while, he sighed and went on: “Fuck. Are you sure?” Another pause, shorter this time. Evidently Heinrich was sure, because Larry sighed again. “Well, if that’s the best you can do, it’s the best you can do. If we’re still here in the morning, I’m sure we’ll thank you for it. Auf wiedersehen — I hope.” He killed the phone to give himself whatever small charge he got from the last word.
“Well?” Kelly, Ruth, and Daniel made like a Greek chorus… or, given the reputation scientists had these days, a geek chorus.
“No helicopter till morning,” Larry said glumly. “Sorry, but that’s the way it goes, or doesn’t go. Heinrich’s a good guy, but he can’t get the government to get anybody airborne before then. Copter pilots don’t like night flying to begin with. When you factor in two erupting volcanoes… It’s hard to blame anybody, you know?”
Put that way, he had a point. The logical, rational part of Kelly’s mind saw as much. The big aftershock that rocked the parking lot just then made paying attention to that logical, rational part a skosh harder than it would have been in the Geology Department conference room back in Berkeley.
“What do we do if… if the bottom falls out before sunup?” Ruth asked. Her logical, rational part was feeling the strain, too.
Larry’s still functioned. Kelly supposed she should admire him for that. But then again, what was that parody of Kipling’s “If”? If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, chances are you don’t understand what the fuck is going on. Something like that, anyhow. Larry proved he did, though, because he answered, “Remember all those liability waivers we had to sign before they’d let us back into the park to study the Ranger Lake eruption? Well, every one of the little bastards is still in force.”
Kelly remembered that pile of paperwork much too well. What it boiled dowto was, she’d admitted to the U.S. government and the Parks and Wildlife Service that she was out of her ever-loving mind for coming back into Yellowstone, and agreed that anything that happened to her was her own goddamn fault, not the Feds’. At the time, it had just seemed like more forms to sign off on. That was then. This was now. Now was a lot scarier.
Bleakly, she said, “After all that paperwork, I’m surprised the government will try to get us out of here at all.”
“As a matter of fact, so am I,” Larry answered, which did nothing to set her mind at ease. He went on, “God only knows how many markers Heinrich had to call in to get as much as he got. I owe him bigtime. Now I hope I last long enough to have a chance to pay some of it back.”
Something out in the darkness went boom! — splash! — a new noise. It was large, but not very close. The ground shook yet again. “If that wasn’t a hydrothermal explosion, I’ve never heard one,” Daniel said.
“ Have you ever heard a hydrothermal explosion?” Kelly asked.
“Well, no,” he admitted.
“Good,” she said. “Neither have I-till now, I mean.” Somewhere out there, steam bursting through to the surface had just created a new pond near Yellowstone Lake, or maybe taken a new bite out of the lake’s shoreline. With a shaky laugh, she added, “We’ll have a fresh tourist attraction if this turns out not to be the supervolcano after all.”
“We always wanted to study one,” Ruth said.
“Sure, from a safe distance.” Kelly pointed up at the moon, which the plume from the Ranger Lake eruption dimmed but didn’t hide. “Right now, I think that would be a pretty safe distance. Nobody’s messed around with the geology there for the past couple of billion years.”
“Do you think it’s going to blow?” Daniel asked.
She shrugged. A mosquito buzzed near her left ear. They weren’t so bad as they had been earlier in the summer, but they hadn’t disappeared. The supervolcano meant nothing to them. Probably even the earthquakes didn’t scare them. Except perhaps for squashing one with a toppling pine, what could an earthquake do to a mosquito?
“I still don’t think anybody know for sure,” she said slowly. “We’re like preachers studying Revelations, trying to figure out if these finally are the Last Days.”
“If it goes now, these are the Last Days-for us, anyway,” Larry said.
Kelly was old-fashioned enough to wear a watch in spite of carrying a phone. She brought her left wrist up close to her face to read the glowing hands. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. “What do we do for the rest of the night?” she asked.
“Assuming we’ve got the rest of the night to do it in,” Ruth said.
“If we don’t, there’s no point to worrying about it, so we may as well pretend we do.” As usual, Larry made good sense. He continued, “We can try to sleep-”
“Good luck!” Daniel broke in.
“We can try,” the older man said. “Or we can stay up and talk. Not a whole lot of other stuff going on.” An aftershock contradicted him. Unfazed, he corrected himself: “Not a whole lot of other stuff going on that we can do anything about.”
Kelly had sometimes slept through small aftershocks in California. Ifsiz were tired, a 3.2, say, might not wake you up, even if it was centered close by. Sleep through quakes that started at 5.0 and went up from there? Sleep through quakes that felt as if they started six inches under your shoes? In the immortal words of any New York cabby of the past hundred years, fuhged-daboutit.
She learned more about her comrades that night-and they about her-than she had in all the time since she’d met them. How much she’d remember when the sun came up, if she was still here when it did, was a different question.
Telling when the sun came up was also a different question. Volcanic ash from the eruption northeast of Coffee Pot Springs darkened the eastern horizon. Little by little, the sky above that mass of tiny rock particles lightened. Somewhere beyond the ash plumes, the sun still shone. Kelly thought of that reminder in The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien talked about Sauron’s smokes and fumes. Unlike Sauron’s smoke screen, this wasn’t evil. It just… was.
She was gnawing on more beef jerky when, in lieu of Tolkien’s eagles, two helicopters came down out of the sky and landed on the beat-up parking lot. They were louder than a Me-tallica concert. The wind from their rotors tried to blow the geologists away. The pilots both wore orange suits that made them look like animated carrots. They gestured frantically.
Along with Larry, Kelly got into one copter. Ruth and Daniel hopped into the other. The cabins didn’t cut the noise at all. Kelly was still fumbling with her uncomfortable seat’s safety harness when the copter took off again. They flew due north, which struck her as a good idea. If the supervolcano erupted, the plume would blow south and west. And…
“Try to put some mountains between us and the eruption,” Larry bawled, over and over, till the pilot got it. “They may shield us from the worst of the blast.” The pilot swore, but he did it.
IX
The helicopters flew like jinking halfbacks, using the peaks of the Rockies for blockers. But they were running from, not towards. And what they were running from would flatten them more mercilessly than any middle linebacker ever hatched. Kelly found a whole new reason to be glad she liked football; the comparison never would have occurred to her otherwise.
By the time they were zooming down the canyon between Prospect Peak and the slightly lower Folsom Peak to the west, she and Larry both wore helmets like the pilot’s. They cut the din in the cabin a little, and let the geologists talk by shouting instead of by screaming. Most of what Kelly and Larry had to say amounted to variations on the theme of Go like hell!
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” the pilot said when they banged on that drum once too often. “I’m going flat out now, and there’s no guarantee the sumbitch’ll go off while we’re airborne. There’s no guarantee the sumbitch’ll go off at all, right?”
Every word he said was gospel truth. But he hadn’t spent the night on the ground in that potholed parking lot. He hadn’t felt the earth shudder under him only God knew how often. He also hadn’t been studying the Yellowstone hot spot for his whole career.
