The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  Barney inadvertently started to reach for the saltshaker, then caught herself. We both laughed.

  “Sec, he’s got us both trained,” I said.

  “He needs us, Jerry’,” she said, her smile dimming. Earnestly, she added, “Don’t be angry with him. Please, Jerry, no matter how hard it is, please don’t be angry with him. Try to remember that he needs every friend he has.”

  “Then why does he trample on people?”

  She shook her head. “It’s the way he is. We’ll have to accept him that way. He won’t change.”

  I knew she was right about Ted. And I knew I could never argue with her, whether she was right or wrong. “Okay, we’ll accept him the way he is. But we don’t have to like it. He’s a fanatic, and fanatics can be dangerous.”

  “Yes, I know,” she agreed. “But they’re just as dangerous to themselves as to anyone else.”

  Miami took the brunt of the hurricane. The plush Miami Beach hotels were dark and empty as the invading seas and wind tore through them, smashing windows and flooding ground floors with a massive storm tide. Luxury automobiles were swept by the surging waves completely off the island, most of them to disappear forever into the sea. The city of Miami was devastated, its waterfront wrecked, its civil defense shelters jammed with fleeing thousands. Planes were ripped from their moorings at airfields and lofted wildly, to crash and pinwheel against the drenched ground. People huddled for hours in homes and buildings, without radio reception, without phones, with nothing to listen to but their own frightened voices and the howling fury outside that was breaking windows, toppling poles, tearing down signs, and seemingly trying to erase mankind from the landscape. Finally, Lydia turned up the peninsula, spreading death and havoc wherever she touched.

  Lydia was still a big topic of discussion at Climatology the following week, when I visited Ted’s shop. My official reason for going there was to take care of some of the paperwork that would lead to a contract between the Division and Aeolus. I spent the morning filling out forms, and by noontime I was hungry enough even for the cafeteria’s brand of food. But Ted and Barney took me out to a little pizza place in the next town.

  It was starting to rain again as we pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot.

  “Secondary storm,” Ted mused. “Spin-off from Lydia.”

  “She was some hurricane,” I said as we scampered from the car to the restaurant door. “Miami’s been wrecked; damage estimates are in the billion-dollar range.”

  “It’s a shame we didn’t have long-range forecasts to predict where the storm would strike,” Barney said.

  By now we were inside. We picked a booth and ordered pizza.

  “Would a long-range forecast have been able to help Miami very much?” I wondered aloud.

  Shrugging, Ted answered, “Be tough to pinpoint exactly where and when the storm’ll hit. Too many variables. Hurricanes are tricky—very sensitive, even with all that size and power.”

  “But a longer warning time would have helped the people to get ready for the storm,” Barney suggested.

  “Not interested in warnings,” Ted grumbled. “I want to stop those storms. Nothing worse than knowing where it’s going to hit but not being able to do a blasted thing about it.”

  I looked out the restaurant window at the rain. “Looks like a northeaster blowing up.”

  That made him grin. “Sound like a real Yankee there. But you’re right. We’re in for heavy weather.”

  After the pizza arrived and we were halfway through, Barney asked, “Just what does Dr. Rossman intend to do now that the drought’s finished?”

  Ted made a sour face. “Tell you what he’s not going to do: weather control. He wants us to check and recheck everything about the drought, for the whole northern hemisphere, for the next six months. Says he wants to make certain we didn’t cause any harm. Just another one of his delaying tactics.”

  While I was struggling with a taffy-like slab of cheese atop a pizza slice, Ted went on, “He’s dead-set against another modification job; scared to death of anything new.” Here we go again, I thought.

  “Just to keep me quiet, though,” Ted went on, “he’s given in on the long-range forecasts. He’s letting us send them out to the Weather Bureau networks on an experimental basis. The forecasts won’t be made public, but the offices around the country’ll start comparing ‘em with what really happens. That’s why we need Aeolus, old Yankee buddy. Have to start cranking out forecasts for the whole continental U.S.”

