by Ben Bova
It was quiet inside, with the door closed. Phone screens lined the walls, and half my desk was covered with a private switchboard that put me in direct contact with a network of THUNDER support stations ranging from New Orleans to the Atlantic Satellite Station, in synchronous orbit some twenty-three thousand miles above the mouth of the Amazon River.
I looked across the control center again, and saw Ted still talking earnestly into the phone. There was work to be done. I began tapping out phone numbers on my master switchboard, alerting the Navy and Air Force bases that were supporting the Project, trying to get ready to hit those hurricane threats as hard and as fast as we could.
While I worked, Ted finally got off the phone. Barney came over with a thick sheaf of computer print-out sheets; probably the detailed analysis of the storm threats. As soon as I could break away, I went over and joined them.
“Okay,” Ted was saying, “if we leave those two farther-out Lows alone, they’ll develop into hurricanes overnight. We can knock ‘em out now without much sweat, but by tomorrow they’ll be too big for us.”
“The same applies to the two closest disturbances,” Barney pointed out. “And they’re much closer and already developing fast . . .”
“We’ll have to skip one of ‘em. The first one—off the Leewards—is too close to ignore. So we’ll hit Number One, skip the second, and hit Three and Four.”
Barney took her glasses off. “That won’t work, Ted. If we don’t stop the second one now, by tomorrow it will be—”
“A walloping big hurricane. I know.” He made a helpless gesture. “But if we throw enough stuff at Number Two to smother it, we’ll have to leave Three and Four alone until tomorrow. In the meantime, they’ll both develop and we’ll have two brutes on our hands!”
“But this one—”
“There’s a chance that if we knock out the closest Low, Number Two’ll change its track and head out to sea.”
“That’s a terribly slim chance. The numbers show—”
“Okay, it’s a slim chance. But it’s all we’ve got to work with.”
“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” she asked. “If a hurricane strikes the coast. . .”
“Weis is already looking through his mail for my resignation,” Ted said. “Okay, we’re in trouble. Best we can manage is hit Number One, skip Two, and wipe out Three and Four before they get strong enough to make waves.”
Barney looked down at the numbers on the computer sheets. “That means we’re going to have a full-grown hurricane heading for Florida within twenty-four hours.”
“Look,” Ted snapped, “we can sit around here debating ’til they all turn into hurricanes. Let’s scramble. Jerry, you heard the word. Get the planes up.”
I dashed back to my cubicle and sent out the orders. A few minutes later, Barney came by. Standing dejectedly in the doorway, she asked herself out loud:
“Why did he agree to take on this Project? He knows it’s not the best way to handle hurricanes. It’s too chancy, too expensive. We’re working ourselves to death. . .”
“So are the aircrews,” I answered. “And the season’s just starting to hit its peak.”
“Then why did he have to make the newsmen think we could run up a perfect score the first year?”
“Because he’s Ted Marrett. He not only thinks he can control the weather, he thinks he owns it.”
“There’s no room in him for failure,” she said. “If this storm does hit, and if the Project is canceled . . . what will it do to him?”
“What will it do to you?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Jerry. But I’m terribly afraid we’re going to find out in another day or two.”
Tropical storms are built on seemingly slight differences of air temperature. A half-dozen degrees of difference over an area hundreds of miles across can power the giant heat engine of a hurricane. Ted’s method of smothering tropical disturbances before they reached hurricane strength was to smooth out the temperature difference between the core of the disturbances and their outer fringes.
The nearest disturbance was developing quickly. It had already passed over the Leeward Islands and entered the Caribbean by the time our first planes reached it. Hie core of the disturbance was a column of warm air shooting upward from the sea’s surface to the tropopause, some ten miles high. Swirling around this column was relatively cooler air sliding into the low-pressure trough created by the warm column.
