If it failed, and oceanographers and meteorologists were afraid that it might, a maelstrom would descend on England as cold air normally held back by warm air rising off the current came gushing down from the Arctic. Already, starting in 1999, the British Isles had experienced some truly terrible precursor storms. All of Europe had. But they would be nothing compared to the big one.
Professor Gerald Rapson knew all of this. He knew it and he lived with it every day of his life. He was a friend of Jack Hall’s and had supported him at Delhi. Now, as he drove along the twisty road to Hedland, as always enjoying the magnificent views of sea and sky and sweeping highland that disclosed themselves around every bend, he worried about Jack and he worried about the bizarre weather.
A supertyphoon had just smashed across the Hawaiian Islands, leaving death and fantastic destruction behind it, reducing a legendary island paradise to a twisted mass of wreckage. Bizarre storms had erupted in Japan when a moisture-laden Siberian cold front had smashed into the hottest November Tokyo had ever known. Huge hailstones had killed people all over the country, even right in downtown Tokyo. So far, the Japanese government hadn’t released a death toll, but back-channel sources were saying that it was going to be in the neighborhood of two thousand.
As Rapson pulled into the car park, he confirmed another odd phenomenon. Seabirds were migrating southward, creatures that normally did not move at all. I le listened to their haunting cries and wondered what i hey knew. Out there beneath the dark, mutinous waters, what was happening? What secret was nature about to reveal?
Shuddering, he hurried toward the redbrick facility with its roof covered with antennae and satellite dishes. Maybe Hedland would have some secrets to reveal.
Inside, Simon was thinking about brewing a new pot of coffee. This was always an issue. His coffee was no good, Dennis said. But Dennis didn’t even drink coffee. He preferred his Brodies bloody Scottish Teatime tea, even though the Manchester laddie was no more Scots than the queen. Preferred fancy tea, and preferred to criticize simple old coffee as provided by the Met.
Simon had just dumped the coffee into the Cona when he noticed that amber light on the console. He walked over to the monitor station and read the flashing line of text.
“Nomad buoy forty-three eleven is showing a temperature drop of thirteen degrees.”
Dennis asked around the game, “Where’s forty-three eleven?”
“Looks like… Georges Bank. Over toward Canada.”
“That’s rough seas out there. They’ve had a nor’easter brewing up for about a week. Must have knocked it out.”
“We’ll have to file a request to get it fixed.”
Professor Rapson had entered too quietly to get any notice from the techs. He was a little embarrassed. They wouldn’t care to have a superior sneaking up on them. “Are our boys winning?” he asked by way of announcing himself.
Dennis almost fell to the floor. He turned off the game immediately. Laughing, Simon said, “Hello, Professor, how was India?”
“You know scientific conferences. The dancing girls, the wine, the parties …” Rapson shook his head, pretending a bit of a hangover. Then he, also, saw the amber alarm light, quietly flashing.
THREE
J
ack Hall was now living through at least the sixth weather anomaly he had personally experienced in the past three weeks. It was hot as hell right here at home in Arlington. Thanksgiving was just weeks away, and it felt like August. What few people strolling the streets in their shirtsleeves knew was that, if they’d decided to go to the beach, they would have found the ocean so cold that they couldn’t have stayed in for more than a couple of minutes.
He tossed his bags on the floor and picked up his mail as he entered the apartment. And look at it. The place was a damn wreck. His National Geographies were scattered all over the living room, his African violets looked as if they’d been both drowned and parched, and crumbs and other evidence of heavy-duty teenage eating were everywhere.
Sam was going to have a little explaining to do, he thought as he flipped through his mail. He stopped at an envelope from the Arlington County School District. Sam’s grades. As he opened it, he felt more cheerful. Sam was a really good student. Where it counted, in the grades department, Sam Hall delivered. He scanned the list: A, A, A+, A+, very nice. Then he saw something that he could not believe. A misprint? He picked up the telephone and dialed his ex-wife’s house.
Sam was gobbling cereal. He was late, he knew that, but also hungry. He was always hungry, but math, lit, and Am. history would prevent him from eating even a Snickers bar until noon.
“Will you get that?” his mom called.
“Gotta eat,” he hollered around a mouthful of cornflakes.
Lucy was in a hurry, too. This family was not fabulous at getting rolling in the morning. “‘Lo,” she said into the cordless phone as she walked back and forth loading on her white doctor’s coat, her stethoscope, car keys, purse, and all the other little things she could remember.
“It’s me.”
“Hi, Jack, when did you get back?”
In the kitchen, Sam practically choked on his cereal. Milk and bits sprayed across the table.
“You didn’t tell me Sam got an F in calculus!”
Sam was making frantic gestures at her. She shook her head. His efforts to keep her from giving his dad the grim news were for naught. “All right,” Lucy said, “calm down now.”
