“I really don’t know.”
“Sailing stones.”
“Yes.”
“They also mentioned an unplayable golf course somewhere in the valley.”
“Did you bring your clubs then. For the challenge.”
“What people you work for, Ravan.”
“With.”
They exchanged a family smirk, Ravan’s wryer than Menar’s. A resemblance held them together, the smirks. Otherwise the brothers did not look much alike, except for a shared softness in the eyes. Menar was the taller, by half a head, perhaps 6’3”. He had a long, clean-shaven face with a sharply tapering chin. His skin was a pale tan, a shade or two lighter than Ravan’s, and he wore his hair short and neat, the inverse of his brother’s.
“It’s a craggy salt bed,” Ravan said. “The Devil’s Golf Course.”
“Well, as I say…” Menar trailed off, or referred back to something Ravan couldn’t pinpoint, something indefinite, a general idea, maybe, or several at once, even an infinite conjunction. Menar said a lot when he was in the mood for it.
They pulled into the station under marbled, pregnant skies.
“Well timed,” Menar said.
“Dr. Peshwa, we are so pleased to have you here.” A bearded man, not so old, in a light blue button-down and dark blue jeans approached them as they hopped out of the jeep. Two more men stood within the station.
“We have a live feed set up so the rest of the team can see back East,” the bearded man said.
“Ah, hello Michael,” Menar said. He squinted and twisted his face. “And please — it’s Menar. You don’t call this one doctor, do you?” His hand trailed back toward Ravan, who approached from the back of the jeep with two white duffle bags.
“So the matériel has arrived, I take it,” Menar said.
“Just over there,” Michael said. “Dispersers on the left, seeders on the right.”
“Slakers and makers,” Ravan said softly as he passed by his brother with the bags.
The garage held a central server, four workstations, a bank of laptops, and a large monitor some hundred inches wide. Beyond the workstations was the storage and lab facility. Ravan set the duffels on the ground next to the weather missiles crowding the racks.
Menar stooped and lifted a seeder up to his chest. It was the height, if not quite the weight, of a dwarf. He cradled it in his arms. The head of the missile, the end of the rocket stage, was ringed by six smaller missiles, copper darts, each about a foot long. The two technicians moved to help him but he nodded them off. He set the rocket roughly on the central steel table in the lab. It clanked and rolled several degrees, planting on a fin. Michael trotted to the back wall and switched on the lights above the table, which were startlingly bright. They turned the silver rocket a watery white.
“It doesn’t take much of a payload to activate clouds, or to dissolve them either,” Menar said, tapping one of the darts. “It used to be thought you needed to dump huge quantities to get anything going. That was actually a mistake. Too much agent retards the reaction. You just need to get the formula right. That, and the mechanism of distribution. My father sent you the specs.”
“Some, yes,” Michael said. “A one-pound charge in each?”
“That’s right. The tiniest warhead. You can launch them from the shoulder too, if need be, when a platform isn’t practical. Easier with two men, but a strong one can do it alone. On-board altimeters activate the charges, and rather than explode, they make the powder, treated antimony, smolder and stream smoke.” He looked at his brother. “So, you’ve got these set to discharge at what, seven thousand feet? Eight thousand?”
“I was going to send them up to six, to eight, and to ten,” Ravan said, “one at each elevation, and then draw them right across.”
“That sounds right,” Menar said. He pointed to the rack of missiles and looked at Michaeclass="underline" “These are based on the latest Starstreak, you know. The Mark III. Can you see the resemblance? I don’t know exactly how much bleed-through there is from military technology to your atmospheric R & D. I’m assuming rather a lot,” he said with a gesture of outspread fingers and tightly closed eyes. “Just like us.” He shook his head with vigor and a smile. “You and the Brits appear to share the Starstreak now. Thales builds them, in Belfast, but Lockheed’s helped tweak it for your army. Actually,” Menar said after a pause, “I have seen quite a lot of them deployed in Kashmir, and in Pakistan, launched by the allies, principally the two of you. More versatile than the old Stinger. Good for striking lightly armored vehicles, low-lying helicopters. Defeats jamming. No infrared needed. And with the darts, the odds of making contact expand.” He caressed one of the darts. “They were certainly effective there, we can all agree, I think.”
Michael looked to one side of Menar and nodded slowly without saying anything. He sucked in his lower lip, drawing the blond whiskers of his mustache down past it.
“And now they’ve proved more versatile still,” Menar said.
Michael smiled and fixed Menar’s eyes. “They have, yes,” he said.
“One more use for them, and again, it’s all in the darts. Did you know any of this?” Menar asked.
“Not exactly, not really,” Michael said. “But what your father has managed to do here is very interesting.” The two techs stirred and nodded along.
“He’s a gift. And it’s much more than interesting.” Menar paused again, a habit of his. “The formulation is mostly his work. Delivery, how to aerate the substance, that was up to me. That’s why I talk of the rockets.”
“Well that’s not really true,” Ravan said. “You’ve done plenty with the formula. And it’s nothing without distribution. It’s really all one thing, not many.”
“Is it?” Menar said. Again there was the suggestion of a smile on his face, invisible to all but his blood, Ravan. “You know, I think it would be possible to do both today.”
“Both?” Michael cocked his head slightly.
“Seeding and dispersal. The same storm, the same patch of it even. We’ve done it in parallel before, at a distance of some miles. We precipitated a cloudbank in one place and vanished it in another. But why not try the very same cloud. Let’s seed this one now. After we have it going, we’ll switch it off, scatter it. We can try, anyway. It’s not foolproof. None of it is, actually. There are definitely still unknown variables in play. But we’ve reduced their number more than anyone. More than the Chinese. More than you too, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. We are far beyond chance now.” He looked at the techs. “Shall we get these outside, then, before the water falls?”
Michael looked slightly confused.
“Before it comes down on its own,” Ravan said, pointing through the opaque roof to the heavily clouded skies beyond.
“Ah,” Michael said.
The technicians each picked up a seeder and headed outside, ducking under the back doors before they had fully risen. Michael and Ravan helped move them while Menar took out a laptop from one of the duffels and logged onto the network. “Oh, good work,” he said as Ravan left with a missile in his arms. It drew a smile from his brother.
The two launch platforms were side by side, just behind the station. They looked like squat traffic lights, but without the lights. There were only holes where they should have been. The wide poles, painted in a textured, heat-resistant green, were moored deep in the dirt, far below the mud tiles, with support struts fanning out from the base along the flats. Thick rectangular panels with three holes, each a foot deep and stacked vertically, hung off one side of the poles. The panels could be remotely flattened out to any degree, and the poles themselves could be rotated.
Low-lying stratus clouds, vertically developed, hung overhead. A tiered deployment of makers, as Ravan had suggested, would be ideal. “So, rotate them out ten degrees each,” Menar said. “That should get us enough of a gap between them.”