The Weathermakers (1967) (3 page)

“But those people in the other office—they were talking about weather control.”

Rossman tried to smile again, but his eyes narrowed. “That’s Ted Marrett. As I just explained to you, there’s always a lot of
talk
about controlling the weather. Mr. Marrett is young and ambitious—going for his master’s degree at MIT and all fired up, the world-beater type. I’m sure you’ve met his kind before. He’ll settle down someday, and then he’ll probably make a very fine meteorologist.”

“Then . . . then there’s nothing you can do to help us?”

“I didn’t say that.” Rossman tapped the pencil against his chin for a moment. “We can provide you with realtime service on our forecasts, for one thing. In layman’s terms, that means we can furnish you with our forecasts by computer link as quickly as they’re printed out here. I assume you’re getting your forecasts now by commercial videophone, which is twelve to eighteen hours behind our printers.”

“I guess that’ll be some help,” I said.

“You can also apply to the Government for financial assistance. Of course, you can’t have the entire mid-Pacific declared a disaster area, but I’m sure you can get some help from a number of Government agencies.”

“I see.” Suddenly there was nothing left to talk about I started to get up from my chair. “Well, thank you for your time, Dr. Rossman.”

“I’m sorry to have to disappoint you.”

“My father’s going to be the one who’s disappointed.”

He walked me to the door of his office. “Can you come back tomorrow? I can put you in touch with the people who will make the arrangements for this realtime forecasting.”

I nodded. “All right. I wasn’t planning to leave until tomorrow afternoon anyway.”

“Good. We’ll do everything we can for you.”

I walked down the hallway, past the now-empty office where Ted and Dr. Barneveldt had been, and made my way back to the lobby. The building seemed completely deserted now, and I was feeling awfully alone.

Ted was slouched across one of the couches in the lobby, thumbing through a magazine. He looked up at me.

“Dr. Bee figured you might not have any transportation back to town. Tough to get a cab around this time. Need a lift?”

“Thanks. Are you going into Boston?”

“Live in Cambridge, just across the river. Come on.”

His car was a battered old Lotus two-seater. He gunned it out of the parking lot and onto the beltway, engine howling, and roared down a manual-control lane. Probably the car had no electronic guidance equipment, I thought.

It had been a long time since I’d been in New England in April; I’d forgotten how chilly it can be. Zooming through the twilight, and still wearing my Island sports clothes, I could feel my teeth start to chatter. Ted was happily unaware of this. He talked steadily over the growl of the engine and the whistling cold wind, gesturing with one hand and steering through the thickening traffic with the other. His monologue changed tack almost as often as he switched driving lanes: he talked about Rossman, Dr. Barneveldt, something about turbulent air flow, mathematics, air pollution, and even threw in a quick lecture on the peculiarities of Hawaii’s climate. I nodded and shivered. Every time he zipped past another car I wished we were on the automatically controlled section of the highway.

He dropped me at the hotel I told him I wanted, after raising his eyebrows in mock respect at the mention of its name. “Fanciest place in town; you travel top class.”

My room was comfortable. And heated. I was surprised, though, that the hotel wouldn’t give me a suite. Too many people and not enough floor space, the registration clerk told me. I ordered a wardrobe by viewphone—nothing too much, just some slacks and a jacket, and incidentals.

Dinner felt strangely like lunch until I realized that my body was still on Hawaii time. I was far from sleepy even at midnight, so I watched the all-night TV movies until I finally drifted off.

The sun rose brightly across the western half of the globe, its unfailing energy heating the seas and continents—and the restless, heaving ocean of air that mantled them both. Powered by the sun, twisted by the spinning Earth beneath it, the atmosphere moved like a living, throbbing creature. Winds and currents pulsed through it. Gigantic columns of air billowed upward for miles and sank again, absorbed moisture and released it, borrowed warmth from the tropics and carried it poleward, breathed life wherever they touched. Above this endless activity, the turbulent air ocean became more placid, except for the racing rivers of the jet streams. Higher still, electrical charges swirled through a darkening sky where meteors flashed and unbreathable gases blocked all but a small slice of the sun’s mighty radiance. Pulled by lunar and solar tides, mixed with magnetic fields and ghostly interplanetary winds, the ocean of air gradually thinned away and disappeared on the dark shore of space.

