Ark Storm (14 page)

They landed beneath the cloud on a large, scrubby plain. Led by Messenger, they hiked a few hundred meters away from the helicopter. Gwen suddenly had a mad fear that she was being walked to some isolated spot where she would be shot. Al Freidland’s ghost, she thought, hovered over her. She began to sweat lightly.

“Hot isn’t it, under all this sun,” remarked Weiss, smiling up at Gwen. “Could do with some clouds. Whoa, look, there is one, right above!”

Gwen felt her unease deepen. Weiss and Messenger were grinning at what was evidently a private joke.

A low, droning sound made her look up.

“There they are!” said Weiss, rubbing his hands together, looking suddenly like an excited schoolboy. All three of them craned their necks, looked up.

Gwen spotted two small airplanes, which seemed to be orbiting at opposite ends of a huge loop above them, not just going round and round on one altitude, but going higher and lower through the cloud, appearing and disappearing, the sun glinting on their wings.

“What the heck are those planes doing?” asked Gwen.

“Drones,” replied Messenger. “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.”

“Drones as in the things they send in to bomb the bad guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan?” asked Gwen.

“Exactly, just smaller, less expensive, and they’re not carrying bombs.”

“So what are they doing?” asked Gwen. “Hey,” she wiped her face. “It’s raining!”

Messenger and Weiss both let out whoops. Weiss started dancing, stamping round in a circle, bending down then straightening, raising his hands to the sky, fluttering his fingers. Gwen wondered if he were manic-depressive. She’d felt the depression, now she saw the mania.

Weiss paused, eyed Gwen, exultant.

“Exactly! It’s raining. Remember the forecast? Zero percent chance of rain?” he asked, his usually soft voice several decibels louder.

Gwen nodded, wiped her face as the rain began to pelt down.

“Welcome to Project Zeus,” said Messenger, gesticulating at the sky.

“This is you guys?” asked Gwen, disbelief warring with the rain sluicing down her face.
“You made it rain?”

Messenger and Weiss nodded. “We made it rain.”

32

THE LAB

Back in Messenger’s office, with the door closed, they sat round the table. They were soaked. And exhilarated. Messenger had turned off the air conditioning and opened a window. The balmy air drifted in with a whisper of birdsong and the tang of eucalyptus baking in the sunshine.

Gwen turned to Messenger, who had a seemingly permanent smile fixed to his lips.

“Am I dreaming?” she asked. “Tell me if I just imagined the rain.”

“It’s true, Gwen,” he said, using her name. He never used her name without affixing
Doctor
to it. Gwen recognised a new intimacy, was not immune to it.

“It rained. We made it rain,” intoned Messenger, voice low as if imparting the secrets of the confessional. “We can create rain where there is none. And where there is rain, we can make more of it. Or if we choose, less of it.”

“You can stop the rain too?” Gwen asked, glancing between Messenger and Weiss. “What are you, shamans?”

Messenger gave her a wry look. “In our own way.”

“This is cloud seeding?” asked Gwen.

“Not even close.”

Gwen got to her feet. She had too much pent-up energy, too many bubbling questions to sit still. She braced her hands on the table, leaned toward the two men. Her hair fell forward like two heavy curtains. The rain had turned it into tendrils.

“All right. Put me out of my misery. Tell me what this is, how it works!”

Gone was the surfer drawl. Gwen’s words tumbled out as an academic’s curiosity combusted with a child’s fascination at the magic of the world.

Messenger laid a hand on Peter Weiss’s shoulder.

“Weissy, why don’t you tell Gwen? You’ve put in some serious hours on this. Go on.”

A strange cocktail of emotions seemed to play across Weiss’s face. He looked thrilled, he looked cautious, then there was a glimpse of something far away, as if he were making some kind of hidden reckoning. Finally, he nodded.

“Sure. Happy to,” he added, as if none of his conflicts had just played out.

He looked up at Gwen, practically cricking his neck as she towered above him. He stood, gaining a few feet of height and distance, then leaned back on the windowsill, making her wait.

Messenger, still sitting quietly at the table, flicked his gaze between his protégés.

“OK,” Weiss declared at last. “You know all about the freshwater pipelines in the sky, how they’re fed by the sun’s action on the sea…”

Gwen nodded.

