Forecasting
Tom Gartner
Douglass washed out of flight school in July of 1943, before he'd even sat at the controls of an airplane. One of the flight instructors, a Captain Wallace Hargreaves, went for a walk at twilight, when the heat was fading and the sky was smeared with violet and lavender clouds. On a paved walkway near the western bank of Lake Pontchartrain,
Captain Hargreaves found his fiancee on a sturdy wooden bench, holding hands with Douglass.
"Lucinda," Hargreaves said, pronouncing each syllable as if it were a separate word. "And Lieutenant Douglass." He was wearing an ugly grin and standing just a few steps away from them. He'd happened to come along at a time when Douglass and Lucinda weren't paying much attention to passers-by. Their conversation, after straying from Air Corps food to Vieux Carre taverns to the sad state of Mississippi riverboats, had trailed off altogether, and they'd just been looking at each other. Lucinda had clear jade-green eyes that seemed too bright for her pale skin. She reminded Douglass of a girl he'd kissed when he was in the seventh grade.
She jumped up now. Douglass stayed on the bench, feeling breathless.
"Are you possibly forgetting something, Lieutenant?" Hargreaves spoke in tight, nasal tones. He was a New Englander, tall and lanky, with scored cheeks and small eyes.
"Yes, sir." Douglass pushed himself up and saluted. He'd been in uniform six months, and he still hadn't acquired the reflex for deference.
Hargreaves sucker-punched him, a solid right to the mouth just as Douglass finished the salute. "Son of a bitch," the captain said softly, punching him again, and then again, and again.
It was all a little dreamlike for Douglass. He knew each punch had its own story, its special trajectory, its individual signature, but they all felt the same. He noticed that Lucinda was remarkably passive about the whole thing. That girl he'd kissed in the seventh grade—
she would have torn Hargreaves's eyes out.
Well, he thought finally, enough. Growing up in Chicago, he'd done some street fighting. It was no special challenge to bring up one hand and slam his knuckles into the captain's temple.
~ ~ ~
"You do have a talent for trouble, don't you, Lieutenant?" The C.O. spoke without looking up from Douglass's file. He wore, as always, a crisp dress uniform, and his shave was so perfect his face might have been marble.
"I guess it probably looks that way, sir." Before the business with Hargreaves, who was on medical leave now, recovering from a concussion, Douglass had done a week in the stockade for borrowing a Jeep, driving it out to Bayou Teche, and losing it to a Cajun beet farmer in a craps game. Before that, he'd been caught in an awkwardly timed police raid on a house of prostitution near the Fairgrounds racetrack. "But I don't honestly know why."
"You don't." The C.O. seemed amused.
"I always try to make the right choice, but how the hell do I know how it's going to turn out, sir? If a pretty girl wants to go for a walk, how am I supposed to know that's going to mean I get shipped out to the Mojave Desert?"
"I guess you think you're getting a bad deal." The C.O. shook his large, smooth head. "But if you knew what I know about Captain Hargreaves, you'd thank me for shipping you out. And as far as staying out of trouble goes, here's my advice. Find yourself some foresight--just a tiny shred would be an improvement--and put it to use." He bent over Douglass's transfer papers, signed them, and handed a copy across the desk. "You might make a start in that direction by being sure to catch your bus out of here. I believe you've got twenty minutes to get to the Cedar Street gate."
~ ~ ~
The White Mountain Weather Station consisted of a Quonset hut laid out on a gravel plateau at thirteen thousand feet, with a bristling pod of instruments--maximum-minimum thermometers, aneroid barometer, anemometer, precipitation gauges--thirty yards away, out
of the hut's ambient heat. Westward, a steep escarpment dropped two vertical miles into the Owens Valley. Beyond that loomed the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, still snow-laced in late summer.
Thirteen thousand feet, Douglass discovered, was serious altitude. His headache began halfway up the winding dirt road that led to the station, and it stayed with him for a week. Aspirin, sleep, liquids, whiffs from a battered green oxygen tank--nothing helped.
"You'll get over it," Mendelsen said on the second day. He was a civilian, tall and thin, with white hair though he was in his thirties. "Or else you'll get sick enough to die, and they'll take you out. Either way, it won't do any good to complain."
