Complete Short Fiction, page 25
The acoustic profiler immediately extended and tracked the thickening ice sheet. There was no doubt about it. The water was rapidly freezing solk? in the hot-spot bottom pools. The ice cover was thickening while they watched, at a rate of half a meter per minute. The bolometer monitors they had planted in deep bore holes in the ice were registering sudden, intense thermal output from the latent heat released by the solidifying ice.
Commander Brunei shut his eyes and let his head fall back to the steel wall behind him. “Greg . . . Anna . . . Tom. Good God! While we were testing a half liter of its water, something has changed the whole planet!”
But Anna Takoa had finally seen and heard enough to understand it. She fell to her knees in front of Tom Feeney and pressed her thin hands up between his. Her eyes filled with tears of joy. She said to him in her soft voice, “The Lord Buddha can appear as a running, tinkling brook as well as a man, Tom.”
Feeling her hands between his, Father Feeney bent toward her small face. “Monet, the painter, knew that God lived in the pond and the lilies. Oh, think of a billion different ponds and lily pads, dear, dear Anna!”
“And frogs on them, Tom. Fat, green, croaking. All different. All beautiful!”
Their souls swooned together then and their pray ers pierced the metal of the lander and flew outward into the great spangle of stars that lay in every direction.
And at just about that same time, hundreds or maybe thousands of other, more or less similar, groups were making these same discoveries and responding in nearly identical ways. So that for those who could see and delight in it, the entire universe was constantly pierced by bright new arrows of surprise and love and joy.
Hurricane Claude
Hilbert Schenck has written several fine sea-going SF stories for F&SF, most recently, “Buoyant Ascent,” March 1980 and “The Battle of the Abaco Reefs,” June 1979. His new story is about a group of ocean engineers and their attempt to stop a gigantic killer storm that is running north at over 40 knots, headed for Long Island . . .
Sept. 5, 1400 hrs.—Sept. 7, 1700 hrs.
At its moment of conception, the storm was no more than an unnoticed, swirling tube of air, its father a rising current off the northern edge of the largest island in the Caicos group, its mother a thin barometric-depression wave lying east and west across the southern limits of the Bahama Banks. The upward-moving thrust of buoyant air, penetrating the mild depression and gaining energy from it, set a kink in the pressure wave, a bend that eventually closed itself and created a turning cylinder, an atmospheric swirl. The tiny product of this gentle meeting, driven by that ponderous force derived from the rotation of the planet itself, began to rotate in a counterclockwise direction, and this spin rapidly drew in more energy and moisture from the hot, surrounding sea. Its mild and almost-indetectable parents were consumed and destroyed during its first few hours of life as the baby storm drifted on an erratic northeast track out over the deep but unusually warm waters. By chance, no reporting vessel passed through the blustery but unfocused center of its babyhood, so the storm grew unnoticed for almost a day.
Then, that next afternoon, a large American sailing yacht, Passage-Master, Norfolk to Puerto Rico, ran through the western sector of the tiny, diffuse storm. Winds were moderate, no more than twenty knots, but there was a heavy sense of tropical disturbance and moisture, and the sky was very dark. The barometer dipped two-tenths of an inch of mercury over a three-hour traverse, and Passage-Master’s professional skipper spoke over the ship-to-shore with Miami around suppertime. The next morning, Miami Hurricane Center dispatched a hunter aircraft, and it located the storm out in the Gulf Stream, where the hot surface water fed the young hurricane-to-be its continuous, ever-increasing, energy requirements. The storm was still invisible from the synchronous weather satellite, Nimbus IV, masked by a larger fan of high altitude cloud, but the aircraft made a run through the storm center at about 10 A.M. and found a well-defined circulation, almost half an inch of gradient across the storm cross-section, and winds now over forty knots.
At noon that day, four men in shirtsleeves met in the Miami Center and studied the records and maps. The storm was now growing in area rapidly and also extending itself vertically upward into the atmospheric column, so that the Nimbus cameras were beginning to show a typical spiral cloud pattern, imposed on the older, more passive cloud structures overhanging a vast middle Atlantic low-pressure region. They named the growing baby Claude, since it was the third rotating storm of the season, and its predecessor, which had fizzled south of Cuba, had been called a lady’s name, Barbara. At 1300, Miami issued its first bulletin on Claude.
