Mote in Andrea's Eye

by Wilson, David

  It was Phil’s turn to nod. “Guess we’re on our own then, partner.” Then he grinned. “Let’s do it.”

  They dropped out of the upper cloud cover and Phil nearly pulled straight back up. The sight that met their eyes stole his breath and he felt a tingling, cold chill in the joints of his arms and caught at the base of his throat.

  “Jesus,” Matt said.

  The storm spread out in all directions in a dark mass. They were near the eye; it was clearly visible, and an almost calm patch of sea. All about it, though, the wind howled at incredible velocity. They were buffeted, even at twenty-five thousand feet, and Phil clung to the controls grimly.

  It wasn’t like a storm at all from where they watched it. It was like some huge, demonic presence; sliding over the ocean like a sidewinder, ready to strike. Phil realized he was holding his breath and released it with a nervous laugh.

  “Damn,” he said. “Just for a minute there I was being quiet—I think I was afraid it would see us and turn.”

  Matt nodded. His gaze was riveted to the roiling, whirling mass of air, water, and clouds that spun out beneath them. The lower they dropped, the wider the storm grew, filling the horizon to either side. If anything went wrong now, they were statistics. No way around it, and the destructive force beneath them was awesome in its scope.

  “You ready to drop this stuff off and get out of here?” Phil asked, forcing himself to break the silence. “I don’t know about you, but that thing gives me the creeps. I can’t shake the notion it knows we’re here.”

  Matt turned to him, and Phil saw his own sudden understanding of what they were up against mirrored in the other man’s eyes.

  “I’m ready,” Matt said. “Let’s get this done.”

  Phil pressed gently forward on the controls and the aircraft’s nose dropped slowly. The wind around them was rushing by at over a hundred miles per hour, but it was a steady, blowing force. Gusts could cause serious problems, but as they dropped into the hurricane’s grip, the sustained wind did little to upset their flight. Phil watched the gauges nervously, all the same.

  The wind chopped whitecaps from the waves and plowed a furrow across the surface of the ocean. You could see through in most places, like watching through a heavy fog, or driving rain, but at the same time it was a solid, focused entity, a single malevolent force of Mother Nature, grinding its way across the water.

  “Keep your eye out for funnels,” Phil said tersely. “This wind isn’t a problem, but the closer we get to land, the more chance of turbulence.”

  Matt nodded. His hand hovered over the drop button, and the other gripped hard on the armrest of his seat. It wasn’t likely the man would miss anything the way he was scanning the skies around them.

  A gust shivered over and around them and the nose of the plane dropped suddenly. Phil held on and rode it out. He felt the craft shudder, then resume its smooth flight. He took a deep breath, pressed in again on the controls, and dropped lower.

  “Thirty-five hundred feet,” he called out.

  Matt nodded. He flipped a toggle to activate his controls, and checked their position quickly. They had passed over the eye and were nearing the leading edge of the storm. As Phil banked slowly and ran them along that rim, Matt punched the first button. There was a low grinding whirr as hydraulic bay doors opened, another light jerk as the canister dropped away below them and the wire snapped open the door on its side. Phil got only a glimpse as he turned. The glittering silver cylinder dropped quickly, and behind it a shower of sparkling crystals floated for just a second, then whipped into the interior of the storm and were gone.

  A few moments later, Matt depressed the second button, but this time there was no way to watch the cylinder as it dropped away below them. They carried six loads, and they counted between the drops.

  Phil’s actions were almost automatic as the plane soared above the storm, and the canisters of silver oxide dropped away as before. Seeding the clouds—it had a magical sound to it, as if there was something that could be expected to grow from their actions. That wasn’t the image that stuck with Phil, however. Phil was thinking about North Carolina, cotton fields, and a man named Bert.

