Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  The Twist in the Gulf Stream

  A different genre of story tells of large-scale and catastrophic unintended consequences of tinkering in sensitive areas of the Earth’s system. The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream (1908), by Louis P. Gratacap, tells of geophysical and social dislocations caused by the collapse of the Isthmus of Panama, which diverts the Gulf Stream, causing vast climatic and social changes, including the refrigeration and depopulation of Europe.

  The story begins with scientists’ warnings about instabilities along the west coast of North and Central America that could result in massive geological chain reactions. Earthquakes could trigger the release of the “volcanic energy” of Panama and the West Indies, and the region could experience an “isostatic rebound”—basically a rebalancing of the Earth’s crust—as it seeks a new equilibrium state. When Panama is breached (by either humans or geology), “again the waters of the two oceans will unite, and the impetuous violence of the rushing oceanic river, the Gulf Stream, that now races and boils through the Caribbean Sea, will fling its torrential waves across this divide into the Pacific.”12

  In spite of these warnings, commercial interests and the president of the United States push for the completion of the Panama Canal (actually completed in 1914 at a cost of $400 million). In the book, the excavation commences in 1909 and triggers a natural disaster. A massive series of earthquakes and tidal waves strikes Colón. The isthmus sinks, opening up a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific that had been closed for 3 million years. Subsidence in Panama results in volcanic eruptions and the catastrophic convergence and elevation of the Caribbean islands. The Earth shudders, the poles “wobble,” and the Gulf Stream, “no longer turned aside by impassible walls of land, triumphantly [sweeps] into the Pacific,” opening a “new chapter in the history of the world and the history of nations” (92–99). In an understated response, President Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “It seems likely that this physical alteration may mean a change in the climate of the older portion of the earth” and an end of “the glory of England” (121–123).

  With the Gulf Stream now warming the Pacific coast of the United States, Europe descends into a new ice age as the North Atlantic cools dramatically and devastating snowstorms pummel the region. Like a scene out of the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Reykjavik lies deserted. In Edinburgh, snow “fill[s] up the deep moat of the Princes’ Street gardens [and] round[s] the rugged edges and wandering parapets of the Citadel” (131–136). Europe trembles “with a new apprehension” as markets panic and moral depravity sets in. London is evacuated. As the savage Scots move south, the English seek refuge in their colonies in Asia and Australia. “Heat is life, cold is death.... Our civilization, the civilization of Europe, has overstepped the limits of climatic permission” (187, 295). All these consequences were triggered by a macro-engineering project that went against the advice of the geologists.

  Rock the Earth

  World peace as a consequence of the demands of a mad scientist is the theme of The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915), by Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood. With most of the world wracked by war, a mysterious message arrives by wireless from the inventor PAX: “To all mankind—I am the dictator—of human destiny—Through the earth’s rotation—I control day and night—summer and winter—I command the—cessation of hostilities and—the abolition of war upon the globe.”13

  To demonstrate his resolve and his power over the elements, PAX slows the Earth’s rotation by five minutes; makes it snow in Washington, D.C., in August; and, with a flying ring and super-powerful Lavender Ray, diverts the Mediterranean Sea into the Sahara and destroys a German siege gun as it fires on Paris. These phenomena are accompanied by geophysical marvels: strange yellow aurorae, earthquakes, tidal waves, and atmospheric disturbances. An international assembly of scientists is formed to respond, but it is designed by the diplomats to stall and fail in the hope that particular nations might gain special advantages by capturing the inventor and learning his powers.

  PAX controls a source of power—atomic disintegration—that would allow the Earth to blossom “like the rose! Well-watered valleys where deserts were before. War abolished, poverty, disease!” This is reminiscent of the rhetoric, some forty years later, hyping the potential of atomic energy. Impressed, physicist Bennie Hooker sets out to find PAX and the secret behind “the greatest achievement of all time!” (111).

  Meanwhile, disappointed by cease-fire violations, PAX sends his final warning to humanity, declaring that he will “shift the axis of the Earth until the North Pole shall be in the region of Strasbourg and the South Pole in New Zealand” (172). Hooker eventually finds PAX’s laboratory in Labrador and witnesses his demise in an explosion near a gigantic outcrop of pitchblende: “This radioactive mountain was the fulcrum by which this modern Archimedes had moved the Earth” (216). Anticipating the founding of the League of Nations by several years, the nations of the Earth form a coalition government coordinated at The Hague and destroy all their armaments, an event that inaugurates a new age of international cooperation, peace, and never-before-experienced prosperity. In a setup to a possible sequel, Hooker is last seen exploring the solar system in his “Space-Navigating Car,” powered by the Lavender Ray.

  The Air Trust

  The Air Trust (1915), by George Allan England, combines both geochemical and political fantasy in telling the story of a dedicated band of socialists who thwart the plans of ruthless capitalists aiming to control the world’s air supply. The book is dedicated to Eugene V. Debs, “Comrade Gene, Apostle of the World’s Emancipation.” The author depicts scientists for hire as the willing servants of capitalists and the obedient executioners of both corporate plans and, possibly, humanity. England writes in the foreword: “I believe that, had capitalists been able to bring the seas and the atmosphere under physical control, they would long ago [have done so].”

