The Weathermakers (1967) (22 page)

Tuli shook his head. “We can’t handle all four of them at once. One, possibly two, will get past us.”

Ted looked sharply at him, then turned to me. “How about it, Jerry? What’s the logistics picture?”

“Tuli’s right,” I admitted. “The planes and crews have been working around the clock for the past couple of weeks and we just don’t have enough—”

“Skip the flute music. How many of these Lows can we hit?”

Shrugging, I answered, “Two. Maybe three, if we really push it.”

Barney was standing beside me. “The computer just finished an updated statistical analysis of the four disturbances. Their storm tracks all threaten the East Coast. The two closest ones have point-eight probabilities of reaching hurricane strength. The farther pair are only point-five.”

“Fifty-fifty for the last two,” Ted muttered. “But they’ve got the longest time to develop. Chances’ll be better for ’em by tomorrow.”

“It’s those two closest disturbances that are the most dangerous,” Barney said. “They each have an eighty percent chance of turning into hurricanes that will hit us.”

“We Can’t stop them all,” Tuli said. “What will we do, Ted?”

Before Ted could answer, his phone buzzed. He leaned across the desk and punched the button. “Dr. Weis calling from Washington,” the operator said.

He grimaced. “Okay, put him on.” Sliding into his desk chair, Ted waved us back to our posts as Dr. Weis’ worried face came on the phone screen.

“I’ve just seen this morning’s weather map,” the President’s Science Adviser said, with no preliminaries. “It looks as if you’re in trouble.”

“Got our hands full,” Ted said evenly.

I started back for my own cubicle. I could hear Dr. Weis’ voice, a little edgier than usual, saying, “The opposition has turned THUNDER into a political issue, with less than six weeks to the election. If you hadn’t made the newsmen think that you could stop every hurricane . . .”

The rest was lost in the chatter and bustle of the control center. The one room filled the entire second floor of our headquarters building. It was a frenetic conglomeration of people, desks, calculating machines, plotting boards, map printers, cabinets, teletypes, phones, viewscreens, and endless piles of paper—with the huge viewscreen map hanging over it all. I made my way across the cluttered, windowless expanse and stepped into my glass-walled cubicle.

It was quiet inside, with the door closed. Phone screens lined the walls, and half my desk was covered with a private switchboard that put me in direct contact with a network of THUNDER support stations ranging from New Orleans to the Atlantic Satellite Station, in synchronous orbit some twenty-three thousand miles above the mouth of the Amazon River.

I looked across the control center again, and saw Ted still talking earnestly into the phone. There was work to be done. I began tapping out phone numbers on my master switchboard, alerting the Navy and Air Force bases that were supporting the Project, trying to get ready to hit those hurricane threats as hard and as fast as we could.

While I worked, Ted finally got off the phone. Barney came over with a thick sheaf of computer print-out sheets; probably the detailed analysis of the storm threats. As soon as I could break away, I went over and joined them.

“Okay,” Ted was saying, “if we leave those two farther-out Lows alone, they’ll develop into hurricanes overnight. We can knock ‘em out now without much sweat, but by tomorrow they’ll be too big for us.”

“The same applies to the two closest disturbances,” Barney pointed out. “And they’re much closer and already developing fast . . .”

“We’ll have to skip one of ‘em. The first one—off the Leewards—is too close to ignore. So we’ll hit Number One, skip the second, and hit Three and Four.”

Barney took her glasses off. “That won’t work, Ted. If we don’t stop the second one now, by tomorrow it will be—”

“A walloping big hurricane. I know.” He made a helpless gesture. “But if we throw enough stuff at Number Two to smother it, we’ll have to leave Three and Four alone until tomorrow. In the meantime, they’ll both develop and we’ll have two brutes on our hands!”

“But this one—”

“There’s a chance that if we knock out the closest Low, Number Two’ll change its track and head out to sea.”

“That’s a terribly slim chance. The numbers show—”

“Okay, it’s a slim chance. But it’s all we’ve got to work with.”

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” she asked. “If a hurricane strikes the coast. . .”

“Weis is already looking through his mail for my resignation,” Ted said. “Okay, we’re in trouble. Best we can manage is hit Number One, skip Two, and wipe out Three and Four before they get strong enough to make waves.”

Barney looked down at the numbers on the computer sheets. “That means we’re going to have a full-grown hurricane heading for Florida within twenty-four hours.”

“Look,” Ted snapped, “we can sit around here debating ’til they
all
turn into hurricanes. Let’s scramble. Jerry, you heard the word. Get the planes up.”

I dashed back to my cubicle and sent out the orders. A few minutes later, Barney came by. Standing dejectedly in the doorway, she asked herself out loud:

“Why did he agree to take on this Project? He knows it’s not the best way to handle hurricanes. It’s too chancy, too expensive. We’re working ourselves to death. . .”

“So are the aircrews,” I answered. “And the season’s just starting to hit its peak.”

“Then why did he have to make the newsmen think we could run up a perfect score the first year?”

“Because he’s Ted Marrett. He not only thinks he can control the weather, he thinks he owns it.”

“There’s no room in him for failure,” she said. “If this storm does hit, and if the Project is canceled . . . what will it do to him?”

“What will it do to you?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Jerry. But I’m terribly afraid we’re going to find out in another day or two.”

Tropical storms are built on seemingly slight differences of air temperature. A half-dozen degrees of difference over an area hundreds of miles across can power the giant heat engine of a hurricane. Ted’s method of smothering tropical disturbances before they reached hurricane strength was to smooth out the temperature difference between the core of the disturbances and their outer fringes.

