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Authors: Harry Turtledove

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BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption
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Both SUVs from the band remained in front of the inn, along with the Barber family’s cars. Nobody was going anywhere. The Shell station still hadn’t got more gas. All the stations in Dover-Foxcroft were dry, too. Tankers weren’t even trying to come up here any more. North and west of the Interstate, Maine was on its own: the big part of the state, if not the populous part.
But something new had been added. Out there next to the nearly useless motor vehicles stood a one-horse open sleigh straight out of “Jingle Bells.” In lieu of a hitching post or rail, the horse—a well-curried bay—was tied to a doorknob. It munched contentedly from a feed bag.
When Rob went inside, he took off his hat and his overshoes, and that was about it. With even firewood in short supply, the place stayed cold. Dick Barber greeted him with, “Come into the parlor, why don’t you? Someone here I’d like you to meet.”
“Whoever’s in charge of the sleigh there?” Rob asked.
“That’s right. Your cohorts have already made his acquaintance.” Barber sometimes had an old-fashioned turn of phrase. He could use it or not, as he chose, which made Rob classify it as a special effect.
He wasn’t inclined to be fussy. A fire burned in the parlor hearth, perhaps in honor of the newcomer. The man stood with his back to Rob, savoring the warmth. He was talking to Justin and Charlie, who listened in what was plainly fascination.
Hearing Rob and Barber come up behind him, the fellow broke off and turned toward them. He was in his late sixties, and looked like . . . Rob needed a moment to realize who he looked like. If you took John Madden down to about five feet eight, that would do for a first approximation. He was ruddy and fleshy and had a sharp nose, bushy eyebrows, and silver hair.
He didn’t dress like John Madden, though. John Madden looked like an unmade bed, even in a suit. This guy could have been a 1930s dandy. A lot of his hair was hidden under a broad-brimmed black fedora. His overcoat boasted fur trim. When he shrugged it off, he was wearing a double-breasted, pinstriped wool suit underneath, with lapels sharp and upthrusting enough to cut yourself on.
“Jim, this is Rob Ferguson, also of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles,” Barber said. “Rob, here before you stands Jim Farrell, recent unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in the Second District—most of Maine, even if it’s not the part with most of the people in it. The ones who do live their chose, in their wisdom, the usual blow-dried airhead over someone who actually had some idea of what he was talking about.”
“Glad to meet you, Rob,” Farrell said in a resonant baritone. “Dick helped run my campaign, such as it was. He tends to forget that it’s over, and that we got trounced. Ancient history now, like any failed campaign.
“Speaking of ancient history, Jim taught it for years at SUNY Albany,” Barber said. “Then he retired and came home—claimed the good weather in Albany was wearing him down.”
Albany and good weather didn’t strike Rob as a likely mix. Farrell raised those extravagant eyebrows. “I’ve got over that,” he rumbled. “The way things are these days, so has Albany.”
Barber went on as if the older man hadn’t spoken: “He picked up a fair amount of fame—”
“Notoriety,” Farrell broke in, not without pride. “It was definitely notoriety.”
“—for his newsletters called
To the Small-Endians
. They skewered PC academics the way they deserve. Skewered ’em, hell—screwed ’em to the wall.”
Charlie jerked on the couch where he was sitting. He startled a cat sleeping beside him. “Oh, my God! Those things!” he said. “My older brother picked up a couple of them at an sf convention. I think he’s still got ’em. I’ve read ’em. They’re wicked!” He eyed Farrell with newfound regard.
Farrell doffed the fedora, showing off a hairline that hadn’t surrendered even half an inch. “I finally quit doing them. I gave up, in short. The real academic world proved madder and sadder than anything I could invent.”
“And he’s known for his comparative study of the campaigns of Alexander and Julius Caesar,” Barber added. “I can’t speak as a professor—I never even played one on TV. But as a career military man, it impressed the bejesus out of me.”
Rob, Justin, and Charlie eyed one another. Sometimes you got a song cue when you least expected one. Charlie started beating out a rhythm on his thighs and on the coffee table in front of the couch. That was a long way from his usual industrial-strength noisemakers, but it would do. It was plenty to make the cat, which had tentatively settled down again, head for the hills with a tail bristling in indignation.
And Justin and Rob launched into “Came Along Too Late.” Not every band had a song about Alexander the Great—one that even mentioned Julius Caesar, too—but Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wasn’t every band. Not even close. The words were mostly Charlie’s, with some tweaks from Marshall back when he’d got into ancient history. They’d done it before larger audiences, but never before a more knowing one:
“Dozing before the idiot box
When hoofbeats awakened me—
History Channel, three a.m.:
So-called documentary.
Swords and sandals
Maps and blood
Watching the conquests spread and spread
Darius’ name was mud.
 
 
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up the Persian cavalry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!
 
“Now some will stand out from the mass
In good times or in rage
For King Philip’s son by Olympias
Greece was too small a stage.
Had to spread out ’cross the world—
Couldn’t help himself, I think.
Everywhere his flags unfurled;
He won fantastic ink.
 
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up thethe Peralry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!
 
“I know I live in the here-and-now.
It can’t be helped—that’s true.
But thinking of long-vanished days . . . Oh, wow!
All the things he got to do!
Lift a bottle with Aristotle,
Start Alexandrias all over the place.
One got a library
Founded by his longtime friend,
Good old Ptolemy!
 
