Visions of the Future

by Brin, David

  “Are you two all right?”

  “No broken bones.”

  “You’d better come up to the bridge,” he shouted. We were face-to-face, nearly touching noses, yet we could hardly hear him. “I’ve given orders to cast off the anchors and get up steam. We’ve got to try to ride out this blow under power. If we just sit here we’ll be swamped.”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  He shot me a grim look. “Next time you tinker with a hurricane, make it when I’m on shore!”

  We followed the lieutenant up to the bridge. I nearly fell off the rain-slicked ladder, but Ted grabbed me with one of his powerful paws.

  The bridge was sloshing from the monstrous waves and spray that were drenching the decks. The communications panels seemed to be intact, though. We could see the map that Ted had set up on the autoplotter screen; it was still alight. Omega spread across the screen like an engulfing demon. The tiny pinpoint of light marking the ship’s location was well inside the hurricane’s swirl.

  The lieutenant fought his way to the ship’s intercom while Ted and I grabbed for handholds.

  “All the horses you’ve got, Chief,” I heard the lieutenant bellow into the intercom mike. “I’ll get every available man on the pumps. Keep those engines going. If we lose power we’re sunk!”

  I realized he meant it literally.

  The lieutenant crossed over toward us and hung on to the chart table.

  “Is that map accurate?” he yelled at Ted.

  The big redhead nodded. “Up to the minute. Why?”

  “I’m trying to figure a course that’ll take us out of this blow. We can’t stand much more of this battering. She’s taking on more water than the pumps can handle. Engine room’s getting swamped.”

  “Head southwest then,” Ted said at the top of his lungs. “Get out of her quickest that way.”

  “We can’t! I’ve got to keep the sea on our bows or else we’ll capsize!”

  “What?”

  “He’s got to point her into the wind,” I yelled. “Just about straight into the waves.”

  “Right!” the lieutenant agreed.

  “But you’ll be riding along with the storm. Never get out that way. She’ll just carry us along all day!”

  “How do you know which way the storm’s going to go? She might change course.”

  “Not a chance.” Ted jabbed a finger toward the plotting screen. “She’s heading northwesterly now and she’ll stay on that course the rest of the day. Best bet is to head for the eye.”

  “Toward the center? We’d never make it!”

  Ted shook his head. “Never get out of it if you keep heading straight into the wind. But if you can make five knots or so, we can spiral into the eye. Calm there.”

  The lieutenant stared at the screen. “Are you sure? Do you know exactly where the storm’s moving and how fast she’s going to go?”

  “We can check it out.”

  Quickly, we called THUNDER headquarters, transmitting up to the Atlantic Station satellite for relay to Miami. Barney was nearly frantic, but we got her off the line fast. Tuli answered our questions and gave us the exact predictions for Omega’s direction and speed.

  Ted went inside with a soggy handful of notes to put the information into the ship’s course computer. Barney pushed her way onto the viewscreen.

  “Jerry… are you all right?”

  “I’ve been better, but we’ll get through it okay. The ship’s in no real trouble,” I lied.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Certainly. Ted’s working out a course with the skipper. We’ll be back in Miami in a few hours.”

  “It looks awful out there.”

  Another mammoth wave broke across the bow and drowned the bridge with spray.

  “It’s not picnic weather,” I admitted, “but we’re not worried, so don’t you go getting upset.” Not worried, I added silently, we’re scared white.

  Reluctantly, the lieutenant agreed to head for the storm’s eye. It was either that or face a battering that would split the ship in a few hours. We told Tuli to send a plane to the eye to try to pick us up.

  Time lost all meaning. We just hung on, drenched to the skin, plunging through a wild, watery inferno, the wind shrieking evilly at us, the seas absolutely chaotic. No one remained on the bridge except the lieutenant, Ted, and me. The rest of the ship’s skeleton crew were below decks, working every pump on board as hard as they could be run. The ship’s autopilot and computer-run guidance system kept us heading on the course Ted and the lieutenant had figured.

  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 him 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 whole 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 printout 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 clearly. 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.