Read Supervolcano: Eruption Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
Supervolcano: Eruption (49 page)
“Suppose there isn’t just a year without a summer,” Justin said. “Suppose there are five or six or ten years like that all in a row. What does Maine look like by the end of that time?”
“Hell,” Barber answered promptly. “Dante’s hell, I mean. The book is called
The Inferno
, but Satan’s buried in ice. At the end of ten years like that, we’d probably have enough ice to keep Old Scratch from getting loose for quite a while.”
The Inferno
, but Satan’s buried in ice. At the end of ten years like that, we’d probably have enough ice to keep Old Scratch from getting loose for quite a while.”
A cat wandered in, a cat almost big enough to be a bobcat. The Barber family semiprofessionally bred Maine Coons. They handled the weather in these parts as well as a critter was likely to. And they were also uncommonly good-natured. Vanessa would go gaga over them, at least at first. Rob suspected she’d get bored with them, though; they weren’t contrary enough to suit her.
This beast rubbed his leg. It made motorboat noises when he bent down and stroked it. “I ought to keep one or two in the bedding, the way the Australian Aborigines did with their dogs,” he said. “They’re like hot-water bottles with ears, you know?”
Justin nodded. “A three-dog night was really cold. That’s how that turkey of a band got its name.”
“Once upon a time, I liked them,” Barber said. “I got over it.”
Thinking about warmth made Rob think about electricity. He rather wished he hadn’t. “How long will the power stay on?” he wondered out loud. “Won’t storms start knocking the lines down? And if even the utility companies can’t get gas to send out repair crews . . .”
“In that case, we welcome back the nineteenth century in all its glory.” Barber made his tongue-clicking noise again. “Whether that level of technology can support this level of population . . . Well, we’ll all find out, won’t we?”
“Won’t be as much fun playing acoustic sets all the time,” Justin said.
Rob stabbed a forefinger at him. “I was just thinking the same thing! You came out with it before I could.”
“You two might as well be married. I was married once upon a time,” Barber said. “I got over that, too, but it was expensive.”
That only reminded Rob of his own parents’ divorce. And he didn’t know what was up with Teo suddenly running out on Mom after such a long stretch of not-quite-wedded bliss. He had the feeling more was going on than Mom was telling. If Dad knew what, and chances were he did, he wasn’t talking. All he said about it was
Ask your mother
. He wanted to know what the chances were for Rob’s coming back to California when he tied the knot with Kelly.
Ask your mother
. He wanted to know what the chances were for Rob’s coming back to California when he tied the knot with Kelly.
Rob feared those chances were anything but good. Getting from Guilford to Dover-Foxcroft was a major undertaking these days. Getting from Guilford to Bangor or Portland might not be impossible, but it sure wldn’t be easy. Rob would have liked to go to his father’s second wedding. If he did, though, how would he make it back here? He didn’t want to run out on the band. Justin and Charlie and Biff and the polymorphously perverse thing that was Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles seemed more like family these days than did the people connected by arbitrary ties of flesh and blood.
Justin said, “I’m getting hungry. You want to go down to Calvin’s Kitchen for breakfast?”
“Do I want to?” Rob echoed. “Not so you’d notice. But we’ve got to eat, don’t we? Are Biff and Charlie up yet?”
As if to prove they were, they chose that moment to thunder down the stairs. Off to the diner they all went. It was only about a five-minute walk. The place just didn’t cut it for dinner. Despite Dick Barber’s opinion, Rob didn’t think it was all that wonderful for breakfast, either.
Still, you couldn’t mess up eggs and sausages and bacon and hash browns too badly. What got to Rob more than the food was the isolation. The waitress and the cook behind the counter were polite enough, but they were serving strangers. They knew the locals—and vice versa—the way Rob and Charlie and Biff and Justin knew one another. A black Baptist family moving onto a street full of Chasidim could have felt no more cut off from the neighborhood.
He was almost done with his breakfast when it occurred to him that isolation could have more than one meaning. If fuel oil and gasoline had trouble reaching rural Maine north and west of the Interstate, how about food? You could cut down trees and burn them, and maybe you wouldn’t freeze, yeah. But could you feed half a state’s worth of people on moose and ducks and whatever else you could shoot?
