The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  It was a dry, brittle autumn, without the coastal storms of normal years. Frosts came early and then a flood of southern air swept into New England. Indian summer, but not a pleasant one. Cool air from the north was trapped under the lighter, Warmer air. Meteorologists called it a thermal inversion. For days on end the weather was deathly calm, without even a breeze to rustle the paper-dry colored leaves. The air hung heavy with smoke and fog from burning leaves, tinderbox forests ablaze, automobile exhausts, factory smokestacks, sea fog along the coasts—all blended into a hazy, sickening smog that crawled over the landscape and settled down, with no wind to blow it away. Straight overhead the sky w as clear and heart-catchingly blue; but the horizon was lost in dirty mists. Respiratory ailments soared upward sharply, eyes stung and watered, breathing was difficult for many. Indian summer, the best season of all in normal times. Now everyone looked for cold, and snow, and above all, wind.

  Indian summer ended in a single day when a thirty-knot wind howled down from the northwest and sent thermometers plummeting all over New England. It was winter, sudden, sharp, and painfully cold.

  The months rattled by one after the other. Ted drove himself night and day, working on the drought problem. He wore out whole sets of assistants, computers, and researchers. Tuli kept up with him most of the time, but only by taking a three- or four-day break each month to do nothing but rest. Ted never rested. I had my hands full with business matters, especially getting out progress reports to keep our new customers happy. Research results, financial status, equipment purchased, papers written, personnel hired, consultants, travel, material—we had to report on everything.

  Straight through the winter Ted hammered on the theoretical side of the problem. He was trying to uncover the causes of the drought, the reasons why a climate pattern so unlike the usual one can establish itself over the area for years on end. Part of this search, of course, was devoted to identifying the conditions needed to break the drought.

  “Breaks up by itself sooner or later,” he mused in one of the rare moments we had to talk together. “Got to get three basic patterns: the drought pattern, the normal pattern, and the changeover where the drought starts to break up.”

  “And once you’ve identified all three?” he waved a hand. “Then we start to worry about how to move the drought through a break-up pattern into the normal situation. But first we’ve got to get the parameters of each one down in black and white. Which ain’t easy, friend.”

  It was a staggering computer job. Millions upon millions of bits of data were fed into the computers in an attempt to make some understandable sense out of the known weather conditions, past and present. Not only the conditions for New England had to be accounted for; the entire northern hemisphere was put into the picture.

  “Drought’s only one small slice of the global picture,” Ted pointed out. “Can’t play blind men and the elephant. Got to see the whole beast—with both eyes wide open.” It was too big a job for Aeolus’ computers to handle alone. I tried to get help from the local Weather Bureau, but they turned me down. ESSA in Washington did the same; not a single agency would cooperate with us. “Rossman’s work,” Ted growled.

  So I turned to Thornton, while Ted tried persuading MIT. We spent a medium-sized fortune setting up a tight-beam microwave communications link over half the eastern seaboard so that computers from Thornton’s Washington, New York, and Boston offices and the MIT computers could “talk” with our own machines at our Logan Airport location. The effect was to produce a computer of prodigious size and ability; a few hundred miles between the various parts of our super-computer meant nothing to the machine. It worked with the speed of light. Literally.

  By the time the next Fourth of July came by, the drought was major news. The year before, only a few specialists had been concerned. Now there were stories in all the news media and on television almost every day. Reservoirs had dried up, streams had disappeared, even large rivers were showing sandbars and boulders where no living person could remember anything but deep, moving water. Farm delegations were angrily clamoring for action, and we had to keep Ted carefully away from newsmen for fear that he’d give the impression we could break up the drought in a few weeks. Our official line was that we were carrying out research, but the final answers might be years away.