  Bert was a retired air force pilot. He’d had a little too much trouble with alcohol and discipline, so he’d left his military career behind and returned to buzz over the fields of North Carolina in a brand-spanking-new, brilliant yellow crop duster. Phil had watched the man strafe cotton fields, fly too low over the road, taunt traffic, and perform tricks that would give some of Phil’s own running mates heart seizures. Bert did all of this while drunk, and as often as not, while dropping a white mist of insecticide over the fields near Elizabeth City.

  That’s what this was like—crop dusting. There were no hordes of insects to be poisoned or prevented, but there was much worse. The wind below could strip those same cotton fields bare in a matter of a few moments, and take the roof off the barn, and the barn itself if you weren’t lucky. Tornadoes formed around the eye of the storm and removed entire city blocks, or a single tree, at their whim.

  Phil had once seen a feather that a tornado had driven into the solid bark of a tree. His grandfather showed it to him, and it was a lesson he never forgot. The weather was not something that could be ignored, and it was not likely that they would ever control it. It would be good to understand it better, but often as not getting close enough to do that was not in your best interests.

  The laws were getting stricter, and Phil figured if ol’ Bert didn’t mend his ways, he’d end up in jail eventually. If the man didn’t perform such a valuable service, and better than any of the other local pilots, he’d have been grounded long before. Phil remembered because he’d gone to school with Bert’s boy, Leon. Leon wanted to fly, like his daddy, but he didn’t want to learn from Bert. He’d signed up for the U.S. Air Force the same day Phil had signed up for the Navy. More years than Phil wanted to think about, in fact, had passed since that day.

  Matt pressed the final button and released the last of the cylinders to drop away, spinning into the maw of the storm. Phil concentrated on his instruments, and wondered briefly how things had gone for Leon in the military. The boy had already been well along the way to imitating his daddy’s drinking problem, but maybe the boys in blue had straightened him out. Maybe not. Maybe it was Leon soaring over the Great Dismal Swamp with the barrels of insecticide strapped into place and a maniacal grin on his face these days.

  As the final drop was completed, Phil eased back on the controls. The aircraft shuddered just once, caught in a crosswind, and then lifted gracefully. He was about to breathe a sigh of relief when Matt cried out.

  “Three o’clock, Skipper. Look out!”

  Phil glanced to the side just in time to see a whirling, slashing funnel of water bear down on them. There were several of the huge waterspouts, like tornadoes, born of the crazed atmospheric conditions around the storm’s edge. This one was huge, and though they would be above it, he knew they did not want to be caught in the drafts from that thing—not at this low altitude.

  Phil glanced at the altimeter and grimaced. Thirty-eight hundred feet. Not rising fast enough. He didn’t want to pull up too hard in this wind. It was steady for the moment, but more gusts could hit at any second, and if they caught him at the wrong angle they’d send the craft spinning away below, like the cylinders they’d dropped, to disappear into the choppy, foam-topped waves.

  Easing the control to the left, he fought the rising panic that screamed at him to yank back and soar out of there. Phil banked away from the waterspout. They were still rising—four thousand feet—four thousand two hundred feet—very soon they would have enough altitude that the funnel would not matter.

  It seemed impossible that their course would not intersect that of the swiftly moving spout. It snaked from side to side, and once again the impossible thought that the damned storm knew they were there invaded his mind. This—thing—this snake made out of water, whipped about with amazing speed
, undulating unpredictably as though writhing in pain, or swaying from side to side like a cobra, trying to mesmerize them so it could strike. Phil pulled a little harder on the control and banked more sharply to his left. They picked up speed, and the plane spun off on an arc and dove back into the cloud cover above.

  The spout was out of sight, and for a panicked moment, Phil thought they would hit it after all, that he would not be able to find it, or to avoid it, but then he saw the altimeter pass five thousand two hundred feet, and he released the breath. They’d made it. He flattened out and sharpened their angle of ascent, not leveling off until they reached fifteen thousand feet, well above any weather concerns.

  “That was too close,” Matt said. His face was still white, and his eyes had a glazed, faraway look that Phil didn’t like.

