Mote in Andrea's Eye

by Wilson, David

  The Jamieson-Wicks Complex—1976

  Chapter Ten

  About twenty miles inland from the North Carolina eastern shore, a complex of bunkers left over from the Second World War, centered by a low-slung, brick and glass office building, had been brought back to life. Vehicles of all types, sizes, and shapes rolled and roared around the various hangars and laboratories. The office building had been set up with its own generator, and a backup. The interior was gutted on the first floor and redesigned as a climate-controlled, dust-free computer laboratory. Behind thick, insulated windows, low banks of lights flickered. Enormous tape drives whirred as programs were read into memory and data was stored.

  Along one wall, hanging by clips attached to the metal cans that protected them, row after row of these magnetic tapes hung, some waiting to see use, others archiving data and system backups. It was an impressive setup, and as Phil stepped through the front doors of the “Jamieson-Wicks Foundation” he stood for a moment and watched three or four technicians move efficiently around the computer bay. They all wore lab coats, but beneath these scuffed sandals and frayed blue jeans could be seen clearly. It was a far cry from the Navy, but Phil knew that these kids were experts in their chosen field. If they wanted to go work for IBM they could do so in a heartbeat, and they wouldn’t hear a thing from their new bosses about their dress code.

  The computer systems were partly funded by a grant for the study of storm behavior. Several researchers and professors at UNC had access to the system, but for the most part it was controlled and run by Andrea’s handpicked staff.

  Phil skirted the computer bay and stepped into one of the old elevators. They’d kept the originals, with deep interiors for moving freight and huge, plastic buttons that lit up dimly with the floor number. Phil pressed five, the top floor, and leaned against the back wall of the elevator car as it lurched into motion. It was still early, but there was already a lot of activity outside.

  The flight crews would not start for another half hour, and he didn’t expect to see the pilots until nine or ten. There wasn’t a lot for them to do between flights, and there hadn’t been that many flights up to this point. That could change, he knew, and likely would change in the next few days. Hurricane season had begun the week before, and Andrea already had two tropical depressions charted. It was slow work. The government knew her, and they still made use of her expertise from time to time, but getting them to release information—even on the weather—was like pulling teeth. If it weren’t for the extensive array of equipment Andrea had gathered, and the contacts they’d developed in the Caribbean, they wouldn’t have anything better than the local weather stations.

  As it was, those stations often came to Andrea for reports, and that was a good thing because, despite the steady flow of income from her patents, and a few new things the two of them had developed along the way, the Jamieson-Wicks Foundation was not a profitable endeavor by any stretch of the imagination.

  Phil stepped into the hall and turned right, passed the first two doors, which were still dark, and knocked gently on the larger, center door before pressing it inward. A large reception area fronted Andrea’s office, an expense Phil himself had insisted on. It lent an air of professionalism that was necessary when visitors entered their complex, and while this didn’t happen very often, it was almost always a matter of money when it did.

  A young woman smiled at him as he entered.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wicks,” she said brightly. “Andrea is expecting you. Mr. Scharf is expected at nine.”

  “Thanks, Lisa,” he replied.

  Lisa George was a short, energetic research assistant who had been with Andrea from the beginning. Before the keys had changed hands and Andrea had taken possession of this building and the grounds surrounding it, Lisa had worked with her on the maps and charts, organizing what data Andrea had managed to get out of the records of Operation Stormfury before the doors were closed, and helping to get it into a format that the new computers would recognize. She was efficient and exceptionally intelligent, and Phil was glad to know Lisa was nearby when Andrea needed her.

  He himself could not help with the research end of what they did, other than to fly the observation craft now and again and bring back tapes and punch cards filled with data. He played his own part in the grand scheme of things. He ran the small fleet of aircraft that they actually owned, and handled the leasing of more when they were needed. Phil was good with business—a skill he hadn’t known he possessed until he was forced to test it.

  He knew he’d done wonders with what was available. He’d brought in ex-military mechanics and pilots, retirees for the most part who wanted their hands back into flying, but didn’t want to sign on toward a second and less meaningful career with a civilian airline.

  All of it was a wonder to Phil, and the center of that wonder was Andrea herself. He glanced down at his hand and smiled. He still wasn’t used to the gold band that glittered there, or the thought that, after all the years he’d spent alone, wondering where his life was leading him, he’d found all the answers here, beyond the military, beyond wars and killing. He was well aware that most people could consider Andrea a crackpot and himself as the crazed sidekick, but what mattered was that he knew Andrea believed in what they were doing. It also mattered that even after thirteen years he could still see that waterspout whipping through the air at him and the rolling, grinding force of the hurricane he’d first flown over winding like a huge serpent across the waves.

  Phil stepped past Lisa’s desk and into Andrea’s office. It was littered with folders and stacks of computer readouts rested on every available horizontal surface. Two chairs faced the front of her polished wooden desk, but they were as deeply buried as the rest of the room. Phil snorted in sudden laughter, and Andrea looked up, startled.

