Thandie said,“And the models don’t work because the world is going awry. You’ve been missing all the fun, Gary Boyle.”
A deep mechanical groan reverberated through the concrete structure. Gary imagined the tremendous weight of the rising river water, pressing against the Barrier gates.
“So, you ready?” Thandie asked.
11
The chopper, run by the Environment Agency, was a modified Puma. It was fitted out with an instrument pod with temperature, pressure and windspeed gauges, and a neat little unit with radar and infrared monitors to measure the depth of the river water and other properties such as speed, surface roughness and temperature. A camera was mounted beneath the hull. There was even a sonde, a fish-shaped gadget attached to a winched cable that could be lowered into the water, though Sanjay insisted the sonde wouldn’t be used today; the water was too turbulent, the risk of snagging on some bit of flotsam too great.
As Sanjay checked the gear, Thandie grinned at Gary with a glint in her eye, a look he recognized well. She had always had a streak of recklessness about her, a willingness to go chasing hurricanes and tsunamis, all in the name of science, always willing to go that bit further than anybody else. Disaster hunting, she called it, surfing the extreme weather.
And it scared him to his bones when they got into the chopper and Thandie herself took the pilot’s seat. She pulled a radio cap over her head and started snapping switches. An engine roared into life and the rotors overhead turned.
Sanjay opened up a laptop on his knees to make connections to the chopper’s instrument suite. He had a kind of harness that strapped the machine to his thighs. As it booted up he observed Gary’s expression. “You didn’t know she was the pilot, I’m guessing.”
“You guess right.”
“Well, nobody else was available. All the regular pilots have emergency duties. Lucky us-”
Thandie called back,“Hold onto your lunches, guys, this elevator car is going up.”
The chopper surged into the air, rising over the control tower. For a few seconds while Thandie checked her handling they hovered in the air, buffeted by the wind; the chopper felt as fragile as a leaf.
Gary looked down. The Barrier was once more revealed, those steel cowls lined up stoutly, and the Thames raged more violently than he remembered from only a few minutes ago. On the shore, at a fence protecting the Barrier tower, he saw a crowd of protesters, all soggy banners and waterproofs, faced by a line of police in riot gear.
“What’s their beef?” he asked.
Sanjay looked over his shoulder. “Rich versus poor. Protesting about the billions spent to protect London while the rest of England floods, and so on.”
Thandie snapped,“Would they prefer it if London was drowned? Let’s get to work.”
The bird surged forward, heading east into the oncoming storm, and Thandie whooped.
The rain splashed against the cockpit glass, coming in so hard Gary could barely see out. The small cabin, crowded by the three of them and the science gear, juddered and clattered as it was thrown to and fro, harnesses rattling and the hull creaking. This wasn’t like the smooth professional ride Gary had been given by the AxysCorp pilot earlier. Thandie seemed to challenge the storm, just barreling straight through the turbulence. Sanjay was trying to work his laptop. Now Gary could see why he had strapped the sleek pad to his knees.
Gary leaned forward. “So what have I missed in your branch of the soap opera, Thand?” He had to shout above the noise.
“Not much,” she yelled back. “It’s the same old same old in the academic world. Write your papers, scramble for citations, put together proposals for grants for a couple more years, fend off the wandering hands of eminent professors. Climate science has been booming the last few years, especially since all our modeling started going awry, but it’s just as hard to make a living.”
“Thus the life of the junior research scientist.”
“Yeah. Oh, I got myself thrown out of the Royal Society, in London. Got in an argument with an old boy who called me a climate-change denier.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. But I came up with data on sea-level rise that didn’t fit the paradigm.”
“So you weren’t denying anything.”
“Just pointing out that something different seems to be happening. Something new, not explicable by the usual mechanisms, ice-cap melt and ocean-water thermal expansion. Those old guys have been arguing their case too long, Gary, and against too much below-the-belt opposition. They take any questioning, any at all, as attempts at refutation. But on the other hand, there are plenty of commentators taking these exceptional events as proof that global warming is a reality, even though there’s no immediate causal link, and all the old deniers of global warming are getting worked up in response. It’s a mess.”
“Your data was lousy,” Sanjay said. “At the Royal Society. Your conclusions were leaps in the dark. I would have thrown you out, even if you hadn’t told Isaac Keegan he had his head up his arse.”
“I regret nothing,” Thandie yelled back. “The first reports of anything new in the world are always shouted down. You knew Hansen at Goddard, Gary, you know what it’s like for mavericks.” She sang,“ ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus…’ ”
“But you’re still working,” Gary said.
“Somehow, yeah.”
“So what else don’t I know? You got a man in your life these days, Thandie? Is there a Mister Jones?”
Thandie hesitated. Sanjay glanced over at him, then looked down at his displays.
Thandie said, “I guess you didn’t hear about that.”
“About what?”
“I met this guy. Dot-com entrepreneur who was interested in marketing personalized weather forecasting. Not the dumbest idea in the world. You’d base it on public-domain wide-area models, supplemented by a sensor suite that would track the micro-climate in the customer’s vicinity and anticipated route-”
“Thandie. The guy?”
“Yeah. To cut a long story, we got married. Your mother was there-your ambassador, I guess. I got pregnant. Lost the kid. Then lost the guy, or we lost each other.”
He was shocked by the suddenness of the telling.“Oh. I’m sorry. You didn’t want to try again?”
“That turned out not to be an option,” she said crisply. “Not for me. The doctors-hell, it doesn’t matter now.”
“Christ, Thandie, what a terrible thing.”
“It’s just life. We all go through these changes. Births, deaths, whatever. It was just a road not taken.” She sat rigid amid the buffeting of the flight.
Sanjay tapped Gary on the shoulder.“Myself, I have two children, by two marriages. One child in Glasgow is mostly Scottish. The other in Middlesex is mostly Bengali. Life is always complicated, my friend.”
“So it is. But-” But Gary had known a different Thandie before, a wild, reckless, exuberant, imaginative Thandie. He wondered if he would ever be able to get to know this new, damaged person.“It’s a tragedy that I’ve been away so long.”
Sanjay said, “A tragedy for you, your family and your friends. You must resent what was done to you.”
“Hell, yes.” More and more as the days went by, in fact. Maybe he’d got too used to his captors, or even fond of them, or some damn Stockholm-syndrome thing. Domesticated by his long captivity. Now he was out and going through some other process; now he hated them.
But the chopper dipped, and he was reminded that the world was going through its own novel processes, which had no patience for the revolutions in his head.
The chopper swooped over a peninsula that jutted out from the north bank of the river, incised by a deep brook. Industrial facilities sprawled across both sides of the brook, oil storage tanks and refineries and chimney
