The Fire and the Anvil

by Michael Galloway

  Chapter Two

  John stood on the doorstep of Dr. Ferganut’s house and pressed the doorbell button. The house was an olive-green rambler set back from the road and obscured by a row of towering pine trees. The yard was expansive and a painted, white, wooden fence ran around the perimeter. The lawn, much like the grass on the surrounding hills, was faded green mixed with patches of brown. If another month without rain passed, he figured, the lawn would be all brown.

  The front door opened with a creak and Dr. Ferganut stepped out. The man was in his early fifties and had a high receding hairline with chestnut-brown hair. His beard and mustache were gray-and-chestnut-brown and he wore a black tee shirt and blue jeans. “I see you found the doorbell this time,” he said as he peered over the top of his glasses. He extended a hand toward John. “Welcome. Come on inside.”

  He then extended a hand toward James. “It’s Captain Avalanche, right?”

  “James or Jim,” James said.

  “He goes by Captain on storm chases,” John said.

  “What do you want to go by?” Dr. Ferganut said.

  James narrowed his eyes at John as if he was irritated and then smiled at Dr. Ferganut. “Let’s go by Captain.”

  “Okay, Captain. Step inside.”

  Dr. Ferganut slid to the side and held the door open. He then glanced back toward John’s truck. “Did you bring your suitcases?”

  “I figured we would head back up to Valentine and probably stay at a hotel,” John said as he entered the house.

  “If you want you can stay here. I have a guest bedroom and a spare cot in the closet. It may not be the best but it might save you a few bucks.”

  John looked back at Captain. “Are you sure? We wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “I’ve got plenty of room,” Dr. Ferganut said, encouraging them. “Go on, grab your luggage. I’ll show you around.”

  John shrugged his shoulders and lumbered back to the truck to grab his suitcase. Captain followed and within a few minutes they dropped their belongings on the floor of the guest bedroom. The guest bedroom was small, but there was enough space for a cot next to the bed. The walls held pictures of the Oregon coast and sailboats. A dull gray filing cabinet stood in the corner and a wooden chair leaned against the wall, but otherwise the room was empty.

  From there they entered the living room and sat down on a dark brown leather couch across from Dr. Ferganut, who sat down in a black leather recliner. On either side of the couch two overstuffed bookcases appeared ready to spill their contents if a single book was removed. The couch faced a large picture window with burgundy-colored curtains. The curtains were parted and from here John could see his truck, the pine trees, and some of the shadowy hills beyond.

  The walls around them were plastered with abstract paintings and drawings that challenged and confused John at the same time. One of the paintings was that of a man walking down a city street in the rain with a bright red umbrella. The colors of the painting were mainly grays, blues, and browns except for the umbrella. As John continued to look around, he did not see a television set and he wondered if Dr. Ferganut even owned one.

  John propped open his laptop computer on top of the glass-topped coffee table and fired up a word processing program. He pulled out his cell phone and set it onto the table in case he wanted to snap pictures of Dr. Ferganut’s latest inventions.

  “Can I get you guys anything to drink?” Dr. Ferganut said.

  “Water’s fine,” John said.

  “I’m good,” Captain said as he held up his fountain drink from the last gas station they stopped at.

  Dr. Ferganut went into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a translucent, electric-blue, plastic tumbler full of water. “Ever had the water here? It’s some of the best spring water you can find.” He extended the tumbler toward John.

  John took the glass, stirred around the crackling ice cubes inside and took a drink. He shook his head in agreement and set it on a cork coaster on the coffee table. In the meantime, the word processor document full of interview questions appeared on his laptop screen.

  Dr. Ferganut sat back down in the leather recliner and leaned back. He glanced over at John and looked surprised. “You really did prepare for this. Were you thinking of writing a paper or a book?”

  John typed a few notes on his laptop. “At first, I was going to write a paper. But I started finding tons of articles on your work. So I’m thinking it’s going to turn into a book. You ready?”

