acknowledge in writing that you are doing this at your own risk, that you know it is dangerous, and that the federal government is not liable if you are injured or killed. We have a little too much on our plates right now to worry about nuisance lawsuits.”
“Yeah, just a little,” the National Park Service guy agreed.
Kelly was ready to sign on the dotted line. Kelly was, in fact, eager. She wouldn’t have come to this meeting if she weren’t. A chance to fly over the supervolcano crater, look down, and take pictures? She thought she would have signed away her immortal soul for that, let alone a chance for her heirs and assigns to take a bite out of Uncle Sam if something went wrong.
And something was liable to. She hadn’t told Colin about this little jaunt, for fear he would call her ninety- seven different kinds of idiot. If the supervolcano so much as hiccupped while they were over it, they’d be toast-to say nothing of toasted. They’d fall out of the sky and go into the magma pit. Three-quarters of a million years down the road, they’d be part of the next big show. A tiny part, but part even so.
She signed on the dotted line. She signed, repeatedly, on the dotted line. The government’s attitude seemed to be that anything worth doing was worth doing in quadruplicate. Several other grad students and a couple of profs also indited their John Han-cocks in all the requisite places.
What did it say that more graduate students than faculty members were willing to risk their lives for science? That people who’d got tenure had more brains than those who merely dreamt of it? Or that profs lived a better life than grad students and didn’t want to chance throwing it away? Was all of the above an acceptable choice?
One of the other intrepid grad students asked, “Do we know it’s safe for the plane to take off?”
“Son, we don’t know the sun’ll come up tomorrow,” the USGS man answered. “It may go nova between now and then, or the Earth may quit rotating, or whatever the hell. What I do know is, when the plane takes off I’m gonna be on it. I’ve already signed all this bullshit paperwork. If that’s not good enough for you, I don’t know what else to say.”
No one seemed to have any more questions after that. The National Park Service man said, “Be at Oakland International by five a.m. day after tomorrow. Airport security will be in place for our little jaunt.”
“Wit. Run that by me again,” Kelly said. “We sign all this stuff saying we know we’re risking our lives, but they’ve got to make sure nobody’ll hijack the plane and crash it into the crater? Where’s the sense in that?”
The USGS man grinned at her. “Hi! Welcome to Catch-22!” he said. “It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s government policy. Those people may pay me, but they don’t pay me enough to lie for them.”
And so, at a few minutes before five in the morning-well before dawn, in other words-Kelly sleepily put her cell phone and laptop in a tray and took off her shoes. She passed her little bag through the X-ray machine. “Can you open this, please?” a stern-looking black woman said when it came out the other side.
When TSA people said please, they didn’t mean it. Kelly unzipped the bag. The woman pawed through her meager stuff, then grudgingly nodded. “What was wrong?” Kelly asked.
“Your bagels looked like something they weren’t supposed to,” the black woman answered.
She told the story of the bagels of mass destruction to the other geologists waiting to go out to their chartered Learjet. They gave back the mixture of laughs and groans she’d looked for. “What else do you expect from a system designed by very sharp people for very dull people to work?” one of them said. Kelly hadn’t thought of it like that; when she did, the rituals of airport security made more sense.
She’d never been on a private jet. Having enough room to stretch out in her seat made her want to abandon Southwest, American, and United forever. “I could get used to this,” she said as the plane taxied toward takeoff.
“In that case, what are you doing studying geology?” asked her chairman, who had the window seat beside hers. Geoff Rheinburg was gray-haired and pudgy, but more than plenty sharp. “You should have gone into programming and turned into an Internet billionaire. Then you’d have a jet for every day of the week-two for Saturday, if you wanted.”
“I spend more time doing geology than flying,” Kelly answered after a little thought. “And I can use computers, but I’m not much for making them sit up and beg. This is more fun.”
