Storm

by George R. Stewart

  •

  Flanges grinding, coaches swaying on the curves, the streamliner pulled up the steep grade toward the summit. No longer could it race at eighty miles an hour; such speed was for the plains; here, laboring tortuously up the pass, its rate was cut in half. On both sides of the track the piled-up snow was deep.

  At every block-tower the green lights glowed through the gray of the dawn. Snow-encrusted track-walkers—their patrols just finished ahead of the streamliner—stood by the side of the track, and waved salutation.

  Passengers were waking up—hearts pounding a little, ear-drums tight, from the sharp increase in altitude. Here and there a head popped out from between the curtains.

  “Are we on time, porter?”

  “Dis train ah-ways on time, suh!”

  The two young men—early risers—were shaving. “Looks like a lot of snow out there,” said one of them, trying to see through the corrugated glass of the dressing room.

  “Don’t worry. They may have to hold up the freights and the locals, but ‘the streamliner goes through on time.’ I’m quoting that pamphlet again.”

  •

  The General’s office was not so much of a mad-house as he had feared. Even before he had the reports from the Weather Bureau, he could tell that the cloudburst which had swept across Sacramento had not been very widespread; the long-distance calls plotted its course and extent almost exactly.

  Except for the partially protected lands in the delta, the General was still optimistic. The timing and distribution of rainfall was such that the rivers would reach their hours of greatest discharge in regular order, one crest passing on before the next arrived. First of all would come the American, next the Yuba, then the Feather, and only after these were well out of the way would the full flow of the upper Sacramento arrive in the lower river. All this was assuming that the forecast of clearing weather was accurate.

  The American was the immediate and worst problem. By the latest report Sacramento gauge was at twenty-five-point-nine and still rising. Already the red-brown backwater covered U.S. 40 between the bridge and North Sacramento. The Committee had loosed its pressure through the newspapers. And on the other side a sheaf of telegrams from the ranchers in the delta lands lay in one of the baskets on the desk.

  The General set his jaw, and figured carefully on the reports which were already in. The flooding of the highway he dismissed from his thoughts. The balance was between the delta and the city. He decided he still had an outside chance of saving the delta without running too grave a risk for the city. If the Yuba crested as slowly as now seemed likely, and if the cloudburst conditions over the near-by foothills were not quite as bad as reports indicated, then he might—just possibly—squeeze through without opening the weir-gates. But if the gauge-reading at Sacramento crept up to twenty-eight-five, and on toward twenty-nine, he must act; for with the water slopping at the levee-top any unforeseen gust of wind might mean disaster to the city. For the moment he could only wait.

  The telephone bell rang. His secretary was speaking. “Sacramento gauge at twenty-six-point-one.”

  That will put the water over the tops of the wickets, thought the General. Up two tenths in an hour! We can’t stand that very long.

  He again made some calculations. With water spilling through the weir the rate of rise against the levees would be cut down. But he thought of the cloudburst over the foothill country and of the water which was already pouring down the American. He shook his head.

  •

  The J. M. climbed to the roof, and picked his way among the skylights and ventilators. The wind gusts made him stagger. It was full day now, but the thick sweeping rain and low hard-driven clouds made the light dim.

  “Go up and take a look at it,” the Chief had said. “A well-defined cold front coming in from the Pacific is something to see.”

  The violence of the storm increased. The wind was hard from the south; the rain was thick before his eyes. In spite of the wind and rain he felt no sense of chill.

  Then in a moment the wind seemed suddenly to come from all directions at once. He staggered this way and that against it. A few handfuls of hail rattled on the skylights. From far off came a boom of thunder.

  And now the wind was a buffeting flaw from the west. Huge drops flying level, spattered in his face. Just as suddenly, there was no rain, and he was cold. Another wind-shift threw him off balance, and he caught himself with one hand against the parapet. The wind had veered forty-five degrees more and was a cold blast from the northwest.