  The young pilot went on, not waiting for Phil to respond. “I swear it felt like that thing was some kind of big, hungry mouth, and it reached out to drag us in and swallow us whole. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Phil nodded. He picked up the microphone and called the other aircraft, one after the other. All responded within moments. Each had, it seemed, dropped only to about four thousand feet, and then pulled out. He couldn’t blame them.

  He flipped the toggle to the base frequency.

  “Sierra Foxtrot, this is Sierra Papa One, over.” He waited, and then repeated his message. On the second try he heard the eager young voice of the radar operator come back loud and clear.

  “This is Sierra Foxtrot. We thought we’d lost you, Captain. Welcome back. Over.”

  “Sierra Foxtrot, this is Sierra Papa One, load delivered from thirty-five hundred feet. We have turned and are en route to base. Over.”

  “Sierra Papa One, This is Sierra Foxtrot, read you five by five. See you in a few hours.”

  “Sierra Foxtrot, this is Sierra Papa One, copy. Tell Miss Jamieson that will be steak. Over.”

  Flipping the channel back to cut off further conversation, he set a course for the airfield. The others fell in behind him.

  He wondered what would come of it all. He’d seen the tiny pellets dropping into the rushing winds below, but he had no idea if they’d have the desired effect, or any effect at all. He knew, in fact, far too little about the storm they’d just faced off against. It had been a thrill to be so close, but at the same time the most terrifying experience of his life, including night flights through anti-aircraft fire. Nothing could have prepared him for it.

  Phil had seen plenty of propaganda and training films about atomic weapons. He knew the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he’d even been present for one remote test. None of it had impacted him in the way the snaking, whirling wall of water trying to swat him out of the air had done. He knew he faced several long nights and dark dreams over this one, and he hoped it wouldn’t be in vain.

  He wasn’t kidding himself. If the Navy thought it was a very important mission, he probably wouldn’t have drawn the assignment. There was no way to know how the rules of promotion, and advancement in the upper echelon of the U.S. Navy would shift on a day to day basis, but barring some strange circumstance where he rescued the President’s daughter from drowning and got an on-the-spot promotion, Phil knew his days as a Navy pilot were numbered.

  This flight had given him back something he hadn’t even noticed as it slipped away. He’d felt a spirit of purpose down there close to the storm, and he’d felt the same fire that accompanied battle. There was an enemy in the heart of that storm—maybe not a personal enemy, not yet—but he knew at least one person who was fighting it, and she owed him a steak.

  Maybe, he thought, as the lights of shore glittered on the horizon, this assignment will work out after all.

  ~ * ~

  Once the loads had been dropped, and the aircraft were safely up and away, Andrea and her people got down to the serious work. Two assistants arrived, their briefcases stuffed with printouts and maps, and ensconced themselves in the desks that flanked Andrea’s own. There was Tracy Brown, a petite blonde meteorologist on loan from UNC, and Tom Briggs, a research specialist. He was the one they counted on to take what they brought in and organize it into something useful. He worked in one of the Navy’s largest computer laboratories up in Norfolk, and once they had everything categorized, filed, and evaluated, he would take it and, along with his people, input it for further analysis.

  The initial findings were positive, almost positive enough to put a smile back on Andrea’s face. She was still on edge from the lost communication with the pilots, and she felt the memorandum weighing on her more heavily than she’d expected. She didn’t want to see the program shut down. She had the resources to continue her research, with or without Stormfury, but access to the pilots, the radar equipment, all of the people who helped out with the various aspects of the research they were doing—all of this made a difference. It gave her stability and kept her focused—so she couldn’t dwell in the past and get too angry at the storms, or go off half-cocked and cost someone their life. Andrea was well aware of her obsession with hurricanes, but she was also aware that others did not share it to the same degree. She had to compensate.

