The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Nothing,” Ike said. “I guess everyone knows what we’re here for by now. It’s no secret. I hear a little now and then. Mostly nobody thinks that our experiments can possibly work. Some resent us. More, they resent the threat that our failure means that the center will be closed down. They don’t like what we’re going to do, but they like what will happen if we fail even less.” After a long pause, he added, “Casey stopped talking to us when he found out about the fusion devices. He won’t even answer if Jenny or I say something.”

  The sky over the center was brilliantly clear. The temperature was 85 but there was a delightful breeze from the northeast. Despite the frequency of tropical storms, Trident isn’t always a wet and gloomy place, not even the stretch of it that sits in the path of most of the hurricanes.

  “I almost wish there had been some way to hide the fact that we’re going to use fusion devices, if need be, until the last minute,” I said. Casey had walked out of a room just because I entered—a couple of times. I felt bad about that. I had liked Casey when we met. “But anyone who spent a few minutes running the calculations could guess it.” Anyone likely to be working at the Trident Hurricane Study Center, at least.

  There was one other possibility, but it was even more exotic—and therefore less likely. One of the proposals we had investigated had called for deploying a series of large mirrors in orbit to concentrate sunlight on the center of a hurricane. In theory, it would be possible to concentrate more energy that way, but the process would be slower than explosive compression (if that worked), and it would be much more expensive and complicated. And, in the case of Earth, it probably wasn’t feasible. There’s simply too much garbage orbiting Earth after two centuries of space exploration and travel—all the way out to geo-stationary. Mirrors large enough to do the job would be ripped apart by the flotsam and jetsam long before they could manage the task.

  “Well, they can’t get into the module,” Ike said. “And I can’t see them doing anything melodramatic like sabotaging a plane to keep us from finishing.”

  “It’s possible that they would simply cut off our access to the planes and computers,” I said. “Maybe even confine us to our rooms.”

  “They couldn’t get away with that!” Ike protested.

  “No, but they could stop our experiments. Elkins and enough of the others might be willing to take that chance.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “History,” I said.

  For the moment, that was where the discussion ended. A troop of the local chimps spotted us and came charging across the clearing. With them chattering and bouncing around, there wasn’t much chance for Ike and me to continue our talk. But they were a welcome distraction. I couldn’t distinguish among the T-chimps, so I didn’t know if Mona was with this group. I could see differences in the color patterns between different chimps, but I didn’t know them well enough to identify individuals the way Elkins and most of the permanent staff could.

  When Ike and I reached the supply bunker that held the shuttle payload module with our equipment, the chimps broke off their play and ran back toward the center. Evidently, they knew they weren’t permitted in the bunkers.

  I keyed in my password to the main door. Then Ike keyed in his. I had used my authority to commandeer an entire bunker. The door needed any two of three passwords. Jenny had the third. The module we had brought along was protected by a similar two-of-the-three password arrangement, but in that case, one of the two had to be mine. Security.

  Once we got the bunker open, I dug out the electronic log I had put into the lock mechanism to make sure that there had been no attempts to enter. The log was clean. I reset and replaced it.

  “We might as well haul out the first set of sleds,” I told Ike while we were unlocking the payload module. It had been taken out of the shuttle and stored the afternoon before. Ike nodded as he finished keying in his password.

  “I’ll get on the manipulator,” he said.

  Our Manta air sleds had been considerably modified for our experiments. To give them enough payload capacity for our largest explosive loads, we had to strip off a lot of their standard maneuvering and navigating equipment. They were set to maneuver expressly within hurricane eyes, looping clockwise along the eyewall. We could adjust the diameter of the loops within limits, but that constant right bank and sufficient leeway in climbing and descending were the only maneuvers those sleds were capable of. They had to be dropped into the eye from directly overhead. There was no chance of sending them off to find their places from a distance. They no longer carried enough fuel for that, even if we hadn’t limited their maneuverability.

  Ike got the top of the module opened with the bunker’s manipulator—something more than a simple crane, much more flexible—and lifted the first four air sleds out one at a time. Very carefully. Each of these sleds held a ton of TT4. The next four held two tons, the next group three, and then four tons. If four sleds, each carrying four tons of TT4, didn’t provide enough force to disrupt a category five hurricane, we would go to the last set of sleds. Each of those carried a seventeen megaton fusion device—the largest we could squeeze into an air sled. While it might have been more logical to cut down on the number of TT4 trials and include a second set of fusion devices in the moderate kiloton range, logic isn’t always the dominant force when science and politics meet.

  Ike set the first four sleds in a row down the center of the bunker. Then he came back from the manipulator and we locked the wings down on each of the Mantas, and ran the full list of pre-flight checks on each of them. Next Ike ran a hands-and-eyes check on each sled to make sure that there was nothing wrong that wouldn’t show up electronically.

  “Ready to go,” he said when he finished with the last one.

  I nodded. “Let’s put new seals on them and then run the electronic tests on the rest of the sleds while we’re here.” That took us another ninety minutes. We didn’t find anything out of order. I hadn’t expected to. No one else had had access to the sleds since they were packed on Earth, and I had run a check on them before locking the module.

