The Weathermakers (1967) (7 page)

Then he made a slip. Uncle Lowell mentioned that one problem of the air-skimming ships would be avoiding storms at sea, since they couldn’t operate over storm waves.

Ted stepped in quickly, fork in hand, and took over the conversation. From storms at sea, he moved to long-range weather forecasts and weather control. Through the entree, salad, and dessert Ted held all of us—even the reluctant Uncle Lowell—fascinated.

“What I could never understand,” Aunt Louise said, “is why the weather here in New England is so changeable.”

“It’s not just New England,” Ted said, leaning back in his chair now that dessert was finished. “The whole region between the Horse Latitudes and the Polar Easterlies has the same problem. We’re in the region of westerly airflow—the Temperate Zone: meaning winter blizzards, spring floods, summer droughts, and autumn hurricanes.”

That brought a laugh.

“See, in this westerly flow you’ve got storms and fair-weather Highs chasing each other like horses on a merry-go-round.” He twirled a finger through the air. “One right after the other. Never the same weather for more’n a few days—sometimes a few hours. New England is close enough to the sea to get lots of moisture, and far enough north to get practically pure polar air. Mix ’em together and you’ve got a king-sized blizzard. But farther away from the ocean the temperature extremes are a lot worse. Ocean’s a heat sink—soaks up heat in summer to keep you cool, and gives off heat in winter to warm you.”

“What about this drought problem?” Uncle Turner asked quietly. “I understand the spring rains haven’t been up to normal.”

Ted nodded. “And the runoff’s been punk too; not enough snow last winter. We’re sliding into a low-precipitation situation. We’re studying it pretty closely. Don’t want a water shortage if we can help it.”

“Could this weather control you mentioned prevent a drought?” Uncle Turner asked.

Ted shrugged elaborately. “Sure . . . once it gets a chance to work.”

“The idea of weather control gives me the chills,” Uncle Lowell said. “No offense to present company, but I don’t like to think of some bright young engineers tinkering with
my
weather. Too much could go wrong.”

“That’s the kind of spirit that kept Columbus in port twenty years,” Ted flashed. “Talk like that nearly kept this country off the moon.”

“Now hold on, I was never against the moon project; always knew it would pay off handsomely. But fooling around with the weather . . .”

“Man already changes the weather, every blasted day. Smokestacks make weather, if you put enough of ‘em together. Ever fly over a city at sunrise? Watch the factories starting up, you’ll see man-made weather, all right. Every time a builder rips up another acre of grass and paves it over we change the weather.”

“But I mean—”

“And in Israel they’ve even changed the climate by planting trees and irrigating ‘em. Turned a desert into a forest inside of a generation. The Russians’ve used trees for windbreaks to force moist winds from Lake Baikal up to an altitude where they reach condensation temperature and drop rain.”

Tuli nodded at that.

“But that’s a lot different from trying to control the weather altogether,” Uncle Lowell protested. “You can’t have scientists running around the country doing anything that pops into their heads . . . That could be dangerous.”

“Be a lot more dangerous,” Ted countered, “if you didn’t have people trying to do what they think’s possible. You can’t sit on ideas—the world’ll come to a stop. People moan about technology moving too fast and ruining all the true beauty of the world. And at the same time they’re hopping jets for weekends in Spain and lining up for cancer vaccine. Let ‘em moan! I’ll work on tomorrow, they can dream about yesterday all they want. Yesterday is finished and we can’t make it better. But we can build tomorrow. Why shouldn’t we control the weather? Why should we sit inside and just let it rain? Think we should’ve stayed away from fire and lived in caves all this time?”

Uncle Lowell, for once, was speechless.

Aunt Louise turned to Barney and said loudly enough to fill the sudden silence, “Would you like to see the rest of the house while the gentlemen finish their discussion?”

As they left, Uncle Lowell took a cigar from his jacket and lit it. “I don’t know if I agree with you or not,” he said to Ted, between puffs of thick blue smoke. “But stick to your guns, kid. You believe in what you say, and that’s half the battle. More than half.”

