Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2 Read online

  “How come? Because grad students are supposed to worry, that’s how come. It makes them work harder. If you thought everything was cool, you’d try to skate through your research, and then I wouldn’t enjoy having you around so much. Nope-you need fear and deadlines. And so did I.”

  Kelly would have liked to tell him he was full of it. She didn’t even try. She knew too well he wasn’t. What had kept her cramming her head with facts and formulas before her orals but fear of failing? If she’d been sure she would pass, she wouldn’t have studied so hard-and she would know less now.

  “Wait till you have grad students of your own,” Rheinburg said. “You’ll find out what I mean. Oh, will you ever!”

  People were slithering into sleeping bags. Kelly hadn’t done that in a while. She was used to sleeping on a nice, soft bed with a nice, warm husband. In spite of a foam pad between her and the ground, she tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable and not having much luck.

  She couldn’t go off behind a bush the next morning: no bushes to go behind. The geologists went behind Humvees instead, pointers and setters choosing different vehicles. Eventually, the Humvees wouldn’t be able to go any farther. What would they do then? Turn their backs, she supposed. Or, more likely, they’d be able to go behind boulders by then. The supervolcano had thrown great big rocks a hell of a long way.

  In fact, the Humvees lasted till late that afternoon. They were tough critters. They kept going for quite some time after the eruption had destroyed any sign that human beings had ever lived or built things in these parts. Had they been half-tracks, they might have gone farther yet. Or they might not have; wouldn’t tracks be even more susceptible to grit than wheels were? Kelly didn’t know one way or the other. When she asked at the stop for supper, the soldiers, who thought they did know, got into a hellacious argument, some saying one thing, some the other.

  They were still close to eighty miles from the crater when even the valiant Humvees couldn’t force their way through the dust and volcanic ash any more. “It’s a shame we couldn’t get helicopters to take us all the way in and out,” Kelly remarked the next morning as the geologists got ready for the trek that would follow if they wanted to-and if they could-see the caldera up close and personal.

  Larry Skrtel clapped a hand to his forehead: as much emotion as she’d ever seen him show. “Helicopters, she says!” the USGS veteran exclaimed. “Kelly, it took hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat to get the Humvees. The way things are, the way they’re gonna stay for as long as anyone can see, nobody will spend a dime on anything the computer geeks and bean counters call unessential. Like I just told you, it took a special miracle to get ’em to spend a nickel.”

  Mounting the expedition had cost Uncle Sam and however many taxpayers were still paying taxes a pretty fair pile of nickels. Skrtel was bound to be right, though: to a bean counter, it looked like small change. What did they say about the Feds? A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. That was the line. That was the attitude, too.

  But something else Skrtel said raised Kelly’s hackles, even if she wasn’t sure what hackles were. “Who says this is unessential?” she demanded irately. “What could be more important than understanding how the supervolcano did its number on us?”

  He spread his callused hands in resignation. “Darn near anything,” he answered. “It’s not gonna go off again, not the way it did-the magma pool takes a long time to fill up again after it blasts out. Ordinary volcanic eruptions? After what we’ve already been through, those are a piece of cake.”

  Some of the ordinary eruptions that would come would be enormous by the standards civilization was used to. Enormous, yes, but not humongous: the technical term geologists used for a major supervolcano blast. And Skrtel’s words brought back Kelly’s old worry-if studying the supervolcano was obsolete, wasn’t she?

  Well, it wasn’t quite. There might be hope for her yet. And she had more urgent things to worry about. One was a volcanic hiccup, the equivalent of an earthquake aftershock, only with lava. Another was getting lost in this literally tractless wilderness and not making it out again.

  MREs and plastic water bottles made her pack feel as if she were carrying another person piggyback. Everybody who was going forward had a GPS set. That ought to make getting lost less of a worry. And it did. . up to a point. Everybody had a compass, too, but the damn things swung at what looked like random. The supervolcano hadn’t belched out much iron in relative terms, but there was plenty to confuse anything that relied on the Earth’s magnetic field.

