A Planned Improvisation Read Online Free Page B

spite of himself.
    “Heh! By now I suspect Old Faithful gave up the ghost and has been sleeping around, but I’ll find you something,” Park promised.
    “Old Faithful?” Dannet asked as park disconnected from Arn.
    “There used to be a geyser that spouted out steam and hot waters on a very predictable basis, roughly once every hour and a half, by our time reckoning. It was handy for visitors since they would know when the eruptions would usually occur.”
    “Fascinating,” Dannet admitted. “I’d like to see that.”
    “Well, it’s not there,” Park told him, “but there may be others like it. The whole area is a volcanic caldera.”
    “It’s a volcano?” Dannet asked, alarmed.
    “Yes,” Park nodded, “although it hasn’t erupted destructively in a very long time. Over a million years ago is my guess. I know the Mer have no records of any such event, but it’s still an active supervolcano.”
    “And this is how you want to spend a vacation?” Dannet asked nervously.
    “From what I can tell from satellite photography,” Park went on, “The caldera is not as large as it was back in the Twenty-first Century. It’s only about ten miles across.”
    “That is still a very large volcano,” Dannet pointed out, “but I do not understand how it moved.”
    “The source of the volcano is a hot spot under the Earth’s crust,” Iris cut in. “It’s an upwelling of the magma. Hawaii is over another such hot spot.”
    “Was,” Park corrected her, “I’ve checked the maps and can’t find a hot spot that corresponds with Hawaii. I think it must have cooled off, so to speak. There are two others that I do not think existed back when, though. One is in Asia and the other almost perfectly central in Africa. This is still the big daddy of them all, though.   If it were to explode I think we could count on an ice age.”
    “And it last exploded one million years ago?” Dannet pressed.
    “Are you worried it might be due?” Park laughed.
    “Are you sure it isn’t?” Dannet countered.
    “In geological terms,” Park replied, “being due could still mean ten thousand years from now. Part of what we are going to do, however, is to place seismometers and other instruments around the area so we can monitor it.”
    “So another working holiday?” Dannet observed.
    “Of course,” Park laughed. “It’s the only sort I take. Besides, I treat exploration more as a hobby. Given my druthers, I would be exploring this world full time, just like some of the men and women I supervise, but Arn has seen fit to put me in charge of all sorts of exploration, including space. Consequently, I’m also in charge of our defenses, so I can’t stay out of town most of the time. It’s a shame really, because, we still have barely scratched the surface as far as exploration goes. It’s going to take generations to really get to know this world again.”
    They could have reached the Yellowstone caldera by way of Ghelati and stayed over night in the comfort of the Mer city, but both Park and Iris felt the whole point of this vacation was to get away from it all. As celebrities, they would have been expected to visit with Mer officials and might well have been trapped in the city for days, going from one party to the next.
    Instead, Park flew a few hundred miles further along the Bay of Coolinda – what had once been Hudson’s Bay – and set down for the night on top of a large hill over-looking the bay. “This was a little out of our way,” Park explained, but not by much and the known large critters that might give us trouble aren’t known to wander this close to the beach.”
    “Why not?” Marisea asked.
    “Not enough food for them,” Park shrugged. “At least that’s my guess. The grass here is shorter and scrubbier than a few miles inland. I’m not sure why there are no trees around here, though. In any case, the larger herbivores would starve if they stayed here very long and animals that hunt them only