“Tropical storm Claude is now located at approximately 25° 1' north latitude and 71° 5' west longitude, or approximately 400 miles east of Miami. The storm is strengthening in both barometric gradient and size and its movements are erratic. Maximum wind velocities of 40 miles per hour are now concentrated within 50 miles of the storm center, but further strengthening is to be expected. All marine interests are urged to remain informed about Claude, which has the potential of becoming a large and dangerous storm.”
By 1500, Claude had begun to move sluggishly almost due north at about five miles an hour, and Miami established a tropical storm watch along the Atlantic coastline north of Wilmington.
The board of directors meeting at Techoceanics had not been hastily called until around noon that day, but by 3 P.M. the men from Boston and Hartford had arrived by car or charter plane and over a dozen people were assembled in Techoceanic’s spartan conference room. The company owned a series of Butler-type metal-sided buildings located mostly on barges moored next to the swing bridge connecting New Bedford to Fairhaven to the west. When not used for meetings, the room doubled as a meteorological work space and one end was filled with electronic racks.
Ray Alexander, chief of research at Techoceanics, was a small, very thin man, almost sixty, his hair a stiff, white, crewcut brush, his eyes hooded and cold, his mouth no more than the dark cut of a sharp knife. “Let’s get going,” he said in a loud, hard voice. “We’ve got a storm and it’s growing. Come on, you people, shut up!”
The two business-suited men from the Hartford underwriters looked up startled from their private discussion, then lapsed into sullen silence. “Okay, Bettina,” said Ray Alexander in almost a snarl, “work your magic,” but his tone was completely sarcastic, with no sense of joking or kidding.
Dr. Bettina Holbrook, for two years the forecasting meteorologist for Techoceanics, was a plain-faced, thirty-year-old woman in tailored slacks and a severe, simple blouse, entirely trim and businesslike. She stood up to fire a look of pure hatred at her boss, then flipped off the lights and turned on the slide projector. “Okay, here’s Claude twenty minutes ago. . . .”
But Ray Alexander let out a snort of disgust and muttered loudly, “Claude! Those raving faggots in Miami sure do like the fruity names!”
Bettina stopped speaking at once and turned an angry white face to peer at Ray Alexander. “Do you really want to shoot yourself in the foot, Ray?” she said in an icy, distressed voice. “What sense is there in making that kind of sick, stupid crack, anyway?”
“You going to give a weather briefing or a gay rights lecture, Bettina?” snarled Ray right back.
Tall and angular Dr. Cora Alexander, chairman and chief executive officer of Techoceanics, spoke even more coldly than her husband. “Ray, if you make one more comment about fags, fruits, queers, or whatever, you’re out of this thing on your ass! I mean that, you bastard! We don’t need your nasty cussedness, Ray. Moke can pilot the Telsa, and probably better than you!” Where her husband’s face was simply thin and spare, Cora Alexander’s face was thin and extravagantly ugly. Her downward-hooked nose and her upward-hooked chin almost met in front of a huge, wide mouth that often snapped open to show large, tobacco-yellowed teeth.
Ray aimed a sharp finger-point at his wife, sitting at the other end of the long table. “You’d like to cut me out of it, wouldn’t you, you old bag! After four years of shoveling shit against a tide of stupid incompetence, I get tossed into the street. . . .”
The man from State Street Trust turned to the Boston lawyer sitting next to him and raised his eyebrows in pointed astonishment. The old attorney, Arthur Goodspeed, whispered, “Things here are worse than we heard. They must be going to shout the storm to death,” but the banker just shook his head ominously. Techoceanics was into them for over $2 million.
Cora paid no further attention to Ray, but turned to nod impatiently at Bettina Holbrook, who reset her face in as pleasant an expression as possible and indicated the projected satellite photo with her pointer light. “Miami is forecasting hurricane strength by six tonight, and I agree,” she said, indicating the spiral form of the storm that now showed clearly. “There’s a low trough of wet air lying flaccid just off the coast between Hatteras and Montauk. It then runs northeast near Nantucket and it’s going to suck Claude inshore. Miami isn’t quite ready to predict that, but I think it’s likely. I think we should proceed on the basis of that assumed storm track.”
