The Weathermakers (1967) (6 page)

“So there you are,” he said as I stepped before the viewscreen.

I dropped the microfilm spools on the sofa.

“Jeremy, we just got the first of the fast predictions from the Weather Bureau, together with an analysis of the coming month’s weather trends.”

“How does it look?”

Father shook his head. “Not good at all. I’m going to shut down all the dredging operations for the rest of the month. Three days’ advance warning of a storm—which may or may not hit us—just isn’t enough to work with. I’d rather close down and lose money than have the dredges wrecked or somebody killed.”

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s not your fault. You’ve done the best you could. The trouble is, if we default on this contract with Modern Metals, the word will go ’round that deep-sea mining isn’t reliable. That’s what can really kill us.”

I sat on the edge of the sofa. “Father, how would you like to have pinpoint predictions, a week or more in advance. Fully accurate.”

He grunted.

“That’s what Ted is working on. By the end of the month, he might be able to run off a set of predictions for us that will forecast the weather for the entire area where the dredges are working. The predictions will go two or three weeks into the future.”

Father rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If he can do that, we could keep the dredges going . . . just shut them down temporarily in advance of storm weather and then reopen them afterward. But we’d need a week’s warning to make the system work.”

“Ted can do it, I’m sure he can. Two weeks, at least. Then you’d know exactly when to shut the dredges down, how long they’d have to stay shut, and when you could open them again. You could schedule the storms’ effects right into the operation.”

“Can he really do it . . . this Marrett fellow?”

“We’ll know for certain by the end of this week.”

Father mulled it over for a few moments. “All right, Jeremy. I’ll keep the dredges open until the end of the week. Just pray that we don’t get caught with another bad storm in the meantime, that’s all.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Without realizing it, I had committed Ted to a very stiff assignment—without his slightest knowledge. I tried to call him, but he couldn’t be reached. So I got through to Barney, in the computations section.

“I don’t know when you’ll be able to see Ted,” she answered me. He’s going to be busy tonight checking his forecasts . . . I’ll be helping him. Why don’t you join us there?”

“Where?”

“At Ted’s place. We’re going there right after work. We’ll eat there. You’re welcome to join us.”

“Okay, fine.” Then I remembered what Ted considered food. “Um, maybe I’ll meet you after dinner.”

She smiled as though she could read my mind. “I’ll be the cook tonight, so you might be doing the smartest thing.”

“No, I didn’t mean . . . that is—”

“It’s all right, Jerry. Don’t apologize. I wouldn’t want to eat soyburgers either when I could have a real steak.”

“I guess I’m just a foolish snob.” Then I got an idea. “Say, why don’t I bring the dinner? I could have them cook up something here at the hotel and pack it in plastic dishes. You won’t even have to clean up afterward!”

She looked doubtful. “That might be a little too fancy for Ted . . .”

“I’ll make it simple. And it’ll save you time and trouble. Okay?”

“All right, you talked me out of working. Thanks.”

I got to Ted’s apartment, following Barney’s directions, just about five o’clock. The back seat of my rental car was filled with cartons. I buzzed Ted’s number at the lobby phone and asked him to come down and help with the packages.

He was downstairs in half a minute, peering into the packages on the seat.

“CARE comes to Cambridge,” he muttered.

We carried the cartons upstairs and had dinner. The food was excellent; even Ted seemed pleased.

“I’m beginning to see it pays to have rich friends,” he said, sprawling on the little room’s only sofa. “Better be careful or you’ll soften me up, Jerry.”

“I thought it would be easier on Barney this way.”

“Get more useful work out of her, reduce entropy. Guess I can’t complain about that.”

Within a few minutes after finishing the meal, the one-room apartment was converted into a meteorology workshop. The only table, the sofa bed, even the sink and range in the kitchenette were covered with papers: maps, graphs, calculations, scribblings, stacks of computer print-outs. Ted and Tuli soon lapsed into a cryptic shorthand dialogue, while Barney fed them sheets of paper to read.

