“And the comet. We know what it was. In ten more years we’d have been able to push the damned thing out of our way! I’ve been in space. I won’t go there again, but your children could! Hell yes! Give us that electric plant and twenty years and we’ll be in space again. We know how, and all it takes is power, and that power’s right out there, not fifty miles from here, if we’ve just got guts enough to save it. Think about it. Those are the choices. Go on and be good peasants, safe peasants, superstitious peasants — or have worlds to conquer again. To control the lightning again.”
He paused, but not long enough to let anyone else speak.
“I’m going,” he said. “Leonilla?”
“Certainly.” She moved toward the platform.
“And I,” Comrade General Jakov shouted from the back of the room. “For the lightning.”
“Now.” Harvey slapped Maureen’s butt and bounded ahead of her onto the platform, moving quickly before the moment died away. Decisions were simple, now that he knew what he’d be shouting. “Task Force Randall?”
“Sure,” someone shouted. And then Maureen joined him, and another farmer came forward, and Tim Hamner, and Mayor Seitz. Marie Vance and George Christopher were arguing. Good! Marie belonged to Task Force Randall, unless there was a Task Force Christopher. Christopher would join them.
Al Hardy stood in confusion, wanting to speak but held by the command in Maureen’s eyes.
He could stop them, Harvey Randall thought. It wouldn’t take much to stop them. Once everyone’s committed it will be hard to back down, but right now this bandwagon can be stopped, or it can be shoved forward so hard nothing can stop it, and Al Hardy has that power…
Hardy was looking past Maureen now, at the Senator. The old man was half rising from his chair, and he gasped for breath before he fell back into it. Leonilla ran toward him, but he waved her away, beckoning to Hardy. “Al,” he gasped.
Leonilla had her medical bag in the office. She threw it open and seized a hypodermic needle, fought away the Senator’s feeble resistance as she ripped open his jacket and shirt. She swabbed his chest quickly and thrust the needle directly into his chest, near the heart.
Al Hardy tore through the crowd like a madman. He knelt beside the gasping man. Jellison thrashed and writhed in the chair, his hands reaching for his chest while Chief Hartman and others held them. His eyes focused on Al Hardy. “Al.”
“Yes, sir.” Hardy’s voice was choked, almost inaudible. He bent closer.
“Al. Give my children the lightning again.” The voice was clear, projecting through the hall, and for a moment Jellison’s eyes were bright, but then he slumped into the chair, and they heard only a thin whisper that faded to nothing. “Give them the lightning again.”
Epilogue
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
Tim Hamner stood at the top of a low hill. Paper crackled in his breast pocket when he shifted weight.
The long slope behind him buzzed with activity. Animal teams dragged harrows through the hard soil, while methanol-powered tractors worked with deep plows in adjacent fields. Myriads of white flecks gleamed in the soil behind the harrows. Enriched by mustard gas and the defeat of the New Brotherhood Army, this land would produce in abundance.
Three electric carts hummed along the road below. Another stood beside Tim Hamner, ready for his use. It was time to get back down the hill and go to work, but he stood a few moments longer, enjoying bright sunshine and the clear blue sky of spring. It was a glorious day.
Before him was the San Joaquin Sea. Much of what had been underwater was now a vast swampland. Directly ahead was a low island in the sea: the prisoner colony, where those of the Brotherhood who hadn’t wanted to go into permanent exile worked to grow crops. Jakov’s preserve. They called him “Comrade” now… and Comrade hadn’t given up communism. But Marxist theory said that history followed definite stages, slave society to feudal, feudal to capitalist — and the Valley was barely past the slave stage of history. The earth would not be ready for communism for a long time. Meanwhile Comrade was willing to re-educate the prisoners.
Tim shrugged. Comrade and Hooker kept them organized, and they grew their own crops, and if they escaped nobody cared.
Further to his left, distant in the south, he saw the rising plumes of steam from the nuclear power plant. Closer, the work crews stringing power lines. In another two weeks they would have electricity in the Stronghold. Tim tried to imagine what that new life would be like, but it was difficult. The winter had been hard. Damned hard. Eileen’s baby had almost died, and was still in the hospital. The infant mortality rate was above fifty percent, but it was slowly falling now; and Forrester’s notes showed that when they recovered his books from Tujunga they would know how to make penicillin.
Forrester’s notes. That was Tim’s job, to transcribe the reels and reels of tape Dan Forrester had dictated before he died. They could have made insulin, maybe, if they hadn’t committed themselves to saving the power plant; and of course Forrester had known that. The winter had cost them the life of their magician, as it had so many other lives. To learn that a friend had survived, that was always good. Tim patted his pocket.
The past could hit you across the back of the head, no warning, Whap! Tim Hamner patted the telegram in his pocket. Half of a comet! Kitt Peak had confirmed his sighting. He shook his head violently and laughed at himself. It was only the rain-wrinkled scrap of paper Harry the Mailman had brought yesterday, an IOU for $250,000.
Harry Stimms was alive! Now, what would he take for that IOU? A job at the power plant? Stimms must have mechanical skills, and the power plant boys owed Tim. Failing that… could he promote a pregnant cow? That’d be worth $250,000 easy. Tim gazed into the sky, enjoying himself.
A clear thin line crossed the sky, the tip of it moving forward even as he watched. For a second he still did not know what it was. Shout a warning! But what did we used to call that?
“C-contrail! Jet plane!”
They’d heard something from Colorado Springs that some of the aircraft had survived. Harvey and Maureen would have to come to terms with Colorado Springs when they got back from visiting a septic tank in Tujunga. But though they’d heard it on the radio, it was not the same as seeing that clean white line across the sky. He’d forgotten how beautiful that could be.
Tim waved solemnly at the plane. “You can fly,” he said. His voice rose. “You can fly. But we control the lightning.”
The asteroid was a child of the maelstrom: a rough nugget of nickel-iron with some stony strata, three miles along its long axis. No man had ever seen a mastodon when the passing of mighty Jupiter plucked the nugget from its orbit and puny it out toward interstellar space.
It was on the second lap of its long, narrow elliptical orbit. The iron surface was frosted with strange ices now, as it passed the peak of the curve and began to coast back toward the Sun.
And the black giant was there. Its ring of cometary snowballs glowed broad and beautiful in starlight. Infrared light traced bands and whorls in its stormy surface. It was the only major mass out here between the stars, and the asteroid curved toward it and increased speed.
Infrared light bathed and thawed the frosted iron. The ringed planet grew huge.
The asteroid plunged through the plane of the ring at twelve miles per second. Battered and pocked with glowing craters, it receded, carrying in its own small gravitational field a spray of icy masses from the ring. They came like attendants, ahead and behind, in a pattern like the curved arms of a spiral galaxy.