  The rain came again. A chilling shower, hard blown, but with smaller drops. He shivered beneath his oilskin. After a minute the shower was gone. For another minute the storm seemed more threatening than ever. Low-flying scud swept the tops of the higher buildings around him. The wind backed gustily from northwest to west, and then veered to northwest again.

  All at once he was conscious that he could see better. From somewhere there was more light. The cloud-deck was higher and more sharply defined; beneath it he saw the bases of the hills five miles to the north.

  As neatly as if someone drew curtains aside, a hole opened in the cloud-deck just above him and a patch of pure blue sky showed through for a moment. The clouds rolled over it again, but at the same time he saw another patch of blue to the west and a much larger one to the north.

  Then another shower of cold rain enveloped him and clouds were close around. But the insistent northwest wind seemed dry even as it was driving the raindrops before it. The wind did not change; the shower lasted perhaps two minutes. Then it was gone into nowhere as quickly and unexpectedly as it had come.

  Now he did not have to glance rapidly here and there to see bits of blue sky. Over all the north and west the clouds were broken. The dark low-hanging remnants of the stratus-deck changed while he looked at them. They contracted and piled up; the edges took on a touch of white fluffiness. High up they reflected a gleam of sunlight.

  He looked eastward. Over the Bay he saw the slanting lines of two rain-squalls; the Berkeley Hills were still veiled in cloud, which rose high enough to shut out the rays of the morning sun. But now even at the zenith blue sky was showing.

  He looked at his watch—only fifteen minutes. But he felt as if he had passed from one world into another. Already the wind was licking up the water, and dry spots showed on the tiles of the roof-floor. Now he could make out, clear across the Bay, the white shaft of the tower on the University campus. Any moment now the sun would shine over the top of the cloud bank, fast receding to the east.

  His fingers were numb, and his damp feet were like ice-blocks in the chilling sweep of the northern air; but he felt a fine sense of exhilaration. The shock of dropping humidity and the rising pressure gave a sharp stimulus to his body and mind. He indulged in a vigorous, awkward tap-dance which served to get the circulation started in his feet again.

  Then the sun came out, and he was suddenly too warm. He stripped off his now dry slicker. The northwest wind was still chilly, but it seemed to generate an excess energy which made the chilliness pleasant. He wanted to take a long walk on some wind-blown hill.

  Reluctantly he turned to get back to work. The front was only a low blur of cloud on the horizon of the upper bay. The sun shone brightly in a clean blue sky, scattered with drifting high-piled masses of white cloud. The northwest wind again possessed the city.

  •

  The Chief Service Officer, backing his car from the apartment-house garage, stuck his head out the window and looked toward the rear to see where he was steering. Thus he got the whiff of the northwest wind full in his face. He felt reassured; more than any other phenomenon of the atmosphere, he was inclined to trust that particular wind. To him it meant stable air flowing steadily, not likely to shift without warning.

  But as he drove toward the airport, he felt his usual wariness returning. The front must have passed by; off to the nor
theast he could make out what was probably the last of the vanishing rain; the air was still full of big but harmless-looking clouds.

  He began to notice evidences that the last flick of the storm had been even more severe than he had realized. The sun was shining, but while he had been asleep something might have been happening. Here was a small branch blown from a tree and lying still in the street; a newly planted sapling had broken its stake, and now flopped over in a helpless curve; a telephone gang was repairing wire. Of course a cold front must have passed in, and its attendant line-squall would be enough to account for all this. But where was that cold front now, how violent was it, and were any planes in its path? Unconsciously, he began to drive faster. He noticed that little deltas of sand and gravel lay on the pavement at street-corners and driveways. “Act of God!” he thought viciously, and at the thought stepped hard on the accelerator.

  Overcoat still flapping about him, he strode into the dispatching room at the airport. “What’s happening?” he snapped at the meteorologist.

  “A little patch of unstable air from somewhere—doesn’t show up well on the map—too small. Seven o’clock reports showed she hadn’t got to the summit yet. Weather Bureau reports at four showed a lot of local thunderstorms, and—”

  “Thunderstorms!”

