Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, generous of smile, rotund of body, arrived at GE sporting his traditional fez. He was trailed by his brocaded, bejeweled wife and flanked by nine handlers, two from the Department of State. The News Bureau had diligently organized the photo ops. At the Works, the prime minister was photographed smiling while a manager explained the engine assembly line. Then he was taken to the turbine department. Gamely, he stood by as a worker drove gleaming rivets into an enormous flywheel. Flashbulbs detonated like lightning.
The prime minister had left Pakistan to learn what was to be learned in the most powerful nation on earth for the good of his spanking-new country. His state visit, hastily arranged after Stalin invited him to the Soviet Union, was designed to cement young Pakistan’s alignment with Western democracy and free enterprise.
The Ali Khans received a full state tour of Washington, including visits to see President Truman, the Naval Academy, Mount Vernon, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then they went to New York, where the prime minister received an honorary degree from Columbia University president Dwight D. Eisenhower. After that, they were hustled around the country—Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, New Orleans—inspecting everything from hospitals and factories to crop dusters and prize cattle. In Kansas City, they visited the home of an average American family. The average American husband and wife stood nervously in their Sunday best while Liaquat Ali Khan sat stiffly in their average American living room with their average American son on his lap.
When he and his wife arrived in Schenectady on May 24, 1950, Prime Minister Ali Khan had exactly 510 days to live. He would be assassinated on October 16, 1951, by an Afghani Pashtun ultranationalist. Conspiracy theories alleging U.S. or Soviet involvement would never be proved or disproved. But no one knew this on May 24. All anyone knew that day in Schenectady was that a brand-new nation’s head of state must be dazzled by the wonders of American industry.
Kurt didn’t write the press release for the prime minister’s visit, but he couldn’t have missed the fuss. GE loved nothing more than treating visiting dignitaries to a tour of the company’s showcase factory. But what was it like for someone like Liaquat Ali Khan to see the Schenectady Works? Did any of the guests treated to this spectacle of technological prowess and entrepreneurial efficiency ever question the value of all those toasters and refrigerators and washing machines and jet engines and tanks? Did anyone ever dare ask what it was all for?
At home, Kurt put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter and banged out the words “Outline for a Science Fiction Novel.”
He figured that’s what he’d been writing: science fiction. Not crazy exotic tales of alien races and outer space and time travel; that wasn’t what he meant. He had never read the genre magazines full of monsters and Martians, intergalactic wars and improbable future worlds. He meant fiction about science and the probable future that science was spawning in the here and now. Because he’d been living at the leading edge of that future for a couple of years, and he had some issues with what he saw.
Progress: the one true church. The smartest people understood that it had a downside, people like Norbert Wiener, but no one was listening to them. Take, for instance, David Lilienthal’s recent speech. Lilienthal had recently retired from the Atomic Energy Commission, and a group of scientists had quickly arranged for him to come to Schenectady and speak. They thought he would address the morally urgent issues behind atomic energy, now that he could say what he really thought. Instead, Lilienthal blathered on about nuclear medicine and nuclear power and how the main uses of the atom would be for peace. He dismissed the “cult of horror” of certain scientists and compared the discovery of fission to the discovery of fire.
As if fire had never harmed a fly.
During the question-and-answer period, someone in the audience asked how many atomic bombs it would take to destroy Schenectady.
“I haven’t given it a thought,” Lilienthal said.
Kurt was giving it a thought. His novel would be about progress and the dark side of it no one wanted to discuss.
It was Kenneth Littauer who had suggested writing a novel. An editor friend at Doubleday thought Kurt should expand “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” to novel length. It was not impossible, Kenneth said, that the publisher would offer Kurt an advance of $2,500 if he could provide a detailed proposal. Half a year’s salary!
So now Kurt was writing an outline. He had an idea about the novel he wanted to write, and it wasn’t a longer version of “Barnhouse.” He wanted to write a novel about GE. It would be science fiction in the way that most of his stories were science fiction. Science fiction like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984, which had been so acclaimed the previous year. Kurt’s novel would cover many of the same issues—freedom, totalitarianism, warmongering—that those well-respected novels did. But the totalitarian world of his novel would be based not on socialist England but on Schenectady. He wasn’t going to imagine some fantastic future world with babies in bottles or spy screens in every home; he was going to play out the implications of what was already happening right here, in the heart of the free market, in the capital of industrial know-how. He was going to bite the hand that fed him.
