“I wouldn’t be so quick to say that, Donna. It’s true that none of our experiments so far have produced any lasting effect, but the last two have produced measurable results. The problem is that we have too few data points to make adequate extrapolations and the interactions are too complex to model with enough precision to make up for it.” Even calm weather is difficult to model in detail, and we were dealing with hurricanes and large explosive countercharges.
Donna Elkins didn’t show any reaction at all to what I said. She was looking at me, but I’m not even certain that she was actually seeing me.
“In a lot of ways, this project is a monumental cock-up,” I conceded. “It was designed to meet political requirements more than scientific. It would help if we could do ten times as many experiments, keep working upward on the energy scale in logical steps. Ten times? Even a hundred times might not be too much. But there was only one ship available, and the General Assembly wouldn’t have funded more in any case. My instructions are quite clear.” And so are yours. I didn’t have to voice that last part. Donna knew it as well as I did.
“Given enough force, concentrated at the right spots at the right time, we can disrupt a storm, even a category five hurricane,” I said. One way or another, I qualified mentally. That wasn’t a product of our early experiments, just a theoretical certainty that it could be done—although if it took too much energy, the cure might be worse than the disease. “The only real question is whether the necessary force remains at an acceptable level.”
“It’s been more than a century since a nuclear bomb was last exploded,” Donna said. Bomb—I had deliberately avoided the word, and this was the first time she had used it in my presence.
“Bomb,” I said. For a moment, I let the word hang between us. “In a way, it may be a good thing to use what once would have been a weapon of war as a tool to save lives.”
“That’s a terribly transparent attempt at rationalization.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But 27,000 people killed by one storm is a lot harder to accept. Hundreds of thousands of people still living in refugee camps is harder to accept.”
“Nothing can bring the dead back. Nothing can erase the damage that Hurricane Lisa did,” Donna said. “For more than 200 years we’ve warned people not to build close to the ocean in hurricane zones. It hasn’t done a bit of good.”
“And it won’t do any good in the next 200 years,” I added. “Earth can’t afford to waste that much land. That’s why we have to find another way.”
“Even if your fusion bomb does kill a category five here, will they ever let you use it on Earth?”
“After Hurricane Lisa, yes,” I said, with more confidence than I really felt.
“So you cure the disease. How many people will the cure kill? We don’t have all the literature available here, but I seem to recall some death tolls much higher than 27,000 from nuclear weapons.”
“From fission devices used in war, and from accidents in old fission power generating stations nearby,” I said. “The only two instances of fusion weapons being used against people were terrorist acts, designed to kill.”
“Designed to kill or not. Radioactive fallout keeps killing for decades.”
“Not from our devices,” I said. “They are as ‘clean’ as possible, to use the old term for it. They were nanofactured to minimize radioactive fallout. There will be blast effects, high concentrations of neutrons, but very little lasting radiation. And the idea is to hit any storm as far from land as possible, so there should be little human exposure—here or on Earth.”
She was silent for several minutes. I didn’t get up or say anything. I hardly moved. I could see that Donna Elkins was still extremely unhappy with her situation. She had more to say—once she figured out what that might be.
“Have you picked out the storm yet?” she asked finally, lifting her head to look at me again.
“No. There’s nothing suitable just now.” I shrugged. “A couple of new tropical depressions forming in the eastern basin may turn out to fit our parameters. It’s too soon to tell.”
“Some of my people want me to force you to stop,” she said after another long pause. “They think you are endangering the native animals. A few of my people think that the Trident chimps are nearly sentient. And I have one man who gets almost hysterical at the very thought of nuclear explosions.”
“Kasigi?” It was an easy guess.
She nodded. “The Japanese remain extremely sensitive to the issue, even after two centuries. Casey tells me that he had relatives who lived in Nagasaki when it was bombed.”
“Do you think he’s likely to try anything … foolish?” I asked, hesitating before I added the last word. It sounded so banal.
“I don’t know,” Donna said, meeting my gaze directly. “I don’t even know what he might think he could do if he did want to do something.” A frown passed across her face. “I’m not used to thinking in those terms. Not here. Not with these people.”
That’s something else she’ll blame me for, I thought. “I’ll give you as much warning as possible before we use the fusion devices,” I said. “But I would appreciate it if you would hold back on that knowledge as long as you can.”
She shrugged. “It’s difficult to keep secrets here. People will know the minute you start to load your bombs anyway. And you’ve made no secret of your criteria.”
* * *
The next morning when I left my room to go to the dining hall for breakfast, I found a petition taped to my door. It was signed by every member of the permanent staff except the director. It was all very decorous—no threats, no polemic.
“We the undersigned members of the permanent staff of the Trident Hurricane Study Center request that you terminate your experiments immediately.”
Each signature was followed by the signer’s degrees. Every one of them had earned at least one doctorate. They were all highly qualified, responsible professionals.
I found it almost impossible to eat that morning. No one stared. They were quite careful not to stare. And no one said anything about the petition or our experiments. But they didn’t have to. The petition said enough.
