The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  “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.

  6. Squall

  THE 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.

  Ted shared the office with Tuli. It was a tiny room, the same size as Dr. Barneveldt’s cell. Jammed into it were two desks, a pair of filing cabinets, two bookcases bolted one on top of the other, and three electric coffeepots sitting in a row on the windowsill. Ted drank coffee the way bears go for honey, and he hated waiting for a fresh pot to perk, Barney explained. So he kept three pots going constantly.

  On top of each desk was a fax copy of the morning weather report for the entire northern hemisphere. I leafed through it, and saw that there was another storm building up in the Pacific.

  Then I remembered: Father!

  I put through a long-distance call, charging it to my hotel number. When Father’s face appeared on the screen he was bleary and unshaven.

  “It is four in the morning here, Jeremy,” he said in a slow, barely controlled growl. “Since Friday afternoon I have tried to reach you six times, to no avail. The dredges are still operating, but I have not heard from you about this long-range prediction system. Your story had better be good.”

  “I’m sorry I got you out of bed, Dad . . . I forgot about the time difference. And, uh, my news isn’t really very good, either, I’m afraid.”

  I explained about Dr. Rossman’s refusal to put Ted’s scheme into immediate operation, and Ted’s deliberate tampering with the weather. Strangely, Father smiled, as I told him about it.

  “The boy’s got guts,” he said.

  Father always admired people who stood up to their superiors—as long as he wasn’t the superior being stood up to.

  “Yes,” I said, “but what are you going to do about the dredges? There’s another storm building up in the area . . .”

  “I didn’t know that. I haven’t seen the morning forecasts yet. It’s very rare that I’m up this early.”

  I winced.

  “I suppose, Jeremy, there’s nothing we can do except shut down the dredges for the rest of the spring season. Or until your friend Marrett gets a go-ahead for his long-range forecasts. I’ll try to get an extension on our contract with Modern Metals, but we’re going to get a black eye on this one, boy.”

  Ted was crackling with nervous energy at lunch, like a fighter trained to a fine edge before facing the champion.

  “Jerry volunteered to see Dr. Rossman,” Barney said as we sat down in the cafeteria. “He can give a personal account of the effect on the weather that you caused.”

  Ted nodded eagerly. “Good idea. An unprejudiced witness.”

  Barney hunched forward over the table so we could hear her over the clattering din. “I don’t know if it would be better for him to see Dr. Rossman before you do, or to go in with you.”

  “We can go in together,” Ted decided, “all four of us. Overpower the old boy.”

  I looked at Barney. She was smiling.

  Dr. Barneveldt came up to our table and put a hand on Ted’s shoulder. “I understand you did some experimenting Friday night.”

  Ted grinned. “A little. Those new pellets of yours worked pretty well.”

  “Do you have the data from the monitoring planes? I’d like to see it.”

  Tuli said, “There were no monitoring planes. Only the plane carrying the seeding materials.”

  Dr. Barneveldt’s face fell. “I don’t understand.”

  Without leaving his seat, Ted pulled a chair from a neighboring table o
ver for the old man. As Dr. Barneveldt sat down, Ted explained, “I got the plane to take off early and fly past its usual dumping spot, so we could seed the area that had to be changed. But I didn’t want to tip off the whole fleet of monitoring planes . . . too much of a chance that somebody’d complain and the whole job would get grounded. So, after the seeding plane was on its way, the pilot called back and told the monitoring planes he was off course and was going to dump the pellets and turn back. The monitoring planes never got off the ground.”

  “So there were no observations made of the experiment?”

  “Nope.”

  “None at all?”

  Ted said, “We saw the effect your pellets had on the weather. That’s what counts.”

  Dr. Barneveldt shook his head. “Ted, this is bad science. You have no real data. An experiment should never be run so haphazardly. Suppose there had been no effect on the weather? How would you know what went wrong?”

  “Academic question,” Ted countered. “When you’re bootlegging, you have to cut comers. You don’t make progress without sticking your neck out.”

  “Behold the lowly turtle,” Tuli quipped.

  “You are daring,” Dr. Barneveldt said. “And lucky.”

  “We’ll see how lucky in a few minutes. Rossman wants to see me at one thirty.”

  Precisely at 1:30 P.M., Dr. Rossman’s secretary ushered the four of us into his office.

  He looked up from the paperwork on his desk. “I didn’t know this was going to be a group conference.”

  Right away I could see the clouds darkening: frontal squall.

  “We’re all involved in this, one way or another,” Ted answered.

  Rossman eyed us sullenly as we pulled chairs up and sat before his desk.

  “I want an explanation of what happened Friday night,” he said.

  “Simple,” Ted said. “We proved that weather control works. And pretty easily, too.”

  “Don’t say ‘we,’ Marrett!” Rossman snapped. “It’s you; keep your friends out of it.”

  “I’m not looking for protection,” Ted shot back. “I’m giving them credit for helping with the basic work.”

  “But you—and you alone—are responsible for Friday night.”

  “That’s right.”

  Rossman shuffled through his papers. “Do you know what this is?” He brandished a memorandum. “It’s an estimate of the cost to the Department of that plane’s flight over the ocean.”

  “The plane was going to that general region anyway.”

  “And this,” he pulled out a telegram, “is a formal complaint from the Air Force about unauthorized persons being involved in their highly secret laser operations. Unauthorized. That’s you, Marrett. You could be cited for a violation of national security!”

  “But, Dr. Rossman—” I began.

  “Wait a minute, Jerry,” Ted said, turning back to Rossman. “Listen. I spent two years in the Air Force, a good chunk of it on orbital duty. I know those lasers inside out. How do you think I got the idea of using ‘em to alter the weather? I haven’t spied on anybody, or broken Security regs. All I did was ask a buddy of mine who’s still on duty up there to pay special attention to a certain geographic location. I didn’t even mention the word laser’ to him. So there’s no violation. Don’t threaten me.”

