Mote in Andrea's Eye

by Wilson, David

  As it passed over the area where the barges had been placed, Andrea watched the screen carefully. In the very center, there was nothing. The barges that had blinked bright yellow after activation were simply not there at all. That was two. On the upper end, toward the north end of the line, two groups of five barges still floated. One was still bright yellow; half of the others had returned to their original orange color, indicating they were no longer likely to be active. The barges had been rated for the amount of damage, the height and severity of waves and the strength of wind they could withstand. She’d been resigned to losing all, or most of the equipment, but as the last wisps of what had been the largest Category five hurricane in history—albeit for a very brief span of time—passed over that line, she saw that three of the five groups were still in place, and one was still active, pumping away. It had been enough. Her wall of cold water had ruined the storm’s continuity, shredding it like soft cotton caught on barbed wire.

  Andrea leaned back in her chair, laid her head against the top, and stared at the ceiling as green traces of rain and thunderstorms made landfall on her computer screen. She stayed that way for a while, then sat up, halted the simulation, and saved the results. With the patience of long obsession, she reset the controls and restarted the simulation. She varied conditions and locations slightly and let the program run, rising and walking back to her place by the window.

  Gazing down at the empty hangar, she placed her hand on the chilly glass and laid her forehead against it. Closing her eyes, she whispered. “Send me a storm, Phil. Send me a storm so I can rest.”

  No one answered from the shadowy complex, and after a few minutes she dimmed the lights and lay back on her bed. Elvis leaped up onto the mattress and curled in beside her, lifted her arm with his cold, wet nose and insinuated himself beneath with a soft “Whuff.” Andrea smiled, scratched his ear, and drifted off to sleep as the laptop continued to cycle the storm silently across its screen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Andrea awakened out of a dead sleep into darkness. Flashing lights strobed through the windows, and Elvis was up, paws on the sill, staring into the night. He let out a short bark, almost a growl, and ran to the next window, where he repeated his action.

  Andrea thought her alarm was ringing, but even as she reached out to grope for the clock and stop it, she knew that wasn’t right. Her alarm was set for daybreak, and that was hours away. The sound she heard was the phone. She swung her legs off the side of her bed, closed her eyes, blinked to clear her thoughts, and grabbed the receiver off its hook.

  “This is Andrea,” she said groggily. “Who is this? What . . .”

  “It’s Keith.” The reply had no inflection at all. It was terse, as if the words had been bitten from something and clamped between his jaws. Then he went on. “I’m in the control center. Get down here.”

  The line went dead, and Andrea sat, staring at it. A low siren rose to join the flashing lights below. Her first thought was fire, or the police, but she dismissed these quickly. The flashing light was green. That was an internal alarm meant to awaken the staff and put them on alert.

  It didn’t take long for her to slip into jeans, sneakers, a t-shirt, and her lab coat. She didn’t even bother looking into a mirror; there was no time to tame her unruly hair, or to stop and wash the sleep from her eyes. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did. Keith had never once, in all the years she had known him, spoken to her as he had on the phone, and what she’d heard in the tone of his voice had both thrilled and terrified her.

  Elvis trotted at her heel, glancing up and down the passageway as they went, and pausing for a second to sniff the elevator before stepping in at her side. The dog sensed something. Andrea sensed it too—electricity in the air that she’d never felt before.

  “What is it, boy?” she asked, reaching down to pat the bulldog’s head. “What in the hell is it?”

  Elvis had no answer for her, and the elevator doors opened on the first floor with a soft whoosh. There were small groups of technicians and engineers gathered in different corners of the main lobby, and Andrea thought this strange. They had a night shift, but it wasn’t this populous. Most of those gathered held coffee cups cupped between both hands and looked, as she knew she must look, as if they’d been dragged straight out of their beds and placed here on display.

  Andrea barely nodded at the others as she passed through their midst and pressed the button to open the computer room. Though the equipment had come a long way over the years, some habits died hard. The room was climate controlled and, as much as possible, they kept it dust-free as well. The equipment housed inside—computers, radar consoles, and communications sets—was not as delicate as earlier models had been, but the extra precautions made Andrea feel better, and seemed to please their insurance company as well.

  She walked quickly down the center aisle to the control center at the far wall. This was a slightly raised portion of the floor lined with monitors; radarscopes, radio consoles, and a confusing array of computer control panels and tape drive units. In the center was a table, similar to a U.S. Navy chart table, but computerized. The mechanical arm that stretched out across the surface of the map moved slowly, scribing something onto the paper’s surface, but Andrea didn’t notice.

  As she drew closer, she saw that Keith and two others were gathered around a large monitor screen. On the screen was the same radar image that Andrea had checked just before going to bed, the Atlantic, just off the coast of Bermuda. It was the same, that is, with one glaring exception. Where Andrea had seen only bright green patches of rain, the screen was white. White and pulsing with that familiar, hungry heartbeat centered on a tight core so dark it seemed to draw her forward the last few steps.

