by Ben Bova
“Can do,” Ted answered.
“And speaking of customers, it’ll be important to get as many as we can. We can’t depend on Thornton alone.”
“That’s not a technical job,” Ted countered. “I’m here to get the forecasts rolling, and then to do the research. Getting customers is your end of the business.”
I had to agree. “Okay. I’ll take a crack at bringing in new business.”
“Hope you enjoy flying,” Paul told me. “You’re going to spend a lot of time on jets.”
Seeing clouds from the ground is nothing compared to being up in their own domain, flying along with them. Taking off at sunset into a heavy bank of stratus lying thick and gray overhead, climbing into them and watching the world disappear from view, and then bursting out into a sky of flaming red with a royal carpet of deep, soft purple stretching out to the dying sun—nothing on Earth can match that. High in a jet the sky is always clear, no matter what the weather below, except for an occasional wisp of icy cirrus overhead. The sun shines every day up there, the sky is always crystal blue. Far down below, fat clumps of cumulus sail past, casting friendly shadows beneath them, their lumpy tops tufted by invisible tweaking fingers. Lanes and belts of clouds march across the face of the land, and sometimes giant storms blank out everything below and turn the view into an Antarctica of glaring white peaks and hazy valleys. Flying through the clouds, the plane bucks and shudders in their powerful wind currents while their crests whip by the viewport, a curtain of vapor that closes and opens and then closes again to hide even the wings from sight. Towering thunderheads flash ominously, streaking the darkness with lightning. Then the plane lands, back in man’s realm of rain and gray, back under the changeable skies, back in the world of weather.
The summer was long and bright. One sun-filled day after another. It was cooler than usual, but still the beach and mountain resorts did record business. Not one weekend was rained out. In fact, except for a few frontal storms, there was hardly any rain to speak of in New England. No one complained except the farmers. It was too dry, the crops were withering. But everyone in the cities knew that the autumn rains would solve the problem. Suburban homeowners sprinkled their lawns to keep them green, and talked about the salt-water conversion plants that had made water shortages a thing of the past.
But despite the desalting plants, the northeastern corner of the country was caught in a drought.
And so was I.
That whole summer, no matter where I traveled and how hard I worked, I couldn’t uncover a single new customer for Aeolus Research’s long-range weather forecasts.
“It looks fine on paper,” said the manager of a canned-goods firm, “and we would certainly be interested in predictions that could help us tell exactly when to plant each crop, and how much rainfall to expect. But if this scheme gave us some wrong information, we could ruin a year’s crop. Besides, why isn’t the Weather Bureau using this idea, if it’s so good?”
Another businessman was more blunt. “I don’t deal with people I don’t know. I know the Government weather people. I don’t know you. Or your ideas.”
In Kansas City, the president of an international hotel chain told me, “It looks great, it really does. Like a dream come true. But those buzzards on the board of directors just won’t believe it They’d never be the first to try something new.”
And the chief scientist of an oil company snorted, “Nonsense! The scheme will never work. And I know, because I’m a trained geologist!”
“What’s geology got to do with it?” Ted exploded when I told him about that one.
I was slumped in my office chair, gazing forlornly out the window at the gray September sky. Ted paced across the carpeting endlessly.
“Didn’t you show ’em the forecasts we’ve been supplying for Thornton?”
Nodding, I answered, “It didn’t convince them. It’s only about twelve weeks’ worth of predictions, and they claim that either we’re lucky or . . . or we’re cheating, writing the forecasts after seeing the Weather Bureau’s.”
“What?” He stiffened, eyes blazing. “Who said that?”
“A couple of them. Not in so many words, but their meaning was clear enough.”
Ted grumbled something to himself.
“Don’t be sore at them,” I said. “It’s my fault. I couldn’t convince them.”
Ted paced and muttered for a few minutes more. I stayed slumped in my chair. I had just returned from a crosscountry flight and hadn’t slept more than six hours in the previous two days.
“Listen,” he said, pulling up a chair beside my desk. “Maybe you were talking to the wrong guys. Instead of aiming at the company presidents and research directors, you ought to be talking to the working-level engineers and group leaders . . . the guys who’d use our forecasts if their bosses’d buy ’em. The stuffed shirts up at the top know what’s impossible; nobody can convince ’em in one sitting. But get to the plant managers or research scientists or engineers. Invite ’em here to the Lab; pay their way if you have to. Let ’em spend a few days here, learning what we do and how we do it. Then they’ll be on our side.”
“And then they’ll convince their own bosses?”
“Right.”
“Do you think it’ll work . . . in time, I mean. We’ve only got until next April.”
He grinned. “It’d better work!”
The winter came and went, colder, more severe than usual, but with comparatively little snow. The skiers complained bitterly, and several mountain resorts closed for long stretches while their owners sadly contemplated bare slopes and melting bank accounts. In February, a good part of Boston harbor froze over and the Coast Guard had to assign an icebreaker to keep the port partially open. Back away from the coast, in the frigid valleys and frozen hillsides, the farmers waited stonily for the snow that never came. Not enough spring runoff from the mountains, they knew. The streams would be shallow in the spring; the fields would be dry.