  The CSO turned on his heel, and made for the radio-room just across the hall. At the doorway he met his assistant; reading the face he did not waste time on salutations.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Trip one-sixty-five. The air went bad over the summit all at once. I was going to order it down at Reno, and suddenly we can’t make contact. Some electrical disturbance blanketing everything out—nothing but static.”

  The assistant said other things, but the CSO did not listen. He concentrated on the problem for a moment with such violence that perspiration broke out upon him. No solution!

  “Keep on trying,” he said to the radio-operator.

  He took off his overcoat and sat down to wait limply for news, hoping it would not be too long delayed or too bad. Deep and bitter cynicism smoldered inside him. Years of accumulating experience, hundreds of men, scientific experiment, unfailing vigilance, instruments of precision, teletype circuits, radio, beacons, beams, emergency landing-fields—and yet the air could still pull off a trick like this! And what had you left? Only a plane and a pilot in wild air over the mountains.

  “Fire and hail,” he thought. “Snow and vapors, stormy wind fulfilling his word. Well—”

  He lighted a cigarette, and his hand did not shake—not even when the telephone rang. Every man was tense, but it was a call of no importance. Too soon to be hearing anyway. He blew a smoke ring.

  There had been disasters before in this business; he had been in on some of them. There would be still more disasters before men beat the storms. He thought bitterly again, “Act of God.”

  In the silence he heard the clock tick; it was seven-twenty-three.

  •

  Pablo, the Mexican, finished patrolling his stretch of track. The plows had passed already; he knew that the streamliner would be along in a few minutes.

  Pablo was mountain-born, on the bleak slopes above Toluca where corn fails and men harvest thin fields of barley. Also he was patient and enduring by virtue of his Indian ancestry. So even the intensity of the storm as it had blown up in the last few minutes did not disturb him.

  He stepped aside as he heard the streamliner drawing near through the falling snow. After the last car had sped by and gone out of sight around the curve, only the sound of the wind in the trees was left upon the mountain-side, and in that seeming hush Pablo heard the plane.

  Impulsively he crossed himself. “Jesús de mi vida!” he said. Pablo was used to the planes; hourly, east and west, they passed over him; he saw them sharp-cut against the sun; he saw them even at night as gleams in the moonlight or moving shadows against the star-lit sky.

  This plane he did not see. But somewhere low in that close-hanging cloud he heard it. He judged that it was coming from the east, but it did not pass on quickly and steadily out of hearing. Now the roar of engines was loud; now it was dimmed out. Even Pablo knew that the plane was in trouble, buffeted here and there, fighting, lost, beaten down until it was low over the mountain-tops.

  Pablo had the secrecy bred of long generations of slavery. He did not stare about as an American would have done, eager to be the first to report even a disaster. Instead, he walked stolidly along the track through the storm, not looking around. He could not shut the noise out of his ears, and he knew craftily that the plane was moving off northward. But he did not wish to be mixed in the affair. If anybody should ask him about it, he was ready to think first, “No se nada!” and then translate this into “Don’t know nothing about it!”

  •

  At French Bar Power-House the snow had melted under the warm rain, and now everything was awash in the cloudburst. The gang was out tending to some lines. Johnny Martley, half-drowned under the downpour, was trying to do a dozen things at once to control the water. It was gullying the road in a half dozen places, threatening to flood two basements and the garage, and in general looking as if it might wash the whole place over the edge into the canyon.

  When his wife whooped at him from the porch, he knew that the L. D. had called, and he was also pretty sure what the call was about. They had been caught with the dam nearly full, and now this cloudburst would send the water over the top unless the sluice gates were opened—maybe it would go over anyway. He had been waiting for orders.

  “Yes,” he said to the L. D. “The water’s close up to the top, and all the streams are coming down a-boiling. She’ll spill in no time. I’ll go right away.”

  “How’s everything else?”

