The Weathermakers (1967) (2 page)

“There’s a big difference between what engineers can do,” he had answered, “and what people are willing to accept. It takes time for the average man’s attitudes to adjust to a new idea . . . even if the idea will save him time and money.”

I remember Father saying that very clearly, because the next four years of my life were spent living with exactly that problem.

The rocket flight was really uneventful: some pressure and noise at lift-off, a few shudders when they dropped the empty booster stages, a long floating weightless glide, and then more pressure squeezing me into the couch as we reentered. There were no viewports in the passenger cabin, but you could see TV pictures of the world outside on the videoscreen over your couch. The people around me gaped at a color view of Earth, curving blue and flecked with dazzling white clouds; or at views of the stars or the moon. Some of them even claimed to see the pinpoint of light where Moonbase was located.

I had seen it before, so I watched the TV movies.

The outside cameras shut off when re-entry started. No sense startling the passengers with pictures of red-hot air engulfing the ship! As the detective movie on my screen ended, I heard the muffled roar of the retrorockets, and we settled on the special pad at the airfield.

It was warm and sticky outside. One of the Thornton Aerospace reservation clerks pushed through the crowd at the base of the rocket and handed me a tape spool. A message from Father. I thanked him and asked directions for the New York-Boston train. He ushered me to the proper slideway.

As I stepped on the moving belt that ran into the distant terminal building, I took out my pocketphone and snapped the tape into its spool holder. With the earplug in place, I could hear Father telling me:

“Jeremy, we’ve discovered the name of the man you should talk to at Climatology. His name is Rossman . . . he may be a Ph.D. Call him ‘Doctor’ anyway, he’ll be flattered. He’s in charge of the long-range predictions and weather-control work. We’ve set up a five-thirty appointment for you. Oh, by the way, the Navy found our two missing divers. They’re pretty battered, but they’ll pull through. Call me after you’ve seen Rossman. Good luck.”

I stuffed the phone back in my shirt pocket and looked at my wristwatch. It said 10:38. Still on Hawaiian time. There wasn’t a clock in sight as I whisked along toward the terminal building. All I could see was the bustling airport, with jets circling overhead and the rocket pad behind me. Far off in the distance was the vague blur of the Manhattan Dome that covered downtown New York City, its geodesic framework barely visible through the murky city smog.

The belt slid through the blast of air that curtained the terminal doorway, and I spotted a clock—4:40 local time. I dashed down to the train tube level and caught a Boston express.

The pneumatic trains are fast and easy-riding, but the shriek of metal wheels on metal tracks at four hundred miles an hour is still terrible, no matter how much acoustical insulation they put in. I sat in a four-place compartment, alone, wondering if I could make my appointment on time.

It was exactly 5:20 when I stepped out of the train and into an elevator that took me to the top of the Transportation Tower in Boston’s Back Bay. But it took the helicab driver nearly twenty minutes—and several dollars extra on the meter—to find the Climatology Department building, out in the suburbs.

The parking lot where the cab deposited me was nearly empty, and the lobby of the main building deserted except for a solitary uniformed guard sitting at the reception desk.

I walked across the polished lobby floor, feeling slightly foolish. “I’d like to see Dr. Rossman, please.”

The guard looked up from his baseball magazine. “Rossman? He’s left by now.”

“But . . . but he’s expecting me.” I fumbled in my wallet and pulled out one of the business cards that Father had insisted on having printed for me.

“Well, I’m pretty sure he’s gone. Wait a minute and I’ll check.”

He punched out a number on the desk intercom. It had no viewscreen, I noticed.

“Long-range,” a strong voice answered.

“Is Dr. Rossman still there?”

“Yeah, he’s waiting for some visitor . . . somebody named Thornton or something.”

The guard looked at my card. “Jeremy Thom the Third? From Thornton Pacific Enterprises?”

“That’s him. Send him up.”