  She frowned at him, but as he continued to grin and she swept her gaze over the surface of her desk, then the chairs and tables, she laughed.

  “I never promised I was a good housekeeper, just a brilliant meteorologist.”

  “A beautiful, brilliant meteorologist,” he corrected.

  She stood up, and Phil walked around the desk and swept her into his arms. He picked her off the floor and spun her so his back was to the doorway and he could see out the large, tinted glass windows to the complex below.

  After a long, lingering kiss, Andrea disentangled herself and stood beside him, staring down to where several large trucks were just arriving. They had a security gate with a guard, and he currently held a clipboard in his hand. He would be calling up in a few seconds, Andrea knew, to verify that this shipment was expected. It was.

  “Is that the silver iodide?” Phil asked.

  Andrea nodded. “More than I’ve ever set eyes on,” she grinned. “You ready to do some crop dusting?”

  It had become a standing joke between them, the comparison between cloud seeding and crop dusting. The complex wasn’t far from Phil’s home town, and he had taken her down on Highway 17 to watch the brightly colored planes in action, swooping out of the clouds, doing absolutely unnecessary barrel rolls and flips and diving so close to the fields that it seemed impossible they could miss all of the power lines and bridges. They never faltered, like birds in a flight pattern headed south for the winter. It wasn’t the same kind of flying that Phil had trained to perform, but the courage behind it, and the spirit, called out to him on a deep level.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he replied. “Any news on those depressions? Do we have anything that looks like it might tighten up into a storm?”

  She nodded. “One of them is pretty well formed already. It’s still too early to tell, but it looks like it will be the first one to come down the gulf this year, and if it continues to grow like it has so far, it might be a big one.”

  Phil’s heart lurched, just for a second. A lot depended on them finding the right storm to test their theories and processes on, but it didn’t change the danger. The storm he and Matt had flown over h
ad only been a Category two, and there was a lot of room for growth above that. He knew he didn’t want to think about what it would be like flying over one of the truly huge storms much prior to getting airborne. It didn’t do any good to let your enemy know you were spooked—or your wife.

  “Well, we’ll have to watch that one close, then,” he said, giving her a quick, hard hug. “I hear Scharf is due to arrive this morning?”

  Andrea nodded. He saw the spark jump instantly to her eyes, and knew that all niceties had come to an end. Keith Scharf was offering them a possible addition to their process, and any time that happened, Andrea was on fire with energy. It was an almost magical transformation—her features shifted from the soft, pretty woman he’d married to the intense, brilliant scientist as if she’d slipped a mask over her head while he wasn’t looking.

  “I think he may really have something, Phil,” she said excitedly, turning back to her desk.

  As she spoke she picked up the files littering the desk’s surface. Phil moved to the chairs opposite and did the same. If they were going to have someone in here in less than an hour, they needed to be able, at the very least, to provide the guy a seat.

  Andrea didn’t stop talking as she worked, and Phil caught himself smiling again. He hid this in a pile of folders and turned toward the cabinets running along one wall. He didn’t know which drawer was for what, but there was still some space on top where Andrea had trouble reaching, and he figured it was as good a place as any for temporary storage. Over the weekend, Lisa and a couple of her friends would come in and file it all, reorganizing what needed organizing and keeping Andrea on track—another job that Phil was glad was not his, as he was wholly unqualified for it.

  “His theory is very simple,” she continued, “though others have had similar thoughts before, and been ignored.”

  Her eyes flashed. Nothing irritated Andrea more than the attitude of most of her “colleagues” in the field of storm research and meteorology. They, for the most part, had taken the easy road and determined that there was nothing man could do to stop a hurricane. They went further than this, stating that there were ecological ramifications to interfering with storms, and that it wasn’t something that should be attempted.

  Andrea believed this was a way of shielding themselves from further mistakes and disappointments. If you just sat back and watched storms, you could learn a lot about them. You could warn people, help strengthen their homes, and give them more time to evacuate when things were about to be destroyed, but that was as far as it went. It was noble enough work, but it was timid.

  While they might be timid in their approach, the scientists aligned against Andrea were less so when it came to protecting their turf. They made quick work of finding flaw with any new concept or theory involving hurricane or weather control, and this made it more difficult to find anyone with a sharp enough mind and quick enough wits willing to both develop such a theory, and to speak of it in public.

  If Andrea hadn’t been as prominent as she was, and her contributions to their science had not been so important, they would have treated her the same way. The quicker they disposed of “radicals,” the more easily they could relax into their long careers of public “service” and retire—far away from hurricane territory. After all, Mother Nature controlled the storms, and who were they to interfere?

  “What is his theory?” Phil asked, bringing her back from her thoughts.

  Andrea shook her head to clear the mental cobwebs and went on. “He believes that if we were to apply an oil slick to the water directly in the hurricane’s path, it would prevent the storm from being able to draw the moisture it needs from the ocean through evaporation. This was proposed several years ago, but at the time it was killed because of the impact on the environment. There are obvious problems with creating an oil slick on purpose.”

  “What makes Scharf’s plan different?” Phil asked.

