By the time Ken was through with the ordeal in court, Art Matthews had
succeeded in building an engine from entirely new parts. He had it
installed in an airtight room into which only filtered air could pass.
This room, and another air filter, had been major projects in
themselves. The science club members had done most of the work after
their daily stint at the laboratory, while Art had scoured the town for
parts that would fit together.
At the end of the hearing Ken went to the garage. The engine had been
running for 5 hours then. Art was grinning like a schoolboy who had just
won a spelling bee. "She sure sounds sweet," he said. "I'll bet we can
keep her going as long as we have gasoline."
"I hope so," Ken said. "It's just a waste of power to let it run that
way, though."
Art scratched his head. "Yeah. It's funny, power is what we've been
wanting, and now we've got a little we don't know what to do with it."
"Let's see if we can find a generator," said Ken. "Charge some batteries
with it. Do you think there's one in town?"
"The best deal I can think of would be to scrounge a big motor, say an
elevator motor, and convert it. The one belonging to the 5-story
elevator in the Norton Building is our best bet. I don't imagine it
froze up before the power went out."
"Let's get it then," said Ken. "Shut this off until we're ready to use
it. To be on the safe side, could you cast some new bearings for the
generator?"
"I don't see why not."
When he returned home Ken told his father for the first time about the
project Art was working on.
"It sounds interesting," Professor Maddox said. "I'm not sure exactly
what it will prove."
Ken slumped in the large chair in the living room, weak after his
exertions of the day. "It would mean that if we could find enough
unfrozen engines, or could assemble them from spare parts, we could get
some power equipment in operation again.
"However, as Art said about this one engine, what good is it? Dad--even
if we lick this problem, how are things ever going to get started up
again?"
"What do you mean?"
"We've got one automobile engine going. Pretty soon we'll run out of gas
here in Mayfield. Where do we get more? We can't until the railroad can
haul it, or the pipelines can pump it. What happens when the stock at
the refineries is all used up? How can they get into operation again?
They need power for their own plant, electricity for their pumps and
engines. All of their frozen equipment has to be replaced. Maybe some of
it will have to be manufactured. How do the factories and plants get
started again?"
"I don't know the answers to all that," Ken's father said. "Licking the
comet dust _is_ only half the problem--and perhaps the smallest half, at
that. Our economy and industry will have to start almost from scratch in
getting underway. How that will come about, if it ever does, I do not
know."
To conserve their ration of firewood, only a small blaze burned in the
fireplace. The kitchen and living room were being heated by it alone.
The rest of the house was closed off.
"We ought to rig up something else," Ken said tiredly. "That wastes too
much heat. What's Mom cooking on?"
"Mayor Hilliard found a little wood burner and gave it to me. I haven't
had time to try converting our oil furnace."
Ken felt unable to stay awake longer. He went upstairs to bed for a few
hours. Later, his mother brought a dinner tray. "Do you want it here, or
would you rather come down where it's warm?" she asked.
"I'll come down. I want to get up for a while."
"Maria is out in the shack. She has a scheduled contact with Berkeley,
but she says the transmitter won't function. It looks like a burned-out
tube to her. She wanted to call Joe."
Ken scrambled out of bed and grabbed for his clothes. "I'll take care of
it. Save dinner for me. We've got to keep the station on the air, no
matter what happens!"
He found Maria seated by the desk, listening to the Berkeley operator's
repeated call, to which she could not reply. The girl wore a heavy
cardigan sweater, which was scarcely sufficient for the cold in the
room. The small, tin-can heater was hardly noticeable.
Maria looked up as Ken burst through the doorway. "I didn't want you to
come," she said. "They could have called Joe."
"We can't risk disturbing our schedule. They might think we've gone
under and we'd lose our contact completely."
Hastily he examined the tube layout and breathed a sigh of relief when
he saw it was merely one of the 801's that had burned a filament. They
had a good stock of spares. He replaced the tube and closed the
transmitter cage. After the tubes had warmed up, and the Berkeley
operator paused to listen for their call, Ken picked up the microphone
and threw in the antenna switch.
