by John Barnes
“Understood,” Carla says. “I won’t talk—I don’t like most people that much.”
“So Harris tells me. All right, then. Is there, in principle at least, any way in which we can intervene to turn this thing off? Since it was a human action that set it running, is there anything we could do to get rid of it?”
Carla draws a breath as she thinks, changes her mind as she’s drawing it, draws more breath, finally lets it out without quite having decided on an answer. “It’s a physical process. So in principle it can be modified. But it involves immense amounts of energy across vast areas, so the means to modify it may be beyond us.”
“Suppose you talk principles first.”
“All right. One, if we could make the outflow jet move around to due south and keep it there, we could drive the thing right up the Bering Strait or across Siberia, whichever you prefer, and let it die in the cold like a normal hurricane. I suppose it might do that of its own accord anyway.
“Two, if we could make the water cold in front of it, it would die. Removing methane from the air would work but would take a long time; it would be better to turn off the sunlight.
“And that’s about it. To kill a hurricane you cool off its feet. I suppose you could warm its top, too—perhaps with a huge solar mirror—but frankly this thing is so big I’d be worried about giving it a chance to break through the tropopause and extend all the way up into the stratosphere. We might be removing the current constraint on its size by doing that. No, I think if you want to kill it you have to get it over a cold surface—either by moving the hurricane or by cooling the surface. It is moving randomly, you know, and it will probably find a surface big enough to cool it sooner or later.”
“But isn’t every other hurricane this year going to grow to this size?” Henry Pauliss asks. “In fact, we’ve been lucky so far not to have one in the Atlantic, which has actually warmed up a little more than the Pacific. We could have another Clem there anytime.”
“Or something like it,” Carla admits. “You’re right, of course. Given their tendency to circle—assuming that Clem is typical, and generalizing from a sample of one is stupid and I hate it but I guess we have to—if Clem is typical and most such hurricanes do circle, then there’s little question that they’re going to last longer. And if they last longer, they’ll overlap each other more in time—you won’t have any weeks when there aren’t one or two or more of them tearing up some part of the world. No, I suppose if you can do something about them, then just letting them die naturally isn’t good enough.”
“It certainly isn’t,” Hardshaw says. “So you think the best route would be to, as you say, turn off the sunlight?”
“Sure. If you could give the Earth a moon in geosynchronous, inclined orbit so that it moved north and south in a tight figure eight, and set it up so that the northern part of its motion coincided with daytime… and if that moon was big enough to cast a shadow a few hundred kilometers across… after a while you’d have a nice belt of cold water for Clem to run into and die in. But it would have to be an awfully big moon. Geosynchronous is one-tenth as far as the moon is, the natural moon, I mean, and you’d need a shadow fifty times what the moon casts in a total eclipse… whatever it was would be huge in the sky, seven full moons across. Physically it would be bigger in diameter than the Earth.”
“So a Mylar balloon—”
“Would work, sure, if you could keep it in position. And if you could inflate something thousands of kilometers across. Is that what you’re thinking of using?”
President Hardshaw would be a tough lady to play poker with. She doesn’t blink, she doesn’t wince, she doesn’t check to see if Diem has reacted—he hasn’t but Pauliss has, and look here, poor old Di, never really one for intrigue, sits up straight. Obviously Ms. President has made them all swear blood oaths or something that they won’t even vaguely think about telling her what they really want to know, and now she’s spilled it herself.
The only thing Carla has ever learned to like about dealing with power is how easy it is to embarrass people who have it.
After a long instant, Hardshaw says, “Well, that cat’s out of that bag. Yes, we’re thinking of using Mylar balloons, though not in the way you describe.”
“I’m a meteorologist, not a payload specialist.”
“We have an offer to put many thousands of them into highly elliptical orbits, with twenty-four-hour periods, with perigee falling across the North Pacific in daylight. And they’d be a couple hundred kilometers across, but they’d be coming down to within a hundred fifty kilometers of the surface, so they’d probably make only two or three approaches before they burned up on re-entry. But if they were timed right…”
“You’d need a lot of them,” Carla wams.