“Rate of advance?” asked Cora Alexander in an expressionless tone.
Bettina gave a thoughtful shake of her head. “At least 20 knots by the time it’s beyond Hatteras—I mean past latitude 35°—but I don’t like the look of the whole map. The depression up over Long Island is deep and narrow. Things look a whole lot like the ’38 storm. Claude might work up to 50 or 60, but I just don’t know how to forecast that kind of acceleration from what we have now.”
The Techoceanics attorney, Arthur Goodspeed, raised a finger. “Then you predict the storm will come ashore on this coast, Dr. Holbrook?”
The meteorologist nodded. “Somewhere it will hit land, Arthur; perhaps Long Island, perhaps Cape Cod.”
The lawyer turned to Cora Alexander. “Cora, I thought we agreed not to attempt this if the hurricane was certain to do damage ashore?”
Ray answered him bluntly. “Don’t be stupid, Arthur! We’re busted, broke, out of cash! This may be the last storm this year.”
One of the Hartford men cleared his throat and spoke in a low, well-modulated tone. “My instructions are to urge you to attempt to modify the storm. My principals are not willing to continue this sort of funding level for a full additional year. But if you should destroy or divert the storm, you wiil have repaid our underwriter’s group handsomely. Obviously, further funding in that case would be an easy matter.”
The man from the Boston bank shook his head ruefully at his lawyer friend. “I understand your problems, Arthur,” he said, “but we also hope to see the method tried now.”
“After all, Arthur,” said Cora Alexander in a dry, cold voice, “if we get sued for making the storm worse, instead of breaking it apart, they’ll just be going after a bankrupt wreck with no assets or prospects. Also, there’s no physical reason why we should make it worse. The worst we can do is to do nothing at all.”
“Well, let’s hope so,” said the old lawyer, shrugging in doubt.
“Can we vote on this?” said Cora suddenly. “All in favor of attempting modification of tropical storm Claude, raise your hands.” They all put up their hands except the lawyer, and Cora stared at him. “Are you abstaining or voting no, Arthur?” she said icily, but he suddenly put his hand up.
“Try it,” he said in a cracked, excited voice. “Try it, Cora. To hell with the lawsuits!”
Sept. 7, 1700—2400
In doubling its length and width, the storm Claude increased its energy uptake from the Gulf Stream by a factor of four. This added impetus for growth and activity was manifested in two ways, in addition to the further linear expansion of the storm’s perimeter, mostly north and west. Claude’s rotary energy increased so that in its 1800 advisory, Miami declared Claude a hurricane. The weather buoys dropped by a late-afternoon overflight were showing gusts near the center to seventy knots. But Claude could also expend its overabundance of energy in another way, by moving its entire system north at increasing velocity.
So the ocean energy resource was tapped too rapidly for the storm to eat it by simply spreading. In addition, it spun ever more fiercely and moved ever more rapidly.
Coming across Claude’s big, ragged funnel just at dusk, the Miami hunter pilot saw that Claude had grown from a childish, petulant disorder towards a fearsome, mature beauty. From over 30,000 feet up, he could look down into the sloping, roughly circular maw, indistinct with the sun setting, and see the stark white funnel of cloud that led down and down out of sight into a well of gathering violence. Claude was maturing, gaining in self-integration, forcing its way further and higher to involve ever-larger air masses. And everywhere it moved and spread, it ate moisture and thermal energy with a frenzied voracity.
Yet, in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, people shivered under thin blankets and pulled summer jackets tighter around themselves. A gigantic thick finger of Arctic high had poked down from Canada over the middle eastern states. Though Claude was mighty, and would become mightier still, it had neither the resources of energy nor momentum to seriously challenge this vast, stolid mass of dense and quiet air.
To the east another, far smaller and weaker, high-pressure ridge of cold air stretched south, tentatively poking its weak leading edge towards Bermuda. Claude might have challenged this air mass, and probably broken through to the northeast, but the modest Greenland high had its control over Claude, not through sheer strength but by a more subtle yet more certain influence, the steering currents of thin air above 30,000 feet. The Greenland air mass had diverted these ordinarily easterly-flowing winds to the north, and huge, powerful Claude followed with the blind obedience of sheep after a Judas goat. Claude, driven by inexorable need to spend its energy, yet in so doing obtaining ever more, began to stride north into a deep valley of low barometer pointing at the New England coast.