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up the Persian cavalry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Outdoing Julius Caesar’s infantry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!”
“Came Along Too Late” was supposed to end on a wild flourish of cymbals. You couldn’t do those on your person or a tabletop. Justin solved the problem by using a doo-wop shout—“Woo-hoo!”—instead.
Jim Farrell looked from one member of the band to the next. (Biff was probably down at Calvin’s Kitchen. He’d fallen for a brunette who waitressed there. Whether she’d fallen for him was a different question, but he was in there pitching, anyhow.) “These are men of parts,” Farrell said at last, to Dick Barber. “I suspect some of the parts stand in desperate need of repair, but he that is without sin, let him first cast an aspersion at them.”
“Ouch!” Rob said, a noise with more admiration in it than pain. Farrell gave him a tip of the fedora if not a doff. But Rob quickly turned serious again. Here was a real, if unorthodox, politico in front of him. He hadn’t expected to have a chance like that. Since he did, he asked, “What do we do—what can anybody do—about everything the supervolcano’s doing to us?”
“Well, I can’t say I’m completely sorry the government seems to have forgotten about this part of the country. Sometimes being forgotten by the government is the best thing that can happen to you,” Farrell answered.
Rob wasn’t so sure he bought that. He was a liberal more often than not and in most ways. But he turned libertarian, if not reactionary, four times a year: when his estimated-tax payments came due. The band made raw money, with not a dime withheld. Rendering what Uncle Sam and the state demanded hurt more than it would have were he working a nine-to-five like most people.
Farrell hadn’t finished: “But it also seems as though
everybody
on the far side of the Interstate has forgotten about us. I think—I hope—we can get through one winter like that. When things warm up, if they ever do, we’ll have to see about stocking up for another long, hard, cold stretch next winter. If we can stock up. If there’s anything left to stock up on. It’s not just a Guilford, Maine, problem, you know. It’s worldwide.”
“It’s not so bad in a lot of other places,” Rob said.
“True enough. But it’s worse in some,” Farrell said. “How would you like to be in Salt Lake City or Denver right now?”
“My sister was in Denver. She’s one of the lucky ones—she got out quick. I guess she was lucky. Now she’s stuck in one of those camps in the middle of nowhere,” Rob said. “She can’t stand it, but she’s alive, anyway.”
 
Vanessa Ferguson commonly acted on the principle that the squeaky wheel got the grease. She didn’t believe in depriving herself of the pleasure ocomplaining. The only trouble was, there were a hell of a lot of squeaky wheels in Camp Constitution. The miserable place had to have a couple of hundred thousand people in it by now, and it was awful. A saint would have hated it. Ordinary people? Vanessa had heard the suicide rate at the camp was ridiculously high, and she believed it. It was much too easy to decide that staying here was a fate worse than death.
The people who ran Camp Constitution were from the government, and they were there to help you . . . provided you did exactly what they told you to do. If you didn’t, or if you were otherwise unhappy, well, they had Procedures for that.
To get your problem settled, or even noticed, you lined up at the Camp Constitution Administration Building. That only roused further resentment. As far as Vanessa knew, it was the
only
building in the whole enormous goddamn camp. It was flimsy and rickety and had been run up in a tearing hurry, but still.... Federal bureaucrats deserved no less. That was what they and their paymasters in Washington thought, anyhow. Tents and FEMA trailers were for the rabble stuck in the camp 24/7.
You lined up regardless of what it was doing outside. Raining? You lined up. Snowing? Same deal. They did, in their mercy and wisdom, put up an awning that gave some modest protection from the elements. But that was all it gave: some modest protection. The ground under your feet still got gloppy. The weather still got beastly cold. People said it was the worst winter in these parts in they couldn’t remember how long. Everybody blamed it on the supervolcano. Everybody was likely to be right, not that that did anybody any good.
If you didn’t feel like shivering in the muck for however long you needed to see the people with the power to do something about your complaint (if they happened to feel like it), you could turn around and trudge back to your tent through even more of that same muck. The bureaucrats inside the administration building wouldn’t mind. Not one bit, they wouldn’t.
There weren’t nearly enough of them to handle all the people in the camp with problems. That made the line start well before the awning did. It inched forward with glacial slowness. Considering the weather, the comparison struck Vanessa as much too apt. She had a hooded, quilted anorak with a pink-and-purple nylon shell that was at least three sizes too big for her: charity, of a sort. She had long johns, too. More charity. She was cold anyhow.
She was also itchy. There were bedbugs in her tent. There were bedbugs all over Camp Constitution. Somebody’d brought them in, and they’d thrived like mad bastards. Several eradicating campaigns had failed to eradicate. The same was true for head lice, though she didn’t have those—yet. There was talk in Washington of making DDT to fight the vermin at the refugee camps. So far, it was nothing but talk. Vanessa had always thought of herself as a pretty green person, but she would cheerfully have shot a spotted owl to rid herself of her six-legged companions.
A heavyset, bearded man wearing a coat even uglier than hers—and they said the age of miracles had passed!—gave up and stumped away. He muttered a stream of obscenities as he went. Maybe they were what made his breath smoke. More likely, it was just the cold.
The queue moved up to fill the space he’d occupied. “One more we don’t got to wait for,” said the black woman behind Vanessa.
“One more the yahoos up ahead won’t have to deal with,” Vanessa said, pointing to the still far too distant building ahead. “I
hate
lines, you know?”
“Jez, honey, who don’t?” the black woman answered. “But what you gonna do?”
Vanessa still carried the .38 in her purse. A few people at the camp had gone postal. One guy gunned down seven of his tent-mates before somebody brained him from behind with a baseball bat. For a nasty instant, Vanessa savored the brief, scarlet joy of flipping out like that. If the alternative was worming forward an inch at a time till you got to talk to some dumb fuck who couldn’t have cared less . . . Sighing, she wormed forward another inch. Maturity and sanity sucked sometimes. They really did.
BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption
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