"Feels nice and cool now, doesn't it?" Buzzard commented, into Alex's sheltered ears. Buzzard's was voice mask-muffled and cut with microphone wind shrieks.
"Are you crazy?" Alex shouted. "That coulda killed us!"
"Only if it caught us in the open," Buzzard told him. "Hey, now we're cool."
"Carol's got circulation!" Martha said.
"Already?" Buzzard said, alarmed. "It's gonna be a long day... . Bring Jesse in for a chaff run, then."
The violence of the gust front faded quickly, in a series of windy spasms. It was followed by a slow chill breeze, with a heavy reek of rain and ozone. Alex shivered, bunching his numbed fists into his paper armpits.
The insides of his virching goggles were full of wind blown grit. Alex took his mask off, spat onto the screens, and tried to wash them clean with his thumbs.
Buzzard pulled his own goggles off and stood up. Something landed heavily on the stretched fabric of the veranda. Buzzard hopped to the edge of the veranda, jumped up, and snagged it: a landed ornithopter.
Buzzard brushed dust from his leotards and looked at Alex with ungoggled eyes. "What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"
"How do I clean these?" Alex said evasively, holding up the goggles.
Buzzard handed him an antiseptic wipe. Then he opened the back of the truck and ducked in.
He reemerged with a duffel bag and slammed the doors. The bag was full of reels of iridescent tape. Buzzard picked a patch of yellow stickum from the end of one reel and pulled at the tape. A section of shining ribbon tore loose in his fingers and fluttered in the breeze.
He handed it to Alex. "Smart chaff."
The chaff looked like old-fashioned videotape. Both ends of the tape were neatly perforated. The strip of chaff was as wide as two fingers and as long as Alex's forearm. It was almost weightless, but its edges were stiff enough to deal a nasty paper cut, if you weren't careful.
It had a lump embossed in one end: a chip and a tiny flat battery.
Buzzard screwed the axle of the chaff reel snug against the ornithopter's breastbone. Then he fetched his throwing stick again, walked out into the wind, and launched the machine. It rocketed upward in the stiff breeze, wings spread. "We got a hundred strips per reel," Buzzard said, returning. "We deploy 'em through the spike."
"What good are they?" Alex said.
"Whaddya mean?" Buzzard said, wounded. "They measure temperature, humidity... and wind speed, 'cause you can track that chaff on radar in real time."
"Any little updraft can carry chaff." Buzzard fetched up his virching rig. "So chaff will stay with a spike till it ropes out. C'mon, virch up, dude, Greg 'n Carol have got circulation!"
Alex sat on his bubblepak. He pulled the back of the mat up and over his shoulders, like a blanket. The plastic bubbles of trapped air cut the chill wind nicely. He might have been almost comfortable, if not for the windblown filth clinging greasily to his sweat-stained face, neck, and chest. He put on his goggles.
In an instant Alex was miles away, on the wings of Lena, confronting a long white plateau of roiling cloud. Above the plateau, the great curling mountain of the thunderhead was shot through with aerial lightning.
Martha's ornithopter dived below the base of the cloud. The bottom of the thunderhead was steadily venting great ragged patches of rain. But the southern edge of the cloud base was a long, trailing dark shelf, slightly curved, and free of any rain. Seen from below, the storm was charcoal black veined with evil murky green, leaden, and palpably ominous.
"How'd you get in place so fast?" Buzzard asked Martha.
Martha's voice dropped crackling into the channel. "I caught the midlevel jet, man! It's like a goddamn escalator! Did you see that Ienticular slit up there? The jet's peeling the front of that tower like a fuckin' onion!" Martha paused. "It's weird."
"There aren't any normal ones anymore, Martha," Buzzard said patiently. "I keep tryin' to tell you that."
"Well, we might get an F-3 out of it, tops," Martha diagnosed. "That's no supercell. But man, it's plenty strange."
Buzzard suddenly yelped in surprise. "Hell! I see what you mean about that midlevel jet... . Damn, I just lost two strips of chaff."
"Get your 'thopter's ass up here, man, that wall cloud is movin'." Martha's Okie drawl thickened as her excitement grew.
"What exactly are we looking at?" Alex asked her.
"See that big drawdown at the base?" Martha told him. "Between the flankin' line and all that rain? Look close and you can see it just now startin' to turn."
Alex stared Into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entire cloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that a whole area of the base-a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the size of four, maybe five football fields-was beginning a slow waltz. The lumps were being tugged down-powerfully wrenched and heaved down- into a broad bulging round ridge, well below the natural level of the cloud base. The lumps were black and ugly and sullen and looked very unhappy about being forced to move. They kept struggling hard to rise into the parent cloud again, and to maintain their shape, but they were failing, and falling apart. Some pitiless unseen force was stretching them into long circular striations, like gaseous taffy.
Suddenly a new voice broke in, acid-etched with a distant crackling of lightning static. "Carol in Alpha here! We got dust whirl, over!"
"Nowcaster here," came Jerry Mulcahey's calm voice. "Give me location fix, over." Good old Dr. Jerry, Alex realized, had the advantage of the Storm Troupe's best antennas. He seemed to be hovering over the battlefield like God's recording angel.
"Greg in Alpha here," came Greg Foulks. "How's the data channel holdin' up, Jerry, over?"
"Clear enough for now, over.
"Here's your coords, then." Greg sent them, in a digital screech. "We gotta move, Jerry. That wall cloud's gonna wrap hard, and the truck's getting radar off a sheet of big-ass hail to northwest, over."
"Then move behind the hook and get the array booted," Jerry commanded. "Report in, Aerodrome. Where's the chaff, over?"
"Boswell in Aerodrome," Buzzard said, and though he was speaking from an arm's length away, his rerouted voice signal was unexpectedly thin and crispy. "I got Jesse loaded and moving in hard on the jet stream, and Kelly coming out to Aerodrome to load a second reel, over."
"Lena is right in position now, Jerry, should I strafe that dust whirl for you, over?" said Martha.
"Beautiful, Martha," Jerry told her, his deep voice rich with praise and satisfaction. "Let me bring you up on monitor... . Okay, Martha, go! Nowcaster out."
Martha's voice, lost its static and settled again at the very edge of Alex's t. "You with me, little dude?"
"Yeah."
"This is where it gets good."
The ornithopter fell out The wall cloud above them was mucn tmcKer: it didn't seem to be moving any faster. The 'thopter and Alex suddenly noticed a messy puff of filth, way dowii at ground level. The cloud of dust didn't seem to be spin-fling much. Instead, the dust cloud was spewing. It was clumsily yanking up thin dry gouts of ocher-tinted soil and trying to fling them aside.
Martha scanned the dust cloud, circling. Alex had never seen dirt behave in such an odd and frantic fashion. The dirt kept trying hard to fall, or spin loose, or escape just any old way back to the natural inertness of dirt, but it just couldn't manage the trick. Instead, whole smoky masses of the stuff would suddenly buckle and vanish utterly, as if they were being inhaled.
Then water vapor began to condense, in the very midst of the dry churning filth, and for the first time Alex fully realized the real shape, and the terrible speed, of the whirlwind. The air was being thrashed into visibility through sheer shock.