"So, if the computer's artificial intelligence has not lost its mind entirely," Thompson explained, "then perhaps it has somehow lost its UGPS signals. Perhaps through a fault in the antenna system. Or perhaps through some radio interference....If the latter, then we can hope the difficulty will clear itself."
"I've never heard of interference on those frequencies," Carlyle said doubtfully. "For any person to willfully interrupt them would be a serious violation of international regulations."
"You are right, of course. Then perhaps our antenna has died. Anyway, let's see if the computer can recover its composure."
It never did. Instead, the goggles sent them an INSUFFICIENT DATA message. The display of flight cues remained a blank; it was the color of a phosphor tube after the light had died. Only the lower field, showing the cockpit controls in their orderly, functional banks, remained available to the pilots.
"What are we going to do?" Carlyle asked quietly.
"I don't…"
Without explaining further, Captain Eduardo Thompson then did something he had never attempted while on duty before. He reached up, pulled off his goggles, and looked out the windshield with his own eyes.
He was staring up at a pale blue sky, with neither land nor sea in sight. It was the plane's attitude, of course: in descent mode it would be riding with its nose at a thirty-degree positive angle.
Carlyle pushed her own goggles up on her forehead. She looked out the windshield, then across at him.
"You realize this is a total breach of flight regulations," she said.
"I wish I had an alternative." Thompson bit his lip. "If we're going to see anything, we'll have to bring the nose down."
"Then we will gain speed. It might cause us to overshoot. And the ram is already throttled back to just eight percent, which is only enough power for aerodynamic balance."
"I will employ the airbrakes."
"Those are intended only for use at low speed, you know. They will interrupt the airflow and might destabilize—"
"I understand," the captain cut her off.
He eased forward on the imaginary yoke with his hands and reached for the lever which actuated the flow reversers. At this point he realized his error.
"Damn!"
"What's wrong?"
"I can't see the controls."
The Neural link gloves did not work properly without the goggles. They were a system. The plane's flight controls had no physical reality, except as cues in the virtual world created before him by the goggles. It was his hand movements alone, as the gloves reported them to the computer, which operated the plane.
As an experiment, Thompson continued the forward pitch, heedless of the speed their dive was building up. The horizon—the actual Earthly horizon—came up to meet him. It was a mottled field of blue-gray water and gray-green land, partially obscured by wisps of whitish-gray cloud. If there was a city down there, much less an airport, Thompson could not see it.
"This is not going to work."
"Then one of us must watch," Carlyle said reasonably, "while the other one flies. You are the captain and senior officer, so your experience should guide us." She pulled the goggles back over her face again. "I will activate the airbrakes now."
"Not that—look!"
Carlyle pushed away the goggles and leaned forward. The woman was so short, her eyes barely came above the lower edge of the windshield. It had not affected her career before. Now, however, she had to push herself up with her hands on the armrests. While she studied the terrain, the song of descending numbers sirened in her ears. The wingtips started to flutter.
"Can you see anything familiar out there?" Thompson asked, with a note of anxiety creeping into his voice.
"I… I think so. That would be the 'Big Apple,' still off to our left. And the bulge in the shoreline on the right is Colonia. And that must be Tigre, straight ahead. So Ezeiza should be on a heading of—oh, well, make it ten o'clock from here."
"Your eyes are younger than mine." Imperfect eyesight had never before inhibited a pilot's career, either… Thompson made his decision. "You observe. I will fly."
He slipped his own goggles back on. The seat beside him creaked as Carlyle got up on her knees to improve her position.
"You'd better drop your speed now," she said.
Thompson cut back on his throttles even further, reached for the brake lever, and moved it gently. In response, the airframe shuddered and the wings started into a short, sharp, up-and-down oscillation, almost a truncated whip-roll. The captain and the computer, working together, damped the movement.
"Bring it around approximately ten degrees left," Carlyle instructed.
After a minute Thompson made another decision. "I'm going to declare a landing emergency."
"Do that," she agreed.
With his thumb he pushed an imaginary button on the yoke and spoke into his throat-mike. "Ezeiza Tower, this is Argentinas One-niner. Do you read, over?"
The buds in his ears now burped and squealed with static. Through it, a voice said, "… transmission badly. Read back…"
He keyed the mike again. "This is Argentinas Flight One-niner. We have an airworthiness emergency. Our navigation system is out. We are attempting to fly by visual references only. Repeat, we are coming in blind. Please prepare emergency—"
"One-niner, wait one, out," the tower said, suddenly in the clear.
"Left another five degrees, please," Carlyle instructed beside him. "And you can bring the nose up about two degrees."
Thompson made the corrections.
Ezeiza Tower came back on the air. "You're about the tenth in line for rescue, One-niner. Everybody's UGPS is acting up. What is your fuel status, over?"
The captain checked the imaginary gauges before his eyes. "I show fifty-two hundred kilos. Say, forty minutes' flying time, over."
"Thank you, out."
"Captain…" Carlyle began. "If we're not going in on this leg, I suggest you back off the airbrakes and enter a shallow turn to the right. We can hold at thirty-five hundred meters."
