(c) Wherefore Los Alamos should immure itself as a fort against all threat from the ravening masses, until
(1) they calmed down (unlikely for years)
(2) they all perished (not probable)
(3) a manageable remnant remained (most likely)
(d) In which last case Los Alamos could be the nucleus of a new and spreading social culture, factual and scientific in nature, which would gradually recapture and restrain humanity with a view
(z) to establish a true freedom
(y) to abolish racialism
(x) to end wars
(w) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain indefinitely
(v) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all levels of health and intelligence
(u) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed themselves.
So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its inauguration was called for that night. The entire community, dressed in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle tables in an airplane hangar.
It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin, poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations. His stocky body grew stiff. There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed a hitherto unknown star—a nova of approximately the third magnitude. At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead! Schilch! Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too—a nova."
People—including those summoned—began to join the great man and murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet another new star—reaching the planet earth after years of journeying at its absolute speed—burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled in the heavens—and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti—the Italian-Czech—whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I say, Xerx, it couldn't be—?"
Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an unimaginably vast initial of their own, an
