Supervolcano :Eruption Read online

  Then again, maybe the snowmobiles’ flatulent buzz wasn’t the only thing spooking the bison. Kelly needed a little while to realize exhaust from the machine Daniel and Ruth were riding wasn’t all that was fouling Yellowstone’s crisp, cold, clean late-autumn air.

  You could smell sulfur almost anywhere in the park if the wind was blowing the right-or the wrong, depending on how you looked t it-way. Some of the ancient Greeks had said quakes were caused by what amounted to earthfarts. Put one of those robed and bearded philosophers here in Yellowstone and he’d be sure he was right.

  But what Kelly smelled now seemed harsher-hotter? — than the usual brimstone reek from hot springs or fumaroles. The wind was blowing to the southwest, at a right angle from their approach route toward the eruption, but the new volcano made itself known all the same.

  And the farther they went, the less pristine and white the snow seemed. Volcanic ash had started pattering down from the big column of dust and ash ahead. The prevailing wind would sweep more of it across Wyoming and down into Colorado-and who could guess how much farther than that? Nobody could, not yet.

  The ash still floating in the air could prove an even bigger nuisance. The eruption in Iceland had screwed up air travel between the States and Europe and from one part of Europe to another on and off for weeks. If little bits of grit chewed up jet engines on routes between one American coast and the other, that wouldn’t be so good-which was putting it mildly.

  Airplane travel in this day and age sucked. Not being able to travel by airplane would suck even harder in a country as big as the United States.

  But that wasn’t all that was rattling Kelly’s cage. So far, this seemed like a normal volcanic eruption, the kind Yellowstone often had-even if often didn’t mean lately. Nobody knew how a supervolcano worked, though. All the evidence pointed towards everything happening at once. If lava spurted up all around and most of what was now the park fell toward the center of the earth…

  It would all be over in a hurry, anyhow.

  Larry steered a little closer to the Bechler River, which ran in the direction of (though not into) Ranger Lake. The river hadn’t frozen up yet. Ducks rose from it, wings beating swiftly as they got airborne. They liked snowmobiles no better than the bison had.

  Something ahead was burning. Larry waved to Daniel. They stopped side by side. At first, Kelly thought she was seeing lava oozing up from some new crack in the earth’s crust that led down to the magma pool under Yellowstone. But no. The lodgepole pines were burning, which was pretty goddamn awe-inspiring in its own way. Snow stifled wildfires. That was a rule as old as the park.

  Well, there were older rules. How hot did the lava flow heat the trees? Hot enough to steam the snow off them, and off the ground between them. Hot enough to dry them out and set them blazing. Some of what was going up into the air was genuine, honest-to-God wood smoke.

  Silence slammed down after the engines cut out. It seemed all the more quiet because Kelly’s ears were on the stunned side. Through it, Larry said, “I don’t think we ought to get a whole lot closer, y’know?”

  Daniel spread his gloved hands. “You’re the boss. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, we won’t. But it’s a shame to come this far and not be able to go the rest of the way.”

  “It’d be a shame to get into trouble we can’t get out of,” Larry said, and Kelly knew they wouldn’t be going any farther.

  “I wonder what it looks like from space,” she said. “What are the satellites picking up?”

  “Dust. Ash. Smoke,” Ruth said.

  “Oh, more than that,” Kelly said. “They’re bound to have infrared sensors to look through all the crap and see exactly where the hot stuff is coming out.”

  “No doubt about it,” Larry agreed. That made Kelly feel good, the way a nod from one of her profs at her doctoral orals had. She’d understood something clearly. Very few things outside the bedroom were more satisfying.

  Inside the bedroom… Did Colin know what was going on? If CNN had somebody in Yellowstone, it was bound to be making the headlines, but was he watching TV or listening to the radio? She hoped he was. She wanted him to see her. He’d be proud of her if he did, and having him proud of her mattered.

  It mattered a lot, in fact. Was that love? If it wasn’t, it sure felt like a stop on the way. They’d known each other for a year and a half now; they’d been lovers for more than a year. Colin hadn’t said the word, not once. Kelly hadn’t, either. She didn’t think it was her place to start talking about love. He was the one who’d been burned. He needed time to work that through.