  Inland cities went on water rationing that summer, and factories began closing down, throwing thousands out of work. The coastal cities fared better with their desalting plants, but even there they couldn’t make enough fresh water to come close to the demands for it. Suburban lawns began to wither and wells went dry under the uninterrupted blaze of the summer sun. Public fountains were turned off, air conditioners went out unless they used no water, fishing and camping grounds were closed against the threat of forest fires.

  But in the Midwest rivers swelled over their banks to flood cities and farms alike under a merciless series of torrential downpours. ,

  By midsummer Ted was ready for experiments. Most of them were down in the lab, but for some we rented planes and ran tests far out at sea. We had to keep very quiet about the experiments, for fear the press would make the public think that the problem would be solved with a wave of Ted’s hand.

  About the only time I saw Barney all that summer, for more than a quick hello or a hurried meal together, was in

  August when the Perseid meteor shower put on its annual show.

  The shower was at its height over a weekend, and I brought her down to Thornton where we could get a good view of the sky from the beach.

  We stayed on the beach all night, watching the meteors bum across the sky, streaks of light against the changeless stars. They came from all quarters, flashing into brilliance, some of them showering sparks as they raced across the heavens and then snuffed out, all in the span of a heartbeat. If you traced their courses backward, they all tracked to the constellation Perseus, the Hero.

  Somehow they reminded me of Ted, these meteors that made the stars themselves seem commonplace as they dashed through the sky, brilliant, purposeful, following a trail that never wavered. They moved in absolute silence, an eerie contrast to their blazing luminosity. It was as if they knew exactly where they had to go, and were hurrying to take their assigned places before some celestial deadline fell.

  For hours our conversation was limited to brief snatches about the meteors. There was just too much going on overhead to think of anything else. But finally the sky began to pale and the meteors slacked off. Somewhere up near the house I could hear a bird start to twitter. The stars were fading out, and the sea horizon was beginning to turn pink.

  We walked, suddenly sleepy now, back to the house.

  “How is Ted?” Barney asked.

  “Haven’t you seen him?”

  She shook her head. “Not for a week or so.”

  “He’s all right,” I said. “Working like a demon. Make that two demons.”

  “Uncle Jan said he’s possessed . . . possessed by the idea of controlling the weather.”

  “But why? Why should someone get so wrapped up in an idea?”

  She stopped and turned back to look at the brightening eastern sky. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s afraid that there’s nothing else he can do that amounts to anything important. Whatever it is, it could destroy him. If it doesn’t work—or if he’s kept from making it work—it could tear him apart.”

  “I guess so, but everything seems to be going pretty well,” I said.

  “I’m afraid for him, Jerry. Something’s going on at Climatology. I’m not sure what it is, they won’t let me get close to it. Dr. Rossman has a special group working off by themselves. They’ve even commandeered a section of our computers, and no one else can go near them.”

  “Could mean trouble.”

  She agreed with an unhappy little nod. “Dr. Rossman has made several trips to Washington the past week. I think he’s talking to people in the Environmental Science Services Administration.”

  “ESSA? Who’s he talkin
g to there?”

  “I’m not sure. His secretary let something slip about the licensing group, but I couldn’t figure out what she meant.”

  11. Breakup

  TED was furious about Barney’s news.

  “Just like him!” he shouted in my office that Monday morning. “He can’t figure out what we’re doing so he’s down to Washington, trying to slow us.” He kept pounding his fist into his palm as he stalked up and down in front of my desk.

  “It sounds as if he’s pulling some important wires,” I said.

  Ted stopped and glared at me. “Pulling wires, is he? Let’s see if he’s got a wire as good as this one.”

  He stamped out of the office. I scrambled out of my chair and went after him. Half running, I followed him down the corridor to his workroom. Tuli and three other staff members were locked deep in conversation when we entered:

  “Hold it, here’s the boss,” one of them said.

  I didn’t know if they meant Ted or me.

  “One of you guys work the viewscreen controls,” Ted ordered as he went to the big viewscreen map. Tuli went to the desk as Ted picked up an arrow-beam flashlight pointer. “Okay, run it back to the standard pattern.”