“Sam is a straight-A student,” Jack barked. “Since when does he fail?”
That was not a question she cared to deal with at the moment. “I can’t talk about that right now,” she said, hoping he’d understand. But Jack was probably in another time zone altogether. India, Antarctica, Siberia, who knew?
“Maybe you should make the time.” His voice was soft, even gentle. That was a warning sign, big time. Soft words meant only one thing in the world of Jack Hall: a major earthquake was on the way. Well, let it come. She’d divorced Jack for a reason. A lot of reasons. And this kind of implication that she was somehow a lousy, second-rate parent was for sure one of them.
She let him have it, a small dose of what he needed to hear. “Excuse me, but I’m not the one who’s always gone for months and months!”
There was a silence on the other end. Then something happened that she thought was quite surprising. Very damn out of his box. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand how Sam could get an F.”
Neither did she, but she didn’t care to tell Jack any such thing. “I’ll let him explain it to you. Can you take him to the airport tomorrow?”
“Sam’s getting on a plane?”
He who hated to fly was indeed getting on a plane. She spoke in an undertone, glancing at Sam, who was sitting on a barstool across the kitchen pass-through … straining to hear every word. “He joined this Scholastic Decathlon team.”
“Sam joined a team?”
“I think there’s a girl involved. Listen, I’m gonna be on call all night. Pick him up at seven thirty tomorrow morning, will you? And don’t be late. I don’t want him to have to take a taxi to the plane again.”
Now it was time for big ears to do his darndest to de-infuriate his father. “Have you packed yet?” she asked Sam.
“I have all night.” He grabbed for the phone.
She held it away. “Pack.”
He got it, took it to his ear. She kissed him on the forehead. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“It’s only a week, Mom.”
She couldn’t delay any longer. She had many hours ahead of her at the hospital, doing one of the notorious twenty-four-hour shifts that were the lot of residents in these days of budget cuts. Sammy was still her little boy, though, and a week was a long, long time for ole Mom. She did not let him see the moisture in her eyes. No way was she going to be one of those clingy mothers. As far as she knew, he’d inherited his father’s travel gene and this would be one of a lifetime of trips.
It was so damn good to hear Sam’s voice. The hope of youth was in his tone, the energy and fun of being a teenager. Too bad his grades had tanked and he’d left this place a sty.
“Hey, Dad,” Sam said, “so you just got in and I’m taking off?”
At least he’d see Sam on the way to the airport. He wanted that ride to be all fun and no fights, so he decided to get the rough stuff out of the way right now. “Thanks for taking care of my place, Sam.”
“No problem.”
“It’s a disaster zone!”
“I was gonna clean it up. I forgot when you were getting back.”
Now came the biggie. “And what about your report card?” This one grade could keep him out of MIT or Cal Tech. Sam didn’t realize it, but his whole future as a scientist was at stake here. He was brilliant, and he had an extraordinary career ahead of him in whatever discipline he chose. But not if he didn’t get in at a top, top school. That was essential. “So, buddy, what about—”
“Hold on, there’s another call.”
There was a click. “Sam?”
“Dad, it’s Laura! Gotta go. See you in the morning.”
“Sam!”
But he was gone, which was the damnedest thing. Sam hero-worshiped his dad, hung on his every word. Something had sure as hell changed, and Jack had a feeling it had a name, and that name was Laura. He laughed a little to himself. What the hell, his little Sammy had a girl. That was very damn cool. Probably a real looker, too.
Jack wanted to clean this place up, but there was no time for that now. He had to get to the office, which was “space” tucked away in the basement at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was where they buried the resident paleoclimatologist. Out of sight, out of mind. Just as well. His entire budget was no bigger than a computer glitch. NOAA could go out of the paleoclimate business without so much as a peep of protest from anybody of any importance at all.
Thing was, paleoclimate was the whole story. You figure out what happened in the past, you are going to find out what NOAA really wanted to know, what it lived to know, which was what in holy hell was going to happen in the future.
He passed through security and parked, then went down to his digs. The joke was that he was so far underground that you had to go down from the basement parking lot to find him.
True enough, but at least he was here. He existed.
He went through building security, then down the long, neon-lit hallway to the door with the slightly crooked Paleoclimate Laboratory sign in the sliding holder. What they did not know was that Jack’s people had glued it in with Krazy Glue. If Gomez ever ditched paleoclimate, he was going to have to replace this door.
Jack punched in his code and went in. He was greeted by the usual neon and silence. He went down the hall, turned to the room where his ice cores were being unloaded. He was nervous about this operation. After the catastrophe on the ice shelf, a lost Sno-Cat and all that blather, he was not going to be doing any more of this shallow coring anytime soon. The sexy science was being done by the deep-core teams located deep in the antarctic fastness, drilling down to half a million years ago and more. Those were the boys who got the dollars and the news stories. Some jerk with a cracked theory about something that had happened ten thousand years ago was no fun. What about the air Tyrannosaurus rex breathed? That was what CNN wanted to know.
