Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

But no. That familiar voice, once loved, now… not, said, “Hello?” in his ear.

“Hi. It’s me.” His own voice was hard and flat. “I just talked to Vanessa. She’s okay, but it sounds like the quake hit Denver a lot harder than it did here.”

“The same quake?” Louise said incredulously, so she wasn’t with it at all.

Colin filled her in in words of one syllable. “Power’s down in Denver, and the ash cloud is heading that way,” he finished. From what Kelly’d said, the ash might even dust Los Angeles. Louise didn’t need to worry about that right now, though.

“Good God!” she said. “I’d better call the poor baby.”

“Don’t,” Colin said sharply. “She’s trying to save her battery till power comes back, if it does. She told me to call you. She’s being sensible.” For once in her life. He didn’t say that. What good would it do?

What good would anything do? “She talked to you instead of me, Mister High and Mighty? How did that happen?” Louise demanded.

“Because I found out what was going on and called her,” Colin answered. “That’s m…” He was talking to a dead line again.

He powered off his own phone. Chances were Louise would call Vanessa, just to show him. Chances were she’d talk the kid’s ear off, too. Well, Vanessa could tell her to shut up. Vanessa could try, anyway.

He scrolled down the story under the wound in the earth. It said the ash plume would top out at over 100,000 feet. Twenty miles, he thought. None of the Rockies was even three miles high. You couldn’t see the Rockies from L.A. Even imagining you could was silly. But something seven times as high? He didn’t know. He didn’t think he had enough trig left to find out, either. His long-ago high-school math teachers would be pissed off that he didn’t, but that was how the cookie bounced or the ball crumbled. His high-school math teachers had been a bunch of bores.

Rob was on the other side of the country, touring with his band. If anybody was okay, he was. Marshall was up in Santa Barbara, getting ready for a new quarter and another new major. The eruption wouldn’t trash Santa Barbara. Colin didn’t think trashing Santa Barbara was possible. The only thing that convinced him Santa Barbara wasn’t heaven on earth was the real-estate prices there. Heaven wouldn’t have been anywhere near so expensive.

The CNN news feed said the President was urging everyone to stay calm during the present emergency. How calm could you stay when a quake knocked down everything you had or when boulders or ash fell out of the sky on you? Colin routinely despised Democrats in the White House, and Republicans routinely disappointed him. But hadn’t this clown’s advisors briefed him about what a supervolcano eruption would mean?

Or maybe they had. As Kelly’d said, some disasters were just too big to plan for. You hoped they didn’t happen. If they happened all the same, what could you do but duck and cover and roll with the punches and try your best to come out the other side, if there turned out to be any other side to come out to?

Half the country must have felt this punch, maybe more. And the eruption itself was only the first part of the combination the supervolcano would throw at civilization. Under those circumstances, urging calm on people might not be so bad. It wouldn’t hurt, and it might do a tiny bit of good.

Something rumbled outside, and went on rumbling. During the big war, the Germans on the Eastern Front must have heard noise like that when the Russians shelled them before sending in the tanks. Colin knew about naval gunnery, but it was never this continuous. For this, you’d have to line up guns of every caliber hub to hub, shoot them all off at once, and have enough ammo to keep shooting and shooting and shooting.

Or you’d have to have a supervolcano go off eight hundred miles away. This sound had been traveling for more than an hour, and it was still loud enough to shake the building almost as hard as the earthquake had. In another hour or hour and a half, the President would hear it in the Oval Office.

And, three or four hours after that, they might hear it in Europe. They’d heard Krakatoa a couple of thousand miles away, and this thing made Krakatoa look like Vanessa’s Pickles next to a sabertooth.

“Gabe!” Colin said through the rumble that wouldn’t quit.

“Waddaya need?” Sergeant Sanchez answered.

“C’mere a sec,” Colin said. Gabe got up from his own desk and ambled over. Colin went on, “We had better secure a supply of gasoline for the department, and I mean right now. This thing will screw transport like you wouldn’t believe.”

“So why are you telling me? Why aren’t you telling the chief, or else the mayor? Have we got the money in the budget to do anything like that? Can the city get it for us if we don’t?” Gabe was full of reasonable questions.

Or rather, he was full of questions that would have been reasonable a little more than an hour earlier. The chief and the mayor would be full of it, too. Colin had no doubts on that score. The difference was, he could-or he hoped he could-make Gabe see sense. His superiors wouldn’t want to listen… as if they ever did.

“This has to be unofficial,” Colin said. “No refineries in San Atanasio, but there are some over in El Segundo and down in Lomita. Talk to the managers there. Tell ’em we’re gonna have problems. Tell ’em the whole state’s gonna have problems. Do it now-get there ahead of their own cops. Show ’em we’re on the ball. See what you can do to get ’em to lend us a hand.”

“I got you,” Gabe said. “You want ’em to think we know more about what’s going on than their local people do.”

“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded. Thanks to Kelly, he did know more about what was liable to go on than most of the local competition. The problem with that was, the more you knew, the worse things looked. You could tell a refinery manager that California would have problems for a while. You couldn’t tell a guy like that that the world had just walked into a sucker punch. If he didn’t already know it for himself-and chances were he wouldn’t-he wouldn’t believe you.

“Okay. I’ll do it,” Sanchez said. “Better get moving, while those guys’re still shook up by the quake and the boom and shit.”

“Good plan,” Colin agreed. The refinery managers would be shaken-literally and otherwise. They might be more inclined to listen to bulky, imposing Sergeant Sanchez. Colin would have bet his last quarter that things would get worse, not better. But you didn’t want to tell civilians too much too soon. They couldn’t always handle bad news.

And he knew he was a cynical cop, ready to look on the gloomy side both by training and by temperament. He had to put that in the equation, too. Kelly might not understand supervolcanoes as well as she thought she did. It wasn’t as if geologists had ever had a live one to study.

So maybe this wasn’t a catastrophe after all, CNN. com notwithstanding. Maybe it was just a disaster. Colin laughed at himself. Only a cynical cop could have a thought like that and actually find consolation in it.

Bryce Miller had a window seat on the flight from O’Hare back to LAX. He couldn’t stand LAX. He didn’t know anyone who could. O’Hare was even busier. It seemed to run more smoothly, though.

Or maybe that was just his imagination. The conference on the Hellenistic world at the University of Chicago had gone as well as he’d dared hope. He hadn’t given a paper, but he’d critiqued one. He thought his remarks were to the point. The professors who’d listened to him seemed to think so, too.

Something might come of that. No guarantees-there were never any guarantees-but something might. If he could get his thesis done… Or why think small? They did hire people who’d done all but the dissertation. There was even a name for them: ABDs. They got paid less, of course, but after a TA’s money any real salary looked terrific.