The Weathermakers (1967) (10 page)

“But they wouldn’t refuse a legitimate request . . . Then I realized what Father was driving at. “If Dr. Rossman wants to stop us, he could work through ESSA.” Father shrugged. “I don’t know; maybe that’s what he’ll do. I’ll bet he’s a lot better known at ESSA than your friend Marrett.”

I had no answer.

“You’re going to have an interesting year, Jeremy,” Father said, running a finger along the edge of the old desk. “A very educational year, I believe. I’ll expect you back home at the end of it, sadder but wiser, and ready to go to work for an established outfit—Thornton Pacific Enterprises.”

“Dredging sea bottoms?”

“It’ll look different to you twelve months from now.”

I didn’t waste time getting Aeolus Research started. I couldn’t, not with the memory of Father’s patient amusement fresh in my mind.

While Ted was finishing his last six weeks at MIT toward his master’s degree, I was shuttling back and forth along the Thornton East Coast offices, recruiting personnel in Boston, Hartford, New York, and Washington. My uncles complained—but laughingly—during weekends at Thornton. Talk of piracy filled the air as I lured some of their junior administrative staff people to Aeolus. But seldom did they refuse me someone I wanted to “steal.”

I even made a quick rocket trip back to Honolulu and changed the all-knowing smile on Father’s face into a thoughtful frown as I plucked the four best young administrators from Thornton Pacific. I knew Father’s people fairly well, and they knew me. A chance to be top men in a brand-new company, instead of waiting years for promotion, was too good for them to turn down.

By the middle of June Aeolus Research had a working front office: administration, finance, personnel, purchasing, maintenance, and me. We also had a technical staff—Ted Marrett and Tuli Noyon.

We found a near-perfect office location at Logan Airport in Boston, where we rented the entire top floor of a four-story building. The Weather Bureau’s main Boston station was in the same building, and since their observation equipment was mostly on the roof, their people got to know us very well.

Barney and I schemed up a surprise party for Ted and Tuli when they officially received their degrees. I rented a banquet room at the hotel where I was living while Barney quietly invited everyone Ted knew—which turned out to be most of the Climatology people and seemingly all of MIT.

The party was a smashing success. It was the only time I’ve ever seen Tuli look shocked. Later, I must have looked the same way. That’s when I learned that Ted had promised jobs at Aeolus to practically everyone at the party.

It took a weekend to recuperate. Monday morning, Ted met with me and Paul Cook, Aeolus’ personnel manager, in my office at the Laboratory. It was a modest little room: one window that looked out on the airport and harbor, a plain wooden desk, a couch, a few chairs, and some paintings.

“Must be tough living so close to nature,” Ted cracked as he plopped himself on the couch. “Danish furniture. Domestic or imported?”

“It came from Sweden,” I said. “And the paintings are originals that I happen to like. But if they bother you we can take them off and have the walls painted Climatology gray.”

He looked horrified. “Even abstract paintings’re better than that!”

“Now that we’ve settled the decor,” Paul said, tapping a foot-high pile of papers on my desk, “how’s about getting down to work?”

The personnel manager was the “old man” of our staff—well into his thirties. He was chunky, balding, square-jawed, and outgoing.

“These job applications,” he said, “are all from people who claim to be friends of yours, Teddo. Did you really promise
all
of them positions here?”

Ted raised a cautious eyebrow. “Maybe I was a little too eager. But there’re some darned good people in that pile.”

“All right,” I said. “But we don’t want just good people—we want the best. And one of each, at least for the time being.”

“Know exactly who I want,” Ted said, serious now. “No sweat. I’ll get the technical staff set up in a week.”

Paul looked relieved. I said, “Good. In two weeks, I’d like to see us get out the first forecasts to our customers.”

“Can do,” Ted answered.

“And speaking of customers, it’ll be important to get as many as we can. We can’t depend on Thornton alone.”

“That’s not a technical job,” Ted countered. “I’m here to get the forecasts rolling, and then to do the research. Getting customers is your end of the business.”

I had to agree. “Okay. I’ll take a crack at bringing in new business.”

“Hope you enjoy flying,” Paul told me. “You’re going to spend a lot of time on jets.”

Seeing clouds from the ground is nothing compared to being up in their own domain, flying along with them. Taking off at sunset into a heavy bank of stratus lying thick and gray overhead, climbing into them and watching the world disappear from view, and then bursting out into a sky of flaming red with a royal carpet of deep, soft purple stretching out to the dying sun—nothing on Earth can match that. High in a jet the sky is always clear, no matter what the weather below, except for an occasional wisp of icy cirrus overhead. The sun shines every day up there, the sky is always crystal blue. Far down below, fat clumps of cumulus sail past, casting friendly shadows beneath them, their lumpy tops tufted by invisible tweaking fingers. Lanes and belts of clouds march across the face of the land, and sometimes giant storms blank out everything below and turn the view into an Antarctica of glaring white peaks and hazy valleys. Flying through the clouds, the plane bucks and shudders in their powerful wind currents while their crests whip by the viewport, a curtain of vapor that closes and opens and then closes again to hide even the wings from sight. Towering thunderheads flash ominously, streaking the darkness with lightning. Then the plane lands, back in man’s realm of rain and gray, back under the changeable skies, back in the world of weather.

The summer was long and bright. One sun-filled day after another. It was cooler than usual, but still the beach and mountain resorts did record business. Not one weekend was rained out. In fact, except for a few frontal storms, there was hardly any rain to speak of in New England. No one complained except the farmers. It was too dry, the crops were withering. But everyone in the cities knew that the autumn rains would solve the problem. Suburban homeowners sprinkled their lawns to keep them green, and talked about the salt-water conversion plants that had made water shortages a thing of the past.