If the disturbance were left to itself, it would soak up moisture from the warm sea and condense it into rainfall. The heat released by this condensation would power winds of ever-mounting intensity. A cycle would be established: winds bring in moisture, the water vapor condenses into rain, the heat released builds up the wind’s power. Finally, when the storm reached a certain intensity, centrifugal force would begin sucking down cooler air from very high altitudes. The cool air would be compressed and heated as it sank, and then fed into the massive cloud walls around the storm’s core—which would now be the eye of a full-grown hurricane. A thousand megatons of energy would be on the loose, unstoppable, even by Project THUNDER.
Our job was to prevent that cycle from establishing itself. We had to warm up the air flowing into the disturbance and chill down its core until temperatures throughout the storm were practically the same. A heat engine with all its parts at the same temperature (or close to it) simply won’t work.
As I started giving out orders for the three simultaneous missions, Tuli stuck his head into my office doorway.
“I’m off to see the dragon firsthand.” He was grinning excitedly.
“Which one?”
“Number One dragon; it’s in the Caribbean now.”
“I know. Good luck. Bring back its ears.”
He nodded, a round-faced, brown-skinned St. George going against the most destructive monster man had ever faced.
As I parceled out orders over the phones, a battery of gigajoule lasers aboard the Atlantic Station began pumping their energy into the northern peripheries of the budding storms. The lasers were similar to the type mounted in the Air Force’s missile-defense satellites. They had been placed aboard the Atlantic Station at Ted’s insistence, with the personal backing of Dr. Weis and the White House. Only carefully selected Air Force personnel were allowed near them. The entire section of the satellite station where they were installed was under armed guard, much to the discomfort of the civilians aboard.
Planes from a dozen airfields were circling the northern edges of the disturbances, sowing the air with rain-producing crystals.
“Got to seed for hours at a time,” Ted once told me. “That’s a mistake the early experimenters made—never stayed on the job long enough to force an effect on the weather.”
I was watching the disturbance in the Caribbean. That was the closest threat, and the best developed of all the four disturbances. Radar plots, mapped on Ted’s giant viewscreen, showed rain clouds expanding and showering precipitation over an ever-widening area. As the water vapor in the seeded air condensed into drops, the air temperature rose slightly. The satellite-borne lasers were also helping to heat the air feeding into the disturbance and confuse its circulation pattern.
It looked as if we were just making the disturbance bigger. But Ted and other technical staff people had figured out the energy balance in the young storm. They knew what they were doing. That didn’t stop me from gnawing my lower lip, though.
Tuli was in an Air Force bomber, part of two squadrons of planes flying at staggered altitudes. From nearly sea level to fifty thousand feet, they roared into the central column of warm air in precise formation and began dumping tons of liquid nitrogen into the rising tropical air.
The effect was spectacular. The TV screens alongside the big plotting map showed what the planes saw: tremendous plumes of white sprang out behind each plane as the cryogenic liquid flash-froze the water vapor in the warm column. It looked as if some cosmic wind had suddenly spewed its frig
id breath through the air. The nitrogen quickly evaporated, soaking up enormous quantities of heat. Most of the frozen vapor simply evaporated again, although the radar plots showed that some condensation and actual rainfall occurred.
I made my way to Ted’s desk to check the results of the core freezing.
“Looks good,” he was saying into the phone.
The teletype next to his desk chugged into life. It started printing a report from the observation planes that followed the bombers.
Ted stepped over and looked at the numbers. “Broke up the core okay. Now if she doesn’t reform, we can scratch Number One off the map.”
It was evening before we could tell for sure. The disturbance’s source of energy—the differing temperatures of the air masses it contained—had been taken away from it. The plotting screen showed a large swatch of concentric irregular isobars, like a lopsided bull’s-eye, with a sullen red “L” marking the center of the low-pressure area, just north of Jamaica. The numbers on the screen showed a central pressure of 991 millibars, nowhere near that of a typical hurricane. Wind speeds had peaked at fifty-two knots and were dying off now. Kingston and Guantanamo were reporting moderate-to-heavy rain, but at Santo Domingo, six hundred miles to the east, it had already cleared.