"I can see I'm going to have a good time up here." Douglass was lying on his cot. One end of the Quonset was fitted out as living quarters for the two of them; the other housed an office, a radio room, and a garage with a jeep and a snowplow in it. Mendelsen
had lined the walls of the living quarters with old weather maps. Everywhere Douglas looked were cold fronts, warm fronts, cloud masses, isobars, thermoclines, tropical depressions.
"Oh yeah," Mendelsen said. "I'll keep you entertained."
His idea of entertainment, it developed, consisted of just one thing: meteorology. Even when Douglass was still wracked with altitude sickness, Mendlesen hustled him out into the cold to look at cloud formations, tried to explain the theory behind isentropic
analysis, showed him endless photos of hurricane damage, ball lightning, massive hailstones. Douglass's polite counter-offers of cigarettes, girlie magazines, and penny-a-point gin were just as politely declined.
One morning in early August, when Douglass had finally lost his headache, they were outside the hut, repainting its corrugated metal walls. Mendelsen pointed west, to where a long smooth curl of cloud was hovering over the Sierra crest. "Lenticular cloud," he
said, squinting. "They call it the Sierra Wave. And the wind's coming around to the southwest. We'll have some precip by nightfall. Hail, probably."
"You can't be serious," Douglass said. Outside of that one white tube of vapor, the sky was all hot blue. Sunlight glared off the bare stretches of gravel.
"Well, nothing's for sure. Eighty per cent chance."
"Nice try," Douglass said, though Mendelsen never joked about weather. "Four in five? Four to one odds?"
"Yeah. That's approximate, of course."
Douglass set his paintbrush down. "You care to back that up with a little cash, my friend?"
Mendelsen did.
~ ~ ~
Once every two weeks a dusty olive drab truck labored up to the station, stopping at intervals to vent steam from its radiator. The drone of its engine was audible for half an hour before it came into view. The two raw-boned privates aboard would throw out a crate of canned rations, two drums of water, and a flabby mail pouch, then depart. On their first visit in September, they brought Douglass a letter from New Orleans, from one of the officers in his class, a talkative, round-faced Irishman named O'Kiernan who'd sold him cases of Jax beer for cigarettes.
Doubt you'll ever read this, but what the hell. Just thought I should write to remind you why it's a bad idea to go after superior officers' girls (even when they start it). Your pal Captain Hargreaves is AWOL, which is too bad since he belongs in a loony bin. (Word is he killed a couple of guys--our guys--in the Philippines before the war.) He was doing a lot of talking before he left about how he was descended from a cousin of John Wilkes Booth, and I'm sorry to say he seemed curious about where you were. Of course the C.O.'s not talking--I didn't get this address through channels. But if I was you I'd keep an eye out for beady-eyed captains carrying pearl-handled .45s.
Best,
O'K.
~ ~ ~
Mendelsen won that first bet on the weather. An hour before sunset, hail clattered down briefly, followed by a fierce rain-squall. But Douglass made the money back, double or nothing, on the overnight low, which he nailed at 34 degrees to Mendelsen's 36. The civilian spent an hour or so with a textbook and a slide rule after that one, trying to see where he'd gone wrong.
"What you missed," Douglass told him, "was the '34' written in fire next to the Big Dipper last night."
The money flowed back and forth throughout September. Mendelsen cashed big a couple of times on barometric pressure, and once when a light snow fell on a Tuesday morning. But Douglass kept gnawing away with the overnight lows and the afternoon wind velocities, simple measurements that didn’t need much analysis.
"One number's as good as another," he said one day at shift change, as he collected a double sawbuck. Now that Douglass was trained to read the instruments, maintain the logs, and work the radio, they worked opposite shifts, 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. for Douglass, the reverse for Mendelsen.
"To people who can't count," Mendelsen said, "I guess it is."
"For someone who can't count, I think I'm doing all right." Douglass was just fifty dollars down to Mendelsen, a figure which left both of them room for satisfaction.
"Better than you'd expect. But it's noise. Random fluctuations. Won't last."
"Take a look at this." Douglass handed him the letter from O'Kiernan. "Speaking of noise."
