Chapter 6: The Scientist

Ken spent an almost sleepless night. He tossed for long hours and dozed finally, but he awoke again before there was even a trace of dawn in the sky. Although the night was cool he was sweating as if it were mid-summer.

There was a queasiness in his stomach, too, a slow undefinable pressure on some hidden nerve he had never known he possessed. The feeling pulsed and throbbed slowly and painfully. He sat up and looked out at the dark landscape, and he knew what was the matter.

Scared, he thought, I’m scared sick.

He’d never known anything like it before in his life, except maybe the time when he was 6 years old and he had climbed to the top of a very high tree when the wind was blowing, and he had been afraid to come down.

It was hitting him, he thought. He was just beginning to understand what this stoppage of machinery really meant, and he wondered if there was something wrong with him that he had not felt it earlier. Was he alone? Had everyone else understood it before he had? Or would it hit them, one by one, just as it was hitting him now, bringing him face to face with what lay ahead.

He knew what had done it. It was his father’s expression and his words in the laboratory the night before.

Ken recognized that he had never doubted for an instant that scientists and their tools were wholly adequate to solve this problem in a reasonable time. He had been aware there would be great hardships, but he had never doubted there would be an end to that time. He had believed his father, as a scientist, had the same faith.

It was a staggering shock to learn that his father had no faith in science; a shock to be told that science was not a thing that warranted a man’s faith. Ken had planned his whole life around an avid faith in science.

He tried to imagine what the world would be like if no engine should ever run again. The standards of civilized existence would be shattered. Only those areas of the world, where people had never learned to depend on motor transportation or electric power, would be unaffected; those areas of China, India and Africa, where men still scratched the ground with a forked stick and asked only for a cup of rice or grain each day.

This would become the level of the whole world. Until last night, Ken had never believed it remotely possible. Now, his father’s words had shaken him out of the certainty that science would avert such consequences. It could happen.

He thought of his own plans and ambitions. There would be no need for scientists, nor the opportunity to become one, in a world of men who grubbed the land with forked sticks. He felt a sudden blind and bitter anger. Even if the disaster were overcome in a matter of years, his opportunity would be gone.

He knew at once that such anger was selfish and futile. His own personal calamities would be the least of the troubles ahead, but, for the moment, he could not help it. In a way, it felt good because it overshadowed the dark fear that still throbbed in his body.

But something else was gone, too. The opportunity for him and his science club friends to investigate the properties of the altered metal was over. His father and the other scientists had taken over those studies, and there would be no place for high-school boys who did not know even enough to prepare a slide for an electron microscope.

It had always been that way, as long as he could remember. He had always been too young and too ignorant to be intrusted with work that mattered.

He supposed they would turn the operation of the air filter over to one of the teaching fellows, even though that was something the club could handle.

The bitterness and the fear seemed more than he could endure. He dressed quietly and went downstairs. Without lighting a lamp, he found something to eat. The first light of dawn was showing when he left the house.

For an hour he walked the silent streets without meeting anyone. Normally, there would have been the sound of milk trucks, and the cars of early-rising workers. Now there was nothing. The comet had risen just above the eastern hills, and in its light the city was like some fabulous, golden ruin that belonged in an ancient fairytale.

Ken didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to do. There ought to be something useful he could do, he thought fiercely.

As he looked down the street, he saw a half-dozen wagons with two teams each, stopped in front of Sims Hardware and Lumber. In the wagons were several dozen men. Ken recognized Andrew Norton, of the Mayor’s Council, and Henry Atkins, the Sheriff’s chief deputy.

Several of the men were emerging from the hardware store with new axes and saws. Then Ken understood. This was the first wood detail headed for the mountains to begin gathering and stockpiling fuel for the winter. He broke into a run.

Deputy Atkins appeared to be in charge of the group. Ken hailed him. “I want to go along, Mr. Atkins. May I go?”

The deputy glanced down at him and frowned. He consulted a sheet of paper he drew from his pocket. “Your name isn’t on the list for this morning, Ken. Were you assigned?”

“I guess not, but I haven’t got anything else to do today. Is there any objection to my going?”

“I don’t suppose so,” said Atkins dubiously. “It’s just that your name may be on some other list. We don’t want to get these things fouled up right off the bat. There’s enough trouble as it is.”

“I’m sure my name’s not on any other list. I’d have been told about it.”

“All right. Climb on.”

As Ken climbed into the nearest wagon he was startled to find himself staring into the face of Frank Meggs. The storekeeper grinned unpleasantly as he nodded his head in Ken’s direction and spoke to his neighbor. “Now what do you know about that? Old Man Maddox, letting his own little boy out alone this early in the morning. I’ll bet he didn’t let you, did he? I’ll bet you had to run away to try to prove you’re a big boy now.”

“Cut it out, Meggs,” said Atkins sharply. “We heard all about what went on in your store yesterday.”

The man next to Meggs drew away, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He continued to grin crookedly at Ken. “Aren’t you afraid you might get hurt trying to do a man’s work?”

Ken ignored the jibes and faced away from the storekeeper. The slow, rhythmic jogging of the wagon, and the frosty air as they came into the mountains took some of the bitterness out of Ken. It made him feel freshly alive. He had come often to hunt here and felt a familiarity with every tree and rock around him.

The wagon train came to a halt in a grove of 10-year-old saplings that needed thinning.

“No use taking our best timber until we have to,” said Atkins. “We’ll start here. I’ll take a crew and go on ahead and mark the ones to be cut. You drivers unhitch your teams and drag the logs out to the wagons after they’re cut.”

There was none of the kidding and horseplay that would have been normal in such a group. Each man seemed intent on the purpose for which he had come, and was absorbed with his own thoughts. Ken took a double-bitted ax and followed Atkins along the trail. He moved away from the others and began cutting one of the young trees Atkins had marked.

By noon he was bathed in sweat, and his arms and back ached. He had thought he was in good condition from his football and track work, but he seemed to have found new muscles that had never come into play before.

Atkins noticed the amount he had cut and complimented him. “Better take it easy. You’re way ahead of everybody else, and we don’t have to get it all out today.”

Ken grinned, enjoying the aches of his muscles. “If it has to be done we might as well do it.”

He was not surprised to find that Frank Meggs had cut almost nothing but had spent his time complaining to his companions about the unnecessary work they were doing.

After lunch, which Ken had reluctantly accepted from the others, there was a stir at the arrival of a newcomer on horseback. Ken recognized him as Mike Travis, one of the carpenters and caretakers at the college.

Mike tied his horse to the tailboard of a wagon and approached the woodcutters. “There you are, Ken Maddox,” he said accusingly. “Why didn’t you let somebody know where you were going? Your father’s been chewing up everyone in sight, trying to find out where you’d gone. He finally decided you might be up here, and sent me after you. Take the horse on back. I’ll finish up the day on the wood detail.”