  Dr. Ferganut nodded and motioned toward John’s laptop. “Do you want to record any of this? I have equipment we could use in the other room.”

  “No, I got it.” John held up his cell phone and started recording their conversation. He took a deep breath. After all the stories and articles he read, he figured he would start with the easy questions before getting to the more difficult topics. Through it all, he just wanted to let the inventor and the inventions speak for themselves. He had already heard enough of Madeline’s objections over the past few months and even read a handful of negative articles written by jealous competitors. In the end, it was just an interview and he was under no obligation to publish the material. What could go wrong?

  He cleared his throat. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and where have you lived?”

  “I was born in Tomah, Wisconsin. I lived there until I was eighteen. After that I went to college in New York and then came back to Wisconsin. Spent about a year in northern Minnesota until I moved here.”

  John took furious notes. “Great. And what was your childhood like?”

  Dr. Ferganut shifted in his recliner and began to rock it back and forth slightly. “I grew up with two older brothers and my parents are still together after all these years. They live in Idaho, by the way. I was a sickly kid, though. Sometimes I think I spent more time indoors looking out the window than I did playing in the sun. So my parents used to buy me lots of building toys. I loved building toys.”

  “Building toys?”

  “Electronic kits, Lego sets, Erector sets, that type of thing. I think my dad didn’t want me going down the path he did with all the labor jobs he had. My mom worked as a manager at the local phone company but they both hoped us kids would go further than they did.”

  John typed more notes. When he looked up, he noticed Captain had his own laptop open with a weather radar display onscreen. Captain flipped through several online charts and then stared hard at a regional satellite picture.

  John continued. “Were your brothers into all those things too?”

  Dr. Ferganut laughed. “Hardly. Pete and Steve were into hockey and football. I was the odd duck. I was always clumsy when it came to sports. I played community soccer in fourth grade but I never learned how to dribble the ball right. I’m afraid I wasn’t much better in gym class. I was always one of the last kids to get picked. They used to make fun of my last name until one day in the sixth grade I got so mad I hit the softball just right and knocked it over the ball field fence. They left me alone then. Maybe if I’d have kept at it and practiced hard enough I would have been good.”

  “So when did you get into inventing things?”

  Dr. Ferganut thought a minute. He took off his glasses and cleaned them before he answered. “I was always tinkering. When I got my first Lego set I followed the instructions and built this space station. Then I got bored of it and tore it apart. It wasn’t long before I started making my own vehicles and spaceships. I think I was about nine when I started building these funny looking clocks with my Erector sets and parts from the electronic kits. My brothers made fun of me at first until they found the clocks kept perfect time.”

  Captain looked up from his laptop and stood up from the couch. He stepped over to the picture window and peered out toward the hills.

  “See something?” Dr. Ferganut asked.

  “Just checking out the smoke plume,” Captain said. “There’s a grass fire going a few miles south of here. It
popped up on the regional satellite just a minute ago. There’s no clouds for a couple hundred miles so it sticks out. I’m going to run outside a minute.” He backed away from the window and left to go stand out on the front lawn.

  Dr. Ferganut eyed the window a moment before turning his attention back to the interview.

  John stared at his notes and pondered his list of questions before looking back at Dr. Ferganut.

  “Everything okay?” Dr. Ferganut asked.

  “Not to get off topic, but how bad is the drought here?”

  “It’s bad. You worried about the fire?”

  “A little. On the drive in Captain and I saw a huge cloud of bugs to the south of here.”

  Dr. Ferganut looked surprised. “Locusts?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought of the story I read once about you finding little metal bugs that started a forest fire in the north woods of Minnesota. Then I thought of how you used your own robotic bugs to combat them and stop the fires.”

  Dr. Ferganut drew a deep breath. “Those bugs that started the fires couldn’t fly very well. They had wings but they hopped better than they flew.”

  John resumed taking notes. He caught a slightly worried look in the professor’s eyes but carried on with the next question. “So tell me a little about your current family situation. Whatever you’re willing to share.”

