Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

III

Vanessa Ferguson was happy. Oh, not perfectly happy. That would have been too much to expect from anybody, and much too much to expect from her. Mr. Gorczany, the guy who ran the company she worked for, was a goose twit, and too big a goose twit to realize what a goose twit he was. The job was beneath her talents, and didn’t pay her anywhere near what she thought she was worth.

But it did pay her enough to let her escape from the house where she’d grown up, the house she’d moved back to when she returned to SoCal. Escaping was nothing but a relief. She and her father’s second wife hadn’t hit it off, which was putting things mildly. And her kid brother seemed perfectly content to grow moss there. Marshall might still be living at home when he hit middle age. It would serve him right if he was, too.

Her own apartment wouldn’t have been enough to bring her happiness, not by itself. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t cheap. Too right it wasn’t cheap! If Mr. Gorczany had paid her what she was worth to his miserable outfit, she wouldn’t have worried about that so much. But he paid her what he paid her, and worry she did.

When she was in the ratty old expensive apartment with Bronislav, though, she didn’t care about any of that stuff. She didn’t even care that she thought Dad’s second wife was a first-class bitch. All she cared about was Bronislav. He was what made her happy.

Oh, she’d felt that way the first few months with Bryce Miller, too, before she woke up to what a loser he really was. Back when she was still in high school, before she met Bryce, she’d been head over heels over a guy named Peter. She’d lost her cherry to Peter’s peter, as a matter of fact. She’d been sure she would bear his children… till she lived with him for a little while. That cured her. She’d been glad—eager!—to jump to Bryce once Peter wore thin.

After Bryce, there was Hagop. Vanessa violently shook her head, the way she always did when she thought of Hagop. It wasn’t just that the miserable rug merchant had been a year or two older than her own old man. She’d moved to Denver on account of him, dammit. That put her squarely in the line of fire when the supervolcano blew. All kinds of horrible things had happened to her on account of that.

Odds were Hagop was dead, of course. Almost all the people who’d lived in Denver were. Only a few had got out—the ones who’d fled first and fastest. She was one of them.

She didn’t care about Hagop, not any more. Being dead was about what he deserved. Lousy schmuck. Lousy schmuck with his lousy schmuck…

Bronislav, now, Bronislav was different. Vanessa’s sharp features softened as much as they ever did. Bronislav was the Real Thing. She was sure of it. (She’d also been sure of it with Peter, and with Bryce. And she’d done her best to be sure of it with Hagop as well, though even she’d suspected then she was trying to talk herself into it. She remembered none of her earlier certainties now.)

Bronislav Nedic was different all kinds of ways. Immigrant from what had been Yugoslavia. Looks somewhere between Nicolas Cage and an Orthodox icon. Big, dark, sad eyes. Beard thick as a pelt—the beard was the first thing she’d noticed about him, there in that New Mexico truck-stop coffee shop.

He had a musical Serbian accent. God help you, though, if you called it a Serbo-Croatian accent. To Bronislav, anything that had to do with Croats came from the dark side of the Force. He’d been a freedom fighter when Yugoslavia came unglued. He had some scary scars to prove it. He also had a tat on the back of his right hand—a cross with four C’s, two forward and two backward, in the right angles. In Serbian’s Cyrillic alphabet, those C’s were S’s, and they stood for Only unity will save the Serbs.

What had been Yugoslavia was now half a dozen little countries. Serbs dominated two and a third of them. So much for unity. And Bronislav, instead of plying his trade with Kalashnikov and RPG, was a long-haul trucker in America, going back and forth along I-10 to bring Los Angeles little pieces of the Everything it so desperately needed.

He was back in town now. He’d sent her a postcard and an e-mail and a text letting her know he was on the way. With the power grid so erratic, snailmail had advantages over its electronic rivals. It might not get there right away, but it would get there.

Vanessa kept telling herself she needed to buy a satellite phone. Then she wouldn’t need to worry about whether the local plastic pseudotrees had power. But satellite phones dropped calls, too: the demand on the satellites was much worse than anyone had dreamt it could be before the eruption. And satellite plans didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Like everything else these days, they cost an arm and both legs.

Bronislav usually brought stuff into San Pedro. That and Long Beach were the L.A. area’s two main ports. Lots of warehouses and major distribution centers were there. And it worked out well for him another way—San Pedro had a sizable Serbian community.

It also had a sizable Croatian community. So far as Vanessa knew, they didn’t go around firebombing each other or blowing up each other’s churches. They limited their ancient feud to sneers and barroom brawls. Wasn’t America a wonderful place?

