The Year When Stardust Fell Read online

  Chapter 7. _Dust from the Stars_

  Ken felt he had grown 3 inches taller after his father's discussion. Asif he had passed some ancient ritual, he could be admitted to thecompany of adults and his opinions would be heard.

  This proved to be true. His father rapidly organized the facilities ofthe college laboratories and recruited every possible science student inthe chemistry and physics departments, as well as many from the highschool. As these plans were outlined, Ken made a proposal of his own.

  "I believe our first move," he said, "should be to set up a network ofamateur radio stations operating in cities where there are otherlaboratories. If you could be in touch with them, ideas could beexchanged and duplication of work avoided."

  "An excellent idea," said Professor Maddox. "You can work it out as wego along."

  "No. It ought to be done immediately," Ken said. "If not, it may bealmost impossible to find anyone on the air later. There may not be manyamateurs who will bother to convert their rigs to battery operation.There may not be many who can get the batteries together."

  "Good enough!" his father said. "Let that have priority over everythingelse until you get it organized. Probably you should find at least twocontacts in each of the university centers. Put at the top of your listBerkeley, Pasadena, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.

  "See if you can get relay contacts that will put us in touch withStockholm, Paris, London, Berlin, and Tokyo. If so, we can have contactwith the majority of the workers capable of contributing most to thisproblem."

  "I'll do my best," Ken promised.

  Someone would be needed to operate the station and spend a good manyhours a week listening and recording. He didn't want to spend the timenecessary doing that, and he knew none of the other club members would,either. At once he thought of Maria Larsen. She would undoubtedly behappy to take over the job and feel she was doing something useful. Onthe way home he stopped at her house and told her what he had in mind.She readily agreed.

  "I don't know anything about radio," she said. "You'll have to show mewhat to do."

  "We won't expect you to learn code, of course," he said. "When we dohandle anything coming in by code one of us will have to take it. We'lltry to contact phone stations wherever possible for this program we havein mind. Most of the stuff will be put on tape, and Dad will probablywant you to prepare typed copies, too. You can do enough to take a bigload off the rest of us."

  "I'll be happy to try."

  They spent the rest of the day in the radio room of the science shack.Ken taught Maria the simple operations of turning on the transmitter andreceiver, of handling the tuning controls, and the proper procedure formaking and receiving calls. He supposed there would be some technicalobjection to her operation of the station without an operator's license,but he was quite sure that such things were not important right now.

  It was a new kind of experience for Maria. Her face was alive withexcitement as Ken checked several bands to see where amateurs were stilloperating. The babble of high-frequency code whistles alternated in theroom with faint, sometimes muffled voices on the phone band.

  "There are more stations than I expected," Ken said. "With luck, we maybe able to establish a few of the contacts we need, tonight."

  After many tries, he succeeded in raising an operator, W6YRE, in SanFrancisco. They traded news, and it sounded as if the west coast citywas crumbling swiftly. Ken explained what he wanted. W6YRE promised totry to raise someone with a high-powered phone rig in Berkeley, near theuniversity.

  They listened to him calling, but could not hear the station he finallyraised.

  "What good will that do?" Maria asked. "If we can't hear the station inBerkeley...."

  "He may be working on a relay deal through the small rig. It's betterthan nothing, but I'd prefer a station we can contact directly."

  In a few minutes, the San Francisco operator called them back. "W6WGUknows a ham with a 1000-watt phone near the university," he said. "Hethinks he'll go for your deal, but he's not set up for battery. In fact,he's about ready to evacuate. Maybe he can be persuaded to stay. I'mtold he's a guy who will do the noble thing if he sees a reason for it."

  "There's plenty of reason for this," said Ken.

  "Let's set a schedule for 9 p.m. I ought to have word on it by then."

  They agreed and cut off. In another hour they had managed a contact witha Chicago operator, and explained what they wanted.

  "You're out of luck here," the ham replied. "This town is falling apartat the seams right now. The whole Loop area has been burned out.There's been rioting for 18 hours straight. The militia have been tryingto hold things together, but I don't think they even know whetheranybody is still on top giving the orders.

  "I'll try to find out what the eggheads at the university are doing, butif they've got any kind of research running in this mess, it'll surpriseme. If they are still there, I'll hang on and report to you. Otherwise,I'm heading north. There's not much sense to it, but when something likethis happens a guy's got to run or have a good reason for staying put.If he doesn't he'll go nuts."

  The Chicago operator agreed to a schedule for the following morning.

  Maria and Ken sat in silence, not looking at each other, after they cutoff.

  "It will be that way in all the big cities, won't it?" Maria asked.