  The weather symbols on the big map disappeared briefly as Tuli touched the control studs on the console. Then a pattern of colored arrows took form on the map. Ted stood unmoving for a moment, still obviously steaming, trying to force self-control on himself.

  Finally he said, “This is the usual wind pattern for the continental United States during the summer.” Pointing with the flashlight, he explained, “Jet stream comes in over the West Coast, dips south, and then swings northeast. Cold air, these blue arrows, comes down from Canada, gets into the westerly stream and slants out toward the Atlantic.”

  He glanced at me to see if I was getting it. I nodded. “Red arrows show maritime tropical air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, up along the East Coast. That’s rainmaking air for us.”

  He gestured to Tuli, who flicked another set of buttons. “Now see this high-pressure ridge sitting out over the ocean? It’s up at high altitudes. Position moves around a little but it’s usually not far from the shore. High-altitude air flows northward along the west side of the ridge—clockwise motion around a High—up from the tropical seas and along the East Coast.”

  “That’s what guides the rainmaking air toward New England,” I guessed.

  “Check. Now look at the drought pattern.”

  Tuli made the map symbols shift and change. The high-pressure ridge moved westward, inland, and settled approximately around the Appalachian mountain chain. The jet stream curved on a more southerly route. And the red arrows of rainy air moved only halfway up the East Coast, then split; one branch swung out to sea, the other moved into the Midwestern states.

  Ted, slowly forgetting Rossman in his concentration on the meteorology, was cooling off. “Now look. The high-pressure ridge moves inland, and sucks the maritime air into the Midwest, mostly. New England gets cut off from it. And worse, now there’s cool dry air coming down the eastern side of the ridge, right into New England. Even when we do get moisture, the air’s not saturated enough to rain.”

  “But if there’s sufficient moisture . . .” Tuli started.

  “It never gets ‘sufficient’ Oriental chemist. Not when the dew points are as low as they are now. This Canadian air coming down the eastern slope of the ridge dries out whatever moisture we get. Sure, the water vapors still there, but the relative humidity is way down. You get minor droplets, only about five or ten microns big. They’re too light to fall! Need fifty-micron drops to get rain.”

  Walking toward the map, Tuli argued, “Then why not seed the clouds and force rainfall? If the moisture is available . . .”

  “Seeding’s not the answer, unless you want to seed all day long, every day. Soon as you stop seeding, it’ll stop raining. Cost a few million bucks a day to get decent rainfall, buddy. Blasted drought’s cheaper’n that!”

  “Then what do we do?” I asked.

  “Make the natural environment work for us, instead of trying to work against it.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  He gestured toward the viewscreen. “We’ve got to move that high-pressure ridge back over the Atlantic, just offshore.”

  I must have blinked.

  “It’s very simple, really,” Tuli said, nearly grinning. “We only need to manipulate the weather over half the world.” Ted took me to his desk and launched into a detailed explanation. It was long and complex and I hardly understood half of it. But it boiled down to the fact that the cloud cover over the Arctic Ocean had been far less than normal for the past several years. That, Ted firmly believed, was the trigger that started a chain reaction that led to the New England drought.

  “And that’s causing the drought? Sunny weather around the Arctic Circle?” I wondered aloud.

  “Not by itself, but it’s the biggest reason. And it’s something we can change. Right, Oriental chemist?”

  Tuli shrugged. “There are several halogen compounds that will react to sunlight at high altitudes to produce clouds . . . we might be able to cloud over a fair-sized area that way.”

  “And start the ball rolling away from the drought pattern, through the breakup, and into normal conditions.”

  “We haven’t proven that yet,” Tuli cautioned. “Our laboratory experiments are on too small a scale to show if the chain reaction will follow—”

  “Okay, okay.” Ted waved him down. “The rough numbers look good, though. We set up the cloud cover at the right spots in the Arctic. We work on the High over the Appalachians at the same time . . . try to weaken it enough so it’ll break up naturally and re-form over the ocean. Once we get things rolling the right way, the atmosphere’ll snap back to its usual balance and the drought’ll be busted.”

