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Supervolcano All Fall Down(34)

By:Harry Turtledove


She shivered, not because she mourned the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome but because she was bloody cold. They’d scheduled the American geologists’ conclave for December in northern Oregon before the supervolcano erupted. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Now . . .

People kept saying Los Angeles was the new Seattle. Kelly didn’t think that was true, but people kept saying it no matter what she thought. Going with it for the sake of argument, that made Portland the new . . . well, what?

Seattle lay about 1,100 miles north of L.A. What was 1,100 miles north of Portland? The end of the world was the first thing that occurred to Kelly, but she’d actually checked on a map before she came up here. On that same crappy scale of analogies, Portland was the new Skagway, Alaska.

And it felt like it. Snow swirled through the air and drifted on the sidewalks. Heat was in short supply. By law, the only places where you could set your thermostat higher than fifty were schools and hospitals. She wore the same clothes she would have taken to Yellowstone in winter, and she was glad to have them. Ice was forming on the Willamette and even on the broad, swift-flowing Columbia.

When the assembled geologists weren’t giving papers or listening to them, they did the same thing as every other group of conventioneers ever hatched: they headed for the bar. It was just off the lobby, to the right of the glass-and-bronze revolving door that let you in.

Booze didn’t really warm you up, but it made you feel as if it did, which was often good enough. And Oregon was microbrew heaven. Even the new, abbreviated growing season around here seemed to be enough to let barley mature. Behind the bar stood a rack of Oregon reds and whites from before the eruption. When those were gone, they’d be gone for good. Oregon wasn’t wine country any more, and wouldn’t be for nobody knew how many years to come.

And booze lubricated social gatherings. Kelly was halfway down a hoppy IPA when a friend of hers walked in. She waved. Daniel Olson nodded back. He picked his way through the chattering crowd. They hugged. They’d both been plucked from Yellowstone by helicopters just ahead of the supervolcano eruption. Along with two other rescued geologists, Kelly had crashed in his apartment in Missoula till Colin finagled a way out for her.

Daniel ordered himself a pale ale, too, and clinked bottles with her. “Did I hear you got married?” he said. She spread the fingers on her left hand to show off the ring. He nodded. “Sweet. And a job, too? At—what is it? Dominguez State?”

“Cal State Dominguez, yeah,” Kelly agreed. People said San Francisco State and Long Beach State, but Cal State Northridge and Cal State Dominguez or Cal State Dominguez Hills. Why they did that, she had no idea, but they did. She asked, “How’s Missoula these days? Do I want to know?”

“Well, it’s still there and still kind of in business, which is more than you can say for most of Montana,” Daniel answered. “But everything that comes in comes from the west. We’ve got electricity, but no natural gas.”

Kelly nodded. “I remember when it went out.” The big pipe that fed Missoula came to it across the rest of Montana. Or rather, it had come across Montana. Now it lay squashed under God only knew how many feet of ash and dust and rock.

“Not much gasoline, either,” Daniel went on. “We chopped down a hell of a lot of trees to get through last winter, and we’ll chop down more this time around. We’ll regret it one of these days, but people are too worried about not freezing now to give a damn about later.”

“Welcome to America,” Kelly said, and the other geologist spread his hands in resigned agreement. When this quarter’s balance sheet decided whether you got promoted, you wouldn’t care what happened a few years down the line. And when it really was a choice between fuel in the fireplace and a Missoula winter on steroids, you’d chop down the pines now and let the bare hillsides take care of themselves in the sweet bye and bye.

“So, when are you presenting your paper?” Daniel asked.

“Morning session tomorrow,” Kelly answered. She was one of the world’s leading experts on everything that led up to the supervolcano blast. Passing on what she knew . . . probably won’t matter one goddamn bit, she thought. By the time another supervolcano went off, odds were they wouldn’t understand English any more. And even if they did, you couldn’t do anything about a supervolcano eruption anyhow.

“I’ll be there,” Daniel promised.

Kelly gulped a little; Daniel knew as much about the Yellowstone supervolcano as she did. At least partly to soften him up, she said, “You want to have breakfast tomorrow?”