The Weathermakers (1967) (19 page)

H
URRICANES
were the target, and Ted threw every ounce of his single-minded energy into working out a hurricane-stopping program for Dr. Weis. All through that snowy December we saw practically nothing of him. Barney had to just about drag him from his desk to spend Christmas day with us at Thornton.

Tuli, meanwhile, found the key to the Manhattan Dome’s air-pollution problem. The Dome had created a temperature inversion within itself: warm air trapped at the top of the dome prevented the automobile and other engine smokes from rising high enough above the street level to let the Dome’s blowers suck them out and purify the air.

“How will they fix that?” I asked when he explained it to me.

“It won’t be too difficult, now that they know what the problem is,” Tuli said. “They’ll probably install suction vents at the street level to get the smog out before it builds up to noticeable proportions.”

“That’ll cost millions.”

“I suppose it will,” he said impassively. “It’s a shame they built the Dome. In a few more years, Ted might be ready to air-condition the entire country . . . without plastic domes.”

Aeolus made a handsome profit on Tuli’s work, and he seemed pleased with his consulting job. But now there was hardly anything for him to do. Suspended by Climatology, idle at Aeolus, he began working nights with Ted on the hurricane idea.

Two days before the year ended, Ted called and asked me to come to his apartment after dinner. I wasn’t surprised to meet Barney walking down the snowbank-lined street as I approached the place.

Tuli was there already, of course, straddling a turned-around kitchenette chair, his arms crossed on its back and his chin resting on his sleeves. He looked like a brooding Mongol horseman. Ted was pacing restlessly across the cramped little room.

“Glad you guys came,” he said as we took off our coats and dropped them on a chair. “Want to try out this idea before calling Weis about it.”

Barney and I sat on the tattered sofa.

“We
guys
are all ears,” she said.

Ted grinned at her. “Okay,” he said, still pacing, “here it is. There’re two ways to stop a hurricane: dissipate it, or keep it out at sea, away from the coast. Up to now, all the hurricane researchers’ve been trying to break up the storms—dissipate ‘em by knocking their energy balances out of whack . . .”

“They try to seed the storms, don’t they?” I asked.

“Right. But it’s like tossing snowballs at an iceberg. All the seeding in the world won’t dent a full-grown hurricane.”

“There’s even sonic evidence,” Barney said, “that the hurricane absorbs the seeding energy.”

Tuli agreed. “And uses it to add to the total windpower.”

“Then you can’t dissipate hurricanes,” I said.

“Check. Too big for us, too much energy. They just blow along until natural forces break ’em up . . . and we can’t match natural energy sources, not by a long shot. So we can’t use our muscles. Got to use our brains.”

He paused for a moment; then, “If we knew enough about hurricanes—their exact paths, their energy distributions, lots more—we could set up weather patterns that’d keep the storms out at sea. It’s a tricky business, and we don’t know how to do it yet. Predicting a storm’s path is rough . . . lots of second-, third-, even fourth-order effects. A drop in pressure over Chicago might be the difference between a direct hit on Hatteras or a clean miss of the entire seacoast.”

“But we’re getting close to the point where we
can
predict storm tracks,” Barney objected.

“Yeah, but we’re not there yet. So we try another trick. Dissipate the storm
before
it’s a hurricane. Even before it’s a real storm . . . strangle it at birth, while it’s still only a tropical disturbance.”

“Can you do that?”

Ted nodded. “I think Tuli and I have figured it out.”

“Tell Jerry the whole story,” Tuli insisted. “There are dozens of tropical disturbances for each hurricane that eventually develops. We must either destroy each disturbance or risk having some of them develop into hurricanes . . .”

“We can predict which ones’ll develop,” Ted said. “With what accuracy? Fifty percent? You’ll still have to modify twice as many disturbances as there will be storms. The costs will be astronomical.”

“Not compared to the damage a hurricane causes when it hits!”

I said, “Yes, that’s the cost you’re working against.”

“So that’s the bones of the idea: hit the tropical disturbances, stop ‘em from developing into hurricanes. But only the ones that might develop into big storms, and only if their predicted storm tracks smell of coming close to the coast.