* * *
I wanted a perfect specimen for our last trial.
I also wanted to get the fusion experiment run as soon as possible so that the three of us could gather the last of pur data and get back up to the ship waiting to take us home to Earth.
The longer the wait, the greater the chance that Casey—or someone else—would try to stop our final run. That gave me a powerful temptation to grab the first hurricane that even approached our established parameters. I started looking very closely at the separation between storms, and at hurricanes that were almost category fives, either a little too weak or a little too strong. Jenny and Ike shared my anxiety. Every day all three of us spent too many hours staring at the storm tracking data, as if we hoped to impose a suitable hurricane by force of will.
And we all got a little paranoid after the petition. We started looking over our shoulders whenever we were out among members of the permanent staff. We took our meals together, usually in my room. We checked the seals on the supply bunker and on our payload module a couple of times a day, tested the electronics on our last four Manta air sleds and their cargoes. Long days. Long nights. And the way we acted made the permanent staff more suspicious of us. They had been growing more distant almost from the beginning. Now, the separation became virtually complete. Except when it was absolutely necessary, we didn’t associate with them and they didn’t associate with us. Any communications went through Donna Elkins.
The first two prospective storms were wrong. Either might have been suitable, but they moved across the Angry Sea too close together for our purposes. Then the nearer crêche spit out three minor hurricanes—two that never got above category two and one that just barely reached hurricane force.
“I just wish we could get this over with,” Ike said, eight days after my last long talk with Doc
tor Elkins. “I’m ready to climb the walls.”
The three of us were walking back to the center from the bunker, about an hour before sunset. The sun was out—one more reminder that we hadn’t found a suitable storm yet. We had taken to spending as much of each day as possible out in the supply bunker. That kept us away from the staring eyes. It gave us some privacy, some sense of security.
“I can’t even sleep any more,” Jenny complained. “I keep hearing noises and imagining—well, just about anything.”
I knew what she was talking about. Twice I had experienced the same nightmare. In the dream, I woke to find that the local staff had bricked up the doors to our rooms in the night, that we were prisoners doomed to die of suffocation—real “Cask of Amontillado” stuff. I kept that dream to myself.
“Soon,” I said—wishful thinking. From my last look at the computer data, it would be at least another three days—and even that would take a few breaks.
* * *
Sometimes you get the breaks.
As soon as I was certain that we had the hurricane we needed, I went across the center to Donna Elkins’s office. She knew what I had to say as soon as I entered. She had the same view in her holotank that I had in mine.
“This one, right?” she asked, pointing at the storm I had chosen.
“That one,” I agreed. I took a deep breath. “Forty-eight hours from right now—if you still insist on that long a delay. We could take it on tomorrow though, if you have no one out where there might be a problem. The sooner we get this over with, the better everyone here is going to feel.”
She looked at the tank again, then looked down at her desk for a moment before she met my gaze.
“Unfortunately, I agree with you. No one is out at our sub-station.” There was a small facility on the coast. “People have been reluctant to wander too far the last several days.” There was an accusation behind that, but it was too late to matter.
“Do it tomorrow.” She turned away from me. I started to leave, but she said, “Wait.”
I waited. After a moment, she got up from her chair and came around the desk.
“You’ll be leaving as soon as you gather your data on this?”
“As soon as possible,” I said. “We can finish our evaluation process and write our reports on the trip home. I can’t see anyone here shedding any tears over our early departure.”
“No.” She went back to her chair and sat down. “It’s better that you leave quickly. Best that you had never come. Give us what time we have left to close out our work before they drag us back to Earth.”
“Don’t give up yet,” I told her—actually feeling a little sympathy for her. “We just might succeed.”
She turned away again and I left. I didn’t exactly run back toward our quarters, but I wasn’t taking a casual stroll either. I was about halfway there when Casey stepped out into the corridor in front of me.
“You found your storm, yes?” he asked—his voice very tight, very tense. Everyone at the center had access to the storm tracking data, and the expertise to interpret it.
“Yes, we found it,” I said. “I just left Doctor Elkins’s office.”
“So you set your bombs off in two days.” He didn’t make it a question, and I didn’t think that it was the time to correct his estimate.
“We’re going to run our final experiment,” I told him.
“You cannot. You must not!”
“We have to, Casey. You know that.” I didn’t see any hint of a weapon, but I could hardly have been more nervous if he had a gun pointed at my head. The tension that had been building at the center had pushed enough wild fears through my head. Casey was younger than me, probably stronger. I had no idea if he was a student of any of the “martial arts.” That had nothing to do with his ancestry. I think half the people on Earth study them for at least a while during their lives. Back in my undergraduate days, I spent some time at it myself. But I hadn’t kept up. You don’t win bureaucratic fights with judo or karate.
“It is an abomination. You cannot let this horror be reborn.” His voice was so tight that it sounded ready to snap. I started looking for a chance to get away from him.