  GPS systems didn’t, of course. That didn’t mean Kelly trusted hers completely. When sorrows came, they came not single spies but in battalions. She laughed at herself. Where the hell had she come up with that bit of Shakespeare from an undergrad lit course? Only showed that general-ed requirements didn’t always go to waste.

  Off she went with her colleagues. The dust and ashes scrunched under her hiking boots. She’d let herself fall out of shape since she got married, too. Well, things could’ve been worse. She could have been slogging through mud as deep as she was tall.

  Still nothing man-made visible. Gone-all gone, buried, on the way to fossilization. She looked ahead. Even the mountains seemed strange. So much volcanic rubbish had fallen on them, it had changed their heights and their shapes. That should have been impossible. It wasn’t, not to the supervolcano.

  Scanning the mountainsides with binoculars, she did spot a few dead pines sticking up through the dust and ash. Back in the day, you could see dead trunks from the big fires of the 1980s sticking up through snow. Colin said those reminded him of the stubble on a corpse’s cheek. Kelly never would have thought of that herself, which didn’t mean it didn’t fit.

  Larry Skrtel called back to Missoula. He had a satellite phone. Like the GPS, those still worked. They also carried little radios, whose signals would cross the ruined land. Geoff Rheinburg called them Dick Tracy wrist radios. They weren’t quite, but that came close enough.

  Except for the noises the geologists made, the world was eerily quiet. No insects buzzed or chirped. No birds called. No hawks or vultures glided overhead. At night, no coyotes yipped and yowled. No dogs howled at the moon. No cats screamed. No mosquitoes imitated tiny dentists’ drills. It wasn’t the worst of the mosquito season, nowhere near, but there should have been a few.

  “You’re right!” Larry exclaimed when Kelly mentioned that. He made as if to slap himself upside the head. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Hard to notice something that isn’t there,” Professor Rheinburg said.

  “Now we know what the supervolcano really was,” Kelly said. When her comrades sent her blank looks, she explained: “The world’s biggest bug bomb-what else?”

  They groaned. She’d been sure they would. “Now that’s what I call overkill!” Skrtel said. Then he paused thoughtfully. “Or is it? Nothing smaller than a supervolcano could even slow the bastards down.”

  “It’s not just the world’s biggest bug bomb,” Rheinburg said. “It’s the world’s biggest people bomb, too.”

  No one said anything to that for some little while. The United States, one of the most thoroughly measured and counted countries in the world, couldn’t come close to being sure how many people the supervolcano had killed, not even two years after the eruption. Somewhere between two and three million: that was the best guess. Somewhere between five and ten times that many were still homeless.

  Refugee camps were a staple of stand-up comics and late-night talk-show hosts. They weren’t so funny if you were stuck in one. And if you’d ended up in one after the supervolcano blew, odds were you remained stuck there. You could get out if you landed a job somewhere, but plenty of other people, most of them not from camps, were chasing that job, too. And there were hardly any jobs to land to begin with.

  Colin’s daughter had managed to get out. Kelly had never met Vanessa Ferguson. Colin was tight-lipped about her. Kelly gathered that th
e guy for whom she’d moved to Denver, the guy who was indirectly to blame for her landing in Camp Constitution, was his age, maybe older. What that said about Vanessa, Kelly didn’t want to know.

  But she was out. She was doing some national-service gig, salvaging what could be salvaged from the eastern fringes of the eruption zone. There was a government program that did make sense, no two ways about it. Because the supervolcano wasn’t done causing casualties. Oh, no. It was just getting started.

  This would be the third harvest in a row that didn’t happen in what used to be the world’s breadbasket. Well, the world’s breadbasket had taken one in the breadbasket. How many people would go hungry on account of that? No way to know, not yet, but the number wasn’t small.

  And how many would freeze on account of climate change from the supervolcano? Some already had frozen. But that would only get worse. Canada, the northern United States, Scandinavia, England, Russia. . Drop Los Angeles’ average temperature by five degrees Celsius (nine in the scale she still used when she wasn’t being scientific), and you could still live there. Drop London’s or Moscow’s or Toronto’s? Living in any of those places after the climate change fully kicked in didn’t strike her as a whole lot of fun.

