Harry Turtledove: Supervolcano :Eruption

Blue Funnel Spring was… blue. The Thumb Geyser sputtered and blew out steam. The Fishing Cone sat a few feet out into Yellowstone Lake. You couldn’t reach it from the boardwalk. Once upon a time, his guidebook said, people had steamed fresh-caught trout in there. Some of them had hurt themselves trying it. Now the Fishing Cone was off limits to a close approach.

Farther back from the shore, ice still covered much of the lake. That was just too weird for somebody who’d lived most of his life in Southern California. It made Colin think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A lot of snow still lay on the ground, too.

It was beautiful-no two ways about that. The beauty and the snow were reason enough for some people to live in these parts. Colin shook his head. In the forties, the week after Memorial Day? Forget about it!

He worked his way around the boardwalk. A duck swimming in the unfrozen water close inshore eyed him, decided he was dangerous, and taxied along the surface, wings beating, till it got up enough speed to take off.

The Black Pool was a sickly green, not black. Colin had no idea whether the Abyss Pool, on the other side of the planked path, led to the abyss. By the sulfurous steam rising from it, though, he wouldn’t have been surprised

Somebody in a broad-brimmed hat, a rain slicker, and jeans was hunkered down on the narrow lakeside beach, back to Colin, intent on something he couldn’t see. Not six feet away stood one of those stay-on-the-boardwalk! signs. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” he growled, a line whose every intonation was honed by years on the beat.

The miscreant jumped and whirled back toward him. Only he-no, she: a woman in her mid-thirties, with short, honey-blond hair and attractively weathered features that said she spent a lot of time outdoors-probably wasn’t a miscreant after all. She wore a picture ID on a lanyard around her neck, the way rangers here did. And she answered, “Checking a seismograph. Why? What business is it of yours?”

Colin felt like a jerk. He wouldn’t have minded vanishing under the oh so thin, oh so hot crust that seemed to have no trouble at all supporting the woman’s weight. “Sorry,” he said, and for once he meant it. “I’m a cop back home. I saw you out there where I didn’t think you were supposed to be, and I jumped to a conclusion, and I went splat.”

She weighed that. On one side of the scales was something like Okay, fine. Now fuck off, asshole. He’d earned it, too. But a couple of other tourists were coming. Maybe she didn’t want to cuss him out in front of an audience. All she did say was, “Mm, I can see that-I guess.”

Then fate-or something-lent a hand. The ground shook more than hard enough to need no seismograph to detect. Colin staggered. He was glad to grab the handrail on the boardwalk. For ten or fifteen seconds, he felt as if he were standing on Jell-O. At last, the earthquake stopped.

“Holy moley!” said one of the approaching tourists. “Nobody told me it was gonna do that! Let’s get outa here, Shirley!” He and Shirley did, at top speed.

Waves-not big ones, but waves-rolled up onto the beach. The ice farther out cracked with noises that made Colin think of what would happen if the Jolly Green Giant dropped a tray from his freezer. Darker streaks-water-appeared between the remaining chunks of ice.

Eyeing them and the direction from which the waves had come, Colin said, “That’s gotta be a 5.3, maybe even a 5.5. Epicenter’s that way somewhere.” He pointed northeast.

One of the woman’s eyebrows jumped. “I was going to ask you where home was, but now I hardly need to. Norcal or Socal?”

“Socal,” Colin answered. “San Atanasio. L.A. suburb.” Of course he had to come from California. Guessing the Richter scale was a local sport of sorts. “How about you?” he asked. That she knew it was a local sport, and that she used local slang for the two rival parts of the state, argued she was a Californian, too.

Sure enough, she said, “Some of both. I grew up in Torrance”-which wasn’t far from San Atanasio-“but I’m finishing my doctorate at Berkeley. So I’m Norcal now.”

In his mind, Colin prefaced Berkeley with The People’s Republic of, the same as he did with Santa Monica. The university was good, though; Marshall, his younger son, had been bummed for weeks after he didn’t get in. He’d followed Rob to UC Santa Barbara instead. He’d followed Rob into smoking pot, too, and still hadn’t graduated. One more thing for his old man to worry about.

Not the most urgent one at the moment. “I didn’t know you could get quakes that big up here,” Colin said.

“Oh, yeah,” the woman answered. “This is the second-busiest earthquake zone in the Lower Forty-eight, after the San Andreas. There was a 6.1 in the park in 1975, and a 7.5 west of Yellowstone in 1959. That one killed twenty-eight people and buried a campground. A landslide dammed the river and made what they call Quake Lake. You can still see drowned trees sticking up out of the water.”

“A 7.5 will do it, all right,” Colin said soberly. How many people would an earthquake that size kill in L.A. or the Bay Area? One hell of a lot more than twenty-eight.

“It sure will,” she agreed. As Colin had before, she pointed northeast. “I think you’ve got the size just about right, too-”

“Practice,” he broke in.

“Uh-huh.” But she hadn’t finished. “You got it right if the quake’s from magma shifting in the Sour Creek dome. But if it’s from the Coffee Pot Springs dome… That’s farther away, so the quake would have to be bigger.”

“Didn’t feel that far off,” Colin said. “The jolts were sharp, not roll-roll-roll the way they go when they’re a long way out.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right.” She didn’t sound-or look-happy. And she had her reasons: “The Coffee Pot Springs dome literally just showed up on the map a little while ago, and it’s swelling like a stubbed toe. It’s like the magma’s found some new weak area that gives it a path up toward the surface.”

Colin knew what magma was: the hot stuff that spewed out of volcanoes. Here in Yellowstone, it was also the canned heat that kept geysers boiling and hot springs bubbling. He had trouble putting those two things together, though. “What would happen if it did?” he asked.

“Did what? Get to the surface?”

“Yeah. Would it be… a volcano, like?”

“Mm, kind of.” Now the look on her face said he’d disappointed her. He’d known something about earthquakes, so she’d hoped he would know something about volcanoes, too. That shouldn’t have bothered him. If anybody’d had practice disappointing women, he was the guy. But, obscurely, he didn’t want to disappoint this one. She went on, “Like a volcano the way a Siberian tiger’s like a kitten, maybe.”

“Huh?” he said brilliantly. To try to salvage things, he added, “I’m not staring at your chest. I’m just trying to read your name badge.”

That got him a crooked grin. “Well, it’s a story. I’m Kelly Birnbaum.” He gave her his own name. She came up and shook hands over the boardwalk railing. He’d known police sergeants with a less confident grip. She looked west. “I bet you went to Old Faithful before you came here.”

“Well, yeah.” Colin hated being predictable. Sometimes he was-sometimes everybody was-but he still hated it.

“Don’t worry. People do that. It’s what the thing is there for, you know?” Kelly said. That made him feel worse, not better. Then she asked, “After you looked at all the stuff there, what did you do?”

“I had lunch.” He’d testified in court too often to be anything but literal-minded.

This time, she stuck out her tongue at him, which made her look about twelve. “You sound like a cop, all right. Let’s try it again. What did you do after lunch? Did you drive up to the Black Sand Basin?”