The Weathermakers (1967) (23 page)

Through the early hours of the morning, Hurricane

Omega grew steadily in size and strength. An immense band of clouds towered from the sea to some sixty thousand feet, pouring two inches of rain per hour over an area of nearly 300,000 square miles. The pressure at her core had plummeted to 950 millibars and central windspeeds were gusting to better than 140 knots, and still rising.

“It’s almost as if she’s alive,” Tuli whispered as we watched the viewscreen. “She grows, she feeds, she moves.”

By two a.m., Miami time, dawn was breaking over Hurricane Omega. Six trillion tons of air packing the energy of a hundred hydrogen bombs, a mammoth, mindless heat engine turned loose, aiming for civilization, for us.

Waves lashed by Omega’s fury were spreading all across the Atlantic and would show up as dangerous surf on the beaches of four continents. Seabirds were sucked into the storm against their every exertion, to be drenched and battered to exhaustion; their only hope was to make it to the eye of the hurricane, where the air was calm and clear. A tramp steamer on the New York-to-Capetown run, five hundred miles from Omega’s center, was calling frantically for help as mountainous waves overpowered the ship’s puny pumps. Omega churned onward, releasing as much energy as a ten-megaton bomb every fifteen minutes.

We watched, we listened, fascinated. The face of our enemy, and it made all of us—even Ted, I think—feel completely helpless. At first Omega’s eye, as seen from the satellite cameras, was vague and shifting, covered over by cirrus clouds. But finally it steadied and opened up, a strong column of clear air, the mighty central pillar of the hurricane, the pivotal anchor around which her furious winds wailed their primeval song of violence and terror.

Barney, Tuli, and I sat around Ted’s desk, watching him; his scowl deepened as the storm worsened. We didn’t realize it was daylight until Dr. Weis phoned again, he looked haggard on the tiny desk-top viewscreen.

“I’ve been watching the storm all night,” he said. “The President called me a few minutes ago and asked me what you were going to do about it.”

Ted rubbed his eyes. “Can’t knock her out, if that’s what you mean. Too big now. Be like trying to stop a forest fire with a blanket.”

“Well, you’ve got to do something!” Weis snapped. “All our reputations hang on that storm. Do you understand? Yours, mine, even the President’s! To say nothing of the future for weather-control work in this country.”

“Told you back in Washington last March,” Ted countered, “that THUNDER was the wrong way to tackle hurricanes . . .”

“Yes, and in July you announced to the press that no hurricanes would strike the United States! So now, instead of being an act of nature, hurricanes are a political issue.” Ted shook his head. “We’ve done the best we can.”

“You’ve got to do more. You can try to steer the hurricane . . . change its path so that it won’t strike the coast.”

“You mean change the weather patterns?” Ted brightened. “Control the situation so that—”

“I do
not
mean weather control! Not over the United States,” Dr. Weis said firmly. “But you can make whatever changes you have to over the ocean.”

“That won’t work,” Ted answered. “Not enough leverage to do any good. Might budge her a few degrees, but she’ll still wind up hitting the coast somewhere. All we’ll be doing is fouling up the storm track so we won’t know for sure where she’ll hit.”

“You’ve got to do something! We can’t just sit here and let it happen to us. Ted, I haven’t tried to tell you how to run THUNDER, but now I’m giving an order. You’ve got to make an attempt to steer the storm away from the coast. If we fail, at least we go down fighting. Maybe we can salvage something from this mess.”

“Waste of time,” Ted muttered.

Dr. Weis’ shoulders moved as if he was wringing his hands, off camera. “Try it anyway. It might work. We might be lucky—”

“Okay,” Ted said, shrugging. “You’re the boss.”

The screen went dark. Ted looked up at us. “You heard the man. We’re going to play Pied Piper.”

“But we can’t do it,” Tuli said. “It can’t be done.”

“Doesn’t matter. Weis is trying to save face. You ought to understand that, buddy.”

Barney looked up at the plotting screen. Omega was northeast of Puerto Rico and boring in toward Florida.

