Vlade recrossed the skybridge, pausing out in the middle to look around again. To the west he could see out into the bacino, and it was wild. The surface of the little rectangular lake was getting ripped away and flung whitely northward. It wasn’t possible to see the water surface itself, as the whiteness over it filled the air, but occasional glimpses confirmed that its level was far higher than normal, amazingly higher. Like the Third Pulse had come at last. The roar was immense. Feeling spooked, and awed, Vlade got back into the Met.
Now they were settling in with the idea that it was going to be a test of endurance between them and the storm. They had limited food, power, potable water, and sewage space. Food was the least self-sustaining, but they had a stock of dried and canned and frozen, and the PV power would keep their refrigerators going. They did have some resilience. And the storm could only go on for so long. Although the aftermath would be problematic. Vlade passed some time tapping out various scenarios on his spreadsheets, using Gantt programs to see how they might do. Well, it seemed they could go for a week at least. It would help if their local power station could send them some electricity. The node network for the power gridwork was robust. He began to check around. The Twenty-eighth power station was still connected to its clients in the neighborhood but not out to the big power plants north of the city. They were identifying the point of the break now and would get out and repair it when they could. Could be a while, they said. That was for sure!
The other buildings in the neighborhood were mostly okay, but one of the bishop skybridges between the Decker building and the New School had come down over Fifth and Fourteenth, and both buildings were now coping with open holes in their sides, just as Vlade had expected. That was apparently just one of about a dozen skybridges that had pulled out in lower Manhattan alone. Bishop bridges were doing worse than rook bridges; north-south rooks were doing worse than east-wests, because the wind was a bit more east than south. If they pulled out at one end but not the other, they fell into the building they were still connected to, breaking windows and so on. Windows were breaking frequently anyway, just by getting blown in or sucked out. The top of the Empire State had just a half hour earlier recorded a gust of 164 miles an hour; one of the superscrapers uptown with an “eye of the needle” near its top had reported winds of 190 miles per hour through the eye, which had been included in the building’s design precisely to reduce wind pressures against its uppermost surfaces. The average speed over Manhattan right now, NOAA said, was 130 miles per hour. “Incredible,” Vlade said when he saw that. As far as he knew he had never seen a wind over a hundred, and that too had been in a hurricane. He had been twenty-four at the time, and he and some friends had gone out into the wind to see what it felt like; this was on Long Island, and they had been blown flat onto the sand of Jones Beach and crawled around laughing their heads off, until his friend Oscar broke his wrist and then it had been less funny, but still, an adventure, a story to tell. But 130? 164? It was hard to believe.
Then they lost their cloud connection. This was like losing a sixth sense, one they used much more than smell or taste or touch. Now the locals were conversing by radio or wire connections. Some viewcams were broadcasting by radio too. Well, it was the same everywhere. Flayed water, whipped rain. There was one camera with a view of the Hudson that was astounding; waves were slamming into the big concrete dock at Chelsea, after which huge masses of water were shooting vertically into the air, the giant sheets then immediately thrown north. Docks and loose empty boats floated upstream, some boats foundering, others capsized, others battened down and looking fine, if doomed. Floating docks torn loose looked like lost barges or giant pallets. Vlade wondered how Brooklyn was doing but didn’t bother to look into it. Anything across the rivers was in a different world now. It seemed quite possible everything afloat in New York harbor would sink or get blown upriver. Idelba’s new beach on Coney Island would be well under the surge by now, so possibly the new sand was just down there waiting things out, but it also seemed possible that the sand had been churned by the breakers and cast far north into Brooklyn. Oh well. Not the worst of the damage by any means. Just another feature of the storm.
Idelba herself didn’t care. “So many animals are going to get killed,” she said. And of course that made them both think of Stefan and Roberto. They glanced at each other, or nearly, but said nothing.
Later when they were alone Vlade said, “I’d feel a lot better if I knew where they were.”
“I know. But they can find shelter. They know to do that.”
“If the surge doesn’t catch them off guard.”
“Most of the shelter they would take would be taller than that.”
This was not necessarily true. “Roberto is not too good at risk assessment,” he said.
Idelba said, “You have to hope a storm like this would put the fear of God in him.”
“Or that Stefan will stop him from doing anything too stupid.”
Idelba put a hand to his arm. Vlade sighed. Sixteen years since she had last touched him. This moment of the storm.
The hours passed, the storm kept howling. Vlade spent some time looking for ways to cut more power without making people uncomfortable. He walked the building a few times, and at sunset he stomped back up to the tower to have a look around. It was black up there; he had arrived too late, unless it had looked that way all afternoon, which was possible. The great city was now a mass of rectilinear shadows, enduring under the flail of rain and wind. The south side of the Empire State was no longer a single white waterfall, but it was still crazy-looking, with spray dashing down its central chute and then being blown up on gusts. The western sky was no lighter than the east; it looked like an hour after sunset, though it was actually an hour before. But day was done. It never had managed much on this day. Someone on the radio had said that sometime that night they would be passed over by the eye of the storm. That would be interesting to see from up here. If the eye passed over the center of New York harbor, the great bay and the eye of the storm might be about the same size. He wanted to come back up here to see if that happened. He wondered if he could power one elevator twice an hour, just to come up here and take looks. Would be nice not to hike the long haul up and down the stairs. Down was harder, or more painful. He was tempted just to lie down and sleep up here. All of a sudden he was very, very tired.
But Idelba came up and got him, and walked him back down to the office, and she slept on the couch there while he crashed in his room. For which he was grateful. Sixteen years, he thought as he fell asleep. Maybe seventeen now.