The Weathermakers (1967)

by Ben Bova

  “You can put your coats on the table next to the stove,” she said, pointing to a magnificent old black woodburner. “Jim might be tied up for a while. Would you like some dinner? How about fruitcake and cider? Or pie?”

  We all declined except Ted, who could always somehow stow another piece of pie. It might have been an awkward half hour as we stood in the kitchen with a gang of strangers and children, but Mrs. Dennis managed to make us feel at home. She knew us all by name, and soon had us talking about the weather—and what we could do about it.

  Ted was just starting to hit his conversational stride when Jim walked in, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, grinning happily.

  “Holidays are kind of confused around here sometimes,” he said to us. “Sorry you couldn’t come for dinner. I ate enough turkey to make up for it, though.”

  “We’ve been talking about the snow,” Mrs. Dennis said. “Ted thinks it’s going to stop in another hour or so.”

  Jim laughed. “Ted doesn’t think. He knows.”

  “Hope so,” Ted replied.

  “Okay,” the Congressman said, “so don’t bother getting out the shovels and boots. Now, how about the four of you coming to the quiet end of the house. And Mary, could you bring us another pot of coffee?”

  “That’s the only time I see you during the holidays,” she said, “when you’re hungry or thirsty.”

  “Politics is a rough life.”

  The Congressman’s office was small but surprisingly quiet.

  “I soundproofed it myself,” he said. “With five kids and all their friends around the house . . . it was soundproofing or insanity.”

  He gestured to the chairs. I picked a rocker. Three walls of the office were covered with bookshelves; the fourth had a pair of windows with several framed photographs between them.

  After Mrs. Dennis delivered the coffee and we poured ourselves some, Jim began, “The Science Committee is going to start hearings in January about the Weather Bureau’s work. Naturally, your weather-control idea will become big news.”

  “So that’s it . . .”

  “Wait, there’s more. The Pentagon has been pushing hard to get their project going. Their work will be secret, if and when they get the go-ahead from Congress and the White House. In the meantime, it’s no secret that they’re driving for a weather-control project. It’s all over Washington, and it could become a political football, first class. Now if—”

  The doorbell rang. Jim said, “I think that’s our mystery guest.”

  He went out into the hall and greeted a man at the front door. “Glad you could come,” we heard him say. “Here, leave your coat on the telephone table and come in. They’re all here.”

  We recognized the man who stepped into the office as Dr. Jerrold Weis, the President’s Science Adviser. He was small, slight, with a high nasal voice. He looked even more tanned in person than he did on TV. His handshake was strong and his gaze penetrating.

  After the introductions, Dr. Weis wound up in my rocking chair. I found some leaning room on a windowsill.

  “So you are the young geniuses,” Dr. Weiss said, digging a pipe out of his jacket pocket, “who broke up the drought.”

  “And who want to control the weather,” Jim Dennis said. “Tell him about it, Ted.”

  It took a couple of hours, and even some equation-writing on the Congressman’s stationery to settle some of Dr. Weis’ technical questions. Ted roamed the small room ceaselessly as he spoke, shaping ideas with his hands, going through the whole history of the long-range forecasts, Aeolus Research, the drought, and Major Vincent’s project.

  Dr. Weis puffed thoughtfully on his pipe as he listened.

  “I believe one point is clear,” the Science Adviser said when Ted finally slowed to a halt. “Unless we act to prevent it, there will be a classified military weather-control program underway within a year.”

  Ted nodded.

  “And a classified military program,” Dr. Weis went on, “will dominate the entire field of research. Congress won’t want to support two or three different Government agencies all doing the same work. If the Pentagon gets a weather-control program going first, they’ll force everyone else to work under their terms.”

  “Is that so terrible?” Barney asked.

  Ted answered, “Already making trouble for you and Tuli. Once they really get started, the Security lid gets welded onto everything. The work’ll be aimed at using the weather as a weapon. The push’ll be to do things that show a big effect; research and everything else has to have a payoff that the top brass can see right away.”

