Read Supervolcano: Eruption Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
Supervolcano: Eruption (5 page)
“Idiot!” Vanessa Ferguson said, her
voce
not nearly
sotto
enough. The idiot in question was her boss. Mr. Gorczany had written
between you and I
in a letter soliciting a bid on the widgets his firm produced. Vanessa wondered if she was the last person alive who could actually use English grammar these days. She changed the boner to
between you and me
, fixed a couple of other clumsy phrases, and printed the letter for his signature.
voce
not nearly
sotto
enough. The idiot in question was her boss. Mr. Gorczany had written
between you and I
in a letter soliciting a bid on the widgets his firm produced. Vanessa wondered if she was the last person alive who could actually use English grammar these days. She changed the boner to
between you and me
, fixed a couple of other clumsy phrases, and printed the letter for his signature.
Even if he wrote like a baboon, he owned the company. He lived on an acre and a half in Palos Verdes, and he bought himself a new BMW every year. Vanessa’s job title was technical writer, which translated into
hired keyboard
. She had a cramped one-bedroom apartment and an eight-year-old Toyota Corolla with bad brakes. Where was the justice in that?
hired keyboard
. She had a cramped one-bedroom apartment and an eight-year-old Toyota Corolla with bad brakes. Where was the justice in that?
“Thanks, Vanessa.” Nick Gorczany looked over the letter before inscribing his John Hancock. He was very blond, about thirty-five, and putting on weight. Because he knew all about widgets, he thought he knew all about everything. He pointed to
between you and me
. “Are you sure that’s right?”
between you and me
. “Are you sure that’s right?”
“Yes, Mr. Gorczany,” Vanessa said. Braining him with the softball trophy on his desk would only get her talked about. Besides, who said any brains lurked inside that skull?
“I dunno. It looks funny,” he said, frowning.
“The object of a preposition takes the accusative—the objective, if you like that better.” All she had to do was reach out, grab the ugly trophy, and . . . “If you don’t believe me, see what the Word grammar checker says.” She never bothered with the Word grammar checker, but it wasn’t—quite—dumb enough to make the moronic mistakes Mr. Gorczany did.
“Maybe you know that, but I bet Don Walsh over at Consolidated doesn’t,” he said. “Change it back to
you and I
. I don’t want him thinking we’re a bunch of yahoos.”
you and I
. I don’t want him thinking we’re a bunch of yahoos.”
“But it’s wrong that way,” Vanessa said helplessly.
“If he doesn’t know it’s wrong, then it’s not wrong for him,” Nick Gorczany told her.
She rolled her eyes. “Good God in the foothills! Why do I bother?”
“That will be enough of that, Miss Ferguson.” Now Mr. Gorczany spoke with some snap: the snap of a boss putting a third-tier employee in her place. He sometimes looked at her in a way she found mildly annoying—not enough to call him on, even for her, but annoying even so. The way he eyed her now scared her, as it was meant to do. “I begin to see why you’ve worked at so many different places the past few years. If you can’t get along with people, you’re going to have problems. Now fix that letter, please.”
By
get along with people
, he meant
do as you’re told
. She almost choked on the injustice of it. She also almost told him to fold the letter till it was all corners and shove it up his wazoo. But the economy, not to put too fine a point on things, sucked. If she punted this job, how long till she snagged another one? Longer than her savings lasted? It might be close.
get along with people
, he meant
do as you’re told
. She almost choked on the injustice of it. She also almost told him to fold the letter till it was all corners and shove it up his wazoo. But the economy, not to put too fine a point on things, sucked. If she punted this job, how long till she snagged another one? Longer than her savings lasted? It might be close.
And so she contented herself with stalking out of his office, head high, back stiff. The look on her face made a software engineer who was coming in to show him some printouts flinch. It also made a couple of people talking by the coffee machine stare. That didn’t bother her; it wasn’t as if either one of them knew anything.
Changing
between you and me
back to
between you and I
took only a few seconds, printing out the letter only a few more. They would have gone even faster if she hadn’t done them through a red mist of fury.
This
was what the world was like? Too right it was! You got along better if you were one more smiling moron than if you gave a rat’s ass about doing things right.
between you and me
back to
between you and I
took only a few seconds, printing out the letter only a few more. They would have gone even faster if she hadn’t done them through a red mist of fury.
This
was what the world was like? Too right it was! You got along better if you were one more smiling moron than if you gave a rat’s ass about doing things right.
