The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Even after nearly a quarter century with the International Weather Service, I still find myself constantly amazed that most people, even highly educated people, think of a hurricane as nothing more than a big rain storm. Five or six years ago, I gave a talk in Indianapolis. During the question and answer session afterward, one chemistry graduate student tried to get at the nature of hurricanes with a sports analogy. “I mean,” he started, “so an afternoon thunderstorm is sort of like Saturday club soccer, right? And a big hurricane is like the World Cup final?” I hid my instinctive grimace and tried another explanation of the driving mechanism of hurricanes. I had already gone through it once, but I drew my analogies down a notch and started over.

  Basically, a hurricane is an immense furnace, a heat-driven engine. It requires hot, moist air, low barometric pressure and rotational momentum. Winds spiral inward—from high pressure to low pressure—pulling moisture and warmth from the ocean’s surface. These are concentrated in the eye, with the energy being pulled up along the eyewall in a chimney effect and redistributed at the top. Rob a hurricane of its heat or its influx of moisture, and it dies. Tropical cyclones weaken and die when they hit cold water or move over land. The longer they stay over warm tropical water, the longer they last, and the stronger they can get. And Trident had more room for them to grow than Earth.

  Donna Elkins didn’t make even a ritual protest at my request for a plane for the next morning, but she did insist that one of her people go along to check me out on the craft. That was fine with me. I’ve never been a full-time pilot, and obviously I had never flown around a category seven hurricane.

  The pilot’s name was Kasigi Jo, but he insisted on being called Casey. He sat at the right-hand controls of the six-seat Imre survey plane and watched me and the instruments.

  “This flight’s yours unless you screw up or ask me to take over,” he said before we took off. “Your log shows you have more than 2,000 hours of instrument time. That’s more than I had when I came here.” Casey took his job seriously. He had examined my log chip before we went out to the plane.

  “Maybe, but it appears that your reflexes have about ten years on me. And you’ve had flight time here. Don’t be bashful about suggestions.”

  “I won’t. My favorite neck is aboard this plane.”

  The ink had still been wet on Casey’s Ph.D. when he left Earth for Trident eight years back. And unlike Elkins and a few of the others, he didn’t plan to make Trident his entire career. He was already scheduled to return to Earth on the next regular ship. “I promised them eight years when I signed on,” he said while we flew toward the coast. “They’re getting a few extra months as it is.”

  “You staying with IWS?” I asked as we leveled off at 35,000 feet. We were crossing the coast, south and a little east of the center, banking through a gentle turn to eventually bring us up on the category seven from behind.

  “Nah. I’m going into broadcasting. I’ve already got three offers, two in Tokyo and one in Jacksonville. They came in with the mail you guys brought. First nibbles.”

  I made a slight change to our flight plan. There was a new storm just starting to develop a distinctive eye in the western creche. The side trip would only add twenty minutes to the flight, so I took it. And even though I hadn’t done any flying in a year, the feel came back quickly. The Imre 370 virtually flies itself.

  “Not bad,” Ike said as we crossed the boundary of the eye of the new storm. “It tripped across the scale from tropical storm to hurricane just as we entered.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said with a soft laugh.

  As we left the new hurricane behind, I took the plane up to 45,000 feet, mostly to pick up a little speed, partly to get a broader look at the ocean. We had a little over an hour and a half of flying left to reach the eye of the category seven.

  “So tell me, Casey,” I said as I let the autopilot take over, “what’s Trident like?”

  “Where do you live?” he asked. The return question surprised me.

  “Southeast Georgia. Halfway between Savannah and Jacksonville, and about twenty-five miles inland.”

  “Oh. You ever live in one of the megalopolises?”

  “I spend a lot of time in Washington,” I said. “At least one day a week, one semester a year. I commute to the old capital to conduct my seminar.”

  Casey shook his head. “That’s just at the edge.”

  “I get to most of them, now and again,” I said. “What are you getting at?”

  “I grew up in Tokyo. Choose any ten-meter square in the entire city and it has more people than the entire planet of Trident. This is heaven.”

  “But you’re thinking of going back there?” Jenny asked.

  Casey shrugged, then laughed. “They don’t have much use for typhoon experts in the Gobi.” He had a point. Tropical cyclones are only a problem for specific areas of Earth—the east coast of North America, the Caribbean, the western Pacific, and the Indian Ocean.

  “You’ll have a hard time finding low population densities anywhere they need your expertise,” I said.

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  * * *

  Even with an airspeed of 570 miles per hour, it took us more than 30 minutes to cross the trailing radius of the category seven hurricane and reach the eye. At 45,000 feet, we were skimming the cloud cap and fighting the outward spiral of air from the top of the chimney. Conversation damped down to the essentials. Casey paid closer attention to the flight instruments and read off anything he thought I needed to know. I focused on the basics of keeping the wings level and our altitude steady. There was enough turbulence to ensure concentration. Jenny and Ike were busy studying the storm. The survey planes were equipped with storm-monitoring equipment, and they were trying to keep tabs on everything at once.

