Chapter 14: Anomalies

Last trip, I threatened to bring a net and we brought far more than nets with us. We came equipped with probes fitted with highspeed streaming realtime cameras.

This is a somewhat scientific experiment intended to study and hopefully explain this incredible impossible polar tornado. How can it be so high?

None of us are meteorologists. We have the Terran data bases and theories, the analytical tools of Earth meteorologists in the computers, but not the interpretation skills. On Earth, this tornado is impossible.

Gravity on BELT is about eighty-five percent Terran gravity, and the atmosphere is about half as thick or high. On Earth, space begins at fifty miles or a hundred kilometers high, depending on who you talk to. Both are obvious arbitrary numbers. On Belt it’s about half that height. Pick a number YOU are comfortable with.

We decided not to call the planet Vulcan. The narrow hundred mile wide strip of usable land that girdles this world, between the ice and the sea like a belt, inspired calling it BELT.

Many forces don’t scale with size. Gravity is an exception. Actually I want to point out tornadoes are more powerful, faster wind velocities, than larger cyclonic storms like hurricanes.

I’m not suggesting a hundred pounds of gunpowder doesn’t explode with greater force than one pound of black powder.

Terran tornadoes can reach twenty thousand feet high with air circulation above them to sixty thousand feet. Volcanoes on earth have had plumes more than a hundred forty thousand feet high.

Because of the extreme volcanic activity on Belt, we suspect there is a volcano or something similar at the bottom of this tornado. We intend to send several submerged probes into the center of the tornado, then send them straight up the core. Maybe we can make some sense of it.

We are hovering at the top of the flying fish fountain. The actual tornado doesn’t reach this high. But the fish are thrown up with such velocity, they do ascend this high before falling back. We have a triangular net with gravitics at the corners, and have caught a few hundred of the pretty sardines. We are bringing it in the airlock now.

Not only are these fish dead, they’ve been cooked! Very bony except they have a keelbone just like birds with a succulent strip of flesh on each side. These are the pectoral muscles for wing beats. Very tasty too.

I wasn’t worried about tasting the steamed fish. My cyborg body copies the organic human body in rejecting toxic or unpalatable ingested substances. It’s called a gag reflex in both body types and results in vomiting in both.