Now that Bronislav had a lady friend in San Atanasio, getting in to San Pedro wasn’t so convenient for him. He had to ride the bus up or Vanessa had to come down. He almost always came north. Her apartment might be cramped, but most of the hotels in San Pedro were only a short step up from flophouses (some of them were flophouses). They catered to sailors and truckers and hookers, not to producers or Silicon Valley gazillionaires.

Vanessa glanced at her watch. A quarter to seven, plus or minus a few minutes—he ought to be on his way now. The watch was a windup job she’d taken for herself while scavenging in Kansas for the Feds. It might not keep perfect time, but it didn’t need a battery or a signal from the outside to work.

Like manual typewriters, windup watches were popular again. Unlike manual typewriters—Vanessa thought of Marshall’s annoying monster—windup watches weren’t annoying… except when you forgot to wind one and it lied to you about the time. That usually happened just when you most needed the truth, of course.

Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy footsteps. Bronislav was a big man. He could move quiet as a cat. He’d learned how in the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Learn or die,” he’d said. Most of the time, though, he didn’t bother. This was America, where he didn’t have to sneak.

That might not be him, of course. The apartment building had a secured entrance, sure. With the power out at least half the time, though, it just stood open. So did most buildings’ security doors. Burglaries were way up.

A knock on the door. Four knocks on the door, in fact: one for each C/S in the Serbs’ patriotic motto. Vanessa’s heart leaped. Before she opened up, though, she peered through the little spy-eye in the door. Yes, that was Bronislav. He had a newspaper-wrapped package under one arm.

After a hug that stamped her against him, a fierce kiss, and murmured endearments in English and Serbian (he liked her learning bits and pieces of his language, even if the way she pronounced it could make him LOL), he set the package on her kitchen counter.

Blood leaked through the newspaper here and there. “What is it?” Vanessa asked eagerly. He was a good cook, a better cook than she was. And truckers got things and swapped things that didn’t show up on their official cargo manifests. Americans didn’t call the informal economy a black market, which didn’t mean it wasn’t one.

“Croat spareribs,” he answered, deadpan. For a split second, she wondered if he meant it. Then he let out a harsh chuckle. “No, is not what you call long pig. Is only ordinary pig. I hear long pig and ordinary pig taste a lot alike. I hear, but I do not know of myself—for myself.”

“Where did you hear that?” Vanessa did her best to make a joke of it.

But Bronislav wasn’t joking. Or he didn’t sound as if he were, anyhow. His voice was serious, even grim, as he answered, “In Yugoslavia, I knew people who could say because they did it. They said they did it, anyhow. Me, I believed them. People on the other side did it, too—oh, yes. Ethnic cleansing.” He mimed picking his teeth.

“Gross!” Vanessa exclaimed. She hadn’t thought she’d lived a sheltered life till she met him. She still wasn’t sure how much to believe from his stories. If they were even a quarter true, though, a pretty good first draft of hell on earth had shown up in disintegrating Yugoslavia in the last decade of the last millennium.

“Too many things are,” he said. The depth of sorrow in his dark eyes kept her from pushing him any more.

Instead, she asked, “What will you do with them?” She assumed he would fix them. She hoped he would, in fact. She appreciated what he did with food without worrying about matching it.

“You have prunes, yes?” he said. “And onions? And chilies?”

“Sure,” she said. Onions she probably would have had anyway. The other ingredients she kept around because he liked them and used them. They wouldn’t have been on the pantry’s shelves if she’d been hanging out with someone who had different tastes.

“Good.” His nod was all business. “I use pressure cooker, then. I get things done fast.”

“Okay,” Vanessa said as he fell to work. She also might not have had the olive oil in which he browned the ribs if she hadn’t known him. She’d always thought it tasted medicinal. She didn’t any more. That might have been love, or it might just have been better olive oil.

A wonderful smell filled the apartment. Bronislav grunted in satisfaction. “Now we are getting somewhere.”

“When I had Pickles and I was making something that smelled good like this, he’d come in and try to scrounge.” Vanessa sighed. “I miss Pickles.”

“I am confused.” Bronislav sure sounded confused.

“Oh.” Vanessa explained: “Pickles was my cat. When I got to a shelter in Kansas right after the supervolcano, they made me turn him loose. He couldn’t have lasted long, poor thing, not with all the ash and dust coming down.”

“That is hard,” Bronislav said. “Why do you not get another cat? I have seen some people in this building have them.”

