"There's not gonna be an F-6 next season. And with the global CO2 finally dropping, there may not ever be another F-6."

"So what? There will always be other spikes. Even if the CO2 drops, that doesn't mean the weather's gonna get any calmer. There was less CO2 in the air during the State of Emergency! Besides, CO2's just one part of the climatic disruption. There's still tropical deforestation and delayed ocean warming."

Jerry said nothing.

"There's thermal pollution from cities. And changes in the North Atlantic currents. Glacier retreats in Antarctica, and higher albedos in Africa, and CFCs in the ozone, and that permanent hitch in the ENSO cycle, and the solar variation... Christ, I can't even count them all. Jerry, the weather's never gonna calm down and be normal. Not in our lifetime. Probably not in three hundred years. We'll have all the spikes we ever want! You and me, we're disaster experts with an endless supply of disaster! And if you nail the F-6 while the feds are sitting on their hands saying an F-6 isn't even possible, then you'll be famous forever."

"Jane, I've been forecasting the F-6 for ten years. I don't just chase spikes, anyone can chase spikes. Spikes aren't enough. There are thousands of spikes, and thousands of weather people, but I'm different, and the F-6 is why. I've been so obsessed by it, so consumed and fascinated and intent on this terrible thing, that I have no real idea how I'll live when it's gone. Everything has been honed for this crisis, and we're in top condition to do it. we're all united to do this, to go through hell to nail this thing. But after that, what's to become of us?"

"Jerry..." She bit her lip. "Jerry, I promise you, as long as I'm m your life, you're never gonna lack things to do, and a reason to live. All right?"

"That's sweet of you, but it's just not like that," he said, sadly. "It's hard to explain, but... I have to have the Work. And it has to be big, bigger than myself, because the way I do my Work is with something that's too big. It's me all right, it's very much part of me, but it's not something I'm in command of, and I don't control it. It's like a force, a compulsion, that tears at things, and sheds them, and chops them up, and comprehends them, and I don't control it, and I never have. I can't. You understand?"

"Yes. I do understand. It's like a spike, inside."

"Yes." -"I have one of those too, you know. It's just very different from yours. And being with you, Jerry, it's helped me with it, and I'm better! What we have together, what we give to each other, it's not hurtful or doomed or destructive, it's really good and strong! We do see a lot of hurt. And I don't know, the world around us might be doomed. And we study destruction all the time, every day. But what you and I have, together, in the middle of all of that, it's really good and strong! There's nothing weak or frail about it. I'll never love anyone else, the way I've learned to love you."

"But when this monster has smashed everything, what if we're part of the wreckage?"

"I'll still want you and love you.

"I might become something very different, after the F-6. I know I won't be able to stand still. I'll have to change, there's no avoiding that. Who knows? I might be-come something like Leo."

She sat up very straight. "What do you mean by that? Tell me."

"I mean that I just bear witness, Jane. The Troupe, we all just bear witness. Half of Oklahoma could be smashed into rubble, and we'll just bear witness. But there are those who talk about the weather-as I do and you do-and those who do something about it. Leo, and his friends, his people, they all do things. He's a man of the world, my older brother, he's a man of competence, a man of influence. And it's a dreadful world, and my brother does some very dreadful things. I watch destruction, but Leo abets it. I'm nothing but eyes, but Leo has hands."

Jerry shook his head. "I don't know exactly what Leo's done, or how he's done it or who helped him-he doesn't tell me, for good and ample operational reasons, and I don't want to learn. But I know why. I know why Leo does what he does, and I know why the prospect of action fascinates him. You see, it's not just one spasmodic passing horror in a small locality, like a spike is. The modem world of global strategic politics and economics, that's Leo's world, and it's eight billion people who've lost all control over their destiny, and are gnawing the planet down to the bone. It's our civilization, turned -into an endless world-eating horror, just like the F-6 itself may well turn out to be. And Leo, he lives inside that, and feeds it energy, and tries to bend it to his will. He'd very much like me to join him in there, you know. To help him maneuver the chaos, by whatever means necessary. And I can understand my brother. I can sympathize. My brother and I, we have a similar affliction. We understand one another, as few people ever do."

"All right," Jane said. She put her hand on his. "Jerry, when this is over, then that's what we're going to do. When the F-6 is over, and it's all behind us, and we've shown the whole world what we know and what we witnessed, then we're going to go after your brother. You and me, together, and we're going to rescue him from whatever trouble he's in, and we'll set him all straight."

"That's a major challenge, darling."

"Jerry, you said you wanted a big problem. Well, you've got a big problem, I see that now. I don't care how many political friends your brother has, he's a big problem but he's just a human being, and he's not as big as a storm that can smash Oklahoma. I'm not afraid of your storm, and I'm not afraid of you, and I'm not afraid of your brother. You can't scare me away from you with any of this talk, I love you and I'm staying with you, and nothing will take you from me, nothing but death. We can do this thing. We're not just helpless watchers, we are doers too, in our own way. In our own way, you and I, we are both very practical people."

"Darling," he said, and meant it, "you are very good to me."

The speaker erupted. "This is Rick in Baker! We got circulation!"

ENDLESS RAIN COULD depress you, and there was no disaster like a flood, but there was something uniquely mean and pinched and harsh about a drought. Drought was a trial to the soul.

They'd followed the spike along the rim of the great high. It was a long, ropy, eccentric F-2, and it had moved, with particular oddity, from the north toward the southwest, a very unusual storm track for Tornado Alley. The F-2 had been exceptionally long-lived, never achieving true earthshaking power, but sipping some thread of persistent energy from the edge of the high. And there had been hail with it, nasty, black, dust-choked hail; but scarcely a drop of rain.

Now the F-2 had roped out and Jane and Jerry were in the canyonlands west of Amarillo, the part of the Texas Panhandle people called the Breaks. They'd been running cross-country in a flat plain, and then the earth opened up in front of them. The Canadian River of the Panhandle was not a major river now, but it had been a very major river during the last ice age, and it had done some dreadful things to the landscape here. Real mesas, not the slumped hills of the south High Plains. Mesas weren't mountains. They were not vigorous upthrustings in the landscape. Mesas were remnants, mesas were all that was left, after ages of stubborn resistance to rainsplash and sheetwash and channel cutting. The mesas had a layer of hard sandstone, t caprock, up on top, but below that caprock layer was a soft, reddish, weak, and treacherous rock that was scarcely petrified mud. That rock wa~ so weak you could tear off clods of it and crumble it to dust with your fingers. The mesas were toothless and terribly patient and all wrinkled down the sides, eaten away with vertical gullies, their slopes scattered with the cracked remains of undereaten sandstone slabs.