Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Maybe not. Maybe she’d given them reason not to. She didn’t feel like worrying about that, so she didn’t.

“I hope so, too,” the USGS geologist answered. “I-” He broke off and started talking into the phone: “Heinrich? Larry. Listen, mein Freund, things are getting a little more interesting than I really like right now. I’m at the West Thumb Geyser Basin, and all the pools are going batshit like you wouldn’t believe… Batshit… It’s a technical term… Fliedermausscheisse, okay?”

Fliedermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better-not good, but better-stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays.

Not that it didn’t fit. It did, like a skintight glove. The pools around here had just sat and steamed for as long as anyone could remember. They weren’t sitting and steaming any more. At the moment, four of them were flinging water into the air like Super Bowl champs spraying one another with champagne. One was the Fishing Cone, out past the edge of Yellowstone Lake. The air, unfortunately, smelled of flatulence, not of bubbly.

Daniel Olson was on his phone, too, talking with somebody from Montana State. He didn’t look very happy. No, scratch that-he looked about as unhappy as any one man could. Whatever he’d been counting on, the person on the other end of the line couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver. That was bad news.

Standing where Kelly stood, there was no good news to see. Off to the southwest, the Ranger Lake volcano was still doing its thing. Prevailing winds blew most of the ash across Wyoming and down into Colorado and even Kansas, not up this way, but the relevant word was most. She and her geologist comrades wore surgical masks. Gray grit coated the pines. Your feet crunched in it when you walked across the parking lot here.

And, up to the northeast, the new Coffee Pot Springs eruption was also going great guns, sending another huge plume of volcanic ash high into the sky. Most of that was blowing away from Yellowstone Lake, too, but it blotted out another big chunk of darkening blue. Anybody would guess that those two eruptions marked opposite edges of what was liable to turn into a caldera any time now. And anybody could see that the passel of geologists were in the middle of the frying pan, waiting to drop into the fire.

Snatches of songs and poetry ran through Kelly’s head. It was much too liable to be the end of the world as she knew it-the REM tune had been all over the radio when she was much younger-but she was anything but convinced that she felt fine. And if this was the way the world ended, it wouldn’t be with a whimper. This would be a bang to top all bangs. TS, Eliot. You missed that one.

The earth shook one more time. Next thing Kelly knew, she wasn’t standing in the middle of the potholed, ash-gritty parking lot any more. She was sitting on her ass. The involuntary yelp that came through her mask said she’d landed hard, too. Ruth Marquez also screeched as she went down. Kelly wondered how long her left cheek would be black and blue. Rending crashes from in amongst the trees said not all of them were standing any more, either.

Somehow, Daniel had managed to keep his feet. “Hello?” he shouted into his phone. “Hello?” He put it away. “Shit. Some of the relay towers must be out.”

“If that wasn’t a 7…” Kelly left it there. A 7 was very bad news. For a couple of horrifying seconds, though, she’d feared a massive earthquake was the least of her worries.

Did the Richter scale even begin to measure the magnitude of the quake there’d be if a state-sized chunk of crust collapsed? Goes to eleven, man. In spite of herself, Kelly giggled as she got to her feet. If she could think of This Is Spinal Tap now, she had to be well and truly deranged.

Well, of course you are, you idiot, she thought, slapping ash and random dirt off herself as best she could. If you weren’t, what would you be doing here?

Aftershocks kept trying to knock her off her feet. She hoped like hell they were aftershocks, anyhow. If that big quake had been a foreshock, the one it was warning of would send her half a mile straight down.

Larry still had cell-phone reception. He could do a commercial for whichever wireless company he used. “Listen, Heinrich, that last one made all the others feel like love pats. We don’t have a lot of time to waste… Yes, I know it’s getting dark. We’ve got flashlights. We’ll set fires in trash cans to mark the parking lot… Yes, I know that’s against regulations. We’ll do it anyway.” He rolled his eyes and lowered the phone for a one-word editorial: “Germans!” Then he was talking into it again. “Come on. Get moving. My will says you can’t have my desk if you let me cook instead of pulling me out… Yes, Heinrich, of course I’m joking. You hope.”

He lowered the phone again. “Any luck?” Daniel asked.

“Some,” the USGS geologist answered. “Some time tonight or tomorrow morning, two helicopters will come and take us away from all this. If they can land. If Heinrich really can pull the right strings. If, if, if…”

“If this stretch of terrain is still in working order by the time they get here,” Kelly put in.

“Yeah, that, too.” Larry whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Anything that can happen can happen to you. That’s what they say. I wish to hell they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“Fires in trash cans, you said?” Kelly looked around. There were plenty. The people who ran Yellowstone didn’t like litter. Unlike volcanic eruptions, they could actually do something about that. “Let’s start filling ’em up with dry branches and stuff.”

“Drop zones,” Ruth said. “It’s like something out of a World War II movie.”

“No choppers in World War II,” Larry observed.

Ruth sniffed. “Okay. Fine. A Vietnam movie.”

Kelly and Daniel said the same thing at the same time: “ Apocalypse Now!” Kelly cocked her head to one side, listening for the strains of “The Ride of the Valkyries.” She was half disappointed when she didn’t hear Wagner’s fierce, churning music.

“I love the smell of hydrogen sulfide in the morning,” Daniel intoned. “Smells like… tenure.”

“Hydrogen sulfide does smell a lot like tenure sometimes,” Kelly said. The others laughed, so she must have got the tone right. A good thing, too. Was she jealous of Daniel? Oh, just a little.

“Wonder what happened to that CNN crew that interviewed you earlier in the day,” Larry said.

“ They’ll have helicopters,” Kelly said. Like most academics, she was positive corporations had more in the way of money and everything money could buy than they knew what to do with. That only proved she’d never worked for one.

“Sure they will,” Ruth agreed-she was an academic, too. “But will they have the sense to use them?” Like most academics, she was convinced people who worked for corporations were none too bright in spite of all that money. Like Kelly, she’d never examined the paradox. And exactly how bright did that make academics?

Pine branches and old refuse made lovely fires. If another earthquake knocked over the metal trash cans… Well, they were on asphalt. If a grass fire started all the same, Kelly told herself she just wasn’t going to worry about it. A grass fire was the least of what Yellowstone had to worry about.

Trail mix and beef jerky made an uninspiring supper. They beat going hungry, though. Kelly kept listening for thuttering rotors. She kept not hearing them. What if Heinrich hadn’t pulled the right strings?