“Bad judgment at least,” said the Chief. “He was an old man. Probably he was a little gone. I don’t mean to say he’d have done a thing like that when he was at his best. In those days he had a real feeling for weather. Without the instruments and reporting-service we have today, I’ve known him to make some amazing forecasts. I don’t yet know how he did it.”

“Luck, maybe,” said the J. M.; he talked more boldly to the Chief now.

“Well, in this world who doesn’t need luck? Hn-n? And forecasting will be a mighty dull business when it’s no guessing and all slide-rules.”

In the pause the J. M. knew that he should say something; he felt the glancing reference to himself and all the new meteorology; but he did not think of any words, and the Chief went on. Somewhere in the Chief, the J. M. realized now, there was a vein of poetry.

“Storms or men,” he was saying. “Hn-n? They get born, and they grow up, and they get old and die. (Some of them die before they grow up.) Everything is always changing, and always it comes back to what it was before. Storms come and go, but there’s always weather. I’ve seen a lot of them—storms and men. Each one is different. There are the big bluffers, and the sneaks, and the honest dependable ones. Some of them will sulk for days, and some will stab you in the back, and some walk out on you between night and morning, and some do exactly what you expect of them.”

“It’s all a matter of air-mass properties and relationships,” said the J. M. stubbornly, still remembering that remark about the slide-rule. “And in men, doctors say, it’s glands working.”

But the Chief did not seem to notice. “Storms and men—they’re all different, and yet they’re all the same. Each little storm starts out hopefully, but until it’s all over, you can’t say whether it was better than the ones that went before it—or as good.”

The J. M. felt the implication of that remark too, but there was nothing to say.

“And in the end,” the Chief went on, “it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Every storm mixes up the air a bit. Sometimes it raises quite a hullabaloo. Then it’s gone, and there you are in a high-pressure area just where you were before, with maybe another storm showing up on the edge of the map. Month in, month out, a lot of wind blows, but at the end of the year everything is just about where it was before.”

The Chief moved on to other work. The J. M. still looked at the map.