“Meanwhile we’ll be learning how to set up weather patterns that’ll keep hurricanes away from the shore. When we finish, we won’t have to bother with knocking out disturbances—we’ll know how to control the weather well enough to keep hurricanes out at sea!”

We sat there for a moment, digesting the idea in total silence, while Ted stood in the middle of the floor, his fists planted firmly on hips, looking like a world champion daring a challenger to raise his head.

We talked it over until the sky outside began to brighten. There were a million problems, a million unanswered questions. But Ted had made up his mind, and all we were doing was forcing him to think up answers that he could use later on Dr. Weis.

I drove Barney back to her apartment.

“I wonder about this idea,” she said. “It’s got more publicity value than science in it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Smothering tropical disturbances . . . it’s just brute force. It’s just something Ted thought up to allow Dr. Weis to start a civilian weather-control project, instead of letting Major Vincent have a military one. Is this the way history is made? By dreaming up fancy projects?”

“No,” I said. “History is made by individual men and women who do things. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. But it’s the doing that makes history.”

The snowbanks piled high in the cities and turned brown and rotten, until fresh snow whitened them again. The first week of January saw a temporary warm spell, but then a high-pressure mass of northern air slid silently into New England. Marked only by a brief flurry of snow, the northern High was barely cooler than the air it displaced. But it was dry and cloudless, heavy and still. That night the stars looked down on the half-thawed countryside while the warmth of the day radiated out of the ground and away into space, sending thermometers plummeting toward zero. By morning there was ice wherever thawing had appeared the previous day, and people who had been smiling at the thought of an early spring shook their heads and reached for the rock salt.

Ted was like a caged tiger when the Congressional hearings began. Dr. Weis had taken the hurricane-killing idea without too much comment, other than to say he’d “run it past my advisory committees.” Meanwhile, both he and Jim Dennis cautioned Ted not to show up at the hearings.

“Most of the Committee members,” Jim told us, “would be suspicious of a brilliant young genius. It’s hard to admit to yourself that someone younger than you can be a whole lot smarter.”

Ted reluctantly agreed, but I decided to keep a careful watch on him, and enlisted Barney and Tuli to help.

The Committee hearings began with Major Vincent and his people explaining the need for a military weather-control project. The press gave them tremendous publicity, and the hearings were on television every morning. Meanwhile, Dr. Weis called with the news that the hurricane-killing idea had passed through his advisers with flying colors. He suggested that Dr. Barneveldt testify before the Congressional Committee about it. So Ted got busy briefing Dr. Barneveldt about THUNDER.

Just who named the idea THUNDER is a mystery we’ll probably never clear up. Someone in the Washington maze of people and committees came up with it; it stood for
T
hreatening
HU
rricane
N
eutralization,
DE
struction, and
R
ecording. Ted grumbled something unintelligible when he first heard the title, but Project THUNDER became the official name.

The day Dr. Rossman was scheduled to appear before the Committee, Tuli and I just happened to drop in on Ted at his Climatology lair. And a good thing we did.

Barney came by to watch the session on Ted’s TV set. Dr. Rossman, looking very dour and unhappy, chose to agree with Major Vincent all the way down the line. Military needs for weather control were extremely important, he said. Possibly just as important as the military need for missiles and space stations. The Climatology Division, he made clear, was ready to do whatever the Pentagon wanted.

Ted leaped out of his desk chair as though he was going to smash the television set.

“He’s sold out! He figured that Weis can’t beat the Pentagon, so he’s lining up with Vincent!”

“No, wait Ted. Maybe—”

“He knows I’m against the military game,” Ted raged, “so he’s trying to get rid of me by backing them!”

There wasn’t anything we could do to calm him down. We were lucky to keep him from jumping onto the next tube train and storming into the Committee hearing with a flaming sword.

We took Ted to dinner that evening, and stayed with him far into the night. Dr. Barneveldt was scheduled to appear before the Committee the following day, and this was about the only thing that calmed him down. He spent an hour on the phone to Washington, talking to Dr. Barneveldt in his hotel room, giving him some last-minute points about Project THUNDER.

