"Exactly. You won't lose anything by doing that. I can get you all the data you want. I'll punch the core on the thing for you, I swear to God I will. I can do that. But you need to live through this so you can put it all together later, and understand it. And sell it too. Right? If I don't make it through this experience, it's no big loss to anybody. But Janey, if you don't survive this, it's gonna put a pretty serious long-term crimp in your career."
"Alex, this is my career."
"You've got nothing, unless you stay alive. That makes good sense, so think about it."
"Do I look afraid to you? You think I want to run for cover? You think I like this stupid idea of yours?"
"I know you're real brave, Janey. That doesn't impress me. i'm not afraid, either. Do I look afraid to you?" He didn't. "Do I look like I'm kidding about this?" He wasn't. "All I'm telling you is that it's a bad idea for both of us to get killed today. Both the Unger kids killed at once? What about our dad?"
"What about him?"
"Well, he's no prize, our querido papd, but he cares! I mean, he cares some. At least, he wouldn't send his daughter into a death trap, just to gratify his own curiosity!" Alex started talking really quickly. "I think Mulcahey does care about you some, when he can be bothered to notice you instead of his mathematics, and in fact that's why Jerry stuck me in here with you today, so you would slow down some, and not do anything really crazy. Right? Right! That's him all over!"
Jane stared at him, speechless.
"So maybe Jerry cares about you, I grant you that, but he doesn't care about you enough! I don't care what charming bullshit he gave you, or how he convinced you to live his life for him, but if he loved you the way somebody ought to love you, he would never have sent you out here, never! This is a suicide mission! You're a young woman with a lot going for you, and you shouldn't end up as some kind of broken, stomped, bloody doll out in this goddamned wasteland!" He broke into a fit of coughing. "Look at those clouds, Jane!" he croaked. "Clouds are never supposed to took like that! We're gonna get ridden down and stomped flat out here, just like two of those rabbits!"
"Take it easy! You're losing it."
"Don't talk down to me, just look up at the sky!"
Jane, against her own will, looked up. The-dust had thinned, and the sun was higher, and the cirrus looked utterly bizarre. There were hundreds of little growing patches of it now. Shapes just like frost on a windowpane, like patchy mutant snowflakes. The clouds looked like a down feather might look if you shot ten thousand volts through it.
But that wasn't the half of it. The crazy thing was that all the little feather clouds were all exactly the same shape. They weren't the same size. Some were huge, some were tiny. They were pointed in different directions. Not all different directions, mind you-exactly six different directions. And yet hellishly, creepily, the clouds were all identical. A little comma drip on one end, a curved spine with a hook at the other, and hundreds of fine little electrified streamers branching off from both sides.
It looked like a tiling pattern. Like ceramic tiling. The Oklahoma sky was tiled like a bathroom floor.
"Bénard convection does that sometimes," Jane babbled. "The cells have six different axes of rotation and that self-similarity has gotta mean that the cell updraft vectors are all, well..." Words failed her. Words failed her quite suddenly, and really badly. A kind of software crash for language. Words-yeah, even scientific words-there were times and contingencies when reality ripped loose from verbal symbolism and just went its own goddamned way. And this was one of those times.
"What's that big seam growing up the middle?" Alex said.
"I dunno. Get the cameras on it."
"Good idea." Alex put his face into the camera goggles and tilted them upward on the weapons mounts. "Wow."
"That's gotta be the jet stream," Jane said. "The major, polar jet stream that's been hanging north all this time. It's finally moved."
"Janey, I don't know much about the jet stream, but I know the jet stream doesn't bend at that kind of angle."
"Well, it's probably not really bending; it just looks that way from this angle of observation."
"The hell it is. The hell it does. Janey, I can see it through these cameras a hell of a lot better than you can, and whatever that thing is, it's coming down. It's coming down right at us, it's gonna hit the earth."
"Great! Keep recording!"
His voice cracked. "I think we'd better leave this place."
"Hell no! That's it! Of course! Of course, that's what Jerry's been looking for-a permanent source of power for the F-6, and the jet stream is permanent power! It wraps the whole planet, and it's seven kilometers thick and it's fifty degrees below zero and it does two hundred klicks an hour. God, the jet stream, if the jet stream spikes down out of the stratosphere, then it's all gonna add up!" She grabbed for her headset.
"Janey, that thing's going to kill us. We're gonna die here."
"Shut up and keep recording." A remarkably stupid robot truck raced suddenly past them, mangling and crippling dozens of bloodied flopping jackrabbits. The rest of the rabbits exploded off in all directions, like fleas on a hot plate.
"Jane in Charlie here!" she shouted. "We got a massive outbreak! These are the coords . .
She began reading them off, her voice rising.
An avalanche of freezing air fell out of the sky. The stratosphere was ten kilometers up. Even at two hundred klicks an hour, it took the jet stream a good four minutes to fall to earth.
First, the sky cracked open, on a long, furred, spiky seam. Then, maybe ninety seconds down, the vast, thick surge of air hit a warm layer in the upper atmosphere. There was a massive, soundless explosion. Freezing gouts of ice-white cloud blew out in all directions. The clouds touched the sun, and in instants, everything began to darken.
The stream plowed through the spewing clouds like a bullet through an apple, and hit a second thermopause. There was another fantastically powerful explosion. There was still no trace of wind at ground level, but the sound from that first overhead explosion reached the earth then, a cataclysmic roll of thunder that did not vary and did not stop. A cottonwood tree at the side of the road trembled violently, for no visible reason, so violently that it shed all its leaves.
From the second explosion, actual vortices blasted out in every corner of the compass, literal swirls of splitting, freezing, curling air, whirlpool swirls of air as big as towns.
She had one last glimpse up the central core of the falling jet stream. It was clear and cold and vast and lethal. She could see stars through it.
Then the jet stream hit the living earth, maybe three kilometers away. The earth erupted in torment and dozens of vast clotted cobras of filth leaped skyward instantly. Jane jammed her sound-cahcellation earphones over her head then so she did not go deaf, but the sound of the F-6 was something far beyond the Train. It was a sonic weapon pressing through her body and crushing her inside. It was more than sound, it was raw shock, terrible, unendurable, deadly.
She fought with the car then, trying to get Charlie to turn and run. Nothing happened; the machine sat as if stunned. Lightning like no lightning she had ever seen caine out of the erupting columns of dirt. It was dirt lightning, rock lightning. It was thick and crooked and horizontal, and it looked like flying, spinning swastikas. A great flying complex of crooked lightning flew right over their heads, and it broke apart in front of her eyes into gigantic, glowing, sparking chunks.
The car moved. She turned and ran. The day was gone. They were in black hell, instant Gehenna. A hurricane of dirt had spread all over the sky. They were buried alive under a giant spreading plateau of screaming, crackling filth. The air was half-dirt. The maddened earth had forgotten the difference between air and dirt. Dirt and air were going to be the same thing from now on. The black slurry of wind was hanging over them, it was all around them.