The nearest disturbance was developing quickly. It had already passed over the Leeward Islands and entered the Caribbean by the time our first planes reached it. Hie core of the disturbance was a column of warm air shooting upward from the sea’s surface to the tropopause, some ten miles high. Swirling around this column was relatively cooler air sliding into the low-pressure trough created by the warm column.

If the disturbance were left to itself, it would soak up moisture from the warm sea and condense it into rainfall. The heat released by this condensation would power winds of ever-mounting intensity. A cycle would be established: winds bring in moisture, the water vapor condenses into rain, the heat released builds up the wind’s power. Finally, when the storm reached a certain intensity, centrifugal force would begin sucking down cooler air from very high altitudes. The cool air would be compressed and heated as it sank, and then fed into the massive cloud walls around the storm’s core—which would now be the eye of a full-grown hurricane. A thousand megatons of energy would be on the loose, unstoppable, even by Project THUNDER.

Our job was to prevent that cycle from establishing itself. We had to warm up the air flowing into the disturbance and chill down its core until temperatures throughout the storm were practically the same. A heat engine with all its parts at the same temperature (or close to it) simply won’t work.

As I started giving out orders for the three simultaneous missions, Tuli stuck his head into my office doorway.

“I’m off to see the dragon firsthand.” He was grinning excitedly.

“Which one?”

“Number One dragon; it’s in the Caribbean now.”

“I know. Good luck. Bring back its ears.”

He nodded, a round-faced, brown-skinned St. George going against the most destructive monster man had ever faced.

As I parceled out orders over the phones, a battery of gigajoule lasers aboard the Atlantic Station began pumping their energy into the northern peripheries of the budding storms. The lasers were similar to the type mounted in the Air Force’s missile-defense satellites. They had been placed aboard the Atlantic Station at Ted’s insistence, with the personal backing of Dr. Weis and the White House. Only carefully selected Air Force personnel were allowed near them. The entire section of the satellite station where they were installed was under armed guard, much to the discomfort of the civilians aboard.

Planes from a dozen airfields were circling the northern edges of the disturbances, sowing the air with rain-producing crystals.

“Got to seed for hours at a time,” Ted once told me. “That’s a mistake the early experimenters made—never stayed on the job long enough to force an effect on the weather.”

I was watching the disturbance in the Caribbean. That was the closest threat, and the best developed of all the four disturbances. Radar plots, mapped on Ted’s giant viewscreen, showed rain clouds expanding and showering precipitation over an ever-widening area. As the water vapor in the seeded air condensed into drops, the air temperature rose slightly. The satellite-borne lasers were also helping to heat the air feeding into the disturbance and confuse its circulation pattern.

It looked as if we were just making the disturbance bigger. But Ted and other technical staff people had figured out the energy balance in the young storm. They knew what they were doing. That didn’t stop me from gnawing my lower lip, though.

Tuli was in an Air Force bomber, part of two squadrons of planes flying at staggered altitudes. From nearly sea level to fifty thousand feet, they roared into the central column of warm air in precise formation and began dumping tons of liquid nitrogen into the rising tropical air.

The effect was spectacular. The TV screens alongside the big plotting map showed what the planes saw: tremendous plumes of white sprang out behind each plane as the cryogenic liquid flash-froze the water vapor in the warm column. It looked as if some cosmic wind had suddenly spewed its frigid breath through the air. The nitrogen quickly evaporated, soaking up enormous quantities of heat. Most of the frozen vapor simply evaporated again, although the radar plots showed that some condensation and actual rainfall occurred.

I made my way to Ted’s desk to check the results of the core freezing.

“Looks good,” he was saying into the phone.

The teletype next to his desk chugged into life. It started printing a report from the observation planes that followed the bombers.

Ted stepped over and looked at the numbers. “Broke up the core okay. Now if she doesn’t reform, we can scratch Number One off the map.”

It was evening before we could tell for sure. The disturbance’s source of energy—the differing temperatures of the air masses it contained—had been taken away from it. The plotting screen showed a large swatch of concentric irregular isobars, like a lopsided bull’s-eye, with a sullen red “L” marking the center of the low-pressure area, just north of Jamaica. The numbers on the screen showed a central pressure of 991 millibars, nowhere near that of a typical hurricane. Wind speeds had peaked at fifty-two knots and were dying off now. Kingston and Guantanamo were reporting moderate-to-heavy rain, but at Santo Domingo, six hundred miles to the east, it had already cleared.

The disturbance was just another small tropical storm, and a rapidly weakening one at that. The two farther disturbances, halfway out across the ocean, had been completely wiped out. The planes were on their way home. The laser crews aboard the Atlantic Station were recharging their energy storage coils.

“Shall I see if the planes can reload and fly another mission tonight?” I asked Ted. “Maybe we can still hit Number Two.”

He shook his head. “Won’t do any good. Look at her,” he said, pointing to the viewscreen map. “By the time the planes could get to her, she’ll be a full-grown hurricane. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

S
O WE
didn’t sleep that night. We stayed at the control center and watched the storm develop on the TV picture beamed from the Atlantic Station. At night they had to use infrared cameras, of course, but we could still see—in the ghostly IR images—a broad spiral of clouds stretching across four hundred miles of open ocean.

Practically no one had left the control center, but the big room was deathly quiet. Even the chattering calculating machines and teletypes seemed to have stopped. The numbers on the plotting screen steadily worsened. Barometric pressure sank to 980, 975, 965 millibars. Wind velocity mounted to 75 knots, 95, no. She was a full-grown hurricane by ten o’clock.

Ted leaned across his desk and tapped out a name for the storm on the viewscreen’s keyboard:
Omega.

“One way or the other, she’s the end of THUNDER,” he muttered.

The letters glowed out at the top of the plotting screen. Across the vast room, one of the girls broke into sobs.