Commander Michael Diocullis efficiently finished with the affairs of his office, delegating any open issues with military expedience. He prepared contingencies to handle any changing priorities that might wash the political horizons of New Vatica in his absence. His personal ship, the WRATH OF JEHOVAH, left orbit before Joshua had even collected his specialists. It was a tedious, if efficient, flight.

****

The WRATH OF JEHOVAH completed its voyage, ending in a parking orbit midway between the North and South polar axis of Earth. Diocullis viewed the planet with soft eyes. The cloud-glazed ball ran to a shocking blue against the total black of space. Alcomer, he mused, always appeared more of a muted gray from orbit. For all of Earth's congestion and social problems, it still pulled at his heart. It seemed to say "Beautiful Home", and brought images of clear vaulted skies. Probably still true in some places there, despite the industrial pollution, Diocullis reflected.

A military vessel, the WRATH was engineered for speed at any cost. There was no approach break where solar sails had to be reeled in before proximity to the Earth's gravity well began to rip and claw at the sail mass. The WRATH had no sails at all. She could emerge from sub-space and spear directly down into a planet's atmosphere, though this was rarely done.

Earth generally used a space-bridge station. Personnel were efficiently lowered down a carbon mono-filiment elevator from the geo-synchronous orbital platform, Canton station.

Michael turned away from the view to make final preparations for transfer Earth-side. He had spent most of the voyage reviewing mission information, a tedious and diverse data set. Nothing about it seemed to offered any answers. Reams of plots and projections detailed an oxygen loss, but offered no actual insights as to a cause.

The long stint aboard the WRATH left Dio oily and itchy, He felt in need of a real bath and a night's sleep. Instead, he groused, his portion would more likely be a series of formal introductions, exchanges of papers, orders, tours, and briefings. Dio sighed, and prepared to transfer to Canton station for the decent.

Observing out the view-screens of the descending elevator, Michael saw snarling winds and bad weather, such as the reports had detailed. The view certainly showed none of the verdant liveliness he remembered of the Rocky Mountain tether base.

The shuttle-pod tethered to the civic Ranchero spaceport, rather than to a military airfield. Ranchero served the well populated south-western quarter of the state. Despite the altitude, it was still a part of the urban sprawl of the Americas, one seamless belt of super-city that now ran from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. The facility itself in the general area of the Telluride/Silverton district, perched high, at at about 3700 feet above sea level.

Dio felt uncomfortable. In descent, one could still see the carefully cordoned-off tracts of mountain wilderness and grazing lands, quilted between the lacy city's web. But as the shuttle landed, the stark, engineered steel metropolis rose up to engulf any hint of that.

The over-built feel of it bore down on him. An engulfing sense of being closed in. The claustrophobia that had driven the Great Flight of the last century. Like crabs abandoning cramped shells lying on a beach, most of the tenants, or at least many of them, had moved on, but the giant shells of its metropolitan structures remained. There were, as Dio looked at things, still too many residents for one planet. No colonial world had ever reached the staggering population Earth had, before technology finally reached the point where colonization became probable in some rational sense. Like the Conestoga wagon, or the railroad, affordable space flight changed...everything.

Ground crews muffled in Oxy-masks picked their way across the field. The car sent for Dio whisked smoothly along to the military center. It was was a quet ride, though Diocullis could hear the faint hiss of an oxygen cylinder leaking its precious cargo into the cab. Michael squinted at the sky before the fast approaching architecture closed away the view. There was something about the clouds. They seemed too close to the ground for the type, he had never seen horsetails that low, and it seemed to Dio, that they curved about ominously.

The pedestrian crush of the streets featured a number of civilians with small breathing aids in place, thin transparent tubes running to oxygen supplementing cylinders carried at the waist. More than a small percentage of chronic asthmatics would account for. At one intersection, an older man grabbed to a street sign and sank to the pavement, as if drunk,or like a marathon runner collapsing after a race. At 3700 feet, the effects of pressure loss were probably more apparent here than other places. Diocullis saw no small children on the streets, very odd in such a press of humanity.

The sandy haired Commander Baine of Earth's Allied Forces met him at the compound's entrance. Breathing heavily, but eschewing the use of a breathing aid, he grinned and saluted as Dio swung his long lank legs out of the transport. "Happy to meet you, Sir. Welcome to Earth, Commander."

Michael returned the salute, and let himself be shepherded into the compound.

Dio was pleasantly surprised. All of the formalities were brisk, and ended with a dinner. The meal was a solid,unpretentious one, featuring a well grilled T-bone steak, roasted potatoes and boiled vegetables, served with hot breads and a choice of beverages. It was a cut above commissary fare, but not quite a banquet. Dio tucked in with a will, listening with half an ear to the low murmur of conversation that permeated the dining hall. Commander Baine, seated to his left, did the same, not bothering Dio with chatter until both were well into the meal.