  “Hey, kids, forget the instruments for a while,” I said as we neared the eye. “You can stare at those later. Look at the real thing while you can.” Neither of them had ever flown in or over a hurricane before—or been in one on the ground for that matter.

  Far from looking sinister and threatening, the cloud cap was a thing of awesome beauty from above. As close as we were, the stratification wasn’t quite as noticeable. Except for the extent of the clouds below us, we might almost be skipping across the top of fair weather cumulus. The plane’s windows had polarized enough to offset the glare of the sun off the top of the cloud deck, but not enough to mar the scene.

  “You’ll have a strong updraft when we cross the eyewall,” Casey reminded me. “I mean strong.”

  I nodded. “We’ll go through that and circle down inside.” Once we got past the strong updraft right along the eyewall we would find gentler down-drafts through most of the clear space at the center of the storm. “Any thoughts on a safe minimum altitude inside?”

  “Depends how good your nerves are.” Casey met my gaze when I turned to him. “Generally speaking, an eye this well-formed will be fairly calm, but there’s always a chance for serious shear.”

  “How about you? How low would you feel safe?”

  “Since I want to go home, I probably wouldn’t go below five thousand.”

  I nodded slowly. “Five thou it is.”

  If you could harness all of the energy wrapped up in one storm that size and put it into a spaceship, you’d have the most powerful rocket ever. This storm had sustained winds of 219 miles per hour. If it hit land without weakening, the storm surge would top 30 feet.

  It was magnificent.

  The updraft at the eyewall carried us up a thousand feet like an express elevator before I compensated. Then I kicked the plane into a slow clockwise spiral down into the eye—clockwise, against the rotation of the storm. The eye was thirty miles in diameter, not quite a perfect circle. The sun brightened a considerable portion of the ocean surface below. The eyewall was regular and well established, tiers of clouds extending all of the way down to the sea, the slight hourglass curve hardly noticeable.

  We had scarcely st
arted our descent when I heard a soft, “Oh, my God,” from Jenny. I glanced back just long enough to see that she had her face plastered against the window to her side. Ike was staring out past her, just as intently.

  “A little different than seeing it on a screen or in a tank, isn’t it?” I asked. If I hadn’t been so intent on the plane, I would have stared that way myself.

  “It’s so … so immense,” Ike managed after a moment.

  I chuckled. Ike and Jenny were both graduate students in meteorology, specializing in tropical cyclones, and they could still get that excited. So can I. It helps to get that involved in your work. It keeps it from being nothing more than a job.

  We spent nearly ten minutes at our slow descent, circling around the clear eye, staring out at the almost eerily regular tiers of clouds that marked the eyewall. It wasn’t just wasteful sightseeing. The survey plane carried a lot of weather instrumentation, and it was all running. Trident had too many hurricanes and too few researchers to get thorough data on every tropical cyclone that made its way across the Angry Sea.

  “Getting close to five thousand,” Casey informed me casually—with five hundred feet to spare.

  “OK. Going up.” I banked us around into the updraft closer to the eyewall and we took a real elevator ride to the top. Five thousand feet above the cloud cap, I asked Casey for a course to the category five and locked onto it. Then, as soon as we were away from the eye, there was time to relax a little and get back to normal breathing.

  “Wow!” Jenny said—some ten minutes later. It was her first word since early into our descent.

  * * *

  The category five storm wasn’t quite as broad as the category seven. The eye was also narrower, though just as sharply defined. I didn’t bother to take us nearly as deep into that one. We went down to 20,000 feet and took a couple of laps while the instruments recorded what they could. Then we climbed out and headed back for the center.

  “It’s pretty close to the stats on Hurricane Lisa,” Ike said as we crossed the cloud cap of the category five. “Size, sustained winds, pressure gradients—all within a couple of percentage points.”

  “They come in six packs here,” Casey said. “At the moment, it’s only the third largest active hurricane we’re tracking.”

  “And Lisa was the most powerful ever recorded in the Atlantic,” Jenny said.

  “We’ve gone to the top of category eight on the modified Saffir/Simpson and we think that category nines must occur occasionally,” Casey said.

  * * *

  I wrote that first full day on Trident off as acclimatization and told Jenny and Ike to take the rest of the afternoon to themselves after we landed. The weather had taken a turn for the worse at the center. A line of squalls was moving in. It had already started sprinkling and heavy rain was only minutes away.

  Ike and Jenny went on toward the living quarters as soon as we landed. I stayed out with Casey to go through the post-flight checklist on the plane. As we finally started for cover ourselves, I spotted several of the local chimps capering about—running along the roofs of the center’s buildings, jumping to the ground, then scampering back up.

  “They always carry on like that?” I asked.

  Casey laughed. “They get a little crazy when the barometer dips. The lower it goes, the wilder the chimps are. They’re sensitive to weather. A lot of the wildlife is, even this far from the coast.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “As extreme as the weather gets, knowing when heavy rain and storm winds are coming would be a definite survival advantage.”

  “No scoffing at all?” Casey asked. He looked as if he were genuinely surprised.

  “None at all. Just don’t tell me that your corns hurt when a big blow’s coming.” We both laughed. Casey didn’t seem the least bit put out by the arrival of “big guns” from Earth.

