The Year When Stardust Fell by Raymond F. Jones (book club suggestions .txt) 📕

"Are you all Johnson could spare?" Ken asked the group.

The nearest man shook his head. "They were assigned. No one else would come. They think you are wasting your time; they think you can't do anything about the comet. A lot of them are like Meggs and Granny Wicks: they think you shouldn't try to do anything about it."

Ken felt a blaze of anger. "Sometimes, I think they're right!" he said bitterly. "Maybe it would be better if we just let the whole thing go!"

"Now don't get me wrong," the man said. "We're on your side. We're here, aren't we? I'm just telling you what they say and think in town."

"I know and I'm sorry. These other fellows will tell you what we need done. I'm going to ride in to see Johnson."

The Sheriff was not in his office. Ken was told he had gone over to the food warehouse where rations were being distributed. There was some rumor of a disturbance.

Ken remounted his horse and rode to the warehouse. As he approached, he saw the lineup before the distribution counter was motionless. In front of the counter, Sheriff Johnson stood with a pair of revolvers in his hands, holding back the crowd.

He glanced at Ken and said, "Don't tell me! I know you haven't any workers out there today. They're here in line, trying to collect groceries without working!"

"We're not going to work so those scientists on the hill can have the fat of everything!" a man near the head of the line shouted. Others echoed him with cries of hysteria.

Ken felt his disgust and disappointment vanish before a wave of genuine fear. These people had ceased to be anything but frightened, hungry animals. Their capacity for rational action had all but disappeared under the strains they had suffered. They were ready to lash out at anything that appeared a suitable target for their own hysterical anger and panic.

It was useless to expect them to help with the projector. The crew of scientists and students would have to do it alone, no matter how many weeks it took.

Sheriff Johnson, however, had no such thought. He fired a bullet over the heads of the crowd and brought them to silence. "Listen to me," he said. "I know you're sick and hungry and scared. There's not a man or woman in this valley who isn't, and that includes me and the members of the Council, and those you tried to burn off College Hill.

"You don't know how good you've got it! You don't deserve it as good as you've got. You people should have been with those in Chicago or in San Francisco. You should have known what it was really like to be suddenly cut off from every ounce of food beyond that which was in your own cupboards. You should have known what it was like to fight day after day in the streets of a burning city without knowing why you were fighting, or having any hope of victory.

"You've gone through your battle, and you've won, and you're still here, and there's food left. A lot of us are still going to die before the epidemic is over. We haven't the medical means to save us all. But some of us will come out of it, and every one has just as good a chance as his neighbor.

"That's not important. It doesn't make much difference whether any one of us stays alive now, or dies in 50 years. What is important is trying to keep the world alive, and that's what these scientists are doing.

"While you accuse them of every crime in the book, they are the only chance the world has got for survival!"

"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 assignments 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 assignment 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 assignment 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 assigned, 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 Larsen'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 pass 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."

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 gassy 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. Larsen 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