Supervolcano: All Fall Down

boyfriend, even after she dumped him. Bryce was a published poet, and had yet to be paid in anything more than copies.

Of course, Bryce’s poems were modeled after Greek pastorals from the third century B.C. That was one way to use the Ph.D. he’d just earned, but not one likely to make Hollywood start banging on his door and seducing him with armored trucks full of cash.

“What’s ‘Sunset Beach’ about?” Colin asked. It had to have more to do with here and now than the stuff Bryce turned out.

Sure enough, Marshall answered, “A guy who’s just graduating from college and trying to figure out what to do with himself when he’s got like zero chance of landing any kind of real job.”

“Sounds cheerful,” Colin said. Marshall’s first sale-which still hadn’t seen print, though he’d gone over the galleys by now-had been about a college student caught in the middle of his parents’ divorce. If he could write about his own life and get paid for it. . well, that was a real job, if he could do it often enough. Not the smallest if in the world, not even close.

Still, other prospects were bleak. Nothing like getting the country’s midsection trashed to shoot the economy right behind the ear. The stock market had fallen and couldn’t get up. The crash wasn’t so spectacular as 1929, but things sure didn’t look good. And, with the weather going to hell in a refrigerated handbasket, heaven only knew when, or if, things would ever straighten out.

“Enough of this doom and gloom,” Kelly declared. “Marshall, you’re getting your bachelor’s. Today, we celebrate. We can worry about all the rest of the crap some other time.”

“Okay.” Marshall raised an eyebrow at Colin. Colin knew what his son wasn’t saying: something like What’s an old cynic like you doing with an optimist? He’d asked himself the same question. Right this minute, he was being happier than he had been in he couldn’t remember how long. If that wasn’t a good enough answer, he had no idea what would be.

He looked at his watch (that he checked it instead of his phone was another sign he was getting up there). “Ceremony starts at half past ten, right? We better get it in gear. Grab your robe and your fancy hat, kiddo.”

“It’s a mortarboard,” Kelly said.

“Fancy hat,” Colin repeated. “I thought the board they used for moving mortar was a hod.”

Marshall topped him: “Hod-de-ha-ha!”

“You’ve both hod it if you keep that up,” Kelly said. Groaning companionably, they went down to Marshall’s Toyota in the little apartment lot. It was smaller than the Taurus, but Marshall had a guaranteed parking space when they got back. Either car would have to pay to park on campus. The University of California didn’t give anything away for nothing, not these days it didn’t.

Marshall drove. He knew the car and the town better than Colin did. His cell phone stayed in his pocket. He also knew better than to talk on it or text where his old man could catch him. Colin hoped like hell he knew better than to do that stuff even when nobody was watching. Texting behind the wheel was asking-begging, really-to wrap your car around the nearest tree or light pole.

Kids in gowns and mortarboards fled from the parking structure toward the soccer and track stadium, along with parents and siblings and friends. Every so often, there’d be a squeal. Somebody would throw her — or himself into somebody else’s arms. Maybe the tears that flowed were tears of joy. Colin suspected they were more likely to be tears of fear. He kept his trap shut. Better to stay quiet and be thought cynical than to speak up and remove all doubt.

He and Kelly went up into the stands, which were no more comfortable than they had to be. Marshall took his place among the other graduates from the creative-writing program. He’d changed majors more than once in his erratic academic career, not least to stretch his time here as far as he could. Still and all, two sold stories argued that he hadn’t ended up in the worst of all possible places.

In due course, the UCSB chancellor came to the mike. Her academic regalia was a hell of a lot more impressive than the cheap polyester crap the undergrads rented. Colin tried to decide whether that made her look imposing or like a pompous jerk. Again, he said nothing about his conclusions.

After some pious blather of her own, the chancellor introduced the main commencement speaker: the Vice President of the United States. He definitely looked like a jerk in his cap and gown. People said he’d restored the Vice Presidency to its proper insignificance after the excesses at the start of the century. Colin hadn’t voted for him, but he sure agreed with those people.

“We are on the way back.” The Vice President’s foggy baritone boomed out of the sound system by the podium. “We are on the way back.” As plenty of comics had noticed, he believed in saying things twice, and in repeating himself. “The United States has taken a heavy blow, the heaviest blow in our history, but we will pick ourselves up and get back on our feet.”

Beside Colin, Kelly made a small but discontented noise. One of the many reasons he loved her was that she knew bullshit when somebody slung it.

“Natural catastrophes, no matter how large and violent, cannot keep this great country on its knees for long.” The Vice President waved out to the kids in the folding chairs on the soccer pitch. “You are our hope. We know you can overcome whatever Mother Nature throws at us. We know you can, and we know you will.”

Kelly made another discontented noise, this one not so small. Colin touched her hand. She rolled her eyes. She knew what the supervolcano had done and was doing. Colin often wondered whether anyone back in Washington really did. When he was feeling charitable, he figured the disaster was too damn big for anyone to cope with. When he wasn’t. .

One of the new graduates yelled, “Do you know where I can get a job, maybe?” He wasn’t electronically amplified. The whole stadium heard him anyhow.

The Vice President looked confused. No enormous surprise: get him off-script and he’d stick a foot in his face. Once upon a time, he’d thought about running for President himself. Then his campaign struck the iceberg of his gaffes, and sank faster than the Titanic.

“I’m sure something will turn up for you,” he said now, and tried to get back to his speech.

That seemed safe enough. It shouldn’t have been another gaffe. It shouldn’t have been, but. . “What? Where? When? How?” the graduates shouted, and variations on all those themes. They knew their prospects were rotten. How blind was the Vice President, if he didn’t?

“Ladies and gentlemen, please!” The chancellor came to the microphone to try to quiet them down. “Let’s give our speaker the chance to finish his address.”

They booed her, and they booed the Vice President. A couple of them made paper airplanes out of program pages and flung them toward the podium, but that was as far as it went. Back when Colin was a kid, rioting UCSB students had wrecked Isla Vista and burned down the Bank of America there. These kids had better reason to rise up than their elders could have imagined. So it seemed to Colin, at any rate. But they subsided after some more jeers and catcalls. In due course, the Vice President did finish, and sat down. He got a lot of applause when he did, along with more derisive hoots.

He said something to the dean or vice chancellor next to him. They both chuckled. Why not? They didn’t need to worry about where their next paycheck would come from. The kids, on the other hand. .

Colin noticed something odd when the chancellor finished the ceremony by formally awarding the degrees. She announced each group separately: the A.B.s from the College of Letters and Sciences, the B.S.s from the College of Letters and Sciences, and so on. Each group in turn whooped and cheered and hollered as it turned its mortarboard tassels from left to right to show it was now full of graduates (to say nothing of those B.S.s).

Each group in turn. . till the chancellor awarded the Ph.D.s. The newly minted holders of doctorates turned their tassels silently and without any fuss. “Same thing happened when Rob graduated here a few years back,” Colin told Kelly in a low voice. “Isn’t that funny?”

“It doesn’t surprise me one bit. When I finally get my diss done, I’ll be too tired to feel like making a fuss even if I do go to the ceremony,” Kelly said. Right now she was teaching geology at Cal State Dominguez Hills, not far from San Atanasio. The slot was probably a wedding present from her chairman up at Berkeley, and a very welcome one. She kept working on the dissertation in her copious spare time.

“Huh,” Colin said thoughtfully. “Hadn’t looked at it like that. Sure makes more sense than any of my guesses.”

“Trust me,” Kelly said. Most of the time, few phrases set off more alarm bells in Colin’s head than that one. He nodded now.