Climate Incorporated

by John Russell Fearn

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

When meteorologist Alvin Brook invents a means of controlling the weather, he imagines it will lead to his becoming a world benefactor, with riches for him and his family. Instead, Brook and his wife are murdered, and his invention stolen and misused by industrialist Marcus Denham. Denham creates the mighty empire of Climate Incorporated, controlling the world's weather and holding nations to ransom...but he does not anticipate that outraged Nature - and Brook's son - will take their revenge.

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 280

Sample

For a long time Alvin Brook had been standing by the window of the lounge, watching the rain. And the longer he watched the grimmer his face became.

‘Well, dear, what’s the chances? Do we go on that picnic or don’t we? Will it clear up?’

Alvin turned, aware of the voice of his wife Nancy. She had just come into the room, a young and pretty woman, but at this moment she was looking a trifle despondent.

‘Chances?’ Alvin repeated; then he laughed shortly. ‘There just aren’t any! We’re not going on any picnic in this deluge. You can forget all about it.’

Nancy moved over to him and gazed for a while at the raindrops chasing down the window glass. Then she raised her eyes to the weeping gray of the sky.

Expressively she gave a little shiver, and rubbed her bare arms. She was wearing a light summer dress for no other reason than that the calendar said it was June.

‘June in name only,’ Alvin said, his voice becoming grim. ‘This is the third time we’ve tried to go on a picnic and been spoiled by the weather. Rain, cold winds, and never a glimpse of the sun, except on days when we can’t make use of it. It’s absolutely idiotic!’

‘I agree, but there’s absolutely nothing which can be done about it … In fact,’ Nancy continued, ‘I don’t know why you didn’t foresee a day like this. You’re a big noise in the Met office, aren’t you? You’ve got all the charts round you. You said it was going to be fine and warm. Remember all that talk you gave me about anti-something-or-other.’

‘Anticyclone, off the Azores,’ Alvin mused. ‘Yes, it ought to have extended a high pressure ridge and given good weather, but something must have gone wrong. A low-pressure trough has galloped in and upset everything. Don’t blame the Met men. That sort of thing’s always happening in this haywire climate.’

‘Then it’s a pity, in this day and age, that something isn’t done about it. We can invent H-bombs to destroy whole nations, yet we have to put up with deluges and hurricanes when we expect to get sunburned. David’s terribly disappointed. He’s sulking in the kitchen over the unpacked picnic basket.’

‘Silly lad,’ Alvin growled. ‘Sulks won’t do any good.’

‘Then you’d better tell him why they won’t. I’ve pictured you as a hero as far as he is concerned, telling him his marvelous daddy has got it all worked out for sunshine — And look at it!’

Alvin smoldered but said nothing. There were drawbacks — big ones — to being a meteorologist. In some obscure way, according to his family and friends, it made him personally responsible for the weather.

‘Play havoc with Sylvia’s garden party,’ Nancy added, apropos of nothing. ‘You told her too that she could rely on sunlight. A nice mess you’ve made of it!’

Alvin turned and looked at his wife directly. There was anger and frustration on her usually mild face.

‘Look here, Nancy, this is not my fault,’ Alvin stated deliberately. ‘I can ring up the Met office and have them satisfy you that all the forecast I made last night was correct, as the conditions were then.’

‘Some good that would do, with a ruined picnic in front of us and the flowers flattened in the rain. Lord, look at it! Pelting harder than ever … we’ve no chance whatever of having our chicken sandwiches under a hot sun! As a Met man you ought to do something about it.’

‘For instance?’ Alvin growled. ‘Do you think I’m some miracle worker who can stand up and shout ‘Cease’ to the elements? I’m not. I’m just a human being as disgusted as you are.’

‘You mean you’re going to sit down to it?’

‘That’s a pretty idiotic question! What else can I do?’

‘I don’t know — Hanged if I do.’ Nancy hesitated, something like tears coming into her eyes. ‘It’s all so depressing — so disappointing. I’m sorry if I flared up, Alvin.’

He did not answer. He was staring fixedly at the lashing rain on the window.