  Besides, how hard would the sudden cooling hit all the big agricultural areas that weren’t caught by the ashfall? Again, nobody knew for sure. Everybody would find out, probably the hard way. Kelly did know the computer models weren’t encouraging.

  Easier to lay your worries aside when you were exhausted. Which she was. And she, and everyone else, would only get tireder as they slogged on toward the caldera. Maybe I should have listened to Colin and stayed home, she thought. But that was bare heartbeats before sleep dragged her under.

  She felt more like going on the next morning. She felt enough more like going on, in fact, that even an MRE for breakfast didn’t discourage her. . much. The instant coffee was nasty, but it packed a caffeine punch.

  Away they went. The wind was at their backs, blowing toward the crater. All the same, Kelly got whiffs of sulfur in the air. It was as if the Devil had set up shop in the phenomenal world. She shuddered. Yeah, it was just like that.

  Every so often, the geologists stopped to collect specimens. Mass spectrography of samples of dust and rock and ash from varying distances from the caldera would tell them all kinds of interesting things about what went into the magma pool deep underground. That was the hope, anyhow. Right this minute, Kelly was just glad the technology had come far enough that the samples could be little tiny ones. She didn’t want to carry one more thing than she had to. For that matter, she didn’t want to carry the stuff she did have to. Her backpacking muscles were as out of practice as her hiking muscles.

  When she complained about it, Daniel Olson gave her a crooked grin. “It’ll get light faster than you wish it would,” said the geologist from Missoula. “Trust me on that one.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. Much of what she was carrying was food and water. She had enough to get her through the planned length of the trek, and a little more besides. If something went wrong, though, they were liable to find out how far they could go on empty.

  In due course, Larry Skrtel consulted his GPS and announced, “Well, we’re inside Yellowstone National Park.”

  “I hate to tell you, but it’s not worth the price of admission any more,” Kelly said. That was definitely in the running for the understatement-of-the-year prize. The ground here was as ugly a gray-brown mash-up of dust and ash as it had been half a mile farther northwest. Here and there, igneous boulders-yes, there were plenty-gave the landscape variety: they made it ugly in a different way.

  Daniel tugged on Larry’s sleeve like a spoiled six-year-old. He sounded like one, too, squealing, “I wanna see the buffaloes! And the grizzly bears! And the wolves and things, too!” in a high, thin voice.

  Kelly laughed. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. The USGS geologist’s face was only half visible, what with his breathing mask and hat, but he seemed closer to tears than to mirth. “So do I, man,” he answered softly. “So do I.”

  Yellowstone’s wide-open spaces-its wide-open, protected spaces-had saved bison from extinction at the end of the nineteenth century. It hadn’t quite been the only place where grizzlies still lived in the Lower Forty-eight, but it had held more of them than any other area of similar size. Wolves had been a recent reintroduction here, but they’d done well enough to leave the park and start raiding nearby farmers’ flocks and herds.

  All gone now. Buffalo herds? Grizzlies? Wolf packs? Gone, gone, gone. Hell, the whole park was gone, and it was-or had been-bigger than several states. So were the nearby flocks and herds and crops. . and the ones not so nearby, too.

  “I loved this place,” Kelly said.

  “We all did,” Geoff Rheinburg agreed.

  “I loved it,” she repeated. “I did, but there’s nothing left, not even the parts that didn’t fall into the caldera. It’s off the map-I mean, literally off the map. You can still figure out what some of the mountains are, but even that’s not easy.”

  “Tell me about it,” her chairman said. “I’ve been photographing them as we go by, to help work out the changes in the local geography.”

  Something far overhead made grukking noises. “A raven!” Kelly exclaimed in amazement. It was the first one they’d seen. “I feel like something out of Edgar Allan Poe-I want it to go ‘Nevermore.’”

