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 was 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.