Harry Turtledove: Supervolcano :Eruption

Another ritual was going home for summer, or at least part of summer. Going home, for Marshall, meant the house where he’d grown up, the house where Dad still lived. He’d see Mom, sure, but he couldn’t stay with her. The condo she shared with Teo Acosta didn’t have room for guests, and they’d made it plain they wouldn’t have wanted any anyhow.

Marshall didn’t know what to make of his folks’ breakup. What kid ever does? His father said as little about it as he possibly could. When he had to say something, his jaw clenched even tighter than usual. Mom would talk at the drop of a hat, or without one. But Marshall had seen long before she left Dad that you couldn’t count on everything she said.

When he came home after finals this summer, he found his father reading a book about the geology of Yellowstone Park. In a way, that wasn’t too surprising. Dad had gone there on vacation, after all. The card he’d sent Marshall featured something called the Fishing Cone, and was postmarked at Old Faithful Station. That was kind of cool. Even so…

“Geology?” Marshall pointed to the book, which had an aerial photo of some colorfully steaming pool on the cover.

“It’s interesting-a hell of alot more interesting than I thought before I went there,” Dad said. “And besides, I’ve read everything there is to read about the South Bay Strangler. None of it does any good, or we’d’ve caught the son of a bitch by now. And-” He stopped short.

“And?” Marshall prompted.

“Nothing.” By the way his father said it, it was definitely something. Marshall didn’t have Dad’s experience at questioning suspects, but he didn’t need it to know that.

“C’mon. Give,” he said. “Who am I gonna tell? The tabloids? Entertainment Tonight? The Huffington Post?”

Dad despised the Huffington Post-and, to be fair, its rivals on the right. He chuckled: uneasily, if Marshall was any judge. “I hope not,” he said.

“Well, then? C’mon!”

“I, uh, met somebody.” Yeah, Dad was uneasy, all right. What did he think Marshall would do? Tar him and feather him and ride him out of town on a rail? Tell the Huffington Post for real? Worse, tell Mom? Mom had always said she wanted Dad to be happy, but no, she wasn’t always a reliable narrator.

“Cool! How’d you meet her? What are you doing about it? Does she live around here?”

If not for the Cool! in front of them, all those questions asked at once would have made Dad clam up for sure. “We met during an earthquake at Yellowstone,” he answered after a pause to decide if it was okay. “She goes back and forth between there and Berkeley. We’ve talked on the phone a few times, and sent e-mails and texts back and forth. That’s about it.” He shrugged, as if in apology it wasn’t more.

It was more than Marshall had expected, even as things were. “Cool!” he said again. “But what’s up with the geology?”

“She studies it,” Dad said, which took him by surprise. “She was checking a seismograph when the quake hit.” Another chuckle. “Got more than she was looking for then.”

“I guess,” Marshall said. “So you’re getting into it because she is?”

“Maybe some.” His father was relentlessly honest-even about himself, as much as anyone could be. “But it turns out to be pretty interesting stuff.”

“All the geysers and hot springs and whatever.” Marshall knew he sounded vague. He’d never been to Yellowstone, and what he knew about the place came from some half-remembered National Geographic documentary. Or was it Ken Burns? One or the other.

“Yeah. All that,” Dad agreed dryly.

“Would you still care about it if you didn’t find out about it from-?” Marshall stopped. “You didn’t tell me her name.”

“Kelly,” Dad said. “You know what? I would. I really would. I don’t see how you could not be interested once you knew what was-what is-going on there.” He sounded convinced. Just because he sounded that way, of course, didn’t mean he was. And even if he was, that didn’t mean he was right.

“Idiot!” Vanessa Ferguson said, her voce not nearly sotto enough. The idiot in question was her boss. Mr. Gorczany had written between you and I in a letter soliciting a bid on the widgets his firm produced. Vanessa wondered if she was the last person alive who could actually use English grammar these days. She changed the boner to between you and me, fixed a couple of other clumsy phrases, and printed the letter for his signature.

Even if he wrote like a baboon, he owned the company. He lived on an acre and a half in Palos Verdes, and he bought himself a new BMW every year. Vanessa’s job title was technical writer, which translated into hired keyboard. She had a cramped one-bedroom apartment and an eight-year-old Toyota Corolla with bad brakes. Where was the justice in that?

“Thanks, Vanessa.” Nick Gorczany looked over the letter before inscribing his John Hancock. He was very blond, about thirty-five, and putting on weight. Because he knew all about widgets, he thought he knew all about everything. He pointed to between you and me. “Are you sure that’s right?”

“Yes, Mr. Gorczany,” Vanessa said. Braining him with the softball trophy on his desk would only get her talked about. Besides, who said any brains lurked inside that skull?

“I dunno. It looks funny,” he said, frowning.

“The object of a preposition takes the accusative-the objective, if you like that better.” All she had to do was reach out, grab the ugly trophy, and… “If you don’t believe me, see what the Word grammar checker says.” She never bothered with the Word grammar checker, but it wasn’t-quite-dumb enough to make the moronic mistakes Mr. Gorczany did.

“Maybe you know that, but I bet Don Walsh over at Consolidated doesn’t,” he said. “Change it back to you and I. I don’t want him thinking we’re a bunch of yahoos.”

“But it’s wrong that way,” Vanessa said helplessly.

“If he doesn’t know it’s wrong, then it’s not wrong for him,” Nick Gorczany told her.

She rolled her eyes. “Good God in the foothills! Why do I bother?”

“That will be enough of that, Miss Ferguson.” Now Mr. Gorczany spoke with some snap: the snap of a boss putting a third-tier employee in her place. He sometimes looked at her in a way she found mildly annoying-not enough to call him on, even for her, but annoying even so. The way he eyed her now scared her, as it was meant to do. “I begin to see why you’ve worked at so many different places the past few years. If you can’t get along with people, you’re going to have problems. Now fix that letter, please.”

By get along with people, he meant do as you’re told. She almost choked on the injustice of it. She also almost told him to fold the letter till it was all corners and shove it up his wazoo. But the economy, not to put too fine a point on things, sucked. If she punted this job, how long till she snagged another one? Longer than her savings lasted? It might be close.

And so she contented herself with stalking out of his office, head high, back stiff. The look on her face made a software engineer who was coming in to show him some printouts flinch. It also made a couple of people talking by the coffee machine stare. That didn’t bother her; it wasn’t as if either one of them knew anything.

Changing between you and me back to between you and I took only a few seconds, printing out the letter only a few more. They would have gone even faster if she hadn’t done them through a red mist of fury. This was what the world was like? Too right it was! You got along better if you were one more smiling moron than if you gave a rat’s ass about doing things right.

The phone rang. As Vanessa reached for it, she thought how tempting it would be to scream Fuck you! and slam down the receiver. Or to imitate Marshall and answer with Yankee Stadium-second base, and let the jackass on the other end go from there.