  “It’s not the proper way to do this kind of work,” Dr. Weis agreed. “Weather control could be a powerful tool for peace. If we make a military project out of it, other nations will start emphasizing the military aspects of it, too. We could end up by making the weather a cause of war—cold or hot.”

  “But the Pentagon has a legitimate need to study weather control,” I said. “There are military aspects to the situation.”

  “Of course there are!” Dr. Weis said, nodding vigorously. “And Major Vincent and his people are going about their work in the way that is best . . . for them. However, I’m concerned about a bigger picture—one that includes the military needs and all the other needs of the nation.”

  “So how do we stop the Pentagon?” Ted asked.

  Dr. Weis took the pipe from his mouth. “We don’t. Not directly, at least. The only way to prevent them from taking control of this idea is to go to Congress with a bigger idea.”

  “Bigger?”

  Jim Dennis smiled. “I get it. Tell the Science Committee about a big, nonmilitary program that won’t be classified, that will be spectacular, and that can get the Congressmen lots of publicity in their home districts.”

  Nodding, Dr. Weis said, “Exactly.”

  “A big project,” I said.

  “Spectacular,” Ted added.

  “And you have between now and the second week of January to figure it out,” Jim Dennis told us.

  Ted literally locked himself in his room at Climatology for the next few weeks, while Tuli set himself up in business in a private office near Aeolus. Ted was furiously searching for a spectacular project to spring on Congress. Tuli was shuttling back and forth between Aeolus and the Manhattan Dome, trying to learn why the “air-conditioned island” was suffering from air pollution.

  In the meantime, I chewed fingernails fretting over the upcoming Congressional hearings, Tuli’s Security status, and everything else. It was really winter now, very snowy, as Ted had predicted, and bitterly cold. I thought sadly of the Islands every time I had to go outdoors.

  Just before Christmas, Major Vincent called and invited us to Hanscom Air Force Base, where he was visiting for a few days. He sounded mysterious.

  It was a gray, heavily cold day as I drove out to Climatology to pick up Ted. Then, together, we went to the Air Base. The major met us at the gate and guided us to the flight line next to one of the field’s two-mile-long runways. We parked and sat huddled in the car as the warmth of the heater seeped away.

  “What are we supposed to be seeing?” Ted asked.

  “Wait a minute; it’ll be here soon.”

  An air policeman, complete with white helmet and sidearm, walked over to check on us. When he saw the major he snapped into a salute.

  A somber, featureless cloud deck had blanked out the sun, and a raw wind swooped out of the distant hills, unobstructed across the open sprawling airfield. The wind and dampness made it seem even colder than it really was, and the smoke from the Air Base’s power generating station seemed almost to congeal in the heavy frigid air.

  “What is this, an endurance test?” Ted growled.

  Then we heard a plane overhead.

  “Here she comes!” Major Vincent hopped out of the car.

  As we followed him, he pointed to a distant speck that had just broken through the clouds. Quickly it grew to solid dimensions: an airplane circling the field once
, twice, then lining up for a runway approach.

  “Big one,” Ted said as it made its final bank and glided down to the ground.

  I could see multiwheeled landing gear extended from pods along her fuselage now. For a moment she seemed to hang in midair, as if reluctant to come back to earth. Then her tires screeched on the runway and she rolled toward us.

  Ted was wrong, she wasn’t big. She was immense. A huge, straight-winged, six-engined propjet, she loomed gigantically as she taxied to the flight line where we were standing, her turbos whining painfully in our ears. She looked like an ocean liner that had grown wings. Her tail soared impossibly high above us; her fuselage looked big enough to hold a whole city’s bus fleet.

  “She’s brand new!” Major Vincent was practically bubbling with enthusiasm. “The first of a new series. This is her maiden flight—the Dromedary, we call her.”

  Ted shrugged. “One hump or two?”

  “No humps. And no crew!”

