Storm

by George R. Stewart

  The passengers of a liner crossing that part of the ocean watched the beads of water continue to form on their tall glasses of iced drinks, but did not know that they were passing from one air-mass to another of very different history. They were conscious of no change in the weather conditions except that some clouds for a while cut off the sun. But if they could have ascended, they would have found that in one place the air grew cooler much more rapidly than in another.

  Because of this difference, the two bodies of air, so alike at the surface, were vastly different in their potentialities. The tropical air could produce extremely heavy and long-continued, but steady, rainfall. The old polar air would be likely to let loose its smaller amount of moisture with almost explosive violence and full accompaniments of thunder and lightning, towering formations of massed cloud, high winds, and violent turbulence.

  During the morning of the ninth day since the storm had formed off the coast of Japan, as part of a readjustment of atmospheric forces around the world the storm-area extended to more southerly latitudes. A large portion of the tropical air-mass began to move northeasterly toward the California coast and behind it followed the old polar air.

  7

  The J. M. could feel the letter in his pocket. That air-line job was open to him again. It paid more than he was getting, and the chances for the future might be better too. He admitted that he had been unhappy in the Weather Bureau; his mathematical training did not seem to help him, and sometimes he thought that it even was a handicap. Sometimes it seemed as if the Chief were using only the same methods that any shepherd might have used back in the time of the Patriarchs; he just looked at the sky, and decided from the appearance of things what weather would probably be coming along after a while. The shepherd, of course, never saw farther than the actual horizon. By the weather-map the Chief extended his view for several thousands of miles. There was a tremendous pyramiding of information, but not much change in method.

  The J. M. broke off his musings about the personal problem, and turned to the map.

  Maria had had a baby! The event was no more unusual than in organic life, and had not been unexpected; in fact, during the last twenty-four hours, the eastward bulge of the isobars had given a distinct suggestion of mammalian pregnancy. Now, however, the appearance of the map suggested rather the process of cell-division known as mitosis; the new storm centering over Utah was already an independent entity, but had not yet wholly separated itself from the mother storm off the coast. Already the J. M. was thinking of the newcomer as Little Maria, and his attitude was that of an old friend of the family. “Why, I’ve known your mother,” he found himself thinking, “since she was a little ripple on a cold front north of Titijima!”

  But to know the mother, he realized, did not allow anyone to predict much about the daughter. The daughter would develop her own personality, and follow her own career. Little Maria would probably make herself well known to the world. Three-quarters of the United States lay ahead of her, and over that area there were many contrasts of atmospheric conditions as the result of the recent north-and-south movements. All this region was a reservoir of energy for Little Maria to tap. And beyond the United States lay the Atlantic and Europe. Given opportunity and a little time, the J. M. thought that he could work out mathematically the route which the storm would follow and the characteristics which it would display at given points.

  The Chief came to take a look at the map. “That new storm,” he said, “she’s not so much now, but she’ll be headlines when she gets to New York.”

  The J. M. jumped mentally; he had been about to say almost the same thing. “What?” he blurted in his surprise, “you mean Little Maria?” Then he shut his lips quickly, realizing that he had exposed his childishness; perhaps the Chief would miss the point.

  But the Chief smiled with a little quizzical expression. “Hn-n?” he said. “You name them too? It must be nice to be new at the game. I used to do it, but I ran out of names years ago. I called them mostly after heroes that I read about in history—Hannibal, and so forth. I remember Marshal Ney developed into a terror; but Genghis Khan fizzled out.”

  Suddenly the J. M. felt at home in the Weather Bureau. Never before had the Chief and he had anything between them in confidence. He had never suspected the Chief of any hidden imagination.

  “That’s Maria off the coast there,” he volunteered. The Chief let his eyes move out across the Pacific. In mid-ocean were three little storms; the J. M. had never named them individually. First there had been two and he had called them the Twins; now he thought of them as the Triplets; for several days they had been blocked behind the great sweep of the polar incursion, and now they were dying. But the Chief let his eyes pass beyond the Triplets to where a new vigorous storm was just leaving the Sea of Okhotsk.

  “Named this one yet?”

  “No. I’ve been using girls’ names in -ia, but I’ve nearly run out.”

  “How about Victoria?”

  “Fine.”

  “All right—Victoria she is, but Victoria won’t concern us much for several days, if ever.”

  The Chief brought his glance back along the more southerly ocean clear to California.

  “Hn-n?” he said finally. “There’s just one thing I don’t like.”

  “You mean that belt of cloud?”

  “Yes. There’s a big lot of tropical air moving in toward the coast, but that cloud belt means something is happening in the upper air. It may be some little local eddy, and it may be something a lot more.”

  “If one of those ships could send up a radiosonde, it would be fine.”

  “Hn-n? Yes, the radiosonde—” The Chief’s voice rang with irony. “A whole radio sending-station weighing next to nothing; you send her up with a cute little balloon, clear into the stratosphere; and as she goes, she sends you back messages about temperature and humidity—just the kind of gadget Americans all love. It’s the best publicity that meteorology ever had, but it seems to me I never have one of those upper-air reports when and where I need it.”

