Her heart thumped in alarm. As if she were still his student, she didn’t want him to think she was dumb. She peered at the plant in the palm of his hand. Whatever it was, a dandelion it wasn’t. She nervously licked her lips. She knew a hell of a lot more about rocks and soil than she did about the plants that grew on them. Still, considering where they were and what this one looked like. . “It’s a lodgepole pine sapling, isn’t it?”
He beamed at her. “That’s just what it is! The damn things can grow in the crappiest soil there is. That’s why there are-were-so many of them in Yellowstone. They’re the first squatter trees to come back after an eruption- even after this eruption.”
“Except this one won’t grow now,” Kelly pointed out.
“Nope.” Rheinburg didn’t sound upset about it. “If I can find one after a few minutes of poking, there are bound to be millions of them popping up all over the ashfall.”
“I guess.” That made Kelly more cheerful, but not for long. Millions of lodgepole pines scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles meant maybe ten trees per square mile. Ten saplings per square mile, that was. Not all of them would live to grow up. Even if all of them did, the result wouldn’t be what anyone in his right mind could call a forest. It would look a lot more like a bald man’s comb-over.
She said as much to Rheinburg. He laughed. “There’s a difference,” he said. “A bald guy’s comb-over gets worse and worse as time goes by, ’cause he’s got more and more scalp showing and less and less hair to cover it with. Here, there will be more and more trees and bushes and whatnot to patch over Mother Earth’s bald spot.”
Kelly found herself nodding. “Well, you’re right,” she said.
Her chairperson beamed at her. “You can say that. It’s one of the reasons I enjoyed having you in the program so much. Most people would sooner be drawn and quartered than admit they’re wrong.” He briefly-only briefly-looked sheepish. “Lord knows I would.”
“How come you never told me you enjoyed having me in the program till I wasn’t in the program any more?” Kelly asked pointedly.
“How come? Because grad students are supposed to worry, that’s how come. It makes them work harder. If you thought everything was cool, you’d try to skate through your research, and then I wouldn’t enjoy having you around so much. Nope-you need fear and deadlines. And so did I.”
Kelly would have liked to tell him he was full of it. She didn’t even try. She knew too well he wasn’t. What had kept her cramming her head with facts and formulas before her orals but fear of failing? If she’d been sure she would pass, she wouldn’t have studied so hard-and she would know less now.
“Wait till you have grad students of your own,” Rheinburg said. “You’ll find out what I mean. Oh, will you ever!”
People were slithering into sleeping bags. Kelly hadn’t done that in a while. She was used to sleeping on a nice, soft bed with a nice, warm husband. In spite of a foam pad between her and the ground, she tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable and not having much luck.
She couldn’t go off behind a bush the next morning: no bushes to go behind. The geologists went behind Humvees instead, pointers and setters choosing different vehicles. Eventually, the Humvees wouldn’t be able to go any farther. What would they do then? Turn their backs, she supposed. Or, more likely, they’d be able to go behind boulders by then. The supervolcano had thrown great big rocks a hell of a long way.
In fact, the Humvees lasted till late that afternoon. They were tough critters. They kept going for quite some time after the eruption had destroyed any sign that human beings had ever lived or built things in these parts. Had they been half-tracks, they might have gone farther yet. Or they might not have; wouldn’t tracks be even more susceptible to grit than wheels were? Kelly didn’t know one way or the other. When she asked at the stop for supper, the soldiers, who thought they did know, got into a hellacious argument, some saying one thing, some the other.
They were still close to eighty miles from the crater when even the valiant Humvees couldn’t force their way through the dust and volcanic ash any more. “It’s a shame we couldn’t get helicopters to take us all the way in and out,” Kelly remarked the next morning as the geologists got ready for the trek that would follow if they wanted to- and if they could-see the caldera up close and personal.
Larry Skrtel clapped a hand to his forehead: as much emotion as she’d ever seen him show. “Helicopters, she says!” the USGS veteran exclaimed. “Kelly, it took hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat to get the Humvees. The way things are, the way they’re gonna stay for as long as anyone can see, nobody will spend a dime on anything the computer geeks and bean counters call unessential. Like I just told you, it took a special miracle to get ’em to spend a nickel.”
Mounting the expedition had cost Uncle Sam and however many taxpayers were still paying taxes a pretty fair pile of nickels. Skrtel was bound to be right, though: to a bean counter, it looked like small change. What did they say about the Feds?
But something else Skrtel said raised Kelly’s hackles, even if she wasn’t sure what hackles were. “Who says this is unessential?” she demanded irately. “What could be more important than understanding how the supervolcano did its number on us?”
He spread his callused hands in resignation. “Darn near anything,” he answered. “It’s not gonna go off again, not the way it did-the magma pool takes a long time to fill up again after it blasts out. Ordinary volcanic eruptions? After what we’ve already been through, those are a piece of cake.”
Some of the ordinary eruptions that would come would be enormous by the standards civilization was used to. Enormous, yes, but not humongous: the technical term geologists used for a major supervolcano blast. And Skrtel’s words brought back Kelly’s old worry-if studying the supervolcano was obsolete, wasn’t she?
Well, it wasn’t quite. There might be hope for her yet. And she had more urgent things to worry about. One was a volcanic hiccup, the equivalent of an earthquake aftershock, only with lava. Another was getting lost in this literally tractless wilderness and not making it out again.
MREs and plastic water bottles made her pack feel as if she were carrying another person piggyback. Everybody who was going forward had a GPS set. That ought to make getting lost less of a worry. And it did. . up to a point. Everybody had a compass, too, but the damn things swung at what looked like random. The supervolcano hadn’t belched out much iron in relative terms, but there was plenty to confuse anything that relied on the Earth’s magnetic field.
GPS systems didn’t, of course. That didn’t mean Kelly trusted hers completely. When sorrows came, they came not single spies but in battalions. She laughed at herself. Where the hell had she come up with that bit of Shakespeare from an undergrad lit course? Only showed that general-ed requirements didn’t always go to waste.
Off she went with her colleagues. The dust and ashes scrunched under her hiking boots. She’d let herself fall out of shape since she got married, too. Well, things could’ve been worse. She could have been slogging through mud as deep as she was tall.
Still nothing man-made visible. Gone-all gone, buried, on the way to fossilization. She looked ahead. Even the mountains seemed strange. So much volcanic rubbish had fallen on them, it had changed their heights and their shapes. That should have been impossible. It wasn’t, not to the supervolcano.
Scanning the mountainsides with binoculars, she did spot a few dead pines sticking up through the dust and ash. Back in the day, you could see dead trunks from the big fires of the 1980s sticking up through snow. Colin said those reminded him of the stubble on a corpse’s cheek. Kelly never would have thought of that herself, which didn’t mean it didn’t fit.
Larry Skrtel called back to Missoula. He had a satellite phone. Like the GPS, those still worked. They also carried little radios, whose signals would cross the ruined land. Geoff Rheinburg called them Dick Tracy wrist radios. They weren’t quite, but that came close enough.
Except for the noises the geologists made, the world was eerily quiet. No insects buzzed or chirped. No birds called. No hawks or vultures glided overhead. At night, no coyotes yipped and yowled. No dogs howled at the moon. No cats screamed. No mosquitoes imitated tiny dentists’ drills. It wasn’t the worst of the mosquito season, nowhere near, but there should have been a few.
“You’re right!” Larry exclaimed when Kelly mentioned that. He made as if to slap himself upside the head. “I didn’t even notice.”
“Hard to notice something that isn’t there,” Professor Rheinburg said.