Mendelsen read it, looked at Douglass, read it again. "This is the captain you decked? Sounds like trouble."
"I guess I can always deck him again if I need to." Douglass took the letter back.
He couldn't quite remember what he'd been hoping for from Mendelsen.
"Seems to me you need to let the MPs in Bishop know, so they can keep an eye out for him."
"Maybe."
"Do you want to know what's going to happen?" He pointed a finger at Douglass. Before the war, he'd been a math teacher in the town of Independence in the Owens Valley, and he had a tendency to lecture. "This guy's going to do one of three things: go back to his
home town, go after the girl, or come looking for you."
Douglass tried to imagine himself going AWOL, which wasn't so hard. He couldn't imagine, though, which of all his countless possible destinations he'd pick. "He could go anywhere. You can't predict that."
"That's what you said about the snow last Tuesday."
Douglass just laughed.
~ ~ ~
The supply truck's next visit came on a cool day, and so it climbed the mountain without overheating. The two privates had time to admire the snow plow in the Quonset, throw rocks at marmots, and wander over to the edge of the escarpment for a casual pee down into the Owens Valley. In the mail pouch were just two things--for Mendelsen, a catalog from Edmund Scientific, and for Douglass, a letter from Lucinda, postmarked Victory, Colorado.
This is all my fault, I admit it. I never should have gone with you, but I didn't want to marry that man, and it isn't like he gave me a real ring or even met my parents. But why in God's name did you stand there and fight with him? If you had just run away it would have been perfect. He would have slapped me, maybe, but that's all right, and it would have been over. Now he's turned into a mad dog. Do you know where he is? He's here, hiding out in the trees along the levee behind my sister's house, all bearded and dirty, and his uniform's all torn and soiled. He comes out in the evening and stares through our windows. The MPs won't believe me that he's out there.
That wasn't all, of course, but she never got around to saying what she wanted from Douglass, or why she was writing to him, or how she knew where he was.
That afternoon he showed the letter to Mendelsen, who pushed aside a journal article on alpine wind dynamics to examine it.
"Interesting." Mendelsen nodded slowly. "You think he's really there?"
"She says so, doesn't she?"
"She also says the MPs won't search for him. Does that sound like any MP you ever heard of? They'd hunt for an AWOL officer if it was raining fire and brimstone."
Douglass slapped the table. "You're the one who said he'd go there."
"I said he'd go there, or he'd come here, or he'd go home."
"Why would she tell me he's there if he's not?"
Mendelsen rolled his metereology journal up in his hands and tapped Douglass on the head with it. "Why did you tell your parents there were monsters under the bed?"
"Because I thought there were," Douglass said, but finally the point of the letter came clear to him. To his surprise--he hadn't thought much about Lucinda since he'd come to White Mountain--he felt an electric rush. "All right. She wants me there?"
"I wouldn't recommend it--regardless of whether your captain's there or not."
Douglass looked at his watch, then glanced around the hut. "I can make the drive in twenty-four hours. Eight hours there to straighten things out--" he was vaguely conscious as he said this of how it might sound to someone afflicted with notions of scientific rigor--"twenty-four hours back. If I leave when I'm off this morning, I'll just miss two shifts."
"I'm not going to report you AWOL, if that's what you're worried about." Mendelsen went to the door of the hut and looked out into the pure blackness. "But you'd do better to wait a few days. We're going to have snow again tonight. A lot of it."
Douglass looked past him. "Doesn't feel like it to me. It's cold enough, maybe..."
"Seventy percent chance."
This was more or less an invitation to a wager, but Douglass just turned back into the hut.
"All that means, my friend, is maybe, and maybe not."
"One of the forecasters down in San Diego told me this story." Mendelsen closed the door. "This was a guy who was at Pearl for a while, doing long-range forecasts for CINCPAC--you know, stuff they'd use to make strategic decisions for the whole Pacific Fleet. Well, they'd get complaints, naturally, when they called something wrong and some poor bastards got nailed. So the forecasters put together a letter and sent it to CINCPAC, saying in effect, Look, these forecasts, they're not gospel, you can't rely on them--are you sure you want them?"
Douglass frowned.
