ken kalfus
dig furiously into the sand and loose dirt, banking the debris on either side of their excavations. The excavations appear to be exceedingly wide roadways into which a lining of pitch is being laid, yet it’s not obvious what conveyances they will bear or to where. The men certainly don’t know, despite repeated instruction. This is Professor Sanford Thayer’s empire, cast under a pitiless star. He can barely drag himself from his camp bed to defy his physicians. At the opening of the tent he gazes upon the settlement and dwells, for the space of a tremor, on the drive and the daring, the decades of work and the moments of impulse, the mountains of paperwork and the massifs of cash, that have brought these animals, this machinