Eye of the Storm (9 page)

“Which is?”

“An electromagnetic storm shield that we
were
able to test successfully.”

“What's that do? Send the tornadoes away?”

Dad nods. “Deflects them, yes.” I watch him stroking Remi's hair as she sleeps. His hands are soft, but his face is hard, eyebrows furrowed.

“So the field sends the storm . . . ?”

“Away from the most populated areas. Away from her.” Dad kisses the top of Remi's head. “Away from you. Away from here, and that's the best I can do for now. At least it's something.”

He says it like it's a success but still looks like someone who thinks he's a failure, and it makes me sad for him, after all his work.

“Well, it's a start anyway, right?”

He doesn't smile, but he nods.

I stand up and take a banana from the counter. “Do you think I could see StormSafe soon? Like a tour?”

“Sure. How come?”

“We're getting assignments at camp, and I may work with this other kid in weather manipulation. I . . . uh . . .” I decide to say it. “I'm interested in the dissipation technology.”

“Hold on a minute then; I have something you might like to see.” He disappears into his office, comes back out with his DataSlate. “Got yours?” I hand it to him, and he starts copying his file called “Effects of Microwave Radiation on Supercell Downdrafts and Vortex Formation.”

“Is this your research?”

“It's the summary.” The file finishes transferring. Mirielle's done talking with her sister, so Dad hands Remi over, heads for his office, and holds his thumb to the panel. “Read it,” he tells me. “You'll see in the last section how the simulation failed, sent us back to square one. But maybe you'll have better luck.” He steps inside, and the door slides shut.

Alex is in his usual seat at camp Monday morning. He looks up from his DataSlate when I sit down next to him. “Hey.”

I gasp. “What happened to you?” Even in the dim light, I can see the angry red scrape on his forehead.

“Aw, nothing.” He shrugs. “It was dumb. Newton went chasing after a groundhog when you guys left. It was right as that storm turned and started heading up our way. I went after him and caught a tree branch in the head. Stupid.” He touches it as if to show me it's no big deal, but he winces.

“All right, scholars!” Van jogs down the aisle holding a remote, aiming it toward the front of the room as if it's a laser gun. “Today, we face down the problems of the future.” He presses a button on the remote, and Dad's holo-sim appears.

“Welcome back, campers. Today, you'll learn the concentration for your studies at Eye on Tomorrow. Please look at the screen behind me for your assignments.”

A map of the campus appears on screen, with the different
buildings labeled by specialty. Then, campers' photographs start appearing next to buildings, while Dad announces who will be where. “Risha Patel, cellular generation and human cloning center.” Risha's face breaks into a smile when Tomas is assigned to cloning as well.

The Beekman twins high-five one another when they both end up in robotics and artificial intelligence. The two boys they hang around with are assigned to bio-botanicals.

I already know from what Van said that I'll be in meteorology, but still, a shiver of excitement runs through me when my face appears on screen next to the Sim Dome. Alex is there, too.

Finally, the last camper's photograph appears. The brush-cut boy, whose name is Randall Harrington, is headed to cloning, and I can't help imagining an army of anxious brush-cut kids checking their watches. Then the screen goes black and it's just Dad looking out at us. “Today is the start of your life as a scientist,” he says. “Make us proud. And always keep your eye on tomorrow.”

Alex turns to face me when the lights come up. “So, will you work with me? Two brains are better than one.”

“Depends on who the brains belong to.” I smile as the door opens, and sunlight streams in. “But in this case, yeah. I think two are better.”

Alex grins. “Want to start in the library? We can go over what we already know and build on that. Hopefully, Van will give us another shot at the Sim Dome soon.”

“Sure.” I turn to Risha. “Want to work in the library with us?”

“Not now, thanks. I'm off to the cloning lab.”

“With
Tomas
?” I tease her. “I can't believe you switched from bio-botanicals just to hang out with him.”

