Storm

by George R. Stewart

  “French Bar reporting,” he said; “their men couldn’t find anything that caused the short.”

  Terry hesitated, and so the L. D. restrained the question he wanted to ask.

  “Say,” Terry went on, “I called him at eight-seventeen—you know—like you said. Martley said he didn’t know yet, and then the men came in while I was on the wire.” A touch of awe came into Terry’s voice, as he faded again through the door. “You sure hit it on the nose that time.”

  Even when left alone, the L. D. maintained his poker-face. No one could have been sure that he smiled when, for further assurance as to the weather, he glanced through his window and saw, two blocks away, the blue banner of Telephone still streaming out before a northwest wind.

  5

  Among the many thousand employees of the great companies, only three equaled the L. D. in their concern over the winter storms. One of them was the General Manager of the Railroad. He was an old-timer, and his hair was gray. Also he had stories from his father who had bossed a coolie gang and heard the strokes that drove home the Gold Spike.

  “In those days,” he would say, when he had a chance to talk, “in those days, they had a lot of trouble with slides in the storms. Now, the cuts are so old that they’ve weathered back, and sometimes all grown up with brush and trees, so they look like natural hillsides.

  “Yes,” he would explain, if anyone seemed interested, “even in my time we used to have our trouble with sinks during the rainy season—plenty of bad spots in the Valley. But we kept piling in rock ballast year after year, and eventually we got down to bottom. And surface water too. To begin with, they put the road through against time. Ditches and culverts were skimpy—kept us worried for years. First thing you knew, something would plug—you’d have running water across the track and a wash-out on the lower side. We put in bigger culverts, and dug the ditches deeper.

  “Snow too. I guess we have the heaviest snowfall of any main line in the world. In those days, they just had push-plows; they’d gang up locomotives behind them and run in till they stalled, and then back out and run at it again. Pretty soon the snow would be piled up so deep there was no place to push it to. I was only a kid in ’89, but I remember. You know how much snowfall we had at Summit that season—sixty-four feet! Not inches—feet! (And that’s not the record either.) We were blocked for two weeks—had hundreds of men with shovels digging out the plows. But now we don’t even bother with snow-sheds except over switches and sidings. We shove the snow back with flangers, and then the rotaries go through and throw it all over the country.”

  “Well,” the listener might reply, “I guess you’ve licked the weather.” And he would wonder why the Manager smiled wryly, as if belying his own words.

  •

  The Chief Service Officer at Bay Airport was another man whose greatest concern was weather.

  Like most men in the flying business he was young, and so people usually accepted his statement that he was second generation in the business. “Sure,” he would go on to say, “my dad was a sky-pilot—Methodist.”

  The sermons and Bible-readings of his youth had left only a few perceptible and curious tokens upon him. For one thing, he was fond of the expression “act of God,” but since he confined it to disasters he must apparently imagine God as practicing sabotage.

  This conception was borne out by the few biblical verses which he liked to quote. “Get this!” he would say to some youngster who was in training. “This is the one business you can’t take any chances in. Why?—because the Lord’s working against you. It says so in the Bible. ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps—Fire, and hail; snow and vapors, stormy wind fulfilling his word.’ ‘Fulfilling his word,’ that means they work for him. Dragons and deeps you can maybe forget about. But fire. That’s lightning, and all kinds of electrical disturbances that go with it—static that mixes up the radio beams and gets a pilot lost. Hail and snow—that’s icing conditions. Vapor means fog and low ceilings. Stormy wind means turbulence. Remember that verse and you’ve got all the inside of what a storm means to the air-lines.”

  He would pause a moment for effect, and then go on:

  “What’s more, who is it that the Bible calls the prince of the power of the air? Why, the Devil! And, believe me, when you got the Devil and God workin’ against you, you got to watch your step.”

  No one was ever sure whether this diatribe was serious or whether it was a pedagogical and mnemonic device to impress his subordinates with the fundamentals of good flight-dispatching.