The phone rang. As Vanessa reached for it, she thought how tempting it would be to scream
Fuck you!
and slam down the receiver. Or to imitate Marshall and answer with
Yankee Stadium—second base
, and let the jackass on the other end go from there.
Fuck you!
and slam down the receiver. Or to imitate Marshall and answer with
Yankee Stadium—second base
, and let the jackass on the other end go from there.
Tempting? God, how tempting! But no. She’d just reminded herself she needed the paycheck. “Gorczany Industries, Vanessa Ferguson speaking.” If she sounded like a slightly constipated robot, well, Mr. Gorczany couldn’t can her for that.
“Hello, sweetheart.” Hagop Nersessyan had a voice like a lion’s rumbling purr. It was the first thing that attracted her to him. She’d rapidly found out there were others. He knew things in bed poor lame Bryce didn’t even suspect. She wondered how she’d got tangled up with a loser like Bryce to begin with. The same way she’d ended up working here, she supposed. It had looked like a good idea at the time.
“Hello,” she said, but even Hagop’s voice didn’t cheer her up as much as she thought it should have.
“I will see you tonight,” he said confidently. “I will close up shop early, and I will see you tonight.” He bought and sold fine Oriental carpets.
“I don’t know,” Vanessa said. “Work’s pretty crazy right now”—which was putting it mildly—“and I may not be fit company for anybody.”
“I will see you tonight,” Hagop repeated. She knew what that meant: he was horny. He had definite rhythms. Well he might—he was a year older than her father. Bryce seemed to be turned on all the damn time, and he’d expected Vanessa to feel the same way. She didn’t just want to screw; she wanted to be wanted, to be seduced. No wonder they hadn’t lasted, even though she’d thought about marrying him.
“Well . . . okay.” She wasn’t happy with herself for giving in. She never was. She’d find some way or another to get even. Now she hurried on: “Listen, I can’t talk. I’ve got to get this document to Mr. Gorczany.”
“Tonight, then,” Hagop said. He meant after dinner, of course. He wasn’t offering to take her out. He had a good deal of cash, but he was slow about parting with it. She’d wondered if he was married. That would explain why he didn’t want to be seen in public with her. She didn’t necessarily mind being a mistress, but she wanted to know if she was one. Some Internet work convinced her that wasn’t the issue. Hagop just didn’t like to spend money.
She waited outside Mr. Gorczany’s office till he stopped speaking in tongues with the software engineer. Then she brought in the letter and set it on his desk. “Here it is—the way you wanted it.” Her words might have been carved from ice.
He scanned it to make sure she wasn’t saying one thing and doing the other. She’d thought about that, but hadn’t figured she could get away with it—a good thing, too. Nodding, he scrawled his signature at the bottom. “Take it to the post office. I want to make sure it gets today’s postmark. We could have taken care of this sooner if you hadn’t gotten foolish about it.”
She got off at half past four. It was 4:27 now, by the digital clock on his desk. The trip and the wait in line would cost her anywhere between ten minutes and half an hour, depending on how retarded the Post Awful clerks were. And he was waiting for her to complain about it—she could see that. So she just said “Right” between clenched teeth and carried the letter out with her fingertips, as if it stank of manure. As far as she was concerned, it smelled worse than that.
The line at the post office was long, and moved slowly. As soon as Vanessa saw the plump blond woman at one of the two open stations, she knew it would be bad. That gal couldn’t count the fingers on one hand and get the same answer twice running. They talked about employees going postal—how about customers who gathered dust waiting their turn?
She collected a receipt when she handed off the letter. She wasn’t about to pay postage for Gorczany Industries. Then back to her car and back to her apartment. She picked up her mail—junk and a cable bill. The cat gave her a big hello when she came in. Pickles always did. A day in there with nothing but two fish tanks to watch wasn’t very exciting. Vanessa petted the fat-bottomed marmalade tabby and fluffed its fur. Then she fed it some kitty treats. After that, it stopped caring about her. She’d performed her functions, which made her superfluous till the next time the beast wanted something.
Cats were more honest than people.
Vanessa nuked a Jenny Craig frozen dinner. It was . . . better than going hungry, anyway. She ate a yogurt for dessert. Hagop would have liked her plumper than she was. Had she thought she’d stay with him . . . She wondered why she didn’t. Whatever the reason, she stuck with Jenny Craig.
She tossed her silverware into the sink. The apartment had no dishwasher. She did dishes when they started getting stinky or when she ran out of clean ones. That appalled her old man, not that it was any of his business.
The buzzer sounded. There was Hagop, waiting for her to pass him through the building’s security system. She did. A few seconds later, she heard his shoes on the stairway up to the second floor. She had to remind herself she was supposed to be glad to see him.