"Mayfield calling Berkeley." He repeated this several times. "Our
transmitter's been out with a bum bottle. Let us know if you read us
now." He repeated again and switched back to the receiver.
The Berkeley operator's voice indicated his relief. "I read you,
Mayfield. I hoped you hadn't gone out of commission. The eggheads here
seem to think your Maddox-Larsen combination is coming up with more dope
on comet dust than anybody else in the country."
Ken grinned and patted himself and Maria on the back. "That's us," he
said. She grimaced at him.
"Hush!" she said.
"I've got a big report here from Dr. French. Confirm if you're ready to
tape it, and I'll let it roll."
Maria cut in to confirm that they were receiving and ready to record.
The Berkeley operator chuckled as he came back. "That's the one I like
to hear," he said. "That 'Scandahoovian' accent is real cute. Just as
soon as things get rolling again I'm coming out there to see what else
goes with it."
"He's an idiot," Maria said.
"But probably a pretty nice guy," Ken said.
They listened carefully as the Berkeley operator read a number of pages
of reports by Dr. French and his associates, concerning experiments run
in the university laboratories. These gave Ken a picture of the present
stage of the work on the comet dust. He felt disheartened. Although the
material had been identified as a colloidal compound of a new,
transuranic metal, no one had yet been able to determine its exact
chemical structure nor involve it in any reaction that would break it
down.
It seemed to Ken that one of the biggest drawbacks was lack of
sufficient sample material to work with. Everything they were doing was
by micromethods. He supposed it was his own lack of experience and his
clumsiness in the techniques that made him feel he was always working in
the dark when trying to analyze chemical specimens that were barely
visible.
When the contact was completed and the stations signed off, Maria told
Ken what she had heard over the air during the time he was in the
hospital. Several other amateur operators in various parts of the
country had heard them with their own battery-powered sets. They had
asked to join in an expanded news net.
Joe and Al had agreed to this, and Ken approved as he heard of it. "It's
a good idea. I was hoping to reach some other areas. Maybe we can add
some industrial laboratories to our net if any are still operating."
"We've got three," said Maria. "General Electric in Schenectady, General
Motors in Detroit, and Hughes in California. Amateurs working for these
companies called in. They're all working on the dust."
Through these new amateur contacts Maria had learned that Chicago had
been completely leveled by fire. Thousands had died in the fire and in
the rioting that preceded it.
New York City had suffered almost as much, although no general fire had
broken out. Mob riots over the existing, scanty food supplies had taken
thousands of lives. Other thousands had been lost in a panicky exodus
from the city. The highways leading into the farming areas in upstate
New York and New England areas were clogged with starving refugees.
Thousands of huddled bodies lay under the snow.
Westward into Pennsylvania and south into Delaware it was the same. Here
the refugees were met with other streams of desperate humanity moving
out of the thickly populated cities. Epidemics of disease had broken
out where the starving population was thickest and the sanitary
facilities poorest.
On the west coast the situation was somewhat better. The population of
the Bay Area was streaming north and south toward Red Bluff and
Sacramento, and into the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys. From southern
California they were moving east to the reclaimed desert farming areas.
There were suffering and death among them, but the rioting and mob
violence were less.
From all over the country there were increasing reports of groups of
wanderers moving like nomadic tribesmen, looting, killing, and
destroying. There was no longer any evidence of a central government
capable of sufficient communication to control these elements of the
population on even a local basis.
Maria played the tapes of these reports for Ken. She seemed stolid and
beyond panic as she heard them again. To Ken, hearing them for the first
time, it seemed utterly beyond belief. It was simply some
science-fiction horror story played on the radio or television, and when
it was over he would find the world was completely normal.
