Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“You listen!” Kelly interrupted. “Whenever we talk, I always think how I’ve never known anybody who listens like you.”

“Louise didn’t think so. She wanted out, and Teo was her way out.” Another chuckle. “Then he wanted out, too.”

“He was everything you weren’t,” Kelly said. “You never would have done anything like that. Even if you had got somebody pregnant, you would have stuck around afterwards.”

“One more thing I told Louise. I do like to think so,” Colin said. “But who knows? Sometimes you just can’t cope, so you run.”

Kelly snorted. It was much easier to imagine Colin sticking like glue even when that made him a goddamn nuisance than to picture him breaking and running. She wouldn’t have minded had he run from Louise-just the opposite, in fact. But that wasn’t his style, and never would be.

“Anyway, now you know,” he continued. “You needed to, because I’ll have to give Louise whatever cop-style help I can.” No, he wouldn’t run. He said, “If she ends up having this kid, though, you’ve got to remember it ain’t mine.”

That made her laugh in surprise. “I promise,” she said.

“Okay.” Another pause from Colin. Then he said, “Son of a-” and broke off very abruptly indeed.

Kelly had long since seen that he didn’t like to cuss in front of her. He must have bitten off something juicy. And he must have had reason to bite it off. “What?” she asked.

He sounded thoroughly grim as he answered, “Somebody’s gonna have to tell the kids about this. Two guesses who draws the short straw. Won’t they be thrilled to find out they’re gonna have a new half brother or half sister?”

Quite a few words for grown children’s reactions to news like that went through Kelly’s mind. Thrilled didn’t make the list. “Don’t say anything right away,” she urged. “Maybe your ex will take care of it for you-”

“Ha!” Colin delivered a one-word editorial.

“-or maybe she’ll decide to get rid of the baby, and in that case there won’t be anything to tell.” Kelly resolutely pretended he hadn’t broken in.

“No, huh?” he said. “She’ll have to explain-or I’ll have to explain-how come dear, sweet, wonderful, loving Teo isn’t in the picture any more. He just disappeared for no reason at all, right?”

“If there’s no baby, you don’t officially have to have any idea why he flew the coop.”

“Maybe.” Colin sounded dubious, and proceeded to explain why: “Way it looks to me is, there’ll be a baby. Teo wanted her to get rid of it. Teo got rid of himself when she didn’t go okey-doke fast enough to suit him. She’d have the kid now just to spite him, even if she wasn’t looking for any other reasons.”

That made a crazy kind of sense to Kelly: just enough to worry her. It wasn’t something she would do herself, but it was something she could see somebody else doing. “If Louise thinks that way, let her tell your children,” she said again.

“I won’t spill the beans right away,” Colin said. “If I did, that might look like I was gloating about it. But if she decides-chooses: that’s the word they always use these days, isn’t it? — if she chooses to have the baby, the kids will need to know.”

“I guess so,” Kelly said unwillingly.

“And what have you been up to?” he asked. “I hope like anything you had a better day than I did.”

“I’m working on a paper about increased geyser activity as a warning sign of a supervolcano eruption,” she said. “Whoever’s in charge of Yellowstone three-quarters of a million years from now can dig it out of the archives if their geyser basins start getting frisky.”

“For a second there, I thought you meant that,” Colin remarked.

“You never can tell, but I won’t hold my breath,” Kelly said. “This lets me use some of the photos I took at the end of my first hike to Coffee Pot Springs after things started heating up.” Her eyes welled with tears. “All that stuff is gone forever. No one will see Yellowstone again.”

“I’m glad I got the chance. I’d be glad even if I hadn’t met you there, but I’m especially glad now,” Colin said.

“Good,” Kelly answered. “Me, too.”

By the time Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could have got to Greenville, going there had lost its point. The local promoter wasn’t wrong to say that nobody in that part of Maine could have got to their show. People in Maine understood snow, and they understood how to keep roads passable. But even they weren’t used to dealing with weather like this.

If they weren’t up for it, the guys from California who were stranded in Guilford were, not to put too fine a point on it, freaking out. “Doesn’t the Iditarod start somewhere around here?” Rob asked Dick Barber.

Before the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn could answer, Justin started doing background vocals: “Rod, rod, ditarod, I ditarod! Ditarodrodrod, I ditarod!” It was as if the Beach Boys had met a denizen of the State Home for the Terminally Loopy.

“Would you please stick that in the deep freeze?” Rob asked him, in lieu of suggesting that he stick it up his ass. He amplified the request: “Go outside, in other words.”

“Cold out there,” Justin observed accurately.

“Cold in here, too,” Rob said, which was also accurate, if to a lesser degree. He quickly turned back to Barber. “We’re not looking a gift horse in the mouth, believe me.”

“I know it’s cold. That’s why God made long underwear,” Barber answered. “I’ve been running the furnace as little as I thought I could get away with, trying to stretch the fuel oil as far as I could. It’ll run dry in the next few days no matter what I do, though.”

“When does more fuel oil get to Guilford?” Rob asked. He was used to gas or electric heat. As far as he knew, nobody in California used fuel oil.

“Good question!” Barber said. “The way things are, I have no idea. I have no idea if any fuel oil is getting into the state. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Quite a few people in town are already out.”

Rob believed that. Barber was one of the more stringently efficient people he’d met. His military background might have had something to do with it. Dad was the same way, only not quite so much.

He tried a different question: “What if no more fuel oil gets here?”

Dick Barber clicked his tongue between his teeth. “In that case, things do get more… interesting, don’t they? The way it looks to me is, we have two choices in that case. Either we freeze to death or we start cutting down trees.”

“That doesn’t sound like two choices to me. More like one,” Justin said.

“Oh, I agree with you,” Barber replied. “But I promise, there will be folks who don’t. Some people in this state-influential people, too-feel it’s not just wrong but evil to harm a tree for any reason. They feel that way very strongly, and they’re not shy about saying so.”

“There are people like that in California, too,” Rob said.

The proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn let one eyebrow climb toward his shock of graying hair. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” Rob had a crooked grin of his own. “I’m kind of a tree-hugger myself, but-”

“That but suggests you’re young enough to get over it,” Barber said.

Rob shrugged. “Whenever you can take care of trees without hurting people, that’s a good thing to do, I think. But if people are going to freeze to death unless they’ve got logs in the fireplace, that’s the time to break out the axes and the chainsaws.”

“Sounds reasonable. Are you sure you’re from California?” Barber said. “The other thing is, all the questions about fuel oil apply to gasoline, too. The Shell station’s closed, in case you hadn’t noticed. So the chainsaws won’t keep working forever, or even through the winter… assuming the winter does eventually end.”