Visions of the Future (18 page)

“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.

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 turned 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 a 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
scramble
!”

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 weather makers 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.”

“Harnessed? For weather control?”

Weis nodded wordlessly.

“The President wants to really work on weather control?” Ted broke into a huge grin. “That’s a harness I’ve been trying to get into for four years.”

“Listen to me, Marrett. The President wants you to work on weather control, but I’m the one who’s going to be responsible for controlling you. And I will never—do you hear,
never
—allow you to direct a project or get anywhere near directing a project. I’m going to find bosses for you who can keep you bottled up tight. We’ll do weather-control work, and we’ll use your ideas. But you’ll never be in charge of anything as long as I’m in Washington.”

Ted’s smile died. “Okay,” he said grimly, “as long as the work gets done… and done right. I didn’t expect to get a National Medal out of this anyway.”

Still glaring, Dr. Weis said, “You were lucky, Marrett. Very lucky. If the weather patterns had been slightly different, if things hadn’t worked out so well…”

“Wasn’t luck,” Ted flashed. “It was work, a lot of peoples’ work, and brains and guts. That’s where weather control—real weather control—wins for you. It doesn’t matter what the weather patterns are if you’re going to change ’em all to suit your needs. You don’t need luck, just time and sweat. You
make
the weather you want. That’s what we did. That’s why it had to work; we just had to tackle it on a big-enough scale.”

“Luck or skill,” Dr. Weis said wearily, “it doesn’t matter. You’ll get weather control now. But under my direction, and on my terms.”

“We’ve won,” Ted said as he shut off the phone. “We’ve really won.”

Barney sank into the nearest chair. “It’s too much happening all at once. I don’t think I can believe it all.”

“It’s real,” Ted answered quietly. “Weather control is a fact now. We’re going to do it.”

“You’ll have to work under Dr. Weis and whoever he appoints to handle the program,” I said.

Ted shrugged. “I worked for Rossman. I can work for anybody. The work’s important, not the titles they give you.”

Tuli rubbed his midsection and said, “I don’t know about you inscrutable westerners, but this red-blooded Mongol is starving.”

“So’m I, come to think of it,” Ted said. “Come on you guys, let’s have a celebration breakfast!”

“Guys,” Barney echoed, frowning.

“Hey, that’s right, you’re a girl. Come on, Girl. Looks like you won’t have to play second fiddle to hurricanes anymore.” He took her arm and started for the door. “Think you can stand being the center of my attention?”

Barney looked back at me. I got up and took her other arm. “If you don’t mind, she’s going to be the center of my attention, too.”

Tuli shook his head as he joined us. “You barbarians. No wonder you’re nervous wrecks. You never know who’s going to marry whom. I’ve got my future wife all picked out; our families agreed on the match when we were both four years old.”

“That’s why you’re here in the States,” Ted joked.

Barney said, “Tuli, don’t do anything to make them change their minds. I haven’t had this much attention since
I
was four.”

Down the main stairway we went, and out onto the street. The sidewalks were puddled from rain, a side effect of Omega, but overhead the stars were shining through tattered, scudding clouds.

“Today the world’s going to wake up and discover that man can control the weather,” Ted said.

“Not really,” Tuli cautioned. “We’ve only made a beginning. We still have years of learning ahead. Decades, perhaps centuries.”

Ted nodded, a contented smile on his face. “Maybe. But we’ve started. That’s the important thing.”

“And the political problems this is going to cause?” I asked. “The social and economic changes that weather control will bring? What about them?”

He laughed. “That’s for administrators like you and the President to worry about. I’ve got enough to keep me busy: six quadrillion tons of air… and one mathematician.”