"What good are they?" Alex said.
"Whaddya mean?" Buzzard said, wounded. "They measure temperature, humidity . . . and wind speed, 'cause you can track that chaff on radar in real time."
"Any little updraft can carry chaff." Buzzard fetched up his virching rig. "So chaff will stay with a spike till it ropes out. C'mon, virch up, dude, Greg 'n Carol have got circulation!"
Alex sat on his bubblepak. He pulled the back of the mat up and over his shoulders, like a blanket. The plastic bubbles of trapped air cut the chill wind nicely. He might have been almost comfortable, if not for the windblown filth clinging greasily to his sweat-stained face, neck, and chest. He put on his goggles.
In an instant Alex was miles away, on the wings of Lena, confronting a long white plateau of roiling cloud. Above the plateau, the great curling mountain of the thunderhead was shot through with aerial lightning.
Martha's ornithopter dived below the base of the cloud. The bottom of the thunderhead was steadily venting great ragged patches of rain. But the southern edge of the cloud base was a long, trailing dark shelf, slightly curved, and free of any rain. Seen from below, the storm was charcoal black veined with evil murky green, leaden, and palpably ominous.
"How'd you get in place so fast?" Buzzard asked Martha.
Martha's voice dropped crackling into the channel. "I caught the midlevel jet, man! It's like a goddamn escalator! Did you see that Ienticular slit up there? The jet's peeling the front of that tower like a fuckin' onion!" Martha paused. "It's weird."
"There aren't any normal ones anymore, Martha," Buzzard said patiently. "I keep tryin' to tell you that."
"Well, we might get an F-3 out of it, tops," Martha diagnosed. "That's no supercell. But man, it's plenty strange."
Buzzard suddenly yelped in surprise. "Hell! I see what you mean about that midlevel jet. . . . Damn, I just lost two strips of chaff."
"Get your 'thopter's ass up here, man, that wall cloud is movin'." Martha's Okie drawl thickened as her excitement grew.
"What exactly are we looking at?" Alex asked her.
"See that big drawdown at the base?" Martha told him. "Between the flankin' line and all that rain? Look close and you can see it just now startin' to turn."
Alex stared Into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entire cloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that a whole area of the base-a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the size of four, maybe five football fields-was beginning a slow waltz. The lumps were being tugged down-powerfully wrenched and heaved down- into a broad bulging round ridge, well below the natural level of the cloud base. The lumps were black and ugly and sullen and looked very unhappy about being forced to move. They kept struggling hard to rise into the parent cloud again, and to maintain their shape, but they were failing, and falling apart. Some pitiless unseen force was stretching them into long circular striations, like gaseous taffy.
Suddenly a new voice broke in, acid-etched with a distant crackling of lightning static. "Carol in Alpha here! We got dust whirl, over!"
"Nowcaster here," came Jerry Mulcahey's calm voice. "Give me location fix, over." Good old Dr. Jerry, Alex realized, had the advantage of the Storm Troupe's best antennas. He seemed to be hovering over the battlefield like God's recording angel.
"Greg in Alpha here," came Greg Foulks. "How's the data channel holdin' up, Jerry, over?"
"Clear enough for now, over.
"Here's your coords, then." Greg sent them, in a digital screech. "We gotta move, Jerry. That wall cloud's gonna wrap hard, and the truck's getting radar off a sheet of big-ass hail to northwest, over."
"Then move behind the hook and get the array booted," Jerry commanded. "Report in, Aerodrome. Where's the chaff, over?"
"Boswell in Aerodrome," Buzzard said, and though he was speaking from an arm's length away, his rerouted voice signal was unexpectedly thin and crispy. "I got Jesse loaded and moving in hard on the jet stream, and Kelly coming out to Aerodrome to load a second reel, over."
"Lena is right in position now, Jerry, should I strafe that dust whirl for you, over?" said Martha.
"Beautiful, Martha," Jerry told her, his deep voice rich with praise and satisfaction. "Let me bring you up on monitor. . . . Okay, Martha, go! Nowcaster out."
Martha's voice, lost its static and settled again at the very edge of Alex's t. "You with me, little dude?"
"Yeah."
"This is where it gets good."
