25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 27

Mattison isn't walking around on the dam just to show off. He needs to check out the fine points of the construction job. The dam slopes up and back at a 45-degree angle, and he wants its lip to rise just a little steeper even than that, so he moves along the face of the front, using his suit's shovel appendage to trim and shape the boundary between new rock and hot lava. He can feel mild warmth, not much more than that, through his suit, at least until he reaches a place where red can be seen crackling through the black, a tiny fissure in the dam, not dangerous but offensive to his sense of craft. He steps back, radios Foust and Herzog to turn the water back on, and has Hawks and Prochaska give the fissure a squirt or two.

Then he checks the far side of the lava front to make sure that there's no likelihood that the top of the lava dome he has created is simply going to spill back the other way, down into the residential block behind the event. But no, no, the oozing lava is quietly piling itself up, filling in behind the dam, giving no indication that it means to go off in some new direction. Thank G.o.d for that much. Because of the way the magma pool lies in relation to the giant subterranean fault line that kicked this whole thing off, the surface flows tend to be consistently directional, rising on a diagonal out of the ground and moving, generally, from east to west only. With some residual slopping around -- lava is a liquid, after all -- but not, as a rule, with any unpredictable twisting and turning back the way they have just come.

Just as Mattison is wrapping everything up, Gibbons radios him from the truck to say, "They want us to move along to San Dimas when we're done here."

"Jesus," Mattison says. "San Dimas is way the h.e.l.l to the east. Isn't everything over and done with back there by now?"

"Apparently not. Something new is about to bust out, it seems."

"Tell them we'll need a lunch break first."

"They said they wanted us to -- "

"Right," says Mattison. "We aren't f.u.c.king soldiers, you know. We're volunteer citizens and some of us have been working like coolies out here all morning. We get a lunch break before we start busting our a.s.ses again today. Tell them that, Barry."

"Well -- "

"Tell them."

As Mattison has guessed, the San Dimas thing is serious but not catastrophic, at least not yet. The preliminary signs indicate a bad bust-out is on the way out there, and auxiliary crews are being pulled in as available, but one team more or less won't make any big difference in the next hour. They get the lunch break.

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. "I sure wouldn't mind a beer right now," Evans says, and Hawks says, "Why don't you wish up a bottle of f.u.c.king champagne, while you're wishing things up? Don't cost no more than beer, if it's just wishes."

"I never liked champagne," Paul Foust says. "For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me." He smacks his lips. "I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue -- that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut -- "Knock it off," says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.

"You never stop wanting it," Foust tells him.

"Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb f.u.c.ker. Don't you think I know that? Knock it off."

"Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?" Marty Cobos asks.

"And how about needles, too?" says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. "Let's talk about needles too."

"Shut your f.u.c.king mouth, you G.o.dd.a.m.n wh.o.r.e," Lenny Prochaska says. He p.r.o.nounces it _hooer_. "What do you need to play around with my head for?"

"Why, did you have some kind of habit?" Mary Maude asks him sweetly.

"You hooer, I'm going to throw you into the lava," Prochaska says, getting up and heading toward her. Mary Maude weighs about ninety pounds, Prochaska maybe two-fifty. He could do it with one flip of his wrist.

"Lenny," Mattison says warningly.

"Tell her to leave me be, then."

"All of you," says Mattison. "Leave each other be. Jesus Christ, you think it's any easier for the others than it was for you?"

It is the tension, he knows, of the morning's work that is doing this to them. They're all on the edge, all the time, of falling back into their individual h.e.l.ls, and that keeps them constantly keyed up to a point where it doesn't take much for them to get on each other's nerves. Of course, he's on the edge himself, he always will be and won't ever let himself forget it, but he is in recovery and they aren't, not really, not yet, and the edge is thinner for them than it is for him. Each of them has managed to reach the abstinence level, at least, but you can get to that point simply by having yourself chained to a bed; that keeps you out of the clutches of your habit but it doesn't exactly qualify you as being free of it. Real recovery comes later, if at all, and you can be a tremendous pain in the a.s.s while you're trying to attain it, because you're angry all the time, angry with yourself for having burdened yourself with your habit and even angrier with the world for wanting you to give it up, and the anger keeps bubbling out all the time. Like lava, sort of. Makes a mess for everybody, especially yourself.

