w, he felt nothing. He was aware only of a kind of deadness in his
emotions with respect to the comet.

There was no excitement he could find in today's event of close
approach, which was probably the only one of its kind that would be
recorded in the history of mankind. He wondered if he had lost all his
scientific spirit that so momentous an occurrence could inspire him so
little now.

Yet, he no longer hated the comet, either. It was not a thing that could
be hated, any more than the wind when it leveled a city, or the waters
when they drowned the land and the people on it.

These things were beyond hate. You could fight them, but you never had
the privilege of hating them. That was reserved only for other human
beings. It was because of the great, impersonal nature of their common
enemy, he thought, that people had finally turned to fighting each
other. It was for this reason that the people of Mayfield had turned
their hate upon the scientists. The questions of food and privileges
were only superficial excuses.

After an hour's work, Ken left the observatory. The gassy tail of the
comet was a full halo of lighter yellow hue, as seen directly along its
central axis. The darker yellow of the core seemed to Ken like a living
heart.

The light spread to the dust motes in the air and curtained the whole
sky with shimmering haze. It bathed the snow cover of the Earth, and
reflected its golden image against the trees and the walls of the
buildings, and penetrated the windows. It gilded the stark, charcoal
skeletons of the ruins it had created. It spread over the whole Earth
and penetrated every pore. Ken had a momentary illusion that there was
not a particle of substance in the world not permeated and illumined by
the comet's light. He felt as if it were inside his own being, through
his vitals, and shining in the corridors of his brain.

For a moment the old hate returned. He wanted to shut his eyes against
that omnipresent light and to run with all his strength to some secret
place where it could never penetrate.

He recalled the words of Dr. Larsen that seemed to have been uttered so
long ago that they were scarcely within memory: "The universe is a
terrible place that barely tolerates living organisms. It is a great
miracle that here in this corner of the universe living things have
found a foothold. It does not pay ever to forget the fierceness of the
home in which we live."

There was no closing the eyes a