Crane: "Like they dropped in their trucks. Stumbled and fallen down dead."
Shawn: "All over the streets, on the sidewalks…"
Another silence, then Crane: "Sir!"
Shawn: "Judas."
Crane: "You see him? The man in the white robe, walking across the street-"
Shawn: "I see him."
Crane: "He's just stepping over them like-"
Shawn: "He's coming toward us."
Crane: "Sir, look, I think we should get out of here, if you don't mind my-"
The next sound was a high-pitched scream, and a crunching noise. Transmission ended at this point, and Vandenberg Scoop Mission Control was not able to raise the two men again.
3. Crisis
GLADSTONE, UPON HEAIUNG OF THE DEATH OF "Chinese" Gordon in Egypt, was reported to have muttered irritably that his general might have chosen a more propitious time to die: Gordon's death threw the Gladstone government into turmoil and crisis. An aide suggested that the circumstances were unique and unpredictable, to which Gladstone crossly answered: "All crises are the same."
He meant political crises, of course. There were no scientific crises in 1885, and indeed none for nearly forty years afterward. Since then there have been eight of major importance; two have received wide publicity. It is interesting that both the publicized crises- atomic energy and space capability- have concerned chemistry and physics, not biology.
This is to be expected. Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.
It was not until the late 1940's that this situation changed. The postwar period ushered in a new era of biologic research, spurred by the discovery of antibiotics.