Thompson relayed his intentions to the tower and received authorization. He shifted the plane into a banking turn.
"Are we going to make it, Captain?" his copilot asked quietly.
"With luck," he said.
For another five minutes, they flew their wide circle.
"All right, Argentinas One-niner," the tower cut in, "you're in luck. Our computer likes your position for a window that's coming up in… forty-five seconds on my mark… Mark. Bring your heading around to—"
"Ezeiza, I have no compass readings and my inertials are unreliable, over."
"Ah… All right. Bring your nose around visually about twenty degrees and descend at forty meters per second, out."
Carlyle touched his shoulder and said, "He's lining us up on the runway, Captain. I can see it in the distance. There are flashing lights…"
"Lights?" Thompson cocked his head.
"Yes, they look just like our tracer beads, except they're blue."
"They must be something for private fliers."
"Must be," she agreed.
"Argentinas One-niner, you are looking good. Increase descent rate to fifty per, out"
Thompson complied, but still he asked Carlyle, "How do we look?"
'Just like in the goggles. Except flatter."
"Flatter? Should I pull—?"
"No, no. Just that, it's not as real, you know?"
"Whatever," he sighed.
A few minutes later, the tower had more instructions for them. "Argentinas One-niner, we have winds out of the west-northwest steady at fourteen. You are three kilometers out, at an altitude of seven hundred meters. You should lower flaps now, out."
"Looks about right, Captain," Carlyle confirmed.
Thompson worked the knobs to throttle up his ramjet by ten percent and then crank in a full forty degrees of flap, which was standard for the light wind conditions described. Even with the increase in power, the greater
drag slowed the big plane until it felt as if they were just hanging in the air. That sensation matched the flight profile.
"Gear down, Captain," his copilot instructed.
He pushed the ghostly lever with his gloved hands, and the three landing gear lights went red. He counted ten and felt for the thud as the struts locked; Thompson was not satisfied with just watching the lights go to green. The gear further spoiled the airflow, sending shudders up through his seat. And that, too, was expected.
"I can see white stripes on the runway," Carlyle said.
"The touchdown zone," he explained. "I've seen it before, from the ground. We interpret them as parallel floating bars."
"They have ragged black marks through them."
''Rubber—from the tires."
"Ouch! I never realized how abrasive—"
"Argentinas One-niner, maintain your angle of descent. You are five seconds from touchdown… Four… Three…"
"Left a bit, Captain."
He swung the yoke gently left.
"Two… One…"
The airframe shuddered and then the undercarriage rumbled continuously along on the concrete. Thompson cut his throttles and steered a straight course. For a moment he could relax: he knew the runway was as linear as a ruler, and crosswinds were not a factor when the plane was rolling at these speeds.
"One-niner, proceed to Taxiway Twelve… And welcome home."
"Thank you, Ezeiza, out."
The captain slipped his goggles back and looked ahead through the glass. They were coming up on the turn off the runway. He steered through it by feel alone.
"That was a novel experience," he said brightly. Then he added seriously, "I couldn't have done it without your young eyes, Allison."
Carlyle's face colored. "The tower would have talked you through it, surely."
"No, I never would have found Buenos Aires."
"Well, at least we'll never have to do it again."
"I hope not. But something interfered with the satellite signals, and it clearly affected a lot of planes… I wonder just what happened?"
Chapter 13
In the National Weather Office
1010 mbar
1008 mbar
1004 mbar
998 mbar
National Weather Office, Washington, D.C., March 21, 18:53 UT
The trailing edge of the warm air mass was shaping up precisely according to his library reference contours as WEATHERMAN hurried the low-pressure mound across the Pacific Ocean. He was moving it north by east from its spawning grounds, which had been two thousand kilometers west of Baja, California.
That part of the operation presented no unusual problems. At this point in the season the semitropical waters were beginning to warm up, vastly increasing the amount of water vapor they could donate. So the reserves of saturated air this region would generate was growing day by day. WEATHERMAN only had to work half as hard as he might have during the deep winter months of January and February to coax this air mass into being and then move it off along its curving, counterclockwise path.
The tools at WEATHERMAN'S disposal for driving such a body were applied heat and cold. The heat, in the form of concentrated solar energy which he lasered from high-orbiting satellites into the cloud banks or the Earth's surface. The cold came from packets of carbon filaments which he could lob into the stratosphere with rocket launches from the western Pacific and Hawaii, or with magnetic catapult lifts out of Whitney Center and Mount Rainier.
Hot and cold, push and pull, these were the tools of the National Weather Office and its master intelligence.
WEATHERMAN was aiming this wet air mass for collision with a high-pressure system that was drifting down from the Gulf of Alaska, headed south and east toward the coast of California.
That lump was his real problem. Working as late as this in the storm season, while the Earth's rotation was tipping the planet's northern regions back toward the sun, WEATHERMAN found the polar air masses were retreating rather than advancing. So he had to darken the skies behind this cold air mass with carbon bombs, strengthening the swell of dense air that kept it alive, and flail the ocean water in front of it with heat waves, creating brief low-pressure pockets that would pull the system forward.
