CHAPTER XXII
PEACE ON EARTH
It is common knowledge now how the great purple star departed as inscrutably as it had come. Throughout those concluding months of 1957, it steadily faded until at last it was gone. The Wanderer! It is out there now, wandering somewhere among the stars. With our imaginations we may follow it, but no way else. It has left the name we gave it written large across the most tragic pages of our history—but itself is only a memory.
It would be superfluous for me to recount familiar world events as the old order of day and night, the old progression of the seasons gradually returned. By September, 1957, astronomers had announced that the earth's axis was swinging back to its normal inclination. It reached there, they told us, in June, '58.
There was another year of adjustment—storms, torrential rains, floods, a disarrangement of all our earth activities newly established since the Great Change. But fortunately, the new conditions had existed for a very short time—it was not difficult to return to the old. I saw, in our Western World, swift evidence of that. Property in the north was reclaimed. Settlers in the tropics began returning. By the end of '58, New York and all the other great cities of the temperate zones, both north and south, were well on their way toward rehabilitation.
With us of human mold, lifelong habits are not easily broken, and are quickly resumed. It is good to feel the warm summer of July, with daylight and darkness coming as they should! Welcome autumn days, merging into winter—with the knowledge that spring will come again!
Within my own lifetime I suppose, there will be slight evidence left anywhere on earth of the Great Change. They say that the tropics will always be more densely populated than before; that some of the industry started there will remain. But on the whole, those fearsome tragic months will linger only as a memory; and soon, when all of us on earth now have passed—they will fade from memory into tradition; then into legend. And the world will go on into the other great changes perhaps—and even legend of this one will be forever forgotten and lost forever.
But now as I write, with the curtain so recently rung down upon its horror, it is all too vivid. The old routine is come back to earth. Father and Freddie are with the Dutch Astronomical Bureau, in Chile, where I am to join them when I have finished helping reestablish the A.B.A. in New York. Dan and Hulda are in Porto Rico. Things are very much as they were before. Our world, for me, for every one, is hardly different.
But there is a difference. Out of the tragedy and horror of those months, has come, I think, a benefit to our world. The Great Change brought all the nations, people of every race, into a sudden community of interest. Like brothers in a family sorely pressed, they fought united against a suddenly wrathful nature. And then fought the invaders from Xenephrene.
We four hundred young men—the pick of the world united—when we flew against Graff that night in Brazil, I think we raised then a monument to a new earthly spirit. It was our united world against another world. Our united life, or death! We cannot soon forget that.
A lesson from Xenephrene! Economists sometimes use that phrase. There was much that the Garlands had come to realize which we of the earth might well heed! Economists are saying it.
And we are heeding it; I see it now in little things all around me. The nations are planning now to establish a working basis of industry and agriculture whereby each may produce without competition from the other, what it can give the world best and most cheaply. An economy of effort! It will decrease enormously the world's work.
They had been planning a gigantic municipal subway to run the length of Long Island, to handle the new population which is coming steadily from the tropics. But the subway plans were yesterday defeated. New York, they claim, will not grow so large. The new radio power-sending stations will make every farm a small factory if need be.
The age of steam flung us into roaring infernos of cities; the age of electricity will send us back into God's green country. They say that is happening now. And I have read in newspaper editorials—and heard, just this evening in the Government radio broadcast—that we would do well, by ourselves, and most of all by our children, if we heeded the lesson from Xenephrene.
I have been just now in Zetta's bedroom, standing in the dimness gazing down into the cradle where our little son lies sleeping. Xenephrene brought tragedy upon our world—a lesson for good, perhaps; but to me it brought a great happiness. I see Zetta lying there, like a little child herself, so early asleep to-night. She gave up everything for me. I mentioned it to her once, soon after we were married. She smiled her quaint smile and held me close.
"Back in Garla, Peter, your father used to read from his Bible. A ver' wonderful book—for the Garlands, for all, it is all the same. There was a place in the Bible, I memorize' it. You say, Peter, for you I have given up my worl'. And I answer, like Ruth:
"'Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people—'"
I sit here to-night finishing these pages. A great thankfulness is upon me. Out of the horror of the past, I have come to-night with a dear father still holding his health and strength; a loving sister, happily married to a man I respect and admire. I have a bachelor friend, joyous with his chosen lot.
I have a beautiful, adoring wife, to realize every romantic dream of my boyhood, to mother our lusty little son growing up to personify all the good which is within us both.
I am very singularly blessed.
THE END