'Lorna' has kicked northwards, they're predicting a track of north
north-west and a speed over the ground of twenty knots. He closed the
door and they stared at each other in silence for a moment.
Nicholas spoke at last.
It is never one single mistake that causes disaster/ he said. It is
always a series of contributory errors, most of them of small
consequence in themselves - but when taken with a little bad luck -he
was silent a moment and then, softly, Hurricane Lorna could just be that
bit of bad luck. He stood up and took one turn around the small guest
cabin, feeling caged and wishing for the space of the Master's suite
which was now David Allen's. He turned back and suddenly he realized
Beauty Baker and David Allen, that they were hoping for disaster. They
were like two old sea wolves with the scent of the prey in their
nostrils. He felt his anger rising coldly against them, they were
wishing disaster on his son.
just one thing I didn't tell you/ he said. My son is on Golden Dawn.
The immense revolving storm that was code-named Lorna was nearing full
development. Her crest was reared high above the freezing levels so she
wore a splendid mane of frosted white ice particles that streamed out
three hundred miles ahead of her on the jet stream of the upper
troposphere.
From one side to the other, she now measured one hundred and fifty miles
across, and the power unleashed within her was of unmeasurable savagery.
The winds that blew around her centre tore the surface off the sea and
bore it aloft at speeds in excess of one hundred and fifty miles an
hour, generating precipitation that was as far beyond rain as death is
beyond life. Water filled the dense cloud-banks so that there was no
clear line between sea and air.
It seemed now that madness fed upon madness, and like a blinded and
berserk monster, she blundered across the confined waters of the
Caribbean, ripping the trees and buildings, even the very earth from the
tiny islands which stood in her path.
But there were still forces controlling what seemed uncontrollable,
dictating what seemed to be random, for, as she spun upon a spinning
globe, the storm showed the primary trait of gyroscopic inertia, a
rigidity in space that was constant as long as no outside force was
applied, Obeying this natural law, the entire system moved steadily
eastwards at constant speed and altitude above the surface of the earth,
until her northern edge touched the land-mass of the long ridge of land
that forms the greater Antilles.
Immediately another gyroscopic law came into force, the law of
precession. When a deflecting force is applied to the rim of a spinning
gyro, the gyro moves not away from, but directly towards that force.
Hurricane Lorna felt the land, and, like a maddened bull at the flirt of
the matador's cape, she turned and charged towards it, crossing the
narrow high strips of Haiti in an orgy of destruction and terror until
she burst out of the narrow channel of the Windward Passage into the
open beyond.
Yet still she kept on spinning and moving. Now, barely three hundred
miles ahead of her, across those shallow reefs and banks prophetically