  As for his own practice the CSO played safe by employing every good principle of meteorology and aerodynamics. Beams, beacons, and constant radio communication kept his pilots on their courses. No plane went out with an overused engine, and he was ruthless against pilots of doubtful skill or intelligence.

  “For this is the way,” he would express it. “You can’t foresee the weather all the time. Eventually you get caught. Then, if you have a good plane and a good pilot, he can most likely come through anyway.”

  •

  Upon the expanse of the vast switch-board, repeated before each of the dozens of operators, appeared the names not of mere local exchanges, but of cities. NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SEATTLE, CHICAGO, DENVER, VANCOUVER, HONOLULU, and dozens more. Beneath the names were small round holes, each the opening of an electrical connection known as a jack. Let an operator push the plug into one of the ten jacks labeled NEW YORK, and she talked across three thousand miles as easily as someone talks across a room.

  Sometimes, walking through that operating-room, the District Traffic Superintendent of the telephone long-distance lines thought of a football game. Like linesmen, shoulder to shoulder, the scores of operators faced the great switch-board. Close behind them, like backs supporting the line, the supervisors shifted here and there, caring for anything which might disturb the operators’ steady routine. In the rear, like a safety-man, the chief operator sat at her desk ready for trouble which might prove too much for a supervisor. The DTS himself, the coach, remained generally in his office, far on the sidelines, planning and directing.

  The analogy, he told himself, was far from exact. In fact, one of his chief efforts was to remove from his workers the sense of strain and constant emergency which was the essence of any athletic contest. And yet in the same way, he imagined, every coach must plan his defense. His hope must always be that the line would stop each play as a mere matter of routine. The other defenses were for greater or less emergencies.

  Sometimes during long periods of calm he welcomed those walks; they seemed his only touch with concrete reality. Of his company’s three operating departments, Plant cared for wires, cables, and poles, and Commercial kept and collected the bills. But in his own department—Traffic—he was seldom immediately concerned with anything so material as wires or money. Instead, he dealt with such abstractions as voice-channels. His traffic consisted not of freight-cars or motor-trucks, but of minute and invisible electric pulsations by which ideas crudely and conventionally interpreted in voice-sounds moved from place to place. Thus like a magician of telepathy he supervised over a vast area the miracle of thought-transference. For him space had lost its power.

  Yet he realized always that his work was not magical, just as in the end it was not abstract. His voice-channels passed through real wires and cables which hung from poles or lay buried beneath the ground. In his imagination, partly picturing maps, partly remembering actual landscapes, he saw the three great long-distance leads running out from the City—north, south, and east. Eastward, the Central Transcontinental, its stout poles carrying forty wires, surmounted Donner Pass; across the Nevada deserts its insulators glittered in the sun; it reached Great Salt Lake, and passed on toward the Atlantic. Northward the Seattle lead skirted the base of Mt. Shasta, and twisted among the labyrinthine gorges of the Siskiyous. Southward, the Los Angeles lead followed the valley high
way and mounted over the treeless slopes of the Tehachapis. Close at hand, the leads were vivid in his mind; farther away, they dimmed; at last, passing beyond his jurisdiction, they disappeared also across the horizon of his mind.

  At every point those thin strands of copper were subject to failure, and most of all they suffered before the assault of the winter storms. The underground conduits were safest, but even they could be washed out by floods. As for the overhead cables and open wires, they could resist rain, but were vulnerable to every unusual attack of clinging snow, ice, and wind.

  When the storms came and the lines lay broken, the men of the Plant Department must go out to replace wire and set poles. But the Traffic Superintendent, dry in his office, also fought the storm—patching together new circuits, rerouting calls, keeping the traffic going through.

