by Jerry
SHE HAD been a pretty good wife, now that it was all said and done. It wasn’t exactly her fault if people didn’t have time to read nowadays. It was just that there was the house, and the bank, and the yard. There were the Jones’ for bridge and the Graysons’ for canasta and charades with the Bryants. And the television, the television Agnes loved to watch, but would never watch alone. He never had time to read even a newspaper. He started thinking about last night, that business about the newspaper.
Henry had settled into his chair, quietly, afraid that a creaking spring might call to Agnes’ attention the fact that he was momentarily unoccupied. He had unfolded the newspaper slowly and carefully, the sharp crackle of the paper would have been a clarion call to Agnes. He had glanced at the headlines of the first page. “Collapse Of Conference Imminent.” He didn’t have time to read the article. He turned to the second page. “Solon Predicts War Only Days Away.” He flipped through the pages faster, reading brief snatches here and there, afraid to spend too much time on any one item. On a back page was a brief article entitled, “Prehistoric Artifacts Unearthed In Yucatan”. Henry smiled to himself and carefully folded the sheet of paper into fourths. That would be interesting, he would read all of it. Then it came, Agnes’ voice. “Hen-rrreee!” And then she was upon him. She lightly flicked the paper out of his hands and into the fireplace. He saw the flames lick up and curl possessively around the unread article. Agnes continued, “Henry, tonight is the Jones’ bridge night. They’ll be here in thirty minutes and I’m not dressed yet, and here you are . . . reading.” She had emphasized the last word as though it were an unclean act. “Hurry and shave, you know how smooth Jasper Jones’ chin always looks, and then straighten up this room.” She glanced regretfully toward the fireplace. “Oh dear, that paper, the television schedule . . . oh well, after the Jones leave there won’t be time for anything but the late-late movie and . . . Don’t just sit there, Henry, hurrreeee!”
Henry was hurrying now, but hurrying too much. He cut his leg on a twisted piece of metal that had once been an automobile fender. He thought about things like lockjaw and gangrene and his hand trembled as he tied his pocket-handkerchief around the wound. In his mind, lie saw the fire again, licking across the face of last night’s newspaper. He thought that now he would have time to read all the newspapers he wanted to, only now there wouldn’t be any more. That heap of rubble across the street had been the Gazette Building. It was terrible to think there would never be another up to date newspaper. Agnes would have been very upset, no television schedule. But then, of course, no television. He wanted to laugh but he didn’t. That wouldn’t have been fitting, not at all.
He could see the building he was looking for now, but the silhouette was strangely changed. The great circular dome was now a ragged semi-circle, half of it gone, and one of the great wings of the building had fallen in upon itself. A sudden panic gripped Henry Bemis. What if they were all ruined, destroyed, every one of them? What if there wasn’t a single one left? Tears of helplessness welled in his eyes as he painfully fought his way over and through the twisted fragments of the city.
HE THOUGHT of the building when it had been whole. He remembered the many nights he had paused outside its wide and welcoming doors. He thought of the warm nights when the doors had been thrown open and he could see the people inside, see them sitting at the plain wooden tables with the stacks of books beside them. He used to think then, what a wonderful thing a public library was, a place where anybody, anybody at all could go in and read.
He had been tempted to enter many times. He had watched the people through the open doors, the man in greasy work clothes who sat near the door, night after night, laboriously studying, a technical journal perhaps, difficult for him, but promising a brighter future. There had been an aged, scholarly gentleman who sat on the other side of the door, leisurely paging, moving his lips a little as he did so, a man having little time left, but rich in time because he could do with it as he chose.
Henry had never gone in. He had started up the steps once, got almost to the door, but then he remembered Agnes, her questions and shouting, and he had turned away.
He was going in now though, almost crawling, his breath coming in stabbing gasps, his hands torn and bleeding. His trouser leg was sticky red where the wound in his leg had soaked through the handkerchief. It was throbbing badly but Henry didn’t care. He had reached his destination.
Part of the inscription was still there, over the now doorless entrance, P-U-B-C L-I-B-R—. The rest had been torn away. The place was in shambles. The shelves were overturned, broken, smashed, tilted, their precious contents spilled in disorder upon the floor. A lot of the books, Henry noted gleefully, were still intact, still whole, still readable. He was literally knee deep in them, he wallowed in books. He picked one up. The title was “Collected Works of William Shakespeare.” Yes, he must read that, sometime. He laid it aside carefully. He picked up another. Spinoza. He tossed it away, seized another, and another, and still another. Which to read first . . . there were so many.
He had been conducting himself a little like a starving man in a delicatessen—grabbing a little of this and a little of that in a frenzy of enjoyment.
But now he steadied away. From the pile about him, he selected one volume, sat comfortably down on an overturned shelf, and opened the book.
Henry Bemis smiled.
There was the rumble of complaining stone. Minute in comparison which the epic complaints following the fall of the bomb. This one occurred under one corner of the shelf upon which Henry sat. The shelf moved; threw him off balance. The glasses slipped from his nose and fell with a tinkle.