  “We’ll put the first four aboard the plane tomorrow afternoon. I’ll tell Doctor Elkins that we have to have it then.”

  * * *

  I had managed a couple of short flights in Imres during the days of waiting for a suitable storm to appear, so I wasn’t nervous about handling a survey plane. At the altitudes we would be at, there was really little to worry about, even flying into the center of a category five hurricane. We wouldn’t go down into the eye this time. Ike and I would drop the air sleds from above, guide them into position, and head back toward the research center. Jenny would monitor the results from there.

  After we loaded the sleds in the drop hold, Ike spent the night in the plane—his idea, not mine. At that, he may have spent a better night than I did. I didn’t sleep well at all. I shared many of Doctor Elkins’s reservations about the possible success of our experiments, at least the TT4 runs. If we killed a hurricane with chemical explosives, it would be a fluke. But we had to start with those tests.

  It was raining over the center when I got up in the morning and drove over to the landing strip. A category three had come ashore to the south during the night and it was quickly losing strength, fizzling away in scattered showers. Ike was already up and running another equipment check on the sleds when I climbed into the plane.

  “I wondered when you were going to get here,” Ike said, grinning. I just shook my head. The computer terminals showed the portions of the Angry Sea we had to worry about. “Our” hurricane was marked in contrasting colors to make it easier to watch. A quick glance at the data screen showed me that it hadn’t changed character in the twenty minutes since I had left the terminal in my room.

  “We’re set to go,” Ike said, brushing his hands off on his coveralls. I nodded and moved up to the pilot’s seat.

  We worked our way down the preflight checklist. I was very careful about that, going down the lis
t item by item. That was one thing about a long layoff from flying. It made me more cautious than I might have been if I flew regularly. But the list of manual steps was fairly short, mostly a series of checks of the plane’s electronics and mechanical connections. The Imre’s own diagnostic programs handled most of the work.

  The two jets fired up quickly and checked out perfectly. We had a full load of fuel. Hydraulics were in top condition. So was everything else. There wasn’t anything even close to yellow on the readiness scale.

  “Let’s go,” I said when we finished the list. I taxied the Imre away from the bunkers and turned into the wind before I cranked the jets around for a 45-degree take-off. There was no real need for the STOL start. I’m just more comfortable with that on grass.

  The flight was uneventful. That’s how I like all of my flights. Jenny was on the radio with us almost continuously. Twice, Donna Elkins broke in to ask nonessential questions—mostly to let us know that she was keeping tabs on the operation. I didn’t ask, but I figured that there was a good chance that most of the permanent staff were where they could keep track of what we were doing. It didn’t matter how they felt about our experiments. They knew that their future on Trident rode with them.

  I let Ike spell me at the controls for part of the flight. He had his pilot’s license, but not a lot of hours. Giving him a shot at the controls let me stretch my legs a little … and run a last check on the air sleds before we deployed them. That was just nervousness. We had no margin for botched runs.

  “Ten minutes,” Ike reported as I strapped myself back in the pilot’s seat.

  “We’re ready.” I looked to make sure that Ike was strapped in. While the hold doors were open, we would be slightly more vulnerable than at other times. “Oxygen masks,” I said. The cockpit was pressurized separately from the hold, and I had sealed the hatch between them when I came back, but it was a matter of not taking any unnecessary chances.

  We dropped to 40,000 feet, just above the top of the cloud cap, to release the air sleds. The center’s Imres were all equipped to launch the Mantas—the basic design was used as a standard weather service probe. The sleds slid out smoothly, one at a time. Each sled’s jet fired up when Ike hit the hot buttons. While I closed the hold door and turned us to our return course, Ike was busy juggling the four sleds, guiding them into position. We wanted the sleds spaced at 90-degree intervals, just over the slight inner bulge of the eyewall. For this storm, that meant at 18,000 feet. It took fifteen minutes to get all four sleds positioned properly with their jets keeping them on station.

  “Jenny, give us five minutes from now, then fire them,” I said as soon as Ike confirmed that everything was set.

  “Counting down,” Jenny replied. A repeater on the data screens in the cockpit flipped over to show the time remaining.

  I cut the microphone before I told Ike, “We’ll need more time than that before we do the fusion run.” I didn’t want all of the eavesdroppers to hear that. If Elkins and the rest knew that I was so certain of going on to the fusion devices, it might add to the hassles.

  * * *

  We were 160 miles in front of the eye and 5 miles above the sleds when Jenny touched off the TT4. We lost telemetry from the sleds at once but picked up the reports from the lowest of the tracking satellites. All four packages exploded precisely on schedule. The satellite picked up the flashes, and the pressure wave around the disintegrating Mantas.

  And that was all. Any effect on the hurricane was minimal and transitory. Within seconds, there was no trace of any change.

  “Well, we didn’t expect anything from the first run,” Ike said softly, his hand over his microphone, but I could hear disappointment in his voice.

