Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“The earth is angry at us,” he said. “Who would have imagined a volcano could throw all our plans for a loss?”

He was a football fan. Louise… tolerated that. As for who would have imagined-well, Colin had been tiresome about it even before the supervolcano erupted. Of course, that was because his new squeeze worried about such things. People rubbed off on each other as they rubbed against each other. You couldn’t help it.

She smiled. Teo smiled back, and ran a hand through her wet hair. As far as Louise was concerned, she’d got the best of the bargain.

There was a technical term for what riding a bike through heavy rain was like. It bit the big one, was what it did. Marshall Ferguson had a plastic poncho that kept him at least partially dry. It bit the big one anyhow.

But so did the UCSB parking policy. There weren’t nearly enough spaces on campus. The ones that were there cost too bloody much. A bike was a lot more practical.

Most of the time. This past week, riding the bike to school tempted Marshall to take the bus instead. But he would have got drenched waiting for it, and it stopped three blocks from his place, so he would have got drenched walking to and from, too. You couldn’t win.

A car zoomed by. It kept its distance; most Santa Barbara drivers, unlike their counterparts in a lot of Southern California, at least had some notion that they shared the road with people on two wheels. That didn’t mean the tires didn’t pick up water and plaster it against Marshall’s side, then splash him in the face as the Toyota got ahead of him.

This happened at least half a dozen ties before he finally got to campus. As he did every day when he arrived, he wondered if the bus wasn’t a better idea after all. He wondered the same thing every time he pedaled home in the rain. Maybe I should suspect a trend, he thought. Somehow, though, he climbed aboard the bike every morning instead of walking to the bus stop. He always figured things would get better this next time. He might have been like that annoying song about tomorrow, tomorrow. Or he might have met one of the short definitions of insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

“Hey, at least I have fun,” he muttered as he escaped the nasty traffic at last. Whether getting cold, dirty water flung in his kisser from speeding Michelins honest to God counted as fun was something he’d worry about some other time.

Campus bike racks took up less room than parking lots did, but they filled up just as fast. He found a space, put his bicycle in it, and locked the machine to the rack. He used a lock and a chain his father approved of. He’d got el cheapos at first-and, one unhappy day his sophomore year, he’d had to take the bus back to his place after biking in that morning. His old man made him pay for the new bike, lock, and chain out of his own money, too. He hadn’t appreciated that. He also hadn’t had his bike stolen since.

Everybody else on campus looked as wet and miserable as he did. Well, almost everybody. A tweedy prof strolled along under an umbrella big enough to keep the supervolcano crater dry. The guy was almost bald on top, but his gray hair came down to his shoulders all the same. He’d probably grown it out when he was a kid around 1973, decided it looked way cool, and never bothered to change his mind in spite of changing styles and changing hairline. Tenure could do that to you. You stopped needing to change, so you didn’t. And if people snickered at you behind their hands, so what? You still had tenure.

Marshall wished students could get tenure. That was what he’d been trying to do all his years here. He liked imagining himself at fifty-five, paunchy, maybe balding, too, still living in an apartment with ratty furniture in Ellwood or Goleta, still soaking up units, still smoking dope, and still laying coeds whenever he got the chance. What more could anybody want?

He was mournfully aware it wouldn’t happen. For one thing, his father wouldn’t keep fronting him cash forever, and you couldn’t make enough money odd-jobbing it to pay for your place and your food and your car and all the other shit you needed, to say nothing of university fees. One more thing that bit. Bigtime, in fact. For another, even if his old man had been willing to leave him on the gravy train for the next thirty years, UCSB wasn’t. By rights, he should have graduated long since. He’d passed-way passed-the ordinary limits on time of attendance and total units. Adroit major-changing and a couple of petitions the administration had carelessly approved left him still working toward his sheepskin.

Pretty soon, though, he’d graduate no matter how much finagling, how much wiggling, or how much kicking and screaming he did. He hadn’t had many expectations before the supervolcano knocked the economy flat and stomped on it. Now life with a bachelor’s degree looked depressingly like going back to San Atanasio, back to his room at the old house, and sponging off his dad while he flailed around looking for work that wasn’t there.

Rain or no rain, people were out on campus collecting donations for all the millions who’d had to evacuate on account of the eruption. Cash, canned goods, old clothes-they’d take anything. Marshall had given them money. He couldn’t see how canned gooor beat-up jeans would make it from Santa Barbara to the Midwest.

He’d even asked about that. “They won’t,” an earnest guy with a Red Cross pin on his pocket replied. “But there are plenty of refugees at the western edge of the ashfall, too.”

“Oh.” Marshall hadn’t thought about that. The next day, he’d donated a can of roast-beef hash and a can of mandarin oranges. So they didn’t exactly go together. BFD.

Today, he walked past the wet volunteers. He was low on funds, and he hadn’t stuck any cans in his backpack. The rain lowered everyone’s spirits. The volunteers didn’t try very hard to get people to stop. They stood or sat under polyethylene sheeting that didn’t keep off enough of the rain, and looked as if they would have donated their souls to go somewhere warm and dry.

Marshall could actually do that. Campus buildings weren’t very warm, because thermostats got pushed way down after the eruption. But it wasn’t raining indoors. He could shed his poncho. He could even go into a men’s room and use a paper towel to dry off a little. New stickers in there warned DON’T WASTE PAPER GOODS! What wasn’t in short supply these days?

On to the room for the creative-writing class. Professor Bolger wasn’t what Marshall had expected. He made the students write. Well, surprise! But he also made them submit what they wrote: submit it to markets where they were competing against people who’d been freelancing longer than they’d been alive.

When Bolger had announced that requirement, a girl bleated, “We’ll get rejected!” Marshall would have beaten her to it if he hadn’t been exhaling at the moment instead of inhaling.

The prof answered a squawk with a question: “Suppose you do. How are you worse off?”

“Because!” the girl explained. Marshall nodded. That sure made sense to him.

“Listen to me,” Bolger said grimly. “You are here to learn something about writing. And you are here-with luck-to see if you can make money writing. To make a living at it, even, if you’re good enough and stubborn enough and lucky enough. You cannot possibly sell your work if you never submit it. And so… you will.”

“How often do you get rejected?” Marshall asked. He assumed Bolger did; if the answer came back never, what the hell was the guy doing teaching here? Why wasn’t he all over the best-seller list?

“I have a stack of slips this high.” The prof held his hands six inches apart. “And that doesn’t even count e-mails. Nobody’s going to like your work all the time. You have to get hardened to that. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means that editor didn’t like that piece that day.”