Supervolcano: Eruption

I

Colin Ferguson woke up with a hangover, alone in an unfamiliar double bed. Not the best way to start the morning. “Fuck,” he muttered, and sat up. Moving made his headache worse. Even the quiet four-letter word seemed too damn loud, always a bad sign. The inside of his mouth tasted as if something had died in there a week ago.

Thick maroon curtains kept out most of the daylight. Most, but not enough. He felt like an owl squinting at the sun. Yeah, he’d done a number on himself, all right. Bigtime.

“Fuck,” he said again, not quite so softly this time. Here he was, in a rented room in… For a second or two, he no-shit couldn’t remember where the hell he was. The hangover just hurt. Not remembering honest to God scared him.

If it hadn’t come back to him, he could have got the answer from the telephone book. The nightstand by the bed was a two-shelf unit attached to the wall. No drawer-using one would have cost an extra seventy-one cents a room, or whatever. Multiply that by a raft of rooms and you knew why Motel 6 never lost money. The top shelf held a phone and his watch, which was that close to falling on the uncarpeted floor. On the bottom shelf lay the phone book and a Gideon Bible bound in bilious blue.

Motel 6. Jackson, Wyoming. The day after Memorial Day. He did remember. “Fuck,” he said one more time. Back when he’d set up this vacation, Jackson, Wyoming, had seemed about as far from the L.A. suburb of San Atanasio as he could get. As far from the fiasco he’d made of his life.

What was supposed to be a laugh came out more like a raven’s croak. That was one of those jokes that would have been funny if only it were funny.

You couldn’t get away that easily. Most of the time, you couldn’t get away at all. Being a cop taught you all kinds of lessons. That one stood pretty high on the list.

He’d slept alone in that not very comfortable double bed because Louise, his wife of close to thirty years, was currently living in sin, as the saying went once upon a time, with her aerobics instructor back in San Atanasio. And he’d slept alone because…

“Fuck!” he said yet again, this time in genuine horror. Bits and pieces of the night before came back to him. You always remembered the shit you most wished you could forget. He’d slept alone because he’d tried to pick up a waitress half his age and struck out as gruesomely as some poor, hopeless high-school kid flailing away against Randy Johnson in his prime.

Christ! No wonder I tied one on, he thought. Shame-and a bladder full to bursting-propelled him to the head. It was as severely functional as the rest of the unit. Its walls were just as thin, too. A guy in the next room was taking a leak at the same time as Colin. The other guy finished and flushed-a space-age whoosh! — long before Colin did.

After his own whoosh! Colin fished three aspirins out of his travel kit. They sat on his tongue while he filled the plastic glass with water. Once he’d swallowed them, he brushed his teeth. That got rid of the dead animal.

He pulled off sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt-elegant nightwear-and stepped into the corner shower stall. The head was set into the outer part of the ceiling, and pointed in at the control and the soap ledge. That struck him as weird, but it worked okayou mont›

He made the water as hot as he could take it without boiling like a lobster and stood under it for a long time. A Hollywood shower, he would have called it in his Navy days. He was surprised the shower head didn’t have an automatic cutoff. If he could think of it, some Motel 6 bean counter could, too, and probably would.

By the time he came out, the aspirins were starting to work. He figured he’d live. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to, but he figured he would.

Up till now, he’d done everything in near darkness. If he planned to shave without cutting his throat, though, he needed to turn on the light over the sink. If he did… Another interesting question, but, he decided, not one for right now. A cop who aimed to end things could always find a quicker, neater way than a disposable Bic.

He flicked on the switch. The vicious photons made him flinch. So did the ancient alky who peered out of the mirror at him. Sallow, sagging skin. Gray stubble. Not to put too fine a point on it, he looked like hell.

Scraping off the stubble helped… a little. So did Visine.. a little. He still had all his own hair, and the stuff on his scalp, unlike his whiskers, was only beginning to frost. Once he combed it, he didn’t look too much older than he really was.

“Coffee,” he said-the first word besides fuck that had come out of his mouth this morning. He could get some down at the front desk, but the coffee here was as chintzy as the rest of the operation. He quickly dressed (jeans, sweatshirt, denim jacket over it, Angels cap-the calendar might say June was starting, but Jackson was cool and Yellowstone, seventy-odd miles north and over a thousand feet higher, was downright cold). Then he went down to his rental car and headed toward the national parks.

