Supervolcano: All Fall Down

“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “no.”

“Do you know where in this frozen wilderness Professor Farrell is currently residing?” she asked him. “We’d like to get to the bottom of his extraconstitutional authority.”

When everybody with Constitutional authority forgets we exist, what are we supposed to do? But Rob didn’t come out with it. What was the use? What was the point? Marie Fabianski wouldn’t listen to him. Chances were she didn’t intend to listen to Jim Farrell, either. CNN wouldn’t have come up here to listen. It was coming up here to talk. Of course, she’d never met Jim. If she had to make sure she got his name right, she didn’t know much about him. The confrontation might prove interesting, in the matter-antimatter sense of the word. And. .

“As a matter of fact, he’s right over there in Guilford.” Rob pointed in the direction from which he’d set out. “If you give me a lift back to town, I’ll introduce you.”

“That would be wonderful!” Marie Fabianski exclaimed, which definitely proved she didn’t know what she was getting into.

Rob rode with the cameraman and the writer. God forbid he should pollute the talent with his touch, though both Marie and he wore enough layers of clothing to make any contact between them strictly a rumor. He’d never been in a dogsled before. The running huskies pulled it along at an amazing clip. They leaned into their harness for all they were worth. Dogs got off on working. No wonder I like cats better, Rob thought.

When they stopped in front of the Trebor Mansion Inn, the huskies stood there panting, pink tongues lolling out of their mouths. They were ready-hell, they were eager-to run some more.

Dick Barber came out, wearing a Navy peacoat and watch cap. One corner of his mouth turned up slightly as he said, “You brought me some summer people, Rob? Way to go!”

Guilford hadn’t seen much in the way of summer people (or, for that matter, summer) since the supervolcano erupted. Rob snickered. To a Californian, the whole idea of summer people had always seemed bizarre to begin with. The CNN crew looked blank. One of the prerequisites for working in TV had to be a vaccination against irony.

“Who, ah, are your friends?” Barber asked.

“We’re from CNN,” Marie Fabianski said brightly. “We understand that James Farrell is staying here. We’d like to interview him and learn more about current conditions in this part of the country.”

A Maine Coon cat studied the huskies from a safe distance. The dogs saw it and barked furiously. The cat, perhaps a coward but for sure not a fool, decided somewhere else was a good place to be and departed thither at high speed. Dick Barber seemed as bemused by it as he was by the descent of the media. “You would?” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Would we have come all this way if we weren’t?” she returned. All this way was a couple of hours’ drive up from Portland in good weather. Not much of that since the eruption, and Guilford was indeed a long way from the rest of the world.

“Who knows?” Barber said. “But if he wants to talk to you, I won’t try to stop him. Just remember, you brought it on yourselves. Why don’t you come into my parlor? I’m not even a spider.” He didn’t say anything about whether Marie Fabianski was a fly.

A fire burned in the fireplace there. That meant it wasn’t frigid: it was just cold. And just cold, in the middle of a post-eruption winter, felt wonderful to Rob.

While the cameraman photographed the room and set up his tripod and some battery-powered lights across from the couch, Barber whispered, “You went out after moose.”

“Yeah, well, this is what I found,” Rob said defensively. “Or I mean, they found me.”

Jim Farrell swept into the parlor. He was elegant in his trademark fedora and a dark gray topcoat that remained dapper even if it showed it hadn’t been new for a while. Not much clothing north and west of the Interstate had been new any time lately.

“An invasion by the Fourth Estate!” he boomed in his resonant baritone. “How quaint! How outdated!”

He didn’t faze Marie Fabianski. She must have got a double dose of the antisarcasm serum. Before long, they sat side by side on the couch. The lights went on. So did the little red LED on the camera. “I’m CNN correspondent Marie Fabianski, speaking to you from the Trebor Mansion Inn in Guilford, Maine. With me is retired Professor James Farrell, who some call the de facto dictator of half the state of Maine.”

“Whom, dear. Whom some call the de facto dictator,” Farrell said genially.

“I didn’t think you were an English professor,” she retorted.

“I wasn’t. But I do prize accuracy-which is more than a lot of people and organizations can claim these days.” Farrell named no names. He didn’t even name any initials. The jab went home even so.

Standing quietly beside Rob, out of the shot, Dick Barber grinned. That mention of the Trebor Mansion Inn would have been worth a lot to him back when there were summer people. Now it was no more than a might- have-been.

“I’ve heard it said that you are the big boss in this part of the country,” Marie Fabianski tried again. “Is that true or isn’t it?”

Rob expected Farrell to come back with something like I’ve heard it said that CNN hires lady reporters because of how pretty they are. Is that true or isn’t it? Instead, the old man complained, “A minute ago, you said I was a dictator. Now I’m only a big boss? Make up your mind, please!”

“Well, are you a dictator?” She sounded flustered. Things weren’t going the way she’d expected. She’d never tried dealing with Jim Farrell before, which had to explain a good deal.

He beamed at her like your kindly grandfather, if your kindly grandfather happened to be a retired history prof and a political gadfly. “Do I look like a dictator?”

“Dictators can look like-”

He overrode her: “Do I sound like a dictator? More to the point, do I act like a dictator? If I am a dictator, where’s my army? Where’s my harem? Most important of all, where are my tax collectors? Hard to be a dictator without what I believe the heathens term a revenue stream.”

“If you’re not a dictator, what would you call yourself?” Out of her depth, Marie Fabianski did her best to swim. She was game, anyhow.

“Someone who knows a little something about how to live without the so-called modern conveniences,” Farrell answered. “Someone who didn’t go to Washington and hole up there, unlike a certain Congresscritter I could mention. Someone the people around here trust. And I’m entertaining. We mostly can’t watch CNN and the other comedy channels any more. The poor, benighted citizenry has to content itself with me.”

She gaped. She gestured to the cameraman. He killed the bright lights and the video camera. Sighing, she said, “I don’t think we’ve got much of a story here.”

“I don’t think you want your network to look like a pack of fools,” Dick Barber said.

“Of course she doesn’t, Dick,” Farrell said. “They’re trying to get by as best they can, just like us. We don’t want to get to the point where we start eating each other, and they don’t want to lose ratings. No matter where you are in the world, it’s not easy. It never was, even before the eruption.”

Before the eruption. Rob wondered how many times he’d said that and thought that in the days since. He was starting to take the new, harder, life for granted, but he still remembered the old one. He remembered the difference. He knew how big it was. Things wouldn’t be the same again, probably not till long after he was dead.

If they ever were. That they looked bigger every day.

* * *

A Hawthorne cop had got killed in a shootout with a bank robber. The robber was also deceased, which didn’t surprise Colin Ferguson a bit. The police tended not to take prisoners in those situations.

When the coroner finally released the robber’s corpse, a few grieving relatives and friends might lay him to rest. Funerals for officers slain in the line of duty were much bigger affairs. Cops and politicians from all the surrounding towns came to pay their respects. Fallen soldiers often didn’t get such a fancy sendoff.

Colin hadn’t known the dead policeman. He was here at Chief Pitcavage’s behest, as the official representative of the San Atanasio PD. He hadn’t worn his uniform for a while. It felt scratchy. The navy blue cap with the shiny brim was an unfamiliar weight on his head.