That night, strange changes took place in the atmosphere over New England. The edge of a high-pressure system that had been sitting over northern Maine abruptly started to weaken. Pressure began falling in a small area out to sea. The storm that had been soaking the Boston area suddenly felt the “downhill” pull of falling pressure to the north and east, and started moving off toward Nova Scotia.

I was awakened by the glare of sunlight streaming through my bedroom windows. Groggily, I sat up and looked outside. The clouds were breaking up! Sunlight was glinting on the ocean.

“Phone,” I commanded, “get the weather forecast.”

The phone clicked to itself for a few moments, then the speaker came on with the Weather Bureau’s tape:

“. . . winds northeasterly, fifteen to twenty miles per hour. Today, rain, occasionally moderate to heavy. Tonight, rain continuing. Sunday, rain ending in the late afternoon, winds shifting to westerly. Sunday night, scattered clouds, westerly winds . . .

There were scattered clouds outside right now, and the wind was coming from the west, I was willing to bet. I pulled on a robe, stuffed my feet into some slippers I found in the closet, and rushed downstairs. Ted was in the kitchen, at the breakfast bar, surrounded by bacon, eggs, pancakes, milk, butter, syrup, toast and jelly.

He looked up from a heavily laden fork. “Good morning.”

“It certainly is,” I said. “Much better than the Weather Bureau is forecasting.”

Ted grinned but said nothing.

“Did you have a hand in this? Did you really . . .”

He silenced me with a gesture. “You wanted to go sailing today, didn’t you? We can talk then.”

The cook was at the far end of the room, and from beyond the dining-room door I could hear Uncle Lowell’s voice. He loved to read the morning news aloud to anyone within earshot.

It took a little time for the four of us to get organized that morning, but finally we were on the ketch
Arlington,
threading through the forest of masts in crowded old Marblehead harbor, heading for the open sea.

Ted and Tuli were forward, handling the sails for me. I was at the wheel, giving orders, with Barney sitting beside me.

“You look very nautical,” I said. She was wearing white slacks and a red-and-blue sailor top.

“Thank you. I forgot to pack sports clothes, so your aunt gave me this outfit. It’s a throwaway, made of paper fiber. Like they wear at Moonbase.”

“Seems a shame to throw away anything that looks so pretty.”

“But you can’t wash it.”

“Well, there are plenty more copies of it,” I said, “and, anyway, it wouldn’t look half as pretty on anyone else.”

“Flattery.”

“Truth.”

We reached the deep swells of the open ocean, under a sparkling sky dotted by a few tattered remains of grayish clouds. A strong west wind filled the ketch’s sails, and the four of us gathered in the cockpit to relax. It was cold enough for sweatshirts and coffee.

“So this weather is made to order,” I said to Ted.

“Sort of,” he replied. “Storm would’ve lifted off tomorrow, late in the afternoon. We just modified things a little to speed up the change.”

“But how did you do it?”

“Wasn’t too tough. Got some buddies of mine in an Air Force satellite to squirt their lasers at the right place . . . added a little heat to the High that was holding the storm over Boston. And one of the Climatology planes was making a practice run for Dr. Barneveldt, dropping cloud-seeding pellets. I just told them where to do the dumping, and when. That set up some low pressure for the storm to slide into. So it moved away. Ought to be going up the Bay of Fundy by now.”

Barney looked worried. “Aren’t you afraid of getting the people who helped you into trouble? You had no authorization—”

“They didn’t do anything more than they would’ve normally done,” Ted replied, a trifle impatiently, “The Air Force guys in the satellites have to run their lasers a certain number of times every day, to make sure they’re combat-ready. It’s part of their regular routine. Did it myself a gillion times when I was wearing a blue suit. And the Climatology plane was going to make a night run for your uncle. So they flew to one spot over the ocean instead of another. So who cares?”

Tuli said, “I hope Dr. Rossman is as nonchalant about this as you are. He generally doesn’t like to have his employees doing things without his knowledge . . . and written approval.”