Bubba’s was a lot closer. They brewed good coffee there, and cooked enormous, delicious, artery-clogging breakfasts. And they opened at half past six, so you could feed your face and head out for wherever you were going.

“What can I get you today, dear?” the waitress asked when Colin sat down. She wasn’t young or cute, but she said dear as if she meant it. Maybe I should have hit on somebody like her last night, Colin thought-too late, as usual.

Aloud, he said, “Coffee-and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream.”

It was the best hangover fighter he knew. It made people give him funny looks, though. Not this gal. It didn’t faze her a bit. She just nodded. “Hurt yourself last night, you say?”

“Oh, maybe a little,” Colin answered dryly.

“I’ll get it for you right away, then. And I’ll keep the coffee coming.” The waitress bustled off.

Caffeinated, his stomach greased against the slings and arrows of outrageous single malts, Colin drove out of Jackson: past the park with the elk-antler arches at each corner, past the visitors’ center, and north out into open country. Yellowstone was still more than fifty miles away, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t fighting traffic, the way he would be on the Harbor Freeway or the 405. A lot of the time, his little Ford seemed to be the only car on the road. Things here would get more crowded later in the season, but they hadn’t yet. No one even checked his receipt when he came to Grand Teton National Park-the ranger station at the southern entrance was closed and empty.

Off to his left towered the Grand Tetons themselves. One of his guidebooks said that was French fr Big Tits. The sharp, jagged, snow-topped mountains didn’t make him think of boobs. They reminded him of a cat’s back teeth, made for shearing meat into swallowable chunks. Whose cat’s back teeth? Maybe God’s.

Even the guidebook allowed that only a very lonely French trapper could have imagined those mountains were breastlike. Colin wasn’t so sure the book had it straight there. How about a French trapper whose wife had run off with an aerobics instructor? That sounded just about right to him.

Clouds rolled in. They were lower than the Tetons, and blocked them from view. Pretty soon, rain started spattering down. Rain in June seemed perverse to someone from L.A., but Colin could deal with it. Besides, it would stop pretty soon, and then start up again whenever it felt the urge. He’d seen that on his drive up the day before-and on the drive down, and while he was in Yellowstone. Erratic weather was the price you paid for beating the crowds.

His older son, Rob, would have appreciated the empty highway. Rob spent much more time on the road than Colin did. He’d taken five expensive years getting an engineering degree from UC Santa Barbara. Since then, he’d made his living-when he’d made a living-playing bass in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. “Best damn outfit nobody’s ever heard of,” was how he described it, not without pride.

Colin didn’t hate the music. Some of the band’s songs were funny. Some were clever. A few managed both at once. He did hope Rob wore earplugs at every gig and every rehearsal. Otherwise, his son wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he hit thirty-five. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles liked turning it up to eleven.

The guys in the band liked smoking dope, too. They liked it a lot, Rob no less than any of the others. He didn’t waste any time pretending he didn’t smoke it, either. Hypocrisy wasn’t in him, any more than it was in Colin. If such things came down through the gene pool, he’d got it from his old man.

“I could bust you for that,” Colin had said the first time he smelled sweet smoke and walked in on Rob toking.

“Go ahead, then,” his son had answered. He didn’t yell Fascist swine! but he might as well have.

And, of course, Colin had done no such thing. He’d woken up the next morning with a hangover at least as vicious as this one, though. Rob hadn’t pointed out that pot didn’t hurt you the morning after. For such small mercies, Colin was grateful. With a cop’s cynical certainty, he was sure he wouldn’t get the larger ones.

Several cars sat by the side of the road at an oxbow bend in the Snake River. People with binoculars and spotting scopes and cameras with long lenses peered out across the water. Colin kept going. He was only a halfhearted birder. A bald eagle he would have stopped for, but those seemed unlikely here. He couldn’t get excited about some duck species he hadn’t seen before.

Right now, he had trouble getting excited about anything. That was part of the reason he’d come here: the hope that being somewhere different, doing something different, would start him perking again.

He’d seen plenty of new stuff, all right. But none of it did much to distract him from the mess his family had turned into, or from the South Bay Strangler, the bastard who got his jollies raping and murdering little old ladies from Hawthorne down to Rolling Hills Estates. Over the past five years, he’d done in at least thirteen of them. Plenty of DNA evidence to put him away if he ever got caught, but no matches showed up with anybody who’d run afoul of the criminal-justice system.

