Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“Oh, shut up,” Professor Rheinburg said under his breath. He looked green around the gills. Kelly suspected she did, too. She’d never been airsick, or even feared she might be. Now she discovered there was a first time for everything. She grabbed her bag, just to stay on the safe side. Next to her, her chairman did the same thing.

Neither of them needed to use theirs. Horrible noises from behind them and an acid reek in the conditioned air warned that someone hadn’t been so lucky. “Oh, dear,” Rheinburg said sympathetically.

Kelly kept her mouth shut-kept it clamped shut, in fact. That sour stink sure didn’t help her stomach. She tried her best not to think about it. Wasn’t lava fascinating? Sure it was!

Then they were past the great pockmark in the earth’s skin and over more devastation of the same kind they’d seen on the approach. The air smoothed out. Kelly’s insides relaxed-until the pilot said, “We’ll turn around now, and make our second pass over the crater while we’re heading for home.”

She’d been about to stuff the airsick bag back where it belonged. On second thought, that could wait till they got back to the Idaho side of things-although Idaho, or big parts of it, was an idea that had come and gone.

“What’s that song about how much do you have to pay to keep from going through all these things twice?” Professor Rheinburg asked.

“Beats me,” Kelly said. Whatever the song he was thinking about was, it came from his generation, not hers. She added, “What I keep thinking about is, we volunteered for this.”

“Proves the Army guys know what they’re talking about when they say that’s a bad idea, doesn’t it?” Rheinburg said.

A U-turn at upwards of 500 miles an hour took time and space to execute. They didn’t fly back over the supervolcano crater right away, then. They had a little while to brace themselves. Then the plane started bouncing some again. Kelly didn’t think it was quite so bad this time through; she might have been more ready for it. As she had before, she stared down at the broad expanse of what was as close as anyone was likely to see of hell on earth.

Beyond it lay the ash beds and stuff that would become tuff. “How many towns and farms and roads somewhere under there?” Professor Rheinburg said. “ ‘Vanity of vanities-all is vanity.’ ”

“Hey, no fair,” Kelly said. “You can’t not build something because the supervolcano goes off every 700,000 years. Besides, they built a lot before they even knew it was there.”

“They sure did-and it’s gone now, along with everything they built after they knew.” The gray-haired prof spoke with a grim relish that reminded Kelly of Colin. Then he switched gears and grinned at her. “Of course, looking at the bright side of things, you’ve got a straight shot at a tenure-track position. You’re one of the top experts on the world’s biggest problem for at least the rest of your life.”

“Well, sure, assuming there are any universities left once everything shakes out.” Kelly wouldn’t let anybody outgloom her without a fight.

“Yes. Assuming,” Rheinburg said, so he probably won that round.

Marshall Ferguson had long since stopped taking snailmail seriously. When you could e-mail or text or talk on the phone, mail with stamps on it that took days to get from hither to yon seemed downright medieval. And snailmail from the other side of the continent had got slower and more erratic since the supervolcano went off. To think they’d said it couldn’t be done!

He opened the box on the ground floor of his apartment building only every other day or so. He did need to check every so often, because some bills still came by snailmail. Corporations lacked a sense of humor when you forgot to pay for cable or your utilities.

Most of the rest of what he got was junk-spam on paper, spam that cost the senders a little something to print and mail. That had dropped off dramatically after the eruption. Paper was scarce and expensive these days, which made junk mail a losing proposition. Even the local restaurants had quit mailing out discount coupons, and that was a goddamn shame.

He almost chucked the envelope with the bland corporate return address unopened. Somebody back in New York City was trying to get him to do something he likely didn’t want to do. Whoever it was either had a stock of old envelopes or money coming out of his ears, because the paper was uncommonly fine.

The only reason he did open it was the off chance it might be a fancy bill. Otherwise, it would have gone straight into the recycling bin for paper. He unfolded the crisp sheet inside. It was stationery, with the same address as the one on the envelope. Below that…

Dear Mr. Ferguson, he read, We are pleased to accept your story titled “Well, Why Not?” for a future issue of New Fictions. A contract and a check for $327.00-the appropriate payment at our standard rate of eight cents a word-are forthcoming. I look forward to working with you on the story. Cordially, — and an editor’s scribbled signature below.

He read it again, and then one more time. By the end of the third go-round, he began to believe it. “Holy shit,” he said softly.

Then he started to giggle. He’d sent out the story because that was part of his assignment. Hell, he’d written it because that was his assignment. If he hadn’t been in Professor Bolger’s class, he never would have done it. And now somebody wanted to pay him money for it? How funny was that?

A moment later, he said “Holy shit” again, on a different note this time. If he’d sold once, chances were he could sell more than once. Having some cash coming in that wasn’t straight out of his old man’s wallet would be nice, which was putting it mildly. He didn’t think you could get rich writing stories-eight cents a word wasn’t bad, from everything he’d heard, but it would never make you a millionaire, either-but that might set the stage for bigger and better (which is to say, more profitable) things.

He went up to his place and sent Bolger an e-mail announcing the sale. If that didn’t do good things for his grade in there, nothing ever would. Then he fished his phone out of his pocket and called his father.

“What is it, Marshall?” came the familiar growl. Of course Dad would know who it was-he could see the number on his screen, after all-and of course he’d be busy at the cop shop. He’d likely be surprised to get a call in the middle of the afternoon, too. Sure enough, the next thing he said was, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Marshall was just starting to realize how fine he was. Once the amazement wore off, what replaced it was, well, more amazement. “Guess what?”

“Chicken butt,” Dad answered, as Marshall had known he would. That had cracked Marshall up when he was little. Dad still did it, though. Did he do it with other cops, too? Marshall wouldn’t have been surprised. After a couple of seconds, Dad did add, “Well, what?”

“I sold a story.” Marshall couldn’t remember the last time he’d sounded so proud of himself.

“Sold?” Dad pronounced the word with care, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard it right. “As in, for money?”

“As in. Three hundred and twenty-seven dollars of money.” Marshall was sure he’d remember the size of his first check as long as he lived, even if he hadn’t seen it yet.

“How about that?” his father said-one of the few phrases, as Dad himself noted, you could use almost anywhere. Then his voice warmed: “Congratulations, son. That’s something, all right. What’s the story called? What’s it about?”

“It’s called ‘Well, Why Not?’ I never know what to call things.” Marshall hated titles. He had no idea how anybody ever came up with a good one. “It’s about… a guy going to college while his folks get a divorce.”