  “Not me,” Daniel said. “During the Civil War, when Sherman was marching through Georgia, he said he’d wreck it so well that even a crow flying across it would have to carry provisions. I was looking to see if the raven had a backpack.”

  “You suppose it’s carrying MREs?” Kelly asked.

  “Wouldn’t that be cruelty to animals?” Rheinburg put in. They could always bitch about their alleged nourishment.

  “Seriously, though, something may sprout where it craps,” Daniel said. “Seeds in the shit, a little extra fertilizer. . That’s one of the ways life starts up again after big eruptions.”

  A million ravens crapping for a million years. . Kelly shook her head. It wouldn’t take anywhere near so long. A million years from now, the supervolcano probably would have gone off again and mellowed again afterwards. In geological terms, these things healed fast. It was only in terms of human lifetimes that they seemed long-lasting.

  Only? She shook her head again. Scientists had invented all kinds of other time frames to help them grasp things that happened very slowly or very quickly. But a human lifetime and its smaller divisions-those were what they lived in, the same as other people.

  They reached the crater at the end of the fourth day. The air smelled of brimstone and metal. It smelled hot, too, or Kelly thought so, even if no thermometer showed a rise in temperature till they got very close to the edge.

  When they did. . When they did, it was with a certain amount, or more than a certain amount, of trepidation. One little burp from the supervolcano, something so small as to be unnoticeable next to the eruption that dropped so much of Yellowstone into the frying pan, would be plenty to make sure the presumptuous geologists didn’t make it back to the Humvees.

  No doubt about the heat at the edge. Kelly could see the air shimmer, the way it did above a desert highway in the summer-or, more to the point, above a burner on a stove. The odor of sulfur was stronger now. Had people got the idea for hell by staring down into active volcanoes? Kelly wouldn’t have been surprised.

  With the others, she collected mineral samples from the caldera lip. She carefully labeled them, using the GPS to get her exact position. One of these days, she thought, I’ll have to see where this would have been in Yellowstone before the supervolcano went off. Like the others, she’d loved the great park and mourned its loss-along with so much else.

  But that would be one of these days. She had no idea when she’d come back to the caldera, or whether she ever would. She stepped forward till she could look down and look across.

  It w
as like sticking your head into an oven on high. You could do it for a little while, but not long. More of the lava half a mile down had congealed into rock than had been true when she flew over the crater in a Learjet. She snapped a few photos. Then she had to step back and cool off for a bit.

  The rest of the geologists were doing the same thing. Awe softened Larry Skrtel’s features as he drew back from the very edge. Kelly knew he wasn’t a man who awed easily. “The scale of the thing!” he said.

  “It’s amazing,” Kelly agreed. It was too big for anything so mundane as mere words. More than heat shimmers blurred the caldera’s far wall. It had to be thirty-five or forty miles away: this was a bigger eruption than the one that had created Yellowstone. More than half an hour at freeway speeds. How many thousands of years would it be before there were any roads here again, much less freeways?

  Kelly stepped up for another look. Something out there on the crater floor geysered upward. But that wasn’t boiling water. It was melted rock. She got a pic: a good one, she saw when she checked her viewfinder. Gold and red against the gray-no, things down there hadn’t calmed down, nor would they for a long time to come.

  Anywhere on earth but here (except maybe on the Big Island of Hawaii), that would have been spectacular, astonishing, even newsworthy. In this place, what had gone before utterly dwarfed it. Such minor spurts happened all the time. Satellites recorded some of them. Others just made small squiggles on seismographs. Too many trees had fallen in this forest. No one cared if the next one was noisy.

  After a while, Geoff Rheinburg said, “People, we have done what we came to do. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” Kelly couldn’t remember hearing an idea she liked better.

  XI

  Winter. Back in his SoCal days, Rob Ferguson had thought the season a bummer, yeah. It got kind of chilly, yeah. Sometimes it rained. When it did, the freeways clogged. There were landslides if it rained a lot. Every once in a while, one would squash a car on Pacific Coast Highway.