  “You make it sound easy,” I said.

  “Sure. Like building the first atomic bomb.” He went on with an hour’s worth of things he needed done, which included weather modifications over Canada and Greenland, as well as over the ocean. He outlined work that had to be done on land, sea, and in the air.

  I was starting to stagger. “But we’ll need the cooperation of the Navy, the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the State Department, just for starting! And what about the Canadians and the Danes? Or the United Nations. . .

  He laughed at me. “Those aren’t technical problems, old buddy. I’m telling you what we need. How to get ‘em done is your end of the stick.”

  “Thanks a lot. Anything else?”

  I shouldn’t have asked. It took the rest of the morning for him to finish telling me.

  “Ted, this is going to cost hundreds of millions!”

  “Baloney! We’re only going to be operating long enough to shift the atmosphere back to its normal balance. Then we leave it alone. Three months ought to do it, maybe less. And the cost’ll be peanuts compared to what the drought’s costing.”

  “And you really can do it?”

  Tuli answered, “It will be slightly more difficult than our optimistic leader thinks, but he’s essentially right. It can be done.”

  Ted grinned. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  I was just beginning to realize, emotionally, what they had said. Talking about weather control and drought alleviation is one thing, but to see it actually begin to take shape, to see plans being laid for moving rainfall from one place to another . . .

  I walked back from Ted’s desk to the mammoth viewscreen, fascinated by its swirling arrows and symbols.

  “Ted . . . this . . . this is marvelous!”

  “Does kind of shake you,” he agreed. “Makes me feel like that character that first climbed Everest.”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean Hillary.”

  “Or Tenzing Norka,” Tuli said.

  “Tenzing, that’s the one. The Sherpa.” Ted sat on the desk, his eyes narrowing as if he were trying to picture the scene.
“He was born right there, under the mountain. Spent all his life looking at it. Nobody had ever made it to the top. But he did. Some kick.”

  Tuli’s round face was solemn. “Someday we may feel the same way.”

  “Someday soon,” Ted added. “Nobody’s ever been able to change the weather. But we’re going to, friends. Sure as it rains on picnics, we’re going to. So let’s get to work!”

  And we did. We all pitched into the job with an eagerness I’d never seen before. It was as if we had been hunting a crafty wild animal, on its trail for ages, and now we were closing in for the kill. Excitement crackled through the Lab. Ted and Tuli started working out the exact details of the modification missions they’d have to conduct: the chemicals to use, the amounts, the planes needed, the days they would operate, the effects they would have. My administrative staff began working on getting the men and materials we would need.

  But beneath it all, I had the sickening feeling that it would never happen. I dreamed a lot of Rossman; wherever we turned, it seemed in my nightmares, Rossman would be blocking us, standing between us and our goal.

  And the nightmare started to come true.

  We had been conducting seeding experiments out over the open ocean for months, working on a month-to-month license granted by ESSA. Without it, we were prohibited from doing any seeding. Our application for the month of September was returned.

  Refused.

  It was a routine request, exactly the same as those we had put through since early in the spring. But ESSA rejected it. I took the tube train down to Washington the next morning.

  It was brutally hot in the capital: even the air-conditioned taxis were muggy and sweltering. The trees were brown from lack of water and the sidewalks shimmered in the late August heat.

  Everyone in ESSA, it seemed, was out of town. Everyone I asked to see, that is. A taxi hop across the blistering city brought me to the Pentagon. At least the military people had the courtesy to talk to me. But the Navy people flatly refused to cooperate with Aeolus’ modification work, and the Air Force officers said they could work with the Weather Bureau, but not with a private firm—unless we had Government approval for our drought-breaking operation.