"He's had the beard ever since I met him," Jane said. "I'm sorry that, um... well, that it's been so long. And that you and he don't get along better."
"A misunderstanding," Leo offered, weighing his words. "You know how Jerry can be... very singleminded, am I right? If you're addressing some issue, and it doesn't quite chime with Jerry's current train of thought.
He's a very bright man of course, but he's a mathematician, not very tolerant of ambiguity." Leo smiled sadly. He has his dignity, Jane thought. That magnetism Jerry has, and that ruthlessness too.
She found him extremely attractive. Alarmingly so. She could easily imagine fucking him. She could hotly imagine flicking both of them. At once.
And when they went for each other's throats she'd be smashed between them like a mouse between two bricks.
She cleared her throat. "Well... is there something I can do for you in particular, Leo?"
"Actually, yes," Leo said. "By the way, you don't mind if I hard-copy these photos, do you?"
"Oh, go ahead."
"It's about this strange business with the F-6," said Leo as his printer emitted a well-bred hum. "I wonder if you could explain that to me a little more thoroughly."
"Well," Jane said, "the F-6 is a theory Jerry has."
"It sounds a bit alarming, doesn't it? A tornado an order of magnitude larger than any seen before?"
"Well, strictly speaking it wouldn't be a tornado per se -more of a large-scale vortex. Something smaller than a hurricane, but with a different origin and different structure. Different behavior."
"Was I right in hearing that this thing is supposed to be a permanent feature of the atmosphere?"
"No," Jane said. "No. I mean, yes, there is some indication in the models-if you set the parameters just right, there are some, urn, indicators that an F-6 might become a stable configuration under certain circumstances. Look, Leo, we don't emphasize that aspect, okay? The woods are full of nutty amateurs running homemade climate models and declaring all kinds of crazy doomsday crap. It would look really bad if the press started telling everybody that Jerry's forecasting some kind of giant permanent storm over Oklahoma. That's just not responsible behavior from a scientist. Jerry's got problems enough already with the labcoat crowd, without that kind of damage to his credibility.''
"Jerry does think, seriously, that an F-6 will actually occur, though."
"Well, yes. We do think that. The mesoscale convection is shaping up, the Bermuda High, the jet stream... Yeah, we think that if it's gonna happen at all, then this is the season. Probably within the next six weeks."
"A giant, unprecedently large, and violent atmospheric storm. Over the heartland of the United States."
"Yes, that's right. That's it exactly."
Leo was silent, and looked grave and thoughtful.
"Leo, you don't double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without some odd things happening."
"I'm used to odd things," Leo said. "I don't believe I'm quite used to this, however."
"Jerry's not alone in this line of thought, you know. He's out on a limb, but he's not way out. There are pale oclimatologists in Europe who think that giant storms were real common during the Eemian Interglacial. There's physical evidence in the fossil record."
"Really."
"There was also a paper out this year saying that the so-called Akkadian volcanism wasn't volcanic at all, that the dust layers, and their three-hundred-year drought, were entirely atmospheric. That was the Akkadian culture in the Tigris and Euphrates."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Akkadians were the first civilization-2200 B.C., in Mesopotamia? They were the first culture ever, and also the first culture ever destroyed by a sudden climate change."
"Right," Leo said, "I'm certain these matters have been cover our ~fted and crusading popular press. Exhaustively. And to the full satisfaction of the scientific community." He shrugged, elegantly. "I understand that the weather is crazy now, and the weather will be crazy the rest of our lives. What I don't understand is why Jerry is taking you into this."
"Me?" Jane said. "Oh! Well, I hack interface. For the Troupe. And I kinds have to get back to work right now, actually."
"Juanita, you're not taking my point. Suppose this is a really big storm. Suppose that it is a permanent vortex in the atmosphere-as Jerry has said, something like Earth's own version of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. A permanent planetary sinkhole for excess greenhouse heat, centered somewhere near North Texas. I know that seems like a bizarre supposition, but suppose it's really the truth."
"Yeah? Well, then I'll be there watching it."
"You'll be killed."
"Maybe. Probably. But I'll be there anyway. We'll document it.
"Why?"
"Why? Because we can! Because we know! It's what we do! We'll do it for the sake of the survivors, I suppose." Jane ran her hands through her hair, her face stiff. "Anyway, if the P.6 is really a worst-case F-6, then the survivors are gonna be the unlucky ones."
Leo said nothing. Jane heard an odd rumbling, then realized he was rapidly drumming his fingers on the desktop.
"I have to go now, Leo. There's a lot of work."
"Thank you for being so frank with me, Juanita. I appreciate that."
"My friends call me Janey."
"Oh. Of course. Hasta Ia vista, Janey." Leo hung up. Jane shivered, looked around herself once more.
Rick entered the yurt.
"I've got Med-I mean, I've got Alex riding shotgun in the ultralight tonight," he said. "He said he wanted to go."
Jane stared at him blankly.
Rick smiled at her. "I told you that kid really liked all of this."
ALEX WAS NIGHT-FLYING high over Texas with his head in a helmet and his face wrapped in oxygen. A tiny amber light glowed between his knees, lighting the joystick~ and rolierball. More light leaked from the translucent face shield of the virching helmet, the phantom watery glow of the menu bar falling off his own brow onto the pitch-black wings of the aircraft.
The hot spark of a global surveillance satellite showed at the horizon. Overhead were a million stars, a sliver of moon, a galactic river fog of Milky Way, a curl of high feathery cirrus. The fan behind his back pushed almost silently, merely sipping power, as it kept slow pace with the Troupe's land convoy, far below.
If there was anything more pleasant than this, Alex hadn't yet discovered it.
This time they were letting him actually fly the machine by hand. Buzzard had booted Ultralight Beryl with an obligatory big-dummy's control setting. Any ham-handed lurch at the joystick was instantly dumbed down into a gentle, nonlethal veer or dip.
Flying under these conditions strongly reminded Alex of riding a motorized wheelchair. Those same 'dainty fingertip controls, that same almost silent buzz of engine, and that same sense of sitting, wrapped with cloying security, in the care of a smart machine. Alex direly wanted to try something stupid, but he wasn't about to try anything stupid under these circumstances. He'd wait till he'd won their confidence, till they gave him a lot more initiative and leeway. Then he'd try something stupid.
Rick was in Ultralight Amber, casing the landscape be-hind the Troupe. Rick had his rifle. Just before their launches, Rick had given Alex a hair-raising lecture about the cunning and cruelty of backwoods bandits and the dire necessity for constant alertness while "riding point."
Alex found this pretty hard to swallow-at least as hard as the night's rations had been, a gruesome chop suey of jackrabbit, parched corn, and buffalo-gourd root. It had been a hell of a root, though. It took two men to carry it, and it tasted like a cross between celery and pencil shavings. It was the biggest root the Troupe had ever unearthed.
Alex couldn't help but feel rather proud of this. And riding point for the Troupe beat the hell out of riding one of -the crammed, overloaded buses. But Alex couldn't imagine that riding point was really all that dangerous. After all, the Troupe chase teams drove on the backroads all over West Texas, and they'd never been stopped and robbed.