Where I-90 dipped, or would have dipped, south toward Butte (or what would have been Butte), the pilot kept flying due east. “This is the line of US-12,” he said, though only his GPS could have told him so. “We’re about forty miles from Helena—say, half an hour.”
Helena was not a big city. No cities in Montana had been big even before the supervolcano blew. The relative handful of people who’d lived in the state—under a million despite almost the area of California—had liked it that way. Now only the western fringe was even remotely habitable. The rest… Well, this exploration party was going in to see what had happened to the rest.
“I would have liked to try somewhere like Salt Lake City before we hit Helena. It was farther away, and it should be in better shape.” Geoff Rheinburg shrugged. “The Mormons discouraged it, which is putting things mildly.”
Utah hadn’t been hit so hard as Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but it had taken a beating. “What do you want to bet that, if we did go into Salt Lake City, we’d meet some Mormons already there?” Kelly said.
“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Rheinburg said. “Some people would rather worry about the wrath of God than HPO. Me, I’d sooner keep breathing.”
“Me, too.” Kelly nodded. The progressive, fatal lung disease, caused by inhaling too much volcanic ash, had already killed more than a million people—how many more, no one even seemed to want to guess. It had certainly killed more by now than the direct effects of the eruption. And it had killed most of the livestock from Calgary down to Chihuahua. North America would be years getting over that, if it ever did. Beef and lamb prices had shot up even higher and faster than gasoline.
The helicopter pilot pointed. “There’s Helena, dead ahead. I’m going to look for a place where I can set us down without kicking up too big a dust storm when I do it.”
You could tell human beings had built Helena. The shapes of buildings persisted in the dust. Some of them, the bigger ones, stuck out of it. The state capitol was only three stories high, but its dome—modeled, like so many, after the one back in Washington—had shed dust and ash better than many newer, taller structures with flat roofs.
Also thrusting up from the dust was what looked like a mosque’s minaret. Kelly hadn’t dreamt Helena had held enough Muslims to need such a grand house of worship. And, as things turned out, it hadn’t. Professor Rheinburg pointed to the minaret. “That’s got to be the Shriners’ temple,” he said.
“Oh.” Kelly felt foolish.
“Can you put us down anywhere near there?” Rheinburg asked the pilot.
“I’ll see.” Cautiously, the man brought the chopper toward the ground. The rotors kicked up some dust, but less than Kelly would have expected. As if it were landing on snow, the helicopter had skis rather than wheels. They spread its weight over a larger area.
The copter crunched as the skis took up the weight. Kelly both felt that and heard it. The pilot cut the rotor. The blades windmilled to a stop. In the sudden quiet, Kelly took off her helmet and put on a surgical mask that covered her mouth and nose and a pair of tight-fitting goggles. She wanted to study the ash and dust. More intimate contact, she could do without.
Geoff Rheinburg also got ready to go outside. The pilot also donned mask and goggles as the other two copters landed not far away. When Rheinburg opened the door, the first thing Kelly heard was a raven’s grukking call. Her old prof beamed—or she thought so, though the protective gear made it hard to be sure. “Something lives here!” he said.
“Or at least passes through,” she replied.
His feet crunched in the fine grit when he got out. He took a few steps. His shoes printed waffle patterns and small Adidas logos at each one. Kelly’s sneakers were old. Time had blurred their sole patterns: when she walked, she left no advertising for wind and rain to erase.
Geologists were getting down from the other helicopters, too. Professor Rheinburg threw his arms wide to draw all goggled eyes to him. Then verse burst forth from behind his mask:
“‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing remains besides. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Wow!” Kelly said softly. “Oh, wow!” The poem deserved better; she knew as much. But that was what she had in her. Shelley, of course, was writing about ancient Egypt… and also about everyone who thought he was unforgettably splendid. Fate did its number on Ozymandias, and now fate was doing its number on the United States.
Daniel Olson took a picture of the dusty, grit-scarred minaret sticking up out of the ash and dust. “Well, we’re here,” he said, which also wasn’t poetry but was true enough. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
They didn’t need long to find some small rodent tracks—like Kelly’s shoeprints, without visible logos—in the dust. There were a few insects, and here and there a weed poked its way up toward the sun. It wasn’t abundance. By any standards except those of the harshest desert, it was devastation. But it was life.
“We definitely have more going on here than we did when we went to the caldera,” Rheinburg said. “We’re farther from the eruption site, and more time has gone by. Bit by bit, the planet is healing up. A few thousand years from now, you’d hardly know anything had happened.”
“Not on a planetary scale,” Kelly said. “But that you you were talking about, who he’d be, what language he’d speak, what he’d think and feel about what he was looking at—the supervolcano would influence all that.”
After a moment, Rheinburg nodded. “You’re right. It’s a question of scale, isn’t it?”
Kelly nodded back. When you looked at people and what they did, you saw one thing. When you looked deeper and wider, at plate tectonics and at magma climbing up through the crust till it burst out like pus from a popped pimple, you saw something else again. Which view was true? Was either? Did you need both—and others besides—to get some kind of feel for what was really there? Would you ever have any idea of what was really there? All you could do was try.
They walked along. They all had printouts of street maps from before the eruption. The minaret, the capitol, and the sun oriented them. Here and there, wind and rain had cleaned the ashfall away from bits and pieces of other buildings. Glassless windows stared back at them like dead eyes.
Rainwater had carved gullies through the ash and dust. Erosion in action, Kelly thought. Geology 101. Something glittered at the bottom of one of the larger new gulches, several feet down. “Is that a big flake of mica?” Professor Rheinburg asked.
Kelly peered down at it. “That,” she said after a moment’s study, “is a Coors Light can.”
“Oh,” Rheinburg said in deflated tones. “I suppose the water’s gone through some buildings—and some gutters—uphill from here.”
The geologists took specimens from the surface. They used probes to dig deeper into the volcanic ash and dust. Eventually, scientists would collect samples from all over the ashfall zone, at varying distances from the supervolcano caldera and at varying depths. As Kelly meticulously labeled another tube full of volcanic ash, she feared that eventually would be a long time coming. The resources and the drive to gather the data just weren’t there.
After a while, Kelly said, “I wonder how long it’ll be before people can start living here.”
“Not in my lifetime,” Geoff Rheinburg said. Like his mustache, the hair that stuck out from under his broad-brimmed hat was gray, almost white. But he went on, “Not in yours, either. In your little girl’s? Maybe.”