He bent down, clawing blindly and found, finally, their smashed remains. A minor, indirect destruction stemming from the sudden, wholesale smashing of a city. But the only one that greatly interested Henry Bemis.
He stared down at the blurred page before him.
He began to cry.
——THE END——
COLD WAR
Harry Warner, Jr.
Weather-control was a necessity in these times when arctic temperatures swept over the world and Ted Foreman couldn’t understand why his plans weren’t even being considered. It all pointed to one conclusion . . .
1
THE HOWLING of the wind outside rose above the hum of voices inside the big reception room. His fingers drumming on his knees, Ted Foreman felt the cold creeping through the thick walls and heated air of the International Weather Observers’ Chicago headquarters.
“Mr. Foreman?” A black-haired girl, dictation notebook tucked under one arm, stood before him. “The chief will see you now.”
Ted followed the girl through a labyrinth of inner offices. Her trim figure battled for his attention with the fascination of the isobar-filled maps on which technicians were working, the statistics that were pouring in on teletypes, the automatic calculating equipment that was pouring forth data.
“Mr. Foreman, Mr. Clark,” the girl said, as they reached an office that was larger than the others.
“Don’t go, Miss Cole,” Clark said; “you’d better take notes on our conversation.”
Ted stole another glance at the girl, then snapped his mind to attention on the authoritative-looking, bespectacled Clark.
“. . . So if my math is right,” Ted finally concluded his long explanation, “we could do something about this climate. If we can just make a start on weather-control procedures, it will start off a cumulative process. Nature would help us. If we broke up some clouds, the sun would get to work on ice; we’d be starting back toward the sort of climate that makes life worth living.”
Clark rose, turned his back to Ted, and stared out the window. Snow was beating against the double thickness of glass with silent, persistent fingers. The neighboring skyscraper, only a half-block away, was barely visible through the storm, and the wind continued its persistent, unsatisfied whine. Finally Clark turned back.
“You might as well go and s
tart transcribing your notes,” he told the girl. She snapped the notebook shut, and disappeared back into the labyrinth.
“It would take a long time to check your math, young man,” Clark said, again sitting down. “But you’ve overlooked two very important things.”
Ted pressed his lips tightly together, feeling that this was a decisive moment.
“The first thing,” Clark ticked it off on his fingers, “is that you’re not the first person to have the idea that weather-control might be possible as an antidote for this perpetual arctic climate. I’d estimate that we get the suggestion a hundred times a month.” Ted pointed to the thick sheaf of papers he had just been exhibiting. “You mean that my calculations just duplicate . . .”
CLARK INTERRUPTED. “You’ve gone further than most people; most of the letters we get just suggest starting mammoth fires, or something equally ridiculous. But you’re overlooking something else.
“Number two, our organization is strained to the very limit to do the work to which it is assigned already. We can’t spare the men to tackle any weather-control theories; if we did, our predictions and analyses would suffer. You know what that would mean—more famine than we have now, because of crop failures; another cutback on transportation; a dozen other things. Even though we’re supported by all the big governments in the world, the governments can’t afford to give us more money or more men. They’re having a hard enough time keeping us going at our present size, with the world’s economy disrupted by the change in the climate.”
“But it wouldn’t be such a big job to test out my theories,” Ted insisted. “I’ve got documentary evidence that there was pioneer weather-control work done years ago, back in the 1940’s.”
“Documentary evidence?” Clark leaned forward, suddenly alert.
“I found a couple of references to cloud-seeding and rain-making in an old reference-book in a second-hand store. Funny thing—I hunted up later editions of the book, and they left out all mention of those experiments.”
“I’d like you to send me that book,” Clark said. “I’m very much interested in it.” Then he stood up.
“You aren’t interested in anything else from me?”
“I’m afraid not. Good day.”
Ted yanked the zipper on his briefcase shut viciously, slammed his hat onto his head, and resisted the impulse to hurl the briefcase at Clark. He was striding out of the office when Clark’s voice came from behind him: “You’ll never find your way out of this maze; ask Miss Cole to show you out.”
Not turning around, Ted waited a moment until the girl slipped to his side. Her pencil was stuck behind her ear, and she looked at him anxiously: “Any luck?”
“No, and that’s an understatement.” Grim-faced, Ted walked beside her, retracing their previous confusing route. “He told me that I’m an extra-smart crackpot.”
“I’m so sorry,” the girl said in low, sympathetic tones. “I’ll bet my old boss would have given you more consideration.”
“Did they send him to Siberia for suggesting the use of blue pencils, instead of red pencils, to mark weather maps?”
“Well, he used to have the job that Mr. Clark holds. But—all of a sudden they transferred him to the Cape Cod observatory. That’s just about as cold and icy as Siberia used to be.”
Clutching at straws, Ted suggested: “If you think it would do any good, maybe you’d give me his name and address and I could write to him.”
“His name is Dr. Hermann Dietrich,” the girl told him. They were back in the reception room by now. “But it wouldn’t do any good to write to him. Your letter would be referred back to here by his secretary before he even saw it, because it concerns experimentation—and that’s not in his division.”