“Probably a pillar of the fucking community-except when he goes hunting,” Colin snarled, there in the Ford where nobody could hear him. He’d voiced the idea before, whenever the South Bay police met to coordinate the hunt. Nobody’d wanted to listen to him. He snorted. As if that were anything new!

It started raining harder. Colin fiddled with the windshield wipers, trying to keep them going just fast enough to wipe away the drops before the windshield got too spattered to see through… and no faster. Such relentless precision was a habit of his. It had driven Louise crazy. Crazy enough to shack up with a guy ten years younger than she was, evidently.

What did they call women who did such things nowadays? There was a word for it. Not being on the front lines of American slang, Colin had to go fishing inside his head. He caught it, though: “Cougars!” He felt good about remembering, then not so good because it was something he needed to remember.

A squirrel darted across the highway. It was smaller and redder than the squirrels in San Atanasio, but just as stupid and suicidal. He slowed down enough to keep from squashing it.

“Cougars,” he repeated sadly. He wouldn’t have figured Louise for one, not till it happened. But then, he hadn’t realized his marriage was in trouble till it blew up in his face. Which proved… what, exactly?

Proves you don’t know shit about women, that’s what, he answered himself. You were supposed to understand your wife better than any other woman, right? Obviously, he hadn’t. And he still didn’t know why his daughter had dumped her longtime boyfriend three weeks after Louise bailed on him. Maybe Louise and Vanessa had plotted it together. Maybe it was just in the air, like swine flu.

Bryce Miller still came by the house every week or two. Part of that was bound to be misery loving company. Part of it… Colin clicked his tongue between his teeth: not a happy noise. The sad and sorry truth was, he liked Bryce better than Vanessa. Bryce had his head on pretty straight, even if he was writing a thesis about Hellenistic poetry. Vanessa… Vanessa got touchy. She snapped like a mean dog if things didn’t go the way she wanted.

Colin’s foot came off the gas pedal. Did you just call your one and only daughter a bitch? Unhappily, he nodded. He hadn’t done it in so many words, but he’d done it. Yeah, that was the word for Vanessa. Not as in touchy-feely, either.

Here came the rangers’ station at the south entrance to Yellowstone. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Not bad. This station was manned. Colin pulled up to one of the gates, stopped, and rolled down his window. A smiling ranger in what looked like a Marine drill sergeant’s hat to Colin said, “Welcome to Yellowstone.” That meant Have you paid yet? Colin held up his map and, stapled to it, the pass-good for a week-he’d bought the day before. Nodding, the ranger changed her lines: “Welcome back to Yellowstone.”

“Thanks.” Colin drove in.

The road up from the south entrance ran pretty straight for twenty miles. Colin held to a steady forty-five even so. A couple of cars and a monstrous SUV zoomed past him. The guidebooks warned that the rangers were fanatical about enforcing the speed limit, especially on this stretch of the Yellowstone highway system. Maybe that was pious bullshit. Or maybe…

He rounded a curve. A rangers’ carith a light bar-now flashing-had pulled over the SUV. The guy behind the wheel looked righteously pissed off. Colin chortled. “Tough luck, sucker,” he said.

You could still see what the big fires of 1988 had done to the park. Some dead tree trunks went on standing tall. Some lay scattered across the meadows that had replaced some of the old lodgepole-pine forests. And the lodgepoles that had sprouted since the fires ranged from the size of coffee-table Christmas trees up to twenty or twenty-five feet tall: about half the size of the burned ones.

When the road finally forked, you swung left to go to Old Faithful and the swarm of famous geysers near it. Colin had done that the day before, his first day in the park. He supposed everybody did. They were Yellowstone’s number one attraction, and he had to admit Old Faithful lived up to its billing.

If you swung right instead, you went to West Thumb, an arm of Yellowstone Lake. There was a geyser basin there, too, and an information station with a bookstore. And there were restrooms. With quite a bit of Bubba’s coffee sloshing around inside him, that mattered to Colin. West Thumb Basin it was.

He pulled into the parking lot at half past nine. Not many cars in it yet. He’d beaten the rush to Old Faithful, too, but he suspected there was no enormous rush to beat here. The potholes scarring the lot argued that way. Had more people come, they would have kept things in better repair.

