"Television? I don't know if I want to be on television. "
"You got no choice if you want to stay with me, " Danny said reasonably, "so quit bitching. Second thing. You know that big new condo that's going up, Pacific Overview Estates? I want you to keep that on the list every day. At
I least a couple people there in front of the sales office, handing out leaflets and all that, you got it?"
"Well, sure. If you want. But why there, Danny? It's way out at the end of nowhere—"
"Because I said so. Now," said Danny, "get Joel's ass back here so I can get home. I got another bunch of loafers to hand out Christmas presents to. "
Some volcanos erupt with violence. Some merely squeeze out a flow of lava, ash, mud, or gas. Each activity has its own perils. Curiously, the flows of lava are the least likely to kill human beings, although they can cause immense property loss. A lava flow is generally quite slow. It can be diverted by bombing, even by chilling parts of it with firehoses if there is plenty of water. It was possible to walk without harm on the congealed surface of a still-moving lava flow. Ash and mud flows can smother or drown. Gas flows sometimes kill by collecting in caves or cellars.
The eruptions, too, come in several varieties. A pyroclastic fall of ash or tephra is only dangerous to life if there is so much of it that the victims are buried alive. A Plinian eruption is a heavier and much more dangerous pyroclastic fall, sometimes with large boulders hurtling through the air. The most spectacular sort of eruption is the nuee ardente, in which an avalanche of glowing gases and ash rolls down the mountains at hurricane speed. Anyone in the way dies instantly of cadaveric spasm. Even the bodies are boiled away.
Friday, December 25th. Christmas Day. 4:00 PM.
Going to her parents' home for Christmas was good, leaving again was even better. Rainy drove up the freeway feeling as though she had just completed a recurring, weighty task, like cleaning an oven. Christmas was a glitch. The world stopped spinning for a moment—well, for twenty- four hours. But it was a time outside of time, and Rainy was glad the steady roll of the clock had resumed.
She had salvaged something from the long morning. First was the tradition of opening of the Christmas presents. Then the tradition of helping her mother get the turkey into the roaster. Then the tradition of everyone going back to bed for another hour's nap—but that tradition she had skipped in order to work on her report for the Pedigrues; and that had been her excuse for leaving almost as soon as the leftovers were put away and the dishes were in the washer. So she was ready to turn her paper over to Meredith Bradison, and as she turned into the hardstand by the Bradison house she was singing carols to herself. For everybody else Christmas was over. Rainy was just beginning to enjoy it.
Sam Houston Bradison let her in, wished her Merry Christmas and offered her a drink. He was pink and moist, as though he had just shaved. "Merry'll be out in a minute," he said. "Did you have a good Christmas?"
"Yes, fine." He was wearing what Rainy had often heard of but never seen on a live human being: a velvet smoking jacket. Obviously new. Obviously a present. It suited him. He smelled of shaving cologne and toothpaste, a sanitary old gentleman in a good mood. When she refused the drink he made her coffee and brought it to her in Meredith's tiny office, overlooking the beautiful garden and the Christmas tree with its white lights already blinking. He entertained her with scurrilous anecdotes about the Pedigrues until Meredith showed up, apologizing. "You caught me in the shower. Is that your preliminary report? All right, let's trade."
She sat down on a small settee and tucked her feet under her. For the next twenty minutes both were silent as they read each other's study papers. Rainy finished first, and silently got up and went to the kitchen for a refill on the coffee. Meredith's report ran fifteen closely reasoned pages, all neatly supported with citations and footnotes, but there was something troubling about it. When Meredith was ready to talk, Rainy asked, "Why are we interested in all these data from around Korea?"
"Weather comes from the west. I've gone back fifty years, as you can see, with the standard reports, and I've included all the unusual reports I could find since 1510— mostly from whalers and naval ships. Maybe a few pirates." She took off her glasses and gazed at the pile of charts, with their gentle curves and tiny symbols. "Actually it was kind of fun. The last time I paid this kind of attention to the Western Pacific was at the Ninth Pacific Science Congress in Bangkok—and that was a long time ago." A quarter of a century by normal human standards. A full generation. But, for the science of meteorology, back to the Stone Age: before weather satellites, before facsimile, before any of the sophisticated aids that were now the basic tools of every forecaster. Especially before the big number-crunching computers that could take a pilot's report from south of Tahiti and a ground station's synoptic from Truk and deduce a low cell in the very act of being born. At Bangkok two of the meteorologists had been insufferably vain of their acquisition of the first real weather radars. "I was looking for two things," she told Rainy. "One was historical records of exceptional weather to match against earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; there's no real correlation there. The other was the same exceptional weather mapped against planetary positions. I couldn't see anything there either. These mean isopleths here, for instance—"
"You say there's no real correlation?" Rainy interrupted.
"Not that I can find. I draw a blank."
The thing that was troubling Rainy loomed suddenly clear. "And yet," she said, "reading your report, I kind of get the feeling that you're really worried that all this might happen."
Meredith sat back. "It shows, huh?"
"Are you?"
The older woman said slowly, "I don't know if I am or not, Rainy. You know, we don't have enough talent for this job. We could use about a dozen more experts; there's all those magnetometer readings from all over the earth's surface. Can you interpret them? I can't. But that geomagnetism surely reflects changes in the ionosphere and magnetosphere—doesn't it? And those are definitely linked with the solar wind, which is to say with the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun. And what about carbon-14 production? Shouldn't we have one of those tree specialists, dendrochronologists, to check that out? And what about—"
"We aren't going to get any of those people, Meredith."
"That's my trouble, Rainy. I can go just so far with my own area of specialization. I can't say any more than that. "
She hesitated, sipping her cold coffee. "It's the rabies syndrome," she said.
"Rabies syndrome?"
"A long time ago," Meredith said, "just after Dennis was born, his grandfather and I were hiking in the red wood country, and Sam went off to answer a call of nature. He came running back, with the back of his hand all blood. A squirrel had bitten and scratched him—and there had just been a scare about rabid squirrels. So I washed it out and put a bandage on it, and then we sat down and talked it out. What should we do? We could go right back to Eureka and see a doctor and start the rabies vaccine series—there were a lot of them in those days, very painful and sometimes people died of the vaccine. Or we could do nothing. It all depended on whether the squirrel was rabid. If it was, then there was no choice—Sam had to have the shots, because otherwise he would certainly die within a few weeks, in great pain. But if it wasn't, then obviously we should avoid the shots, because they were also very painful, and might be fatal. It's the same way with Los Angeles, Rainy. Do you have the courage to tell them there's nothing to worry about? I don't."