  * * *

  “Not even a hint of any effect, not the slightest encouragement of eventual success,” Donna Elkins said. At least she hadn’t been waiting for us at the landing strip. It wasn’t until after supper that evening that she asked me to step into her office.

  “It’s too soon to say that,” I replied, probably just because I was feeling too stubborn to concede anything to her yet. Supper in the communal dining hall had been trying. The staff still did its best to ignore us, but they didn’t try to hide their various reactions to the day’s run. A few showed what may have been genuine regret, but I saw too many gloating smirks to feel very agreeable.

  “We’re still examining the transients we got immediately after detonation,” I continued. “In any case, today’s run was just the first—minimal load, minimal expectations. We couldn’t afford to do a dry run without explosives. And today’s results, minimal though they were, will give us a starting point when we start calibrating results for the series.”

  “You intend to continue?” Donna asked. There was no surprise in her voice. She just wanted confirmation.

  “Of course. As a matter of fact, we’ve already isolated a likely candidate for our next run. Unless it turns out to be unsuitable, we’ll hit it about noon, local time, three days from now. I’ll key the data to you as soon as I get back to my room. More than forty-eight hour notice.”

  “In case you’re interested, nobody on staff thinks you have much chance of succeeding. Only two of our younger people are willing to concede that you have any chance at all.”

  “Some people are born optimists,” I said. I immediately regretted the flippancy. There was no point in aggravating the situation. A little more softly, I added, “I would be a lot happier myself if we had the means to make the test series a lot more comprehensive.”

  “Normally, I would agree with a statement like that,” Donna said. “But I think that you’re building on a fallacious theory to start with. I only wish that the fate of the center wasn’t tied to your work. It’s bad for morale.”

  * * *

  A continuing lack of success was bad for my morale. It didn’t do Ike and Jenny much good either, even though we had only minimal expectations for the chemical explosives. Our second run was with two tons of Tri-thermolite-four in each of four sleds. That went off on schedule and produced little more in the way of measurable data than the first test. The third was scheduled to use three tons of TT4 per sled. But before we got a chance to run that set, we ran into a period where none of the hurricanes were suitable. They were either too intense or they were daisy-chained. We spent our time going back over the scant data that our first two runs had given us. But no matter how often we sifted through the data, there wasn’t enough information to give us any clues about refining our procedure, or even to suggest whether or not there was any hope of eventual success.

  “Is there any way we could use all of our remaining TT4 on one test?” Jenny asked, about ten days into our “dry spell.” “Maybe that would give us enough of a bang.”

  “We’re pushing the limits squeezing four tons into a sled for the last TT4 trial,” Ike told her—as if she didn’t know that already.

  “And it might corrupt our data if we tried to juggle eight sleds around an eyewall at one time,” I added. “If we could even manage it.”

  Ike’s eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. “We don’t have enough control circuits. And I’m not sure I could handle eight sleds at once if we did. Not with the kind of precision we need.”

  “In any case, it would take two planes to deploy eight sleds, which would mean using center personnel. I’m not sure that would be wise,” I said, damping the idea a little further.

  “It was an idea,” Jenny said with a sigh. “Anything to speed things up.”

  “I know,” I told her. “Look, kids, we both know where the holes are in our experiments. No matter what happens, our work is going to be flawed. If we fail, we might not be able to tell if it’s just a matter of insufficient explosive power, or if better positioning of the charges would help. Even if the final run works, our work will still be incomplete. The big questions will be, ‘How much overkill is there?’ and ‘How much less force would have worked?’”

  “That’s the same question, just wo
rded differently,” Ike said.

  “I know. That’s the point.”

  * * *

  By the time we had a suitable target for our third run, we had been on Trident six weeks. The storm was a minimal category five—barely within our test parameters. But the storm showed no sign of weakening. Jenny made this flight with me, leaving Ike on the controls back at the center. Deployment went without a hitch. I started us back toward the center while Jenny maneuvered the Mantas into position along the eyewall.

  I held my breath from the time I gave the signal for detonation until my monitor confirmed that all four sleds had exploded. A minute later, Ike was on the radio.

  “At least I could tell something happened,” he reported. Jenny and I exchanged glances that acknowledged another failure before Ike continued. “We’re still not showing anything significant though, and the effects are already damped out by the system.”

  The fourth run, eight days later, didn’t produce much in the way of positive results either. Four tons of TT4 in each of the sleds set off minimal ripples, and they lasted for less than a minute before they were lost in the general energy dynamo around the eye of the hurricane.

  Doctor Elkins gave me a full day before she asked me to her office for another “conference.”

  “You’re not getting anywhere,” she said as soon as I sat down across the desk from her.

  “We have one test left to run,” I reminded her.

  “Give it up, Roy,” she said softly. “You’re not showing any encouraging results at all. Since it appears that the center here is doomed to close its doors anyway, let’s at least not contaminate Trident with nuclear explosions.”

  “I thought that you were so dedicated to this place that you would do anything to keep it open,” I said.

  “This place is my life,” Donna said. She spoke softly, sorrow more than anger in her voice. “And I would do anything to keep it open—anything that offered any hope of success. And your experiments don’t.”