A round hot pool threw up clouds of steam by the entrance to the lot. It didn’t have a sign or anything-just a wooden warning rail around it to keep idiot tourists from cooking themselves. He found a spot near the start of the boardwalk that let visitors go by the geothermal features in reasonable safety-no, the parking lot wasn’t crowded. After he killed the lights and motor, he got out. Locking the car door as soon as he closed it was as automatic as breathing.

Signs in several languages warned people to stay on the boardwalk. The crust was thin. You could fall through. Right this second, boiling didn’t seem so bad. He shivered despite sweatshirt and jacket; it had to be down in the forties. It had been in the upper eighties when he flew out of LAX. Well, he wasn’t in L.A. any more. That was the point of this exercise, if it had one.

Blue Funnel Spring was… blue. The Thumb Geyser sputtered and blew out steam. The Fishing Cone sat a few feet out into Yellowstone Lake. You couldn’t reach it from the boardwalk. Once upon a time, his guidebook said, people had steamed fresh-caught trout in there. Some of them had hurt themselves trying it. Now the Fishing Cone was off limits to a close approach.

Farther back from the shore, ice still covered much of the lake. That was just too weird for somebody who’d lived most of his life in Southern California. It made Colin think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A lot of snow still lay on the ground, too.

It was beautiful-no two ways about that. The beauty and the snow were reason enough for some people to live in these parts. Colin shook his head. In the forties, the week after Memorial Day? Forget about it!

He worked his way around the boardwalk. A duck swimming in the unfrozen water close inshore eyed him, decided he was dangerous, and taxied along the surface, wings beating, till it got up enough speed to take off.

The Black Pool was a sickly green, not black. Colin had no idea whether the Abyss Pool, on the other side of the planked path, led to the abyss. By the sulfurous steam rising from it, though, he wouldn’t have been surprised

Somebody in a broad-brimmed hat, a rain slicker, and jeans was hunkered down on the narrow lakeside beach, back to Colin, intent on something he couldn’t see. Not six feet away stood one of those stay-on-the-boardwalk! signs. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” he growled, a line whose every intonation was honed by years on the beat.

The miscreant jumped and whirled back toward him. Only he-no, she: a woman in her mid-thirties, with short, honey-blond hair and attractively weathered features that said she spent a lot of time outdoors-probably wasn’t a miscreant after all. She wore a picture ID on a lanyard around her neck, the way rangers here did. And she answered, “Checking a seismograph. Why? What business is it of yours?”

Colin felt like a jerk. He wouldn’t have minded vanishing under the oh so thin, oh so hot crust that seemed to have no trouble at all supporting the woman’s weight. “Sorry,” he said, and for once he meant it. “I’m a cop back home. I saw you out there where I didn’t think you were supposed to be, and I jumped to a conclusion, and I went splat.”

She weighed that. On one side of the scales was something like Okay, fine. Now fuck off, asshole. He’d earned it, too. But a couple of other tourists were coming. Maybe she didn’t want to cuss him out in front of an audience. All she did say was, “Mm, I can see that-I guess.”

Then fate-or something-lent a hand. The ground shook more than hard enough to need no seismograph to detect. Colin staggered. He was glad to grab the handrail on the boardwalk. For ten or fifteen seconds, he felt as if he were standing on Jell-O. At last, the earthquake stopped.

“Holy moley!” said one of the approaching tourists. “Nobody told me it was gonna do that! Let’s get outa here, Shirley!” He and Shirley did, at top speed.

Waves-not big ones, but waves-rolled up onto the beach. The ice farther out cracked with noises that made Colin think of what would happen if the Jolly Green Giant dropped a tray from his freezer. Darker streaks-water-appeared between the remaining chunks of ice.

Eyeing them and the direction from which the waves had come, Colin said, “That’s gotta be a 5.3, maybe even a 5.5. Epicenter’s that way somewhere.” He pointed northeast.

One of the woman’s eyebrows jumped. “I was going to ask you where home was, but now I hardly need to. Norcal or Socal?”

“Socal,” Colin answered. “San Atanasio. L.A. suburb.” Of course he had to come from California. Guessing the Richter scale was a local sport of sorts. “How about you?” he asked. That she knew it was a local sport, and that she used local slang for the two rival parts of the state, argued she was a Californian, too.

Sure enough, she said, “Some of both. I grew up in Torrance”-which wasn’t far from San Atanasio-“but I’m finishing my doctorate at Berkeley. So I’m Norcal now.”

