Of course, from the point of view of the abducted humans the question of whether their deaths had been in vain might have had a different answer. No one had troubled to ask them.
At any rate, the watchers now energized the generators which would soften up mankind for its destruction.
While they were waiting for a charge to build up they looked up the coordinates and call signal for the nearest cruising superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones and transmitted a request for it to come in and finish up the job with a core-bomb. They then discussed among themselves the prospects of what their next assignment would be. It was not a fruitful discussion. Core-bombs are messy and there was not much chance that Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis's orbit would get them far enough away to be out of its range when it went off. Even if they survived, none of them had any idea what the Arrogating Ones' future plans for the watchers were. All they were sure of was that they were certain not to enjoy them.
We now turn to Albert Novak. He was in another four-engined jet, climbing to cruising altitude out of Kennedy en route to Los Angeles International. He was a crew-cut young man, with something on his mind. His neighbor was a short, white-haired, dark-tanned Westerner with the face of a snapping turtle, who offered his hand and said aggressively, jerking his head toward the window, "That confounded thing! Do you know the space agency wants to spend thirty million dollars of your tax money just to go sniff around it? Thirty million dollars! Just to sniff some marsh gas! Not as long as I'm on the Aeronautics and Space Committee. Let me introduce myself. I'm Congressman—" But he was talking to gas himself. Albert Novak had not accepted his hand, had not even met his eyes. Although the "Fasten Seat Belts" sign was still lighted in three languages, he unstrapped himself and walked down the aisle. Hostesses hissed at him and tardily began to unsnap themselves to make him return to his seat. He ignored them. He had no intention of ever arriving at L.A. International and when he wanted to talk to a hostess he would do so on his own terms. He carried a cassette recorder into a toilet and locked the door against everyone.
The cassette recorder could no longer be used to record or play. He had removed its insides the day before, replacing them with more batteries and a coil of fine wire, which he now carefully connected to 30 Baggies full of dynamite and firing caps he had sewn into the lining of his trenchcoat while his mother nearsightedly smiled on him from across the room.
Although Novak thought of himself as a hijacker, it was not his intention to cause the jet to head for Cuba, Caracas, or even Algiers. He did not want the airplane. He didn't even want the one hundred million dollars' ransom he planned to ask for.
What Novak wanted, mostly, was to matter to somebody. As far as he had thought out his plan of action, it was to walk up to a stewardess with his hand on the detonating switch, show her the ingenious arrangement he had gotten past the metal detectors, be escorted to the flight deck in the traditional manner and then, after the airline had begun trying to get together the 5,000,000 unmarked twenty-dollar bills he intended to demand and the maximum of annoyance and confusion had been caused, to close the switch and explode the dynamite.
He knew that in destroying the airplane he would die. That was not very important to him. The one important failure that he regretted very much was that he would not be able to see his mother's face when the reporters and TV crew began to swarm around her and she learned he had been pushing around all kinds of people and thirty million dollars' worth of airplane.
The generators at the core of Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis were now up to full charge.
Disgruntledly, the watchers of the Arrogating Ones sighted the beam in on the planet Earth. They were quite careful to get it aligned properly, for they remembered very well what the consequences were for slipshod work. When it was locked in, they released the safety switch that allowed the contact to close that discharged the beam.
More than three million watts of beamed power surged out toward the near hemisphere of the planet. Certain chemical changes at once took place in the atmosphere and were borne by jet stream, trade winds, and the aimless migration of air masses all around the Earth.
The equipment used was highly directional, but the watchers who operated it were very close and large magnitudes of energy were involved. Some of the radiation sprayed them. There was some loss from corona points, some reflection even from the tenuous gases of the comet's halo.
As the radiation had been designed specifically for use against mankind, on the basis of the experiments conducted on the kidnappees of 2,000 years before, it was only of limited effect on the watchers. But they happened to be warmblooded oxygen-breathers with two sexes and many of humanity's hangups, so that the weapon did do to them much what it was intended to do to mankind.
First they felt a sudden, sharp pang of an emotion which they identified (but only by logical deduction) as joy. The diagnosis was not simple, for they had little in their lives that would enable them to recognize such a state. But they looked at each other with fatuous fondness and, in their not really very human ways, shared pleasure.
The next thing they shared was serious physical pain, accompanied by vomiting, dizziness, and a feeling of weakness, for they were receiving a great deal more of the radiation than was necessary for the mere task of turning them into pussycats to receive the knockout blow of the Arrogating Ones. They recognized that, too. They deduced that they were dying, and doing it pretty fast.
They did not mind that any more than Albert Novak minded blowing himself up with the airliner. It was worthwhile. They were happy. It was what the ray was intended to do to people and it did its work very well.
And all over the near side of the Earth, as the radiation searched out and saturated humanity, joy replaced fear, peace replaced tension, love replaced anger.
In Central Park three slum youths released the girl they had lured behind the 72d Street boat house and decided to apply for Harvard, while a member of the Tactical Patrol Force lay down on Umpire Rock and gazed jubilantly at the comet. At the park's southern margin the white-haired gentleman came leaping out at Myron Landau and his girl. "My dear children!" he cried, tugging the women's stocking off his face. "How sweet and tender you are. You remind me so much of my own beloved son and daughters that you must let me stand you to the best hotel room in New York, with unlimited room service."
This spectacle would normally have disconcerted Myron Landau, especially as he had just succeeded in solving the puzzle of Ellen's bra snap. But he was so filled with the sudden rapture himself that he could only say, "You bet you can, friend. But only if you come with us. Ellen and I wouldn't have it any other way."
And Ellen chimed in sweetly: "What do we need a motel room for, mister? Why don't we just get out of these clothes?"
Forty thousand feet directly overhead, as the Presidential jet sped back from the Summer White House near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the Secretary of State lifted eyes streaming with joy and said, "Dear Mr. President, let's give the spies another chance. It's too nice a night to be H-bombing Caracas." And the President, flinging an arm around him, sobbed, "Danny, as a diplomat you're not worth a bucket of warm snot, but I've always said you've got the biggest damn heart in the cabinet."
A great bubble of orange-yellow flame off on the western horizon disconcerted diem for a moment, but it did not seem relevant to their transcendental joy. They began singing all the good old favorites like "Down by the Old Mill Stream," "Sweet Adeline," and "I've Been Working on the Railroad," and had so much fun doing it that the President quite forgot to radio the message that would cancel his strike order against Caracas. It did not matter very much. The B-52 ordnance crews had dumped the bombs from the fork lifts and were now giving each other rides on them, while the commanding general of the strike, Curtis T. "Vinegar Ass" Pinowitz, had decided he preferred going fishing to parachuting into Venezuela in support of the bombing. He was looking for his spinning reel, oblivious to the noise on the hardstand where the 101st Airborne was voting whether to fly to Disneyland or the Riviera. (In any event, the Venezuelans, or those members of the Venezuelan government who were bothering to answer their telephones, had just voted to give the Yankees all the oil they wanted and were seriously considering scenting it with jasmine.)