"They can"t do anything about it!" a woman shouted. "They"re just making it up to get more than the rest of us!"
The crowd started to take up its cry again.
"Shut up!" the Sheriff thundered at them. "I repeat: you don"t deserve to be as lucky as you are! But you aren"t going to get out of taking your part in pulling things back together again. Help is needed out there north of town, and you"re going to help.
"You help or you don"t eat!"
A roar of rage thundered from the group. One man stepped forward. "You can"t pull a thing like this, Johnson. We"ve got guns, too. We"ve used them before, and we can use them again!"
"Then you had better go home and get them right now," said Johnson. "My men and I will be waiting for you. I suppose there could be a lot more of you than there are of us, so you can probably shoot us down. Then you can eat all you want for a month, and die. Go get your gun, Hank, and come after your rations!"
The man turned to the crowd. "Okay, you heard what he said! Let"s go and get "em!"
He strode away, then turned back to beckon his followers. In the empty street before the converted theater, he stood alone. "Come on!" he cried. "Who"s coming with me?"
The crowd avoided his eyes. They shifted uneasily and looked at Johnson again. "What do you mean?" another man asked. "About, we work or we don"t eat--"
"Come on, you guys!" Hank shouted.
"The a.s.signments on the projector will be rotated," said Johnson. "We"ll spare as many men as we can from everything else. Those of you who have been given a.s.signment slips will get 3 days" rations. When you bring back the slips with a verification that you did your job on the projector you"ll get an a.s.signment somewhere else until it"s your turn again. The ones without verification on the slips don"t get the next 3 days" rations. That"s the way it"s going to be. If there"s no more argument, we"ll get on with the distribution.
"Hank, get down at the end of the line!"
By mid-afternoon, the scientists had their full crew of sullen and unwilling helpers. The Sheriff had sent along a half-dozen of his own men, fully armed, to see there was no disturbance, but the objectors seemed to have had their say.
With a gradual increase of co-operativeness, they did the tasks they were a.s.signed, bringing up materials, laying out the first members of the great, skeletal structure that would rise in the pasture. Johnson came at the end of the day to see how it was going. He breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of disturbance. "It looks like we"ve got it made,"
he said.
"I think so," Ken agreed. "All we have to do now is see how many more of these we can get built in other parts of the world."
They spoke that night to all the stations on the radio net, describing in detail what they had begun, what they were confident it would do.
Professor La.r.s.en"s words were relayed to his colleagues in Stockholm.
They estimated they could begin work almost immediately on six projectors. Others, elsewhere in the country, were quite probable.
In his conversation with Pasadena, Professor Maddox warned, "We have not yet been able to make tests with the big projector. Our only work so far has been with the laboratory models, but they were highly successful."
"That"s good enough for us," said Dr. Whitehead, director of the Pasadena work. "Everything we"ve done here has failed so far. A direct chemical approach seems out of the question. We"ll start with one, but I think a dozen projectors, at least, are possible for this area."
Pasadena also reported a new radio contact with Calcutta, and promised to pa.s.s the word on to them and to Tokyo. When they closed down the transmitter after midnight, Ken totaled the number of projectors promised with reasonable certainty of having the promises fulfilled.
There were eighty.
"It may take a year," his father said, "or it may take 10 years, but now we know, without a doubt, that we can someday get our atmosphere back as it was before the comet."
Chapter 20. _Reconstruction_
On the twentieth of January the comet reached its closest approach to Earth. It was then less than three million miles away. In the realm of the stars, this was virtually a collision, and if the head of the comet had been composed of anything more than highly rarefied gases it would have caused tremendous upheavals and tidal waves.
There were none of these. Only the dust.
Ken arose at dawn that day and went into the yard to watch the rising of the golden enemy a little before the sun came over the eastern hills. He doubted whether anyone else was aware it was closer today than it had been before, or ever would be again. He doubted there would be much scientific interest in the event, anywhere in the world.
In the observatory, he opened the dome and adjusted the telescope to take a few pictures and spectrograms. He remembered when he had done this, a long time ago, with high excitement and curiosity, and he remembered later times when he had looked up with a bitter hate in his heart for the impersonal object in the sky.
Now, he felt nothing. He was aware only of a kind of deadness in his emotions with respect to the comet.
There was no excitement he could find in today"s event of close approach, which was probably the only one of its kind that would be recorded in the history of mankind. He wondered if he had lost all his scientific spirit that so momentous an occurrence could inspire him so little now.