9. Drought Pattern
DURING that bitter, dry winter, I followed Ted’s strategy. It took an endless amount of travel and talking, living in strange hotel rooms, eating in all sorts of restaurants, waking in the mornings and straining hard to recall which city and what day of the week it was. But the young engineers and researchers started trickling in to the Laboratory. One or two at a time, they’d come in for a few days, watch and listen to Ted and Tuli, and go back to their jobs with new lights in their eyes. By March we were getting official inquiries from several companies. They wanted to do business with us.
The meteoroid was a chunk of rock no bigger than a man’s fist. For thousands of centuries it had orbited about the sun without coming to within twenty million miles of another solid body its own size. But at an inevitable point in time, the far-distant sun and planets aligned themselves in such a way that the meteoroid was pulled to within a few million miles of Earth. It was close enough. Earth’s powerful gravity drew the little rock; it gained speed and began “falling” toward the blue planet. It hit the atmosphere going about twelve miles per second and formed a shock wave that heated the air around it to incandescence. The rock itself began to boil away; by the time it had plunged to within twenty-five miles of Earth’s surface there was nothing left of it but a fine spray of microscopic dust grains. For days the dust sifted downward. Some of the grains glided over the American Midwest and were washed out of the air by rainfall. Part of the meteoroid’s substance reached the ground in raindrops and eventually flowed to sea. But over New England, the dust grains drifted through the air for days. Conditions seemed good for rain: there was moisture in the air, and dust nuclei; the winds were coming off the ocean. But no rain fell.
“So you managed to get through a year without folding up,” Father said. He looked pleased and puzzled at the same time, as I watched him on my office viewscreen.
“You seem surprised,” I said.
“I am.”
Leaning back in my swivel chair and clasping my hands behind my
head, I admitted, “So am I . . . a little.”
“The long-range forecasts have been very accurate,” Father said. “This spring has been just as rough as last year’s, but the dredging is going smoothly. We’ll even be able to recoup what we lost last spring.”
“Ted worked very hard on those forecasts.”
Father chuckled. “He hasn’t driven you broke yet?”
“Not yet. He’s tried a few times, but we’ve been able to hold the line, so far. He’s got the forecasts coming out for two weeks ahead now. I wanted him to extend them to four weeks, but he drew the line there. He’s putting all his efforts and budget into research on weather control.”
“A four-week forecast would be very valuable.”
“I know. But “Fed’s made up his mind. We have the two-week forecasts and the ninety-day general climatological predictions . . . you know, they predict the average temperatures and rainfall for a given area, and show the storm tracks.”
“Yes, I’ve seen them. They’re good.”
I nodded. “Well, we get the two-week forecasts out every Wednesday; that gives us overlapping coverage. And the ninety-day predictions come out once a month. To do more than that, we’d need more technical staff, which we can’t afford yet. Ted’s got a small crew working on nothing but research, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t think he’s locked himself in some ivory tower, Dad. Whenever we’ve had trouble with the forecasts, he’s dropped the research to help straighten things out. And he’s spent a lot of time showing potential customers what we can do for them. He’s our all-star team, all in one man.”
“It sounds as if you’re in reasonably good shape, then.” Father looked almost happy about it.
“We’re afloat. We’ve signed up four new customers, besides the Thornton concerns, and three other companies are talking about contracts with us.”
“Good. You’ve got the company on its feet. Your friends are gainfully employed. You’ve had a year’s worth of experience . . . and fun. Now I want you to come back home, son. I need you here.”
“Home?” I snapped forward in the chair and grabbed the desk hard with both hands. “But I never . . .”
“Thornton Pacific is your company, Jeremy. Not this weather business.”
“You can’t expect me to just walk out of here!”
“I certainly can,” he said firmly. “I want you back home where you belong.”
“I can’t leave now.”
“You mean you won’t!”
“Are you ordering me to come home?”
“Is that what you want me to do?”
By now I was sitting on the front inch of my chair. Father and I were glaring at each other.
“Listen, Dad. The first Jeremy Thom put his money into clipper ships when all his advisers and friends were backing the Erie Canal. Grandfather—Jeremy the Second—put the family into the airplane business. You yourself marched off to Hawaii and went into the undersea business. All right—I’m following the family pattern. I’m sticking here and weather control is what I’m after.”
“But it’s impossible.”
“So were airplanes and deep-sea dredges.”
“All right!” he shouted. “Be a stubborn little idiot. But don’t think you can come running home to safety when your pipe dreams fall flat! You’re on your own, don’t ask me for help or advice.”
“Isn’t that the same speech Grandfather made to you before you went to Hawaii?”
He snapped off the connection. The screen went dead. I was on my own.
And enjoying it! I had never really worked before starting Aeolus, never really sunk my teeth into a job that just wouldn’t get done unless I did it. Now I was working night and day. I spent more time in my office than in my hotel room. I forgot about TV, and sailing, and even visiting
Thornton. But I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun, as much of a feeling of building something worthwhile, as I did when we were getting Aeolus into high gear.
Late one night, a week or so after Father’s explosion, Ted popped into my office.