"We were a little surprised with Alcomer's fast response. Not that your services are not appreciated of course. The aid Alcomer agreed to, mostly emergency supplies and making available potential evacuation faciitities should things go completely bottoms up here, was awesome. The See's roll-up-the-sleeves and pitch-in approach set more than a few politicos to reviseing their inter-world status charts."

Dio stabbed at the last bit of steak, and grunted. "Pope John's like that. Will we be looking at your newest data this evening?"

Bane snorted, folding up his napkin. "I can tell you we have ruled out natural causes. We're working on the problem round the clock, but your visit to the data center isn't scheduled until tomorrow morning. Give you a chance to stretch out on clean sheets first. You got here on a Courier class, right? We all know what that means."

"Appreciated, appreciated."

Starched servers passed around the tables, collecting plates and replacing them with silver dessert bowls. Dio beamed. "Strawberry Shortcake! My favorite!"

Bane nodded, watching as Dio dig in with renewed relish. "We used to have trouble getting hold of enough fresh fruit, but since the Great Flight, supplies have consistently gone up. Strawberries aren't on the ration list anymore, not for years now."

"My mother used to grow them," noted Dio. "Almost everyone new to the colony starts a garden as soon as they get settled. For her, it was strawberries. I used to pick over the patch so much, that there was rarely enough to harvest for shortcake. Drove her crazy."

Bane thought about that. "I suppose they would have, at that."

"What, go crazy?"

"No, I mean about starting gardens." Banes eyes drifted off for a second. "All that open land available for the taking. Compelling thought. We could do that here now too, if they knocked down a few buildings and upgraded the city planning, but You know how that goes. Someday, maybe. I almost immigrated once, but I have so much family here...Alcomer was settled mostly from here, right? From Earth, I mean."

Michael paused, setting down his fork. "Largely, perhaps sixty-five percent or so. We weren't a first wave colony."

While the banter stayed light, it was easy to see a discomforting urgency about Bane. Dio cut his dinner short and excused himself, retiring to the quarters Bane assigned. He collapsed onto its stark bed and fell asleep instantly. His dreams were disturbing. Michael slept poorly, mind already working on the problem at hand even as he dreamed, sweating the starched white sheets.

Images.

A beach, a rock-encrusted shoreline, pounded by cold, gray breakers. Tossing on the waves, far from shore, hundreds of cradles, some oversize, some small, floundered in agitated waters. In the far distance, a whirling cyclone thrashed the sea.

On the beach, a lone red crab carefully picked its way between the rocks, drawing close to where Michael stood.

The crab crooked one eye stalk toward the twisting horror, and waved a claw at it. "Bad weather today, bound to cause a few deaths for the floaters," it said.

Michael looked anxiously at the cradles. "Who are they?"

"Oh, the very young, the old and infirm, the floaters on the Sea of Fate."

As Michael watched, a few cradles upended in the stormy waters and sank. His agitation increased. "What happens to them?"

The crab swiveled both eye stalks around to center on Diocullis. "They drown, of course. You know, asphyxiate."

Michael started toward the breakers. "Someone should bring them in, get them out of the water."

The crab chuckled. "Can't. They are part of the thing, part of the gestalt of it - the environment, their age, condition, all of that. Besides, there's too many of them to move, I mean, just look at em' all." The crab scuttled sideways waving both claws in the general direction of the jostling cradles.

"Then the storm should be quelled," said Michael. "There is only one storm."

"Ah," said the crab, "a problem solver, are you? A good solution requires that the whole situation be available to the solver. Do you have the whole of the situation in hand?"

"You don't need the whole situation, just the operant variables, things that leverage change. Your view requires omniscience in order to achieve any solution. That's nonsense. A man doesn't need to be God to work his will and change things."

The crab poked one claw at a small rock, overturning it to expose a wriggling resident, which it snatched and ate. "Just be another storm tomorrow," noted the crab.

"Doesn't excuse a man from cleaning up what's on his plate today."

"It doesn't mean you can solve the problem, either. Do you know how to stop the storm, or not?"

"I'm damn sure going to try." Michael strode into the battling surf, up to his waist, then his chest, finally submerging himself. In the dream, he began to drown. As he flailed in the dream's waters, he tossed and moaned in his sleep, clutching at the linens.