They calm down, though, as the sandwiches. .h.i.t their bellies. Mattison waits until they've eaten before he springs the San Dimas thing on them, and to his surprise there is no enormous amount of griping. The usual grumblers -- Evans, Snow, Blazes McFlynn -- do a predictable bit of grumbling, but not a whole lot, and that's it. They all would rather go back to the house and watch television, of course, but somewhere deep down they know that this volcano stuff is _actual worthwhile and important stuff_, perhaps the first time in their lives they have ever done anything even remotely worthwhile and important, and some part of them is tickled pink to be out here on the lava frontier. Hollywood is just a dozen miles west of here, after all. They all see themselves as characters in the big volcano movie, heroes and heroines, riding into battle against the evil monster that's eating L.A. That's how Mattison himself feels when he's out here, and he knows it's the same for them, maybe even more intense than it is for him, because he also has the self-esteem that comes from having made it back out of his addiction to this level of recovery, and they don't. Not yet. So they need to be heroes in a movie to feel good about themselves.

They clean up the lunch mess and Mattison goes back to check his lava dam, which is holding good and true, and then off they go to San Dimas for whatever is to be required of them there.

To get there they have to travel through the heart of the Zone, the very belly of the beast, the place where it all started.

No. Where it all started was fifty or sixty miles down in the crust of the earth, and maybe fifty miles east of where Mattison and his pals are now: out in Riverside County, where the tremendous but hitherto unknown Lower Yucaipa Fault had chosen to release its acc.u.mulated tension about sixteen months ago, sending a powerful shock wave surfaceward that went lalloping through the Southland at a nifty 7.6 on the Richter. The earthquake made a serious mess out of Riverside, Redlands, San Bernardino, and a lot of other places out there in the eastern boondocks, and caused troubles of lesser but not inconsiderable degree as far west as Thousand Oaks and the Simi Valley.

Californians don't enjoy big earthquakes, but they do expect and understand them, and they know that after you get one you wait for the lights to come back on and then you sweep up the broken crockery and you call all your friends in the affected area as soon as the phones are working so that, ostensibly, you can find out if they are okay, but really so that you can trade horrendous earthquake stories, and sooner or later the supermarket will reopen and the freeway overpa.s.ses will be repaired and things will get back to normal.

But this one was a little different, because the Yucaipa thing had evidently been so severe a fracture that it had shattered the roof of a colossal pool of very deep subterranean gases that had been confined under high pressure for ten or twenty million years, and the gas, breaking loose like a genie that has been let out of a bottle, had taken hold of a whopping big column of molten magma that happened to be down there and pushed it toward the surface, causing it to come up right underneath the San Gabriel Valley, which is just a little way east of downtown L.A. You expect all kinds of troubles in L.A. -- earthquakes, fires, stupid politics, air pollution, drought, deluges and mudslides, riots -- but you don't seriously expect volcanoes, any more than you expect snow. Volcanoes are stuff for Hawaii or the Philippines, or southern Italy, or Mexico. But not here, thank you, G.o.d. We have our little problems, sure, but volcanoes are not included on the list.

Now the list is one item longer.

The first volcano -- the only one, so far, that had built a real volcano-style cone for itself -- had popped up at that freeway interchange near Pomona, a couple of days after the big Yucaipa earthquake. First there was thunder, never a common thing in Southern California, and the ground began to shake, and then it began to puff up, making a blister two or three yards high that sent the freeway spilling into pieces as though King Kong had bashed it from below with his fist, and smoke and fine dust started to spurt from the ground. After which came a hissing that you could hear as far away as Long Beach, and showers of red-hot stones went flying into the air, a pretty good indication that this wasn't simply an after-shock of Yucaipa. Then came the noxious gases, a gust of blue haze that instantly killed half a dozen people who were standing around watching; and then a thick column of black ash decorated by flashes of lightning arose; and then, seven or eight hours later, the first lava flow began. The sky was bright as day all night long from the bursts of incandescent gas and molten rock that were coming forth. By the next morning there was a volcanic cone forty feet high sitting where the interchange had been.