The late-evening New Bedford weather felt damp and heavy. Though the storm still lay over a thousand miles south, there was an oppressive sense of tropic air and the greasy, sheet-metal sidings of the barge cabins dripped and ran rivulets of water. In the center of Techoceanics’ biggest barge sat a huge SeaCrane twin-rotor freight helicopter, but instead of the usual modular pods, this machine had been modified to sling an entire, whale-shaped boat, fat and double-ended, with two big screws showing under the stern. The boat stretched fifty feet under the rotary-wing freighter and seemed to be constructed entirely of welded aluminum sheets.
The air was dead still and the barge was brightly lit by many searchlights and TV light-columns. Four persons stood in front of the thirty-odd press people: Ray Alexander and his tall wife in padded jumpsuits, and two other short, squatty men in bulky flying clothes. Around behind these four clustered some of the Techoceanics engineers and financial people in business suits.
Cora Alexander held up her hand for quiet and shouted, “I’m going to make a statement and give you the tech briefing. Okay, here’s the way the system is supposed to work. I’ve sketched the storm in a vertical cross-section on this blackboard. Now what we found some years back is that the top of the storm, about 25,000 feet in the case of Claude, has a very high negative potential—tens, hundreds of thousands of volts—with a similiar high postive at the base.” She indicated the two locations on the diagram. “Now in a thunderhead or line squall, or similiar type of nonrotating storm with high atmospheric electrical potentials, the electron excess in a cloud is mainly produced by the movement of rain and hail. The water particles carry charges around in the cloud, or between clouds and the earth. This electrical phenomenon in revolving or hurricane types of storms is based on a different principle. It’s produced by the motion in the earth’s magnetic field. If you remember your electrical physics, you know that if you revolve or move charges through a magnetic field, you develop potential.”
“So the storm is acting like a huge generator, Dr. Alexander?” asked a reporter up at the front.
“Correct,” said Cora, showing a mouth full of large, startling teeth, “but a generator with an open circuit. There’s all that voltage potential, but no external wire. We’re going to provide the wire. We’re going to short-circuit the storm by creating an electrically conducting path between its foot and its top. Our computer simulations suggest convincingly that the core of the mature hurricane will not be able to sustain its order and identity when this energy drain begins. The storm will fragment from the eye outwards, break into a series of small storms which will eat energy from each other. Most important, we hope to break the grip of the stratospheric winds, the steering currents, on Claude’s upper levels, to cut the storm loose so it takes its natural northeasterly direction that the Coriolis force would dictate. That is, away from this coast.”
Several of the reporters stared at each other in scorn and disbelief. The man who had spoken before said, “You claim you can string a wire up through the eye of a hurricane?”
Cora patted her tight bun of gray hair and gave a sudden he-haw sort of laugh. “Not even my husband would try something that dumb,” she said gruffly, hooking a thumb at frowning Ray. “We’re going to create an ionized column of air for the current to follow. The material of the core itself, air and water vapor, will be our wire, but we have to get things started.”
She turned to point at the huge, silent helicopter and its oddly shaped load. “That boat, the Nikola Tesla, will be the lower terminal in the atmospheric circuit. It has two very powerful diesel engines and these have two uses: first, to drive propellers to let us move around at Claude’s center, and second, to drive a generator and power a large induction coil inside the boat. Once the Tesla arrives at the proper location at the center of the storm, we will extend a high mastlike structure above the Tesla with a large openwork electrode, and the high voltage will be maintained between the top of the mast and the aluminum hull of the boat. This will create a high-density cloud of ions around the Tesla. At the top of the storm, our aircraft will be doing essentially the same thing. That is, it will maintain a potential between its own metal skin and a large electrode towed some distance below it. In this way, we will create two large ion pools, of proper sign, at the top and bottom of the storm, and our calculations indicate that a self-sustaining current flow will be set up over the five-mile vertical air column.”
