The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  “Seventy-three, fifty-one, ten-sixteen, point-oh-four, west twelve to eighteen,” Tuli answered in singsong chant.

  “Check. Memphis.”

  Barney stole over to my chair and whispered, “They’re checking the five o’clock weather reports from selected stations around the country against the forecasts Ted made last week. So far, everything is checking to within a few percent.”

  “Good.”

  It was well past midnight when Ted finally turned over the last sheet of computer print-out and said triumphantly, “On the line, every last one of ‘em. We got it, kids. We’ve got it cold!”

  “Do you think Dr. Rossman will believe it?” Barney asked from the range. She was boiling water for instant coffee.

  “He’s got to,” Ted snapped. “The numbers are all here and they check. He’s got to buy it.”

  “Could you do the same thing,” I asked, “for a region in the mid-Pacific?”

  He turned to me. “For Thornton’s dredging operations? Sure, why not? Won’t be as accurate, ‘cause there aren’t as many observation stations out there . . . but we can make it good enough to tell your people when to button up for storms.”

  “How far in advance?”

  He shrugged. “Week or ten days, at least. Probably two weeks.”

  “Great!”

  “Take a lot of work,” he said. “We can’t go on bootlegging forever.”

  “Thornton can pay for it,” I said.

  “The first item of business,” Tuli pointed out, “is to match the rest of the forecasts against the actual weather reports for the rest of the week—”

  “And then lay ‘em under Rossman’s long nose,” Ted cracked, “and watch him turn green with surprise. Friday’s the big day. I’ll show everything to Rossman then.”

  “Is it still supposed to rain over the weekend?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Supposed to.”

  “We won’t be able to go sailing,” I said.

  “Don’t give up hope. The situation could change.”

  I didn’t realize what he meant. “You’re going to come anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Try and stop us!”

  Thursday dragged by. I read a good bit of the time, but it was tough going. Most of the books were too full of equations for me to follow; the others were written for simpletons. None of them conveyed the excitement that Ted did about the living, breathing nature of the weather. By Friday I had given up on reading and spent the day staring at the TV screen.

  Sure enough, as I started to drive out to the Climatology building it began drizzling. I never saw a more dispirited trio as they walked across the parking lot in the rain and climbed into my car.

  “Don’t be so glum,” I said. “Even if we can’t sail, we can have a lot of fun at Thornton.”

  “It’s not that,” Barney said, sitting beside me.

  “What’s wrong?” I saw that she was on the verge of tears. In the back seat, Ted slouched back disgustedly, his chin on his chest. Even the normally impassive Tuli looked crushed.

  Barney said, “Ted showed his forecasts to Dr. Rossman this afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “He thinks they’re very interesting, thank you,” Ted growled, “but there’s no use getting excited over what was probably a lucky accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “That’s the word he used.”

  “But . . . what’s it mean?”

  “Nothing. That’s exactly what it means. We show him how to make pinpoint predictions a week in advance, and he wants to stick the idea in a drawer and forget about it!”

  5. A Weather Change

  “THAT’S not exactly true,” Tuli said as I gunned the car’s engine and started off the Climatology parking lot. “Dr. Rossman said he wants to study the new technique before he proposes it to Washington as a standard Weather Bureau forecasting method.”

  “Study it,” Ted grumbled. “You know what that means—couple of years, at least.”

  “He’s a cautious man,” Tuli said.

  “Yeah, especially with other people’s ideas. He could use the system on an experimental basis and see if it works. In three months he’d have enough data to satisfy Congress, the Supreme Court, and the College of Cardinals. But not him. He’s going to sit on it and play around with it until it gets to be known as his idea.”

  “You mean you won’t be able to make any more long-range forecasts?” I asked.

  “Not now. The idea belongs to the Climatology Division now . . . Rossman thinks it’s his private property. He told me to get back to doing the work I’m paid to do and stop trying to run the Division.”

  I began to feel just as dreary as the clouds above us. “What about weather control?”

  “You should’ve seen his face when I brought that up. Told him the whole idea of these long-range forecasts is to make weather control workable. He nearly fainted. Absolutely forbade me to even mention the subject again.”

  We drove out to the North Shore in dismal silence. By the time we reached the causeway that connected Marblehead Neck to the mainland it was raining steadily.

  “Right on the button,” Ted mumbled gloomily as he stared out the car window. “Rain tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday. They think.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Barney asked.

  All he would answer was, “You’ll see.”

  The house hadn’t changed much since the few summers before when I had last seen it. Thornton was big without being pretentious—a clean-lined white Colonial mansion with black shutters and a red door, a modest lawn, flowering shrubs around the front porch, and a garage, boathouse, and pier out back.

  I pulled up in front of the main door, under the weather roof. Ted got out first:

  “Who built this, Miles Standish?”

  “No,” I said, sliding out from behind the controls. “Actually, it was built well after the Revolution, and then rebuilt about a hundred years ago, after a hurricane knocked down the original house.”

  Ted looked at me as though he thought I might have been kidding him.

  “It’s beautiful,” Barney said, as I helped her out of the car.

  The front door opened and Aunt Louise came out toward me, arms extended. She was followed by a trio of servants.

  “Jeremy, it’s so good to see you!” She threw her arms around my neck. There was nothing I could do but stand there and take it. After a few gushy moments, I disentangled myself and introduced Barney, Tuli, and Ted.

  “Welcome to Thornton,” she said. “The servants will take your bags and show you to your rooms. We’re planning to have dinner in an hour.”

  While they followed the servants upstairs, Aunt Louise practically towed me into the library.

  “Now tell me truthfully,” she said as the massive doors slid themselves shut behind her. “How is your father?”

  “He’s fine. Really. Perfect health, cantankerous disposition, full of energy. He drives my brothers and me ragged.” She smiled, but sadly. “You know he hasn’t been here since your grandfather’s funeral.”

  “And none of you have been to Hawaii since my mother died,” I said. “It seems to take a funeral to get the family together.”

  I walked along the ceiling-high bookshelves, back to the ornate wooden desk where Grandfather Thorn used to spend rainy afternoons during my New England visits telling me how he talked his father into investing money on commercial airlines, after generations of Thorn shipbuilding success.

  Aunt Louise followed me across the room. “Jeremy, you know your father always was a rebel. He could have run your grandfather’s interests and lived right here at Thornton. He could have been head of the family, he’s the oldest. But he got mixed up in that drilling thing . . .

  “The Mohole.”

  “Yes, and he had an argument with your grandfather. So he ran off to Hawaii.”

  “And now he lives there and runs his own interests.”

  “But we never see each other,” she said. “It
isn’t right.”

  “Well, why don’t you invite him here? I think he’d be more than glad to come, if he thought you really wanted him to.”

  “Do you really believe he would?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll talk it over with your uncles tonight.”

  “They’re both here?”

  “Yes, for the weekend. They were planning a fishing trip, but it looks as if the rain will ruin everything.”

  For some reason I said, “Don’t be too sure.”

  Both my uncles were completely unlike Father—and each other. Uncle Lowell was heavy-set, paunchy, balding, and loud. He liked cigars and conversation, especially when he was doing the talking. Uncle Turner was very tall and thin, rather quiet; he looked like the popular conception of a New England Yankee.

  Uncle Lowell dominated the first three courses of dinner, in the chandeliered old dining room, with a monologue on how Thornton Aerospace was prospering, how the rocket transport business was definitely in the black and repaying all his risks and investment, and he was now able to devote some of his precious time and engineers to helping Uncle Turner develop the new oceangoing air-cushion ships for Thornton Shipping Lines.

  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.r />
  “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.”