Slide (2 page)

This was the fourteenth day.

The satellite weather map — a sheet of acetate flapped over a dark silhouette of North America — presented its view of conditions. A barometric high-pressure system existed from the Aleutian Islands diagonally across a corner of Oregon and over to the Rockies. Another similar high extended from the Gulf up through Texas and Arizona. The two highs met and mixed, creating what professional weather people called an occluded front. A jam-up. Occluded fronts were not so rare, actually. They could be expected to cause some precipitation.

However, this combined high-pressure front was different. It didn't seem to have any top to it. It went up into the atmosphere as far as Earth weather can. Warmer air; moving in from the Pacific, hit against this wall. The warm air rose, tried to climb over, couldn't, and retreated, overlapping itself like a massive ocean breaker. The low-pressure area that formed had nowhere to go. It appeared on the satellite map as an opaque, cloudlike mass particularly concentrated over Southern California.

Ordinarily, Los Angeles and thereabouts got more cloudy days and more rainfall during the spring months. Nearly every morning the sky was gray, thick with haze, appearing as though it would surely rain. Then the sun would burn it clear away by noon. When rain came, it came in comparatively brief, benevolent showers that distributed in all only about two inches over the season.

But not this year, this May.

The area was now receiving its fourteenth consecutive day of rain — over three hundred hours of continuous drizzle.

The municipal drainage systems were not built for so much water. Gutters overflowed. In places the pressure, choked in the underground drains, blew off heavy steel street covers as though they were corks. Brackish geysers spewed up a hundred feet. Numerous intersections were so flooded they had to be closed and traffic rerouted.

Such inconveniences were relatively well tolerated. More so the first week. Men wearing chest-high waterproof fishing outfits carried women across deep streets.

Chivalrous antics.

A kiss or he'd drop her.

Their picture in the next day's newspaper.

Fat women rode piggyback. It seemed that everyone was walking around barefoot, shoes in hand. And it was a lark to see men strip down right then and there to their undershorts so they could wade across, and women with their skirts held way up, often higher than necessary. After a few days some people went to and from work in bathing suits, toting their clothing in plastic bags.

Motorists went about at only slightly reduced speeds, sending up rooster-tail sprays in their wakes.

Throughout the day, every once in a while, nearly everyone glanced skyward. They held the faith that the sun would not forsake them, that it would come breaking brightly through at any moment, rewarding them for all the worship they had previously paid it.

Some said the Air Force was to blame. Because the Air Force had been conducting rain-making maneuvers above the Mojave and Death Valley. The United States had been the first to wage weather warfare, had chemically produced downpours to impede enemy troop and supply movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Bombarding the sky with canisters of silver iodide. Well, this time the Air Force had given the atmosphere an overdose.

From Edwards Air Force Base and the China Lake Naval Weapons Center came official word denying any recent weather-warfare maneuvers or testing. That wasn't the truth, but the Pentagon thought it best to say that. Otherwise it would be in violation of the proposal made by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in June of 1975 to outlaw techniques for changing the weather for military purposes.

Then there was the old plaint: the problem was caused by messing around with nuclear weapons. Setting off all those bombs over the years had upset the weather. There had been many climatic fluctuations in recent years. Record-breaking colds in some northern regions, less rain than ever in India, where it was so badly needed, a drought in the Soviet Union that gave the Russians such a hunger scare they had manipulated the famous United States-Canada wheat deal. For six years in a row there had been droughts in Central Africa. International relief agencies hadn't been able to keep up with the starvation. More proof? Andrew Ransen, head of the climate project at the National Center for Atmosphere Research at Boulder, Colorado, stated publicly that it was his expert opinion that a benevolent climate could no longer be taken for granted. Climatologists agreed that over the next ten or so years the world could expect more frequent and drastic climatic changes — droughts, floods, temperature extremes. They didn't go so far as to blame any one thing, such as nuclear testing, but some hinted at it. Anyway, people said, certain people knew the score. London, for example, was not getting nearly as much rain as it once had. New York City was having milder winters and not much summer. Florida was generally colder but didn't want the fact publicized. Blast the world off position just a fraction and there could be igloos in Haiti.