‘I said I was sorry,’ Nancy repeated, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’

‘Yes — sort of.’ Alvin looked at her vaguely. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing you blew up. It did something to me.’

‘I didn’t mean it, honestly.’

‘Yes, you did — and I don’t blame you one bit … You said in so many words that as a Met man I ought to do something about it.’

‘Yes, but … I spoke without thinking. Naturally you can’t do anything. Nobody can.’

‘Why can’t they?’ Alvin moved to the window, hands in pockets, and stared at the rain. Then he swung abruptly to look at Nancy again. ‘Yes, why can’t they?’ he repeated. ‘Man has always been at the mercy of the weather, and yet he’s conquered everything else except one or two virulent diseases. He’s mastered the sea, the air, and the land. Even space! Yet he puts up with rain, hurricane, and fog, tolerates paralysis of cities because he thinks the climate is something too big to handle … It isn’t, you know. Somebody has to master it, one day.’

Nancy came forward slowly, surprise in her blue eyes. ‘Alvin, I never heard you say so much before.’

‘I’ve never been so moved before. Control of the climate is a virgin field which no scientist or meteorologist has ever trodden before … suppose Alvin Brook trod it?’

‘You — you mean —’

‘I mean,’ Alvin said, with a grand gesture towards the rain, ‘subdue this sort of thing! Find a way to supply the weather that is required. It could be … done.’

‘But how?’

Alvin smiled a little. ‘That is the part that wants thinking about, and I can’t think of anybody better placed to do it than myself …’ In imagination he suddenly leapt ahead ten years. ‘Just think of it, Nancy! Perfectly controlled climate. The assurance that a certain day will be cloudless, together with the assurance that another day will be wet. Think of the difference that would make to our way of living. Think of the farmers, to mention only one body who rely on the weather.’

Nancy looked at the rain on the window, then she gave a little sigh.

‘It’s a wonderful dream, Alvin, even if it doesn’t come true.’

‘But it will, dearest. You’ve started off the spark, and I shan’t rest now until I’ve followed the thing through — Bring David in and let me make a promise to him. That’s one way of being sure that I’ll keep it.’

Nancy looked doubtful for a moment, but nevertheless she obeyed. In a moment or two she had brought the serious-eyed boy from the kitchen. He looked at his father with undisguised irritation.

‘You think I told you wrong last night when I said it was going to be fine, don’t you, David?’ Alvin asked.

David, ten years old, glanced towards the window, then back to his father.

‘It’s wet, dad, and you said it was going to be fine.’

‘I know. I got it wrong, through a reason that is too complicated for you to understand. But look, I’m going to make another promise to you, and this time I shall keep it … By the time you are a man you are going to be able to have nice weather whenever you want it. So is everybody else. That’s a promise.’

‘Smashing,’ the boy said, shrugging, then with an unusual sagacity, ‘How are you going to do it?’

‘I’m going to do things with machines, things that will make certain no more picnics will ever be ruined … Now, give me a smile, son.’

It was slow in coming, but it came finally. Alvin nodded in approval.

‘Good! No more sulking at the weather, David. We’ll have our picnic somehow before the summer’s finished — but in the meantime we’ll have to stay at home today.’

Alvin Brook had not been joking. His wife’s remarks had started something, the depth of which she had no conception. Alvin patched up the remainder of the miserably wet Sunday as far as he could, then next morning returned to his usual met duties with ideas crowding the back of his mind. That he was preoccupied was immediately apparent to his fellow workers in the chart-lined regions of the met office.

‘Have a good weekend, Alvin?’ asked Johnson, the senior meteorologist-in-charge.

‘Hardly.’ Alvin looked at him with frank eyes. ‘I was bogged down completely by my own forecast, and I don’t think my wife or son have forgiven me even yet.’

‘Too bad. Glad it wasn’t my weekend off. Hope it behaves better next weekend. I’ve the garden to fix up.’

Johnson turned to go but Alvin caught at his arm. ‘A moment, Frank. What went wrong with the weather yesterday? That Azores anticyclone was building up firmly on Saturday night.’

