Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 4

As the truck heads east along the Ventura, though, signs of the disaster begin to show up as early as Glendale, and by the time they have crossed over to the 210 Freeway and are moving through Pasadena there can be no doubt that something out of the ordinary has been going on a little further ahead.

Everything from about Fair Oaks Avenue eastward is sooty from a light coating of fine pumice and volcanic ash that has been carried out of the Zone by occasional blasts of Santa Ana winds, and beyond Lake Avenue the whole area is downright filthy. Mattison-who is a native Angeleno, having grown up in Northridge and Van Nuys and lived for most of his adult life in a succession of furnished apartments in West Los Angeles-thinks of the impeccable mansions just to his right over in San Marino, with theirmanicured lawns and their blooming camellias and azaleas and aloes, and shakes his head at the thought of the way they must look now. He can remember one epic bender that began in Santa Monica and ended up around here in which he found himself climbing over the wall at three in the morning into the enormous sprawling garden of giant cactus at the Huntington Library, right down there in San Marino, and wandering around inside thinking that he had been transported to some other planet. It must look like Mars in there for sure these days, he thinks.

At Sierra Madre Boulevard the truck exits the freeway. "It's blocked by a pile of lava bombs just beyond San Gabriel Boulevard," Gibbons explains to him via the suit radio. "They hope to have it cleared by this afternoon." He goes zigging and zagging in a south-easterly way on surface streets through Pasadena until they get to Huntington Drive, which takes them past Santa Anita Racetrack and brings them smack up into a National Guard roadblock a couple of blocks just beyond.

The Guardsmen, seeing a truckload of mirror-bright lava suits, wave them on through. Gibbons, who is undoubtedly getting his driving instructions now direct from Volcano Central, turns left on North Second Avenue, right on Colorado Boulevard, and brings the truck to a halt a little way down the street, where half a block of one-story commercial buildings is engulfed in flame and red gouts of lava are welling up out of what had until five or six hours ago been a burrito shop. The site is cordoned off, but just beyond the cordon a bunch of people, Mexicans, some Chinese, maybe a few Koreans, are standing around weeping and wailing and waving their arms toward heaven-the proprietors, most likely, of the small businesses that are getting destroyed here.

"Everybody out," Mattison orders, as the tailgate goes down.

Firefighters are already at work at the periphery of the scene, hosing down the burning buildings in the hope of containing the blaze before it sets the whole neighborhood on fire. But the lava outcropping has been left for Mattison and his crew to handle. Lava containment is a new and special art, which the Citizens Service House people have gradually come to master, and the beleaguered Fire Department guys are quite content to leave that kind of work to them and concentrate on putting out conventional fires.

Quickly Mattison sizes up the picture. Things are just in the very early stages, he sees. There's still hope for containment.

What has happened here is that a stray arm of the underlying magma belt that is causing this whole mess has wandered up through the bedrock and has broken through the surface in eight or nine places along a diagonal line a couple of miles long. It's as if a many-headed serpent made of fiery-hot lava has poked all its heads up at the same time.

For just one volcano to have sprung up out here would have been bad enough. But the area now known as the San Gabriel Valley Tectonic Zone has been favored, over the past year or so, with a whole mult.i.tude of them-little ones, but lots. The Mexicans call the Zone La Mesa de los Hornitos-that means "little ovens," hornitos. You can cook your tortillas on the sidewalk anywhere in the affected area.

The lava pool here is maybe eleven feet by fifteen, a puddle, really, just enough to take out the burrito joint. The heat it's giving off is, of course, fantastic: Mattison, who has become an expert in such things by this time, can tell just at a glance that things are running about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lava at that temperature glows yellowish-red. He prefers to work with it glowing bright-red, which is about 400 degrees cooler, or, even better, dark blood-red, 400 degrees cooler than that; but he is not given his choice of temperatures in these situations, and at least they are not yet into the white-heat stage, which is a b.i.t.c.h and a half to cope with.It is the heat of the lava, and not any fire from below, that has set the adjoining buildings ablaze.

Volcanoes, Mattison knows, don't belch fire. But you push a lot of red-hot material up into a street like this and nearby structures made mostly of beaverboard and plywood are very quickly going to reach their flash point.