“I thought about it. I couldn’t stand it,” Vanessa answered. “What happens if—no, when—I have to do something horrible to this one, too?”

“You mourn. Then you go on. What else can you do? Sometimes life is hard. Always, in the end, life is hard. No one except our Lord ever got out of life alive. So do best you can while you are here.”

Vanessa didn’t believe Jesus had got out of life alive, either, not the way Bronislav did. She did believe avoiding pain was better than charging it head-on. Bronislav had a different opinion. They didn’t argue about it. He rarely argued, which made him as different from Bryce as dim sum were from doorknobs. He knew what he knew (not all of what he knew was true, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about that). And he didn’t much care what you imagined you knew.

He put the lid on the pressure cooker and twisted it to seal it. Pretty soon, the steam-release valve in the lid started hissing away—chuff, chuff, chuff! Every chuff smelled great.

Pork ribs with prunes and chopped onions weren’t something Vanessa would have come up with on her own. Bronislav waved her praise aside. “It is home cooking for me,” he said. “My mother would have got angry because I do not have all my spices just right.”

By just right, he no doubt meant exactly the way his mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and all his female ancestors for the past thousand years had fixed the dish. He was still a part of that ancient tradition, still involved in keeping it alive. Vanessa envied the rootedness that gave him. Nothing in her own life reached back further than the stuff her mother had told her when she was little.

She said so. Bronislav looked at her with those eyes out of a church mosaic. “You are American. That is how things are for you. I am Serb. This is how things are for me.”

“But I don’t want things to be like that!” she blurted.

“Life is not about how we want things to be. Life is about how things are.” He sounded certain. He almost always did. After a moment, he went on, “I want things to be so I can open little restaurant, even if my spices in things are not just right every time. But I have not got money to do this. So I do not worry. Maybe one day I have money. Maybe I keep driving truck.”

“Okay, sweetie.” She put the dishes in the sink. Sooner or later, she’d do them. Odds were on later. She sent him a sidelong glance. “You aren’t driving a truck right now.”

The look he gave back said that, if she were a Serb, she would have been a slut. Since she was an American, he could make certain allowances. He got up and slipped a strong arm around her waist. They walked back to the bedroom together.

When everything worked right, Kelly Ferguson could sic one of the world’s most potent computer networks on the climate changes and resulting ecological changes the supervolcano eruption was creating. She sometimes thought, though, that it preferred to remain a creature of mystery. One of its more obnoxious changes was playing merry hell with the North American power grid. Things didn’t work right nearly so often as she wished they would.

When they didn’t—and when she wasn’t riding herd on Deborah, which also ate ridiculous amounts of time—she used what workarounds she could. She had a good scientific calculator. It ran on batteries. Its electronic brain was smarter and faster (and probably cuter, too) than a PC would have been a generation earlier. Next to the computer network she couldn’t access at the moment, however, it might as well have been a retarded hamster.

Swearing, she ruthlessly simplified her assumptions and tried the regression analysis again. And the oh-so-clever scientific calculator choked on it again. Swearing louder, Kelly did some more simplifying. Not just regression for idiots this time. Regression for imbeciles. She hit the red button with the = sign on it. The calculator still choked.

“Fuck you!” she snarled, and drew in a deep, furious breath so she could really tell the stinking gadget where to go, how to get there, and what to do once it arrived.

Across the dining-room table from her, Colin was reading by the light of the same candles that shone on the uncooperative calculator’s little screen. Before she could fire off all the ammo she’d stacked up, he shook his head. “Don’t,” he told her.

She glared at him. “What do you mean, don’t?” He might be the man she loved. When he told her not to do something she damn well intended to do, though, he could take his chances like anybody else. And if he got in her way, she’d fire some of that ammo at him.

Or she thought so, till he answered, “I mean don’t, that’s what. If you cuss that thing the way you were fixing to cuss it, you’ll wake the baby. Do you want to do that?”

Kelly opened her mouth. Then she closed it. After a few seconds, she said “Oh” in a small, sheepish voice. She sighed. “Well, you’re right. How about if I throw the stupid thing against the wall, or maybe whack it a good one with a hammer?”

“Those’d make noise, too. Here. Wait.” Colin got up. He picked up one of the candlesticks and lit his way over to the kitchen with it. Setting the light on the countertop, he rummaged deep in the bowels of the miscellaneous drawer. The drawer was extremely miscellaneous. Except for maybe the Lost Chord or the Holy Grail, Kelly wouldn’t have been surprised at anything he hauled out of there. He’d recently produced a pair of polished-brass opera glasses whose existence she hadn’t even suspected.