“I'm interested in
all
of it.” She laughs. “So I might as well be interested
and
work with him.” She gives me a shove toward the door. “Go on, weather geek. Get studying. I'll catch up with you later.”

I walk with Alex across the grassy quad. “Ready to get to work?” He pulls open the library door. “Hey, Ms. Walpole.” The librarian, a tall, slender woman with brown-gray dreadlocks, red-framed glasses, and dangling turquoise earrings, is twisted around a computer, apparently trying to fix something. She looks up, smiles, and waves as we step inside.

“Wow.” The smell of paper books surprises me. “I thought it would be all computers.”

“Over my dead body.” The librarian stands there with a data cable dangling from one hand. “People ought to be able to get their information however they like best.” She nods and goes back to wrestling with the computer.

“You tell 'em, Ms. Walpole.” Alex laughs and heads for one of the tables. “She's awesome.” He nods back over his shoulder as we sit down. “She's been here since the place started, from what I hear. She was one of the people whose property they needed to make room for the campus, but she wouldn't sell unless she got to be in charge of Eye on Tomorrow's library and education program for the little kids. Then she drafted up this list of conditions: it has to be open to the whole community—she was big on that since the town library shut down—and it has to have books in paper, too. I guess your dad agreed.” Alex grins and gestures around a room
full of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, in addition to the row of computers up front. “Besides that, she brings us oatmeal raisin cookies sometimes when we're working. That's my kind of librarian.”

“Me too,” I say. I wonder if Ms. Walpole has paper poetry books at home, too. I bet she does. “Should we get some books?”

“There's a lot on supercell formation over in the five hundreds if you want to go look. I'll find my notes from last year.”

“Okay.” I head for the stacks, running my hands along the bumps of book spines as I go. A ton's been written about our topic.
Super-cell, Superstorm
and
Planet Earth: The New Storm Belt
chronicle the shift from climate norms to the new weather patterns that have developed over the past fifty years, since the climate's warmed and grown so conducive to storms.
Seeds of Disaster: Foundations of Tornadogenesis
is probably the best-known text on the actual structure of tornadoes and why some supercells give rise to funnel clouds while others don't.
In the Eye of the Storm: Five Researchers on the Cutting Edge of Weather Modification
looks at the wave of scientists who worked on weather modification in the years before Dad and his colleagues.

I'm surprised to see a copy of
Playing God: The Case Against Meteorological Manipulation
; it flies in the face of everything Dad believes in, but I pull the book and add it to the teetering pile in my arms.

“You call that a few books?” Alex meets me on my way to the table, in time to keep the pile from toppling. We spread the books on the big table.

“Where should we start?” I ask.

“We're not exactly starting. I did a lot last summer.” He pulls out his DataSlate. Van gave us clearance to bring them, now that we're settled in our concentrations of study. When Alex turns his on, there's a photograph of his family on the screen. There's Alex smiling at the camera in a white shirt and jeans. His mom, looking neater and less frazzled than she does when she's dropping him off. His dad, actually smiling. And a little girl hugging Newton.

“You have a little sister?”

“Julia just turned seven.” He touches the DataSlate screen, and a document opens. “Here's the formula I came up with last year. It's based on some stuff from the Sim Dome computer. You know the basic premise, right? The one I tried in the dome? It's the same thing your dad is working from.”

I nod. “Heat the downdraft.” Dad used to talk about it all the time at dinner, back when there were still Meggs family dinners. He believed you could find the spot where a storm is beginning to rotate and stop a tornado from forming. It was like any recipe, he told me one night in between bites of chocolate cake. If you didn't have flour and cocoa and butter and all the other ingredients, you couldn't make cake. Tornadoes have ingredients, too—the rotation begins when a warmer updraft comes up against a cold, rainy downdraft. So what if you heated the air to get rid of that cold rainy downdraft? No ingredients—no tornado.

Alex turns to a sketch screen on his DataSlate, and there's a diagram like the one Dad used to draw on his napkins. He taps the
center of the partially formed funnel cloud. “Right here is the spot we'd need to blast.”

