south entrance, you were driving across the Pitchstone Plateau. It’s what happens to a lava field after it weathers for a hundred thousand years or so.”

“Pines,” he said, remembering. “Lots and lots of lodgepole pines.”

“Uh-huh.” Kelly nodded. “They can grow on almost zero nutrients, so they spring up first. Of course, a gazillion acres of them burned back in 1988, and now they’re burning again.”

“I bet they are,” Colin said. Even after all these years, the charred lodgepole pines, some still upright, some fallen and more than half hidden by their upspringing descendants, others lying out in the middle of what was now grassland, remained a big part of what you saw-had seen-at Yellowstone. “What’s the Park Service going to do when tourist season rolls around again?”

“Cry,” Kelly answered, which startled a snort of laughter out of him. She went on, “They ought to close it up completely, but that’d cost ’em God knows how many hundred million dollars.”

“How much would getting tourists swallowed up in a big eruption cost ’em?” Colin asked, not altogether ironically. Governments and corporations did risk-benefit analyses all the time, weighing whether lawsuits from a foul-up were likely to cost more than not fixing what was wrong. Of course, they couldn’t fix it here, but they could hope it didn’t get any worse.

“That’s what they’re wondering, all right,” Kelly thought along with him. “From what I hear, right now the plan is to let people in to see Mammoth Hot Springs and the other stuff way at the north end of the park, but to keep the rest of it off-limits.”

“Maybe that’s far enough away,” Colin said. You didn’t think about Yellowstone’s immensity till you were actually there. It was bigger than some of the little states back East.

“Maybe.” But Kelly didn’t sound convinced.

“You’re worrying about the supervolcano.”

“You bet I am. If it goes, Mammoth Hot Springs aren’t far enough away. Jackson isn’t far enough away.” She took a long pull at her beer. You weren’t supposed to drink porter like that, which didn’t stop her. “Hell, Denver isn’t far enough away.”

Colin grunted.

Kelly looked at him in surprise. Then she nodded. “Oh. Your daughter’s in Denver. I forgot.”

“Yeah. She is.”

“Can you tell her to come back to Socal?”

“I can tell her all kinds of things. Whether she’ll pay any attention-that’s a different story. What I say about Vanessa is, she’s hard of listening. She goes her own way, no matter what.” Most of the time, Colin would have thought that was a good thing. Rob did, too, and Colin admired him for it-reluctantly, but he did. Here, though.. “What are the odds it’ll blow?”

“The odds? Nobody has any idea. A lot of geologists hope the Ranger Lake eruption will take off some of the pressure down below.”

“You donelieve it.” Colin had listened to too many people telling too many stories to have any doubts on that score.

Kelly shook her head. “No. I don’t. I wish I could, but I don’t. Remember how Coffee Pot Springs started going nuts? Things there are crazier than ever. More geyser eruptions there than at the Upper Geyser Basin with Old Faithful and all the rest. Swarms of people would go to see ’em if the place weren’t miles from the nearest road.”

Picturing a park map in his head, Colin remarked, “That’s a long way from Ranger Lake.”

“It sure is,” Kelly said, and left it right there.

Maybe Colin should have, too, but what kind of cop would he have made if he believed in letting well enough alone? “If there’s a serious risk it will blow, shouldn’t they make some kind of plan?”

They’d gone around that barn before. Kelly, he realized too late, would have spent a lot more time brooding and talking about it than he had. It was… It was her South Bay Strangler, was what it was. “I used to think so. I really did. For a long time,” she said slowly, and spread her hands. “Now? I just don’t know any more. It’s too damn big. How do you make a plan that says We need to evacuate the whole Midwest-and that’s just for starters? You don’t. You can’t. The best you can do is hope it doesn’t happen. Pray, if you think praying helps. It won’t hurt.”

“Like not being there when the H-bomb goes off,” Colin said.

“Well, yeah.” She barely gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Only this is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it ain’t even funny.”

She meant it. He’d grown up at the tail end of the Cold War. Imagining something that dwarfed mankind’s finest warlike foolishness took mental muscles he wasn’t used to exercising. “The biggest thing ever, huh?”

“Not ever,” Kelly said seriously-he might have known better than to say something like that to a geologist. “A really big supervolcano will blow out maybe six hundred cubic miles of rock.”

“Yeah, you’ve said so before.” He nodded. “That’s a lot of rock.”

“It sure is. But 250,000,000 years ago the Siberian Traps let loose a thousand times that much lava-enough to bury about ninety percent of the Lower Forty-eight. And sixty-odd million years ago, the Deccan Traps coughed up enough lava to bury Alaska, pretty much. So the supervolcano’s small potatoes next to those, even if it’s plenty big enough to screw us to the wall.”

“Sixty-odd million years ago,” Colin echoed. “Isn’t that when the dinosaurs went under? I thought an asteroid was the number-one suspect for doing them in.”

“An asteroid sure hit then. Whether that was what finished them or whether the Deccan Traps had more to do with it… People are still writing papers. And the Siberian Traps happened about the same time as the even bigger extinction between the Permian and the Triassic.”

“How about that?” Colin said tonelessly. In the scale of things she considered, the South Bay Strangler wasn’t worth noticing. He couldn’t think so big, much as he wished he could. Even-even! — the supervolcano was beyond his comprehension. “You have any other good news?”