It didn’t seem likely. What were people going to do if the food ran low, though? All the L.L.Bean gear in the world didn’t help against hunger. Only eatables could. But where would they come from?
XXI
B
ryce Miller dropped three copies of his dissertation—thump!—on his chairperson’s desk. The physical copies were a formality, left over from the days when theses were actually typed. Professor Har
vey Harriman had had his finger in every chapter of the Word file from which the diss was printed. There seemed to be two kinds of chairpersons: the ones who didn’t do enough and the ones who did too much. Harvey Harriman was of the second school.
ryce Miller dropped three copies of his dissertation—thump!—on his chairperson’s desk. The physical copies were a formality, left over from the days when theses were actually typed. Professor Har
vey Harriman had had his finger in every chapter of the Word file from which the diss was printed. There seemed to be two kinds of chairpersons: the ones who didn’t do enough and the ones who did too much. Harvey Harriman was of the second school.
He stuck out his hand now. “Congratulations, Bryce,” he said in his soft, precise voice. He was heading towards emeritus status, but looked twenty years younger than he was. Maybe, like Dorian Gray, he had a portrait somewhere that was taking a beating.
He’d been at UCLA since dissertations were typed on Selec-trics, and since the University of California system had money. He’d probably had his plaid jacket about that long, too. His father’s translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles were classics among classicists. He’d never done anything so illustrious himself, but he was more than capable.
“Thanks,” Bryce said. “I’m only sorry it took so much longer than I thought it would.”
“They have a way of doing that,” Professor Harriman said. “And it may be
agathe tykhe
in disguise, you know. Suppose you’d finished when you expected to. Suppose you’d taken a job at the University of Wyoming or Idaho State or some such place.” By the way he spoke, all the colleges and universities in the mountain West interchangeable.
agathe tykhe
in disguise, you know. Suppose you’d finished when you expected to. Suppose you’d taken a job at the University of Wyoming or Idaho State or some such place.” By the way he spoke, all the colleges and universities in the mountain West interchangeable.
Even if that was naive, he had a point. It
was
good luck not to have wound up somewhere like that. Bryce might not have got out if he had. “I had my brush with the supervolcano any which way,” he said.
was
good luck not to have wound up somewhere like that. Bryce might not have got out if he had. “I had my brush with the supervolcano any which way,” he said.
“Yes, so you did,” Harriman agreed. “I’m glad you made it back in one piece. And I’m glad to have one copy of the thesis for myself, one for the department library, and one for the University Research Library.”
How often had Bryce wrestled with Doric verb forms in the classics library? Lots. One whole bookcase was full of bound dissertations going back half a century and more. Did anybody ever look at them? He knew he never had. Some eventually got turned into proper books. The rest . . . must have seemed important at the time, at least to the shlubs cranking them out.
And was the world ready for a fat new study of Theocritus and the other leading Hellenistic poets? Would Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard get into a ferocious bidding war over the publication rights? If they did, they might run the advance they paid him all the way up into three figures. But they wouldn’t. Or it sure wasn’t likely.
As if to underscore that, Professor Harriman asked, “What will you do now that you’ve finished?”
“Look for work. What else can I do now?” Bryce said.
“Mm, yes.” Harriman didn’t need to worry about it. He might not have been tenured since the Hellenistic Age, but he seemed as if he had. He coughed delicately now. “The job situation is . . . difficult at the moment. In the present emergency, classics departments find themselves under unprecedented pressure. Surely you are aware of this.”
“Surely,” Bryce said, deadpan. Slots opened up only when the current holder dropped dead. Even then, a university was at least as likely to cut a position as to fill it. It wasn’t just positions, either. Whole classics departments were facing the axe. So were French and Italian departments and anything else that didn’t immediately help people dig out from the supervolcano. What kind of world they’d have once they dug out—if they could dig out—they’d worry about later.
“Well, then . . .” Harvey Harriman spread his well-manicured hands.
“Oh, I’ll take any kind of job I can get,” Bryce said. “If somebody wants me to teach Western Civ at a community college, I’ll do that. If a Catholic high school needs a Latin teacher, I can do that. Or if all I can come up with is a job job, if you know what I mean, I’ll do that, too.”
