The story of man is the story--endlessly repeated--of a struggle:between light and darkness, between knowledge and ignorance, betweengood and evil, between men who would build and men who would destroy. Itis no more complicated than this.
That light, knowledge, good, and constructive men have had a small edgein this struggle is attested to by our slow rise over the long millenniaof time. In taking stock of our successes, however, it is easy to assumethe victory has been won. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thisis a contest that is never ended, nor can it be, as long as men are uponthe Earth.
While man has free choice, the elements of darkness, ignorance, evil anddestruction are available for him to choose, and there are times whenthese seem the best alternatives.
At the end of the 18th century one of the greatest minds of all time wasdestroyed by one stroke of a guillotine blade. The judge who presided atthe trial of the great French chemist Lavoisier is reported to havesaid, "The Republic has no need of men of science."
Choices like this have often been made by the society of man. A turnoffto darkness has been deliberately taken, superstition has been embracedwhile knowledge has been destroyed.
When times are placid we assume such choices could result only from somegreat insanity; that the men who made them had themselves known morepleasant days. The truth is that there are extremes of circumstancewhich could force almost any man to abandon that which he has alwaysheld to be right and good, and only the very giants could stand up andprove themselves unmoved.
Such giants may seem, in ordinary life, rather obscure. Illustratingthis are the people in this story: a somewhat pompous little mayor; aprofessor of chemistry in a small-town college in the mountain west; aminister of the gospel, who would be lost with a big-city congregation;a sheriff who doesn't care what happens to him personally as long as hesticks to the kind of rightness that has always worked; and ahigh-school boy who learns what it means to do a man's work.
Such people are important, the most important people alive today. Theyare the ones whose hands hold all that our culture has achieved whencatastrophe overtakes us.
The illusion of security is a vicious one. With physical comforts aroundus, the abyss that is just beyond our walls is forgotten: the abyss ofouter space, beyond the paper-thin atmosphere shielding us; of the firesin the earth beneath; of the hurricane winds beyond the horizon; of theevil and insanity in the minds of many men.
The caveman dared not forget these abysses, nor the frontiersman, northe scientist who fought the witch hunters to bring forth a new truth ofNature. But when we believe we are secure we do forget them.
In catastrophe, the most recent achievements of the race are the firstto go. When war comes, or mobs attack, or hurricanes strike, our scienceand our arts are abandoned first. Necessity of survival seems to insistthat we cannot fool with things of the mind and of the soul whendestruction threatens the body. And so, "The Republic has no need of menof science."
Emergency can take any form. Here is a story in which the mechanicalfoundation of our culture is threatened. Whether the means of thisthreat, as I have pictured it, could possibly occur, I do not know. Iknow of no reason why it could not, if circumstances were right.
But more important, this is what happens to a small, college town caughtup in such disaster. How quickly do its people dispense with their menof science and turn to superstition and mob rule for hope of survival?
It is perhaps not so apparent to those of us who have grown up with it,but we have witnessed in our own time, under threat of calamity, thedecline of science before a blight of crash-priority engineeringtechnology. Today, we hear it faintly whispered, "The Republic has noneed of men of science."
Insofar as he represents the achievements of our race over the greatreaches of time, the scientist will always be needed if we are to retainthe foothold we have gained over Nature. The witch doctors and thefortunetellers clamor for his niche and will gladly extend theirservices if we wish to change our allegiance.
The story of THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL is not a story of the distantfuture or of the remote past. It is not a story of a never-never landwhere fantastic happenings take place daily. It is a story of my townand yours, of people like you and me and the mayor in townhall, hissheriff on the corner, and the professor in the university--a story thathappens no later than tomorrow.