Supervolcano: Eruption by Harry Turtledove

for sure. But maybe not an enormous surprise. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast” wasn’t a single, though. Never had been, never would be. If you knew that one, you not only had the album but you really liked it.
    “Are you going to the show tomorrow night?” Rob asked her.
    She shook her head. “Can’t afford it,” she said regretfully.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Tina Morton.”
    He wrote it down. “Show up at will-call. They’ll have a seat for you.”
    “Thanks!” She beamed at him. That might turn into something promising later on, or it might not. He wouldn’t worry about it now. Tickets were only twenty-five dollars, but he wasn’t far from the days when twenty-five dollars weren’t only himself. And if the next album tanked instead of taking off from what Out of the Pond was doing, he’d go right back there again.
    The rooms, next door to each other, were, well, rooms. Rob had been in a lot of different rooms in a lot of different places. He’d had some that were better than these, more re worse. These were on the ground floor, as the band had requested. They wouldn’t have to shlep stuff up and down stairs.
    After everything was out of the cars, Justin stretched and grimaced, miming an unhappy back. “We’re gonna be too old for all this hauling one of these days. One of these days soon ,” he amended, so maybe he wasn’t faking the sore back. “What do we do then?”
    “It’s not what we do then. It’s what we do in the meantime. We’ve gotta make ourselves a big enough deal so we can pay roadies to take care of all the heavy, sweaty shit for us,” Rob said. “What I want to know is, where do you go for dinner when you’re in Missoula, Montana?”
    “Go ask Tina at the desk,” Justin answered. “Or I will if you don’t want to. She’s not half bad.”
    “My old man always tells me Never volunteer , but I’ll do it. Not half bad is right,” Rob said. “And she knows ‘Impossible Things Before Breakfast’! How impossible is that?”
    “Pretty much so, most places, but every once in a while they do let the brain-damaged ones out of the Home for the Terminally Inane,” Justin said. Rob shot him the bird and went back to the front desk to chat up Tina. When he came back, Justin gave him a sardonic hand. “Twenty minutes, man. What were you doing?”
    “Like, talking.”
    “Like, right! I’ve never heard anybody call it that before. That long, you probably did it twice.”
    “I wouldn’t have,” Rob replied with dignity. “Some people don’t blow their load too quick the first time. Anyway, about dinner—”
    “You mean you remembered dinner, too?”
    Rob took no notice. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. “Back toward the Interstate half a block is something called the Stone of Accord. ‘Where the Gaelic meets the garlic,’ it says on the menu—she showed me one.”
    “Corned beef and linguini! Cabbage pizza! Oh, boy!”
    “Menu looked pretty good. And they’ve got Moose Drool on tap. Maybe a block and a half the other way is the Montana Club. If you haven’t lost all your money gambling, you can eat dinner there.” Rob knew about poker clubs that doubled as restaurants; San Atanasio had several. When he was little, they’d paid the town a lot in tax revenue. Now, thanks to the big Indian casinos, they’d fallen on hard times. And, without that tax loot, so had San Atanasio.
    “Which is better?”
    “Stone of Accord is a couple of bucks cheaper. Tina says the food’s better, too.”
    “Okay. We’ll blame her if it turns out to be crappy.” Justin set a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “But don’t worry. We’ll blame you, too. If it’s good, though, she gets all the credit.”
    “Have you been talking with my father?” Rob asked, not altogether in jest. The band walked up to the Stone of Accord. The food proved pretty good. The other three guys drank toasts to Tina. Draft Moose Drool stout was as good as anything this side of Guinness. And if you