  That stirred Ted. “Landed automatically?”

  “Right. This is the first time she’s touched ground in three days. She’s been aloft, flying automatically, for three days! That’s classified information, by the way. Don’t tell anyone who’s not cleared.”

  “What’s this got to do with . . .” I started to ask.

  But Ted was ahead of me. “She could be an unmanned weather-observation plane . . . better than a satellite some ways because she’s flying through the air you want to measure, instead of way above it. Could record temperatures, pressures, humidities, the works.”

  lie looked up at the huge plane admiringly now. “How long has this been in the works? Can we go inside and look around? What instrumentation do you have on her? What about—”

  The major held up his hands. “Okay, okay, come on aboard and check her out. She wasn’t originally designed for weather observation, but some of our people think we can convert her to that mission.”

  “Great!” Ted beamed as we headed for the plane’s forward hatch. “And she could carry plenty of seeding material for modification missions.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Major Vincent said. “But I wanted you to see the plane. Working with the Pentagon won’t be all red tape.”

  Ted glanced at me, and I could see our meeting with Dr. Weis flash into his mind. For once, though, he kept his silence.

  He was still silent as we drove back through the late-afternoon darkness toward Boston.

  “It looks as if the Pentagon is moving pretty fast on their weather project,” I said.

  Ted nodded. “Too fast. It’s going to take something really big to get the ball away from ’em.”

  Without taking my eyes from the snaking line of red tail lights building up on the road ahead of us, I asked, “Do you have any ideas about what—”

  “Hurricanes,” Ted said, more to himself than to me.

  “That’s the only way to stop Vincent.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got to give Weis a big program that’ll make weather control a front-page business and keep the Pentagon from gobbling it up. Hurricanes’ll do it. We’re going to stop hurricanes.”

  15. Pressure Systems

  HURRICANES were the target, and Ted threw every ounce of his single-minded energy into working out a hurricane-stopping program for Dr. Weis. All through that snowy December we saw practically nothing of him. Barney had to just about drag him from his desk to spend Christmas day with us at Thornton.

  Tuli, meanwhile, found the key to the Manhattan Dome’s air-pollution problem. The Dome had created a temperature inversion within itself: warm air trapped at the top of the dome prevented the automobile and other engine smokes from rising high enough above the street level to let the Dome’s blowers suck them out and purify the air.

  “How will they fix that?” I asked when he explained it to me.

  “It won’t be too difficult, now that they know what the problem is,” Tuli said. “They’ll probably install suction vents at the street level to get the smog out before it builds up to noticeable proportions.”

  “That’ll cost millions.”

  “I suppose it will,” he said impassively. “It’s a shame they built the Dome. In a few more years, Ted might be ready to air-condition the entire country . . . without plastic domes.”

  Aeolus made a handsome profit on Tuli’s work, and he seemed pleased with his consulting job. But now there was hardly anything for him to do. Suspended by Climatology, idle at Aeolus, he began working nights with Ted on the hurricane idea.

  Two days before the year ended, Ted called and asked me to come to his apartment after dinner. I wasn’t surprised to meet Barney walking down the snowbank-lined street as I approached the place.

  Tuli was there already, of course, straddling a turned-around kitchenette chair, his arms crossed on its back and his chin resting on his sleeves. He looked like a brooding Mongol horseman. Ted was pacing restlessly across the cramped little room.

  “Glad you guys came,” he said as we took off our coats and dropped them on a chair. “Want to try out this idea before calling Weis about it.”

  Barney and I sat on the tattered sofa.

  “We guys are all ears,” she said.

  Ted grinned at her. “Okay,” he said, still pacing, “here it is. There’re two ways to stop a hurricane: dissipate it, or keep it out at sea, away from the coast. Up to now, all the hurricane researchers’ve been trying to break up the storms—dissipate ‘em by knocking their energy balances out of whack . . .”

  “They try to seed the storms, don’t they?” I asked.

