Clear skies

The space pod was still several miles up in the air, but it had stopped being a little speck in the sky and was now more of a semi-distinguishable blob. Lloyd squinted as he tried to recognise its shape through his wire-framed glasses, looking back down at the screen every few seconds, all the while trying not to let the queasiness from the rocking boat take over him. He would have sworn the parachute had not yet been deployed, based on the speed his brain was trying to estimate with the little data it was being given, but the numbers on the screen said otherwise, and he trusted the measurements on this.

There was a faint buzz coming from within the electronic equipment he had hauled on board as it frantically re-calculated figures every few milliseconds, struggling to keep up with the unstoppable stream of data that kept coming at it. Despite the sun shining down on them, a gentle chilling wind nipped at the tiniest bits of exposed skin it could get its cold fangs on, the aluminium mug of hot chocolate he had his hands wrapped around the only real source of warmth for him. The drink was sweet in his mouth, the air salty in his nose.

He picked up the radio receiver and pressed it to his hear, but there was still only a relentless crackling coming through. “Kathleen, it's Lloyd here, do you receive me?” He waited for several seconds, but got no reply. They could keep in contact with people on Mars, but they still couldn't manage to get a couple of bloody radios within a hundred miles of each other to work properly.

He looked back up at the sky as he grumbled to himself, but was unable to keep a wry smile from drawing itself on his face. He'd been right, after all.

Despite the incredibly advanced technology that went into a single rocket – including the pod he was now watching descend from the sky –, there was still an area of science that remained unusually elusive, even though it was older than most scientific disciplines, going back several millennia: meteorology. The weather. The unpredictability of aspects so fundamental to rocket trajectories as were temperature, wind strength and humidity was baffling when considered next to feats of the calibre of modern computing, aerodynamics or telecommunications. Of course, it seems baffling because the weather is something everybody discusses quite regularly, inevitably associating familiarity with simplicity, but what people didn't realise was that it involved understanding fluid dynamics and atmospheric chemistry, to name but a couple of topics, both of them disciplines most people would categorise as anything but simple.

In this particular case, Lloyd and his colleagues had amply discussed the weather they were expecting as the Mars crew arrived back on Earth and, more importantly, how it would affect their descent.

The radio let out a series of sharp pops, making Lloyd jump slightly, but he couldn't tell if the sounds were an indication of the system's general jumpiness or if they were poorly received words from the other team. “Kathleen, Lloyd speaking,can you hear me at all? Hello? Kathleen?”

His colleagues had relied entirely on the data collected by weather stations both down here on Earth and up among the myriad other satellites floating above the Earth, concluding on a certain point in the Pacific Ocean, about two hundred miles west off the coast. Lloyd couldn't blame them for reaching such a conclusion, nor did he fault them for sticking to their guns despite his insistence – after all, he would behave like them in their situation.

But he wasn't. In their situation, that is. He held a significant advantage over however many terabytes of data and state-of-the-art predictive models they were using. Something you couldn't easily turn into one of the thousands (if not millions) of algorithms that governed so many of their decisions: he'd grown up in a farm.

Every morning he would be out of bed before the sun was up to help his father out around the farm. Every morning he would watch the man as he took a thoughtful look around, above and below him, breathing the air in deep and, finally, stating – not guessing, not hoping, not suggesting, but stating – what the weather was going to be like for the following twenty four hours. After enough mornings, Lloyd had developed the same instinct. Developed, that was the word he thought of when he considered it. Not learned: he wasn't sure how it had happened, but there had been no explanations, no fatherly lectures, no gestures. Nothing. Just statements, one per day, of the upcoming weather. One day, Lloyd had found that he could somehow tell what the weather was going to be like too, as if some kind of intuition that he'd always had was only just then being noticed.

“Windy today. A bit of rain just after noon, but it'll clear up after that.” He'd said it without thinking, before his father had even opened his mouth. The man had simply nodded. Not a look, not even a glance, towards him. No words of approval or encouragement. Just a nod. A nod with which he concurred with his son, with which he confirmed that what Lloyd had just said out loud wasn't any kind of guess, nor hope, nor some half-baked suggestion, but a god honest fact.