Early next morning he was met by Commander Baine, and admitted into the situation room. Satellite displays of an atmospheric vortex abounded, visualized in every band of the electromagnetic spectra. Updated maps, indicating ongoing ground operations, peppered the room, and a multitude of screens scrolled data reports. Large weather readouts dominated, displaying the current day's charts, and the slow but perceptibe dropping air pressure in fractional millibars.

"We discovered the vortex quickly enough. It's the immediate cause of our weather problem. Also, we found some kinds of radiation propagating about it. but these emissions are caused by the disturbance, not responsible for it." The E.A.F. commander stabbed his finger at a small graphic printout. "The radiations only provide a foggy pattern, like this." Baine quickly sketched a cone, point placed adjacent to a circle representing the earth, fanning out toward the galactic east in a widening vector.

"We aren't really seeing anything useful, just secondary effects touched off by whatever the process is. We aren't seeing the bear, just the bear's footprints. The source seems diffuse. Somehow, the effect concentrates to a 100-mile diameter inside the stratosphere of Earth. Notice that the cone converges just to the side of the planet, so that as the earth rotates..."

Diocullus finished Baine's sentence tersely. "The effect eats a swath through the atmosphere like an apple peeler stripping the skin from a fruit. Yes, I see. It certainly is not a natural phenomena. Something from outside, then." Diocuilis studied the chart quietly for several minutes, and then both men went back over the contributing reports and figures. There seemed nothing helpful. Finally, they returned to the summary chart. Diocullis stared at it, drumming his long fingers on the desk.

Perhaps you have been looking for the wrong things, Commander."

"What?" Baine started.

Diocullus looked directly at Baine and quoted:

"As rains fall, I look to clouds.

Gentle leaves waft, where winds play.

Shadows deepen where trees bend low.

Reminiscentia Pious X XV"

Baine blinked.

Michael sighed. "Do you know how a lens works?"

"Of course!"

Michael drew a line bisecting the inverted cone. "When you have a cone, you look to the vertex for a radiating source."

"There's nothing there but a tornado of exiting gas."

"True enough. But if there isn't anything at the vertex, you assume a concentrating lens somewhere opposite, like a magnifying lens focused on a bug. Assuming the distances involved, the size of such a lens would be absurd. Maybe a lot of small devices - an array of some kind sponsoring the effect."

Bane nodded. "We speculated about that, but don't know what the perimeter of such a lens might be, or its distance. At a certain height, true, the gas just vanishes, but there is nothing else there. No collector. As for a swarm, such units could be posted along a diameter of any size. We don't know what causative forces would be involved if so, what energy drives it, what it emits, whether they might be stationary or not, nor can we duplicate the effect, or even begin to understand the physics of it. Another words, nothing to provide data clues as to where to look. Ships for example, have to have a known destination. I can't tell my people, drive along the axis until you bump into something. If the elements were peripheral, that wouldn't help anyway. If we knew what to for, a signal type or such, we could send testing probes out, listen for magnitude changes and compute ... something useful, but, what kind of energy or signal are we looking for?"

Baine shook his head then continued. "The whole idea of this being some sort of lens is insane, on the face of it. The area covered, the energy required at the distances that model brings to mind - flatly impossible. We need a target, not a direction. This gas loss has been plaguing us for twenty-six hours now, Goddamn it, we just don't have time to puzzle things out!"

Diocullis frowned at the expletive, but this was lost on Baine. "The pressure at sea level is dropping. At the highest elevations, we are losing the elderly. The radiation count is increasing to levels not seen since the ozone depletion of ancient times. Every newborn in the higher elevations is being handled like a premature birth. We need to find an answer now, right now, and turn this damnable thing off!"

"You are looking to the wrong end of things. I don't want to find out more about the condensing mechanism. If it is an array of some kind, it is targeting from very far away indeed. A very good trick, regardless of the technology used. If we can't identify the source, maybe we can find some kind of spotter mechanism."

Baine looked thoughtful. "You mean, like spotting for a mortar bombardment? Given the problem, we hadn't bothered to look for a spotter. Its a planet, after all. not a brigade of tanks."

Dio asked, "Have you tried looking for some sort of near Earth guide device? If we are lucky, there might be one. It's easier to concentrate fire on a target if you have one. Much less calculation, less of a logistical nightmare. It is a possibility you shouldn't have overlooked," Dio rumbled. "I would look, if not for the signal itself, the spotter for the strike, some nearby physical construct."

Commander Baines' eyes clouded in thought. "We have been looking for a signal to fix on, or a fleet of ships with some sort of super-weapon. You're thinking something small, some kind of tight beam beacon? We can mount more ships to comb the near planet orbits right enough, although that's still looking for a needle in a haystack. All right, let's give that a bigger push." Facing the communications panel, Baine snapped; "Get me the Kit Peak unit!"