“Understood. But could it work?”
“With the right coordination, and with enough of them,” she says. She’d been impressed with Hardshaw up till now, but really she keeps asking the same question over and over. “Do you want me to work on exactly how you’d do it?”
Hardshaw says, “On that we’ll have to get back to you. We have what amounts to a bid in hand to do the job, and I will really want your input about that bid. May we send you a copy for your review?”
“Certainly.”
“Good. I will look forward to hearing your report—and I do mean hearing; let Harris Diem know when you’re ready to talk about it, and he’ll set you up in conference with me. And thank you, Carla, the country already owes you a great debt and I think we will owe you more before this is over.”
Yeah, but can I collect it and take it to the bank? one part of Carla thinks. She stifles it and says, “I’m flattered, Ms. President.”
When she hangs up, there’s a short call from Louie. The poor big dumb lug is missing her, too. Everybody seems to need Carla today.
She’s not sure she likes it.
After they click off from Carla Tynan, and from Di Callare and Henry Pauliss, President Hardshaw turns to Harris Diem and says, “I can certainly see why Pauliss chose to give us that particular head on a plate three years ago.”
“Irritating, isn’t she?” Diem says.
“Not at all.” Hardshaw stands up, stretches, groans. “She’s blunt and she’s effective and she understands the physical world. For that matter, she understands politics. Before I was officially on, while I was just watching, you saw that little smile of pleasure when you slapped Pauliss in front of her? She knew exactly what was happening to him.”
Diem spent the last hour of work last night on the phone to Henry Pauliss, assuring him that no one was out to get him and that everyone understood that all he had ever done was to carry out policy decisions from higher up. He’s known Pauliss for ten years or so and the two have consistently been on warm personal terms; they’ve shared an occasional social evening because Harris Diem, a bachelor who doesn’t date, is constantly out to dinner, sports, or theatre with all sorts of people, generally people that the Administration has some reason to like.
So last night, when it was becoming clear to Pauliss that he was going to be the goat for NOAA, Pauliss called Diem and did his best to find some safe hiding place in the Chief of Staff’s shadow, and Diem made soothing noises and said he would do what he could.
Diem had meant it, too; there is a loyalty owed to the people who work for you, just as much as to the people you work for—unless they conflict. And Hardshaw told him to spend some time on the line with the meteorologists and with Pauhss—and to make sure Pauliss was embarrassed and shaken.
“Well,” Diem says, tentatively, “I suppose you mean you can see why she’d irritate someone like Pauliss.”
“Yes, exactly. Poor Henry Pauliss. Used to be a real scientist and got turned into a yes-man, and now the damned President is demanding real scientists. Not his fault at all.”
“So is he going to take the fall for us? Berlina Jameson has been nosing around—”
“Berlina—oh, Sniffing. Good little show.”
She’s showing her age in that, Diem thinks, for only people of “President Grandma’s” generation and older still call video documents “shows.” But he only says, “Well, it’s well-presented and it’s popular. And Jameson certainly does her research—”
“She’s like a throwback to the people I grew up watching,” Hardshaw agrees. “People like Dan Rather… and of course you know Rather got his start ripping into the Nixon White House. Which the Nixon White House happened to have coming. So I imagine you’re afraid that I might be planning to throw Pauliss to Berlina Jameson to keep the heat off us?”
Diem shakes his head emphatically. “I don’t think you’re dumb enough for that, boss. That kind of thing always smells like a cover-up, and if you have video reporters on it, it’s bad enough, but if there’s any strong hint that there might be a cover-up, you’ll have detectives from every XV channel in the world crawling all over us to find it. And finding god knows what else on the way. ‘Intrepid reporter penetrates cover-up’ is what they feed on—look what happened to those poor stupid bastard doctors after their old folks’ home blew down.
