Heavy Weather

Alex stared into the screens pasted to his face. There was something very wrong with what he was seeing. He felt his eyes begi

"A little alignment problem," Buzzard admitted grudgingly. "Not half-bad for a core punch, though."

"I can't look at this," Alex realized. "I'm seeing double, it hurts."

"Shut one eye.

"No, I can't stand this!" Alex tore off the goggles.

The veranda was sitting in full sunlight again. The thunderstorm anvil had moved on to the northwest, leaving a trail of thin high cirrus clouds behind it, like a snail's slime track.

Alex stood up, walked past Buzzard and Martha's inert legs, and looked to the north. The entire squall line was receding rapidly, speeding off toward Oklahoma. Alex couldn't even see the tornado whose guts he'd just witnessed. It was either blocked from line of sight by nearer towers, or it was already over the horizon.

Behind the storm line, the air was cool and blue and sweet. The sky looked balmy and clear and full of gentle naïveté, as if tornadoes were all someone else's fault.

Alex walked back under the veranda, plucked up an antiseptic tissue, and started smearing filthy grease from his face and neck. His chest and neck and arms were reddened with little clotted nicks and wind whips, as if he'd tried to stuff a house cat inside his paper suit.

His eyes ached with dust and trapped sweat from the goggles. He was tired and dizzy and very thirsty, and his mouth tasted like gunmetal.

But nothing was bleeding. The scratches weren't serious. He was breathing beautifully. And he was having a really good time.

He sat down again and put on his virching rig.

Martha was circling the twister, with difficulty. The twister's spine had bent way off the vertical; its top was firmly embedded in the moving cloud base, but its tip was stubbornly dragging the earth, far to the rear. The forced stretching was visibly distressing it. The tip was badly kinked inside its corona of flying filth, and the wobbling midsection was flinging off long petulant tatters of dirt.

"You had to punch the goddamn core, didn't you," Martha said.

"Yeah!" said Buzzard. "I taped almost four seconds right down the throat!"

"You blew both mikes and you screwed the optics on Jesse, man."

Buzzard was pained. "Yeah, but there's no debris in that spike. A little dust, a little grass, it was real clean!"

"You pulled that dumb macho stunt just because you were late with the chaff!"

"Don't fuckin' start with me, Madronich," Buzzard warned. "I punched the core and the 'thopter still flies, okay? I'm not asking you to fly Jesse now. You can start flappin' your lips when you punch a core and come out in one piece."

"Jerk," Martha muttered.

Something very odd had happened to the earth in front of the twister. A huge patch of the ground was snow-white and visibly steaming. It looked volcanic. "What the hell is that?" Alex said.

"That's hail," Martha said.

"Cold hail with ground fog off it," Buzzard said. "Watch this baby suck it up!"

As the twister approached, streamers of icy fog buckled and writhed, caught up in torrents of suddenly visible ground flow. The tornado lurched headlong through the swath, sucking up torrents of chilly air from all directions, in a giant ragged overhead rosette of tormented fog.

The swatch of fallen hail was only a few dozen meters across. After half a minute the twister had cleared it. But wading knee-deep through the chilly air had visibly upset it. Its violent spew of filth at ground level dropped off drastically. Then it shivered top to bottom. The dry bands of filth around its midsection thi

"See that, dude?" Martha said triumphantly. "Suction' spots!"

The 'thopter nose-dived suddenly and was almost swept into the vortex. Martha careened free, yelping.

"Careful," Buzzard said calmly. "It's wrapped that downdraft real hard."

The twister slowed, hesitated. Down at ground level, its overstretched tip elongated, kinked hard, and reluctantly broke off. The abandoned tip of the whirl vanished in a collapsing puff of liberated dust.

The amputated twister, stranded in midair, took a great pogo hop forward, centering itself under the cloud again. Then it tried to touch down again, to stretch out and rip the earth, but it was visibly losing steam.

The two suction spots, rotating about one another, stumbled and collided. The bigger leg messily devoured the smaller leg. There was a fresh burst of vitality then, and the twister stretched out and touched down, and a torrent of dirt rocketed up the shaft. But now the fu

"It's ropin' out," Martha said. "I like this part. This is when they start actin' really insane."

The twister had changed its character. It had once been a wedge, a vast blunt-nosed drill. Now it looked like a sloppy corkscrew made of smoke and string.

Big oblate whirling lumps were traveling up and down the corkscrew, great dirty onions of trapped vorticity that almost choked the life out of it.

Every few seconds one of the trapped lumps would blow out in spectacular fashion, spewing great ribbons of filth that tried to crawl up the cloud base. Sometimes they made it. More often they wriggled and spasmed and swam out into midair and vaporized.

The roped twister grew narrower still, so pinched at points along its length that it looked like a collapsing hose. The clear air around it was still in very violent motion, but no longer violent enough to be seen. The currents of air seemed to be losing cohesion.

The roping twister finally snaked its way into a sloppy, wriggling helix-it seemed to be trying to blend into some larger invisible vortex, to wrap itself around a bigger core and give up its fierce little life in exchange for large-scale wrath again.

But it failed. After that, it lost heart. It surrendered all its strength, in a ripple of disintegration up and down the shaft, a literal last gasp.

Martha methodically sca

A light, filthy curtain of rain appeared, conjured up and sucked down by the twister's death spasm.

Martha headed out from under the cloud base into clear sunlit air. "Seventeen minutes," she said. "Pretty good for an

"That was an F-3 at maturity," Buzzard objected.

"You wa

"Okay, F-2," Buzzard backed down. "It's still a little early in the day for a big one. How's Lena's battery?"

"Not good. Let's pull out, charge up the 'thopters, pull up stakes here, and head the hell after the dryline."

"Good move," Buzzard said. "Okay, you and Medicine Boy break camp, and I'll fly the 'thopters in.

"Have it your way," Martha said.

Alex pulled off his gear. He watched Martha carefully divest herself of her equipment. She got up off the sling chair, stretched, gri

"What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"

"A little."

Martha laughed. "You're a real prize. Well, get up! We gotta pursue."

"Wait a minute," Alex said. "You don't mean to tell me there's go

"Maybe," Martha said, deftly wrapping her gear. "You've been lucky, for a first chase. Jerry's a good now-caster, the best around, but he only hits a spike one chase out of two. Okay, maybe three out of five, lately