In his mind, Colin prefaced Berkeley with The People’s Republic of, the same as he did with Santa Monica. The university was good, though; Marshall, his younger son, had been bummed for weeks after he didn’t get in. He’d followed Rob to UC Santa Barbara instead. He’d followed Rob into smoking pot, too, and still hadn’t graduated. One more thing for his old man to worry about.

Not the most urgent one at the moment. “I didn’t know you could get quakes that big up here,” Colin said.

“Oh, yeah,” the woman answered. “This is the second-busiest earthquake zone in the Lower Forty-eight, after the San Andreas. There was a 6.1 in the park in 1975, and a 7.5 west of Yellowstone in 1959. That one killed twenty-eight people and buried a campground. A landslide dammed the river and made what they call Quake Lake. You can still see drowned trees sticking up out of the water.”

“A 7.5 will do it, all right,” Colin said soberly. How many people would an earthquake that size kill in L.A. or the Bay Area? One hell of a lot more than twenty-eight.

“It sure will,” she agreed. As Colin had before, she pointed northeast. “I think you’ve got the size just about right, too-”

“Practice,” he broke in.

“Uh-huh.” But she hadn’t finished. “You got it right if the quake’s from magma shifting in the Sour Creek dome. But if it’s from the Coffee Pot Springs dome… That’s farther away, so the quake would have to be bigger.”

“Didn’t feel that far off,” Colin said. “The jolts were sharp, not roll-roll-roll the way they go when they’re a long way out.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right.” She didn’t sound-or look-happy. And she had her reasons: “The Coffee Pot Springs dome literally just showed up on the map a little while ago, and it’s swelling like a stubbed toe. It’s like the magma’s found some new weak area that gives it a path up toward the surface.”

Colin knew what magma was: the hot stuff that spewed out of volcanoes. Here in Yellowstone, it was also the canned heat that kept geysers boiling and hot springs bubbling. He had trouble putting those two things together, though. “What would happen if it did?” he asked.

“Did what? Get to the surface?”

“Yeah. Would it be… a volcano, like?”

“Mm, kind of.” Now the look on her face said he’d disappointed her. He’d known something about earthquakes, so she’d hoped he would know something about volcanoes, too. That shouldn’t have bothered him. If anybody’d had practice disappointing women, he was the guy. But, obscurely, he didn’t want to disappoint this one. She went on, “Like a volcano the way a Siberian tiger’s like a kitten, maybe.”

“Huh?” he said brilliantly. To try to salvage things, he added, “I’m not staring at your chest. I’m just trying to read your name badge.”

That got him a crooked grin. “Well, it’s a story. I’m Kelly Birnbaum.” He gave her his own name. She came up and shook hands over the boardwalk railing. He’d known police sergeants with a less confident grip. She looked west. “I bet you went to Old Faithful before you came here.”

“Well, yeah.” Colin hated being predictable. Sometimes he was-sometimes everybody was-but he still hated it.

“Don’t worry. People do that. It’s what the thing is there for, you know?” Kelly said. That made him feel worse, not better. Then she asked, “After you looked at all the stuff there, what did you do?”

“I had lunch.” He’d testified in court too often to be anything but literal-minded.

This time, she stuck out her tongue at him, which made her look about twelve. “You sound like a cop, all right. Let’s try it again. What did you do after lunch? Did you drive up to the Black Sand Basin?”

“Yes, Honor,” Colin answered, deadpan.

“Okay,” Kelly said in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “You can see the caldera wall-the edge of what fell in the last time the supervolcano erupted-really well from there. I think they’ve got a sign about it, too. Do you remember that?”

“Uh-huh. As a matter of fact…” Colin took the camera out of his jacket pocket, powered it up, and thumbed back till he found the pictures he wanted. One was of the sign she’d mentioned. The other was of the caldera wall itself: an almost vertical cliff of solidified lava, several hundred feet high, with lodgepole pines growing up out of it here and there.

Kelly leaned forward to look at the photos in the viewfinder. She nodded. “That’s it, all right. That’s what’s left from the last time it went off, I mean, maybe 640,000 years ago. It shot out about two hundred and forty cubic miles of ash and lava and rock-say, a thousand times as much as Mount St. Helens.”

“How about compared to Krakatoa?” Colin asked. “Or the earlier one in the 1800s-I forget its name, but the one that made the Year without a Summer?”

“Mount Tambora.” She beamed at him. People did that when you surprised them by knowing more than they’d expected about what they were interested in. “That was about thirty-five cubic miles. Krakatoa was only a squib next to it: six or seven cubic miles.”