If that had been all, well, you would watch it on the news for the next few nights, and then the Federal disaster teams would come in and the people in the neighborhood would be relocated and the _National Geographic_ would publish an article about the eruption, and somebody would start a cla.s.s action suit complaining that the Governor or the President or somebody had failed to give proper warning to home buyers that volcanoes might happen in Pomona, and the religious crazies in Orange County would deliver sermons about sin and repentance, and after a while the impacted area would become a new tourist attraction, Pomona Volcanic National Park or something like that, and life would go on in the rest of Los Angeles as it always did once the latest catastrophe had turned into history.

But the Pomona thing was only the beginning.

That great column of magma, rolling upward from the depths of the earth on a long slant to the west, began breaking through in a lot of other places, bursting out like an attack of fiery pimples across a wide, vaguely triangular strip bracketed, roughly, on the east by the Orange Freeway, on the north by Las Tunas Drive and Arrow Highway, on the south by the Pomona Freeway, and on the west by San Gabriel Boulevard. Within the affected zone anything was likely to happen. Volcanic vents opened in completely random patterns. Lava flows the size of small creeks would crop up in people's garages, or in their living rooms. Fumaroles would sprout in a front lawn and fill a whole neighborhood with smoke and ash. Houses suddenly began to rise from the ground as subsurface bulges formed beneath them. A finger of fierce subterranean heat would whiz along a street and fry the roots of every tree and shrub in your garden without harming your house. All this would be accompanied by almost daily earthquakes -- not big ones, just nervewracking little jiggles of 3.9 or 4.7 that drove you crazy with fear that something gigantic was getting ready to follow. Then things would be quiet for a couple of weeks; and then they would start again, worse than before.

Not all the lava events were trivial garage-sized ones. A few fissures as big as three blocks wide opened and sent broad sheets of molten matter rolling like rivers down main thoroughfares. That was when the Icelanders showed up to give advice about cooling the lava with hoses. Teams like Mattison's were called out to build lava dams, sometimes right across the middle of a big street, so that the flow would back up behind the new rock instead of continuing right on into the towns to the west -- or, perhaps, into Los Angeles proper, the city itself, still far away and untouched on the other side of the Golden State Freeway. The dams did the trick; but they had the unfortunate side effect of walling off the Zone behind ugly and impa.s.sable barriers of solid black basalt.

Today's route takes Mattison and Company on a grand tour of the entire Zone. Freeway travel is a joke in these parts once you get anywhere east of Rosemead Boulevard, and there are new lava-created dead ends all over the place on the surface streets, and so it takes real ingenuity, and a lot of backing and filling, to make a short trip like the one from Arcadia to San Dimas, which once would have been a quick buzz down the 210 Freeway. Now it's necessary to back-track down Santa Anita around the new outbreaks on Duarte Road, and then to come up Myrtle in Monrovia to the 210, and take the freeway as far east as it goes before it gets plugged up by last month's uncleared lava, which is not very far down the road at all; and then comes a lot of c.o.c.keyed wandering this way and that on surface streets, north to south and north again, through such towns as Duarte and Azusa and Covina and Glendora, places that no Angeleno ordinarily would be going in a million years, in order to get to the equally unknown munic.i.p.ality of San Dimas, which is just a couple of hops away from Pomona.

The landscape becomes more and more h.e.l.lish, the further east they go.

"_Look_ at all this s.h.i.t," Nicky Herzog keeps saying, over and over. "_Look_ at it! This is f.u.c.king hopeless, you know? We all ought to give up and move to f.u.c.king Seattle."

"Rains all the time," says Paul Foust.

"You like lava better than rain? You like f.u.c.king black ashes falling from the sky?"

"We don't give up," Nadine Doheny says dreamily. "We keep on keeping on. We are grateful for everything we have."

"Grateful for the volcanoes," Herzog says, in wonder. "Grateful for the ashes. Is that what you think?"