The ornithopter fell out The wall cloud above them was mucn tmcKer: it didn't seem to be moving any faster. The 'thopter and Alex suddenly noticed a messy puff of filth, way dowii at ground level. The cloud of dust didn't seem to be spin-fling much. Instead, the dust cloud was spewing. It was clumsily yanking up thin dry gouts of ocher-tinted soil and trying to fling them aside.
Martha scanned the dust cloud, circling. Alex had never seen dirt behave in such an odd and frantic fashion. The dirt kept trying hard to fall, or spin loose, or escape just any old way back to the natural inertness of dirt, but it just couldn't manage the trick. Instead, whole smoky masses of the stuff would suddenly buckle and vanish utterly, as if they were being inhaled.
Then water vapor began to condense, in the very midst of the dry churning filth, and for the first time Alex fully realized the real shape, and the terrible speed, of the whirlwind. The air was being thrashed into visibility through sheer shock.
The infant tornado had a strange ocher-amber tint, like a gush of magician's stage smoke running backward in an antique movie reel. Some weird phase change, somber and slow and deeply redolent of mystery, was moving up the structure. Translucent bands of amber damp, and ocher filth, reeled slowly up the spike, silhouetting it against the sky and earth. It was very narrow at the bottom, growing broader and thicker with height. . .
Martha swooped in hard beside the tornado, in a complex banking figure eight, and she gained a lot of very sudden altitude. Alex winced with disorientation. Then he saw the top of the twister, dead ahead-the spinning wall cloud, shoving thick vaporous roots slowly downward toward the earth.
The 'thopter dodged and leveled out, circling back. The twister's middle looked treacherously empty: a core of utter nothingness with a great black wall melting down from above, and a bottleneck of tortured dirt rising up. But then the wall's funnel moved down very suddenly, in four thick, churning, separate runnels of octopus ink, and it seized the little dust whirl and ate it, and the world was filled with a terrible sound.
The twister's howling had crept up on Alex almost without his notice. But now, as the twister reached its full dark fury, it began to emit a grotesque earthshaking drone. Even over the ornithopter's limited microphones, it seemed a very rich and complex noise, grinding and rattling and keening, over a dreadful organ-pipe bass note, a noise that crammed the ears, mechanical and organic and orchestral.
The funnel began to migrate. It grew steadily fatter, and it spun steadily faster, and it rolled forward fitfully, across the earth. There was nothing much for it to hurt here, nothing but grass and bushes. Every bush it touched either disappeared or was knocked into tattered knots, but the tornado didn't seem to be damaging the grass much. It was casually tearing at the grass a bit, and leaving it flour-blanched with filth, but it wasn't drilling its way down through topsoil into the bedrock. It was just bellowing and screeching and humming to itself, in a meditative, utterly demonic way, deliberately rubbing the narrow tip of itself through the grass, like a migrating mastodon hunting for stray peanuts.
Martha was wheeling around the structure counterclockwise, keeping a respectful distance. On one pass, Alex caught a sudden glimpse of Pursuit Vehicle Alpha, sitting still behind the twister, shockingly close, shockingly tiny. It was only in glimpsing the Trou 's little pursuit machine that Alex realized the scale of wl~t he was witnessing: the bottom of the twister had grown as wide as a parking lot.
As it reached full speed and size the twister grew livelier. It marched confidently up the gentle slope of
a hill, in a brisk, alert fashion, with its posture straight and its shoulders squared. As it marched down the slore it put its whirling foot through the rusting wreckage o a barbed-wire fence. A dozen rotten cedar posts were instantly snapped off clean at the surface of the earth, tumbling thirty meters into the air in a final exultation of tangled rusty wiring.
The fence fell to earth again in a mangled yarn ball. The twister crossed a road in a frantic blast of dust.
Everything around Alex went silent and black. He thought that Martha's drone had been smashed, that he'd lost contact; but then he remembered that the natural color of a dead virching screen was blue, not black. He was seeing blackness: black air. And he could hear Buzzard breathing hard over audio.
"You're gonna want to see this, dude," Buzzard told him. "I don't do this every day. I'm gonna punch the core."
"Where are we?"