The disturbance was just another small tropical storm, and a rapidly weakening one at that. The two farther disturbances, halfway out across the ocean, had been completely wiped out. The planes were on their way home. The laser crews aboard the Atlantic Station were recharging their energy storage coils.
“Shall I see if the planes can reload and fly another mission tonight?” I asked Ted. “Maybe we can still hit Number Two.”
He shook his head. “Won’t do any good. Look at her,” he said, pointing to the viewscreen map. “By the time the planes could get to her, she’ll be a full-grown hurricane. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
18. Omega
SO WE didn’t sleep that night. We stayed at the control center and watched the storm develop on the TV picture beamed from the Atlantic Station. At night they had to use infrared cameras, of course, but we could still see—in the ghostly IR images—a broad spiral of clouds stretching across four hundred miles of open ocean.
Practically no one had left the control center, but the big room was deathly quiet. Even the chattering calculating machines and teletypes seemed to have stopped. The numbers on the plotting screen steadily worsened. Barometric pressure sank to 980, 975, 965 millibars. Wind velocity mounted to 75 knots, 95, no. She was a full-grown hurricane by ten o’clock.
Ted leaned across his desk and tapped out a name for the storm on the viewscreen’s keyboard: Omega.
“One way or the other, she’s the end of THUNDER,” he muttered.
The letters glowed out at the top of the plotting screen. Across the vast room, one of the girls broke into sobs.
Through the early hours of the morning, Hurricane
Omega grew steadily in size and strength. An immense band of clouds towered from the sea to some sixty thousand feet, pouring two inches of rain per hour over an area of nearly 300,000 square miles. The pressure at her core had plummeted to 950 millibars and central windspeeds were gusting to better than 140 knots, and still rising.
“It’s almost as if she’s alive,” Tuli whispered as we watched the viewscreen. “She grows, she feeds, she moves.”
By two a.m., Miami time, dawn was breaking over Hurricane Omega. Six trillion tons of air packing the energy of a hundred hydrogen bombs, a mammoth, mindless heat engine turned loose, aiming for civilization, for us.
Waves lashed by Omega’s fury were spreading all across the Atlantic and would show up as dangerous surf on the beaches of four continents. Seabirds were sucked into the storm against their every exertion, to be drenched and battered to exhaustion; their only hope was to make it to the eye of the hurricane, where the air was calm and clear. A tramp steamer on the New York-to-Capetown run, five hundred miles from Omega’s center, was calling frantically for help as mountainous waves overpowered the ship’s puny pumps. Omega churned onward, releasing as much energy as a ten-megaton bomb every fifteen minutes.
We watched, we listened, fascinated. The face of our enemy, and it made all of us—even Ted, I think—feel completely helpless. At first Omega’s eye, as seen from the satellite cameras, was vague and shifting, covered over by cirrus clouds. But finally it steadied and opened up, a strong column of clear air, the mighty central pillar of the hurricane, the pivotal anchor around which her furious winds wailed their primeval song of violence and terror.
Barney, Tuli, and I sat around Ted’s desk, watching him; his scowl deepened as the storm worsened. We didn’t realize it was daylight until Dr. Weis phoned again, he looked haggard on the tiny desk-top viewscreen.
“I’ve been watching the storm all night,” he said. “The President called me a few minutes ago and asked me what you were going to do about it.”
Ted rubbed his eyes. “Can’t knock her out, if that’s what you mean. Too big now. Be like trying to stop a forest fire with a blanket.”
“Well, you’ve got to do something!” Weis snapped. “All our reputations hang on that storm. Do you understand? Yours, mine, even the President’s! To say nothing of the future for weather-control work in this country.”
“Told you back in Washington last March,” Ted countered, “that THUNDER was the wrong way to tackle hurricanes . . .”