He’d never written a novel outline before. In his précis for Kenneth Littauer, he reverted to his anthropology-student habits. He started off by claiming broad cultural relevance: machines were taking over human labor, he declared, and this was a more significant cultural development than atomic energy. As proof, he inserted a long quotation from Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics:
The first industrial revolution … was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery … The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy.
That was exactly the world in which his novel would take place: a world sharply divided into an elite class of people intelligent enough to remain necessary and a vast, unhappy underclass whose usefulness has been usurped by machines. It was sort of like the physical split that had already occurred at GE, where the scientists and the managers moved to the Knolls and the laborers stayed behind at the Works, watching as machines took over their purpose. The central character would be an engineer, intelligent enough to be part of the elite but not really comfortable in it. He would be discontented with the whole situation without really understanding why. Eventually, there would have to be a rupture of some sort.
The novel outline hinted at a deeper animus behind Kurt’s resolve to quit GE. The job was making him crazy. And he was making Jane crazy. But it wasn’t just boring company politics and the soul-sapping task of public relations that were wearing him down. For him, GE was a brave new world, and he didn’t like it.
It wasn’t just machines or technology. It was the use of those things to divide the world into winners and losers. When Kurt was young, the Depression made losers of most of the nation, so the shame of losing had faded. But after the war, the nation staged an orgy of victory: VE Day, VJ Day. Suddenly Americans were ahead, and it felt good. It felt right. Even the arms race was exciting—a game the nation could win. The old socialist ideal of equalizing things was out of favor. In fact, people were starting to be afraid of being labeled socialists—or worse, communists—for advocating things that used to be uncontroversial, like trade unionism. People like Joseph McCarthy, the first-term senator from Wisconsin who claimed to have a list of 205 known communists working in the State Department, were whipping up a frenzy of Red-baiting. A Senate subcommittee was now investigating a number of individuals who were suspiciously friendly toward losers.
It was as if some people forgot the most basic truths of being human: we are frail, imperfect, vulnerable creatures always in need of other humans for support. Technology was evil if it was used to make some people fabulously comfortable and toss others out with the trash. It was evil if it made that cruelty seem rational. It was evil if it removed individuals from their humanity, if it suppressed the fundamental insight that we’re all in this together.
Kurt knew that he could shape these themes into an important novel. He gave his two-page outline to Kenneth and went back to writing short stories. The possibility of $2,500 was just that—a possibility. You couldn’t buy Junket or wieners with it. Besides, a popular writer could make $2,500 on two stories. Writing a novel was something you did to gain literary credibility. Kurt wanted that—fervently—but he also wanted to quit his job and make a living by writing. Short stories were the quicker route to prosperity.
Or would be, if someone would only buy them. As summer arrived, Kurt continued to crank out stories, and Knox continued to reject them. “Keep on trying” wasn’t working. Kurt groused to friends that Knox acted as if he were lining up prizewinners for the O. Henry Awards, not picking entertainment for a slick magazine. He couldn’t believe Collier’s rejected “EPICAC.” Even Kenneth liked that one; he submitted it to The New Yorker. “It’s about love in the technological age. I thought you might think it funny,” he wrote to the editors there. They didn’t.
By now, all of Kurt’s free time was consumed sitting at his desk. He started and restarted, wrote and rewrote, as the waves of life broke over him. Mark had his third birthday party; kids brought donations for the Schenectady Cerebral Palsy Fund in place of gifts. Jane waitressed at the Schenectady Symphony’s Junior League pops concert. Bernie’s son Peter won a prize for his flower arrangement at the Alplaus Methodist Church flower show, and Bow was pregnant again. PTA meetings, volunteer nights, dinner parties, school picnics: all of it eddied and churned around the beachhead Kurt built at the end of the hall upstairs. Ashtrays filled, wastebaskets overflowed, and the typewriter clacked away like the engine of a ship headed for a distant shore.
