by Ben Bova
Passing into the hurricane’s eye was like stepping through a door from bedlam to a peaceful garden. One minute we were being pounded by mountainous waves and merciless wind, with rain and spray making it hard to see even the bow. Then the sun broke through and the wind abruptly died. The waves were still hectic, frothing, as we limped out into the open. But at least we could raise our heads without being battered by the wind-driven spray.
Towering clouds rose all about us, but this patch of ocean was safe. Birds hovered around us, and high overhead a vertijet was circling, sent out by Tuli. The plane made a tight pass over us, then descended onto the helicopter landing pad on the ship’s fantail. Her landing gear barely touched the deck, and her tail stuck out over the smashed railing where the helicopter had broken through.
We had to duck under the plane’s nose and enter from a hatch in her belly because the outer wing jets were still blazing. As we huddled in the crammed passenger compartment, the plane hoisted straight up. The jetpods swiveled back for horizontal flight and the wings slid to supersonic sweep. We climbed steeply and headed up over the clouds.
As I looked down at the fast-shrinking little picket, I realized the lieutenant was also craning his neck at the port for a last look.
“I’m sorry you had to lose your ship,” I said.
“Well, another hour in those seas would have finished us,” he said quietly. But he kept staring wistfully out the port until the clouds covered the abandoned vessel.
Barney was waiting for us at the Navy airport with dry clothes, the latest charts and forecasts on Omega, and a large share of feminine emotion. I’ll never forget the sight of her running toward us as we stepped down from the vertijet’s main hatch. She threw her arms around Ted’s neck, then around mine, and then around Ted again.
“You had me so frightened, the two of you!”
Ted laughed. “We were kind of ruffled ourselves.”
It took nearly an hour to get away from the airport. Navy brass hats, debriefing officers, newsmen, photographers—they all wanted a crack at us. I turned them onto the lieutenant: “He’s the real hero,” I told them. “Without him, we would’ve all drowned.” While they converged on him,
Ted and I got a chance to change our clothes in an officers’ wardroom and scuttle out to the car Barney had waiting.
“Dr. Weis has been on the phone all day,” Barney said as the driver pulled out for the main highway leading to the Miami bayfront and THUNDER headquarters.
Ted frowned and spread the reports on Omega across his lap.
Sitting between the two of us, she pointed to the latest chart. “Here’s the storm track . . . ninety percent reliability, plus-or-minus two percent.”
Ted whistled. “Right smack into Washington and then up the coast. She’s going to damage more than reputations.”
“I told Dr. Weis you’d call his as soon as you could.”
“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Let’s get it over with.”
I punched out the Science Adviser’s private number on the phone set into the car’s seat. After a brief word with a secretary, Dr. Weis’ drawn face appeared on the viewscreen.
“You’re safe,” he said bleakly.
“Disappointed?”
“The way this hurricane is coming at us, we could use a martyr or two.”
“Steering didn’t work,” Ted said. “Only thing left to try is what we should’ve done in the first place . . .”
“Weather control? Absolutely not! Being hit with a hurricane is bad enough, but if you try tinkering with the weather all across the country, we’ll have every farmer, every vacationist, every mayor and governor and traffic cop on our necks!”
Ted fumed. “What else are you going to do? Sit there and take it? Weather control’s the last chance of stopping this beast—”
“Marrett, I’m almost ready to believe that you set up this storm purposely to force us into letting you try your pet idea!”
“If I could do that, I wouldn’t be sitting here arguing with you.”
“Possibly not. But you listen to me. Weather control is out. If we have to take a hurricane, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll have to admit that THUNDER was too ambitious a project for the first time around. We’ll have to back off. We’ll try something like THUNDER again next year, but without all the fanfare. You’ll have to lead a very quiet life for a few years, Marrett, but at least we might be able to keep going.”
“Why back down when you can go ahead and stop this hurricane?” Ted argued. “We can push Omega out to sea, I know we can!”