"Leave her alone," Mattison warns him. Nadine's conversation is made up mostly of recovery mantras, and that bothers the flippant, sharp-tongued Herzog. But Doheny is right and Herzog, smart as he is, is wrong. We don't give up. We don't run away. We stand our ground and fight and fight and fight.

Still and all, the Zone looks awful and even after all this time he has not grown used to its hideousness. There are piles of ashes everywhere, making it seem as if a black snowfall had hit the area, and also, not quite as universally distributed but nevertheless impossible to overlook, little encrustations of cooled lava, clinging to houses and pavements like some sort of dark fungus. Light dustings of pumice drift on the breeze. The sky is white with acc.u.mulated smoke that today's winds have not yet been able to blow out toward Riverside. Where major fires have burned, whole blocks of rubble pockmark the scene.

The truck has to detour around all sorts of lesser obstacles: spatter cones, small hills of tephra and lapilli and cinders and lava bombs and other forms of ejected volcanic junk, et cetera, et cetera. Occasionally they pa.s.s an active fumarole that's enthusiastically belching smoke. Around it, Mattison knows, are piles of dead bugs, ankle-deep, killed by gusts of live steam or poisonous vapors. The fumaroles are surrounded also by broad swaths of mud that somehow has been flung up around their rims, often quite colorful mud at that, green or pink or red from alum deposits, bright yellow where sulfur crystals abound. Sometimes the yellow is laced with streaks of orange or blue, and sometimes, where the mud is very blue, it is splotched in a highly decorative way by a crust of rich chestnut-brown. Mattison doesn't know which chemicals are causing these effects.

"It's like fairyland, isn't it?" Mary Maude Gulliver cries out, suddenly. "It's like something out of Tolkien!"

"Crazy hooer," Lenny Prochaska mutters. "I'd like to give you a fairyland, you hooer."

Mattison shushes him. He smiles at Mary Maude. It's hard to see this place as a fairyland, all right, but Mary Maude is one of a kind. Give her credit for accentuating the positive, anyway.

Aside from the mineral incrustations in the mud, the Zone shows color where the ground itself has been cooked by the heat of some intense outbreak from below. That ranges from orange and brick red through bright cherry red to purple and black, with some lively streaks of blue. But this show of color is the only trace of what might be called beauty anywhere around. Every building is stained with mud and ash. There are hardly any live trees or garden plants to be seen, just blackened trunks with shriveled leaves still hanging from the branches.

There aren't many people still living in these neighborhoods. Most of those who could afford it have packed up all their worldly possessions and had them carted off to new homes outside the Zone and, in a good many cases, outside the state altogether. A lot of those at the very bottom of the income ladder have cleared out also, moving to the new Federal relocation camps that have been set up in downtown L.A., Valencia, Mojave, the Angeles National Forest, and anyplace else where there was no irate householders' a.s.sociation to take out an injunction against it. The remaining residents of the Zone, mainly, are the lower-middle-income people, the ones who haven't yet lost their houses but couldn't afford to hire moving companies and aren't quite poor enough to qualify for the camps. They are still squatting here, grimly guarding their meager homes against looters, and hoping against hope that the next round of lava outbreaks will happen on any street but their own.

Just how desperate some of these people are getting is something Mattison discovers when the truck's erratic route around the various obstacles takes it through a badly messed-up segment of a barrio somewhere between Azusa and Covina and they see some kind of pagan religious sacrifice under way in the middle of a four-way intersection, where the pavement has begun to bulge slightly and show signs of imminent buckling as gas pressure builds from below. Flat slabs of blue-black lava have been piled up in the crosswalk to form a sort of rough, ragged-edged altar that has been surrounded by green boughs torn from nearby trees.

What is evidently a priest -- but not any sort of Catholic priest; his dark face is painted with green and red stripes and he is wearing a brilliant Aztec-looking costume, bright feathers and strips of fur all over it -- is standing atop the altar, grasping a gleaming butcher-knife in his hand. The altar is stained with blood, and more is about to be added to it, because two other men in less gaudy outfits than the priest's are at his side, holding forth to him a wildly fluttering chicken. a.s.sorted pigs, sheep, and birds are lined up back of the altar, waiting their turn. In a wider circle around the site are perhaps fifty shabbily dressed men, women, and children, silent, stony-faced, holding hands and slowly, rhythmically stamping their feet.