  6

  San Francisco calling Colusa. Hello, hello. . . . Oh, hello, Jim. This is Pete, Consolidated Flour Company, you know. . . . Sure, you big horse-thief, hope you’re the same. . . . But look here, I’m comin’ up through your one-horse town Sunday afternoon—can I see you? . . . Okey, okey I’ll see you there; maybe I can sell you a coupla pounds of flour even on the Sabbath. Good-bye—Oh, no, say—you still there? . . . Good. Say, you were tellin’ me about that cut-off last time. Where do I hit it? . . . Okey, I’ll remember—turn left at Tom and George’s Service Station. I can maybe use that five minutes it’ll save me. Well, good-bye. . . . Good-bye. See you Sunday. Good-bye.

  7

  “Public service—” said the Chief with a little gesture of his hand toward the door. He did not blink, but the Junior Meteorologist wondered if there wasn’t the little flicker of a wicked smile. The J. M. went into the other room, and greeted the two nuns and the dozen gawky girls in ugly uniforms with black stockings—the physics class from a local convent school. Sister Mary Rose was plump and youngish; she taught the class, and was obviously trying to be progressive. Sister Mary Dolores was thin and oldish; she apparently came along to chaperon Sister Mary Rose, and her attitude seemed to be that if God had wanted us to know about the weather he would have informed St. Thomas Aquinas.

  The J. M. showed them some instruments first, and when he pointed out the barometer, Sister Mary Rose said, “Torricelli!” as if she had that one located properly.

  Then the J. M. showed them his map. The wind-arrows were easy to explain, because all you had to say was that they pointed the direction of the wind and the number of barbs was proportional to the strength of the wind. Isobars were harder, but the J. M. made a shift at explanation by saying that if a ship could voyage at that particular time all the way around one of the isobars the barometer would show the same pressure all the way. After that success, he warmed with enthusiasm, and discoursed five minutes about some elementary matters like air-masses, fronts, and extra-tropical cyclones, before he realized that nobody had the slightest idea what he was talking about. Then he talked in simpler and simpler terms until finally he broke out into a sweat and got down to words of one syllable.

  “You see,” he said, gesturing to help himself out, “a high is more or less like a deep pool in a stream. Everything is quiet there. Or it’s like a dome in the air, and the air keeps kind of sliding down the sides, in a spiral. And since the air is coming down, it gets warmer and can hold always more water, and so there isn’t rain from that air, or even cloud.”

  “You remember,” said Sister Mary Rose to the class, “Boyle’s Law—about pressure.”

  The J. M. took a long breath to cool off, and saw Whitey grinning from across the table.

  “And a low,” the J. M. went on manfully, “is like a shallow whirlpool where everything is going fast. There’s less air at the center and so the outside air tries to flow in and fill up the center but that makes lots of wind and kind of spins round so fast that another force—centrifugal force . . .” He paused doubtfully again.

  “Yes,” said Sister Mary Rose brightly, “Newton.”

  “Well, centrifugal force throws it—helps throw it—out toward the edges, and—and—well, anyway, in a low there are places where the air is rising. And where it’s rising, it’s getting colder and the water-vapor it has in it has to come out as rain, and that’s why—well, more or less—why we get rain when a low comes along. And we know a low is coming when the pressure falls.”

  The J. M. did not look, but he could feel Whitey’s grin.

  “And what, children,” Sister Mary Rose was saying, “indicates the rise and fall of pressure?”

  “The-barometer-sister,” said the class in unison, having obviously been well coached on that point.

  “And always remember,” the J. M. went on in polite desperation, “that warm air is lighter, and so tends to rise over cold air.”

  “Just like in a hot-air heating system,” said Sister Mary Rose.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said the J. M. cordially, being glad of any assistance, “and our rain falls out of warm rising air that’s getting cooler.”

  “Does the class have any questions?” asked Sister Mary Rose.

  “What,” said a determined young voice, “is a typhoon?”

  At this sign of interest and intelligence Sister Mary Rose beamed. Even the J. M. was encouraged.

  “A typhoon,” he said, and then was suddenly overwhelmed by the impossibility of decently explaining a typhoon without the aid of integral calculus.