  “Right. But it’s like tossing snowballs at an iceberg. All the seeding in the world won’t dent a full-grown hurricane.”

  “There’s even sonic evidence,” Barney said, “that the hurricane absorbs the seeding energy.”

  Tuli agreed. “And uses it to add to the total windpower.”

  “Then you can’t dissipate hurricanes,” I said.

  “Check. Too big for us, too much energy. They just blow along until natural forces break ’em up . . . and we can’t match natural energy sources, not by a long shot. So we can’t use our muscles. Got to use our brains.”

  He paused for a moment; then, “If we knew enough about hurricanes—their exact paths, their energy distributions, lots more—we could set up weather patterns that’d keep the storms out at sea. It’s a tricky business, and we don’t know how to do it yet. Predicting a storm’s path is rough . . . lots of second-, third-, even fourth-order effects. A drop in pressure over Chicago might be the difference between a direct hit on Hatteras or a clean miss of the entire seacoast.”

  “But we’re getting close to the point where we can predict storm tracks,” Barney objected.

  “Yeah, but we’re not there yet. So we try another trick. Dissipate the storm before it’s a hurricane. Even before it’s a real storm . . . strangle it at birth, while it’s still only a tropical disturbance.”

  “Can you do that?”

  Ted nodded. “I think Tuli and I have figured it out.”

  “Tell Jerry the whole story,” Tuli insisted. “There are dozens of tropical disturbances for each hurricane that eventually develops. We must either destroy each disturbance or risk having some of them develop into hurricanes . . .”

  “We can predict which ones’ll develop,” Ted said. “With what accuracy? Fifty percent? You’ll still have to modify twice as many disturbances as there will be storms. The costs will be astronomical.”

  “Not compared to the damage a hurricane causes when it hits!”

  I said, “Yes, that’s the cost you’re working against.”

  “So that’s the bones of the idea: hit the tropical disturbances, stop ‘em from developing into hurricanes. But only the ones that might develop into big storms, and only if their predicted storm tracks smell of coming close to the coast.

  “Meanwhile we’ll be learning how to set up weather patterns that’ll keep hurricanes away from the shore. Whe
n we finish, we won’t have to bother with knocking out disturbances—we’ll know how to control the weather well enough to keep hurricanes out at sea!”

  We sat there for a moment, digesting the idea in total silence, while Ted stood in the middle of the floor, his fists planted firmly on hips, looking like a world champion daring a challenger to raise his head.

  We talked it over until the sky outside began to brighten. There were a million problems, a million unanswered questions. But Ted had made up his mind, and all we were doing was forcing him to think up answers that he could use later on Dr. Weis.

  I drove Barney back to her apartment.

  “I wonder about this idea,” she said. “It’s got more publicity value than science in it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Smothering tropical disturbances . . . it’s just brute force. It’s just something Ted thought up to allow Dr. Weis to start a civilian weather-control project, instead of letting Major Vincent have a military one. Is this the way history is made? By dreaming up fancy projects?”

  “No,” I said. “History is made by individual men and women who do things. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong. But it’s the doing that makes history.”

  The snowbanks piled high in the cities and turned brown and rotten, until fresh snow whitened them again. The first week of January saw a temporary warm spell, but then a high-pressure mass of northern air slid silently into New England. Marked only by a brief flurry of snow, the northern High was barely cooler than the air it displaced. But it was dry and cloudless, heavy and still. That night the stars looked down on the half-thawed countryside while the warmth of the day radiated out of the ground and away into space, sending thermometers plummeting toward zero. By morning there was ice wherever thawing had appeared the previous day, and people who had been smiling at the thought of an early spring shook their heads and reached for the rock salt.

  Ted was like a caged tiger when the Congressional hearings began. Dr. Weis had taken the hurricane-killing idea without too much comment, other than to say he’d “run it past my advisory committees.” Meanwhile, both he and Jim Dennis cautioned Ted not to show up at the hearings.