The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  But she was there to meet the shuttle when we landed.

  “Doctor Jepp. It’s been a long time.”

  “Doctor Elkins.” I nodded and we shook hands. “It has been a long time.” I had never really known her personally, but we had met at conferences now and then before she left Earth, and her single-minded drive to establish the research center on Trident had made her something of a “personality” in the agency. Everybody knew about her. She was forty-five years old now, according to her personnel file, and even though there was only a little gray showing in her hair, she looked much older—the sort of look that people get when they push themselves to the limit all the time. I knew her record. I made a point of studying it when I got approval for my finger-in-the-eye experiments.

  “These are my research assistants, Jenny Evert and Ike Pappas.” They nodded and there was more handshaking.

  “We weren’t expecting a ship for another seven months,” Doctor Elkins said as we walked toward the electric van she had brought out for us.

  “That ship should still be on schedule,” I said. “We did bring some of the items you had on order though, what we could fit in. And we brought enough supplies to make up for the extra drain we represent.”

  I had trouble concentrating for a moment when I spotted an animal standing on top of the van. It stood three feet tall and might almost have passed for a monkey. This animal’s fur looked like military camouflage, patches of olive green, dark brown, and tan. It had a broad face with large, slightly protruding eyes, a vertical ridge between them that was apparently not a nose, and a tiny mouth that didn’t make sense until it unreeled a 15-inch-long tongue. An insectivore.

  “Part of the staff?” I asked, glad to have something light to ease the moment.

  Doctor Elkins gave the creature an annoyed glance. “That’s Mona. We call them chimps, or T-chimps, though Dov Marchiese gave them a full Latin classification. There’s a whole troop of those things that hang around the center.”

  Mona stiffened and saluted. Behind me, Jenny and Ike laughed. I avoided sound effects, but I gave Mona a smile and returned her salute.

  “Seems fairly intelligent,” I said.

  “Too smart to scare off, too stupid to know enough to stay away,” Elkins said.

  That was the extent of conversation until we reached the station’s permanent buildings. Permanent: seventy-five miles inland, the weather could get much too fierce for anything less than nanofactured modules of grown diamond, silicrete, and steel-graphite composites. Under test conditions on Earth, the design had survived four-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, the equivalent of eight inches of rain per hour for twelve hours, and impacts from weights of up to nine tons dropped from thirty feet.

  Perhaps half of the station’s people gathered to meet us when we reached the main facility. Doctor Elkins did the introductions, then assigned rooms for me, my assistants, and the shuttle pilot. There was a little chat. The resident staff had questions about home and any mail and so forth that we might have brought. The news that we had a bag of mail chips was welcome. Finally, the director steered me off to her office.

  She slammed the door behind us.

  “Now just what the hell is this all about?” she asked. Her voice was low, but there was no missing the intensity of it.

  “I’m here to see if it’s possible to kill a category five hurricane, Doctor Elkins.” I said, just as softly, but without the tension behind my words.

  “Forget that ‘Doctor’ crap, Roy. It’s all first names here.” That definitely was not a friendly invitation to a closer relationship. “What do you mean, ‘kill a category five hurricane’?”

  “Just that: After Hurricane Lisa hit the Florida coast two years ago, IWS has to produce more than long-term research reports from Trident. We have a new mandate to produce action rather than observation, technology rather than basic science.”

  “Political pressure.” She said those words as expletives.

  “Twenty-seven thousand people died in that storm, Donna. IWS lost nearly a hundred. More than two million people lost their homes. They still haven’t totaled the bills. There are still a half-million people living in so-called ‘temporary’ refugee camps from Florida all the way up to South Carolina. What do you expect?”

  “I expect nothing,” she snapped. She turned away. “But I think I deserve a little support from the agency. I can’t run this project here and defend it day by day back on Earth.”

  “I agree,” I said. I did, in principle. But bending with the wind is more than another tired weather cliche. It’s political survival. “This is something beyond interdepartmental squabbling though. The general assembly has been making noises about the expenses here from the beginning, and since they’re still looking for money to complete the recovery from Hurricane Lisa, they’re looking hard at anything they can do to cut expenses elsewhere. ‘Why spend all this money if we’re not going to get anything practical out of it?’ You know what it’s like.” I waited until she nodded before I continued.

  “The Trident program would never have been approved without a lot of promises that it would finally make it possible to do something about tropical cyclones. Promises you made.” I waited for another nod.

  “Hurricane Lisa merely brought it to a head.” I shut up until she turned to face me again.

  “It’s put up or shut up time, Donna,” I said, as sympathetically as I could manage. “To be a little more precise, it’s put up or shut down. And I want to keep Trident HSC going as much as you do.”

  For an instant, a haunted look got past the anger on her face. Then the anger returned, stronger than ever. “You can’t do basic science on a timetable.”

  “They don’t want basic science. They want usable technology.”

  “Basic research was the whole purpose for this station. Given time, we can learn more about cyclonic weather than anyone ever imagined. We need the basic research before we start thinking about technology to control hurricanes. We’re not set up for that sort of task.”