“Wow.” Colin didn’t need a calculator to do the math. “So this eruption was a heck of a lot bigger than either one of those.” By himself or with his colleagues, he was as foulmouthed as any other policeman. He didn’t like to swear in front of women, though. It wasn’t the only reason he often felt like a dinosaur these days.

“Right,” Kelly said. “But this one went off 1.3 million years ago, too. Only sixty-seven cubic miles that time.”

“Only,” Colin echoed. The word seemed to hang in the cold, moist, sulfurous air.

“Only,” she repeated. “ ’Cause it went off 2.1 million years ago, too, and that was the big one. Something like six hundred cubic miles of junk-enough to bury California twenty feet deep. For real, the ash reached from the Pacific to Iowa and from Canada to Texas.”

There was a thought alongside which even a hangover didn’t seem such a big deal. Colin did some more math in his head. “Um, 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, 640,000 years ago… Seems like it’s about due. Is it?”

“Nobody knows,” Kelly answered. “And even if it is about due, that might mean it’s ten thousand years away instead of a hundred thousand. Or it might not. But people here and people back in Berkeley don’t like the way the Coffee Pot Springs dome is bulging all of a sudden.”

“What would it be like,” Colin said slowly, “if it did go off for real? I mean, the way it did the biggest time?”

He wondered if she’d say it would be indescribable. But she didn’t: “Take Rhode Island. Blow out lava and ash all around the edges. Then drop it half a mile-maybe a mile-straight down onto molten rock.” She cocked her head to one side, waiting to see what he’d say to that.

What he said was, “Best thing that could happen to the lousy place.”

“Huh?” Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it.

“For my sins, I got stationed in Providence when I was in the Navy,” Colied lained. “If America ever needs an enema, that’s where you’d plug it in.”

“Oh.” Kelly laughed-nervously. “I’ve heard the same thing about Buffalo and Syracuse.”

“Only from people who’ve never been to Providence.” Colin spoke with complete assurance.

“If you say so.” Kelly hurried on: “Then we’d get the ashfall all over the place, like we did before. And bunches of particles would go twenty or thirty miles up into the stratosphere and block off sunlight. Best estimate-”

“Guess, you mean,” Colin broke in.

“Guess. You’re right. It’s not like we can make the experiment. Best guess is, global temps go down about five degrees Celsius-nine degrees Fahrenheit. For years. Ten? Twenty? Two hundred? Nobody knows.”

Colin thought about that. L.A. nine degrees cooler would be more like Portland or Seattle-different, but not too bad. But Seattle nine degrees cooler would be more like Anchorage. Brr! And Anchorage nine degrees cooler would be like the North Pole. So would London and Stockholm and Moscow and lots of other places. The North Pole would be more like the South Pole. The South Pole… He didn’t want to contemplate what the South Pole would be like.

“Start of a new Ice Age?” he asked.

“There doesn’t seem to be any cause-and-effect between supervolcanoes and glaciation,” Kelly said. “But it sure wouldn’t be fun. Back seventy-five thousand years ago, Mount Tabo in Indonesia blew up. It’s Lake Tabo now-that was even a little bigger than the biggest blast here. And, about that same time, genetics studies show Homo sap almost went extinct. We got squeezed down to a few thousand people. Why? The bad weather from the supervolcano makes the best sense.”

“Happy day. Happy, uh, bleeping day.” Colin almost slipped. “That’ll give me sweet dreams tonight.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you’re standing in the middle of the last big caldera,” Kelly said cheerfully. “And there’s another caldera-a smaller, newer one-under the water in the West Thumb. There are little calderas all over the place in Yellowstone, if you know where to look.”

“Oh, boy,” Colin said. An aftershock rattled the boardwalk. Another tourist who’d just set foot on it decided this was a hell of a good time to go somewhere else. She hustled back toward the parking lot.

“Nothing much.” Now Kelly sounded disdainful. “That wasn’t even a 4.0.”

“Nope. Not even close,” Colin agreed. He realized he’d just spent fifteen minutes or so talking with a reasonably attractive woman without getting shot down in flames. That was one of the more pleasant novelties he’d run into lately. He asked, “Where does somebody doing research at Yellowstone stay?”

