Heavy Weather

He heard the squeak of the lawn chair as Buzzard settled into his own rig. "You're on Jesse now," Buzzard said. "I'll switch you onto Kelly."

The scene blinked off and on again, flinging him electronically from machine to machine, like a soundless hammer blow between the eyes.

"We're go

"We want to get up to the cap," Buzzard said. "That's where the action is right now."

"Gimme those headphones," Alex demanded, stretching out one arm. "I'll put 'em over just one ear."

Buzzard handed him the headphone rig and Alex adjusted it by feel. The earphones had a little attached mouth mike, a foam blob on a bent plastic stick. Under his fumbling blind fingers, Alex's head felt unexpectedly huge and ungainly. His head felt like somebody else's head, like a big throw pillow upholstered in scalp.

With his ears secured beneath the pads of the earphones, Alex suddenly felt The Hum again, buzzing and tickling at the edge of his perception. The Hum was flowing right through him, some creepy rumbling transaction between the rim of outer space and planetary magma currents deep below. He strained his ears-but the harder he tried to hear The Hum, the less there was to perceive. Alex decided that it was safer not to believe in The Hum. He pulled the pad off his left ear. No more Hum. Good.

Then he began to hear the keening wind of the heights. "We got ourselves a storm situation," Buzzard a

"Yeah."

"That line of cloud dead ahead, that's the cutting edge of some damp hot air off the Gulf. It's wedging up a front of hot dry air coming off New Mexico. That dry air aloft- we're coming into that right now-that's the cap. Right now it's suckin' steam off the tops of those cumulus towers and strippin' 'em off flat."

Alex understood this. He was gazing down across the tops of clouds, approaching them unsteadily on flapping digital wings. The climbing, bubbling sides of the heap were the normal cauliflower lumps, but the flattened tops of the towers looked truly extraordinary: great rippling plazas of turbulent vapor that were being simultaneously boiled and beaten.

The drone fought for more height for a while, then veered in a long panorama across the growing squall line. "See how ripped up it looks, way up here?"

"Yeah."

"That cap is working hard. It'll push all that wet air back today, west to east. But to work like that is costing it energy, and it's cooling it off some. When it cools, it gets patchy and breaks up. See that downdraft there? That big clear hole?"

"I see the hole, man."

"You learn to stay away from big clear holes. You can lose a lot of height in a hurry that way... ." The drone skirted the cavernous blue downdraft, at a respectful distance. "When these towers underneath us build up enough to erode through the cap and soar up right past us, then it's go

The drone scudded suddenly into a cloud bank. The goggles swathing Alex's eyes went as white and blank as a hospital bandage. "Gotta do some hygrometer readings inside this tower," Buzzard said. "We'll put Kelly on automatic and switch over to Lena... whoops!"

"The flying I like," Alex told him. "It's that switching that bugs me."

"Get used to it." Buzzard chuckled. "We're not really up there anyhow, dude."

The machine called Lena had already worked its way past the line of cloud, into the hotter, drier air behind the advancing squalls. Seen from the rear, the cloud front seemed much darker, more tormented, sullen. Alex suddenly saw a darting needle of aerial lighting pierce through four great mounds of vapor, dying instantly with the muffled glow of a distant bomb burst.

Thunder hammered at his right ear, under the earphone.

Martha's voice suddenly sounded, out of the same ear. "Are you on Lena?"

"Yeah!" Alex and Buzzard answered simultaneously.

"Your packets are getting patchy, man, I'm go

"Okay," Buzzard said. The screens clamped to Alex's face suddenly went perceptibly grainier, the cascading pixels slowing and congealing into little blocks of jagginess. "Ugh," Alex said.

"Laws of physics, man," Buzzard told him. "The bandwidth can only handle so much."

Now, belatedly, Alex's clear left ear-the one outside the headphones-heard a sudden muffled rumble of faraway thunder. He was hearing in stereo. His ears were ten kilometers apart. At the thought of this, Alex felt the first rippling, existential spasm of virch-sickness.

"We're ru

"Can you see us from up here?" Alex asked. "Can you see where our bodies are, can you see where we're parked?"

"We're way ahead of the squall line," Buzzard told him, bored. "Now, over there south, lost in the heat haze -that's where the base camp is. I could see the camp right now, if I had good telescopics on Lena. I did, too, once- but that 'thopter caught a stroke of lightning, and fried every chip it had... a goddamn shame."

"Where do you get that kind of equipment?" Alex said.

"Military surplus, mostly... depends on who you know."

Alex suddenly felt his brain becoming radically overstuffed. He tore his goggles off. Exposed to the world's sudden air and glare, his pupils and retinas shrank in pain, as if ice-picked.

Alex sat up on his bubblepak and wiped tears and puddled sweat from the hollows of his eyes. He looked at the two Troupers, a-sprawl on their lounge chairs and indescribably busy. Buzzard was gently flapping his fingertips. Martha was groping at empty air like a demented conjurer.

They were completely helpless. With a rock or a stick, he could have easily beaten them both to death. A sudden surge of deep unease touched Alex: not fear, not nausea either, but a queer, primitive, transgressive feeling, like a superstition.

"I'm... I'm go

ALEX MANAGED THE lunch and ate his share of the rations too, but then he discovered that Buzzard and Martha wouldn't give him enough water. There simply wasn't watèr to spare. It took a while for this to fully register on Alex -that there just wasn't water, that water was a basic constraint for the Troupe, something not subject to negotiation.

The Troupe had an electric condenser back in camp that would pull water vapor from the air onto a set of chilled coils. And they had plastic distillery tarps too; you could chop up vegetation and strew it in a pit under the tarp, and the transparent tarp would get hot in the sun and bake the sap out of the chopped-up grass and cactus, and the tarp's underside would drip distilled water into a pot. But the tarps were clumsy and slow. And the condenser required a lot of electrical energy. And there just wasn't much energy to spare.

The Troupe carried all the solar racks that they could manage, but even the finest solar power was weak and feeble stuff. Even at high noon, their modest patches of captured sunshine didn't generate much electricity. And sometimes the sun simply didn't shine.

The Troupe also had wind generators-but sometimes the wind simply didn't blow. The Troupe was starving for energy, thirsty for it, and watchful of it. They were burdened by their arsenal of batteries. Cars. Trucks. Buses. Ornithopters. Computers. Radios. Instrumentation. Everything guzzling energy with the implacable greed of machines. The Troupe was always ru