Yet, he no longer hated the comet, either. It was not a thing that could be hated, any more than the wind when it leveled a city, or the waters when they drowned the land and the people on it.
These things were beyond hate. You could fight them, but you never had the privilege of hating them. That was reserved only for other human beings. It was because of the great, impersonal nature of their common enemy, he thought, that people had finally turned to fighting each other. It was for this reason that the people of Mayfield had turned their hate upon the scientists. The questions of food and privileges were only superficial excuses.
After an hour"s work, Ken left the observatory. The ga.s.sy tail of the comet was a full halo of lighter yellow hue, as seen directly along its central axis. The darker yellow of the core seemed to Ken like a living heart.
The light spread to the dust motes in the air and curtained the whole sky with shimmering haze. It bathed the snow cover of the Earth, and reflected its golden image against the trees and the walls of the buildings, and penetrated the windows. It gilded the stark, charcoal skeletons of the ruins it had created. It spread over the whole Earth and penetrated every pore. Ken had a momentary illusion that there was not a particle of substance in the world not permeated and illumined by the comet"s light. He felt as if it were inside his own being, through his vitals, and shining in the corridors of his brain.
For a moment the old hate returned. He wanted to shut his eyes against that omnipresent light and to run with all his strength to some secret place where it could never penetrate.
He recalled the words of Dr. La.r.s.en that seemed to have been uttered so long ago that they were scarcely within memory: "The universe is a terrible place that barely tolerates living organisms. It is a great miracle that here in this corner of the universe living things have found a foothold. It does not pay ever to forget the fierceness of the home in which we live."
There was no closing the eyes against this. He looked again at the comet, the representative to Earthmen of all the fierceness and terror that lay in outer s.p.a.ce, beyond the thin tissue of atmosphere that protected man and his fragile life. He would remember all the days of his life that the universe might be beautiful and exciting and terrible, but whatever it was, it held no friendliness toward man. It could destroy him with a mere whim of chance occurrence. Man had gained a foothold, but there was a long way to go to an enduring security.
On the day of the official beginning of operation of the giant projector in Jenkin"s pasture, there was a little ceremony. Sheriff Johnson stood on an improvised platform and with an impressive gesture threw the switch that officially turned the power into the great instrument. It had been successfully tested previously, but now it was launched in an operation that would not cease until the last trace of comet dust had fallen from the sky and was mingled with the dust of the Earth.
Most of the townspeople who were well enough to do so turned out for the ceremony. During the construction, a guard had been kept to prevent sabotage of the projector, but there had been no attempts made on it.
Now the people stood in the trampled snow and ice of the pasture, staring up at the giant structure, with a quality of near-friendliness in their eyes and in the expressions of their faces.
The Sheriff made a little speech after throwing the switch. He thanked them for their co-operation and thousands of man-hours of labor, not mentioning that it had been obtained, initially, at the point of his guns. He praised the scientists and noted that conquest of the comet might never have been achieved without the genius of their men of College Hill. He did not mention the attempts to destroy that genius.
"I think we should all like to hear," he said, "from the man who has led this vast and n.o.ble effort from its inception. He will speak for all those who have worked so steadfastly to bring this effort to a successful conclusion. Professor Maddox!"
There was a flurry of applause. Then it grew, and a shout went up. They called his name and cheered as he stood, a figure dwarfed against the background of the great projector bowl.
Ken knew what he must be thinking as he waited for the cheers to subside. He must be thinking: they have forgotten already, forgotten the angers and the jealousies and the fears, their attempts to destroy the small kernel of scientific hope in their midst. They had forgotten everything but the warming belief that perhaps the worst of the terror was over and they had lived through it.
"I"m grateful," Professor Maddox was saying, "for the a.s.sistance you have given this project, although you had no personal knowledge of what it was meant to do. We asked for your faith and we asked for your confidence that we knew what we were about, at a time when we did not know it even for ourselves. We were nourished and cared for at your expense in order that our work might go on. It would not have succeeded without you."
Ken realized his father was not speaking ironically but meant just what he said. And it was true.
The vengeful Meggs and the psychotic Granny Wicks had fought them and incited others who were frightened beyond reason. Yet there had been Hilliard and Johnson, the Council, and many others who had supported them. There were those who had built the projector, even though at the point of a gun, and at the threat of starvation. All of them together had made the project possible.
It was a miniature of the rise of the whole human race, Ken supposed.
More like a single individual with a mult.i.tude of psychoses, hopes, and geniuses, than a group of separate ent.i.ties, they had come to this point. In the same way, they would go on, trying to destroy the weaknesses and multiply their strength.