  “That’s a big order,” I mumbled, from behind the pizza. “Too big for Climatology to handle, unless Rossman gets permission to double his staff. Which he won’t try for. Lot easier to cut a contract than fire a hundred or so Government employees.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement.”

  He laughed. “Listen. We’ve got to figure out a way to get him to agree to more weather-control work. Without getting me fired again!”

  “That would look bad on your employment record,” I couldn’t help saying.

  Barney stepped in before Ted could reply. “Just what are you thinking of, Ted?”

  “Not sure, yet. But we’ve got to do something that’ll force Rossman to take the next step. Otherwise he’ll just sit where he is, safe and respected, and admire his Medal.”

  “Any ideas?” I asked.

  “Couple,” he said, looking out at the thickening rain. “Been hearing some rumbles from friends in New York that the Manhattan Dome’s got some air-pollution troubles. Maybe you can look into that, Jerry. Rossman’d bounce off the ceiling if he knew I was getting into it.

  “And there’s an Air Force major coming to see me this afternoon, to talk about weather control and military problems. Might be the kind of road we can take to get a real project going.”

  “I never thought about the military uses of weather control,” I said.

  “Something to think about. Why don’t you stick around this afternoon. This might be fun.”

  So I went back to Climatology with them. Ted’s office was clammy, and you could hear the rain drumming hard against the metal roof. He turned on an electric heater near his desk and then poured coffee for me and himself. Barney had gone back to the computations section.

  Major Vincent arrived halfway through the coffee. He was chunky, not too tall, and almost completely bald. But his roundish face was young-looking, nearly babyish.

  “I’m with the Foreign Technology Division,” the major said after Ted had sat him down and handed him a cup of coffee. “Our main job is to keep the Air Force informed as to what other nations are doing in various technological fields.”

  “Such as weather control?” Ted asked, sitting behind his desk.

  “Well, maybe. Right now FTD is officially interested in how well other nations can predict the weather, and perhaps make small-scale modifications . . . like clearing fog around an airfield, that sort of thing.”

  “But you’re worrying about whether the Reds can tamper with our weather . . . At least, you should be.”

  The major shifted his weight uncomfortably in his chair. “I am worried about that, you bet I am. And not just about the Reds, either. Any nation that can control weather has a weapon as powerful as ICBM’s.”

  Ted got up and went down to the chalkboard behind his desk. “Jerry’s heard this lecture before . . . it’s sort of my standard speech about what you need for weather control.” And he launched into his routine about turbulence theory, long-range forecasts, energy sources, and such. As he spoke, Major Vincent took a small notebook from his tunic and began writing in shorthand.

  When Ted finished, the major snapped the notebook shut. Ted had filled the chalkboard with words, diagrams, and equations.

  “This is what we need,” the major said. “If we know what to look for, we can tell what’s going on in other countries.”

  “Without calling in the spies,” Ted added.

  “FTD isn’t in the espionage business.”

  “Not in public
,” Ted jabbed.

  The major decided to change the subject. “Now take this hurricane that just hit Florida . . .”

  “Lydia.”

  “Yes. Now, couldn’t that have been formed artificially? Or maybe deliberately steered to hit the United States?” Ted shrugged elaborately. “It’s possible. We don’t know how to do it yet, but another country might be ahead of us.” Shaking his head, the major said, “The more I think about it, the more important it sounds to me. Suppose this drought you people broke up was the work of an enemy power? Why, with weather control you could bring a country to its knees without its ever knowing it had been attacked!”

  “Never thought of it that way,” Ted answered.

  “Suppose an enemy could control our weather,” the major mused, going to the chalkboard. “Every time it rains, I get nervous.”

  “I really don’t think anyone’s far enough advanced yet to do it,” I said.

  “Maybe not.” The major erased Ted’s work from the board. Then he stepped back and squinted at the faint smudged images still visible. He took a piece of chalk and scribbled heavily over them, then erased the whole board again.