"We're on Jesse, and we're right above the spike. We're up in the wall cloud."
"We can't fly around in here," Alex said. "It's pitch-dark!"
"Sure, man. But Greg and Carol have their array up, and the Radar Bus is on-line. I just put ninety-seven chips of straff-hell! I mean strips of chaff-down this spike! Jerry's running the camp monitors flat out! We're gonna punch the core, dude! We're gonna go right down this funnel, live, real time, flyin' on instruments! Ready?"
Alex's heartbeat changed gears. "Yeah! Do it!"
"There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch-black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light-red and infrared. I dunno what we'll see, dude, but we'll see something."
"Shut up and go!" Alex pressed the goggles against both eyes with the flats of his hands.
His head flooded with maxed-out roaring. Eerie red light bloomed against his eyeballs. He was shearing down the monster's tightened, spinning throat. The 'thopter trembled violently, a dozen times a second. Inside the twister's core, the wind was moving so fast that its terrible speed was oddly unfelt and unseen, like the spin of the earth.
Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spinning inner walls were a blurry streaky gas, and a liquid rippling sheen, and a hard black wobbling solid, all at once. Great bulging rhythmical waves and hollows of peristalsis were creeping up the funnel core, slow and dignified, like great black smoke rings in the throat of a deep thinker.
The 'thopter jerked hard once, harder again, then lost all control and punched the wall. All sound ceased at once.
The image froze, then disintegrated before Alex's eyes into a colored tangle of blocky video trails.
Then the image reintegrated and slammed back into real-time motion. They were outside the twister, flung free of it, tumbling through air with all the grace of a flung brick.
The 'thopter spread its wings and banked. Buzzard crowed aloud in the sudden silence. "We just blew both mikes," he said. "Pressure drop!"
Alex stared into the screens pasted to his face. There was something very wrong with what he was seeing. He felt his eyes beginning to cross, with a complex headachy pang behind the bridge of his nose. "What's wrong?" he croaked.
"A little alignment problem," Buzzard admitted grudgingly. "Not half-bad for a core punch, though."
"I can't look at this," Alex realized. "I'm seeing double, it hurts."
"Shut one eye.
"No, I can't stand this!" Alex tore off the goggles.
The veranda was sitting in full sunlight again. The thunderstorm anvil had moved on to the northwest, leaving a trail of thin high cirrus clouds behind it, like a snail's slime track.
Alex stood up, walked past Buzzard and Martha's inert legs, and looked to the north. The entire squall line was receding rapidly, speeding off toward Oklahoma. Alex couldn't even see the tornado whose guts he'd just witnessed. It was either blocked from line of sight by nearer towers, or it was already over the horizon.
Behind the storm line, the air was cool and blue and sweet. The sky looked balmy and clear and full of gentle naïveté, as if tornadoes were all someone else's fault.
Alex walked back under the veranda, plucked up an antiseptic tissue, and started smearing filthy grease from his face and neck. His chest and neck and arms were reddened with little clotted nicks and wind whips, as if he'd tried to stuff a house cat inside his paper suit.
His eyes ached with dust and trapped sweat from the goggles. He was tired and dizzy and very thirsty, and his mouth tasted like gunmetal.
But nothing was bleeding. The scratches weren't serious. He was breathing beautifully. And he was having a really good time.
He sat down again and put on his virching rig.
Martha was circling the twister, with difficulty. The twister's spine had bent way off the vertical; its top was firmly embedded in the moving cloud base, but its tip was stubbornly dragging the earth, far to the rear. The forced stretching was visibly distressing it. The tip was badly kinked inside its corona of flying filth, and the wobbling midsection was flinging off long petulant tatters of dirt.
"You had to punch the goddamn core, didn't you," Martha said.
"Yeah!" said Buzzard. "I taped almost four seconds right down the throat!"
"You blew both mikes and you screwed the optics on Jesse, man."
Buzzard was pained. "Yeah, but there's no debris in that spike. A little dust, a little grass, it was real clean!"
"You pulled that dumb macho stunt just because you were late with the chaff!"
"Don't fuckin' start with me, Madronich," Buzzard warned. "I punched the core and the 'thopter still flies, okay? I'm not asking you to fly Jesse now. You can start flappin' your lips when you punch a core and come out in one piece."
