Something ahead was burning. Larry waved to Daniel. They stopped side by side. At first, Kelly thought she was seeing lava oozing up from some new crack in the earth’s crust that led down to the magma pool under Yellowstone. But no. The lodgepole pines were burning, which was pretty goddamn awe-inspiring in its own way. Snow stifled wildfires. That was a rule as old as the park.
Well, there were older rules. How hot did the lava flow heat the trees? Hot enough to steam the snow off them, and off the ground between them. Hot enough to dry them out and set them blazing. Some of what was going up into the air was genuine, honest-to-God wood smoke.
Silence slammed down after the engines cut out. It seemed all the more quiet because Kelly’s ears were on the stunned side. Through it, Larry said, “I don’t think we ought to get a whole lot closer, y’know?”
Daniel spread his gloved hands. “You’re the boss. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, we won’t. But it’s a shame to come this far and not be able to go the rest of the way.”
“It’d be a shame to get into trouble we can’t get out of,” Larry said, and Kelly knew they wouldn’t be going any farther.
“I wonder what it looks like from space,” she said. “What are the satellites picking up?”
“Dust. Ash. Smoke,” Ruth said.
“Oh, more than that,” Kelly said. “They’re bound to have infrared sensors to look through all the crap and see exactly where the hot stuff is coming out.”
“No doubt about it,” Larry agreed. That made Kelly feel good, the way a nod from one of her profs at her doctoral orals had. She’d understood something clearly. Very few things outside the bedroom were more satisfying.
Inside the bedroom… Did Colin know what was going on? If CNN had somebody in Yellowstone, it was bound to be making the headlines, but was he watching TV or listening to the radio? She hoped he was. She wanted him to see her. He’d be proud of her if he did, and having him proud of her mattered.
It mattered a lot, in fact. Was that love? If it wasn’t, it sure felt like a stop on the way. They’d known each other for a year and a half now; they’d been lovers for more than a year. Colin hadn’t said the word, not once. Kelly hadn’t, either. She didn’t think it was her place to start talking about love. He was the one who’d been burned. He needed time to work that through.
How long did he need? Kelly shrugged inside her anorak. This wasn’t the time or place to worry about that.
Something not far enough ahead went Boom! — a sub-sub-bass, a noise felt more than heard. Kelly felt something else, too: the ground shook under her feet. Ruth pointed into the sky. “Whoa!” she said.
Whoa! was right. A chunk of rock about the size of a school bus flew through the air with the greatest of ease. For a bad second, Kelly thought the parabola it was describing would end right on top of her. Then she realized the volcanic bomb would fall short.
It did, by a couple of hundred yards. The ground shook again at the impact. How much would a flying boulder that size weigh? Plenty. And how hot was it? Hot enough so the snow went sssss when it came down. That was just steam rising into the air.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Daniel sounded deeply impressed.
“I have, in Hawaii. No snow there, of course,” Larry said. “But that was too close for comfort. I think we’re like Kansas City right now-we’ve definitely gone as far as we can go, or maybe a little farther. Move we adjourn. We probably shouldn’t waste much time doing it, either.”
Daniel still looked disappointed. He didn’t argue this time, though. That enormous boulder still steaming in the snow was a potent argument all by itself. Adjourn they did.
Marshall Ferguson wanted to talk to an academic advisor at UCSB about as much as he’d wanted to have his wisdom teeth pulled. The dentist had knocked him out beforehand. He’d got to eat ice cream and milk shakes for a couple of days afterwards, and the Lorcets the quack prescribed for pain weren’t the least enjoyable drugs he’d ever swallowed.
No anesthetic here. If he wasn’t careful now, he not only wouldn’t get the shift in majors he wanted, but he might end up with a bachelor’s degree at the end of next year. Back in the old days, people said, you could flit from major to major like a butterfly in a botanical garden.
Times had changed. They wanted you out the door, diploma clutched in your sweaty fist, ready to turn into cannon fodder for the big, wide world. Marshall, on the other hand, liked living in Santa Barbara. He liked the weed and the booze and the girls. He liked the very idea of a town where they had a Couch-Burning Day. He even liked some of his classes.
Whatever the big, wide world held in store, it wouldn’t be as much fun as he was having now. He was all too sure of that. And he was also sure his old man wouldn’t keep subsidizing him once he said farewell to the university. He wasn’t allergic to work, but he vastly preferred partying. Sooner or later, it would have to end. He was also too mournfully sure of that. Later was better, though.
Rob was still partying, the lucky so-and-so. He hadn’t let an engineering degree get in his way. But Marshall had seen that playing in a band you wanted to take somewhere was also a hell of a lot of work. Besides, unlike Rob, he was hopelessly unmusical himself.
He’d thought without much hope about landing a Hollywood job with a bachelor’s in film studies. But, like history, it seemed more likely to lead to your working in retail the rest of your life. That looked like hell on earth to him.
Then again, there was no guarantee he’d ever get any kind of job at all with a film-studies degree. The way the economy bit the big one, nobody was hiring anybody these days. One more reason not to pile up enough units to make them throw you out. If you probably couldn’t get a job any which way, staying in school looked great by comparison.
It sure did to Marshall. Convincing Dad wouldn’t be so much fun, but he’d done it before. He’d be able to come through one more time.
A girl walked out of the advisor’s office. She was kind of cute: a brunette with a button nose and perky tits under a tight blouse. Marshall smiled at her. You never could tell. But she didn’t smile back. Whatever the advisor’d told her, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“Ms. Rosenblatt will see you now,” the secretary told him. Her nameplate said SANDE ANKENBRANDT. Her hair, by coincidence or design, was sandy, too. “Go on in.”
“Uh, thanks.” Marshall did.
Selma Rosenblatt-her first name was on a plaque on the door-was a little older than his mother. She’d let the gray in her hair show, which made her seem older yet. The way she eyed him warned that he was the eleventy-first student she’d seen today, and that she wasn’t delighted to have him here.
“Take a seat,” she said. “Give me your name and your SIN.” From her name, he’d guessed she would sound like a New Yorker. She didn’t. By the way she talked, she was a Valley girl. Only she wasn’t a girl any more, and hadn’t been for quite a while.
Sit he did, on the vinyl-covered, badly padded chair in front of her desk. Behind it, she was snuggled by a leather armchair. They let you know who was who, all right. “I’m Marshall Ferguson-two l s,” he said, and rattled off his nine-digit Student Identification Number. Some bureaucrat, his ass in a fancy chair like the advisor’s, must have come up with the acronym, never noticing what he was doing. By now, it was too entrenched in UCSB life to be replaced.
Ms. Rosenblatt wrote it down as he gave it to her, and used the number pad on her keyboard to enter it into her computer. He knew what she’d see on the monitor: his academic career, in all its occasional splendor.
One of her sharply penciled eyebrows jumped a quarter of an inch. “Well, well,” she murmured. The admiration might have been reluctant, but it was real. “We don’t see a transcript like yours every day.”