"All right," Jane said. She put her hand on his. "Jerry, when this is over, then that's what we're going to do. When the F-6 is over, and it's all behind us, and we've shown the whole world what we know and what we witnessed, then we're going to go after your brother. You and me, together, and we're going to rescue him from whatever trouble he's in, and we'll set him all straight."
"That's a major challenge, darling."
"Jerry, you said you wanted a big problem. Well, you've got a big problem, I see that now. I don't care how many political friends your brother has, he's a big problem but he's just a human being, and he's not as big as a storm that can smash Oklahoma. I'm not afraid of your storm, and I'm not afraid of you, and I'm not afraid of your brother. You can't scare me away from you with any of this talk, I love you and I'm staying with you, and nothing will take you from me, nothing but death. We can do this thing. We're not just helpless watchers, we are doers too, in our own way. In our own way, you and I, we are both very practical people."
"Darling," he said, and meant it, "you are very good to me."
The speaker erupted. "This is Rick in Baker! We got circulation!"
ENDLESS RAIN COULD depress you, and there was no disaster like a flood, but there was something uniquely mean and pinched and harsh about a drought. Drought was a trial to the soul.
They'd followed the spike along the rim of the great high. It was a long, ropy, eccentric F-2, and it had moved, with particular oddity, from the north toward the southwest, a very unusual storm track for Tornado Alley. The F-2 had been exceptionally long-lived, never achieving true earthshaking power, but sipping some thread of persistent energy from the edge of the high. And there had been hail with it, nasty, black, dust-choked hail; but scarcely a drop of rain.
Now the F-2 had roped out and Jane and Jerry were in the canyonlands west of Amarillo, the part of the Texas Panhandle people called the Breaks. They'd been running cross-country in a flat plain, and then the earth opened up in front of them. The Canadian River of the Panhandle was not a major river now, but it had been a very major river during the last ice age, and it had done some dreadful things to the landscape here. Real mesas, not the slumped hills of the south High Plains. Mesas weren't mountains. They were not vigorous upthrustings in the landscape. Mesas were remnants, mesas were all that was left, after ages of stubborn resistance to rainsplash and sheetwash and channel cutting. The mesas had a layer of hard sandstone, t caprock, up on top, but below that caprock layer was a soft, reddish, weak, and treacherous rock that was scarcely petrified mud. That rock wa~ so weak you could tear off clods of it and crumble it to dust with your fingers. The mesas were toothless and terribly patient and all wrinkled down the sides, eaten away with vertical gullies, their slopes scattered with the cracked remains of undereaten sandstone slabs.
It was very old and very wild country. It had few roads, and those in poor repair. Around local creekbeds and water holes, people sometimes found twelve-thousand-year-old flint spearheads, mixed with the blackened, broken bones of extinct giant bison. Jane always wondered what the reaction of those flint-wielding Folsom Point peopie had been when they realized they had exterminated their giant bison, wiped them into extinction with their dreadful high-tech ati-atls, and their cutting-edge flint industry, and the all-consuming giant wildfires they'd used to chase whole assembly lines of bison pell-mell off the canyon cliffs. Maybe some had condemned the wildfires and atlatls, and tried to destroy the flints. While others had been sick at heart forever, to find themselves p arty to such a dreadful crime. And the vast majority, of course, simply hadn't noticed.
The canyon walls of the Breaks played hell with communications. They cast a major radio shadow, and if you got really close to them they could even block satellite relay. That posed no challenge for Pursuit Vehicle Charlie, though, who put his superconductive to work and scuttled up the slope to the top of the largest mesa in the neighborhood. That mesa was helpfully festooned with big towers and microwave horns.
Jane and Jerry weren't the first to come here for their own purposes. Most of the horns were lavishly stenciled with bullet holes, some old, some new. A structure-hit gang had tagged the tower blockhouses with much-faded graffiti. Old-fashioned psycho-radical slogans like SMASH THE BALLOT MARKET and t.rr m~it EAT DATA and SCREAMING wou SURVIVES, done with that kinky urban folk intensity that urban graffiti had once had, before the spirit had suddenly and inexplicably leached out of it and the whole practice of tagging had dried up and gone away.
There was a fire pit with some ancient burned mesquite stubs, and a mess of scattered beer cans, the old aluminum kind of beer container that didn't melt in the rain. It was easy to imagine the vanished Luddite marauders, up here with their dirt bikes and guns and howling, chanting boom boxes.
Jane found this intensely sad, somehow more lonely than if there had never been anyone here in the first place. She wondered who the gang had been, and what in hell they had thought they were doing way out here, and what had become of them. Maybe they were just plain dead, as dead as the Folsom flint people. The state of Texas had always been remarkably generous with the noose, the chair, and the needle, and in the early days of parole cuffs there'd been little complaint about tamperproofing them with contact nerve poison. And that was just the formal way-the polite and legitimate way of erasing people. If the gang had been jumped by Rangers they'd be unmarked graves by the roadside now, green lumps in some overgrown pasture. Maybe they had blown themselves up, trying to cook demolition bombs out of simple household chemicals. Had they snapped out of the madness and achieved a foothold in what passed for real life? Did they have jobs now?
She'd once asked Carol, tactfully, about the Underground, and Carol had said bluntly: "There is no more alternative society. Just people who will probably survive, and people who probably won't." And Jane could pretty much go with that assessment. Because from her own experience with structure-hit activity, the people who were into that radical bullshit were just like Rangers, only stupider and not as good at it.
The sun was setting. Off in the western distance, beneath the dissolving clouds, Jane could see, with intense and lovely clarity, the skeletal silhouetting of very distant trees. The trees were whole kilometers away and no bigger than a fingernail paring, and yet she could see the shape of their every branch in the clear still air, stenciled against the colors around the sun, great bands of subtle, gradated, desert color, umber to amber to translucent pearly white.
The chase was over now. It was time to call camp.
Jerry got the spider antenna out of its bag and kicked its tripod open and started cranking it into full extension.
And then the wind stopped. And it grew terribly still.
And then it began to get hot.
Jane looked at the barometer readout. It was soaring- moving visibly even as she looked.