  Unfortunately, he was in a minority in that regard. Most of the members of the permanent staff seemed to share Donna Elkins’s resentment of me, my assistants, and our overriding authority from IWS headquarters. Our reception was generally very cool. I didn’t expect it to get any more cordial once the exact nature of the work we were on Trident to do became known.

  * * *

  Halfway through my second morning on Trident, Doctor Elkins knocked on my door and came into the room after barely waiting for any reply.

  “I’ve been running some simulations,” she said without any preliminaries. I nodded. I had assumed that she would. “What kind of explosives are you planning to use?”

  “Tri-thermolite-four initially,” I said. I turned my chair away from the computer terminal and leaned back. TT4 is the hottest, most powerful chemical explosive known, and we had forty tons of it.

  “Initially. And when that doesn’t work?” She didn’t say “if,” but “when.”

  “If that doesn’t work, we’ll go to hydrogen fusion devices,” I said, still calmly.

  There was no sudden, emotional outburst from the director. She had run her simulations. The answer was too obvious for there to be any surprise. She stared at me for a moment, then took a deep breath.

  “I thought that must be the answer,” she said. The tension was back in her voice, more obvious than before. “It had to be, even if it still doesn’t make sense.” She shook her head. “My first thought was that you can’t be serious … but you wouldn’t have come out here if you weren’t.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed when she paused.

  “But still, I can hardly believe it. No one has exploded a nuclear weapon in more than a century. It was against the law the last I remember. And what I really can’t—don’t—believe is that anyone would permit it back on Earth, even in the unlikely event that it would kill a hurricane.”

  “A few years ago, you would have been right,” I told her. “But you’ve been out of touch. After Hurricane Lisa, people would accept anything that could prevent a repeat.”

  “And you’re going to contaminate an untouched world just to try out this crazy theory of yours.” Statement, not question.

  “It’s not crazy,” I said. “And contamination will be minimal. The devices we have are nanofactured, as clean as possible. There will be some immediate radiation, of course, but little long-term contamination.”

  “Not to mention killing a lot of aquatic life,” Elkins said, as if she hadn’t even heard what I said.

  “It’s not as if Trident had any sentient life forms.” Yes, I know how callous and cavalier that sounds. But there are always trade-offs. And most humans still rank their welfare above that of inedible wildlife on a distant planet that is too wild for colonization to be an immediate prospect.

  “We haven’t been here long enough to rule out the presence of native sentients. Eight years! And that hasn’t been our primary purpose even. At that, those chimps might come close to some definitions of sentience.”

  “I know all the arguments,” I said. “All the ‘ifs, ands, and buts,’ and it still doesn’t alter a damn thing. Stacked up against the deaths, injuries, and property damage of Hurricane Lisa, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. As soon as we’re ready, we start the TT4 experiments. And if those don’t work, we go on to the fusion devices.”

  Doctor Elkins bit her lip so hard that I saw blood, but she didn’t say anything else. After a moment, she turned and left. I punched up the intercom channel on my terminal and called Jenny.

  “I want you and Ike in here, right now,” I said. It was time to talk about security measures.

  * * *

  Even though you can’t control experimental conditions as completely in the field as you can in a laboratory, you have to set tight standards. This is acceptable. That isn’t. The narrower your parameters, the more reliable your test data will be. And even then nature can come up with a surprise that might destroy the validity of your experiment.

  We needed data that would be applicable to conditions on Earth. We needed storms that were category five and threatened land, but right off the bat I ru
led out using any tropical cyclone that reached category six or higher at any point in its career. I also ruled out daisy-chained storms—and that cut seriously into the available test population. There was a chain of three hurricanes dancing across the Angry Sea when we arrived on Trident. Our experiments also demanded storms that had strong and clearly defined eyes. And, to protect the integrity of our test data, we ruled out any storm that showed any sort of maverick activity, any anomalies that weren’t routinely observed in hurricanes and typhoons on Earth. Other than that, any storms would do.

  Ike and Jenny did the first tag on storms, tracing them back to their formation and logging all the available data—data that became better for storms that brewed after our new satellites were operating. I reviewed the storms that my assistants logged, ruled out about half right away, and followed the rest.

  We had been on Trident eleven days before I finally picked a storm for our first test.

  “Isolate the trace and double up the satellite coverage,” I told Jenny. From that moment on, Trident tropical cyclone SSE-14-42 would be under the microscope. Until the storm died, whether as a result of our interference or on its own, we would draw every possible bit of data from it. I had already called Donna Elkins to tell her that we had our first candidate.

  “If it stays good, we’ll take off at dawn, day after tomorrow, deploy and push the button as soon as we can.” That was what I had told Elkins, and that was what I told my assistants. “Ike, let’s take a look at our birds.”

  We walked. That was as close as we could come to being sure that we wouldn’t be overheard. The center didn’t have a lot of equipment for eavesdropping, but wherever you have radios and computers, you have the potential.

  “Have you picked up even the slightest hint that anyone might try to stop our experiments?” I asked softly, once we were well away from the main complex of interconnected buildings.