  Andrea pushed through the others, slipped around Keith, and laid her fingers directly on the screen. It was the storm—her storm—Andrea. It was exactly as it had been, exactly where it had been. She glanced down at the dials and gasped breath into her lungs so quickly and harshly that her head spun and she reeled, nearly fainting. The dial was set for the live radar feed—it was no simulation.

  The storm had taken the expected lurch toward the coast. There was no slick of peanut oil on that water, as if it were coming back after it hit the slick, jumping back through time.

  “I . . .” she tried to speak, but nothing came out. She knew she should be breathing, but that was beyond her as well.

  Keith and one of the technicians grabbed her by her arms, supported her and dragged her back so that she fell heavily into one of the padded leather chairs. Her eyes never left the screen, and it was taking too long to get her breath. Finally it came in a startled gasp, and she sucked the air quickly. Leaning forward, she lowered her head, just for a moment, and forced her mind to clear and her heart to function normally. She had to think.

  “That’s not all,” Keith said, leaning close with one hand on her shoulder.

  Andrea raised her head and turned her uncomprehending face toward his. “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve been in contact with the Navy and the Air Force,” Keith replied. “They have been tracking this almost as long as we have, and they’ve picked up something our radar has not.

  “There’s an unidentified aircraft coming in about five thousand feet over the storm. They’ve tried to raise it on the radio, but have had no luck. They are sending out intercept craft, but I told them I thought they might have better luck with their radio if they dropped back to an older frequency. They’re trying that now.”

  Andrea’s eyes grew wide. She turned and stared at the screen.

  “Get the other radar image up,” she said, suddenly regaining control of her mind and her body. “Overlay it onto the storm image. Find that plane.”

  “Already on it,” one of the assistants, a tall girl named Alicia Kotz called out. “We aren’t really set up to do it any longer—not since we cancelled the seeding program.”

  “Just get it on the screen,” Andrea replied, knowin
g she was being too curt and absolutely unable to control it.

  Tears threatened to spill out the corners of her eyes, and she gripped the arms of her chair too tightly. Her heart was working too hard, and she knew she had to get a grip on herself. There was no way to be certain—yet—what had been spotted, but there were things to do—things that had to be done, and she couldn’t do any of them if she was carted off into an ambulance and taken away.

  “How long do we have?” Andrea asked quickly. She already knew the answer, but getting the others thinking and moving was vital.

  “Two, maybe three days before it’s too late,” Keith answered at once. They had both seen the simulation run so many times that it played in their dreams.

  Andrea had lost Phil, but it was Keith whose theory had placed that slick in the storm’s path. If it had not disappeared all those years in the past, it was Keith who felt responsible for the disaster that followed, and now that disaster had come back to haunt him—to haunt them both.

  “I mobilized all teams,” Keith told her. “I knew you’d do the same, but even the extra half an hour it saved us may make all the difference.”

  “Can we get all twenty-five barges into place?” Andrea asked him. “Is it possible?”

  Keith shook his head. “The two in dry dock aren’t ready. We couldn’t even get them out and floating in time, let alone operational. That leaves us with twenty-three. Of those, I’m ninety-nine percent certain of eighteen. If we could get them all underway this minute, it would be one thing, but if we hold up the tug in the Caymans until all five of his are gathered, he might not have time to make the transit. The storm is moving . . .”

  “At twenty-five miles per hour,” Andrea finished. “I know. God . . . I know.”

  She studied the bottom of the screen. The readouts were very similar to those that displayed at the bottom of her simulation program screen. The wind speed of the storm was incredible. It was well over two hundred miles per hour, and showed signs of increasing.

  “The water temperature is lower than it should be,” she said, thinking out loud.

  “This year has been cooler, overall,” Keith agreed. “That should work in our favor. The damned thing may have pounded its way back through some weird, psychic wall in the air, but it didn’t bring the ocean with it. The water is still warm enough, though—warm enough to sustain a storm.”

  Andrea nodded distractedly. Eighteen. They were only going to get eighteen of the barges into place in time—assuming that they were in time at all, and that her simulation was more than a clever video game for old storm-obsessed women with nothing better to do than play God. Her mind shifted back to the night before. Twenty-five were enough, according to the simulation, but how much of reality did that really cover? How much of what they thought they knew did they really know?

  People respected storms after the past year, but they didn’t understand how deep that respect should go. They didn’t understand, on the average, that a Category two hurricane made the destructive force that hit Hiroshima look like a child’s antique tin toy hammer stacked up against a twenty-pound sledge. Mostly the world got lucky.

  The coast of the United States was famous for dodging direct hits, and even those that had not been dodged could always have been worse. There had never been a threat like this, and once the word spread out through the weather networks, NOAA, and the unstable, inefficient official channels of the government, the entire east coast was going to be in panic.

  Andrea held up her hand to silence anything any of the others might be about to say. “Two things,” she said calmly. “We have got to get our people moving faster than they have ever moved before, and we have got to convince the government to call for an evacuation. They won’t want to do it. They’ll want to look, and stand around with their thumbs up their noses and stare at readouts—check on the weather channel—a million other things than getting on their phones, radios, and faxes and getting the truth out about this storm.