  “There,” he said. “It’s clean. That’s a little habit you get into when you deal with classified information.”

  “There’s nothing classified about it,” Ted said.

  “Maybe it ought to be.”

  Frowning, Ted said, “You can’t classify the weather.”

  “No, I guess not. But weather control is something else again.”

  I didn’t realize how seriously the major meant those words until a couple of weeks later when Aeolus was invaded by a squad of Government Security inspectors. Their job, as the head man explained to me, was to make certain that the Laboratory was physically safe for holding documents that might be classified Secret.

  “But we’re not doing any classified work,” I protested.

  “We’ve got a request here from the Air Force,” he said, brandishing an official-looking yellow sheet, “to check out Aeolus Research Laboratory for a Secret facility clearance. All your people will be getting personal Security checks, too.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that if you’ve hired any people who can’t be cleared for handling Secret work, they’ll have to be moved to a separate building or fired altogether.”

  “But we’re not doing Secret work!”

  He waved the yellow sheet again. “According to the Air Force, you will be.”

  The inspectors poked everywhere, setting up locations for guard desks, slapping padlocks on file cabinets, ordering us to get special wastebins for discarding classified material, and explaining to my one-girl library staff how to stamp, store, distribute, and keep records of classified documents.

  In the middle of the uproar, I phoned Ted.

  “Was just going to call you,” he said. “Got the Security people on your back?”

  “All over the place.”

  He grinned. “They locked Rossman’s desk on him while he was at lunch. Took him an hour to get a key for it. Turned him purple.”

  “Is all this fuss necessary?” I asked.

  “Guess so, if we’re going to work for the Air Force.”

  Just then Tuli—calm, stoic Tuli—came storming into the view of the phone screen, his fists clenched and his eyes blazing. Barney was right behind him, looking close to tears.

  “What’s going on?” Ted asked.

  Wordlessly, Tuli handed him a slip of yellow paper. Ted scanned it, and his face twisted into an angry frown.

  “Look at this!”

  He held the memorandum up to the screen:

  SINCE FOREIGN NATIONALS ARE BARRED FROM ACCESS TO CLASSIFIED INFORMATION, IT IS NECESSARY TO SUSPEND P. O. BARNEVELDT AND T. R. NOYON INDEFINITELY, PENDING FULL SECURITY INVESTIGATION.

  14. Bitter Winter

  I STARED at the yellow memo, trying to think of what to do first.

  “Let me call Major Vincent,” I said. “I wanted to talk to him about what’s been happening here at Aeolus anyway.”

  “I’ll call him,” Ted said, tight-lipped.

  “No, you’d better not.” I knew that after three words to the major, Ted would be shouting. “I’ll talk to him and call you back.”

  Getting the major on the phone wasn’t easy. He had been transferred out of the Ohio base of the Foreign Technology Division and was now quartered in Washington.

  “I’ve been moved to a special group,” he said when I finally tracked him down. “We’re setting up a weather-control project. Marrett’s outfit and yours will both be able to help us on it.”

  I explained about the security uproar both at Climatology and Aeolus. Major Vincent looked sympathetic but helpless.

  “I know you’re not working on any classified stuff at your Lab . . . yet. But we’ve got to be sure that you’ll be okay to handle Secret material when the time comes. Which will be soon, believe me.”

  “But what about Ted’s two closest aides being suspended?” I demanded. “That’s going to ruin his work.”

  He looked truly unhappy. “I battled that out with the Security people here before the order was sent. Believe me, I fought them for a solid week. But they’ve got the rules and regulations on their side. I wish there was something I could do to help, but my hands are tied.”

  “Ted is going to go off like a five-stage rocket,” I said.

  “He won’t work for you unless—”

  “He’ll have to work for us,” the major snapped. “Listen, I’m as easy to get along with as anybody, but this project isn’t going to depend on any one man. If Marrett can’t live with the Security regulations, we’ll get somebody else to run his shop at Climatology and he’ll be out.”

