Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

A radio commentator was in hot water for making slurs about GLBT people. Colin was a cop, so of course he’d never heard-or told-a fag joke in all his born days. Of course.

Commercials came next. He hit the MUTE button. The dough-faced brunette shilling for an insurance company was annoying even when he couldn’t hear her, but she wasn’t as annoying. But why did ad men seem convinced the American public had a collective IQ of 9-maybe 11 with a tail wind? Colin grunted as soon as the question formed itself. Like any other cop, he’d seen enough aggressive stupidity in his time to understand exactly why admen thought that way.

The news finally returned. The young woman reading it was another beauty contest runner-up, or maybe winner. That she was drop-dead gorgeous had nothing to do with her getting the job, of course. Again, of course.

“Mother Nature is showing off her power again,” she said. “Take a look at this video from an already-beleaguered Yellowstone National Park.” She must have been a college graduate: she didn’t make a hash of beleaguered when it came up on the teleprompter.

He waited for her to explain how the eruption by Ranger Lake was screwing up air traffic over the Rockies this time. More to the point, he waited for her to explain how the eruption was impacting, or even being impactful of, air traffic. To his way of thinking, the only way the eruption could impact air traffic was by pitching a volcanic rock through an Airbus’ windshield. But reporters loved the bullshit jargon even more than cops did, which was saying something.

She threw him a curve, though, and not one of hers. As he took the steak out of the oven, she continued, “ Another new volcano has started blowing its stack in Yellowstone. This one is a good many miles away from the Ranger Lake eruption. It’s located not far northeast of a set of geysers called Coffee Pot Springs.”

“Oh, shit,” Colin said softly. The video was taken from a helicopter. It showed the kinds of things he’d seen before: black smoke and ash and dust rising high into the sky while lava set lodgepole pines afire on the ground. After fifteen or twenty seconds, a map replaced the view of the new eruption

Most people, even people who regularly went to Yellowstone, didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell Coffee Pot Springs were, so the map came in handy. Guidebooks didn’t talk about them, because they were sofar from the roads through the park and you had to hike across bear country to get to them. Colin, anything but a Yellowstone regular, would never even have heard of them if not for Kelly. But he had. Oh, my-had he ever.

The pretty newsie reappeared on the screen. She said, “Coffee Pot Springs recently showed a dramatic increase in activity. Hot springs turned into frothing geysers and blew boiling water more than a hundred feet in the air. A geologist CNN talked to this afternoon said this was probably related to the new volcanic outbreak.”

Colin was pouring A-1 Sauce on his steak. He proceeded to pour it all over the place mat, too, because there was Kelly on TV again, a mike shoved in her face. She looked windblown and worried. “Yes, magma-melted rock-in the Coffee Pot Springs dome is moving up toward the surface,” she said, as if she were TAing a Geology 1 section. “It heated the underground water in the springs, and now it’s starting to break through here, the way it did earlier near Ranger Lake.”

Would the reporter ask her about the supervolcano? How much panic could she sow if he did? He didn’t; the picture cut back to the newscaster. “A porn star claims she’s having a billionaire’s baby,” the woman said brightly. “We’ll be back with the details after these messages.”

Colin hit the MUTE button on the remote again. If that wasn’t one of the great inventions from the tail end of the last century, he didn’t know what would be. He patted up the spilled A-1 with a paper towel. After a couple of bites of steak and a forkful of the mixed veggies, he discovered his appetite had disappeared.

He pulled out his cell phone. He didn’t get Kelly; he got her voice mail. He said “Shit” again, but he wasn’t amazed. She’d be really, really busy. And Yellowstone had some of the crappiest cell-phone reception of, well, anywhere. At the beep, he said, “This is what you were worrying about, isn’t it? Sounds like it’s time to get out while the getting’s good. Be careful. Be as careful as you can, anyhow. Love you. ’Bye.”

For good measure, he sent her a text, too. Get out. Now. Love, Me. It lacked the voice mail’s flavor, but it sure as hell got the message across. She’d check texts before she listened to her voice mail because she could do it faster.

Which didn’t say word one about whether she’d pay any attention to him. She would if she felt like it. Otherwise, she’d ignore him. He didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. He wished he weren’t upwards of eight hundred miles away from her. She might take him more seriously face-to-face. Then again, she might not. He couldn’t go all caveman on her, bop her over the head with a club, and drag her away from danger by the hair.

Again, though, he wished like hell he could.

By the time he unmuted the TV, the commercials were gone. So was the story about the bimbo and the billionaire. Even in this high-flying Information Age, Colin couldn’t be too sorry about staying ignorant there. The markets had dropped sharply. The man explaining why had to be in his late fifties, maybe even past sixty. He had wrinkles. He was losing his hair, and what he had left was gray. He’d never make anyone mistake him for a movie star. But here he was on TV anyway. From this, Colin concluded that he might even know what he was talking about without a teleprompter for backup.

He kept hoping Kelly would call him back. She didn’t.

Another earthquake shook Yellowstone. Kelly had lost track of how many she’d felt he past couple of days. Some of them were barely there-just enough to startle you and disappear. Some were mean mothers, getting up toward 6 on the Richter scale. A quake that size would do considerable damage in a built-up area, even one with strong building codes like San Francisco or L.A. What was it going to knock down here? Trees? So what?

Oh, the Yellowstone Inn and the other fancy places in and around the park would never be the same. But that was the least of Kelly’s worries right this minute. If the supervolcano went kablooie right this minute, the United States would never be the same, for crying out loud.

If the supervolcano went kablooie right this minute, she would turn into a tiny part of that kablooie, too, because she was at the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, smack in the middle of what would be the new caldera: a red-hot zit on the face of the earth big enough to see from the moon.

“That one was about a 5.0.” As usual, Larry Skrtel seemed inhumanly calm.

“Feels about right,” Kelly agreed. “The more often they come, the more rattled I get.” She didn’t see how you could avoid that. Human beings hadn’t evolved to stay calm during earthquakes. Staying calm wouldn’t help keep you alive while things were falling on you. Panicking might.

She sure felt like panicking now. Too many earthquakes took it out of anybody, the same way too many body shots made any boxer fold up. Maybe Larry wasn’t anybody. Maybe he didn’t have that earthquake = panic gene. He pulled out his phone, checked to see if he had bars-a better bet here than most places in Yellowstone, but no sure thing-and must have found he did, because he started dialing.

“I hope that’s somebody who can get us out of here,” Kelly said. She had Colin’s messages, along with a slew of others that said the same thing in different words. They left her more annoyed than anything else. Didn’t people think she could see it was sayonara time all by herself?