“Well, each year, the sun desalinates half a million cubic kilometers of water, which becomes atmospheric water vapor and is transported by those pipelines in the sky. What Zeus does is to hook into the earth’s electromagnetic field and open the water valves in the pipelines. Our technology replicates the sun’s natural ionization of the atmosphere and creates rain clouds.”

“How?” asked Gwen.

“Ionizers—basically a machine the size of a microwave cooker. We set them on masts, or, much better, we send them up in drones. That way, we get them right up into the cloud zone, anywhere between a few hundred meters and several kilometers from the ground. Then, from here, based on Zeus’s proprietary weather models, we program the ionizers to emit just the right quantity of short-living ions over the appropriate time period and circulation pattern to charge the natural aerosol particles. That’s where we do our shamanistic dance, with the computer model,” Weiss added, picking up his laptop, cradling it to him like a beloved infant. “All in here. Priceless.”

“I’ll bet,” said Gwen. “Then what?”

“We enhance the growth of ice particles,” replied Weiss, gently laying down the laptop on the table. “Then those babies fatten up by merging with water vapor, which then condenses and drops fast enough to turn the ice to rain before it hits the ground.” He made pitter-patter motions with his fingers, grinning now. Then he sat back, arms behind his head, a vision of sheer delight.

“In other words, we make clouds, full of rain, ready to drop it just where we want it,” concluded Messenger.

Gwen’s head spun. “OK. I get the science. Your ionizers attract dust particles, which in turn grab water vapor out of the atmosphere. These particles bond with the water. If you ionize the atmosphere sufficiently, you get rain. This is the stuff of dreams. Too good to be true. There must be a catch.”

“Well, you do need the right conditions,” conceded Weiss, bringing his arms down, reengaging. “Humidity needs to be thirty percent minimum. You can’t do this if there’s insufficient water vapor to attract.”

“OK. Got that. What kind of area are you talking about?”

“Guess.”

“No! I don’t wanna guess. This whole thing is crazy. I’ll be way out. Just tell me.”

Weiss laughed. He was relishing this, Gwen realized, empowered by the secrets he guarded.

“The answer is, we don’t know yet, exactly,” cut in Messenger. “It’s a function, given the necessary thirty percent humidity threshold, of how many drones, how many ionizers, and how much computing and human brainpower we can throw at it.”

“We know it’s a minimum of several hundred square kilometers,” declared Weiss. “We’ve achieved that with geostatic ionizers on masts. But with drones and mobile ionizers … we think it could be tens of thousands of square kilometers, given the resources. Perhaps as many as ninety thousand,” he mused, a faraway look in his eyes.

“Holy hell!” exclaimed Gwen.

“Quite,” agreed Messenger.

“So, you use the atmospheric humidity generated from the oceans, I get that too. But how far inland can it work?”

“Hundreds of kilometers, maybe three or four hundred,” replied Weiss. “Even further inland if the humidity in the atmosphere is more than thirty percent.”

“And it rains down.”

“Or snows. We can do snow too,” said Messenger.

“’Course you can,” said Gwen, shaking her head in amazement. “This thing’s a miracle. Think what you could do! This could bring water to drought lands, to starving communities. This is a life changer, a game changer.”

“And it’s cheap,” added Messenger. “One of our sites with twenty-five emitters, costing six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, has produced over one hundred million cubic meters of water in the past year. That’s the same volume of freshwater as a one-point-two-billion-dollar desalination plant consuming a hundred and twenty million dollars’ worth of fossil fuel per year and costing three hundred and twenty-five million dollars a year to operate.”

Gwen threw up her hands.

“I’m speechless. This is the stuff of science fiction.”

Messenger smiled. “People said that about planes, cell phones, the Internet.”

Gwen shook her head. “No, this is bigger than that. This is like being God.” And Weiss was the Gatekeeper, thought Gwen. The computer model was God. Messenger was the High Priest. And she was an acolyte and didn’t give a damn. She was beyond grateful to get the chance to see this.

“Thank you, thank you for showing me this,” she said.

“Pleasure,” replied Messenger with a munificent nod. “But this wasn’t just an idle demo. We need your input. You’re a trained meteorologist.”

“And?”