  “Okay. I got married just out of college to a woman named Evelyn Kinney. She’s Madeline’s mom. Have you met her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. We had three kids together, two boys, Derek and Brandon, and you know about Madeline of course. My wife and I later divorced and I never remarried. Since then I’ve dated a few times but nothing’s ever worked out in the long run.” Dr. Ferganut’s voice faded and he looked away at the painting of the lone person walking away in the rain.

  By this time Captain returned. He plunked down onto the couch and ticked out a few commands on his laptop.

  “How does it look out there?” Dr. Ferganut said.

  “The smoke is a few miles away. But I don’t think it’s one fire. I saw three columns rising up over the hills. What’s to the south of here?” Captain said.

  “Mostly hills and a few lakes and swamps. There is a wildlife refuge further down the highway.”

  “What’s weird is that over one of columns there’s a white cloud building up. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no clouds anywhere else in sight. I checked the forecast and the computer models and there’s no mention of rain. A lot of the parameters are right, but it’s too cool in the lower levels and there’s not enough moisture aloft to do much of anything.”

  “Might be a pyrocb,” Dr. Ferganut said.

  “What’s that?” Captain said.

  “A pyrocumulus cloud. Sometimes they form over intense wildfires.”

  Captain hurriedly looked up the term online. “Oh, you mean a cumulonimbus flammagenitus cloud,” he said with a straight face that barely concealed a smirk.

  Dr. Ferganut gave him a strange look. “I saw that kind of cloud out here when we had fires years ago. Did you happen to know which way the wind was blowing?”

  “It’s coming from the west at about ten miles an hour,” Captain said. “Probably won’t make it up here. Right?”

  “I doubt it. But we could check it out after lunch. Is anybody hungry? I’ve got a fryer of chicken I was thinking of putting on the grill.”

  “Sounds good to me,” John said as he looked over at Captain. “And then maybe we should take a closer look at this fire.”

  Chapter Three

  As John finished his plate of mesquite grilled chicken, corn on the cob, and baked beans, his thoughts drifted from his next set of questions for the interview to the haziness in the sky. He kept watching the smoke plumes throughout lunch but what concerned him more was the trio of pyrocumulus clouds rising above. The middle cloud was the largest and despite its bumpy bright white top the underside darkened as if it was a fast-rising ash cloud of a volcano. He looked back toward Captain. “Are you seeing this?”

  Captain nodded and put down his corn on the cob. He stared out through the screened sides of the porch and wiped his hands on a napkin. He spun his laptop computer screen around for John and Dr. Ferganut to see. “Three storms firing just to the south. But check out the middle one.” Captain pointed to a radar display that depicted velocity. He zeroed in on a spot where a few pixels of bright red and green converged. “I’m not seeing a hook echo yet but give it time.”

  John glanced at Dr. Ferganut. “Mind if we take a look?”

  Dr. Ferganut shrugged his shoulders and then stood up. “Let me grab a handful of wireflies first.” He left the porch and returned with four of the devices sealed inside a gallon-sized plastic Ziploc bag. Each device was pine green in color with shiny metallic wings and similar in design to a real dragonfly. Capable of flying several miles on battery power, each wirefly was equipped with a tiny camera and legs adept at picking up tiny objects. In his other hand he held a laptop computer and a telescoping radio antenna that could be mounted on the back of a pickup truck. “Your truck or mine?”

  “Let’s take mine,” John said. “If this thing goes on to produce a tornado, I’d love to fire some rockets into it. Grab your camera, Captain.”

  * * *

  As John drove down Highway 83 toward the line of storms it became evident that all of them were a result of intense updrafts generated by the grass fires now raging on the hills south of Dr. Ferganut’s house. Collectively, the storms were only a few miles wide and the hills and smoke obstructed their bases. The mid-levels of the thunderclouds were sharply defined with a gray-and-white cauliflower-like look. Only the middle storm spouted a robust thunderstorm anvil and it cast a shadow onto the other storms.

