The Year When Stardust Fell by Raymond F. Jones (most recommended books .TXT) 📖

On the morning after the town meeting, Ken dressed early and rode his bicycle toward Art's garage to arrange with the mechanic the details of the gathering and storage of automobile batteries. On the way he passed by Frank Meggs Independent Grocery Market, the largest in Mayfield.

Although it was only a little after 7 o'clock, an enormous crowd had collected outside and inside the store. Curious and half-alarmed, Ken parked his bicycle and made his way through the crowd. Inside, he found Frank Meggs ringing up sales of large lots of food.

A red-faced woman was arguing with him at the check-out stand. "A dollar a pound for white beans! That's ridiculous, Frank Meggs, and you know it!"

"Sure I know it," the storekeeper said calmly. "Next winter you'll be glad I let you have them for even that price. If you don't want them, Mrs. Watkins, please move along. Others will be glad to have them."

The woman hesitated, then angrily flung two bills on the counter and stalked out with her groceries. Ken shoved his way up to the stand. "Mr. Meggs," he exclaimed. "You can't do this! All foodstuffs are being called in by the Mayor's committee."

He turned to the people. "Private hoards of food will be confiscated and placed in the community warehouse. This isn't going to do you any good!"

Most of the shoppers looked shamefaced, at his challenge, but Meggs bristled angrily. "You keep out of this, Maddox! Nobody asked you to come in here! These people know what they're doing, and so do I. How much do you think any of us will eat if townhall gets its hands on every scrap of food in the valley? If you aren't buying, get moving!"

"I will, and I'll be back just as soon as I can find the Sheriff!"

With telephone service now cut off to conserve battery power, Ken hesitated between seeking Sheriff Johnson at his office or at home. He checked his watch again and decided on the Sheriff's home.

He was fortunate in arriving just before the Sheriff left. He explained quickly what was happening at Meggs' store. Johnson had been assigned one of the few remaining cars that would run. With Ken, he drove immediately to the store. They strode in, the shoppers fanning out before the Sheriff's approach.

"Okay, that's all," he said. "You folks leave your groceries right where they are. Tell the others they had better bring theirs back and get their money while Meggs still has it. Not that anybody is going to have much use for money, anyway."

"You've no right to do this!" Meggs cried. "This is my private property and I'm entitled to do with it as I choose!"

"Not any longer it isn't," said Sheriff Johnson. "There isn't such a thing as private property in Mayfield, any more. Except maybe the shirt on your back, and I'm not sure of that. At any rate, you're not selling these groceries. Accounts will be kept, and when and if we get back to normal you'll be reimbursed, but for now we're all one, big, happy family!"

Most of the crowd had dispersed. The armloads and pushcarts full of groceries had been abandoned. Ken and the Sheriff moved toward the door.

"Another trick like that and you'll spend the time of the emergency as a guest of the city. Incidentally, we don't intend to heat the jail this winter!"

Meggs turned the blaze of his anger upon Ken. "This is your fault!" he snarled. "You and that bunch of politicians know there's not going to be any shortage this winter just as well as I do. In a week this whole thing will be straightened out. I had a chance to make a good thing of it. I'm going to get even with you if it's the last thing I ever do!"

"That's enough of that!" said Sheriff Johnson sharply. "Come along, Ken."

Ken was not disturbed by Meggs' threat of personal retaliation, but he was frightened by the realization that Meggs wasn't the only one of his kind in Mayfield. His patrons were only a shade less unstable. What would such people do when things really got tough? How much could they be depended on to pull their own weight?

After he had seen Art Matthews about collecting and storing the batteries, Ken went up to Science Hall where the rest of the club members were already at work. Under the direction of Al Miner, who was the best qualified to plan the alterations of the ventilation ducts, they made the necessary changes and installed one of the motorcycle engines to drive the blower. At the same time, three of them built up a high-voltage, battery-operated power supply to charge the filter elements.

By evening the assembly was operating. The motorcycle engine chugged pleasantly. "I wonder how long before that one freezes up," Al said pessimistically.

"We ought to get more," said Joe. "The way the cars have gone we'll be lucky to get more than 2 days out of each one of these."

During the day, Ken's father had directed the preparation of metallic specimens from samples the boys had brought from Art's garage and from those the men brought back from the power plant. With the high-powered electron microscope, photographs were taken.

As they finished their work the boys went with Ken to the laboratory. Professor Maddox looked up. "Hello, Fellows," he said. "Have you got your piece of machinery running?"

"Purring like a top," said Ken.

"Expected to run about as long," said Al.

"Have you finished any photomicrographs?" Ken asked. "Do they show anything?"

His father passed over a wet print. The boys gathered around it.