“Still working?”
I looked up from the contract I was trying to read. “There’s a lot of fine print to wade through in this job.”
“Got a friend of yours outside. Took her to dinner and she wanted to come over and say hello. Hasn’t seen much of you the past couple of weeks.”
“Barney? Where is she?”
“Down in my shop, with Tuli.”
“Tuli’s still here? What’s going on tonight?”
Ted leaned nonchalantly against the doorjamb, his big frame filling the open doorway. “Been doing some calculations about the drought. Barney’s checking ‘em over.”
I closed the contract folder and shoved it into a desk-top basket.
“This must be pretty special,” I said, getting to my feet. “You could have used the regular Aeolus computations group to check your calculations.”
“Already did. Barney’s double-checking . . . and seeing if Rossman’s done anything along the same lines.”
We walked down the hall to Ted’s room. He didn’t have a regular office; his room was big enough to hold a squash court. He had all sorts of junk in it: a desk with a table to one side of it and an electronics console on the other, half a dozen file cabinets, a tattered old contour lounge that he had somehow smuggled out of the Air Force, a conference table surrounded by the unlikeliest assortment of chairs, and no less than four coffeepots standing in a row on the windowsill. Outside the window was a small automatic weather station.
The entire wall opposite the door was covered by Ted’s private joy: a viewscreen map of the continental United States. He had worked nonstop for weeks to make the map exactly the way he wanted it.
Barney and Tuli were sitting at the conference table as we walked in, thumbing through sheets of notes that were partly computer print-out and partly Ted’s heavy-handed scrawl.
She looked up as we entered. “Jerry, how are you?”
“I’m fine. How have you been?”
“She’s obviously in wonderful shape,” Ted cracked. “Now, what about the numbers, Barney?”
“I can’t find anything glaringly wrong with them,” she said with a shrug. “Of course, I haven’t had time really to go through it thoroughly—”
“Could use our computer,” Ted suggested.
Tuli said in that quiet way of his, “The computer runs at any hour of the day or night. It’s entirely free of human frailty, such as the need for sleep.”
“All right, so I’m asking a favor,” Ted said, waving his hands. “I’d feel better about the numbers if Barney checked ’em out.”
“Can I start tomorrow night?” she asked.
“After dinner,” I said.
“Okay, we’ll all eat together,” Ted countered.
I asked, “What is this all about, anyway?”
Instead of answering, Ted paced to the console beside his desk and touched a few buttons. A weather map sprang
up on the lighted viewscreen: lines and symbols that showed air masses and storm cells across the country, and the weather reported at each major city.
“Here’s the way it looks right now,” Ted said. “Those numbers down in the bottom right corner are precipitation totals from New England. So far this year, we’re standing at nearly half the region’s average rainfall.”
“And snowfall,” Tuli added softly.
“That pile of calculations I showed you,” Ted went on, squatting on his desk, “is a general forecast for New England as far ahead as I can make halfway accurate numbers. Runs to the end of the year.”
“Seven months,” Barney mused. “The reliability won’t be terribly high . . .
“Maybe not, but take a look.” Ted fiddled with the control buttons, and we watched the weather patterns unfold across the face of the continent. Hot summer air welled up from the tropics, late-afternoon thunderstorm symbols flickered here and there, cooler air masses
swung in from the north and west, triggering squall lines across their fronts. You could see autumn taking hold of the nation, and hurricanes hitting Florida and the Gulf Coast. Then came winter and bitter Arctic air, with tiny starlike symbols of snow sprinkling over the northern two-thirds of the country.
“It’s now December thirty-first,” Ted said when the map stopped changing. “Happy New Year.”
“Not very happy,” Tuli observed, “if those precipitation figures are correct.”
I looked at the numbers; New England had received less than half of its usual rainfall.
“Drought pattern,” Ted said. “And a rough one. This neck of the country’s in for trouble. While the Midwest’ll be flooded.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Barney asked.
“Stop it.”
“How?”
“Don’t know . . . yet. But I’m going to make it the business of this Lab to find out.”
Turning from the map toward Ted, I said, “We’ll have to find considerably more money to work on a problem of this size.”
“We’re going to work on it,” Ted answered firmly. “You can worry about the money. If you can find people who want to pay us for it, great. But we’re going to work on it anyway.”
He turned to Barney. “Rossman doing anything like this?”
“Not that I know of. Of course, his official forecasts don’t run this far into the future.”
“But unofficially?”
“I think he’s trying to figure out your type of forecasting technique. He has a small group of people doing some special work for him. It’s very hush-hush. At least, no one will tell me anything about it.”
Ted didn’t answer, but his face settled into a frown.
That night I took the slideway home to my hotel. It was a beautiful warm night, with the thinnest sliver of a moon in a cloudless, star-studded sky. I found myself wishing it would rain.
While Ted was studying the drought pattern, I decided to take a look at the political climate of New England. I found that most of the people in the governments of the six states considered the drought bothersome, but not really serious. No one seemed terribly worried; the salt-water conversion plants were preventing any real shortages in the coastal cities, and the inland reservoirs were still in fairly good shape.