The weather office was Sergeant Vernon's home ground and I smiled to myself as I went in. Like the sergeants' club, this was old-soldier territory; it smelled of floor polish and pine and on a wall was a window framing one of the big, blown-up colour pictures, this time of a picnic site beside a lake somewhere. An electric coffee percolator gurgled contentedly on a side bench and the ashtrays were many and wiped clean.
Vernon returned my smile. 'Something I can do for you, sir?'
'I take it,' I said, 'that you'll have all the records here.'
'We try to calculate it every which way. If it's not in the form you want, sir, we can work it out.'
'Fine. Look, I'm wondering whether there's going to be a break soon. I realize you can't forecast with any great accuracy, but maybe past records will give some kind of indication.'
'Be a pleasure,' Vernon said. He crossed to a filing cabinet and began hefting folders. 'We got anemometers going round and round. We got mercury and alcohol thermometers going up and down. We got barometric readings, snowfall records, you name it. But - ' the corners of his mouth turned down sympathetically -'it's gonna be a statistical answer you get.'
'I know,' 1 said. 'But I can cling on to a hope if you'll give me one.'
'So okay. Here's the plots for the last five years.' He unfolded the charts and spread them on the bench.
'Temperature right here. Wind velocity. This one's humidity. We plotted wind and temperature into a windchill factor on this one. Here's snowfall. Now . . .'
Twenty minutes poring over the charts gave the statistical answer. Some time within the next twenty-eight days it was reasonable to expect there'd be four when the wind was down to thirty miles an hour or less. Two more with wind under twenty.
I said, 'Well, it's encouraging.'
'Just so you don't get too encouraged,' Vernon said. 'A lot of that's gonna break down into short slots. Two, three, four hours maybe as a front goes through.'
'How much warning ?'
'Do what I can, sir. When the radio's open, I can get the satellite picture up from Thule. That can tell us a little more.'
'And pressure?'
Vernon shook his head. 'Highs and lows, they fill and empty too damn fast. You just gotta make a personal judgment here; data won't do it.'
I said, 'Do me a favour, Mr Vernon. Exercise your best judgment for me? An hour's notice, if I can get it, of a two-hour break. I need that to give any kind of demonstration.'
'Minimum?'
I nodded. 'The problem is that your people have to see what she can do. We've got to have time for a bulldozer to roughen the snow surface and build a few steps for the TK4 to climb. Once everybody's sold on that, we can take a few rides in rougher conditions, but I can't get to stage two before stage one's over.'
'Sure,' Vernon said. 'Coffee?'
We drank coffee while I answered his questions about the TK4. It struck me that Vernon was more open-minded about the potential of air-cushion vehicles than Barney Smales, not that his approval was much use. All the same, it was a comfort, and his promise to give me as much warning as possible of any potential weather break could be valuable.
I left him then and went to tidy up the TK4. I'd simply left her at the end of the trip back from Belvoir and I wanted her cleaned out, ship-shape and shiny, for demonstration time. The sergeant syndrome isn't far below the surface in me ; a coating of dirt on the outside of an engine casing doesn't make the engine any less efficient, but for me at least it removes some of the enjoyment. I looked her over carefully and the TK4 was in pretty good nick. In the rear hold a few drops of oil had dripped off the generator, but a handful of waste and a couple of brisk rubs soon shifted that. Otherwise the hold was like a new pin. The cabin wasn't bad, either, though it smelled a little of sweat and old tobacco smoke. I got a hand brush and cleaned the cabin floor of cigarette ash and spent matches, emptied the ashtrays and put a discarded matchbook on the screen sill for future use. Then I leathered the windows. Forty minutes' mindless work, satisfying in its way, and the job was finished, except for a routine check on oil and fuel levels, both of which were fine.
Reilly, the maintenance chief, wandered over as I was admiring her. The inevitable unlit cigar was clamped in the side of his mouth and he spoke round it as he offered the equally inevitable coffee. I was awash with coffee, and had been so virtually since my arrival at Hundred, but the game has rules and one of them is that it pays to be nice to maintenance crews. Reilly was still reading the manuals and hadn't been round the TK4 on hands and knees yet, but he reckoned there weren't nothin' he couldn't handle. I sensed, too, that he was impressed by the hovercraft's swiftness and efficiency on the Belvoir trip.
'Tell you what,' I said. 'First chance I get, we'll take a spin in her.'
He nodded brusquely, but under that matter-of-fact manner an enthusiast lurked. 'If I'm a-goin' in that thing,' he said, 'I'd sure better look after her. That right?'
'Right,' I said, grinning.
'You psychin' me, mister ?'
'I hope so.'
He walked away, then, tough and hard. But he patted the steel side of the TK.4 as he passed. It was the last good moment of that day.
On my bed, when I got back to my room, lay an envelope. Even before I opened it, I sensed somehow that it was ticking like a time bomb. Inside was a note from Master Sergeant Allen to the effect that Barney Smales wished to see me, and the word immediately was underlined. In the outer office Allen gave me a wry look thatcontained a trace of sympathy, and pointed to the door. I knocked, entered as bidden, and found Barney's eyes directed at me like a pair of shotguns. He gave me two or three minutes of level, low-voiced, furious abuse. It was what I'd expected that morning and hadn't collected - my come-uppance for : a) smoking in bed and carelessly; b) blundering out alone on to the icecap; c) failing to tell anybody I was going; d) behaving in general like a goddam cross between Sherlock Holmes and Captain Oates. My degenerate parents, apart from not enjoying benefit of clergy, had also passed on to me various congenital mental conditions. About thirty seconds into the tirade, I found myself surprisingly unimpressed. After a minute, it would have become almost funny, if the whole TK4 deal hadn't rested in large measure on Barney Smales's assessment. Finally, I said, with deliberate rudeness, 'Why wait ? What was wrong with this morning?'
'What in hell do you mean ?'
'All that jazz,' I said, 'about the beauties of bloody ballpoint pens.'
He blinked. 'Now listen, mister, I don't know - '
I said, 'It's got real functional beauty, that's what you told me.' I grabbed the pen off the desk-top and held it up. 'You liked the pretty colours, remember.'
He snatched it from my hand. 'Now listen - '
By now I was almost as angry as he was, but as our eyes met I saw something in his gaze that had no right to be there .. . Fear? Puzzlement? I said, 'You don't remember, do you?'
'You can forget this morning.'