Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

The guy in the middle iggled. He wasn’t deliberately annoying, but he was there, right there. And the woman in front of Bryce had reclined her seat as far as it would go. She wasn’t trying to kneecap him, which didn’t mean she wasn’t doing it.

He got out the pastrami on rye and the big chocolate-chip cookie he’d bought in the airport. The bastards weren’t about to feed you. He counted himself lucky the flight attendants had doled out a Coke. Such extravagant generosity had to be bad for the bottom line.

Somebody somewhere in the plane was eating something smellier than airport pastrami. Bryce was forcibly reminded of the modern fable about the Stinky Cheese Man. You’d think whoever was chowing down would have more regard for everyone else trapped in the flying cigar with him. But no.

And even that minimal regard might be too much to hope for. Going with a cop’s daughter and getting to know the cop himself had made Bryce look at his fellow humans with a freshly jaundiced eye. Getting dumped by Vanessa hadn’t done anything to improve his attitude, either.

He took a bite from the sandwich in self-defense. While he chewed, he looked down out the window: about seven miles down. The landscape was flat and green and gold, and laid out in geometric patterns. The Midwest, from on high.

It wasn’t great pastrami. No way you’d find great pastrami at an airport sandwich shop. But it wasn’t lousy pastrami-all fat and peppercorns-either. And the cookie honest to God was pretty good. It made a better lunch than American would have given him once upon a time-but also a more expensive one.

Bryce slammed the tray into place again. Let the bitch who’d shoved her seat way back feel it. After one more look at the fields far below, he leaned against the bulkhead and tried to sleep.

He’d just dozed off when… “This is the captain speaking.” Bryce’s eyes jerked open. He was surprised he didn’t bleed out through them. The airline’s customer-prevention program was going full blast.

Or so he thought till he saw one of the flight attendants. She looked pale and stunned, like the gal he knew who’d flunked her orals.

“This is the captain,” the slightly Southern voice repeated. “We’ve just got word of… an emergency ahead. We are not going to be able to continue to Los Angeles. We will have to turn around and head back towards O’Hare. I am very sorry for the inconvenience, but this is unavoidable. I don’t know yet whether we’ll land in Chicago or somewhere between here and there. When I find out, be assured I will inform you pronto.”

The PA system crackled into silence at the same time as the cabin exploded into noise. An emergency ahead? What the hell was that supposed to mean? What would make them turn around and head for Chicago again? A replay of 9/11? That was the first thing Bryce thought of.

As the plane began to turn, the guy in the seat next to his fired up his iPhone. You weren’t supposed to do that in flight, but Bryce would have bet gold against gallstones his seatmate wasn’t the only one breaking the rules right now. People wanted to know what the hell was going on. If the pilot wouldn’t tell them, they’d find out for themselves.

Not thinking anything of it, Bryce looked out the window again. His eyes started to track across it, but then stopped as if physically seized. They had to be bugging out of their sockets.

He’d flown between anvil-topped thunderheads that towered higher into the sky than his airliner. Not often-most of the time, you stayed well above the weather-but he had. Those had been goddamn bumpy flights, too.

But those clouds’d gone up a little higher than his plane. That black column off in the distance ahead… If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would have been sure it was impossible. Even seeing it, he thought it should have been. Not knowing how far away it was, he couldn’t say how high up it went. He could say, though, that it went one hell of a lot higher than anything he’d ever imagined, let alone seen.

The guy next to him was staring at the iPhone as hard as Bryce was staring out the window. “Supervolcano,” the man muttered to himself. “The fuck is a supervolcano?”

No one could possibly have dropped an icicle down Bryce’s back. But that was how he felt. He knew what a supervolcano was. He might not have if not for Colin’s new lady friend, but he did. Colin had taken Kelly seriously even before Yellowstone started bubbling over. Bryce hadn’t known how seriously to take her, not then, especially since he was hearing her message delivered through Colin. He knew now, by God!

Other people in the window seats on his side of the plane were seeing that colossal-and seemingly expanding, too-cloud. The word supervolcano started rippling through the whole cabin. Not everybody seemed sure what all it meant, but it obviously wasn’t good news.

“Does this mean we won’t get to have dinner with Uncle Louie tonight?” a woman said. Some people were not overburdened with brains.

“This is the captain one more time. If I could have your attention, please…” The man in the cockpit had to know the passengers were seething. “If I could have your attention, please.. ” He waited for them to settle down a little before continuing, “Some of you on the starboard side will have seen a large cloud of ash and dust rising into the upper atmosphere.”

Naturally, all the people who hadn’t seen it craned their necks in that direction, trying to get a glimpse. Bryce admired the pilot’s power of understatement. A lesser man would have been incapable of it.

“That is why we’re turning around,” the pilot went on. “We can’t fly over it, we don’t dare fly through it-grit does bad things to turbine blades-and it doesn’t look like we can go around it. There is some turbulence associated with this eruption. And I’m going to ask all of you who turned on your smart phones to for God’s sake turn ’em off again. Getting our electronics screwed up right now would be the last thing we need. Thanks very much, folks.”

Bryce would have hit the flight-attendant call button if the guy in the middle seat hadn’t turned off the iPhone. Maybe he was worrying about the hazard too much. But if the captain was getting up in arms about it, he figured he was also entitled to.

Up ahead a few rows, somebody didn’t want to squelch his BlackBerry. He loudly and profanely didn’t want to, in fact. Aided by two other passengers, a flight attendant dispossessed him of it. That brought on more profanity.

“You can have it back when we land, sir,” the stewardess said sweetly. Sweetly still, she added, “Then I hope you ram it up your stupid ass.”

That startled the foulmouthed passenger into silence. You didn’t expect someone in a service industry to shoot back at you with your own weapons. Bryce hadn’t expected anything like that, either. Hearing it made him wonder how much trouble the flight might be in. Up till then, he’d worried what the dickens he would do in Chicago once they got back there. He had nowhere to stay, he had a carry-on’s worth of clothes, and he had no more money than any other grad student. Now he wondered whether they’d make it back. If that flight attendant felt she could let fly at a passenger, she was wondering the same thing.

Some turbulence associated with this eruption. The captain’s bloodless phrase came back to Bryce. Suppose you dropped Rhode Island into a frying pan big enough to hold it-a figure of speech Colin liked, since, as Bryce had long known, he couldn’t stand Rhode Island. What kind of shock wave would go through the air after you did that? How fast would it go? What would it do to any old airplane it happened to meet?

Those were all fascinating questions, weren’t they? They sure were, especially that last one. Bryce’s current perspective aboard one of those old airplanes made it even more intriguing.