Storm

by George R. Stewart

  Until the map was nearly finished, the Chief could not really begin his work. He walked into the teletype room. As he entered, its activity seemed to rise in crescendo. The machines clicked like maddened typists; their bells rang; conveyors from the vacuum tubes plunked into their baskets.

  To an outsider, everything might have seemed insane confusion; to the Chief, it was the ordered rhythm of life. That machine which kept clicking out messages with scarcely a break—he knew that its impulses came from an office in Chicago which served as clearing-house for the weather reports of half the continent. Another machine clicked continuously and in addition, as if in mere exuberant good spirits, loudly rang a bell every few seconds. This was the Weather Bureau’s own wire linking together the stations along air-lines. The other four machines, serving local telegraph and radio stations, were sometimes silent, but by contrast their bursts of activity seemed even more feverish. To add to the confusion one of his own men was cutting a teletype ribbon, for at the proper moment San Francisco must become a sending station and report the local conditions to the rest of the world.

  In spite of years of routine the Chief felt a deep smoldering excitement; the moment drew nearer. Will the good priest ever fail to stir as the ritual of the mass rises to the climax? Will the true actor, even after a thousand nights, take as a matter of course the cue which yields him the stage for his great scene? And for the Chief this was no mere ritual or drama, passing inevitably toward a fixed end. It was a contest, a battle, in which the mighty forces of the air were preparing against him unknown attacks and ambushes. He hurried back to see how the map was shaping up.

  Whitey was still working like a high-speed machine. Winnipeg, The Pas, Qu’Appelle, Swift Current. Most of the United States and Canada was now filled in. Between California and Hawaii a dozen ships had reported. Taking up a new batch of radio messages, Whitey dropped some thousands of miles southward and began with ships along the Mexican west coast; this work was a little slower, for he had to locate latitude and longitude. Nansu, Olaf Maersk, San Roque, City of Brownleigh. A moment later he was back above the Arctic Circle in the Canadian Northwest where stations lonelier than ships sent out the readings of their instruments by radio through the polar night. Coppermine, Aklavik, Fort Norman, Chesterfield Inlet.

  The teletype room sent out less noise. The bells rang only now and then. The Chicago line was quiet. Occasionally some machine broke suddenly into action with a belated report, or something gone astray, or a correction. Whitey relaxed enough to make his first mistake. He cursed softly, and reached for his ink eradicator. Mr. Ragan and the Junior Meteorologist worked steadily at their table, plotting changes of temperature and pressure since the previous reports.

  Although the Chief had not noted any passing of time since the reports had begun, he saw now that the clock stood at a quarter past five. The electric lights still blazed in the office; the blank windows showed only darkness outside.

  “How’s she stand, Whitey?”

  “Pretty well filled up, sir. I think you can start.”

  The Chief slipped into his chair. In this position he was opposite Whitey, and saw the map upside down. But he had long since adjusted himself to this position so as to avoid joggling the chart-man’s elbow and having to peer over his shoulders. After all, as he liked to demonstrate with pencil and paper— is just as easy to read as 5 once you get used to it.

  From whatever direction observed, the map as yet represented nothing but confusion. For each of several hundred stations and ships Whitey had recorded a half dozen or more separate notations. Over the United States the map was nearly filled with numbers and seemingly cabalistic symbols. Even to the Chief such a map was only a recording of data which he must reduce to order.

  First of all, he set himself to locate the present position of the storm which had been advancing toward the south Alaskan coast. Heavy rain and a sharply falling barometer at Sitka indicated that the front had not yet passed but was probably close. With his purple pencil the Chief drew a line lying just west of Sitka and curving slightly away until it ended two hundred miles west of the Washington coast.

  Since no other storms of importance for his district seemed indicated, he began with his isobars. Through the maze of figures he worked confidently. With Denver reporting pressure at 1016 and North Platte 1012, he started his 1014 isobar about half way between the two. He drew it slowly in a curve northwesterly. As the reported pressures indicated, he left Rapid City, Miles City and Havre on one side of the line with North Platte. Cheyenne, Billings, and Helena rested on the other side with Denver. He drew the line onward, bent it around Kamloops in British Columbia, and then brought it sharply toward the southwest just including Vancouver and Victoria within its curve. Off the coast it met the purple line which he had drawn south from Alaska. Although no ship had reported from near this point of junction, the Chief took his isobar across the other line with a sharp angle to indicate the sudden drop of pressure associated with a passing front. Then he paused; a vast region of ocean devoid of notations stretched out before his pencil.

  “How about the Byzantion? She’s out here somewhere.”

  “No report from her, sir.”

  “Hn-n? —Must be a poor ship! Any report yesterday?”

  “Yes, yesterday. But not the day before.”

  “She’ll probably come in late, and spoil my map. Well . . .” With a further grunt of disapproval, the Chief drew his line on, southwestward, across the empty Pacific spaces. It might easily be a few hundred miles misplaced, but lacking information he had no remedy. Skillfully he looped the isobar around the Hawaiian Islands, and ran it back toward the continent. He drew it across the northern end of Lower California, kept Tucson just within the curve, and finally joined it to its beginning, east of Denver.

  Starting with another line, he followed the same procedure. In ten minutes the map had taken form.

  As he worked, the Chief felt a touch of sadness. He remembered Tom saying: “Sure could use a rain.” Well, there was no rain in sight. That storm along the Alaskan coast might bring a drizzle as far south as Oregon. The Chief wished that he could repay Tom’s confidence and conjure up a storm somewhere from nothing. But for three thousand miles to the west stretched off the great high-pressure area. Every ship on the Honolulu run reported light winds and clear skies. On the great-circle route from San Francisco to Japan there was a lack of vessels, but the liner Eureka, sixteen hours out of San Francisco, reported a pressure of almost 1020, discouragingly high. Just as he was contemplating the Eureka, Whitey came in.

  “Well, here she is, Chief—the Byzantion. We’ll see if she spoils your map.”

  The Chief shrugged his shoulders, and looked at Whitey locating the position—forty north, one hundred forty-three west. Whatever her nationality and business might be, she was a little south of the Japan lane; the Chief imagined that she was heading for Shanghai; but he knew very little about the various ships and the commerce they represented. He judged them by the regularity and completeness of their reports. By the set of Whitey’s shoulders, he knew that the Byzantion had turned the trick against him.

  Whitey finished and straightened up. Yes, the ship reported 1015. With the resigned air of a man who deals in actualities, he erased a long section of one isobar, and redrew it in the indicated position two hundred miles farther north. Whitey grinned, not unsympathetically; still, the joke such as it might be, was on the Chief.

  The shift of a single isobar meant little in the general situation. The Chief looked at the finished map, and felt a let-down. The excitement of the day was over, and as often, its end was anti-climax. From today’s map even a fairly intelligent monkey could not go wrong. He turned to his typewriter; “Might as well have had a rubber-stamp,” he thought, “for all this last month.” Without hesitation he wrote:

  SAN FRANCISCO BAY REGION: FAIR TODAY AND THURSDAY; NO CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE; WEST TO NORTHWEST
WINDS.

  He continued typing off the forecasts for his other areas. Much miscellaneous work remained to be done. But as far as the Chief was concerned, the best part of the day was past. The hour hand of the office clock was approaching six. Outside, a faint light had begun to transfuse the darkness.

  3

  Around the curve of the earth, the day-old storm moved eastward, leaving Asia behind. Upon the opposite face of the sphere the sun now shone, but the storm swirled over darkened waters. Although among its kind it must be counted immature and small, nevertheless it had grown so rapidly that it already dominated an area which was a thousand miles across.

  Around its center the winds blew in a great circuit—counterclockwise. In the whole half of the storm-area northward from the center there was little cloud or rain; dry, cold winds were blowing from the east and north. Most of the weather-activity lay to the south along the two fronts, the boundary lines between cooler and warmer air. Extending from the storm-center, like the two legs of a wide-spread compass—warm front and cold front—they moved rapidly eastward, and the storm center moved with them. As a wave moves through the water without carrying the water along with it, so the storm-center and the two fronts moved through the air, yet themselves remained a single unit.

  The southwest breeze which, thirty hours before, had first sprung up near that rocky island south of Japan, had now grown to a great river of air five miles deep, five hundred wide. From over the tropical ocean it poured forth its warm and moist air. Then, as it might have blown against a gently rising range of mountains, it met the slope of the retreating northern air, and spiraling upward, swerved in toward the center. Ascending, it cooled; its moisture first became cloud, and then quickly rain. Thus, like a great elongated comma—head at the center of the storm, tail reaching five hundred miles to the southeast—the continuous rain-belt of the warm front swept across the ocean-surface.

  Not all of the southern air ascended that slope; some of it lagged behind and was overtaken by the advancing line of cooler northern air which formed the other compass-leg, the cold front. Here the northern air forcibly thrust itself beneath the southern air. And since the slope was much steeper, the warm air ascended with a rush, and the reaction was almost explosive. (Old navigators of sailing ships knew its like as the “line-squall”; most of all they feared its sudden treacherous wind-shift, which dismasted many a good vessel despite all seamanship.) Above a five-hundred-mile line of white-caps, the cold front swept forward. Dark thunder-clouds towered high above it. In contrast to the gentle rain-bringing warm front, its passage brought the terrors of the tempest—squalls, drumming rain-bursts, hail, thunder and lightning, the fearful wind-shift. The passage, however, was quick as it was violent. In a few minutes the front had rolled on eastward; behind it, here and there, heavy showers poured down, but before a cold steady wind from the north the clouds were breaking, and ever-widening patches of blue showed clear and clean.

  4

  The great clipper, one would have said, hung motionless between sky and ocean. Though the unloosed power of the four engines hurled the plane onward at close to two hundred miles an hour, still the surrounding vastness of featureless space offered no fixed point by which to observe its speed. Far below, too far for individual waves to be apparent, the blue ocean stretched off, unbroken to the sight by ship or island. The whole arch of the sky was cloudless blue. Only the sun gave a point of reference, but its movement was more rapid than the plane’s; to judge by the sun, one could only conclude that the plane was speeding backward.

  Though the Navigator was sometimes conscious of illusions, they never confused his sense of actuality. At any given moment he knew to a nicety his position on the predetermined route from San Francisco to Honolulu. Although his theoretical range of vision extended about a hundred miles in every direction and covered an area as large as Ireland, he did not rely on sight. Within this circle, to be sure, were at least three ships, but they were at distances which would probably make them invisible to the unaided eye; to hunt for them with a telescope might be as tedious as looking for a penny dropped on a landing-field; and when spotted, they could yield him no new information. Without the direct aid of sight, by instruments and by radio, he nevertheless plotted his course confidently.

  The Navigator’s face, however, was worried. A passenger seeing him might have thought that he feared some impending disaster. Actually, like many another mortal, he was worrying about the monthly bills. Last evening, instead of thinking epic thoughts about the morrow’s flight through space, he had sat down at the dining-room table with his wife, and spent several hours going over the family budget. Three small children with contradictory tendencies toward too large tonsils and too small sinus openings kept a man guessing. Yet this month there had been no doctor’s bills; the water bill, however, was high.

  Then he suddenly smiled, realizing a series of connections which on the previous evening had escaped him. It should have been simple to a man in his profession. While the Pacific High stood firm, California had dry weather. The garden would require water, but the children would not need the doctor to drain their sinuses. And of even more importance to the family, as long as these conditions held, his own flight of fourteen hundred miles across the open ocean was hardly more dangerous than a street-car ride.

  He did not look at the weather-map—he saw it plain in his mind. From San Francisco the great concentric ovals of the High pointed off southwestward. Around those ovals, clockwise, the wind blew steadily. Today, with the course charted south of the High, he was sure of a favoring tail-wind which would bring the plane to Honolulu with gas-tanks still comfortably full. On the return voyage, if the luck held, he might have a course along the north side of the High with the same steady tail-winds.

  That nest of ovals upon the weather-map looked dull and uninspiring enough. He himself, not primarily a meteorologist, had no clear idea of what the High meant in the whole cosmic scheme. But he had a vivid sense of how those ovals affected his own air-route. They shunted off the storms toward British Columbia, and so gave generally fair weather for the Honolulu run; and also they formed a great benign swirl of air which with ingenuity might be made, paradoxically, to serve both going and coming. When the High broke up, there was a different story.

  Looking ahead, the Navigator now saw a ship. By the rate at which it seemed to come dashing toward him, he again became conscious of the plane’s own rapid motion.

  5

  Since the glacier-ice began to melt from the mountains and the crags to show their shapes, the quiet lake has lain at the foot of the gorge. No one knows who first crossed the Pass.

  While the ice still lingered, mountain-sheep must have worn the first trails—faint dull traces across the granite. After some centuries the black-tailed deer followed; by then the ice would have been gone. Next come Pai-ute or Washoe, gathering seeds and pine-nuts. So recently as if it might have been yesterday, some trapper may have watered his horses at the lake, and leaning on his long rifle squinted into the westering sun as he worked out in his mind a route upward from ledge to ledge.

  For certain, we know, the covered wagons came in ’44. Old Caleb Greenwood and hawk-nosed Elisha Stevens guided those emigrants down the Humboldt River. At the sink they found a Pai-ute chief whom they called Truckee. Squatting, he drew them a map in the sand. So they crossed the desert, and went up along the swift river which they called Truckee for the map-drawer. They met the snow at the lake, and with the snow they fought panic. Some went to the south, but others forced their way onward through the snow and over the Pass above the lake.

  Next year, following the wheel marks, came William Ide, and rigged a windlass at the granite crest to pull up his wagons. In ’46 came a great wave of emigrants—five hundred wagons. Last of all that autumn came the Donners; the snow caught them; they starved through the winter; the horror of their story imprinted their name upon both lake and pass, and broods still over
peak and canyon like a legend of Greek tragedy.

  In ’49 the wagons swung round a little to the south through an easier gap. So it went through the fifties, and one might have said that the great days of the Pass were over, that it would lie in the future like a thousand other Sierran gaps—untrodden snow or wind-clean granite. In the sixties the main road followed the double-summited route by Lake Tahoe. There in fiction Hank Monk drove Horace Greeley to Placerville on time, and there in reality passed the stages and the great freighting-wagons to and from the Nevada mines. There galloped the pony-express riders, and there stood the poles of the first transcontinental telegraph.

  But railroad-crazy Theodore Judah craftily shunned the double summit, and changed everything. For after Judah’s surveyors came Charlie Crocker and his coolie gangs digging like ants. The railroad reached Auburn and Illinoistown; it rounded “Cape Horn” and came to Dutch Flat. There it paused, but a wagon-road was laid out ahead. Once more Donner Pass woke to life, and echoed back the sound of cracking whips and teamsters’ bawling. But the rails came on again. In ’67 the coolies were camping at the summit where Ide had set up his windlass. (There, even yet, you can dig up fragments of cheap Chinese bowls.) Then in ’69 the Gold Spike was driven, and the trains went through.

  With routes as with people, success breeds success. The new wagon-road preceded the railroad; the telegraph came with it. In their due time, each supporting the other, came the transcontinental telephone, the all-year automobile highway, the electric transmission-line, and the air-lane. Because Judah chose that crossing for his railroad, the pass of the ill-omened name is now a main channel of world communication.