Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Then we’re screwed, that’s what. She wondered how big a traffic jam there was now, heading north from Mammoth Hot Springs into Montana. Park authorities hadn’t been too smart, leaving the northern attraction open. They’d been greedy, was what they’d been. She’d thought so at the time. Had anyone listened to her when she said so? As if! Nobody listened to her, fucking nobody.

She stopped right there. Colin did. Sometimes he listened so hard, it got scary. He might have been listening to an errogation. Nobody’d ever paid attention to her like that before him. Had she been ten years younger, and less jaded and abraded by the world, she would have been sure he listened to her with a lover’s ears. And, being sure of that, chances were she would have got burned again. As things were, she knew he listened to her like a cop. So what? He listened.

Aftershocks kept right on coming. Some of them seemed almost as big as that 7, or whatever the hell it was. Both as a geologist and as a Californian, Kelly knew things worked that way. Knowing didn’t stop each new quake in turn from almost scaring the crap out of her. The crashes and thuds as more trees went down didn’t help, either.

Something very large and just barely visible ran past them. It ignored them-it was heading for the trees on the far side of the lot, no doubt hoping they wouldn’t fall over like the ones it was escaping from.

“Was that a grizzly?” Ruth asked in a very small voice.

“That was a grizzly.” Even Larry sounded less cool and collected than usual. If it had been a pissed-off grizzly instead of a terrified one… Bison might kill more people in Yellowstone than bears did, but one reason that happened was that people had an unfortunate tendency to treat them like cows: not really dangerous critters. A lot of years of natural selection warned that bears would chow down on people if they got half a chance.

Larry’s cell phone went off. His ring tone was classical, but Beethoven, not Wagner: the opening bars of the Fifth. That would get your attention if anything would. “Hey, Heinrich. What’s up?” he said. After listening for a while, he sighed and went on: “Fuck. Are you sure?” Another pause, shorter this time. Evidently Heinrich was sure, because Larry sighed again. “Well, if that’s the best you can do, it’s the best you can do. If we’re still here in the morning, I’m sure we’ll thank you for it. Auf wiedersehen — I hope.” He killed the phone to give himself whatever small charge he got from the last word.

“Well?” Kelly, Ruth, and Daniel made like a Greek chorus… or, given the reputation scientists had these days, a geek chorus.

“No helicopter till morning,” Larry said glumly. “Sorry, but that’s the way it goes, or doesn’t go. Heinrich’s a good guy, but he can’t get the government to get anybody airborne before then. Copter pilots don’t like night flying to begin with. When you factor in two erupting volcanoes… It’s hard to blame anybody, you know?”

Put that way, he had a point. The logical, rational part of Kelly’s mind saw as much. The big aftershock that rocked the parking lot just then made paying attention to that logical, rational part a skosh harder than it would have been in the Geology Department conference room back in Berkeley.

“What do we do if… if the bottom falls out before sunup?” Ruth asked. Her logical, rational part was feeling the strain, too.

Larry’s still functioned. Kelly supposed she should admire him for that. But then again, what was that parody of Kipling’s “If”? If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, chances are you don’t understand what the fuck is going on. Something like that, anyhow. Larry proved he did, though, because he answered, “Remember all those liability waivers we had to sign before they’d let us back into the park to study the Ranger Lake eruption? Well, every one of the little bastards is still in force.”

Kelly remembered that pile of paperwork much too well. What it boiled dowto was, she’d admitted to the U.S. government and the Parks and Wildlife Service that she was out of her ever-loving mind for coming back into Yellowstone, and agreed that anything that happened to her was her own goddamn fault, not the Feds’. At the time, it had just seemed like more forms to sign off on. That was then. This was now. Now was a lot scarier.

Bleakly, she said, “After all that paperwork, I’m surprised the government will try to get us out of here at all.”

“As a matter of fact, so am I,” Larry answered, which did nothing to set her mind at ease. He went on, “God only knows how many markers Heinrich had to call in to get as much as he got. I owe him bigtime. Now I hope I last long enough to have a chance to pay some of it back.”

Something out in the darkness went boom! — splash! — a new noise. It was large, but not very close. The ground shook yet again. “If that wasn’t a hydrothermal explosion, I’ve never heard one,” Daniel said.

“ Have you ever heard a hydrothermal explosion?” Kelly asked.

“Well, no,” he admitted.

“Good,” she said. “Neither have I-till now, I mean.” Somewhere out there, steam bursting through to the surface had just created a new pond near Yellowstone Lake, or maybe taken a new bite out of the lake’s shoreline. With a shaky laugh, she added, “We’ll have a fresh tourist attraction if this turns out not to be the supervolcano after all.”

“We always wanted to study one,” Ruth said.

“Sure, from a safe distance.” Kelly pointed up at the moon, which the plume from the Ranger Lake eruption dimmed but didn’t hide. “Right now, I think that would be a pretty safe distance. Nobody’s messed around with the geology there for the past couple of billion years.”

“Do you think it’s going to blow?” Daniel asked.

She shrugged. A mosquito buzzed near her left ear. They weren’t so bad as they had been earlier in the summer, but they hadn’t disappeared. The supervolcano meant nothing to them. Probably even the earthquakes didn’t scare them. Except perhaps for squashing one with a toppling pine, what could an earthquake do to a mosquito?

“I still don’t think anybody know for sure,” she said slowly. “We’re like preachers studying Revelations, trying to figure out if these finally are the Last Days.”

“If it goes now, these are the Last Days-for us, anyway,” Larry said.

Kelly was old-fashioned enough to wear a watch in spite of carrying a phone. She brought her left wrist up close to her face to read the glowing hands. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. “What do we do for the rest of the night?” she asked.

“Assuming we’ve got the rest of the night to do it in,” Ruth said.

“If we don’t, there’s no point to worrying about it, so we may as well pretend we do.” As usual, Larry made good sense. He continued, “We can try to sleep-”

“Good luck!” Daniel broke in.

“We can try,” the older man said. “Or we can stay up and talk. Not a whole lot of other stuff going on.” An aftershock contradicted him. Unfazed, he corrected himself: “Not a whole lot of other stuff going on that we can do anything about.”

Kelly had sometimes slept through small aftershocks in California. Ifsiz were tired, a 3.2, say, might not wake you up, even if it was centered close by. Sleep through quakes that started at 5.0 and went up from there? Sleep through quakes that felt as if they started six inches under your shoes? In the immortal words of any New York cabby of the past hundred years, fuhged-daboutit.

She learned more about her comrades that night-and they about her-than she had in all the time since she’d met them. How much she’d remember when the sun came up, if she was still here when it did, was a different question.