‘That was Saturday,’ Johnson sighed. ‘Take a look at the chart for yesterday and see what happened …’ He signaled to the further wall as he went over to it. Alvin followed him and stood gazing at the huge chart. ‘There it is! A small depression, which we thought quite innocuous, suddenly developed and deepened, moving rapidly north eastwards. The whole country was affected. The Midlands worst of all, and bang went one perfectly good forecast.’

‘And our name became mud,’ Alvin sighed. ‘Yet again we took it on the chin.’

Johnson frowned. ‘How’d you mean — took it on the chin? We couldn’t help the mistake, could we?’

‘Of course not. I was just thinking — suppose we’d have been able to steer that depression away, this high pressure area from the Azores would have extended its influence and we’ve had had glorious sun and a temperature around ninety Fahrenheit.’

‘Pipe dreams, m’lad,’ Johnson reproved. ‘There are two things in this world we’ve got to put up with — women and the weather. Now get busy on the reports of those Atlantic charts.’

Alvin nodded and turned quietly to his day’s work — a routine job of weather-chart analysis, mathematics, computations, and the working out of air pressures, humidity, millibars and isobars.

As he completed various sections of his work it was transferred to another worker; then to the map forecaster; and finally to the radio and television department where the forecasts for various areas were transmitted to the various stations and ships at sea.

In the main it looked like being fine. The Azores anticyclone looked like exerting its real influence. Which was also a bitter irony to Alvin, flogging his brains in the bright sunlight pouring through the window. He worked mechanically, reserving his real concentration for other things. Through the day he managed to appropriate some old weather charts from a cupboard and when the evening came he took them home with him.

What he was doing he did not say, but his wife could draw her own conclusions. She went out shortly after tea for an evening of tennis, whilst David went to a local birthday party. She returned to find Alvin in shirtsleeves, hair rumpled, and an extinguished pipe in his mouth — whilst all over the table were notes and figures, and on the floor with the ends held down with a pair of shoes were weather charts.

‘Busy?’ Nancy asked, rather dryly, and she received a reply that was something like ‘Umph.’

‘David not back yet?’ she inquired, and after looking at her for a long minute Alvin answered:

‘It’s the hot and cold air problem every time. Get that sorted out and things can be done. Repulse cold or hot air at will.’

Nancy laid aside her white pullover as she considered.

‘Are you talking about your job, or your dream?’ she asked finally.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘I mean, is all this work connected with the Met office? If it is I wish you’d keep it there instead of messing the place up.’

‘Nothing to do with the Met office, dear.’ Alvin lighted his pipe thoughtfully. ‘It’s what you call the dream — the one which began yesterday. I’m working on the details of how to get the mastery of the weather.’

‘Which has something to do with hot and cold air?’

‘It has everything to do with it. Look, let me show you. Come and sit here for a moment.’

Much as one would tolerate the demands of an insistent child Nancy obeyed. She tried to look interested as Alvin’s arm went about her shoulders.

‘Now, dear, let me explain — May clear things up a bit for me, too. Weather is caused by enormous masses of air pressure in the atmosphere, which in themselves are governed by the motion of the earth on its axis. The high pressure areas are called anticyclones and the low pressure areas are depressions. Think of a smooth pond and call it the atmosphere. Drifting across it is an eddy, which we would — atmospherically speaking — call an anticyclone. Understand?’

‘I think so,’ Nancy agreed, but her brows were knitted. ‘Where does it all lead, anyway?’

‘It leads to this: Warm winds blow from the tropical regions, and cold winds from the Arctic regions. The two are always engaged in a battle with each other, and according to whichever wins a fine or a stormy area is established … Take a clear blue sky of even temperature. The wind shifts and cold air blows across the blue sky. There is condensation — like the steam you get in the kitchen which makes the walls wet — and condensation produces clouds, which if the condensation is particularly dense produces rain. If it is not dense you get clouds only and no rain. At times this upper cold wind descends to the ground and you get a gale. These things happen in varying degree, which brings in cold fronts, warm fronts, occlusions, and such like, about which I don’t suppose you know a thing.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. I don’t …’ Nancy shifted . . .