Mother of Storms (25 page)
Authors: John Barnes
“You’re just in time, Mr. Redalsen—we’re going to try to weld her, and we need one more hand pushing things into place.” Crandall’s shout is about as level as can be managed when yelling at the top of the lungs. “If you can
rush forward with us and just put your hands where they’ll do the most good?”
rush forward with us and just put your hands where they’ll do the most good?”
Redalsen joins them, sees that what they have is a self-heating patch—which ought to fix it, but the patch will need to be held in place for about a minute to adhere. He nods, and they rush forward, keeping the big patch down low to the floor where the wind won’t make it so difficult to deal with, then swinging it up from the bottom, some of them pushing to keep it flush against the window and others pushing from down below until it’s entirely covering the hole. Crandall pushes the trigger, and the edges glow dull red as it melts its way onto the window. They all stay braced, pushing hard, but now there’s no wind, and though it’s just as hard physically, the absence of the cold, wet shrieking terror of the wind and spray that had been coming through the crack seems to give everyone strength.
The edges cease to glow red, and then become clear; the welding-cure process is endothermic, and soaks up most of the heat. After a minute Crandall presses a knuckle to the edges and says, “Cool all around. All right, let go on three, but stay out of the way because if it flies it will take down anyone in its way. One, two, three.”
Their hands leave it all at once, and then they all let a breath out as it holds.
“I presume you came up to let me know you’d lost the communication link to the bridge?” Crandall says, as he returns to his chair.
“Mainly that and to see what else was going on.”
“We’ve had a couple of freak storm surges. One of them came up as high as the third east gallery, and that’s eighty meters above normal high tide. But we’re taking them. I’d feel better if this giant bastard child of a drilling rig had a bow I could point into the sea, but we’re holding anyway, thus far, even though the big hydraulics in the legs are bottoming on every wave.” The screen in front of them clears and then pops up a list of damage-control reports. “What we have are broken windows—which do have to get fixed, they increase the drag and give the wind a place to tear at us—and a lot of severed conduits because the damned idiot architects had a lot of them running on outside surfaces, and they’re breaking wherever they were bridging a gap or running too close to a pinch point. How are things in launch control?”
“Well, there’s nothing to control anymore—the tower came down with the first big wave. Thank god we got rid of the Monster when we did. But things look all right down there. If you want I’ll get you some volunteers to help the damage-control crews—”
“Deeply appreciate it. We should be taking the peak right about now, but it will take hours to get things repaired, and if we don’t—”
The windows burst in, and Redalsen has one bare instant to realize that
what is coming through them is not wind and spray, but solid water, before he is thrown to the wall and knocked unconscious; he does not even have time to notice the motion of the walls, and in this he is fortunate, for at least half the station crew are conscious as the next huge wave strikes, the reinforced concrete pilings shatter, and the whole station tips over into the ocean, bouncing and grinding its way down to the ocean floor; the least fortunate, perhaps, are those who find themselves in the slowly shrinking air pockets. When dawn breaks, late and dim, over the empty sea, there are still a few people alive in the wreckage far below it, as well as all those in the shelter; when a Navy submarine arrives to evacuate the shelter, two days later, they find the people in the shelter terrified but physically unhurt. They find no one alive in the shattered wreckage of the station itself. The divers refuse to talk about what they find, and the video they shoot is classified immediately.
what is coming through them is not wind and spray, but solid water, before he is thrown to the wall and knocked unconscious; he does not even have time to notice the motion of the walls, and in this he is fortunate, for at least half the station crew are conscious as the next huge wave strikes, the reinforced concrete pilings shatter, and the whole station tips over into the ocean, bouncing and grinding its way down to the ocean floor; the least fortunate, perhaps, are those who find themselves in the slowly shrinking air pockets. When dawn breaks, late and dim, over the empty sea, there are still a few people alive in the wreckage far below it, as well as all those in the shelter; when a Navy submarine arrives to evacuate the shelter, two days later, they find the people in the shelter terrified but physically unhurt. They find no one alive in the shattered wreckage of the station itself. The divers refuse to talk about what they find, and the video they shoot is classified immediately.
The submarine is barely on its way out of Pearl Harbor when Di Callare and his team are meeting with Harris Diem to answer the critical question: What happened at Kingman Reef? It’s still early in the morning—Di had to get on the zipline at five A.M. to make it to Washington from North Carolina and allow himself an hour to look at the data, which are not the most informative they’ve ever seen.