Still, if all other factors held equal, then the tracks these two independent weather systems—cold and hot, high and low—were following would eventually insert the warm, moist air from Mexican waters just in front of the cold air coming out of the Gulf of Alaska. And the collision would occur just as the curve of the Jetstream nudged the latter south across the coast into Northern California.
The cold, high-pressure mass would be moving faster then and would eat its way beneath the sluggish, warm, low-pressure system, which WEATHERMAN was allowing to glide northward under its own inertia for the last six hundred kilometers. As the Alaskan air mass moved eastward across the Central Valley, the warm Mexican air would climb its sloping edge, rising until the thin, cold reaches of the upper atmosphere dropped it below the dew point, releasing its latent moisture as precipitation.
If other factors held equal then, the interaction should release two to three inches of rain on farmers in the thirstiest state of the union, with another five inches of moist snow piling up in the Sierra Nevada for the spring runoff.
It would be WEATHERMAN'S fifth such engineered storm of the season. It represented an economic value in crops and watershed of $56 million—all for an immediate expenditure in collected solar energy and launched filament packets of only $280,000. Of course it was still too soon for WEATHERMAN to begin banking and investing the storm's profits, other factors holding equal, but he could certainly alert the humans in the General Services Administration to gear up for another wave of agricultural and water district billings—and for the anguished screams that always accompanied an increase in the weather rates.
Of course, this cost-benefit structure was stated on a project basis only. If WEATHERMAN were forced to include in his calculations the embedded costs of the satellite system at his disposal, or the 16,000 terrestrial and airborne telemetering substations around the continental U.S. alone which reported to him minute by minute on their ambient temperature and pressure, precipitation and humidity, wind speed and direction, visibility, cloud cover and height, compiling the masses of data from which WEATHERMAN worked his miracles of ingenuity—then the profit picture would be substantially different. However, from WEATHERMAN'S point of view, most of those embedded capital costs had long ago been depreciated to the point of nullity, and he was flatly prepared to marshal gigabytes of argument on this subject.
Tidying up that line of isobars now, WEATHERMAN isolated, sampled, and collated the current air-pressure readings from a network of contract buoys floating in the eastern Pacific.
996mbar at24°33'14”N, 132°28'56"W…
998mbar at24°34'38"N, 132°30'09MW…
1002 mbar—ZZZiip!
The data flow stopped almost before it had started. WEATHERMAN noted the loss and posted a grievance with the General Services Administration, instructing them to withhold payments to the management of that buoy operation until the error was corrected. In the meantime, there were other—
The high-pressure center had stopped moving north. And it had stopped turning! Or rather, as WEATHERMAN quickly determined by area analysis, his rich stream of bits, the engorged flow of minutiae which fed his continuing picture of the system, had stopped. He was processing and reprocessing information that was, as of now, milliseconds old and rapidly growing older and more out of date.
Rather than sit and churn, however, the picture began to fade as his self-timed buffers cut in. WEATHERMAN was losing his model of the colliding air masses—which was to say that he was losing control of them. Handled improperly, they might meet too soon for maximum precipitation, or too late for any useful result at all. This was adverbially annoying.
Like a rain of smoking acid droplets, the reporting stations in WEATHERMAN'S network fizzled out.
They did not go serially, in any geographically sensible pattern; nor did they shut down all at once, like a sudden power failure. Instead they went piecemeal and left holes in his analysis. WEATHERMAN tried to fill them by interpolating the data from surrounding stations and dithering the pattern, but the disintegration was too rapid. The holes widened, darkened, eroding the accuracy of his model, damaging his sense of order.
A nanosecond's inspection showed WEATHERMAN that there might be a pattern to the failure: that each substation was falling silent just as it was due to report by the clock. At least, that was the context from WEATHERMAN'S central perspective. Of course, the phenomenon might also represent a simultaneous event, an accident of reporting or transmission approaching global proportions, which closed off each station's transmission at some common point in time before it could be missed. But speculations such as these—especially when they involved the prospect of invoking force majeure clauses in existing contracts—did not interest WEATHERMAN. He functioned solely to run a hemisphere weather model and to engineer variations of the microclimate.
So, convinced that he was being unrightfully deprived of the information he required, WEATHERMAN fired off a string of grievances to the lawyers assigned on retainer to the GSA. Let them deal with it. After all, that was what humans were for.
Fade
Fade
Fade
Away
Regional Weather Center Office, Kansas City, 11:55 a.m.CST
"Look at that!" Metops 1C John Dixon said. He was caught off balance, moving one way through the operations office but leaning the other, trying to look over the shoulder of his senior tracker, Wynans, who was sitting at the screens.
The carefully coordinated images were breaking up. It reminded Dixon of watching a piece of his grandmother's lace burn—sparks and crescents eating away at holes, blazing along strings, until nothing was left. With it went the line of rain squalls they had been chasing down into Arkansas.
"Look at what?" Wynans retorted. "WEATHERMAN is gone!"
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