  How long did he need? Kelly shrugged inside her anorak. This wasn’t the time or place to worry about that.

  Something not far enough ahead went Boom! — a sub-sub-bass, a noise felt more than heard. Kelly felt something else, too: the ground shook under her feet. Ruth pointed into the sky. “Whoa!” she said.

  Whoa! was right. A chunk of rock about the size of a school bus flew through the air with the greatest of ease. For a bad second, Kelly thought the parabola it was describing would end right on top of her. Then she realized the volcanic bomb would fall short.

  It did, by a couple of hundred yards. The ground shook again at the impact. How much would a flying boulder that size weigh? Plenty. And how hot was it? Hot enough so the snow went sssss when it came down. That was just steam rising into the air.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Daniel sounded deeply impressed.

  “I have, in Hawaii. No snow there, of course,” Larry said. “But that was too close for comfort. I think we’re like Kansas City right now-we’ve definitely gone as far as we can go, or maybe a little farther. Move we adjourn. We probably shouldn’t waste much time doing it, either.”

  Daniel still looked disappointed. He didn’t argue this time, though. That enormous boulder still steaming in the snow was a potent argument all by itself. Adjourn they did.

  Marshall Ferguson wanted to talk to an academic advisor at UCSB about as much as he’d wanted to have his wisdom teeth pulled. The dentist had knocked him out beforehand. He’d got to eat ice cream and milk shakes for a couple of days afterwards, and the Lorcets the quack prescribed for pain weren’t the least enjoyable drugs he’d ever swallowed.

  No anesthetic here. If he wasn’t careful now, he not only wouldn’t get the shift in majors he wanted, but he might end up with a bachelor’s degree at the end of next year. Back in the old days, people said, you could flit from major to major like a butterfly in a botanical garden.

  Times had changed. They wanted you out the door, diploma clutched in your sweaty fist, ready to turn into cannon fodder for the big, wide world. Marshall, on the other hand, liked living in Santa Barbara. He liked the weed and the booze and the girls. He liked the very idea of a town where they had a Couch-Burning Day. He even liked some of his classes.

  Whatever the big, wide world held in store, it wouldn’t be as much fun as he was having now. He was all too sure of that. And he was also sure his old man wouldn’t keep subsidizing him once he said farewell to the university. He wasn’t allergic to work, but he vastly preferred partying. Sooner or later, it would have to end. He was also too mournfully sure of that. Later was better, though.

  Rob was still partying, the lucky so-and-so. He hadn’t let an engineering degree get in his way. But Marshall had seen that playing in a band you wanted to take somewhere was also a hell of a lot of work. Besides, unlike Rob, he was hopelessly unmusical himself.

  He’d thought without much hope about landing a Hollywood job with a bachelor’s in film studies. But, like history, it seemed more likely to lead to your working in retail the rest of your life. That looked like hell on earth to him.

  Then again, there was no guarantee he’d ever get any kind of job at all with a film-studies degree. The way the economy bit the big one, nobody was hiring anybody these days. One more reason not to pile up enough units to make them throw you out. If you probably couldn’t get a job any
which way, staying in school looked great by comparison.

  It sure did to Marshall. Convincing Dad wouldn’t be so much fun, but he’d done it before. He’d be able to come through one more time.

  A girl walked out of the advisor’s office. She was kind of cute: a brunette with a button nose and perky tits under a tight blouse. Marshall smiled at her. You never could tell. But she didn’t smile back. Whatever the advisor’d told her, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  “Ms. Rosenblatt will see you now,” the secretary told him. Her nameplate said SANDE ANKENBRANDT. Her hair, by coincidence or design, was sandy, too. “Go on in.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Marshall did.

  Selma Rosenblatt-her first name was on a plaque on the door-was a little older than his mother. She’d let the gray in her hair show, which made her seem older yet. The way she eyed him warned that he was the eleventy-first student she’d seen today, and that she wasn’t delighted to have him here.