The flow, so far, is moving relatively slowly, maybe ten or twelve inches a minute. That means the lava is relatively viscous, and thank G.o.d for that. He knows of flows that come spurting out fifty times as fast and make you really dance. At the upper surface where the lava is coming into contact with the air he can see it congealing, forming a gla.s.sy skin that tinkles and clinks and chimes as inexorable pressures from below keep cracking it. Mattison watches odd blobs and bulges come drifting up, expand, harden a little, and break, sending squiggles of molten lava off to either side. A few big bubbles are rising too, and they seem ominous and nasty, indicators, perhaps, that the lava pool is thinking of spitting a couple of little lava bombs at the onlookers.

The pumping truck that has been supplied for Mattison's crew this morning is strictly a minor-league item, but it appears adequate for his needs. The region has only so many of the big-ticket jobs available, just a handful, really, even after all these months since the crisis began, and those have to be kept in reserve for the truly dire eruptions. So what they have given him to work with, instead of a two-and-a-half-ton pump that can move thirteen thousand gallons of water a minute and throw it, if necessary, hundreds of feet in the air, is one of the compact Helgeson & Nordheim tripod-mounted jobs sitting on top of an ordinary flat-bed truck. It's small, but it'll probably do the job.

An auxiliary firefighter-a girl, couldn't be more than fifteen, Latino, dark eyes glossy with excitement and fear-has been delegated to show him where the water hookup is. Every one of the myriad little munic.i.p.alities in and around the Zone is now under legal obligation to designate certain hydrants as dedicated lava-pump outlets, and to set up and maintain reserve water-tanks at ground level every six blocks. "How far are we from the nearest dedicated hydrant?" Mattison asks her, speaking like a s.p.a.ce invader from within his lava suit, and she tells him that it's back behind them on North Second, maybe a thousand yards. Has he been provided with a thousand yards of hose? She thinks he has. Okay: maybe she's right. If not, the firemen can lend him some. Lava containment is considered a higher priority than fire containment, considering that uncontrolled lava flows will spread a fire even faster than burning buildings will, since burning buildings don't move through the streets and lava does.

Mattison picks Paul Foust and Nicky Herzog, who are two of the least befuddled of his people, to go with the girl from the Fire Department and set up the hose connection. Meanwhile he and Marcus Hawks and Lenny Prochaska get to work muscling the pump rig as close to the lava as they dare, while Clyde Snow, Mary Maude Gulliver, and Ned Eisenstein set about uncoiling the hundred yards of steel-jacketed hose that's connected to the pump and running it in the general direction of North Second Avenue, where the water will be coming from. The rest of his crew begins unreeling the lengths of conventional hose that they have, ordinary fire-hose that would melt if used close in, and laying it out beyond the reach of the steel-jacketed section.

Mattison can't help feel a burst of pride as he watches his charges go about their ch.o.r.es. They're nothing but a bunch of human detritus barely out of detox, as he once was too, and yet, goofy and obstinate and ornery and bewildered and generally objectionable as they are capable of being, they always seem to rise above themselves when they're out here on the lava line. Or most of the time, anyway. There are a few p.i.s.sant troublemakers in the group and even the good ones have funny little relapses when you least expect or want them. But those are the exceptions; this kind of work is the rule. Good for them, he thinks. Good for us all. He's quietly proud of himself too, considering that a couple of years ago he was just one more big drunken unruly a.s.shole like the rest of them, a.s.siduously perfecting his boozing techniques in every bar along Wilshire from Barrington to Bundy to Centinela and so on clear out to theocean, and here he is calmly and coolly and effectively running his own little piece of the grand and glorious Los Angeles lava-control operation.

"Can we get a little closer, guys?" he asks Hawks and Lenny Prochaska.

"Jeez, Matty," Prochaska murmurs. "Feel the f.u.c.king heat! It's like walking into a blast furnace wearing a bathing suit."

"I know, I know," Mattison says. "But we'll be okay. Come on, now, guys. An inch at a time. Easy does it. We're good strong boys. We can handle a nice hot time, can't we?" It's like talking baby-talk, and Hawks and Prochaska are big men, nearly as big as he is and neither of them especially sweet-natured.

