The teletype machines were clicking in wild confusion; Whitey was entering data. The Chief, sitting in his chair, was looking at the map upside down. Reading a notation here and there he already sensed the continued power of the storm.

As usual, it gave him a feeling of his own futility and insignificance. Even his forecast made little difference today; anybody could see the rain was going to keep up for a while. Usually he had a keen sense of interest in the men with whom he worked; he felt the importance of whether the J. M. was just a whippersnapper with a lot of crazy ideas out of books, or whether he had the makings of a good weather-man. But today the Chief did not even inquire about Whitey’s sick wife. Personalities were important in fair weather; when a storm stretched from Sitka to San Diego, what happened to individuals seemed of little moment. The storm was so great that it monopolized his mind.

After he had drawn the map, he saw that the situation had changed remarkably little as far as the Pacific Coast was involved. The storm still centered off Cape Blanco. There was room for argument, the Chief knew, about how a storm could stay in one place, and even about whether it actually did. Some maintained that what looked like the same storm was in some way really a succession of storms, continually dying and being born. Others talked of waves along a stationary front. But as the Chief liked to say, if you’re crossing a tropical river and something grabs your leg, you’re not much concerned whether it’s an alligator or a crocodile. From the practical point of view the storm was all one, although quite possibly it had as many parts as a centipede.

But what really interested the Chief that morning was a bulge eastward of the 1011 isobar, looping around Salt Lake City. It was not a prominent feature of the map, but to the Chief it was the indication that things were getting back to normal, that the ordinary movement of air from west to east was being re-established. It meant that some of the air from the Pacific storm had got across the mountains, and was about to form a secondary storm-center over Nevada or Utah. From there it would go east. Already air was moving up from the Gulf and warming Texas and Oklahoma.