Spokane wasn’t a big city. With Washington State there, though, it had plenty of little clubs. This one had been around a long time. The joint’s name—Harvey Wallbanger—proved as much. Lots of things had come back into style over the years, but not drinks with Galliano in them. As far as Rob Ferguson was concerned, a Wallbanger was a nasty thing to do to a perfectly good screwdriver.
But Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had played here the year before. Rob and his bandmates were glad to be back. The sound and light guys—the guy on lights was a girl, actually—knew what they were doing. The management didn’t try to stiff acts as a matter of principle, the way so many clowns who ran clubs did. And the crowd was lively and enjoyed the show. They had last year, anyhow.
Which meant . . . they were the same kind of weirdos as the ones who played in the band. And if that wasn’t a judgment on them, then it was a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Or something.
Rob turned to Justin Nachman, who would have been Squirt Frog if the band were set up like that. Justin played lead guitar, did most of the singing, and had as much fame as anyone in a resolutely unfamous band could claim. “What
would
you call the kind of stuff we play?” Rob asked.
would
you call the kind of stuff we play?” Rob asked.
“Beats me,” Justin answered cheerfully. “I don’t put labels on it. I just play it. Long as you don’t call me late for supper, you can call it anything you want.” He meant it, or near enough. Nobody in the band was on the wrong side of thirty, but Justin had a good set of love handles.
They’d gone round that barn before, of course. They’d been going round it since the band formed—
congealed
was the word Justin used—in Santa Barbara. Rob and Charlie Storer, the drummer, were the analytical ones. Justin and Biff Thorvald, who played rhythm guitar, didn’t sweat it. They did what they didand hoped they did it well enough to keep them from needing to look for honest work.
congealed
was the word Justin used—in Santa Barbara. Rob and Charlie Storer, the drummer, were the analytical ones. Justin and Biff Thorvald, who played rhythm guitar, didn’t sweat it. They did what they didand hoped they did it well enough to keep them from needing to look for honest work.
Charlie said, “We’re probably somewhere between Frank Zappa and Al Stewart.”
He’d said that before. Arguments came and went like tides, and almost as regularly. Rob sighed. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he asked, a rhetorical question if ever there was one. He answered it, too: “For one thing, most of the people who listen to us have never heard of Zappa
or
Al Stewart.”
or
Al Stewart.”
“I think you’d be surprised,” Charlie said. “Al Stewart still gigs at places like this. Zappa would, I bet, only being dead makes it harder.”
“Maybe a little,” Rob agreed in tones he’d picked up from his father. In some ways, they were like water and sodium, and caught fire whenever they touched. In others—most of them ways Rob never thought about—they were very much alike.
“That’s what I said.” Charlie’s brown hair frizzed out in a perm that looked as if he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket. It bounced when he nodded, which he did now.
“Yeah, yeah.” Rob wasn’t about to be sidetracked, in which he also took after Colin the cop without noticing it. “The other thing I was going to say is, I don’t think there
is
any place between Al Stewart and Zappa.”
is
any place between Al Stewart and Zappa.”
“Sure there is,” Charlie said. “They both write interesting, off-the-wall lyrics. Only Zappa stopped caring about whether he sounded like a rock-and-roller after a while, but Al Stewart still does. Well, as much like a rock-and-roller as you can sound with just a couple of acoustic guitars.”
Rob pondered that. It wasn’t one of Charlie’s usual comebacks. Biff bailed him out before he had to respond to it, saying, “C’mon, you guys. Give it a rest, okay? Let’s do the sound check and hit the greasy spoon next door. We dick around much longer, my belly’ll growl louder’n my axe.” He brandished his guitar.
The so-called greasy spoon next door was an outstanding Vietnamese place. Rob remembered it fondly from the last time they were in Spokane. You couldn’t get better pho in Santa Ana’s Little Saigon. And the only place you could get better Vietnamese food than you could in Santa Ana was Ho Chi Minh City (which had been Saigon, and was likely to be Saigon again one of these years).
An idea tickled the back of his mind. “Maybe we could do something with places that’ve had more than one name. Tsaritsyn, Stalingrad, Volgograd. St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, back to St. Petersburg.”
“We’ve done songs about Russia,” Justin said.
“Not just Russia. Saigon’s Ho Chi Minh City—I was just thinking about that—and Constantinople is Istanbul nowadays. And is it Strassburg or Strasbourg?” Rob tried to make one of those last two Germanic and guttural, the other nasally French.
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