Fletcher was up early next morning, and after a token breakfast he checked two addresses in his notebook, then went into the town. When he arrived back at the Nationale to pick up Davon he was very thoughtful and inclined to be absent-minded, so there was little conversation as they drove to Rivière de la Paix in the car he had hired. They were halted briefly at the gates of the Base, but a telephone call from the guardroom soon released them, and a marine led them to Riley's office.
Davon looked curiously at the charts on the walls and at the battered desk and the scuffed chairs. "You don't in for frills, do you?"
"This is a working office," said Riley. "Please sit down."
Fletcher examined a wall chart with some misgivings. "I'm always baffled by boffins," he complained. "They usually make the simplest things sound hellishly complicated. Have mercy on poor laymen like me."
Riley laughed, but spoke seriously. "It's the other way around, y'know. Our job is to try to define simply what are really very complex phenomena."
"Try to stick to words of one syllable," pleaded Fletcher. "I hear you went to look at a hurricane at first hand the other day. It was more than a thousand miles from here---how did you know it was there?"
"That's easy to explain. In the old days we didn't know a hurricane had formed until it was reported by a ship or from an island---but these days we're catching them earlier." Riley spread some photographs on the desk. "We get photographs from satellites---either from the latest of the Tiros series or from the newer Nimbus polar orbit satellites."
Davon looked at the photographs uncomprehendingly and Riley interpreted. "This tells us all we need to know. It gives us the time the photograph was taken---here, in this corner. This scale down the edge gives the size of what we're looking at---this particular hurricane is about 300 miles across. And these marks indicate latitude and longitude---so we know just where it is. Simple, really."
Fletcher flicked the photograph. "Is this the hurricane you're concerned with now?"
"That's correct," said Riley. "That's Magda. I've just finished working out her present position and her course. She's a little less than 600 miles southeast of here, moving northwest on a course that agrees with theory at a little more than 10 miles per hour."
"I thought hurricanes were faster than that," said Davon in surprise.
"Oh, that's not the wind speed; that's the speed at which the hurricane as a whole is moving over the Earth's surface. The wind speeds inside this hurricane are particularly high---in excess of 170 miles per hour."
Fletcher had been thinking deeply. "I don't think I like the sound of this. You say this hurricane is southeast of here, and it's moving northwest. That sounds like it's heading directly for us."
"It is," said Riley. "But fortunately hurricanes don't move in straight lines; they move in curves." He paused, then took a large, flat book from a nearby table. "We plot the paths of all hurricanes, of course, and try to make sense of them. Sometimes we succeed. Let me see---1955 gives an interesting variety."
He opened the book, turned the pages, then stopped at a chart of the Western Atlantic. "Here's 1955. Flora and Edith are textbook examples---they come in from the southeast then curve to the northeast in a parabola. This path is dictated by several things. In the early stages the hurricane is really trying to go due north but is forced west because of the Earth's rotation. In the latter stages it is forced back east again because it comes under the influence of the North Atlantic wind system."
Fletcher looked closely at the chart. "What about----this one?"
Riley grinned. "I thought you'd spot Alice. She went south and ended up in North Brazil---we still don't know why. Then there's Janet and Hilda---they didn't curve back according to theory and went clear across the Yucatan and into North Mexico and Texas. They killed a lot of people....."
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