“The way you steered her? That certainly boomeranged on you.”
“We tried moving six trillion tons of air with a feather-duster! I’m talking about real control of the weather patterns across the whole continent. It’ll work!”
“You can’t guarantee that it will, and even if you did I wouldn’t believe you. Marrett, I want you to go back to THUNDER headquarters and sit there quietly. You may operate on any new disturbances that show up. But you are to leave Omega strictly alone. Is that clear? If you try to touch that storm in any way, I’ll see to it that you’re finished. For good.”
Dr. Weis snapped off the connection. The viewscreen went dark, almost as dark as the scowl on Ted’s face. For the rest of the ride back to Project headquarters he said nothing. He simply sat there, slouched over, pulled in on himself, his eyes smoldering.
When the car stopped he looked up at us.
“What’d you do if I gave the word to push Omega off the coast?”
“But Dr. Weis said . . .”
“I don’t care what he said, or what he does afterward. We can stop Omega.”
Barney turned and looked at me.
“Ted—I can always go back to Hawaii and help my Father make his twentieth million. But what about you? Weis can finish your career permanently. And what about Barney and the rest of the Project personnel?”
“It’s my responsibility. Weis won’t care about the rest of ‘em. And I don’t care what he does to me . . . I can’t sit here like a dumb ape and let that hurricane have its own way. Got a score to settle with Omega.”
“Regardless of what it’ll cost you?”
He nodded gravely. “Regardless of everything. Are you with me?”
“I guess I’m as crazy as you are,” I heard myself say. “Let’s do it.”
We piled out of the car and strode up to the control center. As people started to cluster around us, Ted raised his arms for silence:
“Now listen—Project THUNDER is dead. We’ve got a job of weathermaking to do. We’re going to push that hurricane out to sea.”
Then he started rattling off orders as though he had been rehearsing for this moment all his life.
As I started for my cubicle, Barney touched my sleeve. “Jerry, whatever happens later, thanks for helping him.”
“We’re accomplices,” I said. “Before, during, and after the fact.”
She smiled. “Do you think you could ever look at a cloud in the sky again if you hadn’t agreed to help him try this?” Before I could think of a reply she turned and started toward the computer section.
We had roughly thirty-six hours before Omega would strike the Virginia coast and then head up Chesapeake Bay for Washington. Thirty-six hours to manipulate the weather over the entire North American continent.
Within three hours Ted had us around his desk, a thick wad of notes clenched in his right hand. “Not as bad as it could’ve been,” he told us, gesturing toward the plotting screen. “This big High sitting near the Great Lakes—good cold, dry air that can make a shield over the East Coast if we can swing it into position. Tuli, that’s your job.”
Tuli nodded, bright-eyed with excitement.
“Barney, we’ll need pinpoint forecasts for every part of the country, even if it takes every computer in the Weather Bureau to wring ‘em out.”
“Right, Ted.”
“Jerry, communications are the key. Got to keep in touch with the w
hole blinking country. And we’re going to need planes, rockets, even slingshots maybe. Get the ball rolling before Weis finds out what we’re up to.”
“What about the Canadians? You’ll be affecting their weather too.”
“Get that liaison guy from the State Department and tell him to have the Canadian weather bureau check with us. Don’t spill the beans to him, though.”
“It’s only a matter of time until Washington catches on,” I said.
“Most of what we’ve got to do has to be done tonight. By the time they wake up tomorrow, we’ll be on our way.” Omega’s central windspeeds had climbed to 120 knots by evening, and were still increasing. As she trundled along toward the coast, her howling fury was nearly matched by the uproar of action at our control center. We didn’t eat, we didn’t sleep. We worked!