  “Do you realize that I can deduct from your salary the cost of that radiophone call to the orbital station?”

  “You can’t put radiophone calls through to the military satellites. I went over to Otis Air Force Base—on my own time—and got some friends of mine to place the message.” Rossman glowered at Ted, his long, sour face flushed with anger. “And do you realize that you ruined Dr. Barneveldt’s experiment? There weren’t even any monitoring planes aloft when the pellets were dropped.”

  “When are you going to realize,” Ted demanded, springing to his feet, “that we proved we can change the weather. Efficiently, quickly, and definitely make deliberate changes! You’re screaming about nickels and dimes when the whole concept of meteorology can be changed. We can make accurate long-range forecasts; we can understand the planetary flow patterns in detail; we can change the weather deliberately. Now are you going to open your eyes or stand there blocking the way?”

  Rossman nearly turned purple. Ted stood there before his desk, looming over him. Visibly trembling, Rossman got up from his chair.

  “Can you prove you changed the weather?” he asked in a choked voice.

  I said, “I can vouch for that, Dr. Rossman. The forecast Saturday morning was completely different from the actual weather.”

  Ignoring me, he asked Ted again, “Can you prove your illegal operations actually forced a weather change? Or would the change have occurred anyway?”

  “We operated. The weather changed. Your own predictions didn’t foresee the change.”

  “But you have no proof whatsoever that the change wasn’t completely natural. You made no observations. You took no data. For all you know, the weather would have changed without your lifting a finger.”

  “No. My long-range forecast showed—”

  But Rossman was fishing through the papers on his desk again. “And here’s another little item—a note from the statistics group. That rainstorm would have helped alleviate the water shortage that’s building up. Suppose the farmers learn that the Climatology Division deliberately took away their best chance for a soaking rain for as far ahead as we can foresee? How long do you think we’d stay in our jobs?” Ted spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, you can’t have it both ways. Either we didn’t have any effect on the weather or we robbed the pitiful farmers of their rain. Now which is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Rossman snapped. “And I don’t care.

  Marrett, I will not have people sneaking behind my back. And I will not tolerate insubordination. Ill expect your resignation on my desk by the end of the day. If not, I’ve got enough on you to get a review’ board to toss you out on your ear. You’re finished, Marrett. Finished!”

  7. Cross Currents

  I MUST have been in a state of shock as we filed out of Dr. Rossman’s office. I really don’t remember what we said or did. I can recall Rossman’s angry, twisted face, Ted’s stunned expression. The next thing I remember is entering my hotel room.

  I must have sat there for quite a while. The buzz of the phone snapped my attention to the room around me.

  “Answer,” I called out, realizing now that the room was dark. Outside, the towers of Back Bay were looming shadows against the reddening sky.

  Barney’s face took form on the viewscreen. “Jerry . . . what are we going to do? Ted’s cleaned out his desk. He’s gone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At Climatology. I . . . what’s Ted going to do?”

  I could see that she had been crying. “Well, don’t go to pieces, now. The world hasn’t ended.”

  Shaking her head, she told me, “You don’t understand. Ted is ruined. His career is finished.”

  “Just because he lost a job? That’s not—”

  “It’s not only a job. The Climatology Division is the only place where Ted had any chance at all of doing the work he wants to do, And Dr. Rossman can prevent him from getting another position anywhere in the Government.”

  I hadn’t realized that. “Well . . . there’s private industry. Lots of firms have meteorological offices. My Uncle Lowell’s airline, for instance. And they pay a lot better than the Government.”

  “But they don’t do research on weather control . . . or long-range forecasts.”

  “Maybe they could . . . maybe . . .”

  “And how is Ted going to finish school? The Division was sponsoring him at MIT. Now that he’s fired he has no way of paying tuition or anything. And Dr. Rossman won’t give him any kind of a reference, and . . . Jerry, it’s so hopeless!”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t go off the deep end. No matter how bad it looks, we can still figure out somethin
g. I remember something my father told me once: When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

  She was silent for a moment. I watched her face; it looked like a little girl’s, trying to be brave, holding back the tears.

  “I just don’t think I’m very tough, Jerry,” she said. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  All right, a voice inside me said, talk is easy; now let’s see you act. For the first time in my life, I felt a weight of responsibility settle on me.

  “Where is Ted now?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know . . . Probably on his way back to his apartment.”

  “See if you can get him to come here. You come too. And Tuli. We might as well all get together.”

  “But what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I answered. “But I can tell you what we’re not going to do: we’re not going to mope around and act as if the world’s come to a sudden stop.”

  It was fully dark by the time they got to my room—the three of them together. Ted was gloomy, the first time I’d ever seen him let down.

  “Look at ’em,” he muttered, standing at my window and watching the crowded, brightly lit streets below. “They walk around with plastic clothes and earplug radios that tell ’em the latest news from the moon. But they’ve got no more control over the weather than the cavemen did.”

  He turned to us. “Y’know, when I was a kindergarten kid, my father took me to a movie . . . some cartoon with classical music for a background: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. This cartoon character was standing on top of a cliff, making magic, making lightning flash from the clouds, making the sea smash against the base of the cliff . . . I think that’s when I first started wondering about controlling the weather.”

  He grinned, a little sheepishly. “Kindergarten dream. Pretty wild, eh?”

  Barney brought us back to the immediate problem. “Ted, did you talk to the people at MIT?”

  With a nod, he answered, “Professor Martingale’ll fix it so I can stay and get my degree. I’ll be okay, long as I don’t overeat between now and June.”