Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  To those who had survived smashing hurricanes, torrential floods, frigid cold snaps, baking, arid spells, and the thousand other vagaries that any planet must have, unless it is a perfectly smooth surface of either land or water, revolving on an upright instead of a tilted ecliptic, weather control had been a miracle.

  Even in 1946 and 1947 it had been possible to predict the future. Not the immediate future, perhaps, but soon—soon.

  A farmer could raise delicate crops and be sure that a snowstorm wouldn’t ruin it, because the storm could be precipitated before it reached him, in some area where snowfall would be harmless, or even beneficial, if the snows could be used to replenish a watershed. It meant the virtual end of droughts. It meant that great cities and transportation systems would never again be snowbound and immobilized.

  Even in 1947 that could be foreseen, and today Earth was more nearly Eden, climatically speaking, than it had been since the prehistoric days when weather could be predicted for two thousand years ahead, because there were no land surfaces to cause variations. The particular ecology had been balanced. Man controlled the weather.

  Not easily, and not completely. There were still catastrophes at times. And always an unceasing vigilance had to be maintained against the ancient, inhuman foe that sent out attack after attack from the birthplace of the storms. It was a never-ending war against an enemy with infinite resources.

  An enemy whose voice was thunder. Whose sword was the lightning. That implacable foe whose bludgeon was the hurricane itself. No wonder the Weather Patrol was glamorous, pitted against the most powerful force that had ever existed in the world.

  As the planet rolled ceaselessly around its tremendous spiral, it gave birth every hour to a god greater than Zeus, greater than his allies, the Cyclopes who ruled the thunder and lightning, and the Hecatonchires, the hundred-handed monsters who shook the Earth.

  Down from the Pole rolled the storms, and up to meet the ancient gods of wind and darkness flashed the jet-planes of the Weather Patrol—the Storm Smashers.

  CHAPTER IX

  Daniele Vaughan, Leader

  IT WAS at times like this, in the rare moments when he was alone, that Mart Havers had trouble with his memories. Mostly his work was planned to give him small opportunity for introspection. But he was beginning to realize, in a dim. halfremembering way, that his own past was too vague.

  He had memories of boyhood in an institute for orphans—the mnemonic experts had tried to parallel the real facts as closely as possible—and of adolescence and adulthood training for this job. But there was a curious quality of—thinness? Emptiness? He could not quite identify it. He only knew a bloc in his mind kept him from looking back closely, or from wanting to look back. He knew this was not normal, and it bothered him.

  The job they had done on his mind was not perfect. For one reason, his mind itself was of a more complicated fabric than the experts had ever before worked on. No one of Leader calibre had needed such alteration until Havers came along. Basically they had succeeded. He now believed wholeheartedly in the Cromwellian cause, in their credo and their sets of rules. He believed because of a long chain of interlocking pseudo-experiences carefully implanted in his memory.

  But there were empty places they had not filled. There were depths they had not been able to reach. And in these hollows a vacuum existed that strove to fill itself and sent little whirlpools of nameless discontent upward to the surface of his mind.

  Georgina had left such a hollow.

  He found Daniele Vaughan’s identification disc while he was straightening the laboratory that night. Trailing a length of fine broken chain, it lay beneath the chair where she had sat. He picked it up and studied the flat, cryptic symbols that told so little about Daniele Vaughan. Well, she would need the medallion in the morning. He had better return it.

  It might be another thousand years before man begun to understand fully the complicated colloid of the human brain. As Havers stood before the door of Daniele’s suite a curious current stirred in his mind. He could not have traced it to its source, and the solemn psychologists who had laid out the artificial patterns of his brain were helpless, too, when they left those vacuum spots—but Havers was unconsciously ready tonight for what lay before him.

  A cool night wind moved gently through the half-open door. He could hear soft footsteps inside.

  He rang, and Daniele’s pleasant, impersonal voice called:

  “Is it you, Mega? Come in. I’ve been expecting you.”