“You want a hypothesis,” he’s saying now, “speculation for the press and all that? Okay, I think what got them was storm surge. They were built for a Beaufort twenty-two or so hurricane, and conditions outside when they went over were only about nineteen or twenty. That’s a wobbly number, and maybe local conditions just swung up to much worse, or maybe there was an ‘oopsie’ in the engineering somewhere, but say it was really a sound structure and conditions really weren’t worse than that. The assumption is that with a Beaufort twenty-plus hurricane, you’ve got to have the eye passing right over you to experience the full effect, and right in the eye the waves will be about thirty meters, max.
“But they were nowhere near the eye—that’s plain both from their own reports and from the satellites. And that eye is huge, about as big as any on record. Suppose it isn’t a freak eye, as we thought, but a freak storm—”
The little man at Diem’s side, who was introduced only as “my assistant” and who has been watching intently, gives off a little half-cough, and Di can feel everyone else pulling back. Well, the hell with it; he’s going to give them his best guess anyway, and they can fix it up later.
“Suppose it’s a storm with a Beaufort of, oh, say, thirty-five at the eye. Yeah, I know that’s close to tornado wind velocities, and we’re talking about something that’s more than fifty kilometers across, not the less than one
kilometer that a tornado averages. Then the waves coming out of the eye—which would be running out away from it, but still close to the storm—might easily be a hundred forty meters, especially given that you have unlimited fetch for every practical purpose—”
kilometer that a tornado averages. Then the waves coming out of the eye—which would be running out away from it, but still close to the storm—might easily be a hundred forty meters, especially given that you have unlimited fetch for every practical purpose—”
The little man turns toward Diem and says, “Fetch?”
“Distance wind blows across water,” Diem says. “Hundred-forty-meter waves, Dr. Callare? You realize you’re telling me that this thing is practically throwing off tsunami?”
“Yep.”
“And does your staff concur?” the little guy says, looking around with a calculated stare.
Di Callare has never been so proud or grateful; they all are nodding. “If you look at the current temperatures in the North Pacific,” Gretch says, “there’s plenty of potential for a storm that big.” And then she says the most daring thing that any of them could have: “If you want an honest opinion and not the one you want us to have, this is it. This is the big storm we were talking about weeks ago. And it’s going to keep growing all the way to Asia.” She brushes her hair back from her face and sits tall, staring back at the little man.
The little man ignores this, as he does everyone else. With the dam broken, Peter, Talley, Mohammed, and Wo Ping all point to the various bits of evidence. Harris Diem is unreadable—which probably explains how he keeps his job—but it’s clear that the little guy isn’t listening anymore, not to what the evidence is (and he probably wouldn’t understand it without a lot of explanation anyway). All he’s doing is noting that people are disobeying.
The meeting breaks up with very little further word from the politicals; since his staff has backed him so thoroughly, Di returns the favor by saying in front of Diem and his shadow that they are going to pursue the investigation on the assumption that it was a storm surge and that this is not merely an unusually wide hurricane, but the biggest one on record. That seems to drive off Diem, the little man, and their secretary, as if they are afraid what more they might hear.
It’s still only eight-thirty in the morning, a bit before anyone would normally be in, and now that Diem and company are gone, the adrenaline rush has gone with them and everyone seems to sag. It’s going to be a long day.
“Let’s all go up the street for breakfast,” Di suggests. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I’ve had this morning has been this lousy coffee. And maybe we can brainstorm a little on what’s going to happen next with this thing.”
It’s a three-block walk, and not a very interesting one; Di notices that
in a way what they really look like is an overage neighborhood basketball team, the kind you were on when you were ten, with everyone dressed like a mess and everyone glad to be with each other. He wonders for a moment if it isn’t just his own longing for support that makes him see it that way, but no—Talley is striding along, head up and confident, arguing fiercely with Pete beside her, and Wo Ping and Mohammed are both keeping up with it, and all of them seem to be daring anyone in the passing traffic to argue with them.
in a way what they really look like is an overage neighborhood basketball team, the kind you were on when you were ten, with everyone dressed like a mess and everyone glad to be with each other. He wonders for a moment if it isn’t just his own longing for support that makes him see it that way, but no—Talley is striding along, head up and confident, arguing fiercely with Pete beside her, and Wo Ping and Mohammed are both keeping up with it, and all of them seem to be daring anyone in the passing traffic to argue with them.
“The team’s gotten really tight, Dr. Callare,” Gretch comments.