But he has their number. Their various chemical dependencies had reduced them, in the fullness of time, to something that functioned on the general level of competence of babies in diapers, and they need to prove over and over, now, that they are the tough hard macho males they used to be. So they lean down close and work with him to drag the pump rig forward and get the nozzle aimed right down the mouth of the lava well.

The suits they're wearing are actually quite good at shielding them from the worst of the heat. They can withstand a surprising amount of it-for a time, anyway. The melnar is very tough stuff, and also, because it is so shiny, it turns back much of the heat through simple reflective radiation, and there's interior insulation besides, and a coolant network, and infrared filters, and two or three other gimmicks also, all of which makes it possible to walk right up to a 2000-degree lava flow and even, if its surface has hardened a little, to step out onto it when necessary. Still, despite the protection afforded by the lava suit, it is quite apparent from the warmth that does get through that they are standing right next to molten rock that has come spurting up just now from the Devil's own domain.

The hoses are hooked up now and Mattison has the nozzle directed to the place he wants it to be, which is along the outer rim of the lava flow. He sends a radio message back to Foust and Herzog out by the hydrant that they're almost ready to go. Then he gives a hand signal and it travels back and back along the line, from Mary Maude to Evans to Cobos to Buck Randegger, or whoever it is that is standing behind Cobos, and on around the corner until finally it reaches Foust and Herzog, who know for sure now that the hose line is fully connected, and the water begins to shoot forth. Mattison and Hawks and Prochaska grip the nozzle together, slowly and grimly playing it along the edge of the flow.

The purpose of this operation is to cool the front of the lava well sufficiently to form a crust, and then a dam, that will cause the continuing flow to pile up behind it instead of rolling on down the street. This is a technique that was perfected in Iceland, and indeed half a dozen grizzled Icelanders have been imported to serve as consultants during this Los Angeles event, frosty-eyed men with names like Svein Steingrimsson and Steingrim Sveinsson who look upon fighting volcanoes as some kind of Olympic sport.

But one big difference between Iceland and Los Angeles is that Iceland sits in the middle of a frigid ocean that provides an infinite quant.i.ty of cold water for use by lava-fighters, and the distances from sh.o.r.e to volcano are not very great. Los Angeles has an ocean nearby too, but it isn't conveniently placed for hosing down lava outbreaks in the San Gabriel Valley, which is inland, thirty or forty miles from the coast.

Hence the system of munic.i.p.al water-tanks all along the borders of the Zone, and a zillion tanker trucks trundling back and forth bringing ocean water with which to keep the tanks filled, Los Angeles's regular water supply being far from adequate even for the ordinary needs of the community.

Any lava-cooling job, even a small one like this, is a ticklish thing. It isn't quite like watering a lawn. You are dumping 60-degree water on 2000-degree lava, an interaction which is going to produce immense billows of steam that will prevent you from seeing very much of what you are in the process of doing. But you need to see what you are doing, because as you build your lava dam along the front of the upwelling what you may all too easily achieve is not the containment of the lava but, rather, its deflection towardsomething you don't want it to hit. Like the fire truck down the block, for example, or some undamaged buildings on the opposite side of the street.

So you have to wield your hose like a sculptor, dancing around squirting the water with great precision, topping up the dam here, minimizing its height there, all the while taking into account the slope of the ground, the ability of the subsoil to bear the weight of the new stone, and the possibility that the lava you are working with may suddenly decide to accelerate its rate of outflow from fifty feet an hour to, say, fifty feet a minute, which would send the flow hurtling over the top of your little dam and put you up to your a.s.s in lava, with the hose still dangling from your hand as you become a permanent part of the landscape.

Which is why the faceplate of your lava suit is equipped with infrared filters to help you see through all that billowing steam that you are busily creating as you work.

And there is other stuff to consider. Coming up out of the core of the earth, along with all that lava, are various gases, not all of them nice ones. Chlorine, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, all kinds of miasmas are likely to head swiftly surfaceward as though carried by a giant blowpipe. These are all poisonous gases, although you are more or less protected against that by your suit; however, traveling upward with the gases may be fragments of incandescent lava that will go up like a geyser and come down all over the neighborhood, including right where you happen to be. Therefore you want to listen, as you work, for strange new whooshings and bellowings and hissings, and in particular for the sound of something like an old-fashioned locomotive tooting its horn as it heads your way. Mattison has beaten a quick retreat more than a few times, sometimes taking his pump with him, sometimes abandoning it and running like h.e.l.l as a highly local eruption starts nipping at his heels.