"They got back a letter from some staff officer saying, 'The admiral knows quite well that the forecasts are useless. Nonetheless, he needs them for his planning.'"
~ ~ ~
It snowed, of course--a flurry of white specks at midnight, then a flood of huge damp flakes swarming across the plateau like migrating butterflies. By three a.m. there were six inches of new powder heaped on the ground; by first light, when Douglass finally made up his mind to go, another three. He thought of taking the snowplow out to clear the road, but in the end he just crept and slithered and fishtailed down in the jeep, barely keeping it under control.
A couple of miles below the weather station, where the road dipped steeply into a bowl at twelve thousand feet, he came on a loop of blurred footprints. Someone had climbed up out of the bowl to where a thick drift lay on its upper brim, then turned around and doubled back. The two lines of footprints--one growing more distinct, the other less so--followed the buried contour of the road down for another mile and a half. A jeep, almost identical to Douglass's, stood abandoned there, its hood up and snow piled on all its horizontal surfaces. Douglass drove carefully on, following a single line of footprints now.
Another mile below the jeep, Hargreaves lay curled up in a snowdrift next to a boulder. Douglass took a huge breath, then coughed as the cold cut into his lungs.
Hargreaves was on his side, a thin sheen of verglas over his face and hands. His neck, when Douglass checked it for a pulse, was hard as tile.
Nothing moved anywhere. Douglass looked up the road toward the weather station, then down toward the frosted hills reaching out to the Nevada border.
There was really no need to go to Colorado. Lucinda would get the news somehow. But flickers of her kept coming to him--her hair roughened by the wind off Lake Pontchartrain, the thin straps of her dress pressing into peach-colored shoulders. And once having started for Colorado, he was disinclined to turn back. Then too, his jeep wasn't going to make it back up the slope until some of the snow had melted. Downhill was always easier. And from here, almost everywhere was downhill--Colorado, Chicago, Los Angeles,
New York, Mexico... If Lucinda failed him as a compass, something else would take her place.
He wondered, as he got back in the jeep, what prediction Mendelsen would offer as to where he'd end up. Whatever it might be, he hoped to prove it wrong.
Tom Gartner
Douglass washed out of flight school in July of 1943, before he'd even sat at the controls of an airplane. One of the flight instructors, a Captain Wallace Hargreaves, went for a walk at twilight, when the heat was fading and the sky was smeared with violet and lavender clouds. On a paved walkway near the western bank of Lake Pontchartrain,
Captain Hargreaves found his fiancee on a sturdy wooden bench, holding hands with Douglass.
"Lucinda," Hargreaves said, pronouncing each syllable as if it were a separate word. "And Lieutenant Douglass." He was wearing an ugly grin and standing just a few steps away from them. He'd happened to come along at a time when Douglass and Lucinda weren't paying much attention to passers-by. Their conversation, after straying from Air Corps food to Vieux Carre taverns to the sad state of Mississippi riverboats, had trailed off altogether, and they'd just been looking at each other. Lucinda had clear jade-green eyes that seemed too bright for her pale skin. She reminded Douglass of a girl he'd kissed when he was in the seventh grade.
She jumped up now. Douglass stayed on the bench, feeling breathless.
"Are you possibly forgetting something, Lieutenant?" Hargreaves spoke in tight, nasal tones. He was a New Englander, tall and lanky, with scored cheeks and small eyes.
"Yes, sir." Douglass pushed himself up and saluted. He'd been in uniform six months, and he still hadn't acquired the reflex for deference.
Hargreaves sucker-punched him, a solid right to the mouth just as Douglass finished the salute. "Son of a bitch," the captain said softly, punching him again, and then again, and again.
It was all a little dreamlike for Douglass. He knew each punch had its own story, its special trajectory, its individual signature, but they all felt the same. He noticed that Lucinda was remarkably passive about the whole thing. That girl he'd kissed in the seventh grade—
she would have torn Hargreaves's eyes out.
Well, he thought finally, enough. Growing up in Chicago, he'd done some street fighting. It was no special challenge to bring up one hand and slam his knuckles into the captain's temple.
~ ~ ~
"You do have a talent for trouble, don't you, Lieutenant?" The C.O. spoke without looking up from Douglass's file. He wore, as always, a crisp dress uniform, and his shave was so perfect his face might have been marble.
