"Of Jo-Anne?" Maxine asked suspiciously.
"Of everything Johnny makes as the world's first _real_ Weather Man. Not
a forecaster--a commander. Because when my client forecasts the weather,
it happens. Brothers and sisters, it happens." He turned abruptly to
Johnny, said, "You have any money saved up?"
"A few hundred dollars, but--"
"An ad in the papers. Alongside the article telling how it snowed on
July twenty-fifth. Saying that your services are for hire. We're a
shoo-in, kid!"
"Well, if you say so," Johnny said doubtfully.
"So don't call D.C.," Bettis told Chief Botts.
"But Sloman's an employee of this Bureau."
"Was, you mean."
"What did you say?"
"Was an employee. He ain't an employee now. He's quitting--with his
manager," said Harry Bettis, and walked out of the office, steering a
dazed Johnny Sloman with him.
"Wait until I call Jo-Anne," Maxine said.
During the next six months, Johnny Sloman--known to the world as The
Weather Man--made fifty million dollars. Since it had taken a whole
lifetime for him to develop his remarkable talent, his lawyers were
trying to have capital gains declared on the earnings rather than
straight income tax. The odds seemed to be in their favor.
How had Johnny made his fifty million dollars? By predicting the
weather. He predicted:
A flood in the Texas panhandle--in time to save the dry lands from going
entirely arid.
An end of the snowstorms in northern Canada--which had trapped the five
hundred residents of a small uranium-mining town without food or
adequate drinking water.
The break-up of Hurricane Anita--which had threatened to be the most
destructive ever to strike the Carolina Coast.
No frost for Florida that winter--a prediction still to be ascertained,
but a foregone conclusion.
Every prediction had come true. In time, the world began to realize that
his predictions were not predictions at all: they were sure things. That
is, they predicted nothing--they _made_ things happen. Johnny was in
demand everywhere and naturally could not fill all engagements. Harry
Bettis hired a whole squad of corresponding secretaries, whose job it
was to turn down, with regret, some ninety percent of the jobs
requested. Johnny, in fact, was in such demand, that his engagement to
Jo-Anne--which, of course, had been reinstated at her insistence--remained
only an engagement. The nuptials were put off, and put off again.
This suited Harry Bettis, who saw to it that Johnny kept putting off the
marriage. Because, ultimately, Jo-Anne would reach the end of her
proverbial tether and decide that Harry's twenty-five percent, if it
could be shared as a wife, was better than Johnny's seventy-five
percent, if it could not.
Jo-Anne, though, was not that kind of girl. Harry Bettis, knowing no
other kind of girl, never understood that.
The scientists, meanwhile, had a field day with Johnny. His strange
talent obeyed no natural law, they said, and at first attributed it to
random chance. Soon, though, this became patently impossible. And so a
new natural law was sought. All types of hair-brained theories were
proposed, none of them accepted, until an osteopathic physician in
Duluth, Minn., hit upon the theory that staggered the world with its
simplicity and, eventually, was accepted as that which explained the
strange phenomenon of Johnny Sloman.
The osteopath, many of whose patients suffered from rheumatism which was
aggravated by the bitter Minnesota winters, suggested that Johnny Sloman
was a case of rheumatism in reverse. The weather, he pointed out, had an
adverse effect upon the symptoms of his patients. Conversely, why
couldn't some human being--a Johnny Sloman, for example--affect the
weather in precisely the same way that the weather invariably affected
his rheumatic patients?
It was clear, simple, lucid. It was the only theory which could not be
disproven by the weight of scientific knowledge. It thus became the
accepted theory.
* * * * *
"The Under-Secretary of Defense to see you," Maxine said one day during
the winter following Johnny's July snowfall.
"Don't see him," Harry Bettis said. "You don't want to see him."
"But why not?" Johnny asked.
"Because they'll make you a dollar-a-year man and we're not in this to
make any stinking dollar a year," Harry Bettis said.
"Well, I think I ought to see him, anyway. At least see him." He turned
to Jo-Anne, who was sitting at the next desk, writing up some reports.
"What do you think, Jo?"
"If the country needs you, Johnny," she said, "it's your duty to help."