  He obeyed before he realized that she was not talking to Mart Havers.

  The room was broad and high, carpeted in deep blue, and dim except for the reading light in the far corner, falling from a fashionably ornate spiral fluorescent made like a flowering vine. There were record books on the low table beside the chair, and a familiar pair of reading-glasses lay upon them. Not for Daniele was the vanity of contact lenses.

  For a moment he did not see her., Then her voice came again and he turned toward the tall windows through which moonlight came strongly, and the brilliant glow that was Chicago outside, a jewel-ease towering up into the starry heavens and mingling its stars with theirs.

  Chicago? He was puzzled for a second. It should have been another city. Reno? No, it couldn’t be Reno. He had never seen Reno, surely. He searched his shallow memory and found no clue.

  “Mega?” the gentle voice from the balcony inquired. “Who is it?”

  Then Daniele came into the open glass doors and stood there staring, and for an instant Mart Havers was speechless.

  If it had not been for that pleasant soft voice he would never have known her. The blue and the pastels in this room might have given him a hint that it had been decorated for a blonde, and in their private quarters even women Leaders had a free hand.

  But to say “blonde” was not to describe Daniele Vaughan with any justice. It was so delicate and elusive a fairness that no flamboyance in her struck the eye. Her hair which was braided tight all day under the severe laboratory cap flowed now in a smooth stream like white molten metal over one shoulder and nearly to her waist. She was lifting it with both hands against her ears, holding the heavy stream away from her head, when she first saw Havers. And for a moment she was speechless, too.

  Then she laughed and said, “I thought you were my hairdresser. I’m sorry. You see my secret. Even a female Leader can be too vain to cut her hair.”

  HE WAS not even aware then he had not M. answered her. He was staring with, new vision at the delicate, serene face framed in the ash-blond hair. It was the same face he had seen daily for a long while, but . . . No, not the same at all. Subtle differences too elusive to name had wrought an indefinable change in her. That ritual “uglification” meant among other things a face tinted to a monotone with careful emphasis on the wrong features!

  But now the make-up was gone and Daniele’s wild-rose coloring against the background of her skillfully colored room all but took Havers’ breath away. And under the carefully shapeless uniform which was her daily dress had been hidden a body as lovely as her face. The tightly girdled robe she wore now made no secret of it.

  One of the whirlpools which had been troubling the surface of Mart Havers’ mind slowed imperceptibly, began to still. Deep down under it an emptiness from which it had risen was filling itself as he stood gazing at Daniele Vaughan.

  “You—I never knew it, but you’re beautiful.” He was surprised to hear his own words.

  She smiled. “No. Passably pretty, that’s all. It’s just the contrast from the way I have to look all day. Really, Havers, you shouldn’t be here. What do you want?”

  He stepped inside, closed the door, put his broad back against it. Under the heavy black brows he grinned at her deliberately.

  “I just want to look at you. That’s all.”

  “Don’t be impertinent, Havers.” The wild-rose coloring deepened a little.

  “Don’t be selfish, Vaughan!” He was surprised at his own sudden daring. He did no
t question it. He let the words come as they would. “You’ve been cheating me all these weeks. Now let me look.”

  She swept the stream of pale molten hair off her shoulder, tossing it down her back with a quick motion of her bare uplifted arm. Then she came forward resolutely and reached for the door.

  “Outside, Havers. I don’t want to report you, but—”

  He seized the wrist that reached past him, pulling her a little off balance, so that he had an excuse to put out his other arm and catch her. For the first time he was aware of how delicately small she was in contrast to his height and bulk.

  She put both hands on his arm to steady herself. Calmly she looked up into his face.

  “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Havers,” she said quietly. “You’re forgetting something.”

  “I’m just discovering something,” he contradicted her, grinning.