“No, I’m more afraid that Henry Pauliss might panic and decide that he’s going to be thrown to the wolves. In which case he’s smart enough to run to Berlina Jameson and tell her everything he knows.”
“And what does he know?” Brittany Hardshaw sits back, fixing Diem with a mild, easy gaze. “He knows that we decided to get rid of Anticipatory Section to reduce the chances of Global Riot Two, since the first one had happened after one of their reports. He knows that if we’d still had an Anticipatory Section we might have known how much trouble we were in much sooner. And that’s about all.
“Give him some reassurance, and then call Jameson yourself and dump the story in her lap. Offer her an interview if you can give her the time. Make it clear that we really blew it, but we blew it for good reasons, and don’t hold anything back.”
“Boss, this openness obsession of yours is going to cause a lot of trouble.”
Hardshaw gestures at the huge pile of paper, the “summary report” on the loss of millions of lives in Hawaii and the estimates of the time needed to repopulate—indeed to resettle—the islands. “We’re already in a lot of trouble, Harris, I don’t think you’ll even notice this little bit more. Now, second and more important on our agenda—get me Rivera; we need to talk about this proposition Klieg is throwing at us.”
Henry Pauliss walks out of his office and considers. He has an ex-wife who has married again. There are two secretaries he sometimes has sex with, and one young woman he’s been courting without success for a while. Other than that, ball games with Diem and a few members of Congress have been his social life.
He has no kids. There’s a large pile of cash in the bank, but Pauliss has never really figured out what to do with it. His will is still made out to his ex, but that doesn’t matter much to him.
He considers all the usual things—that he could delay for a last fling of luxury, a good meal, a good bottle, maybe even a good prostitute? None of it appeals to him. He could resign (they’ll want that anyway) and have a religious conversion, or just take his pile of money and go fishing somewhere. There are some places he hasn’t seen and things he hasn’t done.
But if he ever cared about them, he stopped caring quite a while back. Probably the Pauliss who cared about taking the time to really see Europe or to hike the Appalachian Trail would also have cared enough to resign during the months when they covered up the real data. Certainly if he had wanted a real life with real friends, he’d have wanted it before now. There’s just not much reason to continue to go on….
It’s a complete cliché, he knows, but it works. He walks into a convenience store, presents his i.d., and buys a Self Defender. The little hypersonic pistols are designed purely as weapons against street crime; they contain only twenty rounds and can’t be reloaded, each of them carries a chemical dye packet that stains the hand that fires it with a unique identifier (matching an i.d. capsule in the rounds it fires), and when it fires, it also sends out a “radio scream” that police direction finders can instantly spot. If a woman is attacked in a deserted street, and uses it, not only does it stop the attack, but it also summons help.
But because of its identifier features and its “scream,” it’s useless for robberies, gang murders, or assassinations.
What the designers never anticipated was that it does have another use, and that’s the cliché Henry Pauliss is counting on. If you shoot yourself, it is always possible that failure of nerve, physical weakness, a mistake, or sheer bad luck may lead to your only being wounded. And if that happens, chances are that you’ll be in quite a bit of pain. Even if you’re going to try again, you want the ambulance to get to you right away.
Use a Self Defender, and the ambulance is right there.
Pauliss walks over to Memorial Park, on the site of the old Capitol, and sits down on one of the walls of rubble, like any of the bums and drunks out there at this time of day. Then he pulls out the Self Defender, places the muzzle back against his upper palate, and squeezes the trigger.
The ambulance is there in less than two minutes, just as he had planned, but Henry Pauliss is already dead.
It is not normal for a hurricane to move away from a pole or in the direction of the Earth’s rotation—at least not for a normal hurricane. Not that hurricanes don’t. Just that the physics tends to drive them to move toward the pole and to the west. Toward the west, because the Earth turns under them, dragging its envelope of air eastward with it, and the hurricanes are a bit more resistant to being dragged than the air around them. Toward the pole, because the Coriolis force is stronger as you move farther from the equator, so the spinning winds curl more tightly on the poleward side, the pressure is just that much lower on that side of the eye, and thus the eye itself tends to creep that way.