What is taking place here is utterly obvious right away to everyone aboard the Citizens Service House truck. Even so, it isn't always easy to believe the evidence of your eyes when you see something like this. Mattison stares in shock and disbelief, wondering whether they have slipped through some time-fault and have dropped down into an ancient era, primitive and barbaric. But no, no, prosaic evidence of the modern century can be seen on every side, lampposts, store fronts, billboards. It's just what's going on in the middle of the street that is so exceedingly strange.

"Holy f.u.c.king s.h.i.t," Buck Randegger says. He's a former highway construction worker who has been substance-free about four months and is still plenty rough around the edges. "I thought the f.u.c.king Mexicans in this town were supposed to be Christians, for Christ's sake."

"We are," Annette Perez tells him icily. "And also other things, when we have to be. Sometimes both at the same time." The butcher-knife descends in a fierce arc, the newly headless chicken flaps its wings insanely, the crowd of worshippers jumps up and down and cries out three times in a high-pitched ecstatic way, and Randegger expresses his disgust and amazement at the whole weird pagan scene with a maximum of pungency and a minimum of political correctness. For a moment it looks as though Perez is going to jump at him, and Mattison gets ready to intervene, but she simply shoots Randegger a black glare and says, "If this was your neighborhood, _carajo_, and you had a G.o.d, wouldn't you want to ask him to stop this s.h.i.t?"

"With pigs? With sheep?"

"With whatever would do it," she says.

Gibbons, meanwhile, is backing the truck out of the intersection, since the a.s.sembled congregation now is staring at them as though their presence here is quite unwelcome and it seems manifestly not a good idea to try to drive any closer. Mattison, taking one last look over his shoulder, sees a small pig being led up the side of the altar. The truck, still going backward, swings left at the first corner, then takes the next right and right again, which brings it around to the far side of the site of the ceremony in the same moment as a little earthquake goes rippling through the vicinity, 3.5 or so, just enough to make the gaunt blackened palm trees that line the street start swaying. The worshippers in the intersection behind them point at the truck as it reappears, and begin to scream and yell furiously and shake their fists, and then Mattison hears some popping sounds.

"Hit the gas," he tells Gibbons over his suit radio. "They're shooting at us."

Gibbons speeds up. The street ahead is carpeted with a layer of loose ash maybe two feet deep, but Gibbons ploughs through it anyway, sending up swirling black clouds that make everybody on the open deck close the faceplates of their suits in a hurry. Beyond the ash is a stretch of crunchy cinders and other sorts of tephra, so that they all grab hold of each other and hang on tight as the truck clanks and jounces onward, and then a little newly congealed lava in the road makes the ride even rougher; but after that the street turns normal again for a while and they can relax, as much relaxation as may be possible while you ride in an open truck through territory that no longer looks like just a suburb of h.e.l.l, but the Devil's own back yard.

There have been repeated outbreaks of tectonic activity here before, early on in the crisis -- that much is obvious from the burned-out houses and the black crusts of old lava everywhere and the ashen landscape -- but something new and big is apparently getting ready to happen. The sky here is dead white from thick upwellings of steam and sulfurous fumes, except where the fumes are coaly black. Streaks of lightning keep jumping around and the ground trembles continuously, as if a non-stop earthquake is going on. The sidewalks are warped and bulging in many places and some little red tongues of lava can be seen beginning to ooze from cracks in the pavement. Every few minutes a dull distant boom can be heard, a m.u.f.fled sound that definitely gets your attention, something like the fart of a dinosaur that might be sauntering around a few blocks away.

Three or four weary-looking fire crews are slowly taking up positions in the street and getting their gear into order; some of the biggest pumps Mattison has ever seen have already been hauled into place for the lava-cooling work; police helicopters are whirling overhead, booming down orders to whatever remaining population may still be living here to evacuate the area at once. It is a truly precarious scene. Mattison is ever so happy that he traded the horrors of substance abuse for the privilege of visiting places like this.