So, when they stood at the beach the morning of the crew's arrival, Lloyd's instinct had told him it was going to be a fairly calm day, while his brain told him this meant that the pod would be arriving about a hundred miles South-west from where the data said it would. He's insisted on his conclusions, but so had his colleagues. Given the data, his colleagues' prediction was prioritised and most resources allocated to them. Given Lloyd's successful predictions in past similar experiences, he was granted a small boat with a two-person crew.

“Kathleen, someone, anyone, come in.” His hand squeezed the receiver as he looked back up at the sky and noticed how quickly the pod was descending. There was no way the parachute had been deployed. The smile was replaced with a frown as he and the two crew members of the boat watched it plummet towards the ocean, it's shape now sharply defined in the sky and ever more details distinguishable with every second that passed. A loud screech, like a thousand air planes flying overhead, made the entire boat shake, and the pod disappeared behind a tall wave.

A deafening blast thumped at them and, half a second later, hundreds of gallons of water exploded dozens of feet into the air as the pod came in contact with the ocean. As Lloyd's hearing returned, the captain sped the boat in the direction of the pod's last visible location, the salt spray drenching Lloyd head to toe.

The radio was still as useless as it had been for the last ten minutes, but he felt a buzz in his trouser pocket. He took out his phone and found it somehow had coverage, so quickly dialled Kathleen's number, hoping she would pick up.

“Lloyd! How are-”

They were met by the feet-tall ripples caused by the pod's plunge into the ocean and the rest of her words were quite literally drowned out as Lloyd's phone slipped out of his wet fingers and fell overboard. Just his luck.

Usually he would have felt frustrated about losing his phone at such a time, but the pod's dramatic entrance had half of his mind worried about the Mars crew, while the other half was elated about the possibility of being the first person to welcome them back home. There was also a slight uneasiness floating around in between the two parts too. He'd only heard three words from her, but he thought Kathleen sounded quite cheery, especially when he considered how wrong she and the others had been about the point of arrival. The sense of teamwork had probably taken over her, that was all, but he still couldn't shake off the feeling.

Finally, they arrived at the pod, which had eventually resurfaced. Salt-water rushed down its sides as strands of seaweed clung to any edge the engineers had not rounded out during the design phase. A couple of fish flopped frantically on its roof, eventually managing to hop over the side and back into the dark, cool ocean, and a starfish the size of Lloyd's hand was gripping one of the handlebars that lined the bottom edge of the vehicle.

The pod itself looked fairly simple in shape: a six-sided pyramid with the top lopped off, about ten feet tall in total, all painted white except for a black cushion-like material underneath it that kept it afloat. There were several handlebars around it at different angles, but no windows looked out from inside and there were only two doors, each one at an opposing side. The digits “01” were printed in red on one of the doors, as well as on the roof, and a few smaller alphanumeric codes ran along the rims of the doors. Other than that the pod was fairly bare.

A metallic groan erupted from the pod as the door closest to them began to edge open and a hiss signalled the differences of temperature and pressure between the fresh ocean air and the air escaping the vehicle. The smile made its way back onto Lloyd's face as the excitement tried to take over him. If the door was being opened from inside, it must mean the crew was OK.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, something inside him changed. The strangest feeling, something he had never experienced before. His instinct, so attuned to the weather, began to tell him that there was a storm coming, a complete shift from the sunny weather he had been feeling coming up for the whole day, and when he looked around him he saw only clear skies. The radio, which had remained silent as they floated next to the pod, started to transmit once again.

“Lloyd! Lloyd! Can you hear me?” Kathleen's voice burst out from the receiver. “Lloyd, where on Earth are you? The pod landed next to us almost fifteen minutes ago, but it's been impossible to reach you. We had to trigger the door ejection, as the crew were all quite weakened and shaken. It's quite creepy, actually, they all look gaunt and wasted away, somehow. They haven't said a word yet, other than the commander, who only managed to say a couple of words: They're coming. Quite ominous, if you ask me.”

The door from the pod clanged loudly as it swung open behind Lloyd.