One television network thought enough of it to schedule an hour-long science special called “Weather,” co-sponsored by a coffee company and a tire maker, who were guaranteed an audience rating of no less than twenty-five.

Several prominent meteorologists appeared on the program as featured guests. In the most elementary and hopefully entertaining ways they explained about lows and highs, how winds move counterclockwise toward the centers of low-pressure systems. They acted amused and a bit embarrassed when they admitted they didn't know why. All pressure systems normally moved eastward, they said.

What about that front currently dampening Southern Californian spirits?

Lightly, the meteorologists gave the front the name “High Boy” and said
he
was indeed a strange one, extraordinarily stubborn;
he
refused to move along and let the weather get back to being unpredictable.

For a closing the network's prime-time anchorman gave the weather report and forecast. He performed it with evident futility and with the camera in close, playing up to the resentful reaction his words would surely cause.

“Rain continuing tonight and throughout tomorrow.”

It was initially intended that the program include three of the country's foremost geologists. Network executives decided against that after previewing the material those scientists wanted to present: a definition of the geological makeup of the Southern California region, graphically explaining it was a shallow mantle of calcareous soil with not enough natural subterranean troughs to handle the runoff of such a deluge. The geologists had wanted to warn that the ground was spongy wet, already saturated — to the danger point.

Hell, no use scaring anyone.

1

Frank Brydon felt the sheet slipping.

When the nurse, with her habitual efficient haste, had folded it down to just above his groin, she had left too much draped on one side. It was a fresh sheet, slick out of the hospital laundry. In a moment it would be on the floor and Brydon would be nude. His hands were free and he was about to reach for the sheet when a man's transmitted voice, as though a thought ahead of him, told him: “Try not to move, please.”

The sheet slid off and Brydon didn't care.

He lay face up on a special high table that was cold and hard as a slab. For the moment the place was only partially lighted, which intensified or lessened its intimidation, depending on the patient's frame of mind. Brydon could make out the large, complicated apparatus above him, the heavy multi-elbowed arm of it that was controlled from an adjacent safe cubicle. On the end of the arm a conical, sort of beehive shaped, head. It was now slowly moved closer into position above Brydon.

“Breathe normally, please,” said the transmitted voice.

Brydon watched the head of it divide into quarters, symmetrically, like a flower opening petals. But not silent as a flower; it made an ominous kaah-ploooomp sound and extended rather insolently from its center a tube that resembled an oversize lipstick.

The cobalt.

On Brydon's chest was painted a red fluorescent outline of a rectangle, a vertical rectangle four and a half inches wide by eight inches long with a red dot in its center. It was on the upper part of his chest, from the manubrium notch, that soft, somewhat indented spot below the Adam's apple, down to the tip of the sternum, where the rib cage comes together in front.

They referred to that outlined area as his anterior portal.

Meaning it was through that front door of his body that they could destroy certain undesirable cells, while hopefully killing or injuring a minimum of others.

Brydon heard a low hum and felt a slight fluttering in his ears as he was given 150 RADs. That part of it took only about a minute.

At once the tube of cobalt was retracted and enclosed within its conical-shaped housing. The arm of the apparatus was swung automatically away and aside. Brydon, as usual, was left lying there alone for several minutes. Longer than that, it seemed to him, a bit irritated. He suspected they were allowing time for any stray radioactivity to dissipate. Couldn't really blame them for not wanting to endanger themselves.

Finally they came for him, two nurses guiding a stretcher. Their eyes seemed focused upon something beyond the limits of this space, because of his nudity. The sheet was retrieved, shaken and used to neatly conceal most of him. Then, at once, he noticed the change in their eyes, acknowledging him. Did they teach them that or was it something they naturally acquired? he wondered.