The same thing is occurring to some of his companions, evidently. Blazes McFlynn lays his hand on Mattison's right arm and says, "I didn't sign on for any G.o.dd.a.m.ned suicide missions, Matty. Let me off this f.u.c.king truck right now."

"Let you off?" Mattison says mildly.

"f.u.c.king A. I want out, this very minute."

Mattison sighs. McFlynn always makes trouble, sooner or later: if only he had known that this San Dimas operation was going to be tacked on to the day's outing, he probably would have opted to leave McFlynn behind at the outset. McFlynn is, of all goofy things, a bombed-out circus acrobat and pensioned-off movie stunt man, strong as a tow-truck winch, who over the course of time has found relief from stress in a whole smorgasbord of addictive substances and now, having very badly broken his leg while winning a moronic barroom bet that involved jumping off the top of a building and developed a severe limp that makes it hard for him to practice either of his professions, draws generous compensation pay from a variety of sources while undergoing one of his periodic spells of detoxification and Citizens Service. His first name is actually Gerard, but if you call him anything but Blazes he will react unpleasantly. He is the only man in the house for whom Mattison would feel any reticence about decking, for McFlynn, though five inches shorter than Mattison, is probably just about as dangerous in a fight, gimpy leg and all.

"Are you saying," Mattison asks him once more, "that you don't want to take part in the current operation?"

"The whole street is going to blow any minute."

"Maybe so. That's why we're here, to get things under control if it does. You want to walk back from here to Silver Lake? You think you'll catch a bus, maybe, or phone for a cab? The option of your departing this operation simply does not exist at this moment, okay, McFlynn?" McFlynn tries to say something, but Mattison talks right over him, although keeping his voice mild, mild, mild, as he is has been taught to do all the time when addressing the inmates, no matter what the provocation. "You find this work not to your liking, well, when you get your cowardly a.s.s back to the house tonight you can tell Donna that you don't want to do volcano work any more, and she'll take you off the list. You aren't any f.u.c.king prisoner, you understand? You don't have to do this stuff against your will and in fact you are perfectly free, if you like, to pack up and leave the house tomorrow and go back to your favorite substance, for that matter. But not today. Today you work for me, and we work in San Dimas."

McFlynn, who surely was aware when he began complaining that this was where the discussion was going to end, is just starting to crank up a disgruntled and obscene capitulation when Gibbons says, over the radio from the truck cab, "Volcano Central wants us to start setting up the pump, Matty. Satellite scan says there's a lava bulge about to blow two blocks east of us down Bonita Avenue, which is the big street straight in front of us, and we're supposed to dam it up as soon as it comes our way." So they are going to be right on the front line, this time. Fine, Mattison thinks. Hot diggety d.a.m.n.

They all get off the truck, and seal up their suits, and set about getting ready to deal with the oncoming eruption.

Because the pump they will be using this time is a jumbo job, just about the biggest one Mattison has ever worked with, he designates not only Prochaska and Hawks, once again, for the pumping crew, but also Clyde Snow and Blazes McFlynn, who will be up front not only because he's strong but also because Mattison wants to keep a close eye on him. In any case he's going to need all the muscle-power he can get when it becomes necessary to swing that big rig around to keep the shifting lava penned up. He puts the generally reliable Paul Foust in charge of the controls that operate the pump itself. The rest -- Randegger, Herzog, Evans, and the three women, Doheny and Perez and Gulliver -- Mattison deploys at various points along the line to the standpipe, so that they can keep the hose from getting tangled and cope with any other interruptions to the flow of water that might arise.

Everybody is in place none too soon. Because just as the signal arrives from the rear that the water connection has been made, there comes an all too familiar bellowing and groaning from the next block, as though a giant with a bad bellyache is about to cut loose, and then Mattison hears five sharp heavy grunts in succession, oof oof oof oof oof, followed by an eerie crackling sound, and suddenly the air is full of fire.