Moreover, in most of the Northern Hemisphere’s great hurricane formation zones—the Pacific near southern Mexico and in the area south of the Philippines, the Bay of Bengal, and the Caribbean Sea—it happens that the steering currents blow to the north and to the west, so the hurricane is usually being guided by the steering current and is following its own inclination.
But Clem is not usual or normal. The outflow jet has driven it to the south of Hawaii; in that area the steering currents are generally due south. For a while the outflow jet continues to push the hurricane eastward, and the steering current carries it south, so that it passes the American West Coast and Baja at a great distance, creating the best surfing seen on those coasts in years, sending unseasonably heavy thundershowers into the coast for a day or so, but not much disturbing the rhythm of life.
The outflow jet, sputtering around, at last finds its way back to lining up with the steering current. And thus it is that Clem accelerates to the south, and once again behaves like a normal hurricane, driven to the west. Clem is headed back for his birthplace—and for another rampage through the Pacific.
On July 5, about an hour after sunrise reaches the empty stretch of the Pacific Clem has moved into, the giant hurricane is at 16N 124W, and is now headed almost due south. Louie Tynan, working by telepresence on the moon, is asked to hurry along the first of the weather satellites he’s building, if he can. There doesn’t seem to be any way, so he says he will see what he can do.
Di and Carla are watching Clem, but not as closely as before. Di has a lunch meeting in Washington with leaders of various other NOAA teams, just a few moments away, and so he’s mainly worried about his notes for his presentation. And it’s still only two in the morning in the Solomons, where Carla has at last come into port.
She’s not exactly asleep but she’s not exactly awake, either. She’s lying on a too-sloshy waterbed in her room in the Mendana Hotel, allegedly as good a room as you can get in Honiara, but her newly upgraded data socket (surgery courtesy of an American government slush fund) is plugged into one of about twenty working current-generation universal data j
acks on the whole island of Guadalcanal, and what she’s doing is letting herself drift and doze, randomly associating her way through the vast regions of open net.
If she were paying for this herself the cost would be astronomical, but she’s not—it’s another gift of Uncle Sam’s, who seems to be treating her as a favorite niece these days. Unlimited data access is something she’s wanted to mess around with in just this way for a long time, because her best ideas often come to her in the edges of sleep. So she’s half dreaming, half awake, as she inventories the world’s resources and the scope of Clem, looking for a way to match up what can be launched with the shadows it must cast, trying to find out if Klieg’s scheme will work the way his team of “experts” say it will.
The thing is, at any one time there aren’t even three thousand people who do global weather forecasting or modeling for a living, and Klieg’s experts include only two of them, neither of whom has any reputation. But the lack of names or even of specialists on Klieg’s team does not by itself make that team wrong. And what they’re proposing to do—cool the water in one broad band across the Pacific to twenty degrees Celsius or below, so that there’s a place for Clem, and all the Clems to come, to die harmlessly rather than continue on for weeks or months—is not the problem. If the cold water is wide enough and cool enough, it will work.
The problem is mostly with what will happen to other things; are they creating another problem? And will what Klieg is proposing make a big enough difference to justify the price Klieg is asking?
Carla turns over in her sleep. That thought is really bothering her.
There’s no other word for it—Klieg is blackmailing, or rather trying to blackmail, the UN, into ratifying his launch monopoly, giving him a permanent, dominant position in space launch worldwide. He will in effect own the doorways off planet.
She winces and turns uneasily; if any observer could see the whole net at once, he would see the odd phenomenon of short, microsecond-long interrupts scattering and proliferating across billions of processors in response. Carla does not yet notice this; she herself does not yet understand the power of being plugged in and not having to pay.