“We’ll need to be,” Di says, not wanting to sound gloomy but not feeling like lying about it. “I’m sure Diem understood us and will make our case, but I have no idea how much weight he actually swings—he’s supposed to be buddies with Hardshaw from way back, they call him the President’s Shadow, but for all we know, it’s Hardshaw that wants us to shut up.”
“What’s going to happen if we don’t shut up?”
“I think we’ll probably find out soon. This is quite a summer internship for you, isn’t it?”
She snorts in agreement. “At least it’s a real look at what the job involves. I’m, er, thinking of applying to have the internship extended, if—”
“Naturally I’ll write you a recommendation.”
They come to a traffic light, and Di takes a moment to listen to the rest of the team. Talley is taking the conservative position and Pete the radical; she says that it’s a bigger storm than there’s ever been before, but that’s all, and he’s arguing that there’s at least twenty never-before-seen things it might be able to do besides. Good—put them together on a team and have them hammer out the short list of things to worry about.
Wo Ping is arguing a computational point with Mohammed; the fundamental question is at what level chaos gets into things and therefore which steps of the model have to be explored by Monte Carlo methods. That sounds like a question one of them could resolve—and then Di realizes that what it amounts to is Talley and Pete’s argument, but phrased in mathematics. Either way the question is, do we just scale up the numbers, or do we look for entirely new things that can happen?
They haven’t been to breakfast en masse at this little diner since budget week, but the waitress seems to recognize them and steers them to a table in the back room. Until the food gets there, they talk about family and sports and all the usual ritual; everyone asks how Lori’s book is going, even though only Mohammed reads mysteries, and everyone admires the latest batch of photos of Wo Ping’s kid.
Breakfast is good, and Di realizes a big part of it is that he knows there’s an uproar coming, that there is bound to be fallout from the defiance of this
morning, and so maybe this is the last time the team will be together outside of work—and he’s been very happy with them. These are people he’d tackle any job with, and corny and sentimental though that seems, he wishes he had a good way to tell them.
morning, and so maybe this is the last time the team will be together outside of work—and he’s been very happy with them. These are people he’d tackle any job with, and corny and sentimental though that seems, he wishes he had a good way to tell them.
And, too, there’s something good and productive in the feeling of sitting here too early in the morning, the big thing in the day already accomplished, but with so much still in front of them—assuming they don’t come back to the lab and find themselves all fired, of course.
Finally, as they hit the second cup of coffee after breakfast, Di voices his thinking, and he’s relieved to see the way they all nod agreement. Probably he could have leveled with them a while ago … out in public, where they might be monitored, is not the place to tell them about the private pipeline to Carla and the results coming out of there, and for everyone’s safety he will probably only share bits of that with each of them, but on the other hand, at least he can get them pointed in the right direction.
He decides at that moment to go farther than that. He’s going to spill a lot more of this to that reporter, Berlina Jameson, once he has the team pointed in the right direction. With a scientific team that knows the truth, and media sniffing around, it should be enough to keep them from covering it up any longer.
Part of him wonders about the safety of this. Four members of Congress were shot last year, and a lot of high-level civil servants. Officially, it’s because the citizens of Washington are crazy and furious; the rumor that runs everywhere, though, is that these things are manipulated. Is he making a widow of Lori and abandoning his kids?
Is that worse than abandoning the human race?
They are all staring at him. Probably he has a faraway look in his eyes; he stopped talking in mid-sentence, he realizes, a moment ago. He begins again. “All right, so the big question now is really just the same one, one step down, from the global warming problem we had before. When do effects no one has ever seen before set in? That’s right on the border between math and meteorology—or at least it is if we get the right meteorology described in the right math. So you guys are now officially in two teams, since we may not have a long time to work together. Talley and Mohammed, you’re team one, and your job is to come up with plausible never-before-seen effects—whatever you think in your heart is possible, this is about as much intuition as it is science. Peter and Wo Ping, team two, same job, but don’t look over team one’s shoulders too much. Gretch, you track both and keep reports coming to me. At the end of the week, the teams trade reports and then do their best to knock down each other’s ideas. By the middle of next week, if we’re all still working together and we haven’t been sent to six different cities, we should at least have a short list of what
we think we ought to worry about, and have the ideas on it thoroughly vetted among ourselves. Once we have that I’ll tackle Diem again and see if I can stir him up toward at least getting the issues in front of the policy makers, and ideally toward going public.”
we think we ought to worry about, and have the ideas on it thoroughly vetted among ourselves. Once we have that I’ll tackle Diem again and see if I can stir him up toward at least getting the issues in front of the policy makers, and ideally toward going public.”
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