"I guess it probably looks that way, sir." Before the business with Hargreaves, who was on medical leave now, recovering from a concussion, Douglass had done a week in the stockade for borrowing a Jeep, driving it out to Bayou Teche, and losing it to a Cajun beet farmer in a craps game. Before that, he'd been caught in an awkwardly timed police raid on a house of prostitution near the Fairgrounds racetrack. "But I don't honestly know why."
"You don't." The C.O. seemed amused.
"I always try to make the right choice, but how the hell do I know how it's going to turn out, sir? If a pretty girl wants to go for a walk, how am I supposed to know that's going to mean I get shipped out to the Mojave Desert?"
"I guess you think you're getting a bad deal." The C.O. shook his large, smooth head. "But if you knew what I know about Captain Hargreaves, you'd thank me for shipping you out. And as far as staying out of trouble goes, here's my advice. Find yourself some foresight--just a tiny shred would be an improvement--and put it to use." He bent over Douglass's transfer papers, signed them, and handed a copy across the desk. "You might make a start in that direction by being sure to catch your bus out of here. I believe you've got twenty minutes to get to the Cedar Street gate."
~ ~ ~
The White Mountain Weather Station consisted of a Quonset hut laid out on a gravel plateau at thirteen thousand feet, with a bristling pod of instruments--maximum-minimum thermometers, aneroid barometer, anemometer, precipitation gauges--thirty yards away, out
of the hut's ambient heat. Westward, a steep escarpment dropped two vertical miles into the Owens Valley. Beyond that loomed the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, still snow-laced in late summer.
Thirteen thousand feet, Douglass discovered, was serious altitude. His headache began halfway up the winding dirt road that led to the station, and it stayed with him for a week. Aspirin, sleep, liquids, whiffs from a battered green oxygen tank--nothing helped.
"You'll get over it," Mendelsen said on the second day. He was a civilian, tall and thin, with white hair though he was in his thirties. "Or else you'll get sick enough to die, and they'll take you out. Either way, it won't do any good to complain."
"I can see I'm going to have a good time up here." Douglass was lying on his cot. One end of the Quonset was fitted out as living quarters for the two of them; the other housed an office, a radio room, and a garage with a jeep and a snowplow in it. Mendelsen
had lined the walls of the living quarters with old weather maps. Everywhere Douglas looked were cold fronts, warm fronts, cloud masses, isobars, thermoclines, tropical depressions.
"Oh yeah," Mendelsen said. "I'll keep you entertained."
His idea of entertainment, it developed, consisted of just one thing: meteorology. Even when Douglass was still wracked with altitude sickness, Mendlesen hustled him out into the cold to look at cloud formations, tried to explain the theory behind isentropic
analysis, showed him endless photos of hurricane damage, ball lightning, massive hailstones. Douglass's polite counter-offers of cigarettes, girlie magazines, and penny-a-point gin were just as politely declined.
One morning in early August, when Douglass had finally lost his headache, they were outside the hut, repainting its corrugated metal walls. Mendelsen pointed west, to where a long smooth curl of cloud was hovering over the Sierra crest. "Lenticular cloud," he
said, squinting. "They call it the Sierra Wave. And the wind's coming around to the southwest. We'll have some precip by nightfall. Hail, probably."
"You can't be serious," Douglass said. Outside of that one white tube of vapor, the sky was all hot blue. Sunlight glared off the bare stretches of gravel.
"Well, nothing's for sure. Eighty per cent chance."
"Nice try," Douglass said, though Mendelsen never joked about weather. "Four in five? Four to one odds?"
"Yeah. That's approximate, of course."
Douglass set his paintbrush down. "You care to back that up with a little cash, my friend?"
Mendelsen did.
~ ~ ~
Once every two weeks a dusty olive drab truck labored up to the station, stopping at intervals to vent steam from its radiator. The drone of its engine was audible for half an hour before it came into view. The two raw-boned privates aboard would throw out a crate of canned rations, two drums of water, and a flabby mail pouch, then depart. On their first visit in September, they brought Douglass a letter from New Orleans, from one of the officers in his class, a talkative, round-faced Irishman named O'Kiernan who'd sold him cases of Jax beer for cigarettes.