A half-dozen military satellites armed with lasers started pumping streams of energy into areas pinpointed by Ted’s orders. Their crews had been alerted weeks earlier to cooperate with requests from Project THUNDER, and Ted and others from our technical staff had briefed them before the hurricane season began. They didn’t question our messages. Squadrons of planes flew out to dump chemicals and seeding materials off Long Island, where he had created a weak storm cell in the vain attempt to steer Omega. Ted wanted that Low deepened, intensified—a low-pressure trough into which that High on the Great Lakes could slide.
“Intensifying the Low will let Omega come in faster, too,” Tuli pointed out.
“Know it,” Ted answered. “But the numbers’re on our side. I think. Besides, faster Omega moves, less chance she gets to build up higher wind velocities.”
By ten p.m. we had asked for and received a special analysis from the National Meteorological Center in Maryland. It showed that we would have to deflect the jet stream slightly, since it controlled the upper-air flow patterns across the country. But how do you divert a river that’s three hundred miles wide, four miles thick, and racing along at better than three hundred miles per hour?
“It would take a hundred-megaton bomb,” Barney said, “exploded about fifteen miles over Salt Lake City.”
Ted nearly laughed. “The UN’d need a year just to get it on their agenda. Not to mention the sovereign citizens of Utah and points east.”
“Then how do we do it?”
Ted grabbed the coffeepot standing on his desk and poured himself a mug of steaming black liquid. “Jet stream’s a shear layer between the polar and mid-latitude tropopauses,” he muttered, more to himself than any of us. “If you reinforce the polar air, it can nudge the stream southward . . .”
He took a cautious sip of the hot coffee. “Tuli, we’re already moving a High southward from the Great Lakes. How about moving a bigger polar mass from Canada to push the jet stream enough to help us?”
“We don’t have enough time or equipment to operate in Canada,” I said. “And we’d need permission from Ottawa.”
“What about reversing the procedure?” Tuli asked. “We could shrink the desert High over Arizona and New Mexico slightly, and the jet stream will move southward.” Ted hiked his eyebrows. “Think you can do it?”
“I’ll have to make a few calculations.”
“Okay, scramble.”
The next morning in Boston, people who had gone to bed with a weather forecast of “warm, partly cloudy,” awoke to a chilly, driving northeast rain. The Low we had intensified during the night had surprised the local forecasters. The Boston Weather Bureau office issued corrected predictions through the morning as the little rainstorm moved out, the Great Lakes High slid in and caused a flurry of frontal squalls, and finally the sun broke through. The cool dry air of the High dropped local temperatures more than ten degrees within an hour. To the unknowing New Englanders it was just another day, merely slightly more bewildering than most.
Dr. Weis phoned at seven thirty that morning.
“Marrett, have you lost your mind? What do you think you’re doing? I told you . . .”
“Can’t chat now, we’re busy,” Ted shot back.
“I’ll have your hide for this!”
“Tomorrow you can have my hide. Bring it up myself. But first I’m going to find out if I’m right or wrong about this.”
The Science Adviser turned purple. “I’m going to send out an order to all Government installations to stop . . .”
“Better not. We’re right in the middle of some tricky moves. Besides, we’ll never find out if it works or not Most of the mods’ve been made. Let’s see what good they do.”
Barney rushed up with a ream of computer print-out sheets as Ted cut the phone connection.
“There’s going to be a freeze in the Central Plains and northern Rockies,” she said, pushing back her tousled hair. “There’ll be some snow. We haven’t fixed the exact amount yet.”
A harvest-time freeze. Crops ruined, cities paralyzed by unexpected snow, weekend holidays ruined, and in the mountains deaths from exertion and exposure.
“Get the forecast out on the main Weather Bureau network,” Ted ordered. “Warn ‘em fast.”
The plotting screen showed our battle dearly. Omega, with central wind speeds of 175 knots now, was still pushing toward Virginia. But her forward progress was slowing, ever so slightly, as the Great Lakes High moved southeastward past Pittsburgh.
By noontime Ted was staring at the screen and muttering, “Won’t be enough. Not unless the jet stream comes around a couple of degrees.”
