The car pulled over and stopped.
"Well, that tears it," said Alex, meditatively. "Even these harebrained things have more common sense than we do. If we had any smarts, we'd turn off the road right now and head wherever they're heading."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Alex. It's just a migration. It's because of the drought. The poor things are all starving."
"Maybe they are, but that's sure not why they're running. You seen any birds around here lately? Red-tailed hawks? Turkey vultures? Scissortails? Me neither."
"What are you getting at?"
"Janey, every wild creature that can get away from this place is running as fast as it can run. Get it? That's not any accident." He coughed a bit, cleared his throat. "And I've been doing some research," he announced. "There are certain towns in this area that have a lot of available shelter. Really good, solid storm shelter. Like, say, Woodward. That town got wiped flat by an F-4 about ten years ago, so they got themselves a bunch of diamond drills and they dug out underground in a mega way. Big-city shelters, whole malls down there, lots of private shelters too. And it's only twenty minutes from here."
"You don't say. It's nice of you to take so much initiative."
"I want to make you a deal," Alex said. "When this thing really rips the lid off, I want you to get to a shelter."
"Me, Alex? Me, and not you?"
"Exactly. You won't lose anything by doing that. I can get you all the data you want. I'll punch the core on the thing for you, I swear to God I will. I can do that. But you need to live through this so you can put it all together later, and understand it. And sell it too. Right? If I don't make it through this experience, it's no big loss to anybody. But Janey, if you don't survive this, it's gonna put a pretty serious long-term crimp in your career."
"Alex, this is my career."
"You've got nothing, unless you stay alive. That makes good sense, so think about it."
"Do I look afraid to you? You think I want to run for cover? You think I like this stupid idea of yours?"
"I know you're real brave, Janey. That doesn't impress me. i'm not afraid, either. Do I look afraid to you?" He didn't. "Do I look like I'm kidding about this?" He wasn't. "All I'm telling you is that it's a bad idea for both of us to get killed today. Both the Unger kids killed at once? What about our dad?"
"What about him?"
"Well, he's no prize, our querido papd, but he cares! I mean, he cares some. At least, he wouldn't send his daughter into a death trap, just to gratify his own curiosity!" Alex started talking really quickly. "I think Mulcahey does care about you some, when he can be bothered to notice you instead of his mathematics, and in fact that's why Jerry stuck me in here with you today, so you would slow down some, and not do anything really crazy. Right? Right! That's him all over!"
Jane stared at him, speechless.
"So maybe Jerry cares about you, I grant you that, but he doesn't care about you enough! I don't care what charming bullshit he gave you, or how he convinced you to live his life for him, but if he loved you the way somebody ought to love you, he would never have sent you out here, never! This is a suicide mission! You're a young woman with a lot going for you, and you shouldn't end up as some kind of broken, stomped, bloody doll out in this goddamned wasteland!" He broke into a fit of coughing. "Look at those clouds, Jane!" he croaked. "Clouds are never supposed to took like that! We're gonna get ridden down and stomped flat out here, just like two of those rabbits!"
"Take it easy! You're losing it."
"Don't talk down to me, just look up at the sky!"
Jane, against her own will, looked up. The-dust had thinned, and the sun was higher, and the cirrus looked utterly bizarre. There were hundreds of little growing patches of it now. Shapes just like frost on a windowpane, like patchy mutant snowflakes. The clouds looked like a down feather might look if you shot ten thousand volts through it.
But that wasn't the half of it. The crazy thing was that all the little feather clouds were all exactly the same shape. They weren't the same size. Some were huge, some were tiny. They were pointed in different directions. Not all different directions, mind you-exactly six different directions. And yet hellishly, creepily, the clouds were all identical. A little comma drip on one end, a curved spine with a hook at the other, and hundreds of fine little electrified streamers branching off from both sides.
It looked like a tiling pattern. Like ceramic tiling. The Oklahoma sky was tiled like a bathroom floor.