Tuli went straight to Climatology with Ted the next day, and I made sure to get there in time for the telecast of the hearing.

Even on the small screen of the portable TV you could see that Dr. Barneveldt obviously impressed the Committee members. His Nobel Prize awed them in advance, and as he sat at the witness desk, before a battery of microphones, he looked like a Congressman’s idea of a scientist. He seemed to sense this, for he played his role to the hilt.

After agreeing that there were important military applications for weather control, Dr. Barneveldt went on to say:

“But there are equally important—no, more important—needs for this new knowledge in the peacetime, civilian world. It would be a pity if the short-term needs of the military obscured the long-term benefits that weather control can bring to all mankind. If man can control his weather, he may be able to avert many of the causes of war. Poverty, disease, hunger . . . all these are immensely influenced by climate and weather. Imagine a world where there is no lack of water, where crops flourish every year, where disastrous floods and storms are a thing of the past.”

Jim Dennis, from his seat at the Committee members’ table, leaned forward to ask: “Can this kind of thing be done now?”

Dr. Barneveldt hesitated dramatically. He seemed to be enjoying the television limelight. “It is possible to begin work toward that goal. Some of my colleagues at the Climatology Division and elsewhere, for example, have evolved a technique that could possibly prevent hurricanes from threatening our shores . . .”

The rest was lost in a stampede by the newsmen for the phones. By evening Project THUNDER was the biggest scientific news since the moon landings. But it was a Washington story: Dr. Weis and Dr. Barneveldt were the “experts.” Ted and the rest of us stayed in Boston, grateful for once that Rossman had kept us out of the public eye.

The Science Committee hearings went on for weeks, but it was clear that Project THUNDER had at least pulled up to a neck-and-neck position with Major Vincent’s plan for a military weather-control program. Most of the Congressmen made it look as if they wanted both a military and civilian project.

In effect, the Committee dropped the Pentagon vs. THUNDER problem into the hands of the Administration. Which was right where Dr. Weis wanted it, since he was the White House’s adviser in scientific and technical matters. So it came as no surprise when, early in March, Dr. Weis invited Ted and me to his White House office.

Cyclogenesis: the birth of a storm. Mix equal parts of moist maritime air and frigid polar air. Stir well in a counterclockwise motion. Place the cyclonic storm over Cape Hatteras in early March and watch closely. Obeying the logic of the sun’s energy input, the earth’s spin, the winds and waters and lands around it, the storm moves northward along the Atlantic seaboard. In the Carolinas it drops freezing rain and sleet, but as it moves into Virginia, with more polar air feeding into it from aloft, the precipitation turns to huge, wet dollops of snow. Washington is buried in white, while farther north—in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—armies of men and machines begin to mass for the coming attack, and hope they can prevent their cities from being paralyzed by the blizzard.

When Ted and I took the tube train in Boston, the sky was still clear. But Washington, we knew, would be in the middle of the blizzard as we pulled into the terminal. Even underground you could see the effects of the weather: people jammed the capital terminal, late for work, upset, some even angry. Those coming down the escalators from the street had shoulders and hats crusted with the heavy, sticky snow. Boots left wet, sloppy trails everywhere. Underground slideways were choked with people.

Ted insisted on going topside and walking the few blocks between the terminal and the White House. Nothing was moving on the city streets; even the surface slideways were shut down. The few struggling pedestrians had to bend over nearly double against the howling wind. The snow was thick and heavy underfoot, and in half a minute I was as cold as I ever want to be—even inside my sturdiest coat, boots, gloves, and fur-lined hat.

Ted loved it. “With a couple of platoons of ski troops we could take over the Government!”

“You can have it,” I mumbled from behind my turned-up collar, “on a day like this.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be over in an hour or so. Blowing north. We’ll run into it in Boston again tonight.”

“Nice timing.”

Dr. Weis’ office was an airy, spacious room in the White House executive wing, with French windows that looked out over the blizzard-smothered lawn.