“Urk is just about the size of it,” Jared agreed. “You can get to Ukraine from the rest of Europe, anyhow. Or to Russia. You can assuming you want to, I mean. The last fellow who went into Russia from the rest of Europe was Hitler, and he didn’t have such a great time afterwards.”
“No,” Louise said. “We don’t need a war now. We’re still picking up pieces from the supervolcano, and we will be for the next fifty years.”
“You know that. I know that,” Jared said. “I’ll bet the Russians know that—they’re picking up pieces, too. But does the President know that?”
As far as Louise could tell, the President was a twit. He meant well, but he was a twit regardless. And everybody except maybe him knew which road was paved with meaning well.
A little old Asian man with a fedora came in. It wasn’t a hipster’s stingy-brim. It was just a hat. He’d probably started wearing it when most men put them on every day, and somehow never stopped. He nodded to Jared. “Good morning. Is my Inderal prescription ready?”
“It sure is, Mr. Nakasone.” The pharmacist went behind the counter and handed him a pill bottle. The Asian man handed back a credit card. Since the power was on, Jared could use the computerized system. After Mr. Nakasone signed the slip, he stuck the pills in a pocket of his windbreaker and tottered off. He wasn’t going anywhere fast, but he was going.
He reminded Louise of the whole world these days.
She wondered what the world would do if Russia overran those two chunks of what had been the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Then she wondered what Russia would do if it overran them. Just because you wanted something, you wouldn’t necessarily be happy once you got it. (Hadn’t somebody with Vulcan ears said that the first time?) Ukraine and Kazakhstan had been their own countries for a generation now. They’d got used to being their own countries. They wouldn’t want Moscow ordering them around again. And they were big enough that trying to hold them down might not be a whole lot of fun for the Kremlin.
Well, that was the Kremlin’s worry. It wasn’t Louise’s. She had plenty of worries of her own.
X
Cal State Dominguez Hills wasn’t the most beautiful college campus running around loose. UC Santa Barbara had a much nicer natural setting. UCLA and Berkeley both jumped all over CSUDH when it came to architecture. Dominguez Hills looked more like a nicely landscaped office park than anything else Kelly Ferguson could think of. But Cal State Dominguez Hills had one enormous advantage over all those prettier places. Unlike them, it had given her a job.
She both was and wasn’t glad to be back at the State University. She was because she liked research and teaching. She wasn’t because going back to work took her away from Deborah.
She’d looked down her nose at women who let motherhood slow down their careers… till she had to start making those choices herself. Then, as people often do, she discovered things weren’t so simple as they looked from the outside. She liked research and teaching. She loved her little girl, who changed faster and needed her more than the study of supervolcano eruptions did.
But if she stayed away too long, no one but her would care if she ever came back. So here she was, and there was Marshall, keeping an eye on Deborah back home. Kelly also felt conflicted about Marshall’s progress as a writer. She wanted him to do well. But if he did very well, he could afford to say no instead of babysitting his half-sister.
A Frisbee flew through the air. A dog ran, jumped, caught it, and proudly carried it back to the kid who’d thrown it. Most of the students looked like kids to Kelly—one more sign she wasn’t a kid herself any more.
She made her way to the room where she was privileged, if that was the word, to teach Introduction to Geology: geology for people who weren’t geology majors. Some of them, by all appearances, had barely heard of rocks. There were good students in the Cal State University system, as there were in the University of California system. But there weren’t nearly so many of them.
This lecture was about plate tectonics, and about how continents could slowly move across the surface of the Earth and, sometimes, run into one another. “India used to be a separate continent,” she said. “Then it ran into the bigger Asian land mass. The collision pushed up the Himalayas, the tallest mountains in the world. It’s still pushing them up to this day.”
Some of the students in the room took notes. Some listened without writing anything down. Some, plainly, had their heads a million miles away.
“For a long time, people were sure continents couldn’t move, even though the east coast of South America looks like it fits together with the west coast of Africa, and almost the same with North America and Europe. The first man who proposed the idea of continental drift, a German named Wegener”—Kelly wrote the name on the board—“got called a crackpot for his trouble. That was right after the First World War. It wasn’t till the 1960s that enough evidence came to light to make people take another look at Wegener the weirdo.”
She outlined what the evidence was. Then, smiling as she remembered her own undergraduate days, she went on, “The older profs I studied under were in college themselves when geologists started to realize continental drift and plate tectonics were true after all. One guy told me it hit geology as hard as the idea that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around hit astronomy in the days of Copernicus and Galileo.”
After the lecture, a tall student named George Chun—Chinese? Korean?—came up to her. He was one of the bright ones. He would have been a bright one anywhere. Maybe he couldn’t afford to go to a UC school. Kelly couldn’t find any other reason why he’d be here and not at one of them. She hadn’t learned all her students’ names, but she knew his, all right.
“Talk about astronomy,” he said. “I was in one of those courses last quarter. The instructor talked about the Ptolemaic theory. Then he talked about the Copernican theory. And one of the dudes walking out in front of me said to his bud, ‘If that first one wasn’t true, man, why’d he go and teach it to us?’”
Kelly laughed and groaned at the same time. “The really scary thing is, I believe you,” she said.
“Some people are too stupid to live,” Chun said with the heartlessness of nineteen.
“And of course you’ve never said anything or done anything dumb in your whole, entire life. And neither have I.” Kelly waited to see how he’d take that. There were bright kids who really did think being anything less than bright was, or ought to be, a punishable offense.
But Chun laughed. “Well, when you put it like that… Take care.” He turned away from the lectern.
“You, too, George,” Kelly said. “And thanks for the story. That’s a good one—or a bad one, depending on how you look at things.”
The student shrugged. “Kinda weirded me out that there could be guys who need an astronomy class to tell ’em the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth. But hey, like you say, I bet there’s stuff I don’t know that a lot of people’d call intuitively obvious.”
“We can all say that,” Kelly answered. But her guess was that George Chun’s failings, whatever they might be, weren’t academic. If he was the kind of young man too shy to date much… either he’d get horny enough for his hard-on to push him in that direction or he’d stay social caterpillar and never turn into social butterfly.
She was walking to her office when groans announced that the CSUDH campus had lost power. She slowed down. The office was on the third floor and had no window. With the door open—more important, with the door to the office across the hall (which did have a window) open—it wasn’t quite so dark as the inside of a politician’s head, but it came close.