Stephen Baxter - Flood

“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 stacks and big gas storage vessels, all embedded in a web of walkways and pipelines. One big line strode overhead across the brook itself.

Gary asked, “Where are we? What is that?”

“Canvey Island,” Thandie called.“And to the west of the creek, that’s Coryton. Petrochemical installations.”

The terminals were serviced from the river. One immense supertanker huddled against a jetty, with the compact shapes of tugs nearby. Brightly lit, a carpet of sodium light, this landscape looked as if it went on for kilometers, and Gary could see it had some protection from the water in the shape of a stout concrete sea wall that had to be meters high. But the land wasn’t entirely given over to industry. There were estates of houses down there, clusters of brick red like scrubby flowers huddling in the rain, some of them only a half-kilometer, less, from the industrial plant.

And there was clearly an evacuation underway. Gary saw cars streaming out of the housing estates, crowding the roads that fed into the big arterial routes to the north. It was so dark now, though it wasn’t yet four in the afternoon, that most of the cars had their lights on. The traffic, however, was all but motionless, and helicopters, bright yellow search-and-rescue machines, prowled along the riverbank. Gary saw all this in glimpses through sheeting rain, from a chopper that bucked and rolled in the wind. He heard Thandie talking to some kind of air traffic control.

And now there was a spark of lightning, a crackle of thunder.

“The storm front’s only a couple kilometers thataway,” Thandie called, pointing east. “Sanj, how’s the data? You got GPS?”

“I got that,” said Sanjay, staring at his screen. “Climate sensors nominal, though that wind gauge is going to rip clean off at this rate. And the pressure’s dropping. Nine seventy. Nine sixty-five… The radar’s working, the sonar not so well, you’d expect that. It would help if this tub wasn’t bucking like a fairground ride.”

“Doing what I can, brainbox.”

Gary had had no idea that all this industry was out here. “It’s like a city in itself. And kind of vulnerable, isn’t it?”

“When it comes to fuel London’s a big and thirsty monster, Gary. But they’re prepared for floods, they drill for them.” She snapped a switch, and the radio cut into a feed from a refinery crew going through shutdown procedures, working through checklists of pumps, furnaces, compressors, valves, catalytic crackers.

“Leaving it late,” Gary said.“The storm’s been tracked since Scotland.”

“A flood warning itself is an expensive event,” Thandie said. “With more than a million people living on the Thames flood plain, you don’t raise the alarm unless you have to. The river traffic is a problem too. The Barrier seems to be raised more often than it’s lowered nowadays. And shutting down those refineries is no joke, you don’t just throw a switch. It costs to abandon the processes they put their materials through. False alarms are unpopular. People are terrified of liability, legal claims.”

“And in this case,” Sanjay said, “the error bars around the storm’s probable track and effects were just too wide to be sure. I told you, our modeling is breaking down. What’s worse is that the interfaces between different models aren’t working so well either.. ”

Gary understood the principle. Mathematical models of the weather were generally based on dividing up land, air and sea into discrete elements and tracing the progress of variables like pressure, temperature and wind speed through from one element to the next. You might run a coarse model for the whole of the North Sea, and as a storm passed the Wash or the Thames estuary you would feed predicted conditions from the ocean model to finer-grained models to see what happened in there. But if all the models were suffering because of some underlying change in the physical condition in the planet’s weather systems, it would be at the edges and interfaces that errors would particularly multiply.