“Indianapolis,” Ted called out.

“Seventy-three, fifty-one, ten-sixteen, point-oh-four, west twelve to eighteen,” Tuli answered in singsong chant.

“Check. Memphis.”

Barney stole over to my chair and whispered, “They’re checking the five o’clock weather reports from selected stations around the country against the forecasts Ted made last week. So far, everything is checking to within a few percent.”

“Good.”

It was well past midnight when Ted finally turned over the last sheet of computer print-out and said triumphantly, “On the line, every last one of ‘em. We got it, kids. We’ve got it cold!”

“Do you think Dr. Rossman will believe it?” Barney asked from the range. She was boiling water for instant coffee.

“He’s got to,” Ted snapped. “The numbers are all here and they check. He’s got to buy it.”

“Could you do the same thing,” I asked, “for a region in the mid-Pacific?”

He turned to me. “For Thornton’s dredging operations? Sure, why not? Won’t be as accurate, ‘cause there aren’t as many observation stations out there . . . but we can make it good enough to tell your people when to button up for storms.”

“How far in advance?”

He shrugged. “Week or ten days, at least. Probably two weeks.”

“Great!”

“Take a lot of work,” he said. “We can’t go on bootlegging forever.”

“Thornton can pay for it,” I said.

“The first item of business,” Tuli pointed out, “is to match the rest of the forecasts against the actual weather reports for the rest of the week—”

“And then lay ‘em under Rossman’s long nose,” Ted cracked, “and watch him turn green with surprise. Friday’s the big day. I’ll show everything to Rossman then.”

“Is it still supposed to rain over the weekend?” I asked.

He nodded. “Supposed to.”

“We won’t be able to go sailing,” I said.

“Don’t give up hope. The situation could change.”

I didn’t realize what he meant. “You’re going to come anyway, aren’t you?”

“Try and stop us!”

Thursday dragged by. I read a good bit of the time, but it was tough going. Most of the books were too full of equations for me to follow; the others were written for simpletons. None of them conveyed the excitement that Ted did about the living, breathing nature of the weather. By Friday I had given up on reading and spent the day staring at the TV screen.

Sure enough, as I started to drive out to the Climatology building it began drizzling. I never saw a more dispirited trio as they walked across the parking lot in the rain and climbed into my car.

“Don’t be so glum,” I said. “Even if we can’t sail, we can have a lot of fun at Thornton.”

“It’s not that,” Barney said, sitting beside me.

“What’s wrong?” I saw that she was on the verge of tears. In the back seat, Ted slouched back disgustedly, his chin on his chest. Even the normally impassive Tuli looked crushed.

Barney said, “Ted showed his forecasts to Dr. Rossman this afternoon.”

“And?”

“He thinks they’re very interesting, thank you,” Ted growled, “but there’s no use getting excited over what was probably a lucky accident.”

“Accident?”

“That’s the word he used.”

“But . . . what’s it mean?”

“Nothing. That’s exactly what it means. We show him how to make pinpoint predictions a week in advance, and he wants to stick the idea in a drawer and forget about it!”

“T
HAT’S
not exactly true,” Tuli said as I gunned the car’s engine and started off the Climatology parking lot. “Dr. Rossman said he wants to study the new technique before he proposes it to Washington as a standard Weather Bureau forecasting method.”

“Study it,” Ted grumbled. “You know what that means—couple of years, at least.”

“He’s a cautious man,” Tuli said.

“Yeah, especially with other people’s ideas. He could use the system on an experimental basis and see if it works. In three months he’d have enough data to satisfy Congress, the Supreme Court, and the College of Cardinals. But not him. He’s going to sit on it and play around with it until it gets to be known as
his
idea.”

“You mean you won’t be able to make any more long-range forecasts?” I asked.