It's like one of the Yellowstone geysers, except that what is being flung up is a lot of tiny bits of hot lava, riding on a plume of bluish steam, and for a couple of moments it's impossible to see more than a few feet in front of your face-plate. Then there is one single booming sound, not m.u.f.fled at all but sharp and hard, and the bluish geyser of steam in front of them triples or quadruples in height in about half a second, and the pavement ripples beneath their feet as though an earthquake has happened precisely in this spot. Mattison comprehends that there has been a terrific explosion a very short way down the block and they are all about to be hurled sky-high, or maybe are already on their way up to the stratosphere and just haven't had time to react yet.

But they aren't. What has happened is that an underground gas pocket has blown its head off, yes, but it has done it in one single clean _whoosh_ and all the pent-up junk that is being released has taken off for Mars in a coherent unit, the steam and mud and lava bits and whatnot rising straight up and vanishing, clearing the air beautifully behind it. A couple of good-sized lava bombs go soaring past them, fizzing like fireworks, and come down with thick plopping thunks somewhere not far away, but don't seem to do any damage; and then things are quiet, pretty much. The whole blurry geyser that was spewing straight up in front of them is gone, the ground they are standing on is still intact, and they can see again.

Mattison has just about enough time to realize that he has survived the explosion when he registers the force of an inrush of cool air that's swooping in from all sides to fill the gap where the geyser had been. It isn't strong enough to knock anybody down, but it does make you want to brace yourself pretty good.

And then comes the heat; and after it, the lava flow.

The heat is awesome. Mattison's suit catches most of it, but enough of the surge gets through his insulation so that he has no doubt at all about its intensity. It is what he calls first-rush heat: the subterranean magma ma.s.s has been cooking whatever deposits of air have surrounded it down there, and all that hot air, having had noplace to go, has gone on getting hotter and hotter. Now it all comes gleefully zooming out at once. Mattison recoils involuntarily as though he has been belted by an invisible fist, steadies himself, straightens up, looks around to check up on his companions. They're all okay.

The lava, having busted through the pavement at last, follows right on the heels of that hot blast. A glowing red-orange river of it, maybe two or three feet deep, flowing down the middle of the street, taking the line of least resistance between the buildings as it heads in their direction.

"Hose!" Mattison yells. "Pump! Hit it, you bozos, hit it right down front!"

The lava is moving faster than Mattison would prefer, but not so fast that they need to retreat, at least not yet. It's actually three separate streams, each runnel six to eight feet wide, traveling in parallel paths and occasionally overlapping in a braided flow before separating again. The surface of each flow is fairly viscous from its exposure to the cool air, darker than what is below and showing irregular bulges and lobes and puckerings, which break open now and then to reveal the bright red stuff that lies just below. Here and there, narrow tongues of dark congealed lava rise above the stream at sharp angles like sleek fins, making it seem as though lava sharks are swimming swiftly downstream through the fiery torrent.

As the water from their big hose hits the first onrush of the flow, a sc.u.m of cooling lava starts to form almost instantly atop the middle stream. The front of it begins to change color and texture, thickening and turning gray and wrinkled, like an elephant's hide.

"That's it!" Mattison tells his men. "Keep hitting it there! Smack in the middle, guys!"

The water boils right off, naturally, and within moments they are able to see nothing in front of them once again except a wall of steam. This is the most dangerous moment, Mattison knows: if the lava, pushed toward them by whatever giant fist of gas is shoving it from below, should suddenly increase its uptake velocity, he and his whole team could be engulfed by it before they knew what was happening to them. For the next few minutes they'll be fighting blind against the oncoming lava flow, with nothing to guide them about its speed and position but Mattison's own perceptions of fluctuations in its heat.

The heat, at the moment, is really something. Not as fierce as it had been in the first instant of the breakout, no, but powerful enough to tax the cooling systems of their lava suits practically to their limits. It feels like a solid wall, that heat: Mattison imagines that if he leaned forward against it, it would hold him up. But he knows that it won't; and he knows, also, that if things get much hotter they will have to back off.