“Yes, and in July you announced to the press that no hurricanes would strike the United States! So now, instead of being an act of nature, hurricanes are a political issue.” Ted shook his head. “We’ve done the best we can.”
“You’ve got to do more. You can try to steer the hurricane . . . change its path so that it won’t strike the coast.”
“You mean change the weather patterns?” Ted brightened. “Control the situation so that—”
“I do not mean weather control! Not over the United States,” Dr. Weis said firmly. “But you can make whatever changes you have to over the ocean.”
“That won’t work,” Ted answered. “Not enough leverage to do any good. Might budge her a few degrees, but she’ll still wind up hitting the coast somewhere. All we’ll be doing is fouling up the storm track so we won’t know for sure where she’ll hit.”
“You’ve got to do something! We can’t just sit here and let it happen to us. Ted, I haven’t tried to tell you how to run THUNDER, but now I’m giving an order. You’ve got to make an attempt to steer the storm away from the coast. If we fail, at least we go down fighting. Maybe we can salvage something from this mess.”
“Waste of time,” Ted muttered.
Dr. Weis’ shoulders moved as if he was wringing his hands, off camera. “Try it anyway. It might work. We might be lucky—”
“Okay,” Ted said, shrugging. “You’re the boss.”
The screen went dark. Ted looked up at us. “You heard the man. We’re going to play Pied Piper.”
“But we can’t do it,” Tuli said. “It can’t be done.”
“Doesn’t matter. Weis is trying to save face. You ought to understand that, buddy.”
Barney looked up at the plotting screen. Omega was northeast of Puerto Rico and boring in toward Florida.
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?” she asked Ted. “You know we can’t steer Omega. Even if he’d let us try to control the weather completely, we couldn’t be sure of keeping the storm off the coast. You shouldn’t have—”
“Shouldn’t have what?” Ted snapped back. “Shouldn’t have taken THUNDER when Weis and the President offered it? Shouldn’t have made that crack to the newsmen about stopping every hurricane? Shouldn’t have told Weis we’d try to steer Omega? I did all three, and I’d do them all again. I’d rather do something, even if it’s not the best something. Got to keep moving; once we stop, we’re dead.”
“But why,” Barney asked, almost pleadingly, “did you make that insane promise to the newsmen?”
He frowned, but more at himself than at her. “How should I know? Maybe because Weis was sitting there in front of the cameras looking so sure of himself. Safe and serene. Maybe I was crazy enough to think we could really sneak through a whole hurricane season okay. Maybe I’m just crazy, period. I don’t know.”
“But what do we do now?” I asked.
He cocked an eye at the plotting screen. “Try to steer Omega. Try saving Weis’ precious face.” Pointing to a symbol on the map several hundred miles north of the storm, he said, “There’s a Navy sonar picket anchored out there. I’m going to buzz over to it, see if I can get a firsthand look at this monster.”
“That’s . . . that’s dangerous,” Barney said.
He shrugged.
“Ted, you can’t run the operation from the middle of the ocean,” I said.
“Picket’s in a good spot to see the storm . . . at least the edge of it. Maybe I can wangle a plane ride through it. Been fighting hurricanes all season without seeing one. Besides, the ship’s part of the Navy’s antisubmarine warning net; loaded with communications gear. Be in touch with you every minute, don’t worry.”
“But if the storm comes that way . . .”
“Let it come,” he said. “It’s going to finish us anyway.” He turned and strode off, leaving us to watch him.
Barney turned to me. “Jerry, he thinks we blame him for everything. We’ve got to stop him.”
“No one can stop him. You know that. Once he gets his mind set on something . . .”
“Then I’ll go with him.” She got up from her chair.
I took her arm.
“No, Jerry,” she said, “I can’t let him go alone.”
“Is it the danger you’re afraid of, or the fact that he’s leaving?”
“Jerry, in the mood he’s in now . . . he’s reckless . . .”
