(_a_) No direct harm whatever had come from the Words
(_b_) Thus the disaster was of psychological occasion, up to the
present time
(_c_) Wherefore Los Alamos should immure itself as a fort against all
threat from the ravening masses, until
(1) they calmed down (unlikely for years)
(2) they all perished (not probable)
(3) a manageable remnant remained (most likely)
(_d_) In which last case Los Alamos could be the nucleus of a new and
spreading social culture, factual and scientific in nature, which would
gradually recapture and restrain humanity with a view
(_z_) to establish a true freedom
(_y_) to abolish racialism
(_x_) to end wars
(_w_) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain
indefinitely
(_v_) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all
levels of health and intelligence
(_u_) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within
the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed
themselves.
So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its
inauguration was called for that night. The entire community, dressed
in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle
tables in an airplane hangar.
It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being
served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin,
poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly
exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like
himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped
into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as
a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations.
His stocky body grew stiff. There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed
a hitherto unknown star--a nova of approximately the third magnitude.
At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead!
Schilch! Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too--a nova."
People--including those summoned--began to join the great man and
murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet
another new star--reaching the planet earth after years of journeying
at its absolute speed--burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled
in the heavens--and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti--the
Italian-Czech--whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I
say, Xerx, it couldn't be--?"
Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there
could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of
this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an
unimaginably vast initial of their own, an
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13
The phone split my sleep. I was unready for the sound, or any sound,
ripping open my peaceful bivouac--bayoneting dreams and my poor respite.