  “You mean there’s absolutely nothing that can be done? These people haven’t done anything wrong, and they’ll be thrown out of their jobs. That’s not fair!”

  “Well, maybe I can swing a deal about the girl. She’s taken out citizenship papers, from what the Security people tell me. And her native country is an ally of ours. But the other fellow is from Mongolia. They’re no friends of ours.”

  “They’re not enemies either,” I answered.

  Major Vincent put up his hands in an “I’ve-done-all-I-can-do” kind of gesture.

  Ted was glowering angrily as I told him of the major’s offer.

  “So he’ll let Barney hang on. What’s wrong with Tuli? Air Force afraid he’s part of the yellow peril?”

  “I think it’s the red menace they’re afraid of. Mongolia is officially a socialist nation.”

  “Red menace, yellow peril . . . put ‘em together and you get an orange mess.” He was far from joking about it. “So what do we do, ship Tuli back to Mongolia in a crate?”

  “If he’s officially suspended,” I said, “why can’t he work temporarily for Aeolus? Just until this mess gets straightened out. We can set him up in a separate office close to our building.”

  Ted thought a moment. “Maybe that’ll work. There’s this air-pollution problem the Manhattan Dome people got themselves stuck with. Tuli could help ‘em straighten it out. Can’t do it as a Climatology employee, thanks to Rossman. But as an Aeolus man . . .”

  I nodded. “I’ll get the paperwork started right away. Tuli can join our staff as a temporary consultant.”

  “Okay,” Ted agreed. “But this whole military operation is wrong-end first. Been thinking about it. If they’re going to handle weather control like a secret weapon, the whole idea’s going to get bogged down in trouble.”

  The wind had come a long way. About three weeks earlier it had been a cold, dry blast scouring the Siberian tundra as the November freeze swept southward past Lake Baikal. It blew out onto the wide Pacific, whipping deep swells and drawing moisture from the sea. The west wind invaded America on an eight-hundred-mile-wide front, sending California farmers to their smudge pots to prevent a freeze on the last of the fruit harvest. As it climbed over the Rockies, the wind dr
opped first rain, then a foot-thick blanket of snow as it surrendered its captured moisture. It was a dry wind again when it slid down the other side of the mountains and across the southwestern desert. It curved out toward the Gulf Coast, picked up a little more water vapor and—guided by the jet stream—rushed northeastward into New England. By the time it reached Boston it had cooled down to its dew point and sprinkled a fine powdery snow over the area. Delighted children rushed to their cellars to find sleds. Grumbling adults went to their garages, muttering about snow tires and New England winters.

  Jim Dennis called a few days before Thanksgiving and invited the four of us to his house for the holiday afternoon.

  “I want you to meet someone,” he said, “who’s interested in your problems with the Pentagon’s weather project.” Surprised, I said, “I didn’t realize you knew about it. The project’s supposed to be secret.”

  “You’d be surprised what a Congressman hears,” he answered, with a sly smile.

  I took Barney, Ted, and Tuli to Thornton for Thanksgiving dinner, and then we drove out to the Dennis house. It started to snow as we approached Lynn.

  “Right on schedule,” Ted said, looking at his wristwatch. “Should be a snowy winter this year.”

  The Dennis household was filled with children, friends, political aides, petitioning voters, and neighbors. Jim was shuttling back and forth between his office and the living room, which were separated by the house’s main hallway. The living room was crowded with politically minded adults of one sort or another. Business problems. We fit into that category, but Mrs. Dennis took us in tow first, introduced us to everybody in the dining room, where a second shift of Thanksgiving dinner seemed to be getting started, and ushered us back into the kitchen.

  She had charge of the children and the nonpolitical adults. The dining room, kitchen, and all play areas were her domain. Somehow she managed to keep everyone happy and fed, and the children safely occupied, while still looking calmly unruffled. Barney watched her with unabashed awe.