"It doesn't mean much to me," said Dave Whitaker. "Can you tell us what it shows?"

Ken's father took a pencil from his pocket and touched it lightly to a barely perceptible line across the center of the picture. "That is the boundary," he said, "between the cylinder wall and the piston taken from one of the samples you brought in."

"I can't see anything that looks like a line between two pieces of metal," said Ted Watkins. "It looks like one solid chunk to me."

"That is substantially what it is," said Professor Maddox. "There is no longer any real boundary as there would be between two ordinary pieces of metal. Molecules from each piece have flowed into the other, mixing just as two very viscous liquids would do. They have actually become one piece of metal."

He took up another photograph. "Here you can see that the same thing has happened in the case of the shaft and bearing samples we obtained from the Collin's Dam power plant. Molecules of the two separate pieces of metal have intermingled, becoming one single piece."

"How could they do that?" Ken exclaimed. "Metals can't flow like liquids."

"They can if the conditions are right. When steel is heated to a sufficiently high temperature, it flows like water."

"But that's not the case here!"

"No, it isn't, of course. At lower temperatures the molecules of a solid do not possess the energy of motion which they have in a liquid state. The metallic surface of a piece of cold steel has a certain surface tension which prevents the escape of the relatively low-energy molecules; thus it has the characteristics we ascribe to a solid."

"Then what has happened in this case?" Joe asked. "Are you able to tell?"

Professor Maddox nodded. "The photographs show us what has happened, but they reveal nothing about how or why. We can see the surface tension of the two pieces of metal has obviously broken down so that the small energy of motion possessed by the molecules has permitted them to move toward each other, with a consequent mixing of the two metals. It has turned them quite literally into a single piece, the most effective kind of weld you can imagine."

"What would cause the surface tension to break down like that?" Ken asked.

"That is what remains for us to find out. We don't have the faintest idea what has caused it. It becomes especially baffling when we recall that it has happened, not in a single isolated instance, but all over the world."

"You would think the metals would have become soft, like putty, or something, for a thing like that to happen to them," said Joe.

"It would be expected that the hardness would be affected. This is not true, however. The metals seem just as hard as before. The effect of mixing seems to take place only when the metals are in sliding motion against one another, as in the case of a piston and cylinder, or a shaft and a bearing. The effect is comparatively slow, taking place over a number of days. The two surfaces must break down gradually, increasing the friction to a point where motion must cease. Then the mixing continues until they are welded solidly to each other."

Ordinarily, the dusk of evening would have fallen over the landscape, but the blaze of the comet now lit the countryside with an unnatural gold that reflected like a flame through the windows and onto the faces of the men and boys in the laboratory.

"As to the cause of this phenomenon," Professor Maddox said with an obviously weary deliberation in his voice, "we can only hope to find an explanation and a cure before it is too late to do the world any good."

"There can't be any question of that!" said Ken intensely. "The resources of the whole scientific world will be turned on this one problem. Every industrial, university, and governmental laboratory will be working on it. Modern science can certainly lick a thing like this!"

Professor Maddox turned from the window, which he had been facing. A faint, grim smile touched the corners of his lips and died as he regarded the boys, especially Ken. His face took on a depth of soberness Ken seldom saw in his father.

"You think nothing is immune to an attack by so-called modern science?" he said.

"Sure!" Ken went on enthusiastically, not understanding the expression on his father's face. "Look at the problems that have been licked as soon as people were determined enough and willing to pay the cost. Giant computers, radar eyes, atomic energy. Everybody knows we could have made it to Mars by now if governments had been willing to put up the necessary money."

"You still have to learn, all of you do," Professor Maddox said slowly, "that the thing we call science is only a myth. The only reality consists of human beings trying to solve difficult problems. Their results, which seem to be solutions to some of those problems, we call science. Science has no life of its own. It does not deserve to be spoken of as an entity in its own right. There are only people, whom we call scientists, and their accomplishments are severely limited by their quite meager abilities. Meager, when viewed in comparison with the magnitude of the problems they attack."

Ken felt bewildered. He had never heard his father speak this way before. "Don't you believe there are scientists enough—scientists who know enough—to lick a thing like this in time?"

"I don't know. I'm quite sure no one knows. We became conscious long ago of the fallacy of assuming that the concentration of men enough and unlimited funds would solve any problem in the world. For every great accomplishment like atomic energy, to which we point with pride, there are a thousand other problems, equally important, that remain unsolved. Who knows whether or not this problem of weakened surface tension in metals is one of the insoluble ones?"

"We have to find an answer," said Ken doggedly. He could not understand his father's words. "There's nothing science can't accomplish if it sets about it with enough determination. Nothing!"

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