“Listen,” Ted snapped. “He claimed weather control is impossible. Now I can show him it’s not. It’s that simple.”

Which turned out to be the understatement of the year.

T
HE
rest of the weekend was pleasant but inconsequential. Aunt Louise threw one of her usual Saturday-night parties, and invited half the island, including a couple of Japanese families—presumably for Tuli’s benefit. I met a lot of people I hadn’t seen since my last summer at Thornton, several years earlier. Aunt Louise kept steering me toward every girl in the house who was unmarried and over fifteen, while Ted stuck with Barney. Inevitably, someone brought out a guitar and folk singing started. Unexpectedly, though, Tuli turned out to be the hit of the evening when he began singing old Mongol sagas and translating them for us; most of them were fiercely violent, but some were poetic and haunting.

Before we left on Monday morning, Aunt Louise promised to invite Father to Thornton for my birthday celebration. My real birthday wouldn’t be for another several months, but she intended to have a party for me within the next few weeks, since we weren’t sure how long I would stay in Boston.

I drove the three of them to the Climatology building. Ted and Tuli hopped from my car to the weather-beaten Lotus, which Ted had left in the parking lot for the weekend, and took off for the morning’s classes at MIT.

Barney, sitting beside me, waved as Ted cut in front of us and zoomed out toward the highway.

“How do you think Dr. Rossman’s going to react to Ted’s weather modification?” I asked her.

She let her worry show on her face. “He’ll probably find out about it this morning, before Ted comes back from class.”

“Do you think there might be serious trouble?”

“Dr. Rossman can be very strict about people doing things without his permission,” Barney said. “And Ted has a short temper, too.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. It was still a little early for the main shift; a few cars were starting to pull up and park. Off on the horizon, toward the west, I could see dark clouds starting to gather.

“Perhaps I should try to stick around and talk with Ted after lunch,” I said.

She thought it over before replying. “It might be a good idea if you offer to speak to Dr. Rossman, together with Ted. With a third party in the room, they might both be calmer and quieter.”

“Like a referee?”

She nodded.

I thought to myself that the innocent bystander in the middle usually gets hit from both sides. Then I saw how terribly serious Barney was, how really worried she looked. “All right, I’m game to try it.”

“But you won’t tell Ted you’re trying to referee his argument with Dr. Rossman, will you?”

“Oh? Then how do I get to go in with him?”

“Let me handle it,” she said.

I agreed with a shrug. We walked into the building, while the storm clouds advanced and darkened.

The warm air mass over New England was being invaded by a strong, cold flow sweeping out of Canada. The invasion was marked by a battlefront. The front line, hundreds of miles long, was a thick tangle of black clouds that flashed lightning and boomed thunder, spreading rain and hail over the ground below. Like most battlefronts, this one smelled of violence. Towering thunderhead clouds reared eight miles high, black and terrible, each one a complex engine of turbulent fury. The thunderheads were a savage no-man’s-land of hundred-knot updrafts and downdrafts racing furiously side by side, where an unwary plane could be snapped like a twig. The invading clouds rolled onward, battering the ground with hailstones and blinding rain, racking the air with lightning, even boiling up into the stratosphere where the strong smooth winds flattened the cloud tops into anvil heads. Pressing onward, the cold invading airflow forced the yielding warm mass to surrender its moisture, to contribute its heat energy to the violent frontal line of squalls. But as the warm air retreated before the ruthless invader, its vapor-borne heat softened the cold airflow, warmed it, until the frontal squalls broke up and disappeared, leaving only a few isolated thunderheads to grumble uncertainly before they too were dissipated beneath the constant sun.

I watched the squall develop from the window of Ted’s office, where Barney left me to spend the morning. I saw the wind come up, and the outside lights turn on as the skies thickened; saw the first drops splatter and then sheets of rain sweep the parking lot below me, hailstones bouncing off the car roofs. For all its violence, though, the storm passed quickly. The sun came out and started drying the puddles. I turned and saw by the clock on the wall that less than an hour had passed.