“We can make it rain. You’ve seen that. We want you to work some more on the model so that we can make even more rain. Specifically with the drone-based ionizers.”

Messenger got up. He took a key from his trouser pocket, unlocked his desk drawer, and pulled out a laptop that he handed to Gwen.

“Have a look at Zeus. The model is downloaded onto this laptop. You can take it to your office, work on it there.”

Peter Weiss gave a small gasp.

He was surprised, Gwen supposed, that she was being trusted with something so enormous.

“You will make no copies,” said Messenger, “and the laptop itself cannot leave the Lab.” He gave her an unblinking look, half caution, half threat.

“I wasn’t planning on stealing Zeus,” asserted Gwen.

“I’m sure you weren’t,” replied Messenger, “but other people might not be so trustworthy. For your own safety, it’s better it stays right here.”

“I’ll hand it right back to you when I’m done at the end of the day.”

“Good.”

“So you want more rain,” mused Gwen, moving on. “At the risk of sounding simplistic, wouldn’t you just turn up the ionizers, emit more ions?”

“That’s only part of it,” replied Messenger, “but the other parts relate to picking the optimum prevailing humidity, atmospheric pressure, factoring in all the wind speed and direction permutations, the rotational height and flight pattern of the drones, how many drones to use, for what duration…” He paused, frowned. “As you know, the interplay between variables creates multiple outcomes. We want you to have a look, have a tinker, see if you can improve the theoretical yields.”

We want you to play God, thought Gwen.

“OK. I can do that. Then what?”

“Then we make it rain,” replied Messenger. “Harder and faster.”

Clasping the computer to her chest with one hand, Gwen walked to the door, paused, her other hand on the jamb.

“I’ll get started after lunch. But what about the inventor? Can we work with him, or her?”

“You won’t be able to do that,” said Messenger stiffly.

Gwen tilted her head. There was a wicked undertow swirling round and she felt stuck in it without understanding it.

“He’s dead,” said Messenger.

“Oh no!” exclaimed Gwen. “Old guy? Old age?” Suddenly she felt she had to know more.

“Jeez, Gwen, do you never ease up,” asked Weiss with a flash of irritation.

Gwen shot him a look. “Rarely.”

“Not old age,” said Messenger. “Car accident. He was killed in a hit-and-run.”

Gwen felt a roaring in her ears. Al. Zeus was Paparuda.

33

CARMEL VALLEY

Gwen locked the laptop in her desk, then locked her office door. She crossed the Lab and flashed her pass at the reader by the exit. The door clicked open and she walked out. Now she understood the security, the clocking in and out. If Zeus worked, it would be worth billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions. Governments, individuals, would kill to get their hands on it. It occurred to her that maybe they already had.

She headed quickly for her car, drove out of sight, dug into her wallet, hauled out the tattered business card. She called the number, waited, heart sounding out her anxiety like a drum.

“Hi, Mr. Freidland. Gwen Boudain. We met the other day. Could I come and see you?”

*   *   *

Gwen made the short drive from Laureless to Meadow Place in the Carmel Valley. Was it somewhere along this route that his son, Al, had been run down, knocked off his bicycle, and killed?

Charles Freidland’s house was a single-story structure of stone and Spanish tile overlooking the green expanse of the Garland Ranch Regional Park.

Freidland opened the door.

“Park the car in my garage. It’s too noticeable.”

Quickly, Gwen did as she was told.

Freidland closed the garage door, reappeared at an inner door that led straight into the house.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Freidland.”

He nodded. “Ms. Boudain. Had a feeling I would be. Come in, please.”

He led her into a sunny room with soft terra-cotta sofas, warm wood side tables, and photos in plain wooden frames. Gwen studied the baby, the boy, the man. Al, tousled-haired, smiling back at the camera, the same light warming his crinkled eyes. Always smiling. Gwen felt a yank of emotion, swallowed before speaking.

“He was a lovely looking boy. A handsome man.”

Freidland bowed his head, looked back up. “He was.” He paused a moment. “Er, would you like a coffee or something?” His usual rasping voice was softer on his home base.

Gwen didn’t want to put him to any trouble, but thought it might settle them both.

“Sure, thank you. If you’re having something…”

“Tea. Spent three years in England when Al did his undergrad at Cambridge. Got a taste for it.”