Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Telling when the sun came up was also a different question. Volcanic ash from the eruption northeast of Coffee Pot Springs darkened the eastern horizon. Little by little, the sky above that mass of tiny rock particles lightened. Somewhere beyond the ash plumes, the sun still shone. Kelly thought of that reminder in The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien talked about Sauron’s smokes and fumes. Unlike Sauron’s smoke screen, this wasn’t evil. It just… was.

She was gnawing on more beef jerky when, in lieu of Tolkien’s eagles, two helicopters came down out of the sky and landed on the beat-up parking lot. They were louder than a Me-tallica concert. The wind from their rotors tried to blow the geologists away. The pilots both wore orange suits that made them look like animated carrots. They gestured frantically.

Along with Larry, Kelly got into one copter. Ruth and Daniel hopped into the other. The cabins didn’t cut the noise at all. Kelly was still fumbling with her uncomfortable seat’s safety harness when the copter took off again. They flew due north, which struck her as a good idea. If the supervolcano erupted, the plume would blow south and west. And…

“Try to put some mountains between us and the eruption,” Larry bawled, over and over, till the pilot got it. “They may shield us from the worst of the blast.” The pilot swore, but he did it.

The helicopters flew like jinking halfbacks, using the peaks of the Rockies for blockers. But they were running from, not towards. And what they were running from would flatten them more mercilessly than any middle linebacker ever hatched. Kelly found a whole new reason to be glad she liked football; the comparison never would have occurred to her otherwise.

By the time they were zooming down the canyon between Prospect Peak and the slightly lower Folsom Peak to the west, she and Larry both wore helmets like the pilot’s. They cut the din in the cabin a little, and let the geologists talk by shouting instead of by screaming. Most of what Kelly and Larry had to say amounted to variations on the theme of Go like hell!

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” the pilot said when they banged on that drum once too often. “I’m going flat out now, and there’s no guarantee the sumbitch’ll go off while we’re airborne. There’s no guarantee the sumbitch’ll go off at all, right?”

Every word he said was gospel truth. But he hadn’t spent the night on the ground in that potholed parking lot. He hadn’t felt the earth shudder under him only God knew how often. He also hadn’t been studying the Yellowstone hot spot for his whole career.

Maybe it wouldn’t blow now. Maybe it wouldn’t blow at all. Maybe the two eruptions would do whatever they did and then subside, leaving Yellowstone changed and damaged but still a place someone in his right mind-someone not a geologist, in other words-might want to visit. big explosion wouldn’t happen for another few thousand years or another few tens of thousands of years.

Maybe. But Kelly couldn’t make herself believe it.

While she stewed, the pilot talked with people who weren’t in the helicopter. At last, he said, “Okay. This is what I’ve cooked up. A car’ll be waiting for you at the Butte airport. That’s about as far as I can go on my fuel load. One of you people has a place in Missoula, right?”

Daniel was in the other whirlybird. Somebody out there had a feel for what was going on. Missoula was about 120 miles northwest up I-90 from Butte. If the supervolcano blew, most of what it blasted into the air would go in the other direction. Missoula might get some, but probably wouldn’t get a lot.

And if the eruption held off, Kelly could head back to California. Ruth could go to Utah… assuming anyone would want to go to Utah in the shadow of the big blast. Larry mostly hung out in and around Yellowstone. Knowing him, he might be me-shuggeh enough to head back if he got some kind, any kind, of excuse.

Meanwhile… “Thanks,” she said, a whisker ahead of Larry. She had no idea what Daniel’s place was like. If they couldn’t crash on him… Well, Missoula was bound to have motels. Hotels, even. Times like this were why God made plastic. She might even get the Berkeley Geology Department to reimburse her. Then again, given California’s never-ending budget woes, she might not.

One more thing she could worry about later, if she was still alive to worry about it.

Once they got over the Gallatin Range, they were out of the mountains and forests and roaring along above ranch country. The copter flew much lower than the airliners that had been Kelly’s only source of views of the ground from on high. She could see individual cows and even sheep from the herds, and individual cars scattered along the pale asphalt of country roads that hadn’t been repaved in a long time and got so little wear that they wouldn’t need to be for quite a while yet.

There was I-90 up ahead. Kelly had wondered if it would be packed solid with cars and RVs full of people fleeing Yellowstone, but it wasn’t. Probably weren’t that many left to flee any more.

The Interstate was two lanes wide in each direction. But for the lack of traffic lights, that would have been a boulevard in L.A. or the Bay Area. When your whole state was almost the size of California but held fewer than a million people, you could have a four-lane main highway and go like hell instead of sitting stuck in traffic on a freeway twelve lanes wide.

“Bert Mooney Airport coming up,” the pilot said in due course. Kelly idly wondered who Bert Mooney was or had been. The pilot did things with his stick-with the collective, he called it, as if it were a farm in the extinct Soviet Union. The helicopter descended. Not far away, so did the one carrying Ruth and Daniel.

Whoever Bert Mooney might have been, the two helicopters were his airport’s only current business. Kelly was used to airports like LAX and San Francisco and Oakland. That green Ford sitting there near the terminal couldn’t be the car they’d take away… could it?

“There’s your wheels, I expect,” the pilot said, pointing to it. Sometimes simplicity had advantages.

Touchdown on the tarmac a moment later was surprisingly gentle. The other chopper landed three or four seconds after Kelly and Larry’s. A fuel truck pulled up and waited for their rotorsto stop spinning.

Kelly took off her helmet. Now, with the motor cut, it wasn’t deafening in here. “Thanks more than I know how to tell you,” she said.

“Amen,” Larry agreed.

“Not a big deal. Might not’ve been anything at all,” the pilot answered. “Sometimes you’d sooner be safe than sorry, is all. Good luck to you guys.”

“You, too,” Kelly said as he opened the canopy and she scrambled out. Larry followed her. Ruth and Daniel got out of the other helicopter. They all started dogtrotting across the tarmac toward the car. Kelly presumed it was a rental. She didn’t know for sure, but that was one more thing she could worry about later. After they got to Missoula seemed a pretty good time.

Halfway to the green Ford, Larry suddenly stopped. Intent only on getting to the car and getting onto I-90, Kelly sent him an annoyed glare. “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped.

Instead of answering with words, he pointed southeast, over the top of the low, flat-roofed terminal building. Kelly’s gaze automatically followed his index finger. That great, black, swelling, leaping cloud hadn’t been there when they touched down a minute before. It grew every second. Even across a couple of hundred miles, Kelly could see the lightning bolts lashing around its edges. Which meant they were how big? How bright? Some questions either answered themselves or didn’t really need answering, one.