The Weathermakers (1967) (11 page)

“Yes, I’ve seen them. They’re good.”

I nodded. “Well, we get the two-week forecasts out every Wednesday; that gives us overlapping coverage. And the ninety-day predictions come out once a month. To do more than that, we’d need more technical staff, which we can’t afford yet. Ted’s got a small crew working on nothing but research, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t think he’s locked himself in some ivory tower, Dad. Whenever we’ve had trouble with the forecasts, he’s dropped the research to help straighten things out. And he’s spent a lot of time showing potential customers what we can do for them. He’s our all-star team, all in one man.”

“It sounds as if you’re in reasonably good shape, then.” Father looked almost happy about it.

“We’re afloat. We’ve signed up four new customers, besides the Thornton concerns, and three other companies are talking about contracts with us.”

“Good. You’ve got the company on its feet. Your friends are gainfully employed. You’ve had a year’s worth of experience . . . and fun. Now I want you to come back home, son. I need you here.”

“Home?” I snapped forward in the chair and grabbed the desk hard with both hands. “But I never . . .”

“Thornton Pacific is your company, Jeremy. Not this weather business.”

“You can’t expect me to just walk out of here!”

“I certainly can,” he said firmly. “I want you back home where you belong.”

“I can’t leave now.”

“You mean you won’t!”

“Are you
ordering
me to come home?”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

By now I was sitting on the front inch of my chair. Father and I were glaring at each other.

“Listen, Dad. The first Jeremy Thom put his money into clipper ships when all his advisers and friends were backing the Erie Canal. Grandfather—Jeremy the Second—put the family into the airplane business. You yourself marched off to Hawaii and went into the undersea business. All right—I’m following the family pattern. I’m sticking here and weather control is what I’m after.”

“But it’s impossible.”

“So were airplanes and deep-sea dredges.”

“All right!” he shouted. “Be a stubborn little idiot. But don’t think you can come running home to safety when your pipe dreams fall flat! You’re on your own, don’t ask me for help or advice.”

“Isn’t that the same speech Grandfather made to you before you went to Hawaii?”

He snapped off the connection. The screen went dead. I was on my own.

And enjoying it! I had never really worked before starting Aeolus, never really sunk my teeth into a job that just wouldn’t get done unless I did it. Now I was working night and day. I spent more time in my office than in my hotel room. I forgot about TV, and sailing, and even visiting

Thornton. But I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun, as much of a feeling of
building
something worthwhile, as I did when we were getting Aeolus into high gear.

Late one night, a week or so after Father’s explosion, Ted popped into my office.

“Still working?”

I looked up from the contract I was trying to read. “There’s a lot of fine print to wade through in this job.”

“Got a friend of yours outside. Took her to dinner and she wanted to come over and say hello. Hasn’t seen much of you the past couple of weeks.”

“Barney? Where is she?”

“Down in my shop, with Tuli.”

“Tuli’s still here? What’s going on tonight?”

Ted leaned nonchalantly against the doorjamb, his big frame filling the open doorway. “Been doing some calculations about the drought. Barney’s checking ‘em over.”

I closed the contract folder and shoved it into a desk-top basket.

“This must be pretty special,” I said, getting to my feet. “You could have used the regular Aeolus computations group to check your calculations.”

“Already did. Barney’s double-checking . . . and seeing if Rossman’s done anything along the same lines.”

We walked down the hall to Ted’s room. He didn’t have a regular office; his room was big enough to hold a squash court. He had all sorts of junk in it: a desk with a table to one side of it and an electronics console on the other, half a dozen file cabinets, a tattered old contour lounge that he had somehow smuggled out of the Air Force, a conference table surrounded by the unlikeliest assortment of chairs, and no less than four coffeepots standing in a row on the windowsill. Outside the window was a small automatic weather station.

The entire wall opposite the door was covered by Ted’s private joy: a viewscreen map of the continental United States. He had worked nonstop for weeks to make the map exactly the way he wanted it.

Barney and Tuli were sitting at the conference table as we walked in, thumbing through sheets of notes that were partly computer print-out and partly Ted’s heavy-handed scrawl.