Then he heard Frank’s tired voice say, “You should be cataloging those samples. The boss said he wanted them done by the time he gets back.” Frank was in the massive freezer that would house the cores they had managed to save from the antarctic debacle. Good, that meant that the cores had gotten here on time and in good shape.
As Jack started into the freezer, he heard Jason reply, “He won’t come in before tomorrow. Even Taskmaster Hall has to sleep.”
Taskmaster Hall? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Jack didn’t want to eavesdrop, so he stepped into view, and into the ice-cold air of the freezer. “I slept on the plane,” he said.
He surveyed the boxes. And that was it for Jack Hall. All time, all space, all commitments, all needs, disappeared in an instant. It became him and his ice, beginning and end of the world. He measured, he prepared, he moved, he tagged.
At some indeterminate time, Frank and Jason went to lunch. Later, somebody held a turkey club under his nose until he yelled at them for getting contaminants near his ice. Later, he heard whispers concerning pizza. All he knew was that this project could not be completed until this ice was in order and secure, and that was going to happen as fast as possible, because Jack Hall had a point to prove, and he was damn well going to prove it.
As far as Jack was concerned, he’d been working for about half an hour when Tom Gomez, the director of NOAA, came striding into the freezer.
“I know you have an innate talent for rubbing people the wrong way, Jack, but why, for the love of God, did you have to aggravate the vice president of the United States!”
“Because my seventeen-year-old kid knows more science than he does.” Way more, as a matter of fact.
“Perhaps, but your seventeen-year-old kid doesn’t control our budget. It doesn’t matter if he hates you.”
Wheels clicked in Jack’s head. He realized that the six forty on the clock was not evening but morning, which explained why he’d gotten all the samples processed, and also why his staff had disappeared on him, which he had been going to raise hell about.
Sam. Oh, God, no.
Jack went for the door, brushing past Gomez. He had to reach Sam in time. He needed that half hour alone together in the car with his kid, needed it bad. He drove like a bat out of hell—which, unfortunately, means very slowly anyway in D.C.‘s morning rush. There is no such thing as an easy reverse commute in Washington. With government offices spread halfway from Wilmington to Richmond and up to Baltimore, every road in every direction is jammed from six to nine every damn morning, and this one was no exception.
As he turned the corner onto Lucy’s street, he saw the cab already there and Sam giving his suitcase to the driver.
Jack leaped out of his car and took the suitcase. “Sorry I’m late, Sam, I—”
“Dad, the cab’s already here.”
No, that would not do. He had to have this time. “I’ll take care of the cab.” He gave the driver twenty. “Will that cover it?” Another ten and the driver pulled out. Actually looked kind of happy. Happy-ish.
Jack looked at his boy. He’d grown so damn much, it almost broke his heart. He wanted to be with Sam, to spend every waking moment, in fact, with Sam, but that was not the way Jack Hall’s world worked. He was racing time to convince the powers that be to begin a massive planning effort to prepare for sudden climate change, maybe even to stop it, at least for a while. But nobody believed him and nobody cared, and boy, this was one paleoclimatologist with the world on his shoulders.
Where Sam had ridden when he was five and they’d gone to the Virginia State Fair and ridden the Tilt-A- Whirl and eaten cotton candy, and whacked the Whack-A-Mole with the best whackers at the fair.
Times, oh, good, good times.
Now Sam sat quietly beside him, his teenage secrets hidden behind his careful eyes, hidden in his silence. Jack would love to have met Laura. He dared not even ask.
“So, is being late your way of getting back at me for failing calculus?”
Oh, my love, how far that is from the truth. “Of course not.”
“It sounded like you were pretty angry yesterday.”
That wasn’t true, either. He couldn’t be angry at Sam, not for more than a few seconds. “Not angry, just disappointed.”
“You want to hear my side of it?”
“There are sides?”
“I got every question right on the final. The only reason Mr. Spengler failed me was because I didn’t write out the solutions.”
“Why not?”
“I do them in my head.”
Pure Sam. His mind was breathtaking. “Did you tell him that?�
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“He didn’t believe me. He says he can’t do ‘em in his head, so I must be cheating.”
Now Jack did get angry. He got very, very angry. Very angry. All of Sam’s life, they’d come up against teachers who resented his brilliance or feared his brilliance or just plain thought bright kids got in the way. Spengler was obviously another of these pinheaded pricks. “That’s ridiculous,” Jack said, trying to keep his rage inside. “He can’t fail you for being smarter than he is.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
Day After Tomorrow Page 3