“I do understand. The wolf at the door is a harsh taskmaster,” Harriman said, as if he knew anything about the wolf at the door. Yeah, as if! His father might have grounded him if he’d messed up too many declensions, but that was about it. Sighing, he went on, “It seems a shame to have to turn your back on what took so long and required so much work and study to accomplish.”
Bryce thought it seemed a shame, too. But starving seemed an even bigger shame. “You don’t always get to do what you want to do,” he said. “Sometimes you do what you have to do, and pick up the pieces from there.”
“Will you come back to UCLA in June for the year’s commencement?” Professor Harriman asked.
“I hope so.” Bryce had blown off the ceremony after his A.B. and M.A. His mother would probably disown him if he did it again. So would Susan, whose opinion mattered more to him—and who was waiting for him right this minute.
He said his good-byes to Professor Harriman. He wondered when he would ever see the inside of the UCLA Classics Department again. Once upon a time, business weenies had infested the Public Policy building. Now they had a bigger, newer, spiffier one all their own: the Anderson School of Management. Classics got some of their leftovers—or their sloppy seconds, if you were feeling uncommonly cynical.
Susan called the North Campus Center Maxim’s. Maybe that was a History Department in-joke; Bryce had never heard it before he started hanging out with her. She sat at one of the big tables outside. Unusually in this winter of the earth’s discontent, it wasn’t raining. She got up as he drew near. “Are you official?”
“I’m done, all right—like a roast,” he answered.
“Hey, you did something special,” she said. “How do you want to celebrate?”
“People would talk if we did that right here,” Bryce said.
Susan made a face at him. “How about coffee and a danish instead?”
“Talk about second prizes!” he said mournfully. She poked him in the ribs. That didn’t do much—she was far more ticklish than he was. They walked into Maxim’s together.
Susan did get coffee and a danish. Bryce got a danish and a Coke instead. Susan bought. “You just turned in your diss,” she said. “How awesome is that?”
“I don’t have a job. I don’t have much chance for a job. I was just talking with my chairperson about what I was gonna do. He didn’t have any terrific ideas, either. How awesome is
that
?” One more reason for Bryce to let Susan buy.
that
?” One more reason for Bryce to let Susan buy.
“Something will turn up for you,” she said. “Something will turn up for me when I finish, too. Would you have put all that time and effort into it if you really thought you’d never get the chance to use it?”
They sat down at a couple of chairs facing the brickwork around a circular gas fire. The warmth was welcome. No doubt Susan had meant the question rhetorically. Bryce gave it serious consideration all the same. At last, he said, “You know, I think I would. What else would I have been doing instead? Retail? Real estate? I might have made more money in real estate—”
“The way the roller coaster goes, you might not have, too,” Susan broke in.
“You’ve got that right,” Bryce said. “Whatever I did, I wouldn’t have had much fun doing it. Here I am, close to thirty, and I’ve got away with not working for a living yet. Can’t go on forever, not unless you inherit or something, but I’ve had a pretty good run.”
One of the reasons he’d got away with not working for a living was that Vanessa had dropped out and did work. Add her real salary to the dribs and drabs he brought in, and they’d done tolerably well. He’d had more trouble staying afloat since the breakup. But he didn’t want to remember Vanessa now.
“You’re—not practical,” Susan said. Vanessa had told him the same thing. He seemed to have to remember her, like it or not. She’d said it with intent to wound, though, if not with intent to condemn. With Susan, it was just a statement of fact.
“Guilty,” he said. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know it himself. “I’m afraid nobody who writes poems modeled after ancient pastorals will get a lot of ink in the
Wall Street Journal
.”
Wall Street Journal
.”
“Thatou’ot what I meant. You’ve published them. I think that’s wonderful,” Susan said.
Bryce thought it was wonderful, too. Of course, he’d made exactly no money from any of them. And here, out of the blue, Vanessa’s brother sold—really sold—a story. If that made Bryce jealous (and it did), he was sure it drove Vanessa nuts. He said, “But no one should hang out with me because she expects to get rich doing it. Or even eat, necessarily.”
“I’m hanging out with you because I want to, silly,” Susan said. “One way or another, we’ll make ends meet. Who needs more than that?”
Plenty of people did, or thought they did. Vanessa had always had filet mignon tastes, even when the budget yelled for ground chuck. She was never happy with what she had. He sometimes thought, especially toward the end, that she couldn’t be happy without something to be unhappy about.
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