She looked up as we entered. “Jerry, how are you?”

“I’m fine. How have you been?”

“She’s obviously in wonderful shape,” Ted cracked. “Now, what about the numbers, Barney?”

“I can’t find anything glaringly wrong with them,” she said with a shrug. “Of course, I haven’t had time really to go through it thoroughly—”

“Could use our computer,” Ted suggested.

Tuli said in that quiet way of his, “The computer runs at any hour of the day or night. It’s entirely free of human frailty, such as the need for sleep.”

“All right, so I’m asking a favor,” Ted said, waving his hands. “I’d feel better about the numbers if Barney checked ’em out.”

“Can I start tomorrow night?” she asked.

“After dinner,” I said.

“Okay, we’ll all eat together,” Ted countered.

I asked, “What is this all about, anyway?”

Instead of answering, Ted paced to the console beside his desk and touched a few buttons. A weather map sprang

up on the lighted viewscreen: lines and symbols that showed air masses and storm cells across the country, and the weather reported at each major city.

“Here’s the way it looks right now,” Ted said. “Those numbers down in the bottom right corner are precipitation totals from New England. So far this year, we’re standing at nearly half the region’s average rainfall.”

“And snowfall,” Tuli added softly.

“That pile of calculations I showed you,” Ted went on, squatting on his desk, “is a general forecast for New England as far ahead as I can make halfway accurate numbers. Runs to the end of the year.”

“Seven months,” Barney mused. “The reliability won’t be terribly high . . .

“Maybe not, but take a look.” Ted fiddled with the control buttons, and we watched the weather patterns unfold across the face of the continent. Hot summer air welled up from the tropics, late-afternoon thunderstorm symbols flickered here and there, cooler air masses swung in from the north and west, triggering squall lines across their fronts. You could see autumn taking hold of the nation, and hurricanes hitting Florida and the Gulf Coast. Then came winter and bitter Arctic air, with tiny starlike symbols of snow sprinkling over the northern two-thirds of the country.

“It’s now December thirty-first,” Ted said when the map stopped changing. “Happy New Year.”

“Not very happy,” Tuli observed, “if those precipitation figures are correct.”

I looked at the numbers; New England had received less than half of its usual rainfall.

“Drought pattern,” Ted said. “And a rough one. This neck of the country’s in for trouble. While the Midwest’ll be flooded.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Barney asked.

“Stop it.”

“How?”

“Don’t know . . . yet. But I’m going to make it the business of this Lab to find out.”

Turning from the map toward Ted, I said, “We’ll have to find considerably more money to work on a problem of this size.”

“We’re going to work on it,” Ted answered firmly. “You can worry about the money. If you can find people who want to pay us for it, great. But we’re going to work on it anyway.”

He turned to Barney. “Rossman doing anything like this?”

“Not that I know of. Of course, his official forecasts don’t run this far into the future.”

“But unofficially?”

“I think he’s trying to figure out your type of forecasting technique. He has a small group of people doing some special work for him. It’s very hush-hush. At least, no one will tell me anything about it.”

Ted didn’t answer, but his face settled into a frown.

That night I took the slideway home to my hotel. It was a beautiful warm night, with the thinnest sliver of a moon in a cloudless, star-studded sky. I found myself wishing it would rain.

While Ted was studying the drought pattern, I decided to take a look at the political climate of New England. I found that most of the people in the governments of the six states considered the drought bothersome, but not really serious. No one seemed terribly worried; the salt-water conversion plants were preventing any real shortages in the coastal cities, and the inland reservoirs were still in fairly good shape.

But there was going to be a meeting of the Resources Managers of the New England States, one of a series of regional meetings for various departments of the state governments. This one was for the people who worry about natural resources . . . such as water.

I cornered Ted in Tuli’s kinetics lab and told him about it. “It’s going to be over the Fourth of July weekend.”

“Foul up the weekend to talk to a bunch of bureaucrats?” He was plainly disgusted.

“To talk,” I replied, “with the people who’ll buy drought alleviation . . . if you can sell it.”