  He stared again at the location of the two ships reporting cloud.

  “Well,” he went on, “today we’re in a little ridge of higher pressure between the two Marias, and we’ll have something of a lull. Tomorrow the tropical air will move in, and there’ll be rain a-plenty. And about the next day we ought to know whether that cloudbank out there means anything.”

  Half an hour earlier the J. M. had been telling himself that at the first chance he would show the letter to the Chief and say he was leaving. But now, for the first time, he felt warm toward the Chief. Paradoxically, he realized, this sudden friendship came not because the Chief had been scientific, but just the reverse. And he himself had been equally unscientific. Then he had a sudden new thought. Perhaps there was something about the human mind itself which made it feel comfortable to think of a storm as a person, not an equation.

  At the same time a new little glow of pride came to him about the Weather Bureau. Why, the Bureau recorded and distributed the very observations which the air-line meteorologists depended on! The Bureau made the only public forecasts, and then stood by for the blame—usually not much praise—that was coming. In the end, a private meteorologist was only another fellow working for a company. And the professors were only theorists. But ever since he was a kid, he’d wanted to be a weather-man, and there was only one place he could be that. When you came right down to it, the air-line people dealt in air-lines; only the Weather Bureau dealt in weather.

  8

  Mr. Reynoldhurst was a very great man in the domain of petroleum; from Maracaibo to Bahrein his lightest opinion was quoted, and his official pronouncement was as the yea or nay of a tribal patriarch.

  From Mr. Reynoldhurst’s hotel suite in San Francisco his private secretary had just put through a call to New York. “Good morning, Davy,” said Mr. Reynoldhurst, casually and
informally; transcontinental calls were for him no novelty.

  The impulses conveying the sound traveled in about one-tenth of a second the three thousand miles from ocean to ocean, by way of Salt Lake City, Denver, and Chicago. Every modulation of Mr. Reynoldhurst’s resonant and authoritative voice was vibrating in the ear-drum of his chief legal adviser.

  Just then the decaying bole of the tree which since the year 1789 had lain on a rocky ledge in the Sierra Nevada became weighted with snow past its point of equilibrium, and began to roll. For a moment it hung on the last projection of the ledge; then it slid sideways, up-ended, dropped thirty feet, struck on a rock, catapulted through the air, spun end-over-end, and crashed through the tops of three small spruce trees; gathering speed—now rolling, now hurtling through the air—it began the descent of a long, snow-covered canyon-side.

  “The matter will bear watching,” said Mr. Reynoldhurst into the telephone transmitter. “In view of the present international situation we can scarcely—”

  At that moment the tree-bole, finishing a last hundred-foot leap, struck squarely among the cross-arms of Pole 1-243-76 of the Central Transcontinental Lead. That pole was fifteen inches thick at the base and thirty feet tall; it was of selected, flawless Douglas fir from the Olympic Peninsula; it was firmly set in rocky soil. The four heavy cross-arms were reinforced with steel braces; each cross-arm carried ten glass insulators each bearing a heavy copper wire. The strength of the pole was calculated to withstand any attack of wind, ice, or snow.

  As the tree-bole struck, the pole snapped like a dry twig; every cross-arm broke; the steel braces bent and twisted; most of the insulators were shattered; nearly all the wires broke and the curling loose ends crossed and short-circuited the few which remained unbroken.

  At one moment the Central Transcontinental Lead had been an important link in world-communications. One moment later it was nothing.

  “Hello, hello!” said Mr. Reynoldhurst sharply; inefficiency always irritated him. He had certainly been cut off. He pressed his buzzer.

  “Put that call through again,” he said to his secretary. “Some fool telephone girl cut me off. And register a complaint with the Telephone Company.”

  “Yes, Mr. Reynoldhurst.”

  Some ends of the broken wires were still swinging back and forth; the tree-bole was settling into the snow bank where it had landed.

  The secretary jiggled the telephone. “Operator,” said a voice from the other end. “Mr. Reynoldhurst’s call to New York has been broken off,” said the secretary. “Will you kindly restore it at once?” Her voice was honey-sweet; but, underneath, it was resonant (as was fitting in Mr. Reynoldhurst’s secretary) with authority and the suggestion of threat. “God—” thought the operator. “What have I done?”

  “One moment, please,” was all the operator said. Even while she was saying it, she split the connection and listened to the New York wire. It was dead. Of the nine other direct lines to New York, she saw that five were busy. She plugged in on one of the others; it was dead. She plugged in on another and another—both dead. She plugged in on the last, and in sudden relief heard the clear hum of an open line and then the voice of the New York operator.

  Mr. Reynoldhurst, as the seconds ticked away, drew circles on his desk, and then crossed out each circle with an X. There was no use beginning anything else; this call would be re-established in a moment. His glance sought the window, and he saw that it was still raining. Thirty years earlier when he was sleeping under a boiler during the Tampico boom, rain used to mean a great deal to young Tom Reynoldhurst; but since he had entered his epoch of limousines and covered entrance-ways with doormen holding umbrellas, Mr. Reynoldhurst had lost his personal feeling for rain.