“This time, maybe we can save lives with nuclear power, Casey,” I said. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
He drew himself up ramroad straight, took a deep breath, and held it for a moment.
“You will not cancel your plans?”
“I can’t.” I tried to balance my weight a little better, but I was carrying more poundage than I had when I frequented the dojo. But Kasigi just gave me a formal Japanese bow and walked off.
It wasn’t until he turned a corner that I realized how badly he had frightened me. I gave him a few more seconds and then I did run the rest of the way back to my room. I only stayed there a couple of minutes though before I went next door to the room Ike and Jenny were sharing.
“Time to load up,” I said very softly. “Take anything you can’t do without for the next twenty-four hours.”
Neither of them asked questions. They were starting to look a little like zombies from lack of sleep—puffy eyes with dark circles, worry lines across their foreheads, clenched teeth. Maybe it was a good thing I couldn’t see my own face. It probably looked just as frightful. Or worse. I hadn’t told Ike and Jenny about Casey yet. In any case, they didn’t need long to get ready—much less than a minute. We headed for the nearest exit from the building complex even though that meant detouring around a good part of the center before we could aim directly for the supply bunker.
“What’s up?” Ike asked once we had put fifty yards of open ground between us and the nearest building.
“We’re going out for our last hurricane tomorrow,” I said. I slowed down.
I had to if I was going to keep talking. The air only goes so far. Very briefly, I told them about my interview with Doctor Elkins … and about my strange confrontation with Kasigi Jo.
“You think he’ll try to stop us?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to take chances,” I told her. “We’ll pull a plane into the bunker, load the sleds, and lock ourselves in until it’s time to take off in the morning. Jenny, I want you to stay in the bunker while Ike and I are gone. Locked in. There’s at least one computer terminal in there so you’ll be able to do your work without any difficulty.”
When we reached the bunker, we searched it thoroughly—even though the tracer in the door showed that no one had even attempted to gain entry since the last time Ike and I had opened the door. Ike took a tractor and dragged one of the center’s Imre survey planes in for us. And then we locked ourselves in the bunker. As soon as the red light showed over the inside latch, I let out a long breath. We were as secure as we could get on Trident.
“OK, let’s take a short break,” I said. I plopped myself down on a packing crate and wiped the sweat from my forehead.
“You are worried,” Jenny observed.
I didn’t even try to deny it. “I want a complete check on the plane,” I said. “Not just the usual checklist, everything you can think of. I don’t think there will be any problems. Except for Doctor Elkins, everyone probably thinks we won’t go out until the day after tomorrow. But I don’t want to take chances.” I was getting a little sick of that phrase. “We’ll give the sleds the same kind of check.” I waited until Ike and Jenny both nodded.
“Then, if there’s anything left to the night, we can try to catch some sleep, but I want one of us awake, on guard, all the time. We’ll roll out at first light, take off at sunrise. That should put us in position over the eye with a few minutes to spare before it’s time to deploy the sleds.” The storm we had pinpointed was more than 800 miles east of the center, a couple of time zones, and I wanted to run the detonation as close to noon—local time in the eye—as possible.
* * *
It was a long, miserable night even though no one disturbed us. We didn’t even have any calls over the complink. But that did
n’t keep us from being jumpy. It didn’t keep us from starting at every real or imagined noise. We checked every circuit on the plane, then visually inspected every part of it we could get at, comparing what we saw with the plans that the computer carried. We ran through checks on the four remaining Manta air sleds and their cargoes. Finally, we loaded the sleds aboard the Imre and inspected them again.
“That’s about all we can do until morning,” I said when we were finished with the sleds. It was well past midnight. In a little more than five hours it would be time to taxi the plane out to the landing strip. “You kids find someplace to get comfortable for a while. I’ll take the first watch.” I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. Even when I’m not nervous, sleep takes its own sweet time coming.
Even with the plane sitting in the middle, the bunker was roomy. There was plenty of space for me to pace without bumping into things all the time. We were almost certainly safe in the bunker. The lock would be hard to breach. At the very least, we would have warning. And, as far as I knew, the only explosives on Trident were in that bunker with us. I don’t mean just the fusion devices. A few explosive charges were kept around for construction and for seismic probes. It would take a cutting torch and probably more than an hour to get through the door. If a few members of the staff tried to get in, I could call for help and there would be time for help to arrive. Doctor Elkins would have to respond. The ship waiting for us in orbit would monitor any open call I made.
A security camera covered the outside of the bunker door, so no one could hide out there and surprise us when we opened up to run the plane out to the landing strip in the morning.
But I stayed nervous. I could empathize with Casey, and with Donna Elkins and the others. Different cases. Most of the permanent staff of the Trident Hurricane Study Center had put their professional lives fully into the work on Trident. The center literally was Elkin’s career, twenty years of dedication and work. And she saw it all going down the drain for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality or utility of her work, because of something she had no control over at all—and over an experiment that she saw as impossible.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 66