They gawked and gawked. One of them pointed at the window. The others tried to, but their hands were trembling.
The one who was pointing squawked: "Look!"
The second one said, "Out the window!"
The third one said, "Will you!"
Outside the window on the twenty-fifth of July it was snowing.
It was an hour later. Telephones were ringing. Long-distance calls from all over the country now that the ticker had gone out with the incredible fact that it was snowing in the Northeast in July. Most of the calls, though, were from Washington. Chief Botts disconnected the PBX and walked in a dazed, staggering fashion to Johnny, smiling weakly and saying:
"Sloman, I misjudged you. Genius, right here, right now, in this office, and we never knew it. Sloman, I have to admit I was wrong about you. But how did you know? How did you ever know?"
"Hell's bells," Harry Bettis said before Johnny could say it was all a mistake. "That's easy, Chief. Anyone knows that all rain starts out as snow. It's got to. You see, the droplets of moisture in the cold upper regions of a cloud condense around dust particles because the air up there is too cold to hold them as vapor. Since it's below freezing, snow is formed—snow which warms up as it passes through hotter air en route to the ground, and—"
"That will be quite enough, Bettis," Chief Botts said. "I am a weatherman too, you know. You don't have to tell me the most elementary of—"