  The story begins when billionaire businessman Isaac Flint, seeking new and ever more powerful monopolies, asks:

  What is it they all must have, or do, that I can control? ... Breathing! ... Breath is life. Without food and drink and shelter, men can live a while. Even without water, for some days. But without air—they die inevitably and at once. And if I make my own, then I am the master of all life!... Life, air, breath—the very breath of the world in my hands—power absolutely, at last!14

  His business partner, Maxim “Tiger” Waldron, suggests “The Air Trust—A monopoly on breathing privileges!... Imagine that we might extract oxygen from the air.... [P]eople would come gasping to us, like so many fish out of water, falling over each other to buy!” (23–25).

  The businessmen delegate responsibility for the details and the execution of the plan to the industrial research staff (“That’s what they’re for”) as personified by the chemist Herzog—“a fat rubicund, spectacled man” with a keen mind, two fingers missing (from experimenting with explosives), and “character and stamina close to those of a jelly fish” (29). In the novel, the oxygen extraction plant is located at Niagara Falls and uses hydropower to run the condensers. The book includes sufficient technical details about the extraction process and the scale of the operation to suspend readers’ disbelief while clearly drawing an analogy to the nitrogen fixation process developed about 1909 by the German chemist Fritz Haber and industrialized in 1913 by Carl Bosch. Benefits of commodifying the air include the sale of liquid gas refrigerants, nitrogen for fertilizer and explosives, and even ozone to “freshen and purify” the environment. But by far the most precious commodity is oxygen, the breath of life. As Flint expresses it, “We’ll have the world by the wind pipe; and let the mob howl then, if they dare!” (69).

  The plot turns around the loss of Flint’s notebook, which alerts the socialist hero, Gabriel Armstrong, to the plan. He and his comrades passionately debate the need to destroy the “infernally efficient tyrants” who have taken possession of “all that science has been able to devise, or press and
church and university teach, or political subservience make possible.” The capitalists control “military power, and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair and the power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!” If the socialists can destroy the Air Trust, “the great revolution will follow” to annihilate capitalism (261–262).

  After working out a strategy of attack, the workers organize and, led by Armstrong, storm the plant. In a scene worthy of a Saturday matinee, they chase Flint and Waldron into one of the huge empty air tanks, as the chemist Herzog takes his own life with a vial of poison. The final scene is both ghastly and ghoulishly amusing as Waldron notices the odor of ozone and cries out, “Flint! Flint! The oxygen is coming in!” (325) As a huge stream of pure oxygen from a ruptured valve floods the tank, the brains of Flint and Waldron literally began to “combust”:

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” rang Waldron’s crazy laughter.... All at once his cigar burst into flame. Cursing, he hurled it away, staggering back against the ladder and stood there swaying [panting, with crimson face], clutching it to hold himself from falling.... “Help! Help!” [Flint] screamed. “Save me—my God—save me—Let me out, let me out! A million, if you let me out! A billion—the whole world! ... It’s mine—I own it—all, all mine!” (326–327)

  With a final burst of energy, “his heart flailing itself to death under the pitiless urge of the oxygen,” Flint runs across the tank screaming blasphemies and slams into the opposite wall, where he falls sprawling, stone dead. Tiger Waldron attempts a final dash up the ladder to reach the door at the top of the tank. “Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety”—until his overtaxed heart too bursts and he falls to his death. “And still the rushing oxygen, with which they two had hoped to dominate the world, poured [in]—senseless matter, blindly avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously had sought to cage and master it!” (328).

  As the plant goes up in flames, the oxygen tank explodes in a huge ball of fire. Thus the socialists foil the attempt to control the air supply of the world—and thus the world itself—and inaugurate the “Great Emancipation” of humanity from the clutches of greedy capitalists. In the words of the protagonist Armstrong, “Academic discussion becomes absurd in the face of plutocratic savagery” that seeks a “complete monopoly of the air, with an absolute suppression of all political rights.” Slavery and violent revolution are the only options.

  Tales of the Rainmakers

  “The Rain-Maker,” by Margaret Adelaide Wilson, a short story that appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in 1917, recounts the hopes and dreams of William Converse, who operates, like the real Charles Hatfield at the time (chapter 3), by mixing and evaporating chemicals on a high tower: “The chemicals are holding the storm-centre right overhead, and the evaporation is tremendous. The rain will come this time if it holds off, the wind holds off—if only it holds off.”15

  Converse is a true believer in his rainmaking process. He came to the desert on a mission: to use his skills to atone for the death of his father, who died of thirst near this very spot some thirty years before. But Converse has much more to confront than just the desiccated sky. His wife, Linda, who thought she was marrying a prosperous entrepreneur, has become super-critical of his idealistic quest, which keeps her cooped up in a tent with a smoky stove, frying bacon and potatoes: “You’ve gone and thrown up a perfectly good contract in Grass Valley, a thousand sure, and more if your luck held, and you’ve dragged me off to this God-forsaken spot, with not a soul in thirty miles to know whether it rains or not. I want to know what you mean by it” (503–504). The high-minded Converse, like a modern-day Job, is seeking “to bring rain in the wilderness” by lifting his voice to the heavens as his father did on the night of his death. He receives no support from the vulgar, vain, and greedy Linda, though. She drives him from the tent into the night with her cutting remarks about how she no longer believes in him, and perhaps never did.