  “Your call, Mr. Reynoldhurst.”

  Lifting the receiver he noticed that twenty-five seconds had elapsed; “Inexcusable!” he thought.

  “That you, Reynoldhurst?” said the voice from New York.

  “Oh, yes. Irritating to be broken off! You’d think a big outfit like Telephone would get things organized better—well, anyway, here we are talking just as before. Now, as I was saying—”

  But Mr. Reynoldhurst was incorrect. He was no longer talking as before—by way of Salt Lake City, Denver and Chicago. Instead, the impulses now passed through Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and St. Louis, over one of the alternate circuits which through the foresight of the District Traffic Superintendent had been established some hours earlier.

  •

  Except for two hikers who had sat upon the bole for a few minutes in 1923, no human being had ever known anything about it. During the half hour following its fall down the mountain-side, nobody knew that it had fallen. But the fall affected the lives of many people over a hemisphere.

  A man in Boise was delayed fifteen minutes in getting a call through to Sacramento and lost a prospective job.

  A girl in Omaha was prevented from talking to her mother in Honolulu before she went into the operating-room, not to return alive.

  A woman about to enter a Reno courtroom for divorce proceedings had grown panicky and put in a call for her still hopeful husband in San Francisco; when the call was delayed, she cancelled it.

  Almost before the echoes of the crash had ceased reverberating among the mountain solitudes, the toll testboardmen at Sacramento knew that the Central Transcontinental had suffered a total failure. A few minutes later, merely by using their instruments, without even stepping outside, they had located the break within a quarter of a mile. By telephone the word went to the repair crew closest to the break, and in five minutes more the green trucks were moving on U.S. 40. Since the break was a total failure and might be extensive, the Modesto crew was ordered up from Sacramento toward the Pass, and crews in Stockton and Marysville (like reserves mustered for a counter-attack) were told to stand by.

  To every important long-distance office in the West the fall of the tree brought sudden emergency. Lines were dead, calls could not go through, tickets piled up as calls were delayed. Operators felt the sudden tenseness. Supervisors talked to irate or worried or importunate customers. The rule was “First come, first served,” but there had to be exceptions. Police and hospitals had precedence; there were other real emergencies. But also there were the egotists who thought their own business was always most important. Big small-town business-men foh-ed and fummed; reporters bluffed about the exigencies of getting to press; rich women threatened to report supervisors for impertinence.

  Most of all the San Francisco office felt the stress. All eastern calls must be routed to the south. The change was accomplished chiefly by the testboardmen; by flipping a few switches in co-ordination with the Los Angeles office they soon established new direct circuits over which San Francisco might talk to Chicago, Denver, and the other chief centers. The sudden increase of traffic overcrowded the southern wires, and tickets started to pile up. And even Los Angeles was affected; ordinarily Los Angeles calls reached Reno via Sacramento, but now the connection could be made only via Salt Lake City.

  The congestion and delay of traffic was the result of the decrease in the number of wires, and also of the destruction of the carefully planned direct routings. To increase the number of wires the Plant Department “warmed up” all the extra circuits which were generally not in use except during disasters and the Christmas holidays. To patch up new direct routings without creating new confusion was a work demanding both knowledge and skill. Since the eastern calls were going through Los Angeles, the need for more circuits in that direction was imperative. The Chief Testboardman took over the San Francisco-Merced wire, and re-routed Merced calls through Modesto. From Merced he patched on with a Fresno line; then he took a Fresno-Bakersfield and a Bakersfield-Los Angeles circuit. The adjustments at the various offices took only a few minutes, and the result was another direct circuit to relieve the congestion between San Francisco and Los Angeles. When this circuit had been co
nnected with one between Los Angeles and Omaha, the San Francisco operators could again get Omaha directly.

  Shortly after the fall of the tree a man in a town on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada had occasion to call a friend and business-partner in a town on the east slope; the two places were by air-line about fifty miles apart. “There will be a slight delay; I will call you,” said the local operator. The man making the call was surprised, for he usually got his friend without delay. The local operator had orders to route all eastern calls through Sacramento, fifty miles to the west. From Sacramento the circuit was next established to Los Angeles four hundred miles to the south; next it passed on to Salt Lake City six hundred miles to the northeast; another jump of four hundred miles westward brought it to Reno, and from Reno thirty miles more took it to the final destination.

  The man making the call completed his business and since the toll-rates between the two towns were inconsiderable, he spent an extra period in conversation. During this time he was holding up the use of fifteen hundred miles of badly needed circuit, but was paying on the rate adjusted to a distance of fifty miles.

  Directed with exactitude to the point of failure the nearest repair crew halted at the closest spot on the highway, strapped on their skis, and reached the broken pole within half an hour. They began to restore service, in temporary fashion, by laying across the gap some heavy insulated duplex wires which could lie in the snow and yet carry messages.

  As each circuit was re-established, the testboardmen in Sacramento discovered the hum of life, and then San Francisco put the circuit back into use where it was most needed. The situation became easier. Time also aided, for after mid-morning the number of new calls began to fall off toward the noon lull. By ten-fifty the worst of the emergency was over.