“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?” she asked Ted. “You know we can’t steer Omega. Even if he’d let us try to control the weather completely, we couldn’t be sure of keeping the storm off the coast. You shouldn’t have—”

“Shouldn’t have what?” Ted snapped back. “Shouldn’t have taken THUNDER when Weis and the President offered it? Shouldn’t have made that crack to the newsmen about stopping every hurricane? Shouldn’t have told Weis we’d try to steer Omega? I did all three, and I’d do them all again. I’d rather do
something,
even if it’s not the best something. Got to keep moving; once we stop, we’re dead.”

“But why,” Barney asked, almost pleadingly, “did you make that insane promise to the newsmen?”

He frowned, but more at himself than at her. “How should I know? Maybe because Weis was sitting there in front of the cameras looking so sure of himself. Safe and serene. Maybe I was crazy enough to think we could really sneak through a whole hurricane season okay. Maybe I’m just crazy, period. I don’t know.”

“But what do we do now?” I asked.

He cocked an eye at the plotting screen. “Try to steer Omega. Try saving Weis’ precious face.” Pointing to a symbol on the map several hundred miles north of the storm, he said, “There’s a Navy sonar picket anchored out there. I’m going to buzz over to it, see if I can get a firsthand look at this monster.”

“That’s . . . that’s dangerous,” Barney said.

He shrugged.

“Ted, you can’t run the operation from the middle of the ocean,” I said.

“Picket’s in a good spot to see the storm . . . at least the edge of it. Maybe I can wangle a plane ride through it. Been fighting hurricanes all season without seeing one. Besides, the ship’s part of the Navy’s antisubmarine warning net; loaded with communications gear. Be in touch with you every minute, don’t worry.”

“But if the storm comes that way . . .
”

“Let it come,” he said. “It’s going to finish us anyway.” He turned and strode off, leaving us to watch him.

Barney turned to me. “Jerry, he thinks we blame him for everything. We’ve got to stop him.”

“No one can stop him. You know that. Once he gets his mind set on something . . .”

“Then I’ll go with him.” She got up from her chair.

I took her arm.

“No, Jerry,” she said, “I can’t let him go alone.”

“Is it the danger you’re afraid of, or the fact that he’s leaving?”

“Jerry, in the mood he’s in now . . . he’s reckless . . .”

“All right,” I said, trying to calm her. “All right. I’ll go with him. I’ll make sure he keeps his feet dry.”

“But I don’t want either one of you in danger!”

“I know. I’ll take care of him.”

She looked at me with those misty, gray-green eyes. “Jerry . . . you won’t let him do anything foolish, will you?”

“You know me; I’m no hero.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. And I felt my insides do a handspring.

I left her there with Tuli and hurried out to the parking lot. The bright sunshine outdoors was a painful surprise. It was hot and muggy, even though the day was only an hour or so old.

Ted was getting into one of the Project staff cars when I caught up with him.

“A landlubber like you shouldn’t be loose on the ocean by himself,” I said.

He grinned. “Hop aboard, salt.”

The day was sultry. The usual tempering sea breezes had died off. As we drove along the Miami bayfront, the air was oppressive, ominous. The sky was brazen, the water deathly calm. The old-timers along the fishing docks were squinting out at the horizon to the south and nodding to each other. It was coming.

The color of the sea, the shape of the clouds, the sighting of a shark near the coast, the way the seabirds were perching—all these became omens.

It was coming.

We slept for most of the flight out to the sonar picket.

The Navy jet landed smoothly in the softly billowing sea and a helicopter from the picket brought us aboard. The ship was similar in style to the deep-sea mining dredges of Thornton Pacific. For antisubmarine work, though, the dredging equipment was replaced by a fantastic array of radar and communications antennas.

“Below decks are out of bounds to visitors, I’m afraid,” said the chunky lieutenant who welcomed us to his ship. As we walked from the helicopter landing pad on the fan-tail toward the bridge, he told us, “This bucket’s a floating sonar station. Everything below decks is classified except the galley, and the cook won’t let even me in there.”

He laughed at his own joke. He was a pleasant-faced Yankee, about our own age, square-jawed, solidly built, the kind that stays in the Navy for life.

We clambered up a ladder to the bridge.

“We’re anchored here,” the lieutenant said, “with special bottom gear and arresting cables. So the bridge isn’t used for navigation as much as for communications.”

Looking around, we could see what he meant. The bridge’s aft bulkhead was literally covered with viewscreens, autoplotters, and electronics controls.