  “Driven by an animal’s blind desire to escape its tormentor, Converse stumble[s] down the rocky path toward the tower” (506). Devastated by her verbal assaults, he realizes that Linda has managed to shatter his faith in himself. He trips over something in the sand, and “a hot pain dart[s] through his ankle ... it must have been a snake” (507). Pitiful and increasingly delirious, he collapses in the dry waterhole where his father met his demise. Even as he nears death, his gaze is fixed on the black and brooding sky, with its great masses of clouds sinking lower until a soft hiss, a pitter-pat of rain on the sand, informs him of “his” success: “Rain!... Rain in the wilderness.... I’ve not failed, after all.... I must find father and tell him” (509)—an impossible quest for his paralyzed body but not for his triumphant spirit.

  Jingling in the Wind (1928), by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, is a stylistically complex and multivocal tone poem, “a fantasy of weather control.”16 Here we meet Jeremy the rainmaker, a man who participates in the pure sensation of nature and “gives it a point.” For Jeremy, interior feelings and reflections trump the mere wetness of the rain, which is the “least significant part”: “He had brought the rain into the sky. With his science and his apparatus he had engendered the rain and now, as rainman, reve of the rain, he looked about and saw his work was well done, saw his work take purpose in the clods and the parted loam.”17

  Using Jeremy’s techniques, the commissioners of rural Jason County, Kentucky, in conference with the farmers, set the rain schedule for the month, but only in their own local jurisdiction. The process is so precise that if you wish for fine weather on a scheduled rain day, you merely need to cross into the next county. Much like the Kansas and Nebraska rainmakers of yore, “retorts, clouds, equations, antennae, derricks, vats, and acids” play their symbolic, if nondescript, roles in the rainmaking scenes. So does the hall of the rainmen, where licensed practitioners confer and visitors thumb charts, prod apparatus, and inscribe their names in the guest book.

  Of greater rhetorical significance, however, are the debates over the morality of the technique. Half the population, led by the Reverend James Ahab Crouch (“Make the World Safe for God”), oppose rain control as a “device of the devil,” blasphemous or pagan. He champions a bill in the legislature designed to crush the rainmen and preaches from his great tent how terrible it is “to subtract from the omnipotence of an omnipotent God” (179). Others, more open-minded or daring, look on it as a great benefit (25–27, 74). They plan a carnival with “a great rain display, a model rain, predicted, arranged, conducted by some rainman, controlled” (185).

  Like Frank Melbourne at the Goodland County fair (chapter 3), Jeremy, known popularly as the “rain bat” for his tight-fitting black rain suit, is invited to the carnival and promises the expectant crowd a deluge by two o’clock. He works feverishly, tuning his instruments, mixing the proprietary chemicals, and conjuring up and battling with the clouds, which fight back like dragons. Finally, “out of the great rent in the beast rolled a stream of rain and the gutters were running flush, running over” (213–217). Jeremy’s success is celebrated with a parade, with the rain bat riding in a convertible at the head of a motorcade as music plays, drums beat, men cheer, women swoon, and skywriters pay homage overhead. At the time the book was written, Charles Hatfield was still active in the field, and the Rock Island Railroad rainmakers persisted in memory.

  N. Richard Nash’s romantic comedy The Rainmaker (1955) is set in Three Point, Texas, “on a summer day in a time of devastating drought.” Lizzie Curry’s family worries more about her marriage prospects than about their dying crops and livestock. Suddenly, a charming stranger arrives, a Texas twister of a man named Bill Starbuck—Rainmaker!—a charlatan, but not essentially a crook, who promises, for $100, to make miracles, to bring rain. As the summer storm clouds gather overhead, lonely and plain Lizzie, too, has her love life “seeded” by the confidence man’s machinations.

  How to make rain? Starbuck mocks the scientific voice of the charlatan when he cries, “Sodium chloride! Pitch it up high—right up
to the clouds. Electrify the cold front. Neutralize the warm front. Barometricize the tropopause. Magnetize occlusions in the sky.”18 But Starbuck, like faith healers, has his own method, “all my own,” that begins with him brandishing his hickory stick and exuding confidence. After inviting himself to supper and collecting $100 in advance, Starbuck puts the family members to work for him in a test of their faith—beating on a big bass drum, painting arrows on the ground to direct the lightning away from the house, tying the farm mule’s hind legs together—without allowing any questions and certainly without acting sensibly. Lizzie, who is flabbergasted by all this, admonishes her father, H. C.:

  LIZZIE: You’re making a big fool of yourself! Where’s your common sense?

  H. C.: Common sense? Why, that didn’t do us no good—we’re in trouble. Maybe we better throw our common sense away.

  LIZZIE: For Pete’s sake, hang on to a little of it! (76)