Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“I wonder what’s out there in the big, wide world,” he said. The big, wide, ugly world, he thought, but he didn’t come out with that. “I don’t have any excuses left now. I’ve got to find out.”

Selling his story gave Marshall fifteen McLuhan minutes of fame at UCSB. Because of paper shortages, the campus rag was down to a weekly, but it ran a story about him. The photographer who snapped him holding up a printout of “Well, Why Not?” was seriously cute. She seemed impressed with him, too: impressed enough to let him have her cell number, with the air of an aid worker handing out sacks of wheat to pipe-cleaner-legged famine victims in Zimbabwe or somewhere like that. But when he tried it, it turned out to be bogus. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all.

Professor Bolger gave him an A in the course, which he was glad to have, and advice, which he found as welcome as the phony phone number. “Congratulations. You’ve sold to a market I’d-mm, maybe not kill, but commit armed robbery, anyway-to break into,” Bolger said. “Now you have to figure out where you go from here.”

Where Marshall wanted to go was away from the prof’s journal-crowded office. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem practical for the next few minutes. “Uh-huh,” he said, and tried to keep looking interested while he tuned out.

“If you’ve got anything else you like, you should send it to the editor there right away,” Bolger went on. “Anybody-well, lots of people, anyhow-can get lucky once. Being able to do it over and over is what marks the difference between a writer and somebody who just writes, if you know what I mean.” He waited expectantly.

Thus prompted, Marshall nodded and went “Uh-huh” again, for all the world as if he’d been listening.

“The other side of the coin is, you don’t want to get a swelled head because somebody sent you a check,” Bolger said. “Twenty-five years ago, when I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine sold two stories to a magazine that’s long since gone under. He decided he knew everything there was to know, the way you can when you’re that age. He dropped out of the University of Washington halfway through his freshman year to become a writer, and he sold a couple of novels, too. But he’s made his living moving stuff from here to there at Sears ever since.” Another pregnant pause.

“I’m not gonna drop out now,” waitid, “not with my degree right around the corner.” He’d avoided it as long as he could, but they were going to pitch him out into the real world no matter how little he liked it.

“I should hope not,” Professor Bolger said, politely horrified at the mere idea. “If you work hard at it, and if you don’t expect too much, writing is a good trade in difficult times. There’s not much overhead-hardly any. And you can do it part-time, to add to your income from a more ordinary job. I’ve been doing that for a long time now.”

“Right. Makes sense,” Marshall said. Of course, the prof was bound to have some fancy degree piled on top of his bachelor’s. You didn’t get to teach at a university without one; Marshall was sure of that. One sold story, or even several sold stories, wouldn’t win him possession of the office next door here.

“Students in my classes don’t often place pieces. It happens, but not every quarter. Nowhere near,” Bolger said. “You have a right to be proud of yourself.” He glanced at the clock on the wall across from his desk. “And do keep writing. I always hate it when people who have the ability don’t use it.”

That had to be Okay, I’ve used up as much office time on you as I’m going to. Marshall said his good-byes and got out. It was late afternoon. The sun was sinking in one of those ridiculously over-the-top sunsets people had started taking for granted since the supervolcano erupted. Oranges, reds, purples, sometimes greens… The light show usually started a good hour and a half before actual sundown. You didn’t even have to be loaded to enjoy it, though that sure didn’t hurt.

As Marshall walked to the bike rack, somebody behind him said, “Hey, isn’t that the guy who-?”

He walked a little taller, a little straighter, for a few steps. After all, he was the guy who. He was right this minute, anyhow. Before long, somebody else would do something worth noticing. Then, for a little while, he’d be the guy who.

Marshall unlocked his bike and climbed aboard. How did you keep it going once you weren’t the guy who any more? How did you keep it going when you never got to be the guy who? His brother’s band had always had to deal with that. More hype stuck to the third runner-up from American Idol, who was only almost the guy who, than Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had seen in their whole career.

One good way to keep it going was not to let the jerk in the Lexus flip you over his-no, her-fender. “You dumb asshole!” Marshall said. The Lexus’ driver went on her way with the lordly indifference of those who didn’t need to use their own muscle power to get from hither to yon.

A moment later, though, Marshall had his Come the revolution moment as he pedaled past two gas stations on opposite sides of the street. Prices had been zooming up and up since the eruption. One of the stations had topped six bucks a gallon the other day-and it wasn’t a tourist trap by the 101, either. A sign in front of the other said

SORRY-NO GAS TODAY.

Lots of the petroleum that got made into gasoline came from the Middle East and other distant places. Israeli nukes on the Iranian oil fields hadn’t done that supply any good. But some of it was homegrown. The supervolcano hadn’t done domestic production any good, which was putting it mildly. And some of the big refineries in Texas and Oklahoma were still out of action, while transportation between the West Coast and anything east of Yellowstone remained totally screwed.

Which meant high prices and shortages. Here were both of them. Pretty soon, gas prices would get to the point where they pinched a bitch in a Lexus. Or else even her Majesty wouldn’t be able to fill up at all. Then she’d have to stick her rich ass on a bicycle like the peasants or damn well stay home.

Come the revolution… When Marshall got back to his place, he drank a Coke (they were plugging them as Better than ever with real sugar! because you couldn’t get high-fructose corn syrup when the corn crop lay under volcanic ash) and fired up his computer. He did his e-mail first.

After that, though, he started working on a new story, one about somebody who was rich enough to drive a Lexus and live in Santa Barbara, but who found that her money was buying her less and less, and that it couldn’t buy some things at all. He knew a bit about failed relationships; all he had to do was think of the one that had blown up on his folks.

He stopped after a couple of hours and a thousand words and went back to reread what he’d written. He cleaned up some clumsy phrasing and put in foreshadowing to show that Ms. Lexus didn’t have it as together as she thought she did. Then he nodded to himself. It… felt good. He didn’t know how to put it any better than that. If he stayed at it and finished it, he thought he had a chance to sell it somewhere.

So much he still didn’t know, not just about writing but about finding markets and everything else that had to do with the business. He was at least as surprised as anyone else that somebody’d bought one piece. Could lightning really strike twice? Could he be, or become, a creative-writing major who’d got lucky?

How could you know something like that? The only answer that occurred to him was, by writing and seeing if anything else stuck. He was no more diligent than he’d ever had to be. You needed that stuff if you were going to go anywhere in this racket. That seemed obvious.