Galactic Storm

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

GALACTIC STORM tells the tale of a young genius who uses a supercomputer to discover an alarming trend of global warming that will see half the world's ice-caps melted within fifty years. This leads to an expedition to the South Pole to investigate the problem, and from there to the discovery of a sinister plot of extraterrestrial origin...

Release date: December 31, 2020

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THEY FETCHED SHARP out the other day, a doddering, maundering white-haired imbecile of thirty, who, supported by two white-coated doctors, waved fatuously and laughed at the milling crowds under his balcony. I’m not sure some people didn’t weep; at any rate the silence was like a pall when they realised that this wreck was the Saviour of Mankind, decorated by six heads of government with their own hands. Yes, that was the part that got published. What didn’t get published was how ill the second of those ministers was after he left the room.

I know that, because I was there. You see, I know Sharp before he—saved the world. Before he stopped being Sharp, from sheer horror. I was his best friend.

It was an odd friendship, ours. I and he were in college together. He worked at science and played with meteorology, and held an amateur pilot’s licence. I worked at languages and wrote strange moody dark verses that kept being sent back by the New Poetry and other magazines. I spoke Spanish and French well enough to get by, and I could read German with a dictionary. His madness for meteorology—I said he played with it, but it grew to be an obsession, and he dreamed of perfect weather forecast and wanted better control of weather itself—was as unattractive to me as my favourite Bunk Johnson and Beethoven records were to him. Interesting, but nothing to get het up over.

Yet we somehow took to doing things together, telling each other an occasional fact about ourselves, even to helping each other with work. He with his analytical brain—God, what a mind the world lost when he went mad—ate my arguments up, digested them and came up with the weak points. I polished up his literary style, criticised his ways of speech.

It was that sweltering day ten years ago that still holds the record for heat all down the Atlantic sea-board when it began. Those days people still thought the moon was beyond our reach. Now that I’ve been offered a free holiday on Mars by the Government I wonder how people, including myself, were ever so stupid. But I digress.

In those days Sharp was a tall lean guy with a face that looked like it had argued with a bulldozer and perhaps won, because it was square and regular but not good-looking. He had golden hair which he never brushed, and wore the most incredible clothes. His shirt that morning was purple and gold, wide open because of the heat. We were still three days away from summer vacation, and he was due to leave then. I was staying for an extra year.

I was letting a sickly commercial seep into my ear from a portable radio and not bothering much about the world, when he flung the door of my open, looking slightly hotter and more bothered than usual. I tuned out the commercial and wondered what the hell he wanted. It came.

“Paul,” he announced, (that’s me, Paul Shay), “I want you to help me predict some weather.”

“Nuts,” I told him, “If you do that I’ll make you take up the violin in retaliation. I can’t help you with your weather.” So I turned over and ignored him.

“But this,” he enunciated rather carefully, “is big stuff.”

“Meteorology’s all stuff,” I told him dreamily.

He shook my shoulder angrily. “Paul,” he insisted, “I want to use Charlie.”

That made me sit up! Charlie—well, Charlie cost three million and a few odd thousand, plus an unspecified amount of subsidy from the Government. Charlie is off limits except to authorised personnel. Charlie is the big mechanical brain, the one that solved all Einstein’s problems over again in four hours flat, using the revalued speed of light. And as I said is off limits to everybody. Strictly it’s the property of the university, but the people who use it are mostly ballistics experts from New Mexico, because it happens to be convenient to the university.

Sharp was looking at me cynically. He grinned. I stumbletongued. He enjoyed my astonishment for sometime before he added, “I talked old Masters into letting me run through a little problem. Well, it’s not as little as I told him, but still, there it is. So what you, my friend, have to do is to help me code it. Read out these.” He proffered a great wad of papers, all of three inches thick, that turned out to be the most astonishingly heterogeneous collection of weather reports and etceteras I ever set eyes on. Beside temperature, rainfall and so on, he had heaped in ozone content of the atmosphere, a dozen complicated carbon cycles that meant nothing whatsoever to me, lord alone knows how many years’ reports of coastal erosion, sea level, atmospheric pressure and frequency of cyclones. And more beside.