  “The boys are away on that job still. Everything loose around the place is washing down the canyon. I’ve been out with a shovel busier than a monkey, and wet as a trout.”

  Just as he opened the front door, his wife yelled that there was a leak in the living-room.

  “Set out a pan,” he yelled back.

  He hurried along the narrow trail at the lip of the canyon. A dozen rivulets were rushing across it, and then a few feet beyond cascaded off into space. Ten, twenty, or fifty feet they dropped as little waterfalls until they hit some rock ledge or the sloping wall of the canyon, leaped out in spray, gathered for another fall, and so at last reached the bottom, three hundred feet below.

  Martley picked his way along the trail. He went quickly, but his footwork was as neat as a lightweight boxer’s. It was not a healthy time or place for a slip. The wind came in great gusts, taking him off his balance. The rain was in spurts—now merely a spatter, now a deluge as if someone were throwing buckets of water. When rain and wind struck together the man had to brace himself against them, crouching, steadying himself with his right hand against the rocks on the upper side of the trail. A few feet to his left was the void of the canyon. The little rivulets, as he crossed them, hardly slopped his ankles, but if he should slip and fall their rush of water might be enough to carry him downward before he could catch himself.

  As he neared the dam, he saw that the water was almost level with the top; the wind was upstream; even so, an occasional wave was slopping over. It was an old-fashioned dam, not well designed to spill; if it went at all, it went along the whole crest; that was why the L. D. always watched the sluice-gates. But this time, thought Martley, the L. D. for once had missed. The gates should have been opened twenty-four hours ago; now the water was coming in faster than the sluices could carry it off; but anyway no harm was likely to result.

  He unpadlocked the little steel door just below the overhang of the dam, went in, closed it behind him, and snapped on the lights. He was in a cramped passageway inside the solid concrete of the dam. He went along it a few yards until it ended at a round hole just large enough for a man to descend. F
ar down the hole one electric light after another, far apart, glowed with a dull, wet gleam.

  He lowered himself into the hole, found with his foot a steel rung projecting from the concrete wall, grasped an upper rung with his hands, and began to descend. The hole was so small that he brushed against the concrete with hips and shoulders. Everything was wet with the seepage of water through the dam. The farther he went the more water dripped upon him from above. He descended steadily without hurry, knowing that he had two hundred thirty feet to go.

  Usually he made the descent with a companion, and now even his well-trained nerves felt the isolation and the almost physical inward pressure of the monolithic concrete. He was an ant crawling through some minute crevice of a great rock. Each light, yellow in the dripping atmosphere, seemed a friend as he drew near it.

  As it receded he felt a touch of primitive panic. But still he descended steadily from rung to rung, taking care that neither hand not foot slipped on the wet rounds of steel.

  •

  U.S. 40 was open again, and this day was not so bad as the Superintendent had feared. At the lower levels there was a cloudburst, but it was falling as rain. The cloudburst was so violent that it exhausted itself on the lower and middle slopes, well to the west of the summit; above six-thousand feet, heavy snow-squalls alternated with lulls when only a little spit of snow kept falling. In between the lower and upper levels was a belt of blinding snowfall, but it extended along only a few miles of road, and so the Superintendent had been able to throw plenty of equipment into that short stretch and easily keep it clear.

  He had just talked to a rotary-operator and was getting back into his car; then he heard the mutter of a plane. He glanced upward involuntarily, but of course saw nothing. If you could hardly see across the road, you couldn’t see any higher into the air.

  “Must be like flying through the water in a washing-machine,” he thought.

  He was used to hearing the planes overhead even in what seemed to him impossible flying-weather. Still, he wondered. Where he stood, he was somewhat sheltered in a thick forest of spruce and cedar; even so, the wind came in great gusts and swirls. And the noise of the engines seemed loud, as if the plane had been forced too low. Might be just a trick of the wind. Still— He noted mentally just where he was on the road. If a man offered information (or testimony) it ought to be accurate. He looked at his watch. Seven-thirty-six.