gy seemed to flow from the sky into her withered, bony frame,
and she drank of its substance until time seemed to reverse itself in
her obsolete body. All her life she had been waiting for this time. She
knew it now. She was spared to tell the people why the comet had come.
Although her purpose was diametrically opposed to that of Henry Maddox,
she also fed and grew to her full stature after almost a century of
existence.

Frank Meggs was surely another. He was born in Mayfield and had lived
there all his life and he hated every minute of time and every person
and every event that told of his wasted life here. He hated College
Hill, for he had never been able to go there. His family had been too
poor, and he had been forced to take over his father's store when his
father died.

He had once dreamed of becoming a great businessman and owning a chain
of stores that would stretch from coast to coast, but circumstances, for
which he blamed the whole of Mayfield, had never permitted him to leave
the town. His panic sale had been his final, explosive hope that he
might be able to make it. Now, he, too, found himself growing in his own
special direction as he fed upon the disaster. He did not know just what
that direction was or to where it led, but he felt the growth. He felt
the secret pleasure of contemplating the discomfort and the privation
that lay ahead for his fellow citizens in the coming months.

While personal fear forced him to the conclusion that the disaster would
be of short duration, the pleasure was nevertheless real. It was
especially intense when he thought of College Hill and its inhabitants
in scenes of dark dismay as they wrestled in vain to understand what had
happened to the world.

There were others who fed upon the disaster. For the most part they
found it an interruption to be met with courage, with faith, with
whatever strength was inherent in them.

It was not a time of growth, however, for Reverend Aylesworth. It was
the kind of thing for which he had been preparing all his life. Now he
would test and verify the stature he had already gained.

* * * * *

On the night they verified the presence of the comet dust in the
disabled engines, Ken was the last to leave the laboratory. It was near
midnight when he got away.

His father had left much earlier, urging him to come along, but Ken had
been unable to pull himself away from the examination and measurement of