Making the sheet cooperate, he transferred himself awkwardly to the stretcher. “There we go,” said one of the nurses. A small, fresh pillow went beneath this head. The sheet was again neatened, and he was rolled out and a short way down a corridor to one of the small private outpatient rooms. His clothes and other things were there. An electric signaling button was placed by his head. As the nurses left him they were discussing their next duty, something having to do with someone they called Number Twenty-one.

Brydon closed his eyes. But immediately changed his mind, preferring to look outside himself. There, a metal door and frame. Substantial, as were the walls, composed of steel extrusions and plaster, was Brydon's outside guess. Built to last. No windows. Of course not, two stories underground. Better planning to have the radiology department down there, less dangerous, easier to control.

Doctor Bruno came in.

He called Brydon Frank with his hello and asked how he felt.

“Generally or now?”

“At the moment.”

“Okay, I think. Yesterday, though, I felt lousy afterward for quite a while.”

Doctor Bruno explained that yesterday had been the first time they had treated Brydon via his posterior portal — through his back, where an identical rectangle was drawn in a corresponding position. “Posterior treatments usually have more side effects,” Bruno said. “Nausea?”

“Mostly.”

Bruno was a short chunk of a man. Almost totally bald, his skull skin freckled and tanned as his face. It exaggerated his stockiness. From a Neapolitan peasant line had emerged exceptional intelligence, insight and compassion.

The doctor placed his hand on Brydon's chest. “No pictures today,” he said. “Monday or Tuesday.” His hand remained palm down on Brydon's chest, perhaps consolingly, no pressure, just the weight of it. However, the longer it remained there the heavier it felt to Brydon and soon his impression of it changed. Were Bruno's fingers seeing into him, mystically diagnosing, estimating progress? Or perhaps they were healing with their touch, thought Brydon. He had been told of healers, particularly one in Taos, New Mexico, a part-Navajo, part-something else woman who had brought and could possibly again bring about miraculous cures through her touch. Power beyond all the powers of the American Medical Association. Often as few as three visits to her humble hut were all that was required, and no fee was expected, although a donation was appreciated, it was said. Brydon was not yet to the point of believing such a thing and he doubted he'd ever be.

A beeping sound took Bruno's hand away. He was being summoned. From the white coat pocket over his heart he took out the small electronic device to stop its call and signal that he was on his way. God, how much he disliked that device, the way it pulled and pushed him. From another pocket he brought out a small plastic vial. “Take a couple of these if you feel nauseous again.”

Brydon's eyes must have questioned.

“Just Tigan,” Bruno assured, smiling. “Same as we give for morning or sea sickness.”

Brydon tried to think of something he hadn't asked that was important enough to ask now.

Bruno told him: “I'll try to get around to see you Monday when you're in. If not, then the day after. We should talk.”

At least, thought Brydon, watching the blank door replace Bruno's back, he didn't mention the weather.

No good news or Bruno would have given it to him.

Patients must be patient.

He should have asked Bruno straight out how long at the worst, but more of him hadn't wanted to know, hadn't wanted to hear expert Bruno verify his own research that said eight to eighteen months would likely be the rest of his life.

Brydon has known of his cancer for six weeks. Until this his ailments had been limited to normal brief battles with flus and viruses of various nationalities, and a complex fracture from skiing that was so stubborn to heal it stopped him from skiing forever at thirty.

Two months ago he felt a sort of gripping in his chest. He had shrugged it off as a touch of recurring bronchitis, a somatic toll he paid for living right on the ocean.

But it didn't go away with the shrug.

He had called his doctor, a general practitioner named Russell who rarely got to see him but this time managed to persuade him to come in for an office visit. Dr. Russell tapped, listened, felt, took a chest X ray and, with an explanation that was as understated as possible, recommended Brydon have a more thorough work-up.