The guard gave me directions. Up the stairs, down a corridor, past three cross-corridors . . . or was it four? After a few false turns and some headscratching, I heard that same telephone voice still going strong in conversation with someone else. Following the voice, I came to a door marked Long-Range Forecasts Section. All the other offices seemed to be empty.

I stepped through the open doorway and found myself in a sort of anteroom that housed secretaries’ desks and file cabinets. A short hallway opened off the opposite side of the room, with several doors along the side. One door was ajar, and that was where the conversation was coming from.

I looked inside. It was a drab little cubicle. An elderly gentleman was sitting behind a desk buried under stacks of papers, while the person I had heard on the phone—tall, athletic-looking—was pacing before the chalkboard, his back to me. He was saying excitedly:

“. . . and this paper by Sladek wraps it up. The Kraichnan Institute studies have paid off. You can predict what’s happening in a turbulent flow without any trouble now.”

The old man nodded gently. “Very nice, if true. But perhaps you can stop for a second and greet our visitor.”

He whirled around. “Found us! Beginning to think we’d have to send out a search party.”

“I nearly got lost,” I admitted.

“Ted Marrett,” he introduced himself, grabbing my hand and pumping it hard. Gesturing, he added, “Dr. Barneveldt, chief of the theoretical section.”

Ted was about my own age, perhaps a year or two older. He was big, heavy in the shoulders, flat in the midsection, with long, lanky legs. His face was bony, angular, and there was a barely visible scar across the bridge of his nose—a football injury, I learned later. His hair was an unruly mop of fire red. He hardly looked like a scientist who would shake the world.

While Ted was restless, gesturing, Dr. Barneveldt was small and quiet—almost sedate, in comparison. He was thin and slightly stoop-shouldered; his hair was dead white, and he had a somehow fragile look about him. The wrinkles on his face, though, seemed to come more from the little smile he constantly wore than from advancing age.

“Pleased to meet you both,” I said. “I’m—”

“Jeremy Thorn the Third,” Ted finished before I could. “Never met a Third before. . . or a Second, for that matter. Rocket in from Hawaii? Good flight? Sure dressed Island style.”

“I . . . didn’t have time to change,” I fumbled. “Uh, is Dr. Rossman here? I was supposed . . .”

Ted nodded. “Told him you were here. He’ll make you wait a couple minutes more before he lets you into his office. His way of getting even for making him wait.”

“Getting even?”

“Quitting time’s four fifteen around here; Rossman likes to get home to his wife and family. He was kind of sore about having to stay to five thirty, and you even blew
that
time.”

“The helicab—”

“Don’t worry, he’ll call you in any minute now.”

I didn’t know what to say. “You weren’t staying late just because of me, were you?”

“Oh, no.” Ted waved the idea away. Grinning toward Dr. Barneveldt, he said, “We were just gassing about weather control.”

“W
EATHER
control?” I said. “That’s what I came for.”

“I believe perhaps we should explain,” Dr. Barneveldt began to say, but a buzzer cut him off in mid-sentence.

He carefully moved a stack of paper off the desktop intercom and touched a red-glowing button.

“Has the visitor found the office yet?” a raspy voice asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Barneveldt said. “Mr. Thorn is here now.”

“Good; send him in.” The intercom clicked into silence.

Ted gestured the old man to stay in his chair. “It’s just down the hall,” he said to me, jerking a thumb in the right direction. With the beginnings of a grin, he added, “Good luck.”

I walked down the short hallway to the door at the end, feeling kind of jittery. There was no nameplate. I knocked once, lightly.

“Come in.”

Dr. Rossman’s office was almost as small and tired-looking as the one I had just left. A metal desk, a row of file cabinets, a tiny conference table with chairs that didn’t match: no more furniture than that. Only one window; the rest of the walls were covered with charts and graphs that had been taped up years ago, from the looks of them.

I had never before realized the difference between private industry and government, as far as floor space and trappings were concerned. If Dr. Rossman had been working for Father at an equally important position, his office would have been four times larger. And probably his salary, too.

He was seated at the desk. “Sit down, Mr. Thom. I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding us.”