“Then you may possibly be in the right place after all,” Rheinburg allowed. Was he old enough to have started out on a slide rule, back in the days before pocket calculators? If he wasn’t, he came close.
The plane shot down the runway and zoomed into the sky. Air traffic here and most places in the USA was still screwed up, with flights way, way off their usual level. Maybe that tough black gal had checked out the bagels for no better reason than that she was bored stiff.
“This is the pilot speaking.” The Learjet’s intercom had better sound quality than a commercial airliner’s. The man’s voice didn’t sound as if it were coming through a tin-can telephone. He went on, “I am going to give you the usual advice-keep your seat belts fastened at all times. I mean it more than usual, though. We will be flying over the crater at forty thousand feet. Look for turbulence all the same. That sucker is enormous, and it is hot. Hot air rises-why do you think old politicians float away and never get seen again?”
That won him a few startled laughs. Kelly wondered if he’d ever flown for Southwest. She hated the seating stampede, but enjoyed the way the crew sometimes spoofed the usual instructions about seat belts and exit rows and oxygen masks.
“My brother-in-law told me I needed my head examined when he found out I was making this flight,” the pilot went on. “I told him I needed some help with the down payment on a house I want to buy… That doesn’t necessarily make him wrong, you understand. What’s your excuse, folks?”
“He ought to be doing stand-up,” Kelly said.
“We can’t throw things at him when he’s behind that locked door,” Professor Rheinburg said. “Too bad, isn’t it?”
They flew on. The engines… sounded like engines. Kelly approved. There was still a lot of dust and ash in the air, and the supervolcano’s afterbelches-major eruptions on any normal scale, but the scales weren’t normal now, and wouldn’t be for a long time-kept adding more. The planes that were flying needed much more frequent engine overhauls than anyone had dreamt they would.
From Oakland to Yellowstone was about an hour and a half. No, not to Yellowstone: to the supervolcano crater. Yellowstone was gone, dead, off the map in the most literal meaning of the words. Yellowstone had either fallen half a mile toward the center of the earth or was buried deep in lava or pyroclastic flows or volcanic ash. Yellowstone was screwed, blued, and tattooed, not to put too fine a point on it.
People worked on laptops or fiddled with the sensors and other instruments that were the real reason for the flight. The pilot didn’t make the usual announcement about electronic devices. The geologists might have lynched him if he had. Without electronic devices, they fell all the way back to the start of the twentieth century, or maybe even to the nineteenth.
After a while, the pilot did come on to say, “Folks, we are getting close. I’m going to do what I’m supposed to do when turbulence is likely. I’m going to tell you to make sure you’re in your seats with your belts securely fastened. Don’t be dumb, now. If there isn’t turbulence flying over this critter, then there’s no such animal. We don’t want to have to scrape you off the ceiling-or off your neighbor’s lap.”
Geoff Rheinburg gave Kelly a wry grin as he checked his belt. “No offense, but the only gal I want on my lap is my wife,” he said.
“Okay by me,” she answered, tightening her own a little. She knew he was happily married. Nice that somebody was. She figured Colin would get up the nerve to propose one of these days before too long. She also figured she would get up the nerve to say yes when he did. What happened after that was a crapshoot-as far as she could see, just like every other marriage since the beginning of time.
“Three minutes till we reach the edge of the crater,” the pilot said. “Welcome to the biggest goddamn roller coaster in the world.”
Kelly peered out. Unlike a commercial airliner’s, the Learjet’s windows were big enough to give even somebody in an aisle seat a good view of the wider world. She’d looked down into active volcanoes before. She’d gone to the Big Island of Hawaii: yeah, work as a geologist could be rough. But the volcanoes there, which went off pretty much all the time, were as different as you could get from the Yellowstone supervolcano. The supervolcano was like the little girl saving up more spit. It saved and it saved and it saved till its igneous cheeks couldn’t hold any more. Then-
Then it went and trashed half the continent. And that was only the first act. The follow-up, which did a