  “That’s why I’m here. We brought along everything we’ll need for our experiments.”

  “And if they don’t work?”

  I took a deep breath before I answered. “In that case, when the regular supply ship comes in seven months, it will be to close down the project and take you all home. But if they do work, we’ll be long gone by then and your project will continue.” Our ship would wait in orbit to take us back to Earth when we finished.

  “I won’t leave.”

  “You won’t have any choice. You’re not self-sufficient here and you can’t make yourself self-sufficient in seven months.”

  * * *

  Round one. “That went better than I expected,” I mumbled when I got to my room. Of course, I hadn’t said anything about the actual nature of the experiments I had come to conduct. I knew damn well that the real argument wouldn’t start until Donna Elkins found out what I was planning to do on Trident.

  There was little noteworthy about the arrangement of the buildings that housed Trident HSC. The long, low, narrow modules were linked together like so many dominoes, meandering about a clearing that was a kilometer across. The trees that had been felled around the center had been pruned and used as extra bulwarks around the perimeter. At the edge of the clearing a series of large bunkers had been excavated from the side of a hill to store supplies and equipment, and to serve as hangers for the center’s aircraft and the odd orbiter that might be on the ground for a day or two while a ship was in orbit.

  Everything about the center was utilitarian, Spartan. My room was a cubicle ten feet square and eight feet high. There were no windows. The bed was a simple, uncomfortable cot. There were two tables and two chairs. One table held a computer terminal. The other table was empty.

  I sat on the bunk and leaned back against the wall. I was more tired than I had any right to be. The return of gravity after a few days without any wasn’t excuse enough. I reveled in having weight and a proper orienta
tion to “up” and “down” again. I suppose I was wasting energy dreading the arguments yet to come. Confrontation has never been my style. I just sat there and fretted until Jenny and Ike came to report.

  “Everything is in the bunker,” Ike said. “It hasn’t been opened.” The “everything” in question was the shuttle cargo module with our experimental gear. Our module had made the trip out from Earth in the hold of the ship’s main shuttle. The unit had been designed to use every cubic centimeter available in a lander bay. It would take two more shuttle trips to bring down the food supplies and other things we had brought for the center.

  “Dinner will be in just a few minutes,” Jenny said. From the way she looked at me, I could tell that she was worrying about my health and well-being again. Jenny had clucked over me like a mother hen since she joined the project twenty-one months before—despite the ribbing she took about being so old-fashioned. Sometimes I think Jenny figures that I’m as old as Methuselah and incapable of taking care of myself. Well, since we had started preparing for this trip, I had occasionally felt that old, so maybe she had just cause.

  “I think I can hobble as far as the dining room,” I said, getting up while Jenny had the grace to blush. “Remember, it’s going to be a long haul here.” I looked from Jenny to Ike. I had lucked out in my choice of assistants. They were both conscientious and highly qualified. The data we collected on Trident would provide the final elements for both of their dissertations.

  * * *

  “Just how do you plan to kill a hurricane?” Doctor Elkins asked when I went to her office the next morning. The obvious anger was gone—suppressed at least—but I could still see the tension in her face.

  I leaned back in the chair across from her. None of the furniture at the center seemed to be designed with any thought for human comfort.

  “I’m not going to jump right in with anything,” I said, postponing the moment. “I want to take a few days to familiarize myself with both current and historical storm tracks, take a couple of survey flights over the Angry Sea, run some additional measurements.”

  “No runarounds, please? You have your killer experiments ready. You know what you’re going to do.”

  I nodded. “There aren’t that many possibilities. We’re going to try atmospheric compression—finger-in-the-eye stuff. We’re here to run a series of experiments to see if it can be done and what the minimal force levels might be.”

  “Atmospheric compression?” The disbelief was clear in her voice and on her face. I might as well have told her that we were counting on Santa Claus to do the job.

  “Disrupt the tight pressure gradients around the eye,” I explained. “We’ve worked up computer simulations that show that it may be possible to destroy the hurricane by disrupting the eyewall. Compression and rebound.”

  “You can’t be serious. You know as well as I do how much energy a major hurricane carries. There’s no possible way to counteract that.”

  “We don’t have to equal the total energy of the storm,” I said. “That would be impossible. Our approach is a little different. Our simulations show that it might be possible to cause sufficient disruption by the precise application of considerably less than one percent of the energy carried by the storm. In fact, the stronger the storm is, and the more strongly defined the eye is, the easier it should be to tip it into chaos, causing the storm to self-destruct. The idea is to use the storm’s own strengths against it, make it work against itself.” I shrugged. “There’s always some uncertainty about deterministic chaos,” I conceded. “If we were absolutely certain that it would work, we wouldn’t have come all the way to do the field tests.”

  She didn’t respond to that immediately. Concentration pushed aside the anger on her face as she tried to imagine what I might have in mind. The basic idea wasn’t new. It had come and gone as a topic of discussion for ages. Until Hurricane Lisa wrecked the Atlantic coast of Florida from Biscayne Bay to Fort Pierce, then regrouped to come back ashore in North Carolina, the idea had never gone beyond idle chatter and the roughest of preliminary work-ups.