They stood by the reinforced glass window, watching snowplows fight their way up a wide Chicago street like tiny toys, twenty stories below. Here and there an ant-like person battled his way desperately along the sidewalk, battling the gale and knee-to-waist-deep snow.
“Look,” the girl whispered. “I can forge you a pass into the Cape Cod observatory, if you’re willing to go to the trouble of getting there. I have a feeling that Dr. Dietrich might be interested, if you can see him personally.”
“You’ve never seen me before,” Ted said, looking straight into her eyes. Her gaze held his for a long moment. “Why do you want to do this for me?”
“I guess I just like to help young men with good ideas,” she replied after a brief pause. “Wait here.” She scurried away.
Ted returned to the chair he had occupied a half-hour earlier, wishing he had asked about her first name.
TED REMEMBERED, as a boy, when autos still ran all winter in Chicago. But that was before the climatic changes had reached their peak. Back in his boyhood, airplanes flew in January; people ventured out without earmuffs in February; and below-zero readings were rarities.
But as Ted grew up, the climate grew worse. After the North American temperature averages had gradually climbed during the first half of the 20th century, the world’s climate had taken a turn for the worse—before the 1950’s were ended. Sensational Sunday-supplement articles about the approach of a new ice age had given Ted an interest in the weather that he had never lost.
By 1965, Chicago had winters when snow covered the ground without a break from early November until mid-April. The last major airline ended its regular schedules in North America, five years later, because of storms nine months in the year. Two of the ten years that followed 1970 resulted in world-wide famines, because of crop failures.
The United States had been luckier than the rest of the world. Europe and Asia, still recovering from war’s effects, had barely avoided mass starvation. Improvements in hydroponics, and advances in the science of nutrition, had kept most of the people alive.
The war—which had threatened to engulf the entire world during the ’50’s—was forgotten by the ’70’s, as the nations converted munition plants to greenhouses, and drafted young men and women to labor in the fields during the shortened summer. No army could have marched through the ice and bitter cold during most of the year, in any event.
The United Nations, turning its attention from dope-addiction and disarmament, had gone to work on the fight against the weather’s effects. The International Weather Observers was the new organization that had resulted, fighting a losing action against the inexorable advance of the ice-caps that were creeping southward through Canada and northern Europe.
As a schoolboy, Ted had taken temperature readings every day, comparing them with the official reports the following day. In college, weather had become a full-fledged hobby, with emphasis on efforts to predict the coming day’s weather more accurately than the I WO. In his spare time as a hydroponics engineer, he had developed revolutionary theories about the possibility of man’s changing the climate back to more temperate conditions.
A LONG HOUR passed before the girl returned. Ted’s eyes widened when he saw that she was bundled into the fur-lined overcoat that was now standard street wear for women. “Quitting time, Miss Cole?” he asked.
“It’s Carla Cole,” she replied, rapidly. “Button up your coat and pull up your boots; I’m going to have to tag along with you to the railroad station.”
Ted clambered into his clumsy, thick coat, pulled the hood down over his head, and snapped fast the buckles on his hip boots. Carla explained in guarded tones as they rode the elevator: “I got into hot water quick. One of the supervisors happened to see me typing out a pass into the Cape Cod observatory for you. He started to ask questions, and then I realized that I’d forgotten something very important. Just one person is never given a pass into the place; it’s always two people—one of them from the I WO if the other is an outsider. The supervisor was sitting there watching me, so the only thing to do was include myself on the pass. I told the supervisor that Mr. Clark had ordered it that way. And when Mr. Clark hears what I’ve done—” She made a very wry face.
Ted opened the
huge double-door of the building, and they walked out into the street. A sweep of super-chilled gale clutched them, the instant they left the lee of the building. Carla staggered at the force of the grasp of the wind, and Ted grabbed her around the waist, to keep her on her feet.
“It’s worse than ever today!” she shouted in his ear, above the whine of the gale. They bowed their heads and began to inch their way forward down the street, keeping close to the protection of the building.
“You’d better go back,” Ted suggested.
“It’ll be stormier indoors!” she said. “No, I’ll go along to the station with you; if they’ve put out a stop order on the transportation, I have credentials that might get you on the train.”
“What’ll happen to you after that?” Ted asked.
“We’ll worry about that when we come to it.”
TED’S HOTEL was only two blocks away, but they felt as if they had trudged for miles when they finally reached it. Carla sank exhausted into a chair in the lobby while Ted grabbed his valise, checked out, then accompanied her to the railroad station. It was a mile away, but downwind and easier walking. The snow was less than a foot deep most of the way.
Ted and Carla threw back their hoods and loosened their coats in the railroad station, which seemed warm even though the rules about fuel conservation kept its temperature down to 60. Then Carla headed for a telephone-booth. Through its glass panel, Ted could see her lips pucker into concentrated lines, then her eyes narrowed in worry. She finally emerged, somewhat subdued: “I tried to get through to the Cape Cod observatory; I thought that I might talk to Dr. Dietrich and tell him the truth. He’s a fine man, and I think he’d let you in. But he’s out at a sub-station somewhere where there isn’t a phone for the outside lines.”