Mote in Andrea's Eye

by Wilson, David

  If something happened on one front that caused a reaction on another, they would find it. Already they were able to predict which direction a storm might turn with some accuracy, and whether it would increase in strength. These things couldn’t prevent the storm from hitting, but they could save lives, and for Andrea, that was what it all boiled down to.

  She needed to find a way to make them see the importance of her work, the vital nature of the data they had already accumulated. While Washington continued to believe that their main purpose was to find a way to stop, or slow hurricanes, Andrea knew that the true value of the work lay in the enhanced understanding of tropical depressions and storms in general, and the ability to predict their actions with more accuracy.

  To pit a few men and planes against the fury of such a storm, even a small one, was like sending a poodle out to herd elephants. No bomb ever dropped in aggression, not even those at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, had ever, or would be likely in the future to contain the explosive power of a single large hurricane.

  “So,” she asked herself quietly, “why are you standing here at the window watching that flyboy take off into the sky when you should be writing the letter?”

  She didn’t know the answer to that any more than she knew what she could say that would save Stormfury.

  She stepped to the chart table and glanced down. The storm hadn’t moved much since she had shown it to Captain Wicks, but it was no longer the only thing being plotted. The four seed craft had been added in, and the fifth, the observer, roared down the runway behind her. She heard the engines rev and felt the vibration, even from so far away, as the powerful thrumming shook the windows and walls gently.

  Andrea shook off her concerns for the moment, and moved to one of the radar consoles. The young man seated in front of it looked up as she stepped near.

  “Would you like a look, ma’am?” he asked politely.

  Andrea nodded. She didn’t think she should tell him she’d logged more time in front of one of these scopes than he had in his Naval career. It wasn’t important. What was important was that this be the day—the one time in all of the missions they’d planned, aborted, and flown—that they’d get the results they needed. In the end, it was the only real hope she had of continuing her work with Operation Stormfury. She might buy them some more time with an impassioned letter or two. She might be able to pull a few more strings, offer to fund a little more of the work herself if they extended their support, but this would be the last season.

  If they didn’t stop a hurricane before the end of the storm season this year, then this branch of the research was at its end, and it would be time for her to move on. She wasn’t wholly unprepared for such an outcome, but it was frustrating.

  She took the offered seat, and placed her forehead to the rubber hood that covered the radarscope. The screen itself was amber, backlit dimly. The surface was littered with bright dots and squiggled patterns. Some of it was clouds, some of it was just return from the ocean itself, but in the upper right of the screen, she saw it. The storm. It was larger than it had been the last time she’d looked, and much closer. It seemed to have picked up strength, as they had hoped. Maybe more than they had hoped.

  She also saw the five aircraft, the four on a straight course for the storm, and the fifth slanting off to the near side and rising higher. She worked a control and placed a small circle over the lead seed plane. With a click of her finger, she brought up a set of rings. The rings showed distance from base. They were already well on their way, and it was hard, even though she knew it was true, to see the tiny yellow blips of light as men.

  “We still have quite a while,” the young man offered, trying to make conversation.

  Andrea smiled, and was glad that the rubber hood hid the expression from him. They were all very helpful, but she knew that most of them, particularly the younger sailors, had a hard time figuring out how to handle working for a woman, particularly a younger and not unattractive woman. As often as not they stumbled over themselves trying to be helpful.

  “Yes,” she said, rising. “Let’s see if we can get the lead aircraft on the radio.”

  The boy nodded and returned to his seat. A small communications console flanked each of the radarscopes. The young man, Petty Officer Carlson was his name, flipped a toggle switch and depressed a large, square plastic button. He then picked up a headset, planted it firmly on his head and began to speak, issuing his own call sign and that of the aircraft.

  “Sierra Poppa One, Sierra Papa One, this is Sierra Foxtrot, over.”

  His voice crackled through the small speaker beside him, and when he released the key on the headset, his voice was replaced by steady static. He waited a moment, and then repeated his call. On the second try, a response came through, clear, but sounding very far away.

  “Sierra Foxtrot, this is Sierra Papa One. Read you fivers, over.”

  Carlson turned to Andrea with a quizzical raise of his eyebrows.

  “Tell him the storm has strengthened,” she said. “And ask them to get as low over it as they can. This might be our last shot this year.”

  The boy quickly relayed her information, and her instructions.

  “Is Miss Jamieson there, over?” came the tinny reply.

  Andrea blushed, but nodded.

  “Yes sir, right beside me, over.”

  “Tell her for a hamburger I’ll drop to five thousand feet, but anything lower than that it’s going to have to be steak. This is Sierra Poppa One, over, and out.”

  “Sierra Foxtrot, out,” Carlson replied automatically, and then he broke into a huge grin.

  Andrea blushed harder and turned away, but not before he caught her smiling in return. Without a word she returned to her desk. Instead of taking up her pad and paper again, she neatly stacked and filed all the loose work and cleared enough space for the readouts that had already begun spewing from the Teletype and the facsimile printer. They were initial reports from the observer craft, initial radar and aerial shots of the storm, as well as a set of “control” readings meant to help calibrate the transmitters and respective receivers.

