Interesting later. Now was business time. Kelly talked about everything the supervolcano had done in the runup to the eruption: the earthquakes all the way back to Hebgen Lake in 1959, the rising magma domes, the hot springs and geysers picking up, the premonitory volcanic outbursts in the southwest and northeast parts of Yellowstone, and finally the big kaboom.
“Even by supervolcano standards, it proved to be a large eruption: not quite the size of the one 2.1 million years ago, but close,” she said. “Climatic effects have proved at least as severe as the models predicted.” Her shiver underlined that. Even with all these bodies in the room, it was bloody cold. She went on, “So have other environmental impacts. Geologists did everything they could to alert the authorities to what a supervolcano eruption would mean. The authorities, unfortunately, didn’t want to listen to us. At the time, I was furious. In retrospect, I don’t think it mattered much. During the last big recession before the eruption, there was a lot of talk about companies and banks that were too big to fail. The Yellowstone supervolcano was a disaster too big to let us succeed. No matter what we did or didn’t do, we were going to get overwhelmed. We grew up in the Golden Age. It’s gone. It won’t come back for decades or lifetimes, if it ever does.”
It wasn’t anything her audience didn’t already know. They’d known it before the supervolcano went off, which was more than the rest of the world could say. But hearing it backed up with all the data Kelly’d presented was sobering all the same.
When she asked for questions, the ones she got were mostly technical—about the order and intensity of the precursor signs, about possible steps the government might have taken and what those could have accomplished, and the like. It was all academic, and everybody knew it. Yellowstone wasn’t the only supervolcano. The one on Sumatra deserved careful watching, and so did the one on the Kamchatka Peninsula. There was even one near Mono Lake in eastern California. But none of the others seemed likely to erupt for thousands of years. The Midwest had drawn the short straw this time around. Well, so had the whole planet.
Professor Rheinburg beamed at Kelly as things broke up. “Good job! Very solid!” He clapped his hands with no sound.
“Thanks.” She gathered up her papers. “I’m just glad it’s over.”
“I always feel that way, and I’ve been doing this about as long as you’ve been alive,” he said. “So, how’s your job?”
“Terrific,” she replied. Having one was terrific. She had no doubt he was responsible for it.
He didn’t let on. He never had. “How’s everything else? How’s your life? How do you like being married?”
“So far, so good. Better than so good,” Kelly said. One day at a time. That was how you did anything.
VI
Thunk! The axe bit into the pine log. Rob Ferguson raised it and let it fall again. Little by little, trees turned into firewood. You could work up a sweat chopping wood even in a Maine winter. And the way Maine winters were these days, that was really saying something.
Thunk! Rob got the axe to do what he wanted now. When he’d first started with it, he’d counted himself lucky for not amputating anyone else’s fingers or his own leg. These days, it was just a tool—a tool you had to respect, sure, but a tool all the same. Thunk!
Biff came out of the Trebor Mansion Inn. He held up his left wrist to display a windup watch. Rob wore one, too. They’d had electricity through what was laughably called the summer in these parts, but it was out again now that the Ice Age had returned. Without it, they had no cell coverage, and without coverage their phones were nothing but little plastic bricks.
To amplify the message, Biff said, “Town meeting’s in half an hour.”
“Gotcha.” Rob swung the axe again. Another billet of what would be firewood jumped from the log.
Biff eyed it and the ones lying in the snow nearby. They were all of pretty much the same size and shape. “Dude, you’re getting to be like Conan the Barbarian with that thing.” The rhythm guitarist jerked a mittened thumb at the axe.
“Practice makes pregnant, same as with anything else.” Rob hefted his implement of destruction. “What I think is, it’s goddamn funny to be using a genuine axe for a change, instead of—” He mimed pulling hot licks from a guitar.
“Axe . . . axe . . . Yeah!” Biff grinned. You took the nickname for your instrument for granted until you did a compare-and-contrast with the real Craftsman article.
Rob went on chopping wood for another ten minutes or so. You had to earn your keep, all right. As soon as the power failed, Guilford and the rest of Maine north of the Interstate fell back in time to the land of Currier and Ives. What those nostalgia-filled prints didn’t tell you was how much goddamn work that nineteenth-century life took. You had to find that out for yourself. Rob had, and his hands had new ridges of callus to prove it.