What he is trying to do is to build log-shaped strips of solidified lava along the front of the row, perpendicular to the line of movement. These will slow its advance as the fresh stuff piles up behind them. Then he can raise the angle of the hoses and start pumping the water upward to form larger blocks of lava, which he will eventually link to create his dam. And in time he will have buried the live lava at its source, entombing it beneath a little mountain of newly created rock and thus throttling the upwelling altogether.

The theory is a nice one. But in practice there usually are problems, because the lava, unlike your average river, tends to advance at a variable speed from moment to moment, and you can build a lovely little log-jam or even some good-sized retainer blocks and nevertheless a sudden fast-moving spurt of molten stuff will spill right over the top and head your way, and there is nothing you can do then but drop your hoses and run like h.e.l.l, hoping that the lava isn't traveling faster than you are.

Or else, as Mattison knows all too well, your dam will work very effectively to halt the lava in its present path -- thereby inducing it to take up a different path that will send it rolling off toward some still undamaged freeway or still unruined houses, or maybe pouring down a hillside into another community entirely. When you see something like that happening, you need to move your whole operation around at a 90-degree angle to itself and start building a second dam, not so easy to do when you are operating with two-ton pumps.

Here, just now, everything is going sweetly so far. It's a tough business because of the extreme heat, but they are holding their own and even managing to achieve something. They have been able to maintain themselves at a distance of about half a block from the front edge of the lava flow without the need to retreat, and Mattison can see, whenever the steam thins out a bit, that the color of the lava along the edge is beginning to turn from gray to a comforting black, the black of solid basalt. A pump crew from some other Citizens Service House has arrived, Mattison has been told, and is building a second lava dam on the opposite side of the breakout. The fire crews are at work in the adjacent blocks, hosing down the structures that were ignited by the initial geyser of lava fragments.

If visibility stays good, if the water supply holds out, if the pump doesn't break down, if the lava doesn't pull any velocity surprises, if some randomly escaping gobbet of hot rock doesn't go flying through the air and melt one of the hoses, if there isn't some new eruption right under their feet, or maybe an earthquake, if this, if that -- well, then, maybe they'll be able to knock off in another hour or two and head back to the house for some well-earned rest.

Maybe.

But things are beginning to change a little, now. The lava is penned up nicely in the middle but the bulk of the flow has shifted to the right-hand stream and that one is gaining in depth and velocity. That brings up the ugly possibility that Mattison's dam is achieving diversion instead of containment, and is about to send the entire flow, which has been traveling thus far from west to east, off in a southerly direction.

Volcano Central is monitoring the whole thing by satellite, and somebody up there calls the problem to Mattison's attention via his suit radio about a fifteenth of a second after he discovers it for himself. "Start moving your equipment to the right side of your dam," Volcano Central says. "There's danger now that the lava will start rolling south down San Dimas Avenue into Bonelli County Park, where it'll take out the Puddingstone Reservoir, and maybe keep on going south until it cuts the San Bernardino Freeway in half on the far side of the park. A piece of the 210 Freeway will also be at risk down there."

The street and park names mean nothing to Mattison -- he has never been anywhere near San Dimas before in his life -- and he can form only a hazy picture of the specific geography from what Volcano Central is telling him. But all that matters is that there's a park, a reservoir, and an apparently undamaged stretch of freeway to the south of here, and his beautifully constructed lava dam has succeeded in tipping the flow toward those very things, and he has to hustle now to correct the situation.

"All right, everybody, listen up," he announces. "We're making a 90-degree shift in operations."

Easier said than done, of course. The hoses will have to be decoupled and dragged to new hydrants, the ma.s.sive pump has to be swung around, the trajectory of the water stream has to be recalibrated -- nor will the lava stand still while they are doing all these things. It's a challenge, but stuff like this is meat and potatoes to Mattison, the fundamental nutritive agent out of which his recovery is being built. He starts giving the orders; and his poor battered bedraggled team of ex-abusers, ex-homelesses, ex-burglars, ex-muggers, ex-wh.o.r.es, ex-this, ex-that, all of it bad, swings gamely into action, because this is part of _their_ recovery too.