* * *
Bernie peered out the window of the B-17. His cloud—a clump of billowing cumulus over the mountains west of Socorro, New Mexico—was rearing up from the cloud bank like a gray sea monster. It was his cloud because he had seeded it with silver iodide half an hour earlier. Now it was growing ominously heavy and turning the same dark gray as wet concrete. But no rain was falling from it. As he watched, the cloud thrust farther upward, taking on the anvil shape of a thunderhead. Still no rain.
It was over-seeded, he figured. They had long suspected that over-seeding could cause clouds to grow while creating droplets too small to fall, and here was further proof, a cloud pregnant but unable to give birth. Fifty grams of silver iodide had been too much. Tell that to the private operators who were going haywire all over the state, seeding clouds with a hundred grams or more of silver iodide, on the mistaken theory that more was always better.
New Mexico was parched by drought. Before Project Cirrus arrived, the state’s Economic Development Commission had held a meeting on the topic of rainmaking. Scientists, Weather Bureau meteorologists, and private rainmakers were invited to brainstorm. Irving went out to New Mexico early to attend. Although Bernie had been expressing concern about the burgeoning of rainmaking for profit, Irving had not quite realized how many people had decided to get into the business of weather control. At the meeting, one commercial cloud seeder after another spoke, making it clear that the whole state was blanketed in rainmakers, dispensing dry ice from airplanes, burning silver iodide on the ground, shooting silver iodide from guns: all of it paid for by farmers desperate to save wilting crops and dwindling herds. The amounts of material the cloud seeders were using were ridiculous, and no one was keeping track. Irving finally saw Bernie’s point: Project Cirrus’s entire program was being jeopardized by careless amateurs.
Irving had stood up at the conference and made an impassioned speech urging the establishment of a central repository for data about the cloud-seeding operations across the state. He didn’t like regulation, but he suggested a voluntary agreement among rainmakers to submit detailed reports of any activities to the New Mexico School of Mines. Jack Workman’s group there would assemble and collate all the data and make them available to researchers. He spoke with conviction, and his usual charisma worked its magic. Everyone at the meeting agreed to the plan. But afterward, when one of the conference’s private rainmakers started a new operation and the Economic Development Commission wrote asking for its report, the reply was a flat refusal from the group’s lawyer stating that all data were “the property of the client.”
Nevertheless, the Project Cirrus team had come back to New Mexico for more test flights; the pilots stayed at the base, while the scientists packed into Poverty Row, the School of Mines’ war-era bunkhouse, with its paper-thin walls and spartan living quarters. Vince and Irving brought their wives, but the trip was too much for the pregnant Bow. Bernie brought his nephew Albert Lieber, whose family lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. A high school senior headed for Caltech, Albert was delighted to spend his summer tagging along after Irving, recording data, and hanging on the great scientist’s every word.
Bernie’s plane banked sharply and flew back around the seeded cumulus cloud to get more photographs before turning back toward Socorro and the radar site. At Socorro, they headed northwest, toward another slowly forming cumulus system. This one they seeded with dry ice, two pounds per mile. Almost as soon as they had dropped it, radar echoes began to show precipitation. The clouds ballooned upward, their action captured in time-lapse photographs.
Within an hour, rain was pounding New Mexico. The Rio Salado and the area’s dry arroyos quickly became engorged with rushing water. A truck and a car that were in the dip where Route 85 crossed the normally dry riverbed were swept downstream, halting all traffic on the road. Vince later estimated that the rivers had carried a thousand cubic feet of water per second to the Rio Grande. The floodwaters raged all that afternoon and continued through the next day as well.
The team was delighted. The photographs were excellent, and with the radar echoes they offered powerful evidence that their seeding was capable of dramatic effects. It had been even more powerful to observe it in real time from the air. Bernie felt in his heart that they had made that storm: He saw it. He was there. Unfortunately, William Lewis of the Weather Bureau was not. He had chosen to sleep in that morning and had missed the whole operation.
That night, they read in the news that the UN Security Council had passed a resolution committing itself to military action in Korea. Two weeks earlier, seventy-five thousand soldiers from Korea’s communist North had crossed the 38th parallel and invaded the democratic South. In response to this clear breach of the peace, the UN Security Council had recommended that member nations begin making their military forces available to the American unified commander. For the first time, the young UN was taking up its role as planetary peacekeeper.
