But all that’s to one side. Back to Inkling.
He was occupied, when I met him, in trying to find something that moved faster than an electromagnetic signal, and among many, many others I kept telling him there was no such thing, not in this space-time. Stuff that moves at the speed of light cannot be sped up any, no matter how hard you push.
He finally did give up on that one, saying sadly that light-speed would have to do, and when I asked him what sort of distances his signal would have to travel he told me:-“Roughly thirteen thousand miles, at a maximum.”
Light (or an electronic signal, if not an actual electron, which has actual mass) makes that in something like a fifteenth of a second, which seemed pretty fast for a trip four times across the United States, with a side-trip from here to Chicago thrown in as a frequent-speeder bonus.
After his flirtation with light-speed, he got curious about those spy satellites that can read your license plate, or diagnose your acne, from whatever number of miles up is the current record. He asked several LUNY professors if they knew any of the precise details of such satellites, from telescopes to comm links—hell, he even asked me, and I am not cleared for much beyond the National Enquirer.
What all this was in aid of I hadn’t the faintest idea. I was doing Rehab—flexing my toes and getting the flex measured, lifting teeny weights and having my arm strength measured, such as it was, and even more repetitive chores—and chatting with Inkling when I was free and he could be found. He was spending a lot of time over in electrical engineering, though—to what purpose, again, I had no idea.
Not that I didn’t ask him, but the most he would say was: “To anyone who understands chaos theory, it should be obvious.”
I took that as a particularly vicious crack. I hadn’t said I understood chaos theory, I’d just mentioned that there was such a thing. I’ve been through some popular stuff, but the real subject, the math, is some ways outside my ambit. Your readers are the people to ask, if you really want to know on that level; I’ve said for years that the readers are smarter than both of us.
But I went back to the pop works and read about the butterflies, and the orbits of the planets, and Fourier analysis (which seems to be what chaos theory is emphatically not about) and such things, and couldn’t make them add up to spy satellites, speeds faster than light, and electrical engineering. I could see where weather might come in, but the books kept saying that nothing could predict weather very well—which is where I’d come in.
Inkling was talking about predicting it and controlling it. For a little while in there, I paid a lot more attention to Rehab, because it made more sense than the puzzle Inkling was being. But only for a little while.
Inkling was clearly up to something sizable, and, since I was in LUNY, there were very few limits on what that could be. Maybe, I thought, it was a business of controlling the weather by thinking good-weather thoughts and beaming them at light-speed to unstable air masses. That explanation sounded sufficiently LUNY, to be sure—I’ve told you a little about LUNY, Stan, but I haven’t even mentioned some of the high points; next letter, maybe—but it didn’t seem to cover all the bases.
Then I ran into a fellow from electrical engineering, and things began to make sense.
I mean I literally ran into him; wheelchair management is not much like leg management, and takes some getting used to. I was backing out of a traffic jam in Rehab (three wheelchairs and what they call a Gerrychair, a sort of near-horizontal wheelchair setup for geriatric patients or others who can’t sit up), and ran over the foot of a man standing behind me. It’s a lot harder to look behind you from a wheelchair, and I didn’t happen to have a warning beeper.
I apologized and he made light of the event and one graceful sentence led to another, and I mentioned Inkling’s interest in Electrical E. “I know,” he said. “He’s a nice enough fellow, but he’s been a terrible bother; he wants us to build a mechanical bird.”
“A what?” This new piece didn’t fit any of the other pieces.
“Well, not a bird,” he said. “A butterfly.”
“That one word,” as Holmes once told Watson, “should have told me the whole story, were I the ideal reasoner you are so fond of depicting.” And were I the ideal r. myself, it certainly would have. I’m sure Holmes himself would have had no trouble moving from spy satellites to mechanical butterflies (given a short course in both, since he has had no certified cases since 1917). The notion of mechanical spies shaped like butterflies, one immediate mental construction, is perhaps just a little too James Bond for consideration, though I did consider it for a few minutes. Not enough space for data collection and transmittal, I thought, and dismissed it.
Not, I’m afraid, the ideal reasoner, but which of us is? I mulled over Inkling’s butterfly for some time, never getting to ask him about it because he didn’t show up much for the next few days, and when he did he was almost totally abstracted—wherever the essential Amadeus Inkling was, it wasn’t where his body was located.
And by the time I did find him in, so to speak, and got ready to ask him what the hell was going on, I didn’t have to. He told me.
The whole grand scheme took my breath away, let me tell you. I have run into some large schemes in my time—there was that whole business of making strawberry-flavored envelopes with just the faintest touch of LSD, back in the ’60s, and there was one mad scientist’s idea of adding subliminal messages to all Talking Books (he wanted to turn us all into vegetarians, pacifists, and other uninteresting people)—but I think Inkling took the cake that one afternoon.
We were sitting in one of the Rehab gyms (not too much like your usual gym, but they smell the same, thanks), and Inkling announced, without preliminaries: “I have done it.”
“Done what?” I said; with Inkling I always seemed to be the straight man: How hot was it? “Fixed the weather?”
“Everybody,” he said, “talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” He gave me a big, big smile. It looked odd on that face; behind the glasses his enormous eyes crinkled, and he looked like a Whitley Streiber jolly visiting alien. “I,” he said, “have done something about it.”
I suppose I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist saying it: “Bought an umbrella?”
He didn’t take umbrage and stalk away; he was too damn happy to take any umbrage at all. “I can predict and therefore control the weather,” he said. “Finally and absolutely. Have you ever noticed (for instance) that New York is littered with drought warnings when our reservoirs are low, and we are then cailed upon, idiotically, to welcome any passing bucket of rain that falls here—many miles from the reservoirs?”
I’d noticed that, and been as irritated by it as everybody else. I said so.
“Now,” he said, “it will rain into the reservoirs. The city, as it should, will stay nice and dry for us.”
“Great,” I said. “Got any other improvements?”
“Hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons and all the rest will no longer be worrisome. They will occur in designated Storm Areas, varied from week to week but always over large bodies of water. Ships and planes will be warned to stay clear of a given week’s Storm Areas.”