“Little problem!” I exploded. “How long will this little lot take Charlie?”

“All of thirteen hours,” he told me complacently.

I looked for a long time at the pile of information he had given me. Then I remembered how he had helped me index my record collection, all two hundred sixty discs of it, earlier on. So I got up resignedly, and agreed.

We spent all the afternoon codifying those pages of figures. Sharp had to digest them into a peculiar language of his own that it seemed Charlie had to be spoonfed with, and wrote the results on an immense paper spool that was to give the whole thing into the brain. We laid off for coffee later, and wound up the lot at two a.m.

I read him the last six digits, twice to be sure, and threw the last sheet on the pile beside me. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling and inquired quite politely, “Now just what the hell is that going to prove?”

He wouldn’t tell me. And I knew too much to think twice of pressing him. He had a good reason for shutting me up, obviously, so I swallowed my curiosity, dragged myself to my feet and followed him across the edge of the black campus—fortunately nobody was around—and began slowly plodding the two hundred yards to Charlie’s kennel, a square concrete blockhouse without windows, with only one door, and a ferocious bulldog of a janitor.

The latter wasn’t pleased at being fetched up at two in the morning. What we heard was a bellow and a rattle from the little house beside the kennel, and a string of colorful imprecations. Sharp had to produce written permission from Masters, the professor who usually looks after Charlie, and explain, before the janitor surlily undid the four heavy switches inside his house. There is a magnetic lock on the door of the kennel which weighs about two tons.

The interior was dark and uninviting. I shivered and started reciting morbid verse about tombs and vampires under my breath, while I heard the janitor’s hoarse gruff voice say, “I hope you know how to make the bloody thing work?” and Sharp assured him that he did and could get results. After a certain amount of palaver the former returned to his interrupted repose, while Sharp came up beside me and felt for the light switch.

The unreliable popping of the mercury lamps revealed the controls of Charlie. It looked like the intestines of a beast. Before the tubes settled down to steady work, I’d already gotten an impression of the miles of cable and the thousands of valves that went into the building of this near-intelligence.

“Almost human, except for its total lack of imagination,” Sharp said light-heartedly. He pulled down row after row of switches on the main control board. Charlie can be operated solo—by one man.

“Not so different from some humans at that,” I cracked, in spite of the cold air inside the kennel, Concrete sides make for quick radiation of heat. It was damned near uncomfortable in there.

Sharp said nothing. He fed the spool of paper on which we had laboriously transcribed that three-inch wad of data, and set the tiny motor going that would reel it in. It was with some awe that I saw the spinning axles lead the problem in for solution.

There was a large section of the control board consisting entirely of lights. Yellow lights indicated the stages the problem had reached. After one had gone on, there was a sudden flash and the red one corresponding lit up. Sharp immediately snapped off the brain and reversed the winding motor.

“What is it?” I inquired. I’d never seen Charlie close to before.

“Charlie’s like most people. He hates to get up. First two or three times you’re liable to get a mistake before you’re under way. That’s what the red light means.” He let the problem run in again. This time the third stage was glowing yellow before the red lamp went on. Sharp swore, but patiently rereeled the paper a second time. He glanced at the four-foot dial of the electric clock at the far end.

“We’re running it close,” he murmured. “Charlie may take more than thirteen hours at this little caper. There’s another problem—an official one about a californium bomb, I hear—due in at three p.m. tomorrow for solution. It took me a solid hour to talk Masters into letting me use the brain at all.” Here he got the spool turning again for the third time. Now a smooth warm hum filled the room, and Sharp heaved a sigh of relief. “He’s working,” he said, and lit himself a cigarette on. . .