It was a UN military action, but it still meant that America was once again at war. Men would be drafted, ships and aircraft would be sent to the front, and military personnel on noncombat assignments would be called into active duty.
In other words, Project Cirrus was going to lose its planes and its pilots.
At least Bernie’s work could carry on. Workman’s team in New Mexico would continue dispensing silver iodide on their regular schedule, and the GE team would continue to analyze the data, searching for proof that Bernie’s generators were changing the nation’s weather patterns.
* * *
Kurt looked out over the oily harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and felt glum. He loved being near the ocean, even if, as a Great Lakes person, it made him feel as if he were swimming in chicken soup. He and Jane had been excited to bring Mark and little Edie to New England for their August vacation. They hadn’t counted on the world going to hell.
The newspapers were full of it. War again. The first UN observer—Colonel Unni Nayar of India—had just been killed by a land mine, along with the two British journalists riding in his jeep. The UN had ejected a pacifist protester who tried to hand out leaflets advocating mediation instead of war. President Truman was rattling his saber. It all felt so familiar.
But it was new too, a civil war that felt like the opening skirmish in a global battle of ideologies. Some of the American GIs who came back wounded were insisting they had seen Russians driving the tanks that attacked them. America’s UN delegate, Warren Austin, called the North Koreans a “Russian zombie.” The armed camps were summoning their ranks; the Cold War was turning hot.
Looking out over the ocean, Kurt couldn’t help but picture it: seven thousand miles across that expanse of dark water, it was all happening again. Young men—as young as he had been—were being sent into another maelstrom. They thought they were soldiers, but they were pawns really, pawns in a nasty game of brinksmanship between the world’s two superpowers. The Korean War had nothing to do with them, little even to do with the Korean peninsula, and everything to do with the growing enmity between communism and capitalism, between what were called East and West but were really the Soviet Union and the United States.
Right there in Gloucester, he started a new story: “King’s Knight to Queen Five.” In the story, later retitled “White King,” the soldiers are literally pawns. Twelve soldiers, their commander, Colonel Kelly, and Kelly’s family—on their way to a military attaché post in India—have been blown off course by a sudden storm over China and crash-landed in territory held by a communist guerrilla chief, Pi Ying. In the presence of a Russian “observer,” Major Barzov, Pi Ying offers to let them all go—but only if Colonel Kelly will play chess for their lives, using his troops and his family as chessmen. Whenever he loses a piece, that person will be shot. If Colonel Kelly refuses to play, they will all be killed.
The Americans take their places, and the game commences. As pieces are lost and soldiers dragged off to their deaths, Colonel Kelly realizes that Pi Ying has a sadistic fascination with what the American will do. Major Barzov seems cold and distant, Pi Ying’s mistress is blank-faced, but the communist guerrilla chief is watching the game with the avid fascination of a young boy watching a colony of ants being drowned by a flood.
Kurt drew chessboards and sketched out the game, because the story would hinge on an actual move. Colonel Kelly realizes that he can beat Pi Ying by luring him into a trap where his sadism will blind him to the ramifications of his move. He has to make a sacrifice that will trick Pi Ying into a checkmate. As he contemplates his options, he realizes that only one sacrifice will suffice: he must lose one of his sons.
The cold resolve deserted Kelly for an instant, and he saw the utter pathos of his position—a dilemma as old as mankind, as new as the struggle between East and West. When human beings are attacked, x, multiplied by hundreds or thousands, must die—sent to death by those who love them most. Kelly’s profession was the choosing of x.
Four soldiers have already been killed when Kelly moves his son into a vulnerable position. He pretends to realize the sacrifice too late and begs to take the move back. Pi Ying refuses. As the boy is about to be hauled off and shot, Pi Ying’s mistress intervenes, murdering Pi Ying and killing herself. Major Barzov continues the game, but he quickly realizes the cleverness of Kelly’s move. He allows the survivors safe passage out of the region and doesn’t insist on killing the boy. The story ends with banter between Barzov and Kelly about a possible rematch—at the time and place of the Soviet Union’s choosing.