“In the employee housing at Lake Village, near the Fishing Bridge you can’t fish from any more,” Kelly said. “Not the Black Hole of Calcutta, but not the Ritz-Carlton, either. Makes dorm rooms look good.”

“Ouch! I’m sorry for you.” Colin remembered the UCSB dorms Rob and Marshall had lived in before they moved to off-campus apartments. (Vanessa had commuted to Long Beach State till she decided she knew it all and quit halfway through her junior year. She’d made a living ever since-he gave her that much.) He also remembered what student housing had given his sons to eat. “I hope the food’s better, anyhow.”

“Not so you’d notice.” Kelly made a face. Then she asked, “How about you? Where are you staying while you’re visiting here?”

“Jackson,” he answered. He saw that surprised her. You could go through cash in a hurry in Jackson if you were so inclined, and plenty of people were. What? I don’t look like I just finished a term as ambassador to the UN? he asked himself. Himself answered, You bum, you look like you just started a term for drunk and disorderly. He wasn’t that bad, not after caffeine and painkillers, but Himself could be rougher on him than anyone else. With a sheepish grin, he added an explanation she could hear: “Motel 6.”

“Oh. Okay.” She laughed. “So you’re not gonna sweep me off my feet, drive me away in a gold-plated Mercedes, and fund my research for the rest of my life?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Colin said. But if that wasn’t an opening, he’d never heard one. (If that wasn’t an opening, she’d do unto him as the waitress had the night before.) Trying his best for suave, he went on, “If you’ve got a phone number or an e-mail, though

…”

He waited to see if he’d wind up with egg on his face. She pulled a little imitation-leather card case out of a jacket pocket, extracted a card, and started to hand it to him. Then she said, “Hang on.” Second thoughts? She scratched out the phone number on the card and wrote in a different one. “This is my cell. The one that’s printed here is my office back in Berkeley. I won’t be there till fall, and they’re liable to kill all the landlines anyway, to save money. Budgets.” It wasn’t a four-letter word, but she sure made it sound like one.

“Thanks.” He’d rarely been so sincere about what sounded like ordinary politeness. “And let me borrow that pen a sec, would you?” He scratched out not only the phone number but also the e-mail address on his card. “Here. This is my cell, and this e-mail doesn’t go through the official police system.”

“Thank you.” She looked at the card before she stowed it away. “You just said you were a cop, not a lieutenant.”

He shrugged. “All it means is, I wear a suit more often than a uniform. No gold-plated Mercedes. Not even tin-plated.”

“Oh, it means more than that. It means you’ve spent a lot of time working hard,” Kelly said quietly. “Later on, if either one of us decides this wasn’t such a good idea…” She didn’t go on, or need to.

To show she didn’t need to, Colin gave back a quick nod. “No harm, no foul. Sure,” he said. If he figured she wasn’t young enough or skinny enough or whatever the hell, he wouldn’t write or phone. If she thought he looked too weather-beaten to stand or that he really was a lush coming off a bender, she wouldn’t call back or return his e-mail. It would all be very clean and civilized.

He had zero intention of not getting in touch with her again. A drowning man didn’t push away the spar he’d just grabbed, did he? Not likely! What she’d do then… Again, he could only wait and see. And if she didn’t decide he was too strange to deal with, he could only wait and see how they got along, or if they got along at all.

For now, Kelly said, “You’ll want to do some more exploring, and after the quake I really need to check that seismograph. I got more data than I thought I would.” As if to underline her words, another little aftershock rattled the boardwalk.

What Colin wanted to do was hang around right here and get to know her as well as he could as fast as he could. But he saw she’d given him a test question. Between the lines, it said If you come on too strong, you blow it. If he couldn’t work that out, he flunked.

So he said, “Sure. Glad to meet you,” and went on his way. He drove up to Dunraven Pass, which he might have done anyway, and looked south across miles and miles (more than thirty of those miles, he later figured out) to the distant mountains on the far side of the caldera (the middle-sized caldera, he reminded himself). Then he left the park altogether, which he wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t talked to Kelly Birnbaum.

He drove into the town of West Yellowstone, up US 191 to US 287, and west on 287 to Hebgen Lake and on to Quake Lake. The visitors’ center there perched high on the debris that had slid down from the far side of the Madison River and dammed it after the 1959 temblor. The rangers at the center seemed impressed he’d ever heard of the quake. They didn’t worry about the supervolcano. Maybe it was too big to worry about. Hoping the world stayed lucky seemed a better way to go.