But despite the desalting plants, the northeastern corner of the country was caught in a drought.

And so was I.

That whole summer, no matter where I traveled and how hard I worked, I couldn’t uncover a single new customer for Aeolus Research’s long-range weather forecasts.

“It looks fine on paper,” said the manager of a canned-goods firm, “and we would certainly be interested in predictions that could help us tell exactly when to plant each crop, and how much rainfall to expect. But if this scheme gave us some
wrong
information, we could ruin a year’s crop. Besides, why isn’t the Weather Bureau using this idea, if it’s so good?”

Another businessman was more blunt. “I don’t deal with people I don’t know. I know the Government weather people. I don’t know you. Or your ideas.”

In Kansas City, the president of an international hotel chain told me, “It looks great, it really does. Like a dream come true. But those buzzards on the board of directors just won’t believe it They’d never be the first to try something new.”

And the chief scientist of an oil company snorted, “Nonsense! The scheme will never work. And I know, because I’m a trained geologist!”

“What’s geology got to do with it?” Ted exploded when I told him about that one.

I was slumped in my office chair, gazing forlornly out the window at the gray September sky. Ted paced across the carpeting endlessly.

“Didn’t you show ’em the forecasts we’ve been supplying for Thornton?”

Nodding, I answered, “It didn’t convince them. It’s only about twelve weeks’ worth of predictions, and they claim that either we’re lucky or . . . or we’re cheating, writing the forecasts after seeing the Weather Bureau’s.”

“What?” He stiffened, eyes blazing. “Who said that?”

“A couple of them. Not in so many words, but their meaning was clear enough.”

Ted grumbled something to himself.

“Don’t be sore at them,” I said. “It’s my fault. I couldn’t convince them.”

Ted paced and muttered for a few minutes more. I stayed slumped in my chair. I had just returned from a crosscountry flight and hadn’t slept more than six hours in the previous two days.

“Listen,” he said, pulling up a chair beside my desk. “Maybe you were talking to the wrong guys. Instead of aiming at the company presidents and research directors, you ought to be talking to the working-level engineers and group leaders . . . the guys who’d use our forecasts if their bosses’d buy ’em. The stuffed shirts up at the top know what’s impossible; nobody can convince ’em in one sitting. But get to the plant managers or research scientists or engineers. Invite ’em here to the Lab; pay their way if you have to. Let ’em spend a few days here, learning what we do and how we do it. Then they’ll be on our side.”

“And then they’ll convince their own bosses?”

“Right.”

“Do you think it’ll work . . . in time, I mean. We’ve only got until next April.”

He grinned. “It’d better work!”

The winter came and went, colder, more severe than usual, but with comparatively little snow. The skiers complained bitterly, and several mountain resorts closed for long stretches while their owners sadly contemplated bare slopes and melting bank accounts. In February, a good part of Boston harbor froze over and the Coast Guard had to assign an icebreaker to keep the port partially open. Back away from the coast, in the frigid valleys and frozen hillsides, the farmers waited stonily for the snow that never came. Not enough spring runoff from the mountains, they knew. The streams would be shallow in the spring; the fields would be dry.

D
URING
that bitter, dry winter, I followed Ted’s strategy. It took an endless amount of travel and talking, living in strange hotel rooms, eating in all sorts of restaurants, waking in the mornings and straining hard to recall which city and what day of the week it was. But the young engineers and researchers started trickling in to the Laboratory. One or two at a time, they’d come in for a few days, watch and listen to Ted and Tuli, and go back to their jobs with new lights in their eyes. By March we were getting official inquiries from several companies. They wanted to do business with us.

The meteoroid was a chunk of rock no bigger than a man’s fist. For thousands of centuries it had orbited about the sun without coming to within twenty million miles of another solid body its own size. But at an inevitable point in time, the far-distant sun and planets aligned themselves in such a way that the meteoroid was pulled to within a few million miles of Earth. It was close enough. Earth’s powerful gravity drew the little rock; it gained speed and began “falling” toward the blue planet. It hit the atmosphere going about twelve miles per second and formed a shock wave that heated the air around it to incandescence. The rock itself began to boil away; by the time it had plunged to within twenty-five miles of Earth’s surface there was nothing left of it but a fine spray of microscopic dust grains. For days the dust sifted downward. Some of the grains glided over the American Midwest and were washed out of the air by rainfall. Part of the meteoroid’s substance reached the ground in raindrops and eventually flowed to sea. But over New England, the dust grains drifted through the air for days. Conditions seemed good for rain: there was moisture in the air, and dust nuclei; the winds were coming off the ocean. But no rain fell.

“So you managed to get through a year without folding up,” Father said. He looked pleased and puzzled at the same time, as I watched him on my office viewscreen.

“You seem surprised,” I said.

“I am.”

Leaning back in my swivel chair and clasping my hands behind my head, I admitted, “So am I . . . a little.”

“The long-range forecasts have been very accurate,” Father said. “This spring has been just as rough as last year’s, but the dredging is going smoothly. We’ll even be able to recoup what we lost last spring.”

“Ted worked very hard on those forecasts.”

Father chuckled. “He hasn’t driven you broke yet?”

“Not yet. He’s tried a few times, but
we’ve
been able to hold the line, so far. He’s got the forecasts coming out for two weeks ahead now. I wanted him to extend them to four weeks, but he drew the line there. He’s putting all his efforts and budget into research on weather control.”

“A four-week forecast would be very valuable.”

“I know. But “Fed’s made up his mind. We have the two-week forecasts and the ninety-day general climatological predictions . . . you know, they predict the average temperatures and rainfall for a given area, and show the storm tracks.”