“Microwaves?”

“Yep. From satellites.”

“Powered how?”

“Solar.” He swipes the screen with his finger, and the next page appears—a sketch of a satellite with solar panels mounted on top. Yellow sketch lines representing microwave energy beam down to the bottom of the screen. “This is all in place already. They've had satellites collecting solar energy and beaming it down to storage facilities for almost ten years. It would just be a matter of amping it up and redirecting it into the heart of the storm.”

“But that's what nobody can quite figure out, right? How much do you amp it up?”

“Right. Last summer, I played around with a formula for the amount of microwave energy you'd need, depending on the size and energy of the storm.” He swipes to another page. “And every time I ran the numbers, it made perfect sense. But when I got time in the Sim Dome, I couldn't get it to work. It always . . . well, you saw what happened when I tried last week.”

“That's what happened to my dad.” I turn on my DataSlate and find the file he copied for me. “He gave me the summary.”

Alex leans in, and his dark eyes scan line after line of numbers, explanations of what should have happened, but didn't.

Alex nods slowly. “Where did he do the simulation, do you know?”

“Up at StormSafe.”

“Shoot.” Alex sighs and tips back in his chair. “I was hoping it might have been a glitch with the Sim Dome here at Eye on Tomorrow, but if he used StormSafe equipment, that stuff's gotta be right. That means the data must be off.” He stares off into a corner of the library, then nods toward my DataSlate.

“Did he use data from a real storm for the simulation?”

“I'm not sure.” I skim through the document again. There's a link at the end. I click on it, and video from an online archive fills the screen. “This must be it.” It's amateur storm footage from 2008, the kind people used to get when they went driving around in trucks, chasing tornadoes, back when you had to go looking for them to see one.

“Man,” Alex says, breathing out. “It's a big one for back then.”

Shaky video, shot through a car windshield, shows a funnel cloud forming and then touching down. It's nothing I haven't seen before, but the reaction to it—the way the guys in the car are acting—makes my stomach clench.

“We got debris! We got debris!” one of them shouts, as if he's won a new HV.

“Look at that thing!” the other one screams. “Dude, look! Can we get closer?”

They drive closer.

“Idiots,” Alex whispers under his breath. But he doesn't turn away. There is something mesmerizing about watching these people sitting in the line of a tornado as if it's some kind of old-fashioned video game.

“Come on, baby,” the camera guy's voice says. “Come on. Keep going.” Like he's coaxing an animal out of a cave.

“Oh my God!” one of the guys yells. “Reverse! Put it in reverse!”

The tornado comes straight at them, and they're cursing and the video is shaking everywhere as they fly backward down the long stretch of road until the tornado gains on them and gains on them and they stop driving.

“Duck down! Get down!” one of them screams, and wind whips the car, pelts it with branches and dirt and rain until finally, the storm passes.

A few seconds of quiet. Then whooping, cheering. “Man, we were all over that thing! That was awesome! That was just—”

Alex presses the STOP button, and there is silence.

I realize I've been holding my breath. I breathe out and turn to him. He is shaking his head.

“It's surreal, isn't it?” he says. “That they'd put themselves in the path? That anyone could think this was entertaining?”

I stare at the frozen images, the men in their baseball caps, laughing, high-fiving each other. They must be in their twenties in this video. They're old men now. If they've survived. “They didn't know,” I say. “It was fun for them. Exciting and fun. They didn't know what was about to happen with the climate, the storms.”

“Stupid,” Alex mutters, opening a book.

But I can't stop looking at their frozen faces amid the dust. They had no idea what was coming. Are we like that today? Is there something worse on the way that will make our storms seem like nothing at all?

“Come on,” Alex says. “Let's work.”

I turn the pages of the
Seeds of Disaster
book. The theories about tornado formation here are the best and latest, but there's still a big mystery about why the storms form some times and not others, when almost the exact same conditions are present.