  “It’s slowed,” Petty Officer Carlson called out from the radarscope. “The eye is getting a little ragged, and it seems to be just sitting there. Winds have dropped down to a sustained speed of ninety-two miles per hour. Does this mean . . .”

  He stopped, and Andrea looked up from her paperwork. “That we stopped the hurricane?” she finished. She sat, thinking about the question for a moment, and shook her head slightly in frustration.

  “I wish I could say yes, or even no,” she replied. “From what I’m seeing here, the storm cut back about ten percent. That’s a significant difference—it dropped back to a Category one, and even if it makes landfall now, it’s the kind of storm that you can ride out.

  “The problem is,” she went on, “that it isn’t a significant enough change in the storm for us to say that, without a doubt, this wouldn’t have happened with the storm acting on its own. Storms grow, and others shrink. Some of them head straight in to land, picking up speed as they come, and others flounder, blow in circles, or head back out to sea. It happens all the time.”

  “But,” the lieutenant glanced up from where he was plotting the latest report on the map, “this happened almost immediately after the silver iodide was dropped. Surely we can infer from this that we had an effect?”

  Andrea smiled. It was funny how they all started out as men just assigned to this project, biding their time and waiting for the call back to war, or to home, and then, somewhere in the middle of each of these experiments, they bonded. Now it was “we” and not you, or “you people,” or “the project.” It was we, and she felt it as surely as they did.

  “We can infer what we like,” she replied. “We can even believe it, and I’ll be honest, the indications are pretty positive to me, but that doesn’t mean that Washington is going to buy into it. In fact, even if they believed we were able to reduce that Category two storm to a Category one and buy a little more time for the people on shore to evacuate, it might not really register. They might answer that the change was not ‘significant.’ Category two storms hit often enough, and people weather them and move on. If we had dropped it back to a tropical storm, they might sit up and take notice.”

  “Maybe if it had stayed the size we expected,” the lieutenant began.

  Andrea cut him off with a tired, quiet tone in her voice. “I wish to God it had happened that way. We might have stopped a tropical storm, or a Category one, almost completely. They would have listened then.”

  “We’ll get the next one,” Briggs said, glancing up from his readouts. “It’s only a matter of time, Andrea. We’ll get one of the big whirling bastards and when we do, no one will be able to argue with the facts.”

  As if to emphasize his words, he shook his sheaf of computer printouts at her. The top one unfolded, and with a rippling motion, the whole stack unwound like
a paper slinky, slipping over the front edge of his desk before he could catch it.

  Everyone burst out laughing, but for Andrea the humor, and the moment were hollow. She didn’t want to spoil it for the others, but she knew that this small success was not going to be enough to keep this particular branch of Operation Stormfury afloat.

  Some of the experts would move on to NOAA, and no doubt they would offer her a position as well. Research, gathering storm data, predicting storms. It was fascinating, and the draw of their state-of-the-art equipment and nearly bottomless well of government resources was tempting. They would probably even keep much of the research under the Stormfury heading, though it would be a more passive, research-oriented operation.

  She knew, however, that she would not go to NOAA. If Operation Stormfury faded, she would take up the fight on her own, move it into different battlegrounds and find support on different fronts. She had worked toward such a possibility for a long time. She had plans, and between the money her father had left her and what she’d earned through consultation and side-research, all socked away and invested carefully, she knew she could fund the beginnings of a very adequate storm center. She had just hoped she’d have longer to straighten out the details and to get her life on track before she was forced to play her hand.

  Footsteps echoed in the hallway, and they all turned as Captain Wicks stuck his head around the corner to survey the room.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” Andrea said. “Good to see you in one piece.”

  He stepped into the room, and gave a quick wave to the rest of those gathered. “Did we do any good?” he asked.

  Andrea started to give him a pat answer, but something in the seriousness of his tone brought her up short. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t asking only to make conversation.

  “There was about a ten percent drop in strength and speed,” she said at last. “The storm is floundering, but it looks like it’s going to make landfall in Florida sometime tomorrow afternoon.”