“Not now. The idea belongs to the Climatology Division now . . . Rossman thinks it’s his private property. He told me to get back to doing the work I’m paid to do and stop trying to run the Division.”

I began to feel just as dreary as the clouds above us. “What about weather control?”

“You should’ve seen his face when I brought that up. Told him the whole idea of these long-range forecasts is to make weather control workable. He nearly fainted. Absolutely forbade me to even mention the subject again.”

We drove out to the North Shore in dismal silence. By the time we reached the causeway that connected Marblehead Neck to the mainland it was raining steadily.

“Right on the button,” Ted mumbled gloomily as he stared out the car window. “Rain tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday.
They
think.”

“What do you mean by that?” Barney asked.

All he would answer was, “You’ll see.”

The house hadn’t changed much since the few summers before when I had last seen it. Thornton was big without being pretentious—a clean-lined white Colonial mansion with black shutters and a red door, a modest lawn, flowering shrubs around the front porch, and a garage, boathouse, and pier out back.

I pulled up in front of the main door, under the weather roof. Ted got out first:

“Who built this, Miles Standish?”

“No,” I said, sliding out from behind the controls. “Actually, it was built well after the Revolution, and then rebuilt about a hundred years ago, after a hurricane knocked down the original house.”

Ted looked at me as though he thought I might have been kidding him.

“It’s beautiful,” Barney said, as I helped her out of the car.

The front door opened and Aunt Louise came out toward me, arms extended. She was followed by a trio of servants.

“Jeremy, it’s so
good
to see you!” She threw her arms around my neck. There was nothing I could do but stand there and take it. After a few gushy moments, I disentangled myself and introduced Barney, Tuli, and Ted.

“Welcome to Thornton,” she said. “The servants will take your bags and show you to your rooms. We’re planning to have dinner in an hour.”

While they followed the servants upstairs, Aunt Louise practically towed me into the library.

“Now tell me truthfully,” she said as the massive doors slid themselves shut behind her. “How is your father?”

“He’s fine. Really. Perfect health, cantankerous disposition, full of energy. He drives my brothers and me ragged.” She smiled, but sadly. “You know he hasn’t been here since your grandfather’s funeral.”

“And none of you have been to Hawaii since my mother died,” I said. “It seems to take a funeral to get the family together.”

I walked along the ceiling-high bookshelves, back to the ornate wooden desk where Grandfather Thorn used to spend rainy afternoons during my New England visits telling me how he talked
his
father into investing money on commercial airlines, after generations of Thorn shipbuilding success.

Aunt Louise followed me across the room. “Jeremy, you know your father always was a rebel. He could have run your grandfather’s interests and lived right here at Thornton. He could have been head of the family, he’s the oldest. But he got mixed up in that drilling thing . . .

“The Mohole.”

“Yes, and he had an argument with your grandfather. So he ran off to Hawaii.”

“And now he lives there and runs his own interests.”

“But we never see each other,” she said. “It isn’t right.”

“Well, why don’t you invite him here? I think he’d be more than glad to come, if he thought you really wanted him to.”

“Do you really believe he would?”

I nodded.

“I’ll talk it over with your uncles tonight.”

“They’re both here?”

“Yes, for the weekend. They were planning a fishing trip, but it looks as if the rain will ruin everything.”

For some reason I said, “Don’t be too sure.”

Both my uncles were completely unlike Father—and each other. Uncle Lowell was heavy-set, paunchy, balding, and loud. He liked cigars and conversation, especially when he was doing the talking. Uncle Turner was very tall and thin, rather quiet; he looked like the popular conception of a New England Yankee.

Uncle Lowell dominated the first three courses of dinner, in the chandeliered old dining room, with a monologue on how Thornton Aerospace was prospering, how the rocket transport business was definitely in the black and repaying all his risks and investment, and he was now able to devote some of his precious time and engineers to helping Uncle Turner develop the new oceangoing air-cushion ships for Thornton Shipping Lines.