“A little,” I answered. “I’m sorry if I’ve kept you late.” He shrugged. He was lean and pale-looking, with a long, somber face that reminded me a bit of a bloodhound’s.

“Well, now,” he said as I pulled a chair from the table toward the desk, “what can we do for Thornton Pacific?” I sat down and said, “It’s about these storms that have hit our mining dredges. They’re causing a lot of damage and expense.”

He nodded gravely. “Yes, I suppose they are.”

“My father wants to know what you can do about them. We’ve been forced to suspend mining operations for several days at a time. If something isn’t done soon to stop the storms, we’re going to lose a considerable amount of money. To say nothing of the lives of the men who are in danger.”

“I understand,” Dr. Rossman said. “We’ve been trying to furnish the entire Pacific area with the most accurate long-range forecasts possible. Fully a third of my entire staff is working on the problem right now. Unfortunately, pinpointing storm development in the open ocean is a very,
very
difficult task.”

“I guess it is.”

“You see, Mr. Thorn, our long-range forecasts are made on a statistical basis. We can predict, with very good accuracy, how much rain will fall over a certain area during a given period of time—say, a month. But we can’t foretell exactly when a storm will form until practically the last minute. And it’s even more difficult to forecast a storm’s exact path, except in a very general manner.”

“Yes, but when a storm’s going to affect a vital area such as our dredges,” I asked, “can’t you turn it aside or perhaps destroy it altogether?”

He nearly laughed, but checked himself just in time. “Mr. Thorn, whatever gave you the idea we could do that?”

“Well . . . aren’t you the people who do the weather-control work? I’ve seen stories about cloud seeding and hurricane patrols . . .”

“You’re making a very common mistake,” he said, smiling patiently. “Yes, my group here has the responsibility for weather modification
experiments.
The Weather Bureau has been doing small-scale seeding trials and other experiments for years. But they’ve never amounted to anything. Nothing definite has been proven. No one can alter the course of a storm. No one can dissipate a storm.”

I could feel myself sink in the chair. “But those people who fly into hurricanes..

“Oh, that. Yes, for years they’ve tried to modify hurricanes. But there’s never been a firm connection established between what they do and the effect—if any—on the hurricane.
Never
has a hurricane been stopped, or even slowed down for long, as a result of seeding its clouds.”

Leaning back in his swivel chair, he almost seemed to be enjoying himself. “There’s the Severe Weather group in Kansas City who’ve claimed they’ve prevented tornadoes—sometimes—by cloud seeding. But I’m not convinced, and neither is anyone else of any technical stature in the Weather Bureau. The results are far from conclusive.”

I must have looked rather dumbfounded.

“Look at it this way,” Dr. Rossman said, absently picking up a pencil from his desk. “A hurricane will expend within a few minutes as much energy as the Hiroshima A-bomb. In a single day, it will release the equivalent of a hundred ten-megaton hydrogen bombs. No one and nothing can destroy that!”

“But . . . smaller storms: can’t you do something about them? Or at least try?”

He shook his head. “It would be enormously expensive, and completely futile, as far as I can see. In fact, hurricanes are probably more susceptible to man-made modifications than any other type of storm—at least, they seem more delicately balanced, closer to instabilities.”

“That sounds strange.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose it does, to a layman. But it’s true. As far as talk about controlling the weather, though, I’m afraid that’s all it is—just talk. And I can assure you, no one from the Long-Range Forecasts Section will ever be involved in such foolishness as long as I’m in charge.”

“Foolishness?”

“Of course it’s foolishness,” he snapped, waving the pencil at me. “Weather control! All the experiments we’ve done have been meaningless. Even supposing we
could
alter large-scale features of the weather . . . divert one of the storms that’s been bothering you, or destroy it altogether. How do we know that we haven’t created a condition where an even worse storm will develop? Or perhaps caused some changes in the natural balance of forces that will cause trouble thousands of miles away. No, there’s too much involved, too much that we don’t understand and probably never will understand. Believe me, as far as weather control is concerned . . . it’s impossible.”