Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Even if that was naive, he had a point. It was good luck not to have wound up somewhere like that. Bryce might not have got out if he had. “I had my brush with the supervolcano any which way,” he said.

“Yes, so you did,” Harriman agreed. “I’m glad you made it back in one piece. And I’m glad to have one copy of the thesis for myself, one for the department library, and one for the University Research Library.”

How often had Bryce wrestled with Doric verb forms in the classics library? Lots. One whole bookcase was full of bound dissertations going back half a century and more. Did anybody ever look at them? He knew he never had. Some eventually got turned into proper books. The rest… must have seemed important at the time, at least to the shlubs cranking them out.

And was the world ready for a fat new study of Theocritus and the other leading Hellenistic poets? Would Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard get into a ferocious bidding war over the publication rights? If they did, they might run the advance they paid him all the way up into three figures. But they wouldn’t. Or it sure wasn’t likely.

As if to underscore that, Professor Harriman asked, “What will you do now that you’ve finished?”

“Look for work. What else can I do now?” Bryce said.

“Mm, yes.” Harriman didn’t need to worry about it. He might not have been tenured since the Hellenistic Age, but he seemed as if he had. He coughed delicately now. “The job situation is… difficult at the moment. In the present emergency, classics departments find themselves under unprecedented pressure. Surely you are aware of this.”

“Surely,” Bryce said, deadpan. Slots opened up only when the current holder dropped dead. Even then, a university was at least as likely to cut a position as to fill it. It wasn’t just positions, either. Whole classics departments were facing the axe. So were French and Italian departments and anything else that didn’t immediately help people dig out from the supervolcano. What kind of world they’d have once they dug out-if they could dig out-they’d worry about later.

“Well, then…” Harvey Harriman spread his well-manicured hands.

“Oh, I’ll take any kind of job I can get,” Bryce said. “If somebody wants me to teach Western Civ at a community college, I’ll do that. If a Catholic high school needs a Latin teacher, I can do that. Or if all I can come up with is a job job, if you know what I mean, I’ll do that, too.”

“I do understand. The wolf at the door is a harsh taskmaster,” Harriman said, as if he knew anything about the wolf at the door. Yeah, as if! His father might have grounded him if he’d messed up too many declensions, but that was about it. Sighing, he went on, “It seems a shame to have to turn your back on what took so long and required so much work and study to accomplish.”

Bryce thought it seemed a shame, too. But starving seemed an even bigger shame. “You don’t always get to do what you want to do,” he said. “Sometimes you do what you have to do, and pick up the pieces from there.”

“Will you come back to UCLA in June for the year’s commencement?” Professor Harriman asked.

“I hope so.” Bryce had blown off the ceremony after his A.B. and M.A. His mother would probably disown him if he did it again. So would Susan, whose opinion mattered more to him-and who was waiting for him right this minute.

He said his good-byes to Professor Harriman. He wondered when he would ever see the inside of the UCLA Classics Department again. Once upon a time, business weenies had infested the Public Policy building. Now they had a bigger, newer, spiffier one all their own: the Anderson School of Management. Classics got some of their leftovers-or their sloppy seconds, if you were feeling uncommonly cynical.

Susan called the North Campus Center Maxim’s. Maybe that was a History Department in-joke; Bryce had never heard it before he started hanging out with her. She sat at one of the big tables outside. Unusually in this winter of the earth’s discontent, it wasn’t raining. She got up as he drew near. “Are you official?”

“I’m done, all right-like a roast,” he answered.

“Hey, you did something special,” she said. “How do you want to celebrate?”

“People would talk if we did that right here,” Bryce said.

Susan made a face at him. “How about coffee and a danish instead?”

“Talk about second prizes!” he said mournfully. She poked him in the ribs. That didn’t do much-she was far more ticklish than he was. They walked into Maxim’s together.

Susan did get coffee and a danish. Bryce got a danish and a Coke instead. Susan bought. “You just turned in your diss,” she said. “How awesome is that?”

“I don’t have a job. I don’t have much chance for a job. I was just talking with my chairperson about what I was gonna do. He didn’t have any terrific ideas, either. How awesome is that?” One more reason for Bryce to let Susan buy.

“Something will turn up for you,” she said. “Something will turn up for me when I finish, too. Would you have put all that time and effort into it if you really thought you’d never get the chance to use it?”

They sat down at a couple of chairs facing the brickwork around a circular gas fire. The warmth was welcome. No doubt Susan had meant the question rhetorically. Bryce gave it serious consideration all the same. At last, he said, “You know, I think I would. What else would I have been doing instead? Retail? Real estate? I might have made more money in real estate-”

“The way the roller coaster goes, you might not have, too,” Susan broke in.

“You’ve got that right,” Bryce said. “Whatever I did, I wouldn’t have had much fun doing it. Here I am, close to thirty, and I’ve got away with not working for a living yet. Can’t go on forever, not unless you inherit or something, but I’ve had a pretty good run.”

One of the reasons he’d got away with not working for a living was that Vanessa had dropped out and did work. Add her real salary to the dribs and drabs he brought in, and they’d done tolerably well. He’d had more trouble staying afloat since the breakup. But he didn’t want to remember Vanessa now.

“You’re-not practical,” Susan said. Vanessa had told him the same thing. He seemed to have to remember her, like it or not. She’d said it with intent to wound, though, if not with intent to condemn. With Susan, it was just a statement of fact.

“Guilty,” he said. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know it himself. “I’m afraid nobody who writes poems modeled after ancient pastorals will get a lot of ink in the Wall Street Journal.”

“That nevot what I meant. You’ve published them. I think that’s wonderful,” Susan said.

Bryce thought it was wonderful, too. Of course, he’d made exactly no money from any of them. And here, out of the blue, Vanessa’s brother sold-really sold-a story. If that made Bryce jealous (and it did), he was sure it drove Vanessa nuts. He said, “But no one should hang out with me because she expects to get rich doing it. Or even eat, necessarily.”

“I’m hanging out with you because I want to, silly,” Susan said. “One way or another, we’ll make ends meet. Who needs more than that?”

Plenty of people did, or thought they did. Vanessa had always had filet mignon tastes, even when the budget yelled for ground chuck. She was never happy with what she had. He sometimes thought, especially toward the end, that she couldn’t be happy without something to be unhappy about.

Susan wasn’t like that. For a while, Bryce had wondered if something was missing in his relationship with her. Before long, he’d figured out what it was: tension. Once he realized that, he quit missing it.