"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.