All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page B

fact, the city had still been rebuilding from one of the worst of them, a big one that had knocked down several temples and public buildings, when the big blast from the volcano put a permanent stop to the repair program. That was the end of that chapter in the history of Pompeii.
    Nobody saw the city again for a long time. Not until some workmen, with their minds undoubtedly on other matters entirely, accidentally dug up a piece of it almost two thousand years later.
     
     
    People are stupid, you know that? For instance, you’d think the old Pompeiians would have figured out that this was not a really safe place to settle down in.
    They didn’t. Still, hey, I’m not in a position to criticize them. We Americans weren’t all that much smarter. It wouldn’t have taken a genius in, say, 2000 to figure out that all those geysers and hot springs in old Yellowstone Park might just mean that something on a large bad scale could be getting ready to happen there.
    Nobody did figure it out, though.
    I knew how those old Pompeiians felt. I had felt the same way, back when I was a kid and Yellowstone happened. The big difference between us was that Yellowstone was a couple thousand kilometers away from our house in Kansas City, while for the Pompeiians Vesuvius was right next door.
    So when Yellowstone began to do its serious premonitory shaking and rumbling, around 2055, the Americans had the sort of warning that you really shouldn’t ignore. That didn’t stop them. They ignored it anyway. According to the seismologists, Yellowstone only did one of those really big eruptions about every 600,000 years or so, so why worry? They didn’t worry. Not even when other scientists pointed out that the last eruption had been about 640,000 years ago, so a better way to think about it was that it was kind of overdue.
    Anyway, in America the people in charge of such matters didn’t choose to do any worrying until it was quite a lot too late. By then the dust from that giant-sized eruption of what they began calling the Yellowstone super-volcano was already two meters deep in Chicago and St. Louis and Milwaukee—and right on top of my family’s house on the old Missouri River as well.
    I wondered if, a few thousand years from now, people would reconstruct Kansas City the way the Italians had Pompeii.
    Probably not, I decided. Pompeii was pretty much one of a kind, while those thousands-of-years-from-now archeologists would have a large selection of ash-buried cities to choose from, since Yellowstone didn’t stop with Kansas City. Actually it had buried nearly half of the land mass of the old USA’s lower forty-eight before it was over.
     
     
    So now let’s get back to present time. We’re up to the summer of AD 2079 now and the dead city has come back to life.
    I don’t know if some ancient Roman, just waking up from a two-thousand-year nap, would have thought the Giubileo’s restoration of Pompeii was authentic. I guarantee, though, that he would have thought it was gorgeous. And I know there’s one thing about it that would have surprised him a lot. Unlike the AD 79 version, our AD 2079 Pompeii didn’t stink.
    Well, didn’t stink much, anyway. Especially if you stayed away from the public latrines, or the barrels of urine outside the laundry—see, the way the Pompeiians cleaned woolen tunics was first to soak them in human pee. For that reason every passerby was invited to relieve himself in one of those barrels so the laundry could have the raw materials it needed to get on with its work.
    That was the kind of tourist guide fact I had been trying to fill my head with on the ship from Alexandria. I thought I’d made quite a lot of progress. That seemed to me as though it might justify giving me some preferential treatment, so I asked the Welsh Bastard to let me take one of the tourist groups out as a guide.
    He laughed at me. “Asshole. You got to know something before you can tell the customers anything, don’t you? Half