Rain of Fire Read Free Page B

the resources you need, Hollis.” She ignored his penchant for being addressed as ‘Doctor.’ Figuring a good offense would be her strongest defense, “I’m going to propose a number of new recording sites in Yellowstone.”
    “The Park Service needs to put their own people and money on it.”
    “That’s for the Consortium to decide,” she bit out. “As long as I can make my case on Monday, I think they’ll agree inadequate resources are allocated to Yellowstone. You know perfectly well another eruption the size of the ones the park has seen in the past few million years would cause the equivalent of nuclear winter.”
    How many times had she lectured along these same lines without her pulse rate going ballistic? How often had she fielded questions from students and the press without feeling the sense of foreboding she did today? She glanced again at the map showing the ‘Ring of Fire’ and hoped the Sakhalin shake hadn’t spawned others.
    Turning back to Hollis, she went on, “Millions would die when crops failed around the world.” She’d parroted those words before too, but today she imagined a hungry little girl watching snow fall from a leaden summer sky.
    “What’s got into you?” Hollis replaced his glasses and glared at her. “Stop being dramatic.”
    He squared narrow shoulders and marched away down the aisle between computer terminals. The oscilloscope hooked to a portable seismograph on the table showed a small excursion, a dutiful record of him slamming the door.

    At 4 PM Kyle finished teaching her Earthquake Risk seminar and headed for her office. Passing Hollis’s door, she heard him on the phone, “… talking about ridiculous things like nuclear winter …”
    Her face went hot. Torn between eavesdropping further and walking away, she decided on neither. Instead, she stepped to his door and leaned against it, her arms folded across her chest. She cocked one of her brows in an expression of disdain.
    Hollis flushed. “I’ll have to phone you back.” He fumbled the receiver and almost dropped it.
    “To whom were you talking about me?”
    He shook his head.
    “More behind the back stuff?” She pointed her slender index finger at Hollis. “Whoever it was, you know what I said was not the least ridiculous. Even the park rangers tell the tourists about the possibilities.”
    She went on down the hall, trying to believe her sense of impending disaster stemmed from Stanton’s collapse.
    “Any calls?” she asked Xi Hong, as she passed his open door next to hers. She and the Chinese postdoctoral researcher shared a phone line in a triumph of bureaucratic false economy.
    Xi shook his head. All the while, he maintained a squint at vertical rows of characters on his computer monitor. In one of his trademark moments, Hollis had suggested Xi was a spy for Mainland China.
    As she started to go into her office, Xi roused. “There is a note here from the department secretary.” He passed it to her with a grave look. “Leila says the CT scan shows area of damage in Stanton’s brain from stroke.”
    Kyle took the message and scanned it, but there was no more than he had said.
    She went into her small cluttered space and sank into the swivel chair. Raising her long legs, she propped feet clad in slim black flats on the desk, crossed her ankles, and leaned back. In the familiar, rewarding hubbub of teaching, she had managed to set aside thoughts of Stanton’s misfortune, but now, with her eyes stinging, she crumpled the note and threw it at the wall.
    Why him? And why
now
for his good fortune to run out?
    On her office credenza rested what Kyle liked to think of as her lucky piece, a colorful chunk of the bright green copper mineral malachite. When she was growing up under the watchful eye of her grandmother near the great open pits of Globe, Arizona, Franny’s second husband, Zeke, worked in the mines. He had learned early on that bringing a sample of deep-blue azurite or soft, turquoise-hued