He let out a sudden, pleased grunt and pulled out something in a leather sheath. “What have you got there? A vorpal blade?” Kelly said. “If I can go snicker-snack on the calculator with it, bring it on.”

Bring it on he did, or at least back to the table. He laid it next to the offending piece of electronica. “Not quite a vorpal blade. It was out of date by the time I went to high school, but hey, the high school I went to was out of date, too, so I ended up using it a lot.”

Kelly opened the flap and drew out the enameled-aluminum body. “A vorpal slide rule!” she exclaimed. “Wow! This is retro like Marshall’s typewriter.”

“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded. “The other way it’s like Marshall’s typewriter is, it still works and it doesn’t need a plug, or even batteries.”

“It still works if you know what to do with it.” Kelly aimlessly moved the slide back and forth. “Hate to tell you, but this is the first time I ever tried.” She was fifteen years younger than her husband. When she went to high school, slide rules might as well have been buggy whips. Well, buggy whips were probably staging a comeback these days, too.

“I can show you,” Colin said. “Some, anyhow.”

Multiplying and dividing seemed pretty simple… till Kelly said, “Wait a minute. How do I keep track of the decimal point?”

“Um, in your head,” he answered.

“Tell me another one,” Kelly said. “That’s great for three times two equals six, but you start going batshit when it’s 3.191X104 times 4.867X107.”

He got a faraway look in his eyes. “That’d be about, uh, 1.5X1012.”

She punched the scientific calculator. She felt like punching it a different way altogether, but refrained. Sure as hell, it told her the answer was 1.5530597X1012. “How’d you know that?” she yipped.

“Trick my uncle taught me. He’s the guy who gave me the slide rule. This baby cost like thirty-five bucks, and that was a lot of jack back in the day. Me, I woulda bought an el-cheapo plastic job, but he wanted me to be an engineer like him, so I got this fancy one.”

“The trick,” Kelly said with the air of someone holding on to her patience, which she was.

“Oh, yeah. Your first number was about 3X104. Your second one was about 5X107. Multiply those two together and you get 15X1011. That’s the same as 1.5X1012. You do the same thing whenever you work something on the slide rule. It’s the best way I know to keep the decimal point straight.”

“I guess it would be,” she said slowly, and looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “If you knew stuff like that and you remember it all these years later, how come you weren’t an engineer?”

“’Cause I couldn’t stand high school. I did okay, but I hated every minute of it. It was like being in jail, only I hadn’t done anything to deserve to be there. Soon as I graduated, I joined the Navy—but you know that.”

“Uh-huh.” Kelly eyed him again, not the same way this time. “And the Navy wasn’t like being in jail?”

Colin let out a small, very dry chuckle. “As a matter of fact, it was. More like jail than high school was, a whole lot more. I didn’t know that going in, though. I was eighteen. I was dumb. But I repeat myself.”

“Oh, boy, do you ever.” Kelly thought back to some of the things she’d done when she was that age. And she didn’t even have the excuse of testosterone poisoning.

“Yup.” Her husband nodded. “I got used to it, though. After a while, I got to where I kinda liked it. Well, except for the living and sleeping arrangements. So when I took off one uniform, I put on another one. I’m what they call an institutional man, same as any other lifer.”

“No, you put the bad guys in the institutions,” Kelly said.

“Less difference than you’d think sometimes.” Colin made a point of changing the subject: “Want to take a shot at square roots and cube roots and waddayacallems—trig functions?”

“Sure,” Kelly said. If he didn’t want to talk about it, he’d clam up bigtime if she pushed. He’d already come out with some things about his past she’d never heard before.

Square roots and cube roots seemed pretty straightforward. So did trig functions. You slid the center piece. You moved the transparent piece with the hairline. You read the answer. It wouldn’t be anything like 1.5530597X1012, or even 4.867X107. You were kind of guesstimating the third significant figure, let alone any past that. In a way, that was cool. No one could accuse you of trying to be more precise than the data allowed.

But Kelly did wonder why no one had ever taught her the neat truck Colin used. Then she quit wondering. By the time she came along, nobody needed to keep track of decimal points in her head. The machines automatically took care of it. And if the machines screwed up, or—more likely—if some dumb human entered the wrong number somewhere, nobody would notice that the answer was also screwed up till something went horribly wrong. Every so often, something did. Maybe it wouldn’t if people checked a little more.

