Free Supervolcano: Eruption by Harry Turtledove

a thousand-watt smile. “Darling!” she said, and all but threw herself into his arms.
     
    “So how are those Greek poets?” Colin asked Bryce Miller. They sat across the dining-room table from each other, a chessboard between them. Colin had a cup of coffee in front of him; Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend, a Coke.
    “I’m getting there—diss’ll be done next year, maybe year after next,” Bryce answered. He was tall and skinny and pale almost to translucence, with curly red hair and a wispy little beard. After due consideration, he pushed a pawn.
    Colin took it. He played chess the way he approached most problems: with straightforward aggression. He simplified ruthlessly and tried not to make too many dumbass mistakes. Against a lot of opponents, that was plenty good enough. Against Bryce, he won maybe one game in five: enough to keep him interested, not enough to let him imagine they were in the same league.
    Bryce moved a knight. Colin wagged a finger at him. That nasty horse would fork his queen and a rook if he didn’t do something about it. He moved the queen to threaten the knight and the forking square. Bryce covered it with a bishop.
    Okay , Colin thought. Now I can get on with my own attack . He moved a bishop of his own, over on the other side of the board.
    Bryce had long, thin fingers. He picked up the knight the way a surgeon might lift a scalpel. He took a pawn with it. “Check,” he said regretfully.
    One of Colin’s pawns could wipe it from the board. But as soon as he did that, Bryce’s bishop would assassinate his queen. He eyed the board for a moment, considering his chances after losing the queen. He saw only two, bad and worse. He tipped over his king.
    “You got me good that time,” he said. “I saw the bishop defending, but I didn’t see it would turn to attack as soon as you unmasked it. And the check meant I couldn’t just ignore the lousy knight.” Everything was obvious—after the fact. It usually worked that way.
    “Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded—a spider encouraging a fly. “Want to play again?” He tried not to look too hopeful.
    But Colin shook his head. “Not right now. That one kinda stings.” He leaned back in the dining-room chair. Something in his shoulder crunched. Bryce could sit forever in any position and never get uncomfortable. Colin hadn’t been able to do that even in his twenties. He tried a different tack: “How’s the world treating you these days?”
    “Oh, fair to partly cloudy, I guess you’d say,” the younger man answered. “Maybe a skosh better than that. Writing your thesis leaves you hostile. And having a relationship blow up in your face doesn’t exactly make you want to go out and party,either.”
    “Tell me about it!” Colin said with more feeling than he’d intended.
    Bryce nodded. “Yeah. You know what I’m talking about, all right. So I ought to be down in the Dumpster, right?”
    “Hadn’t heard anybody put it like that before, but it seems like a possibility,” Colin said. “You aren’t, though?”
    “I aren’t,” Bryce agreed. “I had another poem accepted by a pretty good journal. Theocritus updated, you might say.”
    Theocritus was one of the 2,000-plus-years-dead poets he studied. Colin knew that much, and not a nickel’s worth more. Still, he brought his hands together in one silent clap. “Not bad,” he said. “That’s two in a few months.”
    As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have left them in there. Bryce had got the first acceptance just before Vanessa threw him out. Cause and effect? Jealousy? Vanessa made a hell of an editor. She had all the tools she needed to be a writer herself except the nerve. She would rather submit to a root canal without Novocain than to an editor.
    Bryce said “Uh-huh” again. He owned a pretty fair poker face. Colin couldn’t tell what he was thinking. That might have been just as well.
    “They pay you anything for this one?” Colin asked.
    Now