“I think you’ll be able to keep track of your hurricane without much trouble.” He nodded proudly toward the communications equipment.

“If we can’t,” Ted said, “it won’t be your fault.”

The lieutenant introduced us to his chief communications technician, a scrappy little sailor who had just received his engineering degree and was putting in two Navy years. Within minutes we were talking to Tuli back in THUNDER headquarters.

“Omega seems to have slowed down quite a bit,” Tuli said, his impassive face framed by the viewscreen. “She’s about halfway between your position and Puerto Rico.”

“Gathering strength,” Ted muttered.

They fed the information from THUNDER’S computers to the picket’s autoplotter, and soon we had a miniature version of Ted’s giant map on one of the bridge’s screens.

Ted studied the map, mumbling to himself. “If we could feed her some warm water. . . give her a shortcut to the outbound leg of the Gulf Stream . . . then maybe she’d bypass the coast.”

The lieutenant was watching us from a jumpseat that folded out of the port bulkhead.

“Just wishful thinking,” Ted muttered on. “Fastest way to move her is to set up a low-pressure cell to the north . . . make her swing more northerly . . .”

He talked it over with Tuli for the better part of an hour, perching on a swivel stool set into the deck next to the chart table. The cook popped through the bridge’s starboard hatch with a tray of sandwiches and coffee. Ted absently took a sandwich and mug, still locked in talk with Tuli.

Finally he said to the viewscreen image, “Okay, we deepen this trough off Long Island and try to make a real storm cell out of it.”

Tuli nodded, but he was clearly unhappy.

“Get Barney to run it through the computer as fast as she can, but you’d better get the planes out right now. Don’t wait for the computer run. Got to hit while she’s still sitting around. Otherwise . . .” His voice trailed off.

“All right,” Tuli said. “But we’re striking blindly.”

“I know. Got any better ideas?”

Tuli shrugged.

“Then let’s scramble the planes.” he turned to me. “Jerry, we Ye got a battle plan figured out. Tuli’ll give you the details.”

Now it was my turn. I spent the better part of the afternoon getting the right planes with the right payloads off to the exact places where the work had to be done. Through it all, I was calling myself an idiot for tracking out to this mid-ocean exile. It took twice as long to process the orders as it would have back at headquarters.

“Don’t bother saying it,” Ted said when I finished. “So it was kinky coming out here. Okay. Just had to get away from that place before I went over the hill.”

“But what good are you going to do here?” I asked.

He gripped the bridge’s rail and looked out past the ship’s prow, toward the horizon.

“We can run the show from here just as well . . . maybe a little tougher than back in Miami, but we can do it. If everything goes okay, we’ll get brushed by the storm’s edge. I’d like to see that. Want to feel her, see what she can do. Never seen a hurricane from this close. And it’s better than sitting in that windowless cocoon back there.”

“And if things don’t go well?” I asked. “If the storm doesn’t move the way you want it to?”

He turned away. “Probably she won’t.”

“Then we might miss the whole show.”

“Maybe. Or she might march right down here and blow down our necks.”

“Omega might . . . we could be caught in the middle of it?”

“Could be,” he said easily. “Better get some sleep while you can. Going to be busy later on.”

The exec showed us to a tiny stateroom with two bunks in it. Part of the picket’s crew was on shore leave, and they had a spare compartment for us. I tried to sleep, but spent most of the late-afternoon hours squirming uncomfortably. Around dusk, Ted got up and went to the bridge. I followed him.

“See those clouds, off the southern horizon,” he was saying to the lieutenant. “That’s her. Just the outer fringes.” I checked back with THUNDER headquarters. The planes had seeded the low-pressure trough off Long Island without incident. Weather stations along the coast, and automated equipment on satellites and planes, were reporting a small storm cell developing.

Barney’s face appeared on the viewscreen. She looked very worried. “Is Ted there?”

“Right here.” He stepped into view.

“The computer run just finished,” she said, pushing a strand of hair from her face. “Omega’s going to turn northward, but only temporarily. She’ll head inland again early tomorrow. In about forty-eight hours she’ll strike the coast somewhere between Cape Hatteras and Washington.” Ted let out a low whistle.

“But that’s not all,” she continued. “The storm track crosses right over the ship you’re on. You’re going to be in the center of it!”

“We’ll have to get off here right away,” I said.