The Year When Stardust Fell Part 13

Professor Douglas grunted disdainfully. "Impossible!" With that dismissal, he moved away.

Professor La.r.s.en looked more carefully. "You could sc.r.a.pe dust from a thousand different sources and get pictures like this from half of them perhaps. Only the chemical tests will show us the nature of this material. I am certain it is very worthwhile following up."

"I feel certain that whatever contaminating agent we are dealing with is airborne," said Professor Maddox. "If this is the same substance it will not tell us its origin, of course, nor will it even prove it is responsible for these effects. However it is a step in the right direction. We can certainly stand that!"

"Couldn't we tell by spectroscopic a.n.a.lysis?" said Ken.

"That would be difficult to say. The commonness of the elements involved might mask what you are looking for. Get John Vickers to help you set up equipment for making some comparisons."

Vickers was the teaching fellow in the chemistry department whom Professor Maddox had planned to a.s.sign to help the boys when they first suggested atmospheric a.n.a.lysis. He had become indispensable in the research since then. But he liked helping the boys; it was not too long since he had been at the same stage in his own career. He understood their longing to do something worthwhile, and their embarra.s.sment at their ineptness.

"Sure, Guys," he said, when Professor Maddox called him in. "Let's see if we can find out what this stuff is. Who knows? Maybe we've got a bear by the tail."

It was delicate precision work, preparing specimens and obtaining spectrographs of the lines that represented the elements contained in them. Time after time, their efforts failed. Something went wrong either with their sample preparation, or with their manipulation of the instruments. Ken began to feel as if their hands possessed nothing but thumbs.

"That's the way it goes," John Vickers consoled them. "Half of this business of being a scientist is knowing how to screw a nut on a left-handed bolt in the dark. Unless you're one of these guys who do it all in their heads, like Einstein."

"We're wasting our samples," Ken said. "It's taken two weeks to collect this much."

"Then this is the one that does it," said Vickers. "Try it now."

Ken turned the switch that illuminated the spectrum and exposed the photographic plate. After a moment, he cut it off. "That had better do it!" he said.

After the plates were developed, they had two successful spectrographs for comparison. One was taken from the metal of a failed-engine part.

The other was from the atmospheric dust. In the comparator Vickers brought the corresponding standard comparison lines together. For a long time he peered through the eyepiece.

"A lot of lines match up," he said. "I can throw out most of them, though--carbon, oxygen, a faint sodium."

"The stuff that's giving us trouble might be a compound of one of these," said Ken.

"That's right. If so, we ought to find matching lines of other possible elements in the compounds concerned. I don't see any reasonable combination at all." He paused. "Hey, here's something I hadn't noticed."

He shifted the picture to the heavy end of the spectrum. There, a very sharp line matched on both pictures. The boys took a look at it through the viewer. "What is that one?" Ken asked.

"I don't know. I used a carbon standard. I should have used one farther toward the heavy end. This one looks like it would have to be a transuranic element, something entirely new, like plutonium."

"Then it could be from the hydrogen bomb tests," said Joe.

"It could be," said Vickers, "but somehow I've got a feeling it isn't."

"Isn't there a quick way to find out?" said Ken.

"How?"

"If we took a spectrograph of the comet and found this same line strongly present, we would have a good case for proving the comet was the source of this substance."

"Let's have a try," said Vickers. "I don't know how successfully we can get a spectrograph of the comet, but it's worth an attempt."

Their time was short, before the comet vanished below the horizon for the night. They called for help from the other boys and moved the equipment to the roof, using the small, portable 6-inch telescope belonging to the physics department.

There was time for only one exposure. After the sun had set, and the comet had dropped below the horizon, they came out of the darkroom and placed the prints in the viewing instrument.

Vickers moved the adjustments gently. After a time he looked up at the circle of boys. "You were right, Ken," he said. "Your hunch was right.

The comet is responsible. Our engines have been stopped by dust from the stars."

Chapter 8. _Attack_

There are people who feed upon disaster and grow in their own particular direction as they would never have grown without it, as does the queen bee who becomes queen only because of the special food prepared by the workers for her private use.