I slept late, dressed hurriedly, and got a rental car for the ride out to the Climatology Division. While the auto guided itself through the impossible crush of Boston traffic, I bought the best breakfast that the tinny vending machine in the back seat had to offer: synthetic juice, a warmed-over bun, and powdered milk.

I phoned ahead as the car threaded its way to the throughway and picked up speed. Dr. Rossman’s secretary answered that he was busy but would detail someone to meet me in the lobby.

Climatology’s parking lot was jammed now, and the lobby fairly bustled with people. I announced myself to the receptionist, who nodded to a lovely slim blonde sitting near the desk.

She was dressed in a light-green sweater and skirt, touched off with the fresh, outdoor fragrance of flower fields.

“I’m Priscilla Barneveldt,” she said. “Dr. Rossman asked me to see that you got through the Services Section without trouble.”

Her eyes were grayish-green, I noticed. Her face was a trifle on the long side, but well put together, with firm features and a determined little chin.

“Well,” I said, “you’re the most pleasant surprise I’ve had in the whole Weather Bureau so far.”

“And that’s the most pleasant compliment I’ve heard all day . . . so far.” She spoke with a slight, unidentifiable accent. “The elevators are down this way.”

“Don’t forget your glasses, Barney,” the receptionist said.

“Oh, thanks.” She went back to the chair she had been sitting in and picked up the eyeglasses. “I’d be squinting all day without them.”

“Barney?” I asked as we walked to the elevators.

A trace of a smile shaped her lips. “It’s better than ‘Prissy’ or ‘Silly’ don’t you think?”

“I guess so.” The elevator doors slid open and we stepped inside. “But isn’t it a little confusing?”

She really smiled now. “I’m afraid I’m not a very highly organized person . . . not with people, anyway. Third floor please,” she said to the elevator control panel.

It took nearly an hour for me to fill out the forms in the Services Section that would send Dr. Rossman’s up-to-the-minute predictions to our Honolulu offices. Barney helped me with them and fed the finished paperwork into the automatic processor that made up most of the Section.

Then she said, “Have you seen the rest of the building? I could give you the official guided tour, if you like.”

Nothing could have bored me more, I thought. Except sitting in the airport, waiting for the afternoon flight. “Okay, guide me.”

The tour took the remainder of the morning. The building was much larger than it appeared from the outside, and even had an annex out back where the shops and maintenance equipment were kept. Barney showed me the laboratories where men and women were studying the nature of air at various pressures and temperatures—its chemical composition, the way it absorbs heat energy, the effects of water vapor, dust particles, and thousands of other things. Then we went through the theoretical section, on our way down to the electronic computers.

“The theoreticians aren’t much to see,” she told me as we passed their cubbyhole office. “They sit at their desks and write equations that we have to solve down at the computations center.”

The computations area was impressive. Row upon row of massive computer consoles, chugging away, tapes spinning in their spools, girls scurrying, print-out typers spewing out long folding sheets of incomprehensible numbers and symbols.

“This is where I work,” Barney said over the noise of the machines. “I’m a mathematician.”

I had to laugh. “For a not-very-highly-organized person, you certainly picked an odd occupation.”

“I’m only disorganized with people,” she said. “The computers are different. I get along fine with the big machines. They don’t get impatient, don’t have tempers. They’re strictly logical, you can tell what they’re going to do next, what they need. They’re a lot easier to get along with than people.”

“They sound pretty dull,” I said.

“Well,
some
people are more exciting than others,” she admitted.