"Bénard convection does that sometimes," Jane babbled. "The cells have six different axes of rotation and that self-similarity has gotta mean that the cell updraft vectors are all, well . . ." Words failed her. Words failed her quite suddenly, and really badly. A kind of software crash for language. Words-yeah, even scientific words-there were times and contingencies when reality ripped loose from verbal symbolism and just went its own goddamned way. And this was one of those times.
"What's that big seam growing up the middle?" Alex said.
"I dunno. Get the cameras on it."
"Good idea." Alex put his face into the camera goggles and tilted them upward on the weapons mounts. "Wow."
"That's gotta be the jet stream," Jane said. "The major, polar jet stream that's been hanging north all this time. It's finally moved."
"Janey, I don't know much about the jet stream, but I know the jet stream doesn't bend at that kind of angle."
"Well, it's probably not really bending; it just looks that way from this angle of observation."
"The hell it is. The hell it does. Janey, I can see it through these cameras a hell of a lot better than you can, and whatever that thing is, it's coming down. It's coming down right at us, it's gonna hit the earth."
"Great! Keep recording!"
His voice cracked. "I think we'd better leave this place."
"Hell no! That's it! Of course! Of course, that's what Jerry's been looking for-a permanent source of power for the F-6, and the jet stream is permanent power! It wraps the whole planet, and it's seven kilometers thick and it's fifty degrees below zero and it does two hundred klicks an hour. God, the jet stream, if the jet stream spikes down out of the stratosphere, then it's all gonna add up!" She grabbed for her headset.
"Janey, that thing's going to kill us. We're gonna die here."
"Shut up and keep recording." A remarkably stupid robot truck raced suddenly past them, mangling and crippling dozens of bloodied flopping jackrabbits. The rest of the rabbits exploded off in all directions, like fleas on a hot plate.
"Jane in Charlie here!" she shouted. "We got a massive outbreak! These are the coords . .
She began reading them off, her voice rising.
An avalanche of freezing air fell out of the sky. The stratosphere was ten kilometers up. Even at two hundred klicks an hour, it took the jet stream a good four minutes to fall to earth.
First, the sky cracked open, on a long, furred, spiky seam. Then, maybe ninety seconds down, the vast, thick surge of air hit a warm layer in the upper atmosphere. There was a massive, soundless explosion. Freezing gouts of ice-white cloud blew out in all directions. The clouds touched the sun, and in instants, everything began to darken.
The stream plowed through the spewing clouds like a bullet through an apple, and hit a second thermopause. There was another fantastically powerful explosion. There was still no trace of wind at ground level, but the sound from that first overhead explosion reached the earth then, a cataclysmic roll of thunder that did not vary and did not stop. A cottonwood tree at the side of the road trembled violently, for no visible reason, so violently that it shed all its leaves.
From the second explosion, actual vortices blasted out in every corner of the compass, literal swirls of splitting, freezing, curling air, whirlpool swirls of air as big as towns.
She had one last glimpse up the central core of the falling jet stream. It was clear and cold and vast and lethal. She could see stars through it.
Then the jet stream hit the living earth, ma
ybe three kilometers away. The earth erupted in torment and dozens of vast clotted cobras of filth leaped skyward instantly. Jane jammed her sound-cahcellation earphones over her head then so she did not go deaf, but the sound of the F-6 was something far beyond the Train. It was a sonic weapon pressing through her body and crushing her inside. It was more than sound, it was raw shock, terrible, unendurable, deadly.
She fought with the car then, trying to get Charlie to turn and run. Nothing happened; the machine sat as if stunned. Lightning like no lightning she had ever seen caine out of the erupting columns of dirt. It was dirt lightning, rock lightning. It was thick and crooked and horizontal, and it looked like flying, spinning swastikas. A great flying complex of crooked lightning flew right over their heads, and it broke apart in front of her eyes into gigantic, glowing, sparking chunks.
The car moved. She turned and ran. The day was gone. They were in black hell, instant Gehenna. A hurricane of dirt had spread all over the sky. They were buried alive under a giant spreading plateau of screaming, crackling filth. The air was half-dirt. The maddened earth had forgotten the difference between air and dirt. Dirt and air were going to be the same thing from now on. The black slurry of wind was hanging over them, it was all around them.