However, none of that happens this morning. This Arcadia thing is just a teeny-weeny little isolated lava outbreak with no special complications except for the owner of the burrito stand. Mattison, aided expertly by Marcus Hawks, who is just eight months out of a crack house in El Segundo, and Lenny Prochaska, whose powerful forearms bear needle tracks that look like freeway interchanges, deftly creates a low wall of cooled lava across the front of the outbreak, then adds a limb up its right-hand side and another up the left to form a U, after which they concentrate on hardening the new lava wherever it comes curling up over the boundaries of their wall. The cooling process is very quick. Along the face of the wall, the temperature of the lava has dropped to the 500-degree level, at which heat it is hardly glowing at all, at least not at the outer crust. Mattison figures that the crust he has built is maybe three inches thick, a skin of solid basalt over the h.e.l.lish stuff behind.

Of course, lava is still oozing steadily from the ground at the original exit point, and probably will go on doing so for another six or seven hours at this site, maybe even a day or two. But the dam should hold it and keep it from welling out into Colorado Boulevard, which is an important thoroughfare that needs to be kept open. Instead, the lava will go on piling up on the site of the burrito stand, forming a little mountain perhaps fifteen or twenty feet high. Unless, of course, it decides to break through the surface a couple of dozen yards down the street instead, but Mattison doesn't think that's going to happen at this site.

He sometimes wonders what life is going to be like around here when all this is over, the volcanoes have died down, and the whole eastern half of the Los Angeles Basin is littered with new little mountains in the middle of what used to be busy neighborhoods. Are they going to dynamite them all? Build around them?

On top of them? And where are they going to put the freeways to replace the ones that are now mired in cooling lava that soon will be solid rock?

h.e.l.l, it's not his problem. That's one of his mantras: Not my problem. He has enough problems of his own, currently under control but not necessarily going to stay that way if he borrows trouble from elsewhere. One day at a time is another phrase that he has been taught to repeat to himself whenever hestarts worrying about things that shouldn't matter to him. Easy does it. Yes. First things first. These are absolutely right-on concepts. Somebody else will have to figure out how to repair Los Angeles, once all this is over. His job, which will last him the rest of his life, is figuring out how to operate Cal Mattison.

The fires in the surrounding buildings are just about out, now. One of the firefighters comes over and asks him how he's doing. "Under control," Mattison tells them. "Just a little tidying-up to do."

"You want us to stick around, just in case?"

Mattison thinks for a moment. "You got work nearby?"

The firefighter points. "There's a whole line of these things, from the freeway all the way down to Duarte.

If you don't think the lava's going to pop, we can move on south of here. There's a bad one going on on Duarte, just at the Monrovia line."

"Go on, then," Mattison says. "We get any problems, I'll call you back in."

Real executive decision-making. He feels good about that. Time was when he never wanted to be the one who made the call about anything.

But he's confident of his own judgment right here and now. This job has been handled well. There's a high in that that feels like half a fifth of Crown Royal traveling through his veins, smooth and fine and warm.

The firefighters go away, leaving just two of their number posted as supervisors during the wrap-up and report-filing phase of the job here, and Mattison, signalling back down the line to have the hose shut down, moves forward onto the lava dam. It can be walked on, now, at least by someone equipped with tractor treads like his. He tests the crinkly new skin. It holds. Dainty little tinkling sounds are coming from it, the sounds of continued cooling and hardening, but it supports his weight. It's a little like walking on thin new ice, except that what is behind the fragile surface is molten rock instead of chilly water, and if he falls through he will be very sorry, though not for long. But he doesn't expect to fall through, or he wouldn't be up here.

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. Except, of course, when a badly thought-out dam is slapped in its path. but Mattison tries to think his work out properly.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, Mattison'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 just about 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, until you understand, really and truly understand in your bones, that until you want to give it up, nothing's going to happen.

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 willget 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 and previously unsuspected 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 daylight, 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's big brother 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 aftershock 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 gray 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 nerve-wracking 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 startagain, 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, 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 have been flung up around their rims, often quite colorfulmud 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.

"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 crude, 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.