The flight to O’Hare was routine. The cost wasn’t. If her department hadn’t sprung for some of it, she would have stayed home. The convention had laid on a shuttle bus to the Hilton. A good thing, too. Some Internet work had shown that cab fares were as bad as in L.A. Without every seat filled and a couple of fare-savers riding in the trunk with the luggage, no human being who wasn’t an All-Star second baseman or point guard could have afforded a taxi. Even a millionaire wouldn’t stay a millionaire for long if he took taxis very often.
At the hotel, most of the people in the check-in line were also in her line of work. She said hello to friends and acquaintances even before she got her key card and took her stuff to her room. Like the front desk, the bar was on the second level. It was only Thursday afternoon. The convention hadn’t officially opened. Kelly could see the bar was already doing a land-office business anyhow. She’d never gone to a professional gathering that worked any other way. From what Colin said, it was the same with cops. It was probably the same with birders and stamp collectors, too.
She met Geoff Rheinburg for dinner. “Better food than in Helena. Better beds, too,” she said.
He was presenting a paper on what they’d learned on their excursion to the abandoned capital of Montana. “Lord, I hope so,” he said. But he seemed distracted. He looked out through the glass curtain wall at the snow sifting down.
“You okay?” Kelly asked after several minutes when he said nothing else.
“Me?” He came back to himself with a wry chuckle. “Yes, I’m fine, Kelly. I’m wondering about Manic-Five and La Baie James, though.”
“You’re wondering about… what?” Manic-Five sounded like a band whose songs she’d almost heard. She didn’t know what La Baie James sounded like. Nothing she was familiar with.
Patiently, her mentor answered, “They’re Hydro Québec power plants. Manic-Five is on the Manicouagan River. The others are even bigger. They’re at, well, La Baie James—James Bay, it’d be in English. It’s the little bay at the southern tip of Hudson Bay. They’ve been putting power, more and more power, into the grid since the 1970s. And it’s cold up there. I mean, it’s really, really cold up there, and it gets colder every winter with all the supervolcano crud in the stratosphere.”
“Cold enough to freeze the rivers?” Now that Kelly knew what he was talking about, she could connect the dots. “What happens if it is?”
“We all find out,” he answered with what might have been gallows humor or the simple truth. “The grid’s… complex. It’s gone out for weird computer glitches, and it’s stayed up for the hell of it. But I don’t like the way I’ve had to learn about the situation through the back door. It tells me the people who know more about it than I do don’t want word leaking out.”
Kelly looked out at the snow, too. “Even these days, cold in L.A. or Berkeley’s just a word. Turn off the lights and most of the heat in a town like this in the middle of winter, though…” She didn’t go on, or need to.
“Uh-huh,” Rheinburg said. “If we can get out of the airport and back to California before things hit the fan—or before the ice up there stops the turbines—I’ll be a happy man.”
“If you feel that way, and if you know that much, I’m surprised you came to the convention,” Kelly remarked.
“If I were a totally rational man, I wouldn’t have,” he answered. “That’s about the size of it. But things up there may last till we get home. They may find better workarounds than I expect. I want to see some people here I may never see again if the Northeastern grid does crap out. And what the hell, Kelly. Sooner or later, we’ll get home again even if things do fall apart. It may mean standing in line for a train ticket and not making it back for three weeks, but we’ll get there.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kelly told him. “You don’t have a little kid who expects you back Monday no matter what.”
“Well, no,” Rheinburg said. “Although I might, if I were in the habit of hitting on my students. I’ve been tempted a few times, but never enough to do anything about it.”
He’d been married to the same woman as long as Kelly had known him, and for a fair number of years before that. There’d never been any hint of scandal about him. He was, if anything, scandalously normal. At a campus like Berkeley, that stood out more than it might have somewhere else. Kelly wondered, not quite for the first time, if she’d ever tempted him. She didn’t ask. This wasn’t science. Just because you wondered something didn’t mean you had to know the answer. Sometimes you were better off not knowing, in fact.
When the waiter came by again, Rheinburg ordered a second gin and tonic, which he seldom did. Then he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t keep anything you really need in your room. You may have trouble getting back in there. The computer key may not work if there’s no power. I don’t know that. I haven’t researched it. The door units may have batteries in them. Why set yourself up for hassles you can duck, though?”
That was such a good question, it prompted Kelly to say, “Anybody would think you were a grownup or something.”
“I doubt it, even if I can play one on TV,” Rheinburg answered. She laughed. They finished dinner. He grabbed the check. She squawked. He wouldn’t listen. “I’m senior to you. Hell, these days I’m senior to damn near everybody. I can do things like this. I can afford to do ’em, too.”
There were receptions and cocktail parties after dinner. Kelly got a little buzzed, but only a little. Some people did use them as an excuse to drink hard. Some people needed no excuse to drink hard. And some people used drinking as an excuse to come on to others, while, again, some people needed no excuse. Still, there was less of that than there had been in the days before cell-phone cameras and harassment lawsuits.
Buzzed or not, when Kelly got back to her room she made sure she stuffed everything she had to have into her purse. Normally, she would have thought leaving it here was safer. From what Geoff Rheinburg said, these weren’t normal times. She wondered if there’d been any such thing since the supervolcano erupted.
The presentations got rolling on Friday. Kelly went to Professor Rheinburg’s, and made a couple of comments from the audience. She bought a fat book on the supervolcano at the Oxford University Press booth. Oxford books weren’t cheap, but weren’t so bad as the ones from Cambridge. Since it was deductible, the price didn’t seem too outrageous.
More geologists poured into the Hilton. There were more receptions and parties in the rooms Friday night. Kelly kept a drink in her hand in self-defense. As long as she had one, people didn’t try to press others on her. She still did some drinking, but less than she would have otherwise.
Because she did some drinking, she needed to get up in the middle of the night. She’d left the light on in the bathroom when she went to bed. She always did that in hotel rooms. Enough light leaked around the door so she could get there if she needed to without breaking her neck.
Except she couldn’t tonight. The room was pitch black. The digital clock on the nightstand was out. So was the red LED at the bottom of the flat-screen TV. The smoke detector’s red LED still worked—it had to be hooked to a battery. But one firefly didn’t spit out enough photons to do her any good.
She groped for her purse. Fumbling in it, she found her phone. It showed no bars. “Oh, shit,” she said softly. But she could—and did—use it to show her the way to the john. The toilet still worked. She went to the window. The light-blocking curtains did a good job. Little more light came in when she pushed them aside. Chicago and Chicagoland had just fallen back into the nineteenth century.
No—there were some lights way off in the distance. Maybe that was O’Hare, running on generators. Whatever it was, it had precious little company.