It was a dark story, bleaker than much of what Kurt had been writing. He made a sketch of himself on the back of one of his drafts, a lanky figure hunched feverishly over his typewriter. He drew quickly, the lines electric with urgency. All his hopes for world government, for peace and disarmament, were being dashed by the action in Korea. The world powers were once again playing games with the lives of men. And he was becoming more and more convinced that the root of it was the ability to see human beings not as individuals but as pawns. The danger of the technocratic worldview was that it made human conflicts, human drama, even war, into a kind of game.
While they were in Gloucester, he made a painting of the face of a clown and put it up for sale in a local gallery. It didn’t sell, so they brought it home with them. Kurt’s clown had a bulbous red nose and straw-like blond hair and a big white greasepaint smile, but his blue almond-shaped eyes—eyes much like his own—were unmistakably sad.
* * *
Bernie looked out over the audience of high school teachers in Connecticut. Often at events like this one, a meeting of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers, he gave a general overview of rainmaking and its results to date. But tonight he was doing something different. He was talking about the ethical implications of science.
“Many farmers, ranchers and civic-minded people in many parts of the country are now engaged in cloud seeding,” he declared. He was careful to point out that the amateurs were not bad people. But they “can unwittingly cause large scale, and perhaps adverse, modifications of weather many miles from the scene of their operations.” Not only that, but their efforts could be polluting the data of serious scientists trying to conduct rigorous experiments.
The media were still enamored of cloud seeding. An issue of Time magazine had just hit newsstands naming Langmuir the man of the week, his likeness on the cover holding an umbrella that doubled as a test tube. The writer noted Irving’s intense curiosity: “He has been known to sit for half an hour beside a rock surrounded by rising water just to see what a dozen ants will do when their refuge is submerged.” But though the article featured a long list of cloud-seeding projects under way across the nation, it gave no indication that this deluge of rainmaking might be problematic. That, it seemed, was going to be Bernie’s job.
Like Professor Barnhouse, like Dr. Macon in “Ice-9,” Bernie was beginning to fear that his invention was getting out of hand. But, also like his fictional counterparts, he couldn’t prevent people from using it recklessly until he had proved it was real.
“Legislators in the future may well face many problems connected with cloud seeding,” he told the chemistry teachers. “Laws may be necessary to prohibit and police seeding operations which are contrary to the best interests of the public. Licensing of seeding operations and permits for seeding may be desirable.”
It was a risky thing to be suggesting at a time when the future of Project Cirrus was hardly guaranteed. The number of flights had plummeted as Project Cirrus pilots were reassigned to Korea. GE’s president Charlie Wilson had recently resigned his post to head up the Office of Defense Mobilization, and his successor, Ralph Cordiner, was a meticulous and humorless leader with an eye glued to the bottom line—a trait that earned him the nickname Razor Ralph. Razor Ralph was unlikely to have much enthusiasm for a project that did nothing for profits, especially as it exposed the company to all kinds of risks.
For an example of those risks, one only had to look to the Catskills, where residents of New York City’s watershed were still trying to get the city to stop cloud seeding. At a meeting of the local Farm Bureau Federation, hay farmers and apple growers bitterly complained about damage to crops, and the general secretary for New York demanded government regulation. The Boards of Supervisors in Orange and Sullivan Counties had passed resolutions demanding the city cease all rainmaking. The Palisades Amusement Park had even offered to pay the consulting meteorologist Wallace Howell twice his city salary if he would quit. “Why Don’t You Let Us Alone, Rainman,” griped a headline in The Kingston Daily Freeman, summarizing the general feeling. But even though the reservoirs were replenished, Howell and the New York City Board of Estimate carried on. Their data would be more valuable if they seeded for four consecutive seasons.
The New York Times’s editorial board commended Bernie’s endorsement of regulation, noting that his position differed from Langmuir’s. Irving too was frustrated with the amateurs who might be polluting his data, but he believed regulation was impracticable, suggesting only a voluntary agreement among rainmakers. That was in keeping with the times, where “planning” and “regulation” were increasingly unpopular words. Bernie was swimming against the tide of unbridled capitalism. It was not a role he had ever expected to assume. But someone had to make sure that scientists paid attention to the damage they and their inventions might unwittingly do.