  “A typhoon,” he repeated, “oh, that’s a big storm at sea they have over near the Philippine Islands.” To his amazement this answer satisfied everybody.

  The class went out, each bobbing and thanking the J. M.

  “That sure was a fine, scientific lecture—” said Whitey, “in terms of 1902. I thought you were trained in air-mass.”

  But the J.M had done his duty, and was not going to be badgered. “Public service,” he said, feeling that he was learning some of the answers. But he thought to himself that the Chief ought to put someone like Whitey on jobs like that, not someone with a real scientific attitude. Then he settled to his desk and forgot all about it.

  The storm now dominated a region which was as large as the United States westward from the Mississippi.

  The Junior Meteorologist again looked at Maria with interest as for the third day she appeared on his map. At the time of observations she had centered, as closely as he could determine, at the one-hundred-eightieth meridian, almost in mid-ocean. Since this meridian was also the international Date Line, Maria had thus been in the anomalous position of having her warm front still in Thursday while her cold front stretched off through Friday for a while, until its trailing end was again in Thursday. In spite of her size Maria nowhere touched land. She centered exactly between Midway Island and the southernmost Aleutians, almost filling the broad space between.

  The J. M. decided that on the whole Maria had changed but little since yesterday. She remained a fast mover, having again traveled more than a thousand miles in the twenty-four hours. She would still have to be called a vigorous and growing young storm. Already the horse-power developed by her winds was enough to equal that of a dozen tropical hurricanes combined, but this huge energy was spread over such a wide area that nowhere, except perhaps in a few squalls along the cold front, did her winds reach gale force.

  Now that Maria was well advanced into girlhood she was no longer the youngest of the family. Two new storms had already developed along the Asiatic coast, and were moving out to sea. But the J. M. regarded them with no special interest; he did not even find names for them, but since they had appeared at the same time he called them the Twins and let it pass at that.

  The rest of the map also had little to offer. Antonia, continuing her erratic and suicidal course, had moved close to Bering Strait and come into a region of polar high pressure; she was rapidly disappearing. Cornelia was still beating against the south Alaskan coast. She too was losing energy, but
a bulge of isobars eastward showed that some of her Pacific air had crossed the mountains. This eastward elongation, the J. M. decided, would bear watching.

  As his eyes wandered north toward the stations along the Arctic Ocean, he realized even more surely that something might be about to happen. The Chief, as he remembered to his chagrin, had commented upon Coppermine the day before. Quickly now he checked back over his previous maps. On Tuesday, Coppermine had reported 1020; on Wednesday, 1022; now on Thursday, 1023. During the same time the wind had been blowing from the east or northeast and growing stronger; the temperature had fallen slowly.

  Tantalized, he looked at the broad blank spaces over Beaufort Sea, and beyond. How could anyone know what was happening when there were holes like that in the map? And here in California he did not have reports from the Atlantic or from Europe and western Siberia. That little rise of pressure over Coppermine seemed slight, and might be some local development. Or it might be the bulging snout of some great mass of cold air from over the polar ice-cap. Even if it were, without round-the-world reports you could not be sure how it would move.

  The Chief came, and looked at the map, particularly at the Arctic stations. He said nothing, but two or three times he emitted his doubting little nasal grunt. The J. M. wanted to ask a question, and felt his scientific curiosity urging him to gather information in all humility wherever it might be found. But his pride as a recent distinguished graduate of the Meteorological Institute suddenly objected to asking a question of the Chief whom he often felt to be nothing but a weather-guesser. He compromised with an affirmation which was really a question:

  “That polar air-mass is about ready to let go, I should say.”

  “Hn-n? Well—yes, and no.”

  The tone of voice was so level that not until after several seconds did the J. M. begin to wonder whether the non-committal reply had been a snub. At the idea he grew angry—these Weather Bureau old-timers! He remembered his experience of the early morning.