I said that Simon published the theory, but that is inaccurate. Of course he’s never been able to publish any of his papers, in print; he’s not a Federal employee and doesn’t have a Government clearance. But it did get circulated in what the scientists and poets call Sammy’s-dot, that is, just handwritten or hectographed. It’s an old joke that the FBI arrests everybody with purple fingers, because they have either been hectographing Sammy’s-dots, or they have impetigo.
Anyhow, Simon was on top of the mountain that night. His true joy is in the pure math; but he had been working with Gara and Max and the others in this effort' to materialise the theory for ten years, and a taste of material victory is a good thing, once in a lifetime.
I asked him to explain what the sun tap would mean to the masses, with me as a representative mass. He explained that it means we can tap solar energy for power, using a device that’s easier to build than a jar battery. The efficiency and storage capacity are such that about ten minutes of sunlight will power an apartment complex like ours, heat and lights and elevators and all, for twenty-four hours; and no pollution, particulate or thermal or radioactive. “There isn’t any danger of using up the sun?” I asked. He took it soberly—it was a stupid question, but after all not so long ago people thought there wasn’t any danger of using up the earth—and said no, because we wouldn’t be pulling out energy, as we did when we mined and forested and split atoms, but just using the energy that comes to us anyhow: as the plants, the trees and grass and rosebushes, always have done.“You could call it Flower Power,” he said. He was high, high up on the mountain, ski jumping in the sunlight.
“The State owns us,” he said, “because the corporative State has a monopoly on power sources, and there’s not enough power to go round. But now, anybody could build a generator on their roof that would furnish enough power to light a city.”
I looked out the window at the dark city.
“We could completely decentralise industry and agriculture. Technology could serve life instead of serving capital. We could each run our own life. Power is power!… The State is a machine. We could unplug the machine, now. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. But that’s true only when there’s a price on power. When groups can keep the power to themselves; when they can use physical power-to in order to exert spiritual power-over; when might makes right. But if power is free? If everybody is equally mighty? Then everybody’s got to find a better way of showing that he’s right…”
“That’s what Mr. Nobel thought when he invented dynamite,” I said. “Peace on earth.”
He slid down the sunlit slope a couple of thousand feet and stopped beside me in a spray of snow, smiling. “Skull at the banquet,” he said, “finger writing on the wall. Be still! Look, don’t you see the sun shining on the Pentagon, all the roofs are off, the sun shines at last into the corridors of power… And they shrivel up, they wither away. The green grass grows through the carpets of the Oval Room, the Hotline is disconnected for nonpayment of the bill. The first thing we’ll do is build an electrified fence outside the electrified fence around the White House. The inner one prevents unauthorised persons from getting in. The outer one will prevent authorised persons from getting out…”
Of course he was bitter. Not many people come out of prison sweet.
But it was cruel, to be shown this great hope, and to know that there was no hope for it. He did know that. He knew it right along. He knew that there was no mountain, that he was skiing on the wind.
The tiny lights of the lantern creatures died out one by one, sank away. The distant lonely voices were silent. The cold, slow currents flowed, vacant, only shaken from time to time by a shifting in the abyss.
It was dark again, and no voice spoke. All dark, dumb, cold.
Then the sun rose.
It was not like the dawns we had begun to remember: the change, manifold and subtle, in the smell and touch of the air; the hush that, instead of sleeping, wakes, holds still, and waits; the appearance of objects, looking grey, vague, and new, as if just created—distant mountains against the eastern sky, one’s own hands, the hoary grass full of dew and shadow, the fold in the edge of a curtain hanging by the window—and then, before one is quite sure that one is indeed seeing again, that the light has returned, that day is breaking, the first abrupt, sweet stammer of a waking bird. And after that the chorus, voice by voice: This is my nest, this is my tree, this is my egg, this is my day, this is my life, here I am, here I am, hurray for me! I’m here!—No, it wasn’t like that at all, this dawn. It was completely silent, and it was blue.
In the dawns that we had begun to remember, one did not become aware of the light itself, but of the separate objects touched by the light, the things, the world. They were there, visible again, as if visibility were their own property, not a gift from the rising sun.
In this dawn, there was nothing but the light itself. Indeed there was not even light, we would have said, but only color: blue.
There was no compass bearing to it. It was not brighter in the east. There was no east or west. There was only up and down, below and above. Be-low was dark. The blue light came from above. Brightness fell. Beneath, where the shaking thunder had stilled, the brightness died away through violet into blindness.
We, arising, watched light fall.
In a way it was more like an ethereal snowfall than like a sunrise. The light seemed to be in discrete particles, infinitesimal flecks, slowly descending, faint, fainter than flakes of fine snow on a dark night, and tinier; but blue. A soft, penetrating blue tending to the violet, the color of the shadows in an iceberg, the color of a streak of sky between grey clouds on a winter afternoon before snow: faint in intensity but vivid in hue: the color of the remote, the color of the cold, the color farthest from the sun.
On Saturday night they held a scientific congress in our room. Clara and Max came, of course, and the engineer Phil Drum, and three others who had worked on the sun tap. Phil Drum was very pleased with himself because he had actually built one of the things, a solar cell, and brought it along. I don’t think it had occurred to either Max or Simon to build one. Once they knew it could be done, they were satisfied and wanted to get on with something else. But Phil unwrapped his baby with a lot of flourish, and people made remarks like, “Mr. Watson, will you come here a minute,” and “Hey, Wilbur, you’re off the ground!” and “I say, nasty mould you’ve got there, Alec, why don’t you throw it out?” and “Ugh, ugh, burns, burns, wow, ow,” the latter from Max, who does look a little Pre-Mousterian. Phil explained that he had exposed the cell for one minute at four in the afternoon up in Washington Park during a light rain. The lights were back on on the West Side since Thursday, so we could test it without being conspicuous.
We turned off the lights, after Phil had wired the tablelamp cord to the cell. He turned on the lamp switch. The bulb came on, about twice as bright as before, at its full 40 watts—city power of course was never full strength. We all looked at it. It was a dime-store table lamp with a metallised gold base and a white plasticloth shade.
“Brighter than a thousand suns,” Simon murmured from the bed.
“Could it be,” said Clara Edmonds, “that we physicists have known sin—and have come out the other side?”