* * *
“Ice-9,” Kurt’s story about a scientist whose invention nearly destroyed the world, was languishing. After Argosy rejected it, hard on the heels of The Saturday Evening Post, Kurt glumly told Kenneth they should probably hawk it to Astounding Stories for $300. That was highway robbery for something he thought was the best thing he’d ever written, but it was better than having the whole novella end up in the garbage can.
But he was hard at work on a new story, a political allegory, which was perhaps not the smartest choice. Already an editor at Collier’s had complained that his chess story, “White King,” savored of knee-jerk anticommunism. Kurt objected to Knox.
“I am a registered Democrat, pro–Fair and New Deal, distressed by the new anti-subversive laws, hate McCarthy, enflamed by Communist smears on liberals—etc., etc.,” he wrote. “But, dammit, Knox, I don’t like Communist Russia any more than I did Nazi Germany. There are some 3,000 Americans dead in Korea, killed in a chess game with Russia looking on.” People who considered his depiction of Pi Ying sadistic, he declared, were perhaps “too insensitive to a casualty list as long as King Kong’s arm.” He signed the letter “George Sokolsky”—the name of a newspaper columnist known for loving free markets and hating Reds.
Now, unrepentant, Kurt was writing another anticommunist story, using petrified ants to tell a morality tale about totalitarianism. He made it even more direct by setting it in the Soviet Union. The problem was, he couldn’t figure out how it ended.
Kurt had been looking at William Morton Wheeler’s book Ants: Their Structure, Development, and Behavior. According to Wheeler, ant societies had progressed through stages of social behavior analogous to those of human cultures. Modern ants lived in mindless, often militaristic societies in which the hereditary hierarchies of caste and function were evident as physical traits: soldier ants were big, with pincers for fighting; worker ants were small, with enlarged mandibles for carrying things. There was no individualism, no escaping one’s physical destiny. What, Kurt wondered, if human beings were headed in the same direction?
Like “Ice-9,” the new story centered on a conflict between two men, one doctrinaire, the other doubtful. But in this story, the men are brothers, Josef and Peter. Both are myrmecologists—scientists who study ants—but they have different approaches to their discipline. The elder brother, “Josef the rock, the dependable, the ideologically impeccable,” plays along with the Communist Party, while the younger brother, Peter, chafes under party orthodoxy. Peter has a blot on his reputation, a paper he wrote about slave-raiding ants that was declared ideologically incorrect, requiring him to issue an apology. Now Josef, who ghostwrote the retraction for him, is trying to help him steer clear of trouble as they investigate some newly discovered fossil ants.
The story is set in the Erzgebirge, or Ore Mountains, the rolling mountain range dividing eastern Germany from Czechoslovakia. The occupying Russians, while searching for uranium there, have discovered a cache of fossilized ants. When the brothers see them, they are amazed. The pre-Mesozoic ants are large and pincerless and have smaller mandibles than modern ants. And petrified along with them is evidence of a prehistoric ant culture: houses, art, musical instruments, and books.
“Josef,” Peter says, “do you realize that we have made the most sensational discovery in history? Ants once had a culture as rich and brilliant as ours. Music! Painting! Literature! Think of it!”
Going through the layers of rock, the brothers see how the “magnificent ant civilization” evolved into “the dismal, instinctive ant way of life of the present.” Artistic, intellectual, individualized ants have disappeared, leaving only warlike, cultureless drones. The brothers slowly realize they will never be allowed to publish their find: the parallels with their own totalitarian culture are far too obvious.
The political allegory was heavy-handed. But what gave Kurt even more trouble was the relationship between the two brothers. The story is told from Peter’s perspective. But Kurt struggled with the character of the older brother, Josef. In early versions, he made Josef a Communist Party dupe. He wrote a scene in which Josef and Peter go out in a thunderstorm and argue about Peter’s desire to speak the truth. Josef tells Peter that he mustn’t speak “some kinds of truth” and urges him to “overlook certain things.” Peter suddenly sees his brother for the sorry character he is: a “frail figure in a whirlpool, clinging desperately to a raft of compromises.”
The scene needed to be fixed. It didn’t convey Peter’s respect for his older brother. Kurt rewrote it several times, once even having the brothers get into a physical fight, but he couldn’t get it right, so he took it out. He was also struggling with the ending. In one version, Josef falsifies their scientific report while Peter escapes to the West. In another, the brothers end up in Siberia, near a huge atomic bomb factory that blows up. Yet another concludes with the brothers rewriting their findings to adhere to the party line but still getting banished to Siberia, where they bitterly reflect on the similarity between men and ants.
