The horn on the right looked like the dominant one of the pair. To judge by the complex curdling of the shelf behind them, the two spikes were trying hard to go into slow orbit around one another. Rick's advice was sound: the first spike to touch down would likely get a better supply of updraft. Over the next few minutes the twin with more juice would probably starve out and eat up the other one.
But you could never tell. Spikes lived on the far side of turbulent instability and sometimes the least little extra puff of energy would push them off trajectory into a monster phase space... . Jane was coming hard to the point of decision. She slowed the car and stared upward.
"Damn!" she yelled. "That left one's backward!"
"What?"
"It's anticyclonic! Look at that damn thing spin!"
Rick swung his head, moving the slaved cameras out on the bumper. "Good Christ!" he said. The spikes were rotating in opposite directions.
It was hard to judge the vortex rotation against the curdled black background of shelf, but once she'd recognized the movement, there was no mistaking it. Jane was flabbergasted. There hadn't been an anticyclonic spike documented since the late nineties. Finding a storm spinning clockwise in the northern hemisphere was freakish, like seeing a guy running down the Street who happened to have two left feet.
"We're following that crazy one!" Jane announced. She reached beneath the seat and yanked up a pair of cordless headphones and mike.
"Good choice!" Rick said, his voice high with disbelief.
Jane yelled orders ~to Charlie, got tired of the verbal interface, and pulled down the steering wheel. She got into a manual-assist mode, where a tug on Charlie's steering wheel was the software equivalent of a tug on a horse's reins. This was an excellent way to pursue a storm, if your horse was a smart machine a thousand times stronger and faster than you were. Excellent, that is, if your horse didn't get its code hung between mode changes. And if you didn't forget that you weren't really driving a car at all, but instead, vaguely chairing a committee on the direction, speed, and tactics of the vehicle. It was certainly vastly safer than driving manually in the wake of a pair of tornadoes. But it was still a really good way to get killed.
Rick yelled a site report at the Troupe while bracketing the anticyclone with the camera's binocular photogrammetry. Jane thought anxiously about the chaff bazooka in the back. The bazooka's chaff rounds cost so damned much that she had never had enough practice to get good with it. Rick, unfortunately, considered himself an excellent marksman, as if it were a real feat to kill deer with a silent, high-velocity, laser-sighted electric rifle. Rick was lousy with the bazooka and overconfident, while she was lousy with the bazooka but at least properly cautious about it.
She punched Rick's shoulder. "Where're the 'thopters?"
"They're coming. It'll take a while."
"I gotta chaff-shoot that anticydonic from the ground then," she said.
"No use, Janey! Radar Bus just pulled up stakes, nobody'll get the data but SESAME!"
"Let SESAME get it then, we gotta nail it now, the goddamned thing is left-handed! It's for Science!" She stopped Charlie in the middle of the field, opened the door, and leaped out into wet knee-high grass.
Out from under the shelter of Charlie's roof, the sound of the Train was enormous, ground-shaking, cosmic. Jane ran around the car, burrowed into the back, and unstrapped the bazooka from its Velcro mounting. No use looking up at the spikes just yet. No use getting rattled.
She found the chaff rocket, unstrapped it. Removed its yellow safety tape. Twisted the rocket to arm it. Put up the bazooka's flip-up sight. Powered up the bazooka. Booted the bazooka's trajectory calc. Charlie was vibrating in place with the sheer noise of the Tram, and violent gusts of entrained updraft were ripping at the grass all around her.
Loading the chaff bazooka was a very complex business. There was a very sweet and twisted intellectual thrill about doing it exactly right in conditions of intense emotional excitement. It was like paying a lot of slow, deliberate, very focused attention to giving somebody else an orgasm.
Jane stepped out into the open, carefully braced her legs, raised the muzzle, and squinted into the bazooka's readout. She pressed the first trigger. A red light came on. She bracketed the twister in the target screen. The red light went out and a green light flicked on. Jane pulled the second trigger.
The rocket took off with a calf-scorching backwash of heat and soared directly toward the spike. It made a couple of wasplike dips as it fought turbulence and it disappeared right into the spinning murk, not quite dead on, but good. Jane stared happily into the readout, waiting for the detonation signal from the chaff's explosive canister.
Nothing. She waited.
Nothing. Another goddamned dud.
Jane lowered the smoking bazooka with a grinding disappointment and suddenly noticed movement and color over to her tight. A spindle-wheeled TV camera truck had pulled ;ust to the right of them, maybe ten meters away. A woman correspondent with a head mike and a darling little brass-toggled yellow raincoat had jumped out. She was doing a stand-up.
Not in front of the tornadoes, though. In front of Jane. Jane was on live television. The realization gave Jane a sudden rush of deep irrational fury. It was all she could do to avoid swinging the muzzle around and threatening to blow the journos away, just to watch the sons of bitches run. The bazooka was empty, though, and she had no more chaff rounds, which was just as well, because otherwise they and their human-interest spot would have been structure-hit to blazing hell-and-gone. Jane flinched away from their cameras and gritted her teeth, and set the bazooka back in place with meticulous professionalism, and ran around the car and got back in and slammed the door.
"That was great!" Rick shouted. "Damn, Janey, you're good with that thing!"
"It was a dud round," Jane shouted back.
"Oh! Shit."
Jane turned on the noise cancellation in her headphones. The Train vanished suddenly, its every sonic wavelength neatly canceled by a sound chip inside the earphones. The echoing roar was replaced by an eerie, artificial, oddly wet-sounding silence, as if she'd thrust her head into a big hollowed-out pumpkin.
When Rick shouted at her once again, his voice was a flat filtered drone. "We just got dust whirl on that right one! We're gonna lose the anticyclonic."
"I figured," Jane murmured, her voice loud in her own ears. Rick lifted his goggles, realized she had her noise-cancellation headphones on, nodded in appreciation, fetched up his own headphones from beneath the passenger seat, and clamped them over his ears.
"Can't tag 'em all," Rick uttered wetly through the phones. "I'm gettin' some real good photogrammetry, though. Move up closer on that left one."
The right-hand spike was on the ground now, trying to stabilize. It was tearing through a patch of high grass a kilometer away, stewing a blur of dirt and straw. No major debris yet, but that straw was no joke; tornado straws were flying high-speed needles that could pierce boards and tree trunks.
She urged Charlie into pursuit again, avoiding the right-hand spike and drawing nearer to the anticyclonic twister. It had not touched down yet, and didn't seem likely to. The backward twister was being dragged off behind the front, in the shadow of its bigger brother, kicking and wriggling in distress.
Twisters were not living things. Twisters had no will or volition, they felt no joy or pain. Truly, realty, genuinely, tornadoes were just big storms. Just atmospheric vortices, natural organizations of rapidly moving air that blindly obeyed the laws of physics. Some of those laws were odd and complex and nonlinear, so their behavior was sometimes volatile, but twisters were not magic or mystical, they obeyed laws of nature, and Jerry understood those laws. He had patiently demonstrated their workings to her, in hours and hours of computer simulation. Jane knew all that with complete intellectual certainty.