  "I'm afraid so. We're luckier than they are," Ken said, "but I wonderhow long we'll stay lucky." He was thinking of Frank Meggs, and thepeople who had swamped his store.

  At 9 p.m., W6YRE came back on. The Berkeley 1000-watt phone wasenthusiastic about being a contact post with the university people. Hehad promised to make arrangements with them and to round up enoughbatteries to convert his transmitter and receiver.

  They had no further success that night.

  Ken's father shook his head sadly when told of the situation in Chicago."I had counted on them," he said. "Their people are among the best inthe world, and they have the finest equipment. I hope things are notlike that everywhere."

  Members of the science club took turns at the transmitter the followingdays for 20-hour stretches, until everything possible had been done toestablish the contacts requested by Professor Maddox.

  In Chicago there appeared to have been a complete collapse. The operatorthere reported he was unable to reach any of the scientific personnel atthe university. He promised a further contact, but when the time came hecould not be reached. There was no voice at all in the Chicago area. Kenwondered what had become of the man whose voice they had heard briefly.He was certain he would never know.

  Although there was much disorder on the west coast, the situation was insomewhat better control. The rioting had not yet threatened theuniversities, and both Berkeley and Pasadena were working frantically onthe problem with round-the-clock shifts in their laboratories. They hadwelcomed wholeheartedly the communication network initiated by theMayfield group.

  In Washington, D.C. tight military control was keeping things somewhatin order. In Stockholm, where contact had been established through aWashington relay after 2 days of steady effort, there was no riotingwhatever. Paris and London had suffered, but their leading universitieswere at work on the problem. Tokyo reported similar conditions.

  Ken grinned at Maria as they received the Stockholm report. "ThoseSwedes," he said. "They're pretty good at keeping their heads."

  Maria answered with a faint smile of her own. "Everybody should beSwedes. No?"

  * * * * *

  The fall winds and the black frost came early that year, as if in fairwarning that the winter intended a brutal assault upon the strickenworld. The pile of logs in the community woodlot grew steadily. A largecrew of men worked to reduce the logs to stove lengths.

  They had made a crude attempt to set up a circular saw, using animalpower to drive it. The shaft was mounted in hardwood blocks, driven by acomplicated arrangement of wooden pulleys and leather belts. The horsesworked it through a treadmill.


  The apparatus worked part of the time, but it scarcely paid for itselfwhen measured against the efforts of the men who had to keep it inrepair.

  The food storage program was well underway. Two central warehouses hadbeen prepared from the converted Empire Movie Theater, and the RainbowSkating Rink.

  Ken wished their efforts at the college laboratory were going half aswell. As the days passed, it seemed they were getting nowhere. The firsteffort to identify any foreign substance in the atmospheric dust was afailure. Calculations showed they had probably not allowed sufficienttime to sample a large enough volume of air.

  It was getting increasingly difficult to keep the blower system going.All of their original supply of small engines had broken down. The townhad been scoured for replacements. These, too, were failing.

  In the metallurgical department hundreds of tests had been run onsamples taken from frozen engines. The photomicrographs all showed auniform peculiarity, which the scientists could not explain. Embedded inthe crystalline structure of the metal were what appeared to be somekind of foreign, amorphous particles which were concentrated near theline of union of the two parts.

  Berkeley and Pasadena confirmed these results with their own tests.There was almost unanimous belief that it was in no way connected withthe comet. Ken stood almost alone in his dogged conviction that theEarth's presence in the tail of the comet could be responsible for thecatastrophe.

  Another theory that was gaining increasing acceptance was that thisforeign substance was an unexpected by-product of the hydrogen andatomic bomb testing that had been going on for so many years. Ken wasforced to admit the possibility of this, inasmuch as radiation productswere scattered heavily now throughout the Earth's atmosphere. BothRussia and Britain had conducted extensive tests just before thebreakdowns began occurring.

  The members of the science club had been allowed to retain completecontrol of the air-sampling program. They washed the filters carefullyat intervals and distilled the solvent to recover the precious residueof dust.

  As the small quantity of this grew after another week of collecting, itwas treated to remove the ordinary carbon particles and accumulatedpollens. When this was done there was very little remaining, but thatlittle something might be ordinary dust carried into the atmosphere fromthe surface of the Earth. Or it might be out of the tail of the comet.Dust from the stars.

  By now, Ken and his companions had learned the use of the electronmicroscope and how to prepare specimens for it. When their samples ofdust had become sufficient they prepared a dozen slides forphotographing with the instrument.

  As these were at last developed in the darkroom, Ken scanned themeagerly. Actually, he did not know what he was looking for. None of themdid. The prints seemed to show little more than shapeless patches. Inthe light of the laboratory he called Joe Walton's attention to onepicture. "Look," he said. "Ever see anything like that before?"