He drafted more than ten versions of the story. His struggles to figure out Peter’s fate mirrored his struggle to determine his own. He was trapped at GE just as Peter was trapped by the Communist Party. Would he continue living a lie or take the risk of escaping?
But he was also wrestling with his view of his brother. Bernard was the rock, the dependable scientist. But he wasn’t like Josef, a frail man clinging to a false ideology out of fear and conformity. Living in Schenectady, being part of Bernard’s work, Kurt could see that Bernie was no kept scientist, toeing the science factory’s company line. He too was trying to stay true to his ideals in a culture that didn’t share them. The simplistic characterization of the older brother as a thoughtless organization man wasn’t working anymore.
On a blank page, while working on his ant story Kurt typed up a to-do list. One thing on it was his income tax. Another was to get back to writing his novel. For the first time he gave it a title: Player Piano.
* * *
Bernie’s phone rang at the lab. It was Bow, with a shopping list of things to pick up on the way home. Bernie grabbed the nearest thing at hand, a letter from a Park Avenue matron thanking him for giving a talk about cloud seeding to her women’s club, and scribbled as Bow dictated: books, pen, cigarettes, matches, newspaper …
Bow was at home, recovering from the birth of their twin boys a few weeks earlier. She’d suffered headaches and gloominess after Peter’s birth five years earlier, so Bernie was trying to help out as much as he could. But it was hard to tear himself away from the lab. Project Cirrus was getting closer to proving that their periodic seedings had caused widespread changes in the weather.
The day after the twins were born, GE formally dedicated the Knolls by hosting the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. Irving gave a lecture about their periodicity experiments in New Mexico. He saw it as a chance to change the minds of the meteorology professors who had written a report for the Department of Defense branding his claims of widespread weather modifications “extraordinarily extravagant.” When the report was declassified, something like a brawl had ensued at the AMS. Harry Wexler wanted to publish the report in the Bulletin. Vincent, who had been elected to the AMS council, insisted that Langmuir be given a chance to respond. Chief Reichelderfer pointed out that Langmuir never gave anyone else a chance to respond to his GE reports. “It seems to me it is time we began to play up the authentic meteorological opinion in this matter of rainmaking,” he wrote to the council heads, “in view of the complete abandon with which the proponents of artificial rainmaking on a large scale have expressed themselves in public over the past two or three years.”
For the National Academy, Langmuir had marshaled their statistics and their best photographic evidence. He had Weather Bureau charts showing rainfall at stations throughout the Midwest enlarged to enormous size so the seven-day pattern was stunningly obvious, even from the back of the room. Chief Reichelderfer was unable to attend, but he dispatched two Weather Bureau meteorologists to Schenectady soon afterward. Bernie was back at work by then, and Langmuir enlisted him to assist in lecturing the Weather Bureau men, laying out their charts and data over the course of two days.
Irving was growing frustrated with the meteorological community’s refusal to grant scientific credibility to his life’s most important work. He was particularly annoyed by the Weather Bureau’s claim that no one could say cloud seeding worked until they understood the mechanism precisely. After all, meteorologists might never know all there was to know about the atmosphere. But they could still change it. It was like the germ theory of disease, he reasoned. For decades, doctors knew that washing their hands led to lower mortality among patients. The fact that they didn’t know why was not sufficient reason for refusing to lather up.
Bernie, meanwhile, was determined to track down the truth about what the commercial rainmakers were doing. He began writing to chemical supply companies like Braun, Dow, Merck, and Pfizer to ask whether their sales of silver iodide had gone up. “It is hoped that it will be possible on the basis of the information received to estimate the rate at which silver iodide has been and is being introduced into our atmosphere,” he wrote. “If this quantity is sufficiently large, an attempt will be made to evaluate the effects which may be produced by this seeding.” Many companies reported no increase in sales, but a few had seen large jumps. Elmer & Amend, a division of Fisher Scientific, reported that its 1950 sales had gone from three pounds to twenty-seven. Eight pounds of that was sold to New York City for use in the watershed.