Doubt you'll ever read this, but what the hell. Just thought I should write to remind you why it's a bad idea to go after superior officers' girls (even when they start it). Your pal Captain Hargreaves is AWOL, which is too bad since he belongs in a loony bin. (Word is he killed a couple of guys--our guys--in the Philippines before the war.) He was doing a lot of talking before he left about how he was descended from a cousin of John Wilkes Booth, and I'm sorry to say he seemed curious about where you were. Of course the C.O.'s not talking--I didn't get this address through channels. But if I was you I'd keep an eye out for beady-eyed captains carrying pearl-handled .45s.
Best,
O'K.
~ ~ ~
Mendelsen won that first bet on the weather. An hour before sunset, hail clattered down briefly, followed by a fierce rain-squall. But Douglass made the money back, double or nothing, on the overnight low, which he nailed at 34 degrees to Mendelsen's 36. The civilian spent an hour or so with a textbook and a slide rule after that one, trying to see where he'd gone wrong.
"What you missed," Douglass told him, "was the '34' written in fire next to the Big Dipper last night."
The money flowed back and forth throughout September. Mendelsen cashed big a couple of times on barometric pressure, and once when a light snow fell on a Tuesday morning. But Douglass kept gnawing away with the overnight lows and the afternoon wind velocities, simple measurements that didn’t need much analysis.
"One number's as good as another," he said one day at shift change, as he collected a double sawbuck. Now that Douglass was trained to read the instruments, maintain the logs, and work the radio, they worked opposite shifts, 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. for Douglass, the reverse for Mendelsen.
"To people who can't count," Mendelsen said, "I guess it is."
"For someone who can't count, I think I'm doing all right." Douglass was just fifty dollars down to Mendelsen, a figure which left both of them room for satisfaction.
"Better than you'd expect. But it's noise. Random fluctuations. Won't last."
"Take a look at this." Douglass handed him the letter from O'Kiernan. "Speaking of noise."
Mendelsen read it, looked at Douglass, read it again. "This is the captain you decked? Sounds like trouble."
"I guess I can always deck him again if I need to." Douglass took the letter back.
He couldn't quite remember what he'd been hoping for from Mendelsen.
"Seems to me you need to let the MPs in Bishop know, so they can keep an eye out for him."
"Maybe."
"Do you want to know what's going to happen?" He pointed a finger at Douglass. Before the war, he'd been a math teacher in the town of Independence in the Owens Valley, and he had a tendency to lecture. "This guy's going to do one of three things: go back to his
home town, go after the girl, or come looking for you."
Douglass tried to imagine himself going AWOL, which wasn't so hard. He couldn't imagine, though, which of all his countless possible destinations he'd pick. "He could go anywhere. You can't predict that."
"That's what you said about the snow last Tuesday."
Douglass just laughed.
~ ~ ~
The supply truck's next visit came on a cool day, and so it climbed the mountain without overheating. The two privates had time to admire the snow plow in the Quonset, throw rocks at marmots, and wander over to the edge of the escarpment for a casual pee down into the Owens Valley. In the mail pouch were just two things--for Mendelsen, a catalog from Edmund Scientific, and for Douglass, a letter from Lucinda, postmarked Victory, Colorado.
This is all my fault, I admit it. I never should have gone with you, but I didn't want to marry that man, and it isn't like he gave me a real ring or even met my parents. But why in God's name did you stand there and fight with him? If you had just run away it would have been perfect. He would have slapped me, maybe, but that's all right, and it would have been over. Now he's turned into a mad dog. Do you know where he is? He's here, hiding out in the trees along the levee behind my sister's house, all bearded and dirty, and his uniform's all torn and soiled. He comes out in the evening and stares through our windows. The MPs won't believe me that he's out there.
That wasn't all, of course, but she never got around to saying what she wanted from Douglass, or why she was writing to him, or how she knew where he was.
That afternoon he showed the letter to Mendelsen, who pushed aside a journal article on alpine wind dynamics to examine it.
"Interesting." Mendelsen nodded slowly. "You think he's really there?"