If the scientific calculator was retarded next to the computers Kelly couldn’t access, the slide rule was dumber yet. Trying to set up her problems so she could use it to work, Kelly feared she was simplifying so much that whatever answers she got wouldn’t mean anything.

When she said so, Colin observed, “They built the first A-bomb off calculations from bunches of those babies.” She grunted. She might have been playing with more variables than the Manhattan Project had. Then again, she might not have. She didn’t know one way or the other.

After a while, she asked, “How do I raise, say, three to the 2.5th power?”

“That’s what the log-log scales are for,” Colin said.

“The who?” Kelly said blankly. He might as well have been speaking Cherokee.

“The LL scales. Here, I’ll show you.” And he did. It made sense once you saw how to do it. Well, damn near everything made sense once you saw how to do it. Kelly began to understand how there’d been science in the ancient, primitive days before computers and even calculators.

She had more fun twiddling the slide rule than she would have punching buttons on the HP. She knew she would have to refine her results once she could get on the computer again, but she would have had to do that with results from the scientific calculator, too. Then Deborah woke up and started to cry. She’d made a mess in her diaper. For the next little while, geology took a back seat to motherhood.

Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles tuned their instruments near the altar of Guilford, Maine’s, Episcopalian church. Rob Ferguson sighed. Even inside the crowded church, his breath smoked. “One more acoustic set,” he said quietly. “There are times when I really miss cranking it up.” He did some impassioned air guitar. You really couldn’t impersonate an electric bass without, well, another electric bass.

“I miss all kinds of things from the old days,” Justin Nachman said. Lead guitar was easier to do without a power cord than bass was—not always easy, but easier. He was also responsible for most of the band’s vocals. Those didn’t change a whole lot even if he wasn’t miked.

But lack of electricity wasn’t all he was mourning. He patted his hair. It was long and curly. It wasn’t the aggressively permed Brillo fright wig—Dylan with his finger in the electric socket—he’d once worn to mark his status as a rock-’n’-roll not-quite-legend. Perms were ridiculous luxuries everywhere these days. In Maine north and west of the Interstate, which enjoyed very intermittent power a couple of months a year, perms were flat-out impossible.

Biff Thorvald, the rhythm guitarist, said, “Wish we had some dope, is what I wish.”

“Amen, Brother Ben!” That was Charlie Storer, whose drums missed amplification less than anybody else’s pet instrument. Just because Charlie said it first, though, that didn’t mean Rob didn’t agree with him. It didn’t mean Justin and Biff didn’t agree with him, either.

The only trouble was, Rob couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen weed in Guilford, much less smoked any. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember because he’d got too wasted to think straight. It had been a hell of a long time ago, if he’d ever seen any here at all.

Since the eruption, Cannabis sativa would not grow here. It wouldn’t grow here even in greenhouses, which stretched the growing season from essentially nonexistent all the way up to ridiculously short. The only things that would—sometimes—grow in local greenhouses were the kinds of food plants that had been eaten in the Far North since time out of mind: turnips, parsnips, a few extra-hardy varieties of Andean spuds, cabbage, rutabaga, and the ever-unpopular mangel-wurzel. Rob had never heard of the mangel-wurzel before the supervolcano blew. Now he’d eaten it stewed, boiled, baked, steamed, fried… . If he never ate it again—that would mean he’d moved away from Maine.

Two or three months a year, enough snow melted to make road traffic possible if not easy. During what passed for summer up in these parts, the rest of the USA dimly remembered Maine north and west of the Interstate still existed. Food and machinery and some fuel came in. People who’d got sicker than the local quacks could fix or who couldn’t stand living in these parts another second got the hell out.

The authorities reckoned that, next to food and machinery and fuel, dope was nonessential (to say nothing of illegal). Nobody seemed to see enough profit in this little tiny market to flout the authorities and bring some up here anyhow. Where were the Mexican drug cartels when you really needed them, dammit?

When the blizzards started rolling in again—say, about the end of August—even the Interstate turned impassable. The rest of the country forgot about its northeastern extremity again. It had plenty to worry about where more people lived. The handful of cold-loving maniacs who stayed in the new Arctic were left to their own devices.

Which was why Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were tuning up here in the church. They’d play after the town meeting. Before the eruption, Rob might have been caught dead in a church, but he wouldn’t have been caught alive in one. Justin, Charlie, and Biff had piety every bit as notorious.

Before the eruption, odds were they all would have made loud, unhappy noises about the separation of church and state if they even heard about a secular town meeting in a building dedicated not merely to religion but to one particular religion. Now… Now Rob couldn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it, even if he had no dope to keep him mellow. The church held more people than any other building in town. Okay, fine. The locals used it, and they worried not at all about the Supreme Court telling them they were committing a serious no-no.