Such a man was Henry Maddox. He would not have admitted it, nor was he ever able to realize it, for it violated the very principles he had laid down for Ken. But for him, the comet was like a sudden burst of purpose in his life. He had taught well in his career as professor of chemistry at the State Agricultural College at Mayfield, but it had become fairly mechanical. He was vaguely aware of straining at the chains of routine from time to time, but he had always forced himself through sheer exercise of will to attend to his duties. There was never time, however, for any of the research he used to tell himself, in his younger days, he was going to do.

With the sudden thrusting aside of all customary duties, and with the impact of catastrophe demanding a solution to a research problem, he came alive without knowing what was happening. Yet without the imminence of disaster he would not have found the strength to drive himself so.

This was what he could not admit to himself.

Another who was nourished was Granny Wicks. She should have been dead years ago. She had admitted this to herself and to anyone else who would listen, but now she knew why she had been kept alive so long past her time. She had been waiting for the comet.

Its energy seemed to flow from the sky into her withered, bony frame, and she drank of its substance until time seemed to reverse itself in her obsolete body. All her life she had been waiting for this time. She knew it now. She was spared to tell the people why the comet had come.

Although her purpose was diametrically opposed to that of Henry Maddox, she also fed and grew to her full stature after almost a century of existence.

Frank Meggs was surely another. He was born in Mayfield and had lived there all his life and he hated every minute of time and every person and every event that told of his wasted life here. He hated College Hill, for he had never been able to go there. His family had been too poor, and he had been forced to take over his father's store when his father died.

He had once dreamed of becoming a great businessman and owning a chain of stores that would stretch from coast to coast, but circ.u.mstances, for which he blamed the whole of Mayfield, had never permitted him to leave the town. His panic sale had been his final, explosive hope that he might be able to make it. Now, he, too, found himself growing in his own special direction as he fed upon the disaster. He did not know just what that direction was or to where it led, but he felt the growth. He felt the secret pleasure of contemplating the discomfort and the privation that lay ahead for his fellow citizens in the coming months.

While personal fear forced him to the conclusion that the disaster would be of short duration, the pleasure was nevertheless real. It was especially intense when he thought of College Hill and its inhabitants in scenes of dark dismay as they wrestled in vain to understand what had happened to the world.

There were others who fed upon the disaster. For the most part they found it an interruption to be met with courage, with faith, with whatever strength was inherent in them.

It was not a time of growth, however, for Reverend Aylesworth. It was the kind of thing for which he had been preparing all his life. Now he would test and verify the stature he had already gained.

On the night they verified the presence of the comet dust in the disabled engines, Ken was the last to leave the laboratory. It was near midnight when he got away.

His father had left much earlier, urging him to come along, but Ken had been unable to pull himself away from the examination and measurement of the spectrum of lines that bared the comet's secret. He had begun to understand the pleasure his father had spoken of, the pleasure of being consumed utterly by a problem important in its own right.

As he left the campus there was no moon in the sky. The comet was gone, and the stars seemed new in a glory he had not seen for many nights. He felt that he wouldn't be able to sleep even when he got home, and he continued walking for several blocks, in the direction of town.

He came abreast, finally, of the former Rainbow Skating Rink, which had been converted into a food warehouse. In the darkness, he saw a sudden, swift movement against the wall of the building. His night vision was sharp after the long walk; he saw what was going on.

The broad doors of the rink had been broken open. There were three or four men lifting sacks and boxes and barrels stealthily into a wagon.

Even as he started toward them he realized his own foolishness and pulled back. A horse whinnied softly. He turned to run in the direction of Sheriff Johnson's house, and behind him came a sudden, hoa.r.s.e cry of alarm.

Horses' hoofs rattled frighteningly loud on the cement. Ken realized he stood no chance of escaping if he were seen. He dodged for an instant into a narrow s.p.a.ce between two buildings with the thought of reaching an alley at the back. However, it was boarded at the end and he saw that he would have to scale the fence. A desperate horseman would ride him down in the narrow s.p.a.ce.