  Finally, she put the look of concentration aside.

  “I hope you’re not going to disrupt our routines too much as well,” she said. “Particularly if we may be running out of time. We do have our own ongoing projects, research that may do more long-term good than this political knee-jerk show you’ve got.”

  “At least until we run our active experiments, any disruption should be minimal,” I assured her. And, no, I wasn’t offended by her characterization of our experiments. They were a “political knee-jerk show.” But I did think we had a real chance of success. “We’ll be spending a lot of time at computer terminals, of course, and I’ll need some air time in one of your aircraft. And we’ll need a survey plane for the actual experiments, when the time comes. Oh, in case you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve strung a few extra satellites to increase the coverage of the ocean. That data will all be available to your people as well. Jenny has all the access codes and orbital data. And after we finish, the satellites will still be there to increase the amount of data your people have to work with.”

  “I want plenty of notice before you go messing with any storms,” Elkins said. “At least forty-eight hours. I want to make sure that my people are well out of the way.”

  “We’ll work something out,” I said. “But if you insist on forty-eight hours, you might have to pull people on a few scrubs. We have tight test conditions to meet, and a storm might stray beyond our limits in forty-eight hours.”

  She started to say something to that, but stopped by biting at her lip.

  “We’ll work something out,” I repeated.

  * * *

  In the eight years of the Trident HSC, there had never been a single minute without at least one hurricane on the Angry Sea—and the times when there were only one were rare enough to count on the fingers of one hand. The average number of hurricanes and tropical storms on any given day was slightly over three. Five at a time wasn’t rare, and the record was eight. I had studied all but the last seventeen months’ activity before we left Earth—all that had been received up to that time. When I got back to my room after that session with the director, I sat at the computer terminal and called up the storm track program.

  The holotank built its model layer by layer, up from the sea floor, through the surface, to the lower levels of the stratosphere. I could watch a horizontal view or toggle over to the overhead view, cut a cross-section to throw on one of the flat data screens that flanked the tank, get any data I needed on the other screens. The scales were adjustable as well—physical dimensions and time. The first time through, I ran the seventeen months in seventeen minutes, sitting on the overhead view, watching the hurricanes form and plow their courses across the Angry Sea. Most ran into the bulge of the coast. Some turned north, missing land, finally dying out in the empty northern reaches of the Angry Sea.

  Generally speaking, the tropical cyclones rose in one of two large, regularly defined areas, one south-southeast of the IWS station, the other east-southeast, and 3,000 miles away. The largest and more durable storms generally came from the eastern crêche.

  Trident offered what seemed to be an infinite variety of patterns with its hurricanes. The fact that there were almost always several tropical cyclones moving across the Angry Sea provided opportunities that meteorologists could scarcely dream of on Earth. Occasionally, a series of hurricanes would follow each other west and north in a conga line, spaced between eighteen and thirty-six hours apart. At other times, two storms would merge. I found those episodes the most heartening. Eighty percent of the time, merger spelled the end of both hurricanes. They disrupted each other chaotically and spiraled back down through tropical storm and tropical depression within a matter of hours. Of course, the remaining one time in five, the storms did merge into a storm more powerful than either of the antecedents.

  I ticked off bookmarks for each of the merger events in the past seventeen mont
hs and keyed them to the attention of Jenny and Ike. They would make the precise measurements we were interested in. Jenny came to my room just as I was loading up the storm track sequence for a second play. I was going for a scale of ten seconds per day this time.

  “How soon do we get to look at some of these super hurricanes?” Jenny asked.

  “Any in particular you’d like to look at?”

  “There’s a category seven about nine hundred miles out that looks interesting.” Category seven. On Earth, the Saffir/Simpson Damage-Potential Scale only goes as far as category five—winds over 156 miles per hour, storm surge over 18 feet—but that catch-all top end was ridiculously insufficient for Trident. The Elkins team had added three extra categories at the top.

  “We’re not here as tourists, Jenny.”

  “Come on, Roy.” I had insisted on the first-name basis almost from the start. I hated being called “Doctor Jepp” or “Professor” all the time. “You want to see the big ones as badly as Ike and I do.”

  I grinned. “I confess. But does this category seven give us a chance to look at a four or five en route?”

  She grinned back at me. “There’s a category five about to hit the coast 250 miles northeast of here tomorrow afternoon.”

  “OK, I’ll try to book us a flight.”

  * * *

  Back home, I teach a graduate seminar at American Regional University in Washington and I give eighty or ninety talks and lectures to various outside groups each year. Public relations is a large part of any researcher’s job, particularly in a government-sponsored agency. People always want to know why weather forecasts aren’t more precise than they are and why—with all the time, money and effort that have gone into studying weather and climate—the forecasts are sometimes dramatically wrong, even for the next twenty-four hours. And people have a fascination with the most dramatic expressions of weather, the killer storms, tornadoes and tropical cyclones—hurricanes and typhoons.