Come to think of it, there were some serious advantages to being cut off from the rest of the world. You had the freedom to do what you wanted (within the limits imposed by frigid weather and nineteenth-century technology). Nobody called you at dinnertime to sell you on a candidate, to get you to take a survey, or to try to pry your credit-card number out of you. Since Rob’s cell phone had been as dead as a doornail the past couple of years, no one called him at all. Nobody texted him, either. He found that he missed being hooked into everything 24/7 a lot less than he missed getting stoned.

Mayor McCann rapped loudly for order. The secretary—a real secretary, a gray-haired woman who actually knew shorthand—poised pen over paper to take the minutes. People paid close attention when the mayor read the typed transcript of last week’s minutes. The church was packed. For people who couldn’t amuse themselves with one electronic gadget or another, town meetings and screwing were your basic choices for fun. And hey, you could screw any old time.

No one moved to change the minutes, so they were approved as read. The arguments would come later. And they did, over hunting and over cutting wood. Without shooting lots of moose and deer, Guilford—like any other small Maine town north and west of the Interstate—would have starved. Rob had an ugly scar on his leg where an overeager hunter had shot him instead of a moose.

And, like any other small Maine town north and west of the Interstate, Guilford would have frozen if people hadn’t chopped down acres and acres of the second-growth forest that had sprung up on great swaths of abandoned cropland. Rob didn’t like denuding the countryside. He liked freezing even less, though. He’d swung an axe. He’d pulled on a two-man saw that came out of somebody’s barn, too.

By now, though, not so many unshot moose were left. And there wasn’t a whole lot of forest close to Guilford or any other town, either. The argument about what to cut now and what to leave for later was louder and more heated than the air inside the church.

“If we all turn into blocks of ice now, we won’t have to worry about later, will we?” Dick Barber asked in loud, sardonic tones. Barber wasn’t always loud, but sardonic seemed his default setting. Before the eruption, he and his family had run the Trebor Mansion Inn, a towered hostelry dating from the 1830s. These days, Maine got no summer, which meant it also got no summer people. Barber and his clan still lived at the Inn. The bank might have taken it away from him, but the bank also seemed to have forgotten about lands where electricity no longer reached. There were certain advantages to falling off the edge of civilization.

When Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves snowed in in Guilford, they’d lived at the Trebor Mansion Inn, too. Charlie still did, in the tower room that had once been Rob’s. Like Rob, Biff and Justin had found companions of the female persuasion with more spacious living quarters.

“If we cut down everything in sight now, what will we do next winter?” someone else countered. Those were the two sides of it, boiled down to a nub.

“If we aren’t here next winter, what difference does it make?” Barber said. “Jim Farrell’s basic rule is, you do what you have to do now, and you worry about later, later.” Farrell’s was a name to conjure with. Barber had helped run the retired history prof’s Congressional campaign before the eruption. The winner, a blow-dried lawyer type, hadn’t been back in his district since the supervolcano blew. Farrell hadn’t left. And he knew all kinds of useful things—medieval things—that helped folks get by. He might not be the law west of the Pecos, but he was the biggest cheese north and west of the Interstate.

“He isn’t God, you know. You don’t quote him like you’d quote the Bible,” the other man said.

“As. As you’d quote the Bible,” Barber said helpfully.

Bang! went the gavel. “You’re out of order, Dick,” the mayor said.

“No, his grammar is,” Barber replied.

The two sides wrangled a while longer. The meeting didn’t decide anything. As far as Rob could see, town meetings never decided anything till they absolutely had to. Watching the fur fly was at least half the fun.

Some of the rest came after formal adjournment. People started clapping as the guys from the band ambled up to take their places. They played “Losing My Tail” from their first CD: an inevitable song for a band with their name and quirks. They did “Came Along Too Late,” which could be taken here as a tribute to Jim Farrell, though it hadn’t been conceived as one. They sang “Pleasures,” the closest approach to straight-ahead rock in their eccentric orbit. They did “Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” which was just bizarre. They did… a set.

They got a hell of a hand for it, too. That high was better than dope, even if it didn’t last as long. As things wound down, a pretty brunette came over to Rob and squeezed his hands. “Good job!” she said.

“Thanks, gorgeous,” he answered. “Can I take you home?”

“You’d better, since we’re married,” Lindsey said pointedly. And, in due course, he did.