“This place,” I said, watching the girls who were attending the machines, “looks like a meteorologist’s harem.” Barney nodded. “There’ve been lots of little romances blossoming here. I’ve often said we wouldn’t have half so many men from the staff coming over here with requests for special programming if we had male programmers.”

“Girls work cheaper, I guess.”

“And better, as far as detail and accuracy are concerned,” Barney said firmly.

“Sorry . . . I spoke before I thought. It’s a bad habit of mine. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“It’s all right,” she said, smiling.

To change the subject, I said, “I met a Dr. Barneveldt last night. Is he your father or grandfather or . . .”

“Uncle,” Barney answered. “Jan Barneveldt. He received the Nobel Prize for his work on the physical chemistry of air. He developed the first cloud-seeding chemicals that work on non-supercooled clouds.”

It sounded important, even though I hadn’t the faintest idea of what she was talking about.

“My father is Hannes Barneveldt; he and my mother are at the Stromlo Observatory in South Africa.”

“Astronomers.”

“Father is. Mother’s a mathematician. They work together.”

I had to smile. “Then you’re following in your mother’s footsteps.”

“Yes, that’s right . . . Come this way.” She took my arm and guided me through the ranks of computer consoles. “There’s something no guided tour would be complete without.”

We stepped through a door into darkness. Barney shut the door behind us and the din of the computers was cut off. The room was cool and softly quiet. Only gradually, as my eyes adjusted to the low lighting level, did I realize what was there.

I heard myself gasp.

We were standing before a twenty-foot-high viewscreen that showed the entire western hemisphere. I could make out the North and South American continents clearly, even though clouds obscured broad stretches of land and sea. The Arctic glittered dazzlingly, and the sweep of colors—blue, green, red, white—was literally breathtaking.

On the other side of the room, the other side of the world: Europe, Africa, Asia, the broad Pacific, covered in their entirety by two more viewscreens.

“This never fails to awe people,” Barney said softly. “Including me, no matter how often I see it.”

“It’s . . .” I groped for a word, “. . . unbelievable.”

“The pictures are being transmitted from the synchronous space stations. We can see the entire world’s weather patterns at a glance.”

She walked to the podium that stood in the center of the room. A few touches on the control switches there, and weather maps sprang up on the viewscreens, superimposed on the televised pictures.

“We can backtrack,” she said, her fingers flickering across the controls, “and see what the weather maps looked like yesterday . . .” the map shifted and changed slightly, “or the day before . . . or last week . . . last year . . .”

“What about tomorrow, or next week, or next year?”

“Tomorrow’s no problem.” The map shifted again. I could see that the storm now covering the area where Thornton dredges were trying to operate would lift off by tomorrow.

“We can give you an educated guess about next week,” Barney said, “but it’s so vague that we don’t bother making up the maps for it. As for next year,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “you’ll have to consult the
Old Farmer’s Almanac.
That’s what we all do.”

“Is that what Ted Marrett does?”

Surprised, she asked, “Do you know Ted?”

“We met last night. Didn’t your uncle tell you?”

“No, he didn’t mention it. He’s rather forgetful; it’s sort of a family trait.”

“Is Ted here? I’d like to talk to him.”

“He’s at MIT in the morning,” Barney said. “We generally see him at lunch.”

I glanced at my wristwatch. Almost noon.

“Where do you eat?”

“There’s a cafeteria here in the building. Would you like to join us?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“I warn you,” she said seriously, “there’s usually nothing but shoptalk.”

“If the shoptalk’s about weather control, I want to hear it.”

T
HE
Climatology Division’s cafeteria was large, very crowded and noisy, and terribly depressing. The walls were painted dead gray, and the few attempts someone had made at decorations had long ago faded into near-oblivion. Streams of people jostled through the lines and crowded the bare plastic tables. There was practically no real food at all, just synthetics and concentrates. Hardly appetizing, although Barney seemed to be pleased enough with the selection.