It was raining in Washington now, and snow was starting to fall in Winnipeg. I was trying to handle three phone calls at once when I heard an ear-splitting whoop from Ted. I looked toward the plotting screen. There was a slight bend in the jet stream west of the Mississippi that hadn’t been there before.
As soon as I could, I collared Tuli for an explanation.
“We used the lasers from the Atlantic Station and every ounce of catalysts I could find. The effect isn’t spectacular, no noticeable weather change. But the desert High has shrunk slightly and the jet stream has moved a little southward, temporarily.”
“Will it be enough?” I asked.
He shrugged.
Through the long afternoon we watched that little curl travel along the length of the jet stream’s course, like a wave snaking down the length of a long, taut rope. Meanwhile the former Great Lakes High was covering all of Maryland and pushing into Virginia. Its northern extension shielded the coast well into New England.
“But she’ll blast right through,” Ted grumbled, watching Omega’s glowering system of closely packed isobars, “unless the jet stream helps push her off.”
I asked Barney, “How does the timing look? Which will arrive first, the jet-stream change or the storm?”
She shook her head. “The machines have taken it down to four decimal places and there’s still no sure answer.”
Norfolk was being drenched by a torrential downpour; gale-force winds were snapping power lines and knocking down trees. Washington was a darkened, wind-swept city. Most of the Federal offices had closed early, and traffic was inching along the rain-slicked streets.
Boatmen from Hatteras to the fishhook angle of Cape Cod—weekend sailors and professionals alike—were making fast extra lines, setting out double anchors, or pulling their craft out of the water altogether. Commercial airlines were juggling their schedules around the storm and whole squadrons of military planes were winging westward, away from the danger, like great flocks of migrating birds.
Storm tides were piling up all along the coast, and flood warnings were flashing from civil defense centers in a dozen states. The highways were filling with people moving inland before the approaching fury.
And Omega was still a hundred miles out to sea.
Then she faltered.
You could feel the electricity crackle through our control center. The mammoth hurricane hovered off the-coast as the jet-stream deflection finally arrived. We all held our breaths. Omega stood off the coast uncertainly for an endless hour, then tu
rned to the northeast. She began to head out to sea.
We shouted our foolish heads off.
When the furor died down, Ted hopped up on his desk. “Hold it, heroes! Job’s not finished yet. We’ve got n freeze in the Midwest to modify, and I want to throw everything we’ve got into Omega, weaken the old girl as much as possible. Now scrambled
It was nearly midnight before Ted let us call it quits. Our Project people—real weathermakers now—had weakened Omega to the point where she was only a tropical storm, fast losing her punch over the cold waters of the north Atlantic. A light snow was sprinkling parts of the Upper Midwest, but our warning forecasts had been in time, and the weathermakers were able to take most of the snap out of the cold front. The local weather stations were reporting only minor problems from the freeze. The snow amounted to less than an inch.
Most of the Project people had left for sleep. There was only a skeleton crew left in the control center. Barney, Tuli, and I gravitated toward Ted’s desk. He had commandeered a typewriter and was pecking on the keys.
“How do you spell ‘resignation’?” he asked.
Before any of us could answer, the phone buzzed. Ted thumbed the “on” switch. It was Dr. Weis.
“You didn’t have to call,” Ted said. “Game’s over. I know it.”
Dr. Weis looked utterly exhausted, as if he had personally been battling the storm. “I had a long talk with the President tonight, Marrett. You’ve put him in a difficult position, and me in an impossible one. To the general public, you’re a hero. But I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw a cyclotron.”
“Don’t blame you, I guess,” Ted answered calmly. “But don’t worry, you won’t have to fire me. I’m resigning. You’ll be off the hook.”
“You can’t quit,” Dr. Weis said bitterly. “You’re a national resource, as far as the President’s concerned. He spent the night comparing you to nuclear energy: he wants you tamed and harnessed.”