  “Take a seat,” she said. “Give me your name and your SIN.” From her name, he’d guessed she would sound like a New Yorker. She didn’t. By the way she talked, she was a Valley girl. Only she wasn’t a girl any more, and hadn’t been for quite a while.

  Sit he did, on the vinyl-covered, badly padded chair in front of her desk. Behind it, she was snuggled by a leather armchair. They let you know who was who, all right. “I’m Marshall Ferguson-two l s,” he said, and rattled off his nine-digit Student Identification Number. Some bureaucrat, his ass in a fancy chair like the advisor’s, must have come up with the acronym, never noticing what he was doing. By now, it was too entrenched in UCSB life to be replaced.

  Ms. Rosenblatt wrote it down as he gave it to her, and used the number pad on her keyboard to enter it into her computer. He knew what she’d see on the monitor: his academic career, in all its occasional splendor.

  One of her sharply penciled eyebrows jumped a quarter of an inch. “Well, well,” she murmured. The admiration might have been reluctant, but it was real. “We don’t see a transcript like yours every day.”

  “My interests keep changing,” Marshall said. That was true, and then again it wasn’t. His interest in staying right where he was had been remarkably constant ever since his sophomore year. The proof of that was how far behind him his sophomore year lay now. But here he was, still an undergrad.

  Selma Rosenblatt studied the transcript more closely. She clicked her tongue between her teeth. “You know,” she remarked, with the air of a literary critic approaching an interesting novel, “if you’d taken Introduction to Geology two years ago, they would have had to turn you loose.”

  She’s on to me! Marshall thought. How many losers sitting in front of his father had felt that same stab of panic? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Marshall did his damnedest not to show it. “I wanted to,” he lied, adding, “but I couldn’t,” which was true. “That was the year the Legislature and the Governor didn’t agree on a budget till November, and everything went to, uh, the dogs.” Sarcasm from his old man-and an occasional whack on the behind-had taught him not to cuss in front of people of the female persuasion.

  “Oh, yes. I remember,” Ms. Rosenblatt assured him. “I didn’t say you could have taken the course, then. I just said, if you had. Then you switched majors, of course, and your breadth requirements changed. You timed it well.”

  “Huh?” Marshall aimed to play innocent as long as he could.

  “You timed it well,” she repeated, with no rancor he could hear. “And what have you got in mind for today?”

  Encouraged, he answered, “Well, I was thinking of changing majors again.”

  “To what?” Again, only curiosity in the advisor’s voice-Marshall hoped.

  “Creative writing,” he answered brightly.

  “Well, let’s see how that would work. We’ll stack the requirements up against what you’ve already taken…” Ms. Rosenblatt punched a few keys. Marshall didn’t have her software, but he’d already gone through the same arcane calculations. Now he had to hope he’d done them right. She studied the monitor. A slow smile spread across her face. It didn’t seem to want to take up residence there, but there it was. “Yes, that may keep you enrolled a couple of quarters longer than sticking to film. I gather you’re not paying for your stay here?”

  “Uh, no,” Marshall admitted. He was chuffed-he’d worked it out exactly the same way her program had.

  “We do try to get people on their way. Some students are more diligent in their efforts to stick around than others, though,” Ms. Rosenblatt said. “And it may be better for the state’s poor, abused balance sheet to have you here paying in rather than out there collecting unemployment or welfare.” She studied Marshall. “Who knows? Maybe you will turn into a writer… and maybe the horse will learn to sing.”

  “Herodotus!” Marshall exclaimed. He remembered the story, read in translation. If only he weren’t such a hopeless goof at languages.

  “Very good. I was a history major once upon a time, too-and look where I ended up.” Ms. Rosenblatt hit a few more keys. “The change is recorded. Now get out of here so I can take on someone who really needs advice.”

  “What do I need, then?” Marshall asked.

  “You need your head examined. But then, that’s one of the reasons you come to a university. Or you’re missing something if it’s not.” Selma Rosenblatt pointed to the door. “Scoot. You’ll probably piss off your folks doing this, but then you’re probably doing it to piss them off.”