  Joe started to shake his head. Then he gave an exclamation. "Hey, theylook like the same particles found in the metals, which nobody has beenable to identify yet!"

  Ken nodded. "It could be. Maybe this will get us only a horselaugh forour trouble, but let's see what they think."

  They went into the next laboratory and laid the prints before Ken'sfather and his associates. Ken knew at once, from the expressions on themen's faces, that they were not going to be laughed at.

  "I think there may be something here," said Professor Maddox, trying tosuppress his excitement. "It is very difficult to tell in a picture likethis whether one particle is similar to any other, but their size andconfiguration are very much alike."

  Professor Douglas grunted disdainfully. "Impossible!" With thatdismissal, he moved away.

  Professor Larsen looked more carefully. "You could scrape dust from athousand different sources and get pictures like this from half of themperhaps. Only the chemical tests will show us the nature of thismaterial. I am certain it is very worthwhile following up."

  "I feel certain that whatever contaminating agent we are dealing with isairborne," said Professor Maddox. "If this is the same substance it willnot tell us its origin, of course, nor will it even prove it isresponsible for these effects. However it is a step in the rightdirection. We can certainly stand that!"

  "Couldn't we tell by spectroscopic analysis?" said Ken.

  "That would be difficult to say. The commonness of the elements involvedmight mask what you are looking for. Get John Vickers to help you set upequipment for making some comparisons."

  Vickers was the teaching fellow in the chemistry department whomProfessor Maddox had planned to assign to help the boys when they firstsuggested atmospheric analysis. He had become indispensable in theresearch since then. But he liked helping the boys; it was not too longsince he had been at the same stage in his own career. He understoodtheir longing to do something worthwhile, and their embarrassment attheir ineptness.

  "Sure, Guys," he said, when Professor Maddox called him in. "Let's seeif we can find out what this stuff is. Who knows? Maybe we've got a bearby the tail."

  It was delicate precision work, preparing specimens and obtainingspectrographs of the lines that represented the elements contained inthem. Time after time, their efforts failed. Something went wrong eitherwith their sample preparation, or with their manipulation of theinstruments. Ken began to feel as if their hands possessed nothing butthumbs.

  "That's the way it goes," John Vickers consoled them. "Half of thisbusiness of being a scientist is knowing how to screw a nut on aleft-handed bolt in the dark. Unless you're one of these guys who do itall in their heads, like Einstein."

  "We're wasting our samples," Ken said. "It's taken two weeks to collectthis much."

  "Then this is the one that does it," said Vickers. "Try it now."

  Ken turned the switch that illuminated the spectrum and exposed thephotographic plate. After a moment, he cut it off. "That had better doit!" he said.

  After the plates were developed, they had two successful spectrographsfor comparison. One was taken from the metal of a failed-engine part.The other was from the atmospheric dust. In the comparator Vickersbrought the corresponding standard comparison lines together. For a longtime he peered through the eyepiece.

  "A lot of lines match up," he said. "I can throw out most of them,though--carbon, oxygen, a faint sodium."

  "The stuff that's giving us trouble might be a compound of one ofthese," said Ken.

  "That's right. If so, we ought to find matching lines of other possibleelements in the compounds concerned. I don't see any reasonablecombination at all." He paused. "Hey, here's something I hadn'tnoticed."

  He shifted the picture to the heavy end of the spectrum. There, a verysharp line matched on both pictures. The boys took a look at it throughthe viewer. "What is that one?" Ken asked.

  "I don't know. I used a carbon standard. I should have used one farthertoward the heavy end. This one looks like it would have to be atransuranic element, something entirely new, like plutonium."

  "Then it could be from the hydrogen bomb tests," said Joe.

  "It could be," said Vickers, "but somehow I've got a feeling it isn't."

  "Isn't there a quick way to find out?" said Ken.

  "How?"

  "If we took a spectrograph of the comet and found this same linestrongly present, we would have a good case for proving the comet wasthe source of this substance."

  "Let's have a try," said Vickers. "I don't know how successfully we canget a spectrograph of the comet, but it's worth an attempt."

  Their time was short, before the comet vanished below the horizon forthe night. They called for help from the other boys and moved theequipment to the roof, using the small, portable 6-inch telescopebelonging to the physics department.

  There was time for only one exposure. After the sun had set, and thecomet had dropped below the horizon, they came out of the darkroom andplaced the prints in the viewing instrument.

  Vickers moved the adjustments gently. After a time he look
ed up at thecircle of boys. "You were right, Ken," he said. "Your hunch was right.The comet is responsible. Our engines have been stopped by dust from thestars."