"She says so, doesn't she?"
"She also says the MPs won't search for him. Does that sound like any MP you ever heard of? They'd hunt for an AWOL officer if it was raining fire and brimstone."
Douglass slapped the table. "You're the one who said he'd go there."
"I said he'd go there, or he'd come here, or he'd go home."
"Why would she tell me he's there if he's not?"
Mendelsen rolled his metereology journal up in his hands and tapped Douglass on the head with it. "Why did you tell your parents there were monsters under the bed?"
"Because I thought there were," Douglass said, but finally the point of the letter came clear to him. To his surprise--he hadn't thought much about Lucinda since he'd come to White Mountain--he felt an electric rush. "All right. She wants me there?"
"I wouldn't recommend it--regardless of whether your captain's there or not."
Douglass looked at his watch, then glanced around the hut. "I can make the drive in twenty-four hours. Eight hours there to straighten things out--" he was vaguely conscious as he said this of how it might sound to someone afflicted with notions of scientific rigor--"twenty-four hours back. If I leave when I'm off this morning, I'll just miss two shifts."
"I'm not going to report you AWOL, if that's what you're worried about." Mendelsen went to the door of the hut and looked out into the pure blackness. "But you'd do better to wait a few days. We're going to have snow again tonight. A lot of it."
Douglass looked past him. "Doesn't feel like it to me. It's cold enough, maybe..."
"Seventy percent chance."
This was more or less an invitation to a wager, but Douglass just turned back into the hut.
"All that means, my friend, is maybe, and maybe not."
"One of the forecasters down in San Diego told me this story." Mendelsen closed the door. "This was a guy who was at Pearl for a while, doing long-range forecasts for CINCPAC--you know, stuff they'd use to make strategic decisions for the whole Pacific Fleet. Well, they'd get complaints, naturally, when they called something wrong and some poor bastards got nailed. So the forecasters put together a letter and sent it to CINCPAC, saying in effect, Look, these forecasts, they're not gospel, you can't rely on them--are you sure you want them?"
Douglass frowned.
"They got back a letter from some staff officer saying, 'The admiral knows quite well that the forecasts are useless. Nonetheless, he needs them for his planning.'"
~ ~ ~
It snowed, of course--a flurry of white specks at midnight, then a flood of huge damp flakes swarming across the plateau like migrating butterflies. By three a.m. there were six inches of new powder heaped on the ground; by first light, when Douglass finally made up his mind to go, another three. He thought of taking the snowplow out to clear the road, but in the end he just crept and slithered and fishtailed down in the jeep, barely keeping it under control.
A couple of miles below the weather station, where the road dipped steeply into a bowl at twelve thousand feet, he came on a loop of blurred footprints. Someone had climbed up out of the bowl to where a thick drift lay on its upper brim, then turned around and doubled back. The two lines of footprints--one growing more distinct, the other less so--followed the buried contour of the road down for another mile and a half. A jeep, almost identical to Douglass's, stood abandoned there, its hood up and snow piled on all its horizontal surfaces. Douglass drove carefully on, following a single line of footprints now.
Another mile below the jeep, Hargreaves lay curled up in a snowdrift next to a boulder. Douglass took a huge breath, then coughed as the cold cut into his lungs.
Hargreaves was on his side, a thin sheen of verglas over his face and hands. His neck, when Douglass checked it for a pulse, was hard as tile.
Nothing moved anywhere. Douglass looked up the road toward the weather station, then down toward the frosted hills reaching out to the Nevada border.
There was really no need to go to Colorado. Lucinda would get the news somehow. But flickers of her kept coming to him--her hair roughened by the wind off Lake Pontchartrain, the thin straps of her dress pressing into peach-colored shoulders. And once having started for Colorado, he was disinclined to turn back. Then too, his jeep wasn't going to make it back up the slope until some of the snow had melted. Downhill was always easier. And from here, almost everywhere was downhill--Colorado, Chicago, Los Angeles,
New York, Mexico... If Lucinda failed him as a compass, something else would take her place.
He wondered, as he got back in the jeep, what prediction Mendelsen would offer as to where he'd end up. Whatever it might be, he hoped to prove it wrong.