  Marshall left. Another more than reasonably pretty girl was sitting there waiting for the advisor. UCSB could spoil you that way. But she also ignored his experimental smile as she went in to do whatever she was going to do.

  Every once in a while, adults made you wonder if maybe they did know what they were up to after all. Marshall’s dad could pull that off sometimes. And Ms. Rosenblatt had the same kind of mojo. She saw right through him. How many college kids had traipsed into her office, to give her the knack of reading at a glance what made them tick?

  She was damn good at it. Damn good, but not quite perfect. Mom wouldn’t care that he had a new major. Mom cared about Mom, and about Teo, and, now and again, about Vanessa. Mom and Vanessa were going through the same adventures at the same time, which gave them a bond they hadn’t had before. Sons? Mom remembered she had them and everything, but all they did was remind her of Dad. The way things were there, that was news as bad as it got.

  Even Dad wouldn’t be too bent out of shape. After all the other changes Marshall had made, Dad would just roll his eyes and wonder out loud if his kid thought his initials were ATM. (Marshall did think so, but he’d learned long before he got to UCSB that saying as much was one of the really bad ideas.) Dad would also wonder-pointedly-if Marshall thought he could get a job with his new major in the unlikely event that he graduated. Marshall could hear the whole thing already, inside his head. He didn’t even need to go home for it.

  He hustled down the stairs and escaped air conditioning and fluorescent lights. The sun smiled on him. The sun smiled on all of Santa Barbara almost all the time. It was May. L.A. was sweltering under a heat wave. Even San Atanasio, which caught a lot of sea breeze, would be up in the eighties. The Valley, Riverside, places like that… Marshall didn’t want to think about them.

  Here, he didn’t have to. It was seventy-three, maybe seventy-four. It might climb to eighty on the hottest days of summer. It might sink down to sixty on the coldest days of winter. The campus had its own lagoon, full of reeds and ducks and shorebirds. How awesome was that?

  Guys and girls went by. Some wore shorts and T-shirts, some jeans and T-shirts. About one in three was talking into a cell phone or texting and trying not to bump into anybody. Bicycles wove in and out among the people on foot. Some of the riders were talking on cell phones, too. And yes, some of them were texting. Even Marshall didn’t think that was exactly brilliant. It wasn’t that he’d never done it, but he didn’t do it a whole lot.

  A girl smiled
at him. He waved back. They’d been in a class together… last year? Year before? He couldn’t remember, any more than he could remember her name. She wasn’t anyone special, just someone vaguely nice. He supposed she thought he was somebody vaguely nice, too.

  He was a creative-writing major now. What kind of story could you make out of a couple of people, each thinking the other was vaguely nice? How would you even start? Or maybe that was the wrong question. How would you end the story? What would you be trying to say? You had to say something about life, the universe, and everything, didn’t you? Otherwise, why would you bother to write?

  Those all struck him as pretty good questions. He didn’t have answers for any of them. How did you find answers for questions like those? By writing? Would you-or somebody-see what was wrong with what you did and how to fix it? Wouldn’t you get awful tired of turning out crap? Sooner or later, you were supposed to stop turning out crap, weren’t you? But how?

  Those struck him as good questions, too. The person he knew who came closest to being a writer was Vanessa, and cranking out reports and proposals and editing other people’s garbage didn’t seem awful goddamn creative to him.

  Maybe I’ll learn, he thought. Or maybe I’ll switch majors again, even if Ms. Rosenblatt does laugh at me.

  VII

  Berkeley. Colin Ferguson always felt he needed a passport when he came up here. The People’s Republic of Berkeley, cops called it. Cops called Santa Monica, the L.A. beachside suburb, the People’s Republic, too. Damn few cops had an idealistic view of human nature. Jerks and assholes-that was what their world boiled down to.

  “Holy shit!” he said happily. That was a parking space, right around the corner from Kelly’s apartment building. Parking spaces in Berkeley were even harder to find than Republicans. He had to parallel-park to get into this one, but he did it. It wasn’t even a two-hour zone; he could stay as long as he wanted. He put on the Club and got out.