Kelly leaned forward to look at the photos in the viewfinder. She nodded. “That’s it, all right. That’s what’s left from the last time it went off, I mean, maybe 640,000 years ago. It shot out about two hundred and forty cubic miles of ash and lava and rock-say, a thousand times as much as Mount St. Helens.”
“How about compared to Krakatoa?” Colin asked. “Or the earlier one in the 1800s-I forget its name, but the one that made the Year without a Summer?”
“Mount Tambora.” She beamed at him. People did that when you surprised them by knowing more than they’d expected about what they were interested in. “That was about thirty-five cubic miles. Krakatoa was only a squib next to it: six or seven cubic miles.”
“Wow.” Colin didn’t need a calculator to do the math. “So this eruption was a heck of a lot bigger than either one of those.” By himself or with his colleagues, he was as foulmouthed as any other policeman. He didn’t like to swear in front of women, though. It wasn’t the only reason he often felt like a dinosaur these days.
“Right,” Kelly said. “But this one went off 1.3 million years ago, too. Only sixty-seven cubic miles that time.”
“Only,” Colin echoed. The word seemed to hang in the cold, moist, sulfurous air.
“Only,” she repeated. “ ’Cause it went off 2.1 million years ago, too, and that was the big one. Something like six hundred cubic miles of junk-enough to bury California twenty feet deep. For real, the ash reached from the Pacific to Iowa and from Canada to Texas.”
There was a thought alongside which even a hangover didn’t seem such a big deal. Colin did some more math in his head. “Um, 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, 640,000 years ago… Seems like it’s about due. Is it?”
“Nobody knows,” Kelly answered. “And even if it is about due, that might mean it’s ten thousand years away instead of a hundred thousand. Or it might not. But people here and people back in Berkeley don’t like the way the Coffee Pot Springs dome is bulging all of a sudden.”
“What would it be like,” Colin said slowly, “if it did go off for real? I mean, the way it did the biggest time?”
He wondered if she’d say it would be indescribable. But she didn’t: “Take Rhode Island. Blow out lava and ash all around the edges. Then drop it half a mile-maybe a mile-straight down onto molten rock.” She cocked her head to one side, waiting to see what he’d say to that.
What he said was, “Best thing that could happen to the lousy place.”
“Huh?” Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it.
“For my sins, I got stationed in Providence when I was in the Navy,” Colied lained. “If America ever needs an enema, that’s where you’d plug it in.”
“Oh.” Kelly laughed-nervously. “I’ve heard the same thing about Buffalo and Syracuse.”
“Only from people who’ve never been to Providence.” Colin spoke with complete assurance.
“If you say so.” Kelly hurried on: “Then we’d get the ashfall all over the place, like we did before. And bunches of particles would go twenty or thirty miles up into the stratosphere and block off sunlight. Best estimate-”
“Guess, you mean,” Colin broke in.
“Guess. You’re right. It’s not like we can make the experiment. Best guess is, global temps go down about five degrees Celsius-nine degrees Fahrenheit. For years. Ten? Twenty? Two hundred? Nobody knows.”
Colin thought about that. L.A. nine degrees cooler would be more like Portland or Seattle-different, but not too bad. But Seattle nine degrees cooler would be more like Anchorage. Brr! And Anchorage nine degrees cooler would be like the North Pole. So would London and Stockholm and Moscow and lots of other places. The North Pole would be more like the South Pole. The South Pole… He didn’t want to contemplate what the South Pole would be like.
“Start of a new Ice Age?” he asked.
“There doesn’t seem to be any cause-and-effect between supervolcanoes and glaciation,” Kelly said. “But it sure wouldn’t be fun. Back seventy-five thousand years ago, Mount Tabo in Indonesia blew up. It’s Lake Tabo now-that was even a little bigger than the biggest blast here. And, about that same time, genetics studies show Homo sap almost went extinct. We got squeezed down to a few thousand people. Why? The bad weather from the supervolcano makes the best sense.”
“Happy day. Happy, uh, bleeping day.” Colin almost slipped. “That’ll give me sweet dreams tonight.”
“If it makes you feel any better, you’re standing in the middle of the last big caldera,” Kelly said cheerfully. “And there’s another caldera-a smaller, newer one-under the water in the West Thumb. There are little calderas all over the place in Yellowstone, if you know where to look.”
“Oh, boy,” Colin said. An aftershock rattled the boardwalk. Another tourist who’d just set foot on it decided this was a hell of a good time to go somewhere else. She hustled back toward the parking lot.
“Nothing much.” Now Kelly sounded disdainful. “That wasn’t even a 4.0.”
“Nope. Not even close,” Colin agreed. He realized he’d just spent fifteen minutes or so talking with a reasonably attractive woman without getting shot down in flames. That was one of the more pleasant novelties he’d run into lately. He asked, “Where does somebody doing research at Yellowstone stay?”
“In the employee housing at Lake Village, near the Fishing Bridge you can’t fish from any more,” Kelly said. “Not the Black Hole of Calcutta, but not the Ritz-Carlton, either. Makes dorm rooms look good.”
“Ouch! I’m sorry for you.” Colin remembered the UCSB dorms Rob and Marshall had lived in before they moved to off-campus apartments. (Vanessa had commuted to Long Beach State till she decided she knew it all and quit halfway through her junior year. She’d made a living ever since-he gave her that much.) He also remembered what student housing had given his sons to eat. “I hope the food’s better, anyhow.”
“Not so you’d notice.” Kelly made a face. Then she asked, “How about you? Where are you staying while you’re visiting here?”
“Jackson,” he answered. He saw that surprised her. You could go through cash in a hurry in Jackson if you were so inclined, and plenty of people were. What? I don’t look like I just finished a term as ambassador to the UN? he asked himself. Himself answered, You bum, you look like you just started a term for drunk and disorderly. He wasn’t that bad, not after caffeine and painkillers, but Himself could be rougher on him than anyone else. With a sheepish grin, he added an explanation she could hear: “Motel 6.”
“Oh. Okay.” She laughed. “So you’re not gonna sweep me off my feet, drive me away in a gold-plated Mercedes, and fund my research for the rest of my life?”
“Now that you mention it, no,” Colin said. But if that wasn’t an opening, he’d never heard one. (If that wasn’t an opening, she’d do unto him as the waitress had the night before.) Trying his best for suave, he went on, “If you’ve got a phone number or an e-mail, though
…”
He waited to see if he’d wind up with egg on his face. She pulled a little imitation-leather card case out of a jacket pocket, extracted a card, and started to hand it to him. Then she said, “Hang on.” Second thoughts? She scratched out the phone number on the card and wrote in a different one. “This is my cell. The one that’s printed here is my office back in Berkeley. I won’t be there till fall, and they’re liable to kill all the landlines anyway, to save money. Budgets.” It wasn’t a four-letter word, but she sure made it sound like one.
“Thanks.” He’d rarely been so sincere about what sounded like ordinary politeness. “And let me borrow that pen a sec, would you?” He scratched out not only the phone number but also the e-mail address on his card. “Here. This is my cell, and this e-mail doesn’t go through the official police system.”
“Thank you.” She looked at the card before she stowed it away. “You just said you were a cop, not a lieutenant.”