“If
I can sell it? Insults yet! Okay bossman, you want fireworks for the Glorious Fourth, you’ll get ’em.”

It took some string-pulling to get us on the conference agenda. I finally had to talk to a Congressman from Lynn; he was on the House of Representatives’ Science and Natural Resources Committee, and was helping to make the arrangements for the meeting.

The biggest job was getting Ted prepared to speak to a group of non-meteorologists. The first time he rehearsed his talk he spent fifty minutes showing slides and explaining the science of meteorology. We all tried to argue him out of it.

“It’s got to be simplified,” I insisted. “These people don’t understand meteorology. I couldn’t even follow most of your talk.”

He sat on the couch in my office and folded his arms like a stubborn little boy. “What do you want me to do, tell ‘em fairytales?”

“Right! Exactly right,” I said. “Tell them a fairy tale . . . a horror stow. Show them how bad this drought’s going to be. And then show them enough to convince them that you can break it up.”

“Is that fair?” Tuli asked.

“If you’re talking to people who don’t understand the nature of the problem,” Barney said, “you’ve got to speak in language that will get through to them.”

“Okay,” Ted said with a shrug. “The talk’ll be show business, not science.”

Take the energy of a full-fledged storm and compress it into a narrow funnel so that its wind speed reaches five hundred knots, causing a semi-vacuum inside its rotary structure. Such winds hit a wall with a force of a thousand pounds per square foot. And the vacuum immediately behind the wind makes the normal air pressure in a building explode the walls outward. Such a funnel makes a fine weapon, especially in a crowded city. It is called a tornado.

It was a gray, soggy afternoon in Tulsa, with thick bulbous clouds hanging low. The weather map showed a strong cold front approaching from the northwest, pushing into oppressively humid tropical air. A tornado alert had been issued by the Weather Bureau, and planes were seeding some of the clouds, trying to disperse them before danger struck. The shopping center was jammed nonetheless; tomorrow, the Fourth, stores would be closed. The funnel dropped out of the clouds suddenly, hissing and writhing like a supergiant snake, spewing lightning. It touched a pond and instantly sucked it dry, hopped over a parking lot, and pounced on the main shopping buildings. They exploded. It was all over in thirty seconds. Forty-two killed, more than a hundred injured. The funnel disappeared, and soon after the clouds blew away. The sun shone down on five acres of sheer devastation.

Ted and I saw the results of the tornado on the TV news as we ‘coptered out to the meeting on the morning of the Fourth.

“Instead of taking a chance on weather control,” he muttered, gesturing toward the wreckage shown on the TV screen, “they’d rather sit back and let
that
happen.”

The conference was taking place in a resort hotel in the Berkshire Mountains. We flew over lovely wooded hills and rolling farmlands. As we went farther west, though, more and more brown patches were sprinkled in among the green. The lakes and ponds were shrinking; we could see the muddy, rocky edges that were normally under water.

“Dry streambed,” Ted pointed out to me. “And there’s another.”

“It looks pretty serious,” I said, looking at the sandy gullies that had been streams.

“This is nothing. Wait another couple of months. And
next
summer’ll be a beaut.”

“But your forecasts don’t go that far.”

“This kind of pattern runs four to five years before it changes, unless something kinky happens . . . like weather control.”

The hotel was swarming with conference members. They had come from all six New England states, from New York, and from Washington. We arrived just before lunch, in time for the brief outdoor ceremony in honor of the Fourth.

As we elbowed our way through the crowd to one of the hotel’s four restaurants, Ted grumbled, “More politicians here than I’ve ever seen under one roof.”

We ate quickly and then got one of the hotel’s assistant managers to show us to the conference room where we were scheduled to speak. It was a small, windowless room, with a slide projector set up at one end and a projection screen at the other.

“Got here early,” Ted said as the manager shut the door behind him. “Nobody’s here.”

“I’ll put your slides in the projector,” I said.

I was putting the last slide in when the door opened and a man in his middle thirties stepped into the room.

“I’m Jim Dennis,” he said, extending his hand to us.