And out at the far edge of it-at the very far, spreading edge, where there was still a little squashed and sickly light at the horizon: there were spikes dropping. Spikes, all around them. Dozens of spikes. A corona of spikes, a halo of spikes. F-is, F-2s, F-3s. Kinky spikes. Fat spikes. Spikes as squat as footballs. Spikes that whipped like venom-spitting mambas. Spikes that the F-6 had flung out all around itself in a single gesture, spikes it had conjured up and flung to earth in a moment, a chorus line of devils at the skirts of its Dance of Destruction.
Charlie flew as it had never flown before. They ran east over a darkened road, and the pursuit vehicle's complex wheels scarcely touched the ground. Jane glanced at Alex. He was still looking through the cameras. He was still recording-everything that he could. He had the cameras turned backward and he was looking behind the car.
Then suddenly Alex flung the cameras off his face and he doubled over hard, and he wrapped both arms around his head. Jane wondered for a passing instant what he had seen, and then in the next instant, the car simply became airborne. Charlie was actually flying. No illusion. No simulation. No hallucination. A very simple matter.
They were flying through the air. Maybe ten meters off the road. They were up in the air in an arctic, polar, stratospheric gust of wind that had simply caught the car and plucked it from the earth like a paper cup, and it was bearing them along inside it, like a supersonic torrent of black ice.
Jane felt a chill existential horror as they remained airborne, remained flying, and things began to drift gently and visibly past them. Things? Yes, all kinds of things. Road signs. Bushes. Big crooked pieces of tree. Half-naked chickens. A cow. The cow was alive, that was the strangest thing. The cow was alive and unharmed, and it was a flying cow. She was watching a flying cow. A Holstein. A big, plump, well-looked-after barnyard Holstein, with a smart collar around its neck. The cow looked like it was trying to swim. The cow would thrash its great clumsy legs in the chilly air, and then it would stop for a second, and look puzzled.
And then the cow hit a tree and the cow was smashed and dead, and was instantly far behind them.
And theft Charlie hit another, different tree. And the air bag deployed, and it punched her really hard, right in the face.
When she came to, Alex was driving, or trying to. Everything was pitch-black. Great sheets of lightning tore across the sky and the noise-cancellation phones, amazingly, were still on her head. She was slumped in the passenger seat and drenching wet.
They were in some small town. The town strobed, periodically, into visibility around them, in massive flashes of sky-tearing lightning. Because everything was utterly noisy, everything beneath her headphones was silent. The town was a silent ghost town, under silent artillery bombardment. The town was simply being blown down, blown apart. Walls were being twisted apart, and roofs methodically caved in. But the bare wind was not alone in its work. The wind had brought its -friends. Thinp-projcctiles, shrapnel-were randomly smashing the town, smashing anything that stood up, smashing anything that resisted, flying and smashing and crushing and bursting. Flying, wrecking things. Ancient telephone poles from before the wireless days-they were being snapped up clean and picked up and thrust through the sides of multistory buildings. With a weird kind of ease, like someone piercing big blocks of tofu with a breadstick.
Everything was airborne, like a little city churned into a dense aerial mulch. Laundry. Stoplights. Bicycles. Dog-houses. Sheets of tin, bending and tumbling and rippling just like big shining sheets of paper. Hills of branches, mountains of leaves. Satellite dishes, multibranched hollow radio and telephone aerials. The town's water tower had fallen over and ruptured like a big metal egg. Dirt. Dirt everywhere. Sudden mean gusts of dirt like a sandblast. Dirt that pierced the skin like ink from a tattoo needle. Dirt and hail, and water that was full of dirt, and water drops that hit her hard as hail.
Alex had twin runnels of blackness streaking down his face and she realized numbly that his nose was bleeding. Her nose too. Her nose hurt; the wreck had really hurt her nose.. . . Alex was driving down the main street of town, rather slowly and clumsily really, and with a lot of pained attention to detail. There were cars turned upside down all over the place, kicked-over cars like a giant child disturbing a convention of turtles.