  “We can tell them that truth. I have a hundred saved simulations of this storm striking the coast. At least a hundred,” she mused, thinking for a second. “We need to get these out there and into the hands of the people that can make things happen. We have to show them and we have to convince them—and we have to get them moving. That is going to be the hardest thing we face.

  “Our people know what to do. I have no doubt we will get our equipment where it needs to be, and that brave men and women will race out there to risk their lives for this . . . battle.” Her voice broke, suddenly, and her eyes filled with tears. “I know this,” she went on, clearing her throat and brushing the tears away impatiently. “I also know that as ready as we are for this, the rest of the world is going to be equally stubborn in ignoring it. People are going to die. The TV is going to start spitting nonsense about duct taping windows and buying a lot of bottled water and they are not going to understand, or believe, what is coming, unless we force them.”

  Andrea spun to Keith. “I want you to be the one to do that, Keith,” she said. Then she continued, speaking quickly and still holding up her hand to forestall his reply. “I know. I know you want to be on that first tugboat out of here, and I know you want to be on site to manage the setup. You could do it, I know you could, and you hate this storm almost as much as I do.

  “But this one is on me. I don’t have a lot of boat cruises left in me, but I have enough left for this one. If I stayed behind to try and convince the government what was about to happen . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Keith,” she turned to him and took his hands, “I have to be the one to go. If that’s Phil up there,” she nodded toward the screen, where the storm now had been joined by a pulsing radar blip—an aircraft, “then I can’t be here when he lands. If he lands. I can’t trust that I’ll do what needs to be done, or that I’ll even care.”

  Andrea’s hands shook and she willed them to stop. She kept her voice as calm as possible. “You will get the work done here as well as I could, and I will get the barges into place. If it works out that we both make it through whatever is to come, I’ll be able to face him then.”

  Keith wanted to protest, she saw it in his eyes, but in the end he must have seen something in hers as well. He nodded at last. “The tug leaving from here is already being fueled,” he said gruffly. “The barges we brought in yesterday are being staged and should be back at the harbor within a couple of hours. There are some minor repairs needed, but I’ve ordered all the equipment, and a couple of extra men, so that the repairs can be made en route. We can’t afford to leave even a single pump behind.”

  “I’ll be ready to leave in under an hour,” she told him. Then, as if just remembering he was there, she leaned down and patted Elvis on the head.

  “You’re going to have to stay with Keith,” she told him. “But I’ll be back.”

  The dog gazed up at her, his head cocked and his eyes bright. If someone had told her in that instant that he understood every word she said, she would have believed. She could still hear his ancestor, Jake, barking at the storm, barking at the house collapsing over his mistress, and her father. She still felt his cold, damp fur pressed against her under the wool blanket on the Coast Guard cutter that had saved them that long ago day. She could even smell the wet dog smell that had filled her nostrils for days afterward, long, confused days that blurred together in her memory.

  “I know,” she said, her eyes blurry with tears and burning. She knelt and hugged the dog tightly, and he licked salty tears from her cheeks and whined low in his throat. “I know, buddy, but it’s going to be all right.”

  Then she was up and moving, striding as quickly down the center aisle of the computer banks as her wobbly legs would carry her. She didn’t look back, and she hoped to God that either Elvis would sit tight, or Keith would grab the dog’s collar. She had used up all the emotional energy available to her, and she had very little strength of any other kind to get her through the next few hours. There would be time to
rest once they were underway, but not before then.

  She wanted desperately to rush to her room and set up the simulation with only eighteen of the barges, but she knew there was no time. It wouldn’t matter anyway. The most powerful software program in the world, running on the fastest computer, could not replace reality, or reproduce it. Random chance played too large a factor to be accounted for by simple logic.

  Andrea exited the clean area and headed straight for the elevators. All the others who had stood around drinking coffee a few moments before had disappeared. She saw groups of men working quickly out on the lot, and the lights above the equipment bays glowed brightly through the high windows of the two outbuildings where the barges had been taken just the day before. She hoped that the repairs necessary were as minor as Keith had said. They were already going to be operating on too few pumps, and this storm was no tropical depression, it was a rampaging monster. The barges would have to be at full capacity to handle the beating they were about to have administered to them.

  The elevator slid open, and she stepped inside. When it opened on her floor she hurried to her office and apartment, already going over what she would need to bring with her and trying to anticipate what she might forget and regret. As she entered the office, though, the window caught her attention. Maybe it was just the flashing green lights below, or the sound of some of the equipment. Maybe she’d caught a reflection from truck headlights winking off the glass.

  Whatever it had been, it drew her without any hope of denial. She stepped to the glass, planted both of her palms against it and stared off into the darkened sky. The very first glimmer of daylight rimmed the horizon, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw that there were clouds overhead. They didn’t coat the sky, but were scattered across it in long, thin strips.