* * *
In late November 1950, a winter storm hit the Eastern Seaboard. It started in North Carolina and eventually swept across twenty-two states. All-time record low temperatures were set across the Southeast, historic snowfalls pounded the Appalachians and the Midwest, hurricane-force winds hit New York, and tidal flooding surged northward up the coast of New England. The Big Ten championship game between Ohio State and Michigan was played in a near whiteout, earning it the nickname the Blizzard Bowl. A million people lost power, and 353 people lost their lives.
The Catskills were hit especially hard. But New York’s rainmaker Wallace Howell wanted a full year of data. So, as heavy winds and hard rain lashed the region, a city water department crew ran a silver iodide generator attached to a trailer in Fahnestock State Park, near Cold Spring, a location chosen so that the prevailing winds would carry the silver iodide over the watershed. At the same time, a city airplane seeded clouds closer to the reservoirs.
The storm intensified that night. The northern part of Ulster County got a downpour of eight inches, and ten of the region’s twenty-four rain gauges recorded more rain than in the famous hurricane of 1938. A month’s worth of water was added to the city coffers in three days.
The damages were epic. Dozens of bridges and highways were washed out. Farms and villages were flooded. Parts of the New York Central’s Delaware and Ulster branch railroad bed were washed away, leaving tracks hanging from hillsides like strings of Christmas lights. Three small dams burst in the village of Pine Hill, draining the town’s recreational lake. In Arkville, a seventy-two-ton fuel tank broke loose and barreled a quarter mile down State Route 28, and a covered bridge was swept a thousand feet downstream. Many local residents declared it the worst flood they had ever seen. The Weather Bureau would later call the storm one of the most destructive ever recorded on the Eastern Seaboard. And its meteorologists had failed to predict any of it.
It was a freak storm, the Weather Bureau said. No one could have predicted it. Irving Langmuir didn’t necessarily disagree. He doubted anyone could have predicted it. But he had a sneaking suspicion that Bernie’s cloud seeding had caused it.
* * *
Bernie and Bow didn’t have far to go to get to 18 Hill Street; a short walk around the corner, and they were at Kurt and Jane’s front door. Tonight the house was brightly lit and buzzing with voices. It was a couple of days after Christmas, the night of the Junior League holiday ball. Kurt and Jane were throwing a dinner party before the dance. Bernie and Bow were joined by the Fishers, the Hollomons, the McCartys, the Yarboroughs, and the Metcalfs—all GE employees and their wives.
There was a lot to celebrate. After Langmuir’s recent paper presenting his evidence for widespread periodicities in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the meteorologists were taking a more conciliatory tone: Harry Wexler had even gone to Socorro earlier that month to let Vince and Jack Workman present the Project Cirrus case. They disagreed on whether cloud seeding was sufficiently proved but had all gained more respect for the other side’s position. It seemed as if it were only a matter of time before the meteorological world at large realized the significance of the Cirrus work.
But if Bernie had reason for optimism, Kurt was in an even better mood—jubilant, in fact. The story logjam had finally broken when Knox Burger bought “EPICAC.” Knox had never liked the story much, and he sarcastically blamed the purchase on the higher-ups. He told Kurt his rewrite was shoddy, asking him to take into account the fact that thinking machines had become common knowledge: there was one at Harvard and maybe even one at MIT. He also suggested Kurt try to make the scientist in the story sound a little less puerile.
But the rough handling was a sign that Kurt was finally a real magazine writer. In November, Knox had bought “White King,” upping Kurt’s fee from $900 to $1,250. Kurt wrote “SOLD” in big letters with a red crayon on the story’s GE News Bureau folder. It was a turning point, the turning point, at long last. He had sold “Thanasphere,” “Das Ganz Arm Dolmetscher,” “EPICAC,” and now “White King” in the year since selling “Report on the Barnhouse Effect.” Five stories total: the number sufficient to quit his job. And he had a bunch more in the pipeline, along with his idea for a novel.
So this party was a farewell of sorts. In mid-December, Kurt had given notice at GE. He was quitting as of the start of the New Year. New year, new life. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was no longer a PR flunky. He was finally going to be what he’d always wanted to be: a writer. And he knew what he was going to write about too: science in the House of Magic.