  “There’s a dirt road up ahead that might take us toward the biggest cell,” Captain said as he motioned toward the left. “The couplet’s still going and everything is drifting to the east at ten.”

  John wheeled his truck down a dirt road riddled with potholes. For the first time there was a break in the hills and he could see the base of the middle storm. Despite the shifting curtains of rain and smoke he spotted a narrow white tornado. At times the tornado took on a reddish hue not from inhaling the surrounding soil but because of the color of the wildfire. He rolled down his driver side window to listen. In the distance he heard an occasional crash of thunder along with a lone police siren.

  “Do you think you can launch your rockets into it?” Dr. Ferganut said from the backseat. He leaned forward to watch out the windshield.

  “I’ve never tried to launch them over a fire,” John said. “The heat might melt the electronics. I want to get closer but I don’t like our escape options.” He gestured toward Captain. “Unless you see some way out.”

  “Not really,” Captain said.

  “Did you check for…”

  “Minimum maintenance roads? Don’t even go there. Just don’t.” Captain took a gulp of his fountain drink.

  “You said on your drive in that you saw bugs,” Dr. Ferganut said. “Clouds of them, right?”

  “Coming in from the west,” John said.

  Dr. Ferganut pulled out his plastic bag of wireflies and motioned toward the southeast. “Any chance we could get a little closer? Close enough to launch these?”

  John nodded but felt a knot forming in his stomach. He had driven through a wildfire only once in his life when he was with his father and it was not a pleasant memory. His father kept a steady speed as they fled their wilderness cabin but it felt like they were driving through a blizzard of orange embers for an hour. He gave Dr. Ferganut an astonished look. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking if I can get these close enough they can confirm my suspicions. Did you notice anything unusual about the bugs? Were they flying in a strange pattern? Did the swarm look artificial?”

  “Artificial?”

  “Too perfect in shape. Not like how real bugs swarm.”r />
  “Yeah, yeah. When they turned they all moved with the same motion and speed.”

  Dr. Ferganut held his plastic bag open and stared hard at the dashboard. “There’s only one person I can think of…that could do that.” He glanced at Captain and then back at John. His eyes were pensive and new wrinkles appeared on his forehead. “It’s possible Dr. Minton is up to something.”

  “You serious?” John tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He tried to bring them as close as he could to the edge of the middle storm, but the smoke was so dense in places he often had to slow down to fifteen miles per hour in order not to veer off into the ditch.

  “Who’s Dr. Minton again?” Captain asked.

  “He’s another inventor. Although I think our goals are fundamentally different,” Dr. Ferganut said with an angry undertone. “Here. Stop the truck.”

  John hit the brakes and waited. There was no shoulder to the road here, but since he had not seen any vehicles coming up behind them he was not worried. He toggled his headlights on but it did little to penetrate the smoke.

  Dr. Ferganut jumped out of the backseat and walked into the middle of the dirt road. He pulled out the wireflies and lofted them into the air one by one. Each device whirred to life and lifted off from his hand toward the storms. When he climbed back into the truck, he pulled out his laptop computer and hit a few keys on the keyboard. “In an hour, we should have some answers, gentlemen.”

  John strained to follow the reddish-white tornado as it moved to east. Curtains of smoke passed in front of them until he lost sight of it altogether. He could feel the heat pulsing from the fire now and grimaced as a birch tree a hundred feet ahead of them burst into flames. He turned to Captain. “Is there a still a signature?”

  Captain looked up from his laptop computer. “Not really. It’s falling apart. If it’s still there it’s going to rope out any minute now.”

  John looked back at Dr. Ferganut and then in his rearview mirror. A red-and-white wildland fire engine came up behind them on the dirt road. The engine was bigger than his truck but not as large as a hook-and-ladder truck. The tires on it were larger than those of his truck and meant for traveling over uneven terrain. He pulled over as far as he could to the right to let the fire engine pass. The engine rumbled past and disappeared into the smoke.