"Jerk," Martha muttered.
Something very odd had happened to the earth in front of the twister. A huge patch of the ground was snow-white and visibly steaming. It looked volcanic. "What the hell is that?" Alex said.
"That's hail," Martha said.
"Cold hail with ground fog off it," Buzzard said. "Watch this baby suck it up!"
As the twister approached, streamers of icy fog buckled and writhed, caught up in torrents of suddenly visible ground flow. The tornado lurched headlong through the swath, sucking up torrents of chilly air from all directions, in a giant ragged overhead rosette of tormented fog.
The swatch of fallen hail was only a few dozen meters across. After half a minute the twister had cleared it. But wading knee-deep through the chilly air had visibly upset it. Its violent spew of filth at ground level dropped off drastically. Then it shivered top to bottom. The dry bands of filth around its midsection thinned and dimmed out. As the air grew clearer a pair of dense dirty runnels suddenly appeared within the spike, for all the world like a pair of stumbling, whirling legs.
"See that, dude?" Martha said triumphantly. "Suction' spots!"
The 'thopter nose-dived suddenly and was almost swept into the vortex. Martha careened free, yelping.
"Careful," Buzzard said calmly. "It's wrapped that downdraft real hard."
The twister slowed, hesitated. Down at ground level, its overstretched tip elongated, kinked hard, and reluctantly broke off. The abandoned tip of the whirl vanished in a collapsing puff of liberated dust.
The amputated twister, stranded in midair, took a great pogo hop forward, centering itself under the cloud again. Then it tried to touch down again, to stretch out and rip the earth, but it was visibly losing steam.
The two suction spots, rotating about one another, stumbled and collided. The bigger leg messily devoured the smaller leg. There was a fresh burst of vitality then, and the twister stretched out and touched down, and a torrent of dirt rocketed up the shaft. But now the funnel was much narrower, thin and quick and kinky.
"It's ropin' out," Martha said. "I like this part. This is when they start actin' really insane."
The twister had changed its character. It had once been a wedge, a vast blunt-nosed drill. Now it looked like a sloppy corkscrew made of smoke and string.
Big oblate whirling lumps were tr
aveling up and down the corkscrew, great dirty onions of trapped vorticity that almost choked the life out of it.
Every few seconds one of the trapped lumps would blow out in spectacular fashion, spewing great ribbons of filth that tried to crawl up the cloud base. Sometimes they made it. More often they wriggled and spasmed and swam out into midair and vaporized.
The roped twister grew narrower still, so pinched at points along its length that it looked like a collapsing hose. The clear air around it was still in very violent motion, but no longer violent enough to be seen. The currents of air seemed to be losing cohesion.
The roping twister finally snaked its way into a sloppy, wriggling helix-it seemed to be trying to blend into some larger invisible vortex, to wrap itself around a bigger core and give up its fierce little life in exchange for large-scale wrath again.
But it failed. After that, it lost heart. It surrendered all its strength, in a ripple of disintegration up and down the shaft, a literal last gasp.
Martha methodically scanned the cloud base. The rotating wall cloud had broken. A great clear notch had appeared just behind it, a downdraft channeling cold air from somewhere near the stratosphere, chewing through the source of the vortex and breaking its rotation. The twister was dead and gone.
A light, filthy curtain of rain appeared, conjured up and sucked down by the twister's death spasm.
Martha headed out from under the cloud base into clear sunlit air. "Seventeen minutes," she said. "Pretty good for an
"That was an F-3 at maturity," Buzzard objected.
"You wanna bet? Let Jerry check the numbers on that chaff."
"Okay, F-2," Buzzard backed down. "It's still a little early in the day for a big one. How's Lena's battery?"
"Not good. Let's pull out, charge up the 'thopters, pull up stakes here, and head the hell after the dryline."
"Good move," Buzzard said. "Okay, you and Medicine Boy break camp, and I'll fly the 'thopters in.
"Have it your way," Martha said.
Alex pulled off his gear. He watched Martha carefully divest herself of her equipment. She got up off the sling chair, stretched, grinned, shook herself, and looked at him. Her eyes widened.
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