  “He isn’t proposing a petroleum oil slick,” she said excitedly. “He believes the same end can be achieved using a biodegradable vegetable oil. To be more precise, given our location—he thinks he can stop a hurricane with peanut oil.”

  Phil stopped, holding a stack of files over his head precariously as he turned to gape at her. “Peanut oil?”

  Andrea smiled and nodded. “There isn’t any difference in the way peanut oil and petroleum oil coat the water, other than you won’t find a lot of dead seagulls and fish coated in it when we’re done. And the beauty is, there’s plenty of it available locally—if he’s right, we could have all we need in a very short amount of time.”

  “You believe it will work?” Phil asked, shoving the files into place and returning to sit in the chair he’d just cleared.

  Andrea dropped into her own chair. “I’m not sure. I don’t think that the oil alone will do it—and we’ve shown that, while we can control the moisture in the storm somewhat with the silver iodide and disrupt the storm wall, we may not be able to stop one completely, or weaken it below the danger point. But the two theories make an interesting partnership.”

  Phil nodded. He understood the basic concept behind how the silver iodide weakened the storm. If this new process could really prevent more water from evaporating into the hurricane, and the silver iodide seeding could work to remove what was already there, it just might be enough to do more than downgrade the winds by ten percent. It might be enough to bring the whole whirling churning mass of destruction to a halt.

  “You see it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “If he’s right,” Phil nodded, “then it’s the best news I’ve heard since we started this. I still get calls from that woman, Pam Jones. You know, the one who thinks that we should go up with tug boats and haul a bunch of icebergs down so we can leave them in the hurricane’s path?”

  “I remember,” she said, and laughed. “The last call I got from her, she’d given up on the tug boats and was convinced that if we used explosives to break loose large chunks of the arctic ice cap, they could be transported on slings between helicopters. That was her answer to my telling her the tug boats would arrive about a month after the storm had passed.”

  They laughed together. The world was full of people with great ideas for stopping hurricanes or controlling the weather. Most of them had no idea what caused the storms, and their ideas amounted to nonsense, but Andrea made a point of responding to every single input they received, or having one of her staff respond. If even one particle of useful knowledge escaped them because they ignored someone, it would be a bitter pill to swallow, particularly given the way the government had set her aside and ignored her research.

  Lisa stepped into the doorway.

  “Mr. Scharf is here,” she said.

  A stocky young man with curly black hair and a lopsided grin entered the office. Phil rose, shook hands with Scharf, and gestured to the chair he’d been sitting in.

  “I’ll clear the other one,” he said.

  Scharf nodded and stepped up to the desk. He shook Andrea’s hand quickly and took the offered seat. He clutched a briefcase tightly to his chest, but he didn’t move to open it.

  “I’m glad to finally meet you,” he said at last. “I’ve followed your work since I was a boy. I still have an Operation Stormfury t-shirt I made myself—a bunch of us had them. We were all going to be superheroes and control the weather.”

  The young man laughed nervously, and then went on. “I guess I’m the only one who ever really believed it.”

  Andrea smiled at him and leaned forward to put her hands on her desk. Her eyes were bright, and Phil knew she understood him completely.

  “We could use a few more superheroes these days, Keith. We may not live in Gotham City, but there are plenty of dangers out there that men could protect themselves from. For the most part they do a poor job of it. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Scharf nodded and placed his briefcase on the desk. While he arranged his papers and drew out some graphs and charts, Phil placed the stack
of folders from the second chair on top of the high file cabinet beside the other pile he’d moved and took a seat.

  “As you can see,” Scharf began, “I’ve worked this out pretty carefully. I’ve never been in a position to test this in any more than a theoretical environment. We created a scenario at UNC—and we were able to use vegetable oil to almost completely cut off evaporation, but obviously those controlled conditions are not the ocean.”

  Andrea nodded. “We have some figures somewhere that were developed when they proposed the petroleum slick. I’ll have Lisa dig them out later, if we need them.”

  “Very simply,” Scharf continued, “I believe that a coating of no more than an inch over the proper amount of miles can stop a hurricane’s forward progress cold. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that the storm will do what any force of nature does when confronted with an obstacle. It will take the path of least resistance. The fear is that this process will not actually stop a hurricane, but only divert it. If the new direction can be controlled, we can move the storm into cooler water and let nature take its course, but that’s a pretty big if.”

  “We were just discussing this when you arrived,” Andrea told him. “I agree with you, this is an incomplete and probably not altogether effective process. By itself, it would be risky at best. But we are still experimenting with silver iodide seeding. What I see in your idea is the chance of a two-pronged attack. If we reduce the moisture already available to the storm with the cloud seeding, and your slick can prevent it from drawing more from the ocean, we may be able to hold it in place until it self-destructs from lack of ‘fuel.’ At the very least we should shake up the structure quite a bit.”

  Scharf was nodding long before Andrea had finished speaking, and Phil saw with approval that the boy knew his stuff.

  “It’s just a matter of locating enough oil,” he said at last, “and figuring out the best way to get it in the path of the storm.”