  “This is exactly the reason I have to dress the way I do,” she told him, making her voice dispassionate. “You see? The moment you find I’m a woman you treat me like any little fluffy fool you’ve known outside the lab. All women needn’t be morons—it’s only a fashion. Don’t think you’re flattering me when you act this way, Havers. I don’t like it. Let me go.”

  For an instant the muscles of his arm trembled and he thought he was going to tighten that embrace in which he half held her. She thought so too. She looked up at him in silence, and the color deepened in her face, and her lips parted in a protest she did not voice. They were quiet for what seemed like a long moment, and in the air between them a sudden unspoken emotion vibrated, too formless to name, perhaps too dangerous to name. But as real as the air they breathed.

  He could have kissed her. He meant to. He could see she expected that he would. But the justice of what she had just said came to him more fully in every second he delayed, and whatever jaunty intoxication had come over him in recognition of her beauty, and reaction to it, chilled in his mind.

  Slowly he let her go.

  She stepped back, her eyes still upon his in an almost searching look. For Daniele had never known anyone like this man, and there were undercurrents between them now that frightened and fascinated them both.

  “I’m sorry,” Havers said to her, surprised to find his voice a little unsteady and his breath coming faster than usual. “You’re right. I expect I’m a fool. Forget it, if you—if you’re willing.”

  She lifted her brows at him.

  “No!” he said rapidly, in answer to that query. “Don’t forget it. That was a kiss, whether I took it or not. Remember that.” There was no coquetry about her.

  “I know it was. I will remember. But—”

  THE ring of the doorbell interrupted whatever she was about to say. She frowned and glanced at the door.

  “Mega,” she said softly.

  “I’ll go. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. But you’ll have to go, of course.”

  “May I come back later?”

  She put her hand to her cheek and lifted the heavy hair away, pulling her head back with it. Without looking at him she shook her head, making the pale stream swung upon her shoulders.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re due for Patrol duty next week,” she said obliquely, not meeting his eyes. “Right? Do you know your assignment?”

  “Patrol Fifty-one. Captain Kelvin.”

  “Andre Kelvin,” she said gently. “Andre’s a wonderful person. We’re going to be married next year.”

  Havers opened his mouth and then closed it again. In the silence the bell rang again, and this time he did not interfere when she reached to open the door. But just before the handle turned in her fingers he said;

  “No. I warned you that was a kiss. I expect there’ll be others, more tangible. I won’t take Andre Kelvin for an answer.” She smiled. She pulled the door open. “Come in, Mega,” she said. “You’re late. Havers—good night.”

  The door closed quietly behind him.

  CHAPTER X

  Weather Patrol

  CAPTAIN ANDRE KELVIN said, “We’ve got two jobs. We don’t need a jet-plane for the first one, but we do for the second. Stratosphere work.”

  The crew of five men were in an office attached to the hangers. Mart Havers, in the blue-and-gold uniform of Weather Patrol, stood with the others, at ease, watching the blackboard over which Kelvin’s pointer hovered. He switched his gaze to the Captain.

  Andre Kelvin was a tall, long-boned, rangy man, with blond hair and a deceptively young face.

  “The first job is to bust a cloud over the Canadian Rockies,” he said now. “That’s a cinch. The second one needs more explaining, though you’ve been briefed already. But I’ll run over the main points. The sun’s corona has been acting up. It takes a coronagraph with a birefringent filter to make the predictions we need, but that’s been done. Electrons are going to blast into the upper atmosphere at a high rate—solar-generated electrons. That’s nothing new. But we’ve orders to make analytical recordings of the effects of that electronic bombardment on artificial meteors. Got that?”

  His eyes rested on Havers, the new man. Havers nodded.

  “Know what artificial meteors are?”

  “Slugs loaded into rockets that explode only at high altitudes.”

  “Yeah. They go fast—seven miles a second. They’ll be watched from Earth and photographed with telescopic equipment for study, but we want to get close photographs, without any intervening troposphere. These slugs aren’t iron. Some of them are fissionable isotopes. They’re testing all sorts of effects this time.”

