“Move your fuzzy butt,” Colin told Playboy. Playboy ignored him. Colin stepped around the cat. One of these days, he wouldn’t see the lazy beast. Then they’d both be sorry.
He ran water into a Pyrex measuring cup to nuke it to make coffee. As long as they had electricity, he’d enjoy it. When he finished his joe, Kelly fixed some. He went into the front room and turned on the TV. He’d developed a new tolerance for it since he got hurt. Watching cost no effort, and he could work the remote with one hand.
Which he did, as soon as the picture came on: it was Barney and Baby Bop. PBS was fine most of the time, but not all the time. He switched to CNN. A Viagra commercial was running. He muted it. It was at least as irksome as the sappy purple dinosaur. A commercial for backyard chicken coops followed it. He wouldn’t have seen that before the eruption. But meat and eggs, these days, were more do-it-yourself than they had been for many years.
“Hey, hon!” he called.
“What?” Kelly answered from the kitchen. The microwave hadn’t dinged again yet.
“If I do retire, what do you say I start raising chickens? We could use the poop to fertilize the garden.”
“If that’s what you want to do,” she said. “Make sure it is before you start, that’s all.” He nodded, though she couldn’t see him. It sounded like good advice. So did most of what she said.
At last, a newswoman came on. “A bill to construct seven new nuclear plants has passed the House,” she said. “Fierce debate is expected in the Senate. Polls show that most Americans want more energy, no matter how it is produced. But less than one person in four wants a nuclear power plant built within a hundred miles of his or her home.”
Colin sipped his coffee. “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” he said.
“Say what?” Kelly brought in her cup. She hadn’t heard the story. He explained. She nodded. “Oh. Yeah. One of the things I haven’t heard many people say is that the supervolcano coughed out a lot of radioactive crud. Not by percentage, of course, but when over six hundred cubic miles of junk come out, even a tiny percentage makes a fair-sized raw number.”
“If the EPA finds out about that, I bet they declare the eruption illegal,” Colin said. “Then all our troubles are over, right?”
“Right.” She sent him a severe look. He grinned back.
On the TV, the newswoman said, “The Administration hopes the disastrous outages in the Northeast last winter will allow this bill to pass both houses at last. The nuclear plants will add to the grid a large part of the power lost as a result of the freezeup in Quebec. Environmental groups vow to fight construction through the courts if the bill does pass.”
“So they’ll start building them about the time the climate finally gets better on its own,” Colin said.
“That may not be for hundreds of years,” Kelly reminded him.
“And your point is… ?” he said. She stuck out her tongue at him.
CNN ran more commercials. When the news came back, it was with a report from London. The reporter stood outside in the snow, bundled up as if near the summit of Everest. It wasn’t winter yet—it wasn’t far into fall—but he looked cold anyway. “The continued fading of the Gulf Stream from stream to trickle has dealt Britain and all of northwestern Europe a catastrophic blow,” he said somberly. “The United Kingdom has endured winters of discontent every year since the eruption. And they have grown progressively worse. As has often been remarked, we are on the latitude of Labrador. More and more, we have a climate to match.”
They cut to clogged roads in London, to fields full of drifts, to Stonehenge all ghostly under a mantle of white. Then back to the fields, to cattle trying to dig their way through the thick snow to whatever greenery lay beneath.
“Our livestock is not so drastically afflicted as that in the United States,” the reporter acknowledged. “Yet forage for our cattle and sheep has decreased as the climate worsens. Last year, the Home Counties—for our American friends, the ones surrounding London—had a winter that once would have been reckoned harsh even in the Scottish Highlands. Forecasts for the long cold season ahead are even grimmer.”
Another cut, this time to a poorly shaved farmer in Wellingtons and a thick anorak with the hood over his head. “It’s a balls-up, all right,” he said, his accent much less suave than the BBC man’s. “I’ve got to buy more fodder from abroad, because my flocks can’t get as much from the fields when they’re mostly frozen. And sweet suffering Jaysus, the prices! I’ll have to charge more for my animals when I sell ’em. Everyone will. It’s a pity. It’s a great pity, but no help for it I can see. My main hope is, I can get through the winter without losing half the beasts from a blizzard.”
A 3-D graph showed three steeply rising lines. “These are the prices of petroleum, wheat, and beef since the eruption,” the reported said, in case his audience couldn’t read the dates at the bottom of the screen and the words PETROLEUM, WHEAT, and BEEF. “No end to this inflation seems to be in sight. Production has dropped sharply in all three commodities, whilst demand has remained constant or even increased. A more classic recipe for exploding prices can scarcely be imagined.”
This time, the picture cut away to the bustling port of London. A correspondent standing on a wharf said, “There is concern the Thames may freeze for an extended period this winter. If it should, one of the busiest ports in the world will have to shut down. Two new icebreakers have entered service since the supervolcano erupted, and five more are on order. If the port does fail, the effect on the UK’s economy will be staggering.”
They shifted to a different reporter, this one on a beach under as bright a sun as the world got these days. People in Speedos and bikinis invited skin cancer. The beach was in… Greece, by the unreadable letters on a taverna. “More and more inhabitants of Britain and Ireland and Scandinavia are abandoning their homelands for the more congenial climes farther south,” the reporter said. “Immigration within the European Union is easy—so easy that Greece and Italy and Spain have begun to worry that they may be swamped by newcomers. Some politicians in these Mediterranean countries have proposed stricter controls and higher taxes for aliens coming to their warmer shores. That the EU constitution forbids such discrimination fazes them not in the least.”
“I know the weather is bad farther north,” a Greek official with a bushy mustache said in excellent English. “But this is our country, our homeland. We were here first. We have more than anyone else the right to live here now. We will not let foreigners buy our nation out from under us.”
Colin turned to Kelly. “Change his clothes and his accent a little and he could be from Orange County.”
“He has the same troubles we do, and for the same reason: his weather’s got worse, but it isn’t terrible,” she answered. “And his supplies don’t move along I-10 to get to his country, either. Compared to us, he’s well off.”
“And compared to England, he’s in hog heaven,” Colin said. “The Russian war in the Ukraine seems to have bogged down pretty well, too. Ain’t everybody got fun?” He stood up to fix himself some more coffee. By now, he was good at doing that one-handed.
Rob had eaten a good many strange things before he wound up in Guilford. That was what he got for liking weird restaurants. He’d had sea cucumbers at a Chinese place in San Diego. The taste was briny and innocuous, but the texture put him in mind of something halfway between custard and Play-Doh. He’d eaten a stewed sheep’s eyeball and other odd bits of the head at a Moroccan restaurant in… was it Tucson or Phoenix? He couldn’t remember. He liked tongue, but for anyone who grew up with Jewish friends that hardly counted as strange.