He looked up and saw Maria watching him. He saw the little tin-can stove
with a few sticks of green wood burning ineffectively. He saw the large
rack of batteries behind the transmitter. Unexpectedly, for the first
time in many days, he thought of the Italian steamship alone in the
middle of the Atlantic.
"The _White Bird_," he said to Maria. "Did you hear anything more of
her?"
"One of the amateurs told me he'd picked up a report from the ship about
a week ago. The radio operator said he was barricaded in the radio room.
Rioting had broken out all over the ship. Dozens of passengers had been
killed; the ones who were left were turning cannibalistic. That was the
last report anyone has heard from the ship."
Ken shuddered. He glanced through the window and caught a vision of
Science Hall on College Hill. A fortress, he thought. There were maybe a
dozen other such fortresses scattered throughout the world; in them lay
the only hope against the enemy that rampaged across the Earth.
In the sky, he could see the comet's light faintly, even through the
lead-gray clouds from which snow was falling.
"You should get back to bed," said Maria. "You look as if you had been
hit two hours ago instead of two weeks."
"Yeah, I guess I'd better." Ken arose, feeling weak and dizzy. "Can you
get that report typed for Dad tonight? It would be good for him to be
able to take it to the lab with him in the morning."
"I'll get it done," said Maria. "You get off to bed."
As much as he rebelled against it, Ken was forced to spend the next two
days in bed. Dr. Adams allowed him to be up no more than a few hours on
the third day. "I'm afraid you took a worse beating than any of us
thought," the doctor said. "You'll just have to coast for a while."
It was as he was finally getting out of bed again that he heard Art
Matthews, when the mechanic came to the door and spoke with Ken's
mother.
"This is awfully important," Art said. "I wish you'd ask him if he
doesn't feel like seeing me for just a minute."
"He's had a bad relapse, and the doctor says he has to be kept very
quiet for a day or two longer."
Dressed, except for his shoes, Ken went to the hall and leaned over the
stair railing. "I'll be down in just a minute, Art. It's okay, Mom. I'm
feeling good today."
"Ken! You shouldn't!" his mother protested.
In a moment he had his shoes on and was racing down the stairs. "What's
happened, Art? Anything gone wrong?"
The mechanic looked downcast. "Everything! We got the Norton elevator
motor and hooked it up with the gas engine. It ran fine for a couple of
days, and we got a lot of batteries charged up."
"Then it quit," said Ken.
"Yeah--how did you know?"
"I've been afraid we had missed one bet. It just isn't enough to supply
filtered air to the engines built of new parts. The parts themselves are
already contaminated with the dust. As soon as they go into operation,
we have the same old business, all over again.
"Unless some means of decontamination can be found these new parts are
no better than the old ones."
"Some of these parts were wrapped in tissue paper and sealed in
cardboard boxes!" Art protested. "How could enough dust get to them to
ruin them?"
"The dust has a way of getting into almost any corner it wants to," said
Ken. "Dad and the others have found it has a tremendous affinity for
metals, so it seeps through cracks and sticks. It never moves off once
it hits a piece of metal. What parts of the engine froze?"
"Pistons, bearings--just like all the rest."
"The generator shaft, too?"
Art nodded. "It might have gone a few more revolutions. It seemed loose
when we started work, but as soon as we broke the bearings apart they
seemed to fasten onto the shaft like they were alive. How do you account
for that? The bearings were new; I just cast them yesterday."
"They were contaminated by dust between casting and installation in the
protected room. We've got to dig a lot deeper before we've got the right
answer. It might be worthwhile setting up another rig just like the one
we have in order to get some more juice in our batteries. Do you think
you could do it again, or even several times? That engine lasted about
90 hours, didn't it?"
"Eighty-eight, altogether. I suppose I could do it again if you think
it's worth it. The trouble is getting generators. Maybe we could machine
the shaft of this one and cast a new set of bearings to fit. I'll try if
you think it's worth it."
"Get it ready to run," said Ken. "The battery power for our radio isn't
going to last forever. We'll be in a real jam if we lose touch with the
outside."