A quite large brick building gracefully gave up the ghost as they passed it, and it cascaded gently into the street like a sackful of dominoes. Inside it, every object on its walls and floors took flight like liberated pigeons, and its guts spewed great crackling gouts from severed power lines.
Outside the city, they picked up speed again. Jane's head began to hurt a lot, and suddenly she regained full consciousness, and she came to herself. She went at once for the comset, pressed the mike to her lips between two closed hands, and began shouting into the mike. Not that she could hear herself. Not that anyone in the Troupe could hear her, necessarily. But just to bear witness. Just to bear witness to everything, to bear witness as long as she could.
They entered some kind of forest. That seemed like a really bad idea. Charlie-began jumping over downed trees in the road, and she could tell from the way his wheels scrunched against the tarmac that this was not at all good for the car. The car was badly damaged. How badly, she couldn't tell.
Trees were whipping back and forth at the roadside like damned souls frantically flagging down a lift. Another great sheet of cloud-to-cloud lightning arc-lit the zenith, and, incidentally, also lit an F-i that was striding knee-deep through the forest alongside them, not fifty meters away. The spike was just churning along there, spinning like a black cone of wet rubber and methodically tossing a salad of smashed tree. She saw it again, three more times, in three more lightning flashes, until it meandered out of sight.
On the far side of the forest an insane wind gust pounced on them and almost blew them away. Charlie actually leaped into the air like a hooked fish and sort of skipped, leaning and kicking violently against the wind, an odd maneuver dredged up from some subroutine she'd never seen before. Jane said as much, into the mike, for something to say, and then she looked at her lit Trouper cuff.
It was June i6, at two-thirteen in the afternoon.
Then another stronger gust hit them broadside, and Charlie was knocked completely off its wheels, and roiled right over and jumped up. And rolled over and jumped up, and roiled and jumped in yet a third somersauIt~ tumbling in the grip of the wind like an aikido master. Until Charlie fetched up, very hard, with his undercarriage smashing into the unyielding trunk of a tree. And then all maneuvers stopped.
Jane did not pass out. The air bags had deployed again, but without the same slamming gusto they had shown before. She realized from the sharp stink of ozone and the steady buzzing that the superc
onductive had cracked.
Alex gripped her shoulder-from above, since they were now hanging sideways in-their seats, propped against the tree trunk-and he shouted something at her, which of course she could not hear. He shook her and shouted again and shook his narrow, rain-drenched head, and then he climbed out of the top of the vehicle and vanished into the dark.
Jane assumed that Alex had at least some vague idea what he was doing, but she felt very weak and tired, and she had no urge to leave the vehicle. Jane had often imagined herself dying in a wrecked pursuit car, and it was a relatively peaceful and natural idea for her. It certainly seemed more comfortable and decent than stumbling into the woods in a violent rainstorm to hunt for some fresh way to be killed.
She kept on talking. She wiped fresh blood from her upper lip and she kept talking. There were no answers, but she kept talking. Charlie's superconductive blew its last fizzing volt and all the onboard instrumentation crashed. The radio stayed on, though. It bad its own battery. She kept talking.
After half an hour Alex showed up again. The wind had begun to slack off in spasms, long glassy moments of weird calm amid the roar. Also, it was not quite so dark.
There was a rim of drowned greenish light in the west-the F-6 was moving east. The F-6 was moving past them.
And apparently civilization was not so desperately far away as it seemed from the tilted seat of a smashed car, because Alex, amazingly, was carrying a hooded terry-cloth baby towel, a six-pack of beer in biodegradable cans, and half a loaf of bread.
She tried talking to Alex then, shouting at him over ~ atches in the constant rumble of thunder, but he shook is head and patted one ear. He had gone quite deaf. He'd probably been deaf from the very first instant the F-6 hit. He might, she thought, be deaf forever now. Worse yet, he looked completely insane. His face was drenched with rain and yet still black with dirt-not just dirt on the skin, but dirt tattooed under his skin, his face stippled with high-speed flying filth.
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