He tried a different question: “What if no more fuel oil gets here?”
Dick Barber clicked his tongue between his teeth. “In that case, things do get more… interesting, don’t they? The way it looks to me is, we have two choices in that case. Either we freeze to death or we start cutting down trees.”
“That doesn’t sound like two choices to me. More like one,” Justin said.
“Oh, I agree with you,” Barber replied. “But I promise, there will be folks who don’t. Some people in this state-influential people, too-feel it’s not just wrong but evil to harm a tree for any reason. They feel that way very strongly, and they’re not shy about saying so.”
“There are people like that in California, too,” Rob said.
The proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn let one eyebrow climb toward his shock of graying hair. “Why am I not surprised?”
“I don’t know. Why aren’t you?” Rob had a crooked grin of his own. “I’m kind of a tree-hugger myself, but-”
“That but suggests you’re young enough to get over it,” Barber said.
Rob shrugged. “Whenever you can take care of trees without hurting people, that’s a good thing to do, I think. But if people are going to freeze to death unless they’ve got logs in the fireplace, that’s the time to break out the axes and the chainsaws.”
“Sounds reasonable. Are you sure you’re from California?” Barber said. “The other thing is, all the questions about fuel oil apply to gasoline, too. The Shell station’s closed, in case you hadn’t noticed. So the chainsaws won’t keep working forever, or even through the winter… assuming the winter does eventually end.”
“I’ve checked out the Year without a Summer online,” Rob said. “Snow in June! That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”
“No. And the Yellowstone supervolcano is a bigger, nastier beast than the one in the nineteenth century,” Barber agreed. “So it may come down to men working up a sweat even in our lovely winter weather chopping down pines the old-fashioned way. But chances are they won’t be leveling old-growth forest. There’s still quite a bit of that farther north, but not around here. A lot of the woods in these parts have grown up since the war. People stopped trying to farm. They gave up the land and moved to the cities-or else they pulled up stakes and headed for the Sun Belt. There are more people in Maine now than there were in 1950, but there aren’t three times as many or six times as many, the way there are some places.”
“I believe that,” Justin said. “You’re more settled here than we are on the other coast.”
“And nobody moves here on account of the weather,” Rob added. “Nobody moved here on account of the weathr even before the supervolcano.”
“You forget the summer people,” Barber reminded him. “I can’t afford to do that, no matter how tempting it is. I make my living off them. They come to Maine to get away from Boston and New York City and Philadelphia. If there’s no summer next year, there won’t be any summer people. I don’t know what I’ll do then.”
Rob wondered how many times he’d heard that since the supervolcano erupted. More often than in all the years before then, he suspected. It was too big to plan around. You just had to wait and see what happened next and try to roll with it as best you could.
“Suppose there isn’t just a year without a summer,” Justin said. “Suppose there are five or six or ten years like that all in a row. What does Maine look like by the end of that time?”
“Hell,” Barber answered promptly. “Dante’s hell, I mean. The book is called The Inferno, but Satan’s buried in ice. At the end of ten years like that, we’d probably have enough ice to keep Old Scratch from getting loose for quite a while.”
A cat wandered in, a cat almost big enough to be a bobcat. The Barber family semiprofessionally bred Maine Coons. They handled the weather in these parts as well as a critter was likely to. And they were also uncommonly good-natured. Vanessa would go gaga over them, at least at first. Rob suspected she’d get bored with them, though; they weren’t contrary enough to suit her.
This beast rubbed his leg. It made motorboat noises when he bent down and stroked it. “I ought to keep one or two in the bedding, the way the Australian Aborigines did with their dogs,” he said. “They’re like hot-water bottles with ears, you know?”
Justin nodded. “A three-dog night was really cold. That’s how that turkey of a band got its name.”
“Once upon a time, I liked them,” Barber said. “I got over it.”
Thinking about warmth made Rob think about electricity. He rather wished he hadn’t. “How long will the power stay on?” he wondered out loud. “Won’t storms start knocking the lines down? And if even the utility companies can’t get gas to send out repair crews…”
“In that case, we welcome back the nineteenth century in all its glory.” Barber made his tongue-clicking noise again. “Whether that level of technology can support this level of population… Well, we’ll all find out, won’t we?”
“Won’t be as much fun playing acoustic sets all the time,” Justin said.
Rob stabbed a forefinger at him. “I was just thinking the same thing! You came out with it before I could.”
“You two might as well be married. I was married once upon a time,” Barber said. “I got over that, too, but it was expensive.”
That only reminded Rob of his own parents’ divorce. And he didn’t know what was up with Teo suddenly running out on Mom after such a long stretch of not-quite-wedded bliss. He had the feeling more was going on than Mom was telling. If Dad knew what, and chances were he did, he wasn’t talking. All he said about it was Ask your mother. He wanted to know what the chances were for Rob’s coming back to California when he tied the knot with Kelly.
Rob feared those chances were anything but good. Getting from Guilford to Dover-Foxcroft was a major undertaking these days. Getting from Guilford to Bangor or Portland might not be impossible, but it sure wldn’t be easy. Rob would have liked to go to his father’s second wedding. If he did, though, how would he make it back here? He didn’t want to run out on the band. Justin and Charlie and Biff and the polymorphously perverse thing that was Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles seemed more like family these days than did the people connected by arbitrary ties of flesh and blood.
Justin said, “I’m getting hungry. You want to go down to Calvin’s Kitchen for breakfast?”
“Do I want to?” Rob echoed. “Not so you’d notice. But we’ve got to eat, don’t we? Are Biff and Charlie up yet?”
As if to prove they were, they chose that moment to thunder down the stairs. Off to the diner they all went. It was only about a five-minute walk. The place just didn’t cut it for dinner. Despite Dick Barber’s opinion, Rob didn’t think it was all that wonderful for breakfast, either.
Still, you couldn’t mess up eggs and sausages and bacon and hash browns too badly. What got to Rob more than the food was the isolation. The waitress and the cook behind the counter were polite enough, but they were serving strangers. They knew the locals-and vice versa-the way Rob and Charlie and Biff and Justin knew one another. A black Baptist family moving onto a street full of Chasidim could have felt no more cut off from the neighborhood.
He was almost done with his breakfast when it occurred to him that isolation could have more than one meaning. If fuel oil and gasoline had trouble reaching rural Maine north and west of the Interstate, how about food? You could cut down trees and burn them, and maybe you wouldn’t freeze, yeah. But could you feed half a state’s worth of people on moose and ducks and whatever else you could shoot?
It didn’t seem likely. What were people going to do if the food ran low, though? All the L.L. Bean gear in the world didn’t help against hunger. Only eatables could. But where would they come from?
XXI
Bryce Miller dropped three copies of his dissertation-thump! — on his chairperson’s desk. The physical copies were a formality, left over from the days when theses were actually typed. Professor Harvey Harriman had had his finger in every chapter of the Word file from which the diss was printed. There seemed to be two kinds of chairpersons: the ones who didn’t do enough and the ones who did too much. Harvey Harriman was of the second school.