  “What’s, this got to do with Weather Patrol?” one man asked.

  “Weather Control depends on communication, like most tech-systems,” Kelvin explained. “Solar storms can mess up teleradio plenty. And solar radiation, has a lot to do with the weather directly, too. The more the astrophysicists find out about the sun, the farther ahead weather predictions can be made, allowing for the variables that mess us up sometimes. Now—we’ll wear thermosuits, just in case. I don’t think one of the rockets will hit us. They’re aimed carefully, and our route’s laid out in advance. But you never know. Remember—don’t take chances topside.” Again he looked at Havers! “That’s all. Let’s jet.”

  He led the way out to the field.

  Following him, Havers turned the last words in his mind. Was that coincidence, or was the man warning him obliquely to stay away from Daniele? He thought it was coincidence. He had seen Daniele only briefly since that night, and never alone. She was as remote and impersonal with him as ever, but now and again their eyes would meet and for on instant hold a remembering stare. She was not pretending the episode had never taken place. She was simply dismissing it.

  Deliberately Havers put the memory of her out of his mind. If Andre Kelvin knew what had happened—well, that didn’t, matter either. Warning or no warning, Havers knew what he meant to do, when the time came. Meanwhile, there was work to be done.

  He followed Kelvin toward the plane . . .

  It’s easy to retrain a man after the Purge.

  There are psychic blocs in his mind; he misses certain of his memories, and He doesn’t like to think about those gaps. He concentrates completely upon the work on hand, giving it his fullest attention—which is why Mart Havers, who had already assimilated the technical training, was able to pick up the field experiences with surprising ease.

  Jet-planes move fast. They had to use a precision bomb-sight in order to hit the clouds over the Canadian Rockies before they were jetting above the Pacific, and it was impossible to tell with the naked eye whether they had succeeded. But the relayed television shots told them. The pounds of dry ice smashed into the cloud belt, exploding vaporous blasts toward the upper tropopause, and the dry ice broke the deadlock of super-cooling that wouldn’t let the droplets of vapor freeze. From the created ice seeds grew snowflakes instantly, and as precipitation occured, snow poured on the Canadian Rockies.

  The fall would replenish the
watershed there, and would save southern agricultural areas, in the path of the storm, from blighted crops.

  That was the first job. It was routine. Jet-planes weren’t necessary for a simple snowmaking task, but Weather Control was killing two birds at once.

  Mart Havers, by the captain’s order, sat beside Kelvin at the control board, which supervised the activities of the entire crew. Kelvin spoke to the pilot through the microphone, and slanted a glance at Havers.

  “Know why we’re climbing?” he asked.

  “Well, this is a stratosphere job.”

  “Sorry. I meant, do you know why we haven’t begun to accelerate yet?”

  HAVERS considered that There was acceleration, plenty of it, but nothing at all compared to the possibilities this plane held.

  Kelvin made a few deft gestures at his control board. “We’ve got trapezoidic wings,” he remarked, apparently at random.

  “Oh,” Havers said. “The trans-sonic wait.”

  “Give. Details.”

  “Speed of sound is seven hundred and sixty-one m.p.h. Supersonic’s a thousand m.p.h. and up. Between those speeds you get the trans-sonic wall, where air conditions are fouled up. Props, wings, airfoils don’t react normally. The shock waves can tear a ship to pieces in seconds when you hit the wall.”

  “And?”

  “Trapezoidic wings stabilize the center of pressure during the shift-over. That helps. But it helps to climb above the cirrus level, too, into the base of the stratosphere, where density’s less and shock waves aren’t so intense. When you get high enough, you can crack the wall safely. We’ll need supersonic speeds, I guess, to be able to keep track of those artificial meteors.”

  “What’s the worst point of the wall?”

  “Six hundred and fifty to nine hundred m.p.h. That’s when the standing sound wave can step in.”