Heavy Weather

Out on the western horizon, the grass and brush suddenly went crazy. It bent flat in a big spreading wave. Then, it whipped and wriggled frantically in place. The grass seemed to be crushed and trampled under some huge invisible stampede.

A flying wall of dirt leaped up from the beaten earth, like the spew from a beaten carpet.

Alex had never seen the like. He gaped in astonishment as the wall of dirty wind rushed forward. It was moving across the landscape with unbelievable speed, the speed of a highway truck.

It rocketed up the slope of the hill and slammed into him.

It blew him right off his feet. Alex landed hard on his ass and tumbled through the spiky grass, in a freezing, flying torrent of airborne trash and filth. A shotgun blast of grit spattered into both his eyes, and he was blinded. The wind roared.

The gust front did its level best to strip his clothes off. It had his paper suit around his knees in an instant and was tearing hard at his shoes, all the while scourging him with little broken whips of airborne pebble and weed. Alex yelled in pain and scrambled on hands and knees for the shelter of the truck.

The truck was heaving back and forth on its axles. The fabric veranda flapped crazily, its vicious popping barely audible in the gusting howl.

Alex fought his way back inside the writhing, flapping paper suit, and he tu

More filth was gusting steadily beneath the truck. The dirty wind skirled harmlessly under the bottoms of the Troupers' sling chairs. Though Alex couldn't hear what they were saying, he could see their jaws moving steadily below their paper masks. They were still talking, into the little bent sticks of their microphones.

Alex trawled up his windswept virching gear as it danced and dangled violently at the end of its wiring. He jammed his back against the lurching truck and clamped the earphones on.

"Feels nice and cool now, doesn't it?" Buzzard commented, into Alex's sheltered ears. Buzzard's was voice mask-muffled and cut with microphone wind shrieks.

"Are you crazy?" Alex shouted. "That coulda killed us!"

"Only if it caught us in the open," Buzzard told him. "Hey, now we're cool."

"Carol's got circulation!" Martha said.

"Already?" Buzzard said, alarmed. "It's go

The violence of the gust front faded quickly, in a series of windy spasms. It was followed by a slow chill breeze, with a heavy reek of rain and ozone. Alex shivered, bunching his numbed fists into his paper armpits.

The insides of his virching goggles were full of wind blown grit. Alex took his mask off, spat onto the screens, and tried to wash them clean with his thumbs.

Buzzard pulled his own goggles off and stood up. Something landed heavily on the stretched fabric of the veranda. Buzzard hopped to the edge of the veranda, jumped up, and snagged it: a landed ornithopter.

Buzzard brushed dust from his leotards and looked at Alex with ungoggled eyes. "What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"

"How do I clean these?" Alex said evasively, holding up the goggles.

Buzzard handed him an antiseptic wipe. Then he opened the back of the truck and ducked in.

He reemerged with a duffel bag and slammed the doors. The bag was full of reels of iridescent tape. Buzzard picked a patch of yellow stickum from the end of one reel and pulled at the tape. A section of shining ribbon tore loose in his fingers and fluttered in the breeze.

He handed it to Alex. "Smart chaff."

The chaff looked like old-fashioned videotape. Both ends of the tape were neatly perforated. The strip of chaff was as wide as two fingers and as long as Alex's forearm. It was almost weightless, but its edges were stiff enough to deal a nasty paper cut, if you weren't careful.

It had a lump embossed in one end: a chip and a tiny flat battery.

Buzzard screwed the axle of the chaff reel snug against the ornithopter's breastbone. Then he fetched his throwing stick again, walked out into the wind, and launched the machine. It rocketed upward in the stiff breeze, wings spread. "We got a hundred strips per reel," Buzzard said, returning. "We deploy 'em through the spike."

"What good are they?" Alex said.

"Whaddya mean?" Buzzard said, wounded. "They measure temperature, humidity... and wind speed, 'cause you can track that chaff on radar in real time."

"Any little updraft can carry chaff." Buzzard fetched up his virching rig. "So chaff will stay with a spike till it ropes out. C'mon, virch up, dude, Greg 'n Carol have got circulation!"

Alex sat on his bubblepak. He pulled the back of the mat up and over his shoulders, like a blanket. The plastic bubbles of trapped air cut the chill wind nicely. He might have been almost comfortable, if not for the windblown filth clinging greasily to his sweat-stained face, neck, and chest. He put on his goggles.

In an instant Alex was miles away, on the wings of Lena, confronting a long white plateau of roiling cloud. Above the plateau, the great curling mountain of the thunderhead was shot through with aerial lightning.

Martha's ornithopter dived below the base of the cloud. The bottom of the thunderhead was steadily venting great ragged patches of rain. But the southern edge of the cloud base was a long, trailing dark shelf, slightly curved, and free of any rain. Seen from below, the storm was charcoal black veined with evil murky green, leaden, and palpably ominous.

"How'd you get in place so fast?" Buzzard asked Martha.

Martha's voice dropped crackling into the cha

"There aren't any normal ones anymore, Martha," Buzzard said patiently. "I keep tryin' to tell you that."

"Well, we might get an F-3 out of it, tops," Martha diagnosed. "That's no supercell. But man, it's plenty strange."

Buzzard suddenly yelped in surprise. "Hell! I see what you mean about that midlevel jet... . Damn, I just lost two strips of chaff."

"Get your 'thopter's ass up here, man, that wall cloud is movin'." Martha's Okie drawl thickened as her excitement grew.

"What exactly are we looking at?" Alex asked her.

"See that big drawdown at the base?" Martha told him. "Between the flankin' line and all that rain? Look close and you can see it just now startin' to turn."

Alex stared Into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entire cloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that a whole area of the base-a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the size of four, maybe five football fields-was begi

Suddenly a new voice broke in, acid-etched with a distant crackling of lightning static. "Carol in Alpha here! We got dust whirl, over!"

"Nowcaster here," came Jerry Mulcahey's calm voice. "Give me location fix, over." Good old Dr. Jerry, Alex realized, had the advantage of the Storm Troupe's best ante