  From this point on there was nothing to do but to watch, and to wait. Now that the young radar operator was back in place behind his scope, the readings resumed, and the steady scratch of the stylus on the chart tracked the slow progress of the storm, and the quicker advance of the aircraft.

  The amount of preparation, paperwork, and luck that went into planning such an experiment was incredible. Andrea had managed to get all of the pieces in place three or four times over the span of several years. There were only certain seasons of the year that tropical depressions formed in any great number, or with any strength. They traveled across warm water, down through the gulf, and without the proper meteorological conditions, a storm wasn’t even possible.

  Much of their research in preventing the storms from reaching shore involved an emulation of the conditions in nature during the off-season. It wasn’t conceivable that they could stop a storm once it had reached its full fury, but if they could lessen it, or disrupt it, remove the path by which it would normally travel, or shake up the environmental conditions violently enough, they might cause the shift that would allow the storm to fizzle on its own.

  One problem with this approach, of course, was that even if they succeeded, the reaction they caused would be almost identical to the course nature would eventually take herself, and that being the case, it was very difficult to convince others in her field, let alone generals and politicians, that the results they achieved were anything at all. They needed one storm to give them a radical shift, a shift that could reasonably be attributed to their program. So far, they’d caused only minor changes, and it was questionable whether those changes were happening because of the cloud seeding, or if they happened on their own.

  Andrea knew she could go to the press. They were always around, and always available. The title of the project had leaked somehow, and anything with a name like Stormfury, e
ven after years of producing nothing newsworthy, was worth watching. Who knew what the government might be hiding away in the dark recesses of buildings like this one? Another Area 51? Some new experimental aircraft?

  The thing was, the press would take the information to the public, and the public was an even harder sell than the government. They would want immediate results, and after the first set of questions didn’t net them anything spectacularly newsworthy, the press would start digging into the budget and the money being spent.

  Taxpayers could ignore what they knew nothing about, but the minute you started telling them about some harebrained scheme to hunt hurricanes with their money backing it, they were all ears. Going public would just speed up the inevitable end.

  She worked steadily through the readouts, making entries in a series of logbooks and marking charts. The storm had grown more quickly than they thought it would. It was nearly a Category two now, and its breadth was enormous. Andrea frowned.

  She didn’t believe it posed any greater danger to the pilots, but if the storm got any bigger, the amount of silver iodide they had planned on would not be enough. It had barely been adequate, to her mind, for a tropical storm, let alone a hurricane, and nothing like the size of this one. Despite their greater understanding of hurricanes, they were as often wrong as right on the strength and direction of any given storm.

  If it had happened any earlier, she probably would have called them back. There were two more small depressions forming, and there was still time to divert their resources to one of these before the end of the season, assuming the budgetary plug wasn’t pulled immediately. They were committed, though, and the aircraft were nearly in place. Another hour, and the silver iodide pellets would be plummeting into the frothing, whirling mass of the storm.

  Andrea wondered what it looked like from above. She’d seen pictures. There were aerial photographs, and the facsimile machine gave them a rough approximation of the storm, but she knew it would be different from the air. How could it not be? It would be the difference between holding a postcard of Niagara Falls in your hand, and standing on the precipice, staring over the edge to the crashing foam below.

  The thought gave her a moment of vertigo, and she laid her head on her desk. The second her eyes closed, she saw the line stretching out over the waves. She saw and heard the water rushing beneath her and felt the change of pressure as the back window of her home burst inward and spewed glass and water and wind through the center of the kitchen and into the rear wall.

  She heard the creaking, tearing groan of Muriel’s house teetering over backward, and crashing into the water.

  “Ma’am?”

  A hand dropped lightly onto her shoulder and she released the memories with a rush of breath. She lifted her head and found the lieutenant standing over her desk, looking down at her in concern.

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “I just haven’t been getting much sleep.”

  He nodded. Then he spoke. “The planes are in position,” he told her. “They’ve begun their descent.”

  She rose quickly and followed him back to the chart table. She wanted to take over the radarscope again, but knew it was pointless. Petty Officer Carlson was well trained, and she’d learn more by listening to his steady reports than she would from watching the display herself.

  She saw that the four aircraft were now plotted directly above the storm’s position.

  The radio crackled.

  “Foxtrot Sierra, Foxtrot Sierra, this is Sierra Papa One, come in. Over.”

  The radar operator thumbed his switch and replied. “Sierra Papa One, this is Sierra Foxtrot, read you five by five, over.”

  “Foxtrot Sierra, read you same. Dropping altitude on my mark.”

  Slowly, the four planes fanned out and descended on the forward wall of the storm. Captain Wicks’ steady voice droned over the speaker, dropping to twenty-five thousand feet, fifteen thousand feet, and on down. At six thousand feet his voice wavered. There was a roaring sound just for an instant, and a crackle of static.

  The radar operator keyed his microphone. “Sierra Papa One, Sierra Papa One, repeat your last, you are breaking up, over.”

  There was nothing but static and silence. The speaker popped once then again, but that was all they heard. The radar operator tried again, but the result was the same.

  He turned to the lieutenant, wild-eyed. “We’ve lost them, sir!”

  “Keep trying,” the lieutenant said, his voice calm, but his face pale. “Keep trying. The storm may have put up some interference. Try raising the observer and see if they can get through.”

  The boy flicked his toggle to the second channel and he spoke quickly. “Echo Sierra India, Echo Sierra India, this is Sierra Foxtrot, do you copy? Over.”

  After a slight delay, the pilot of the observation craft crackled over the line. The radar operator explained the communications loss.

  “Sierra Foxtrot, that’s a negative,” the man replied. “We still have them on radar, but I get no response.”

  “Roger.”

  They kept at it, frantically shifting from frequency to frequency. Andrea gripped the edge of the chart table so hard that her knuckles turned white, and the lieutenant leaned close over his chart. He was not marking anything, but his head was cocked toward the speaker and his eyes were closed, as if in prayer.

  Chapter Eight

  Far above the cloud layer, it was difficult to believe that the storm existed. Phil kept a close watch on his instruments, knowing that the weather was unpredictable, but it was hard, from where he sat, not to enjoy the afternoon. It was bright, and the flight had been quick and pleasant. Matt had kept up a steady stream of banter about the upcoming World Series. The Dodgers would have Koufax on the mound, and the Twins were hot this year. It was going to be a series to remember, and Matt loved the game. You could see it in the twinkle in his eyes, and the animated way he swung his hands around when he spoke.

  Phil liked baseball well enough, but he really didn’t care who won. He was a Chicago Cubs fan, and his boys weren’t in the running. He stared out over the clouds and thought about the load they were carrying.

  They had trained for this. The drop was different than the bombs they would have released over a target in the war. These packages dispersed gradually, opening on a mechanism similar to those that first time parachutists used. As the cylinders of silver iodide pellets rolled out and began their downward spiral into the heart of the storm, lines fastened to the aircraft would pull taut, just for a moment, and flip open compartments on the side of each load. This, along with the natural spiral as they dropped, would allow the cylinders to release their cargo in a pattern that spread out over the widest possible area. They would drop several in their run, then pull up and away and head back to base. The other three aircraft would spread along the near perimeter of the storm, punch in over the outer wall of the eye of the storm, and perform the same task.

  It was a good enough plan, he supposed. The problem was, the plan had been conceived to seed the eye-wall of a storm seventy-five miles across. This one had grown astronomically. The last report he’d seen brought the winds almost to Category two, and his radar, coupled with some reports from the observation craft, set the boundaries out around two hundred miles. A two hundred mile storm was going to take a hell of a lot more silver iodide to stop than what they had brought with them, at least if it was dropped from the five thousand feet originally planned.

  It was possible that if they came in lower and concentrated their loads strategically along the way, that the effect, localized as it might be by such an action, would break the continuity of the storm’s front.

  He wished he could discuss this with someone who knew more than he did about storms, and this process in general, but there was no time. They were directly over the storm now, banking and turning, and all he had to go with was his very basic understanding of the process from a quick perusal of the brochure. Lifting his microphone, he called in to base.

/>   “Foxtrot Sierra, Foxtrot Sierra, this is Sierra Papa One, come in. Over.”

  The response was quick and clear.

  “Sierra Papa One, this is Sierra Foxtrot, read you five by five, over.”

  Phil smiled and keyed his microphone again. “Foxtrot Sierra, read you same. Dropping altitude on my mark.”

  Flipping channels, Phil called to the other aircraft. “Sierra Papa Squadron, this is Sierra Papa One. Over.”

  Three responses crackled quickly over the air.

  “I’m going to drop down lower than planned,” he said slowly. “Dropping load at thirty-five hundred feet, vice five thousand feet. Over.”

  “That’s pretty low, Captain,” a voice crackled back. Then, almost in afterthought, “Over.”

  “This storm is bigger than it’s supposed to be,” Phil said. “I want to concentrate our drops. If we release too high, the pellets will spread too quickly, and in a storm this size, we’ll be spitting in the wind. If you feel turbulence, or things go south, pull up and regain altitude. I had a buddy flew over one of these puppies once—he said you could get down to three thousand safely.”

  He got three affirmatives, and smiled.

  “I’ll see you all on the other side of the storm,” he said with finality. “This is Sierra Papa One, over and out.”

  The radio went silent, and Phil turned to Matt, who watched him carefully. “You sure about this, skipper?” the younger pilot asked. “I’ve never been that close over a hurricane before.”

  “Don’t know if anyone has, other than that old buddy of mine,” Phil replied. “We’ll pull up at the first sign of trouble. I just don’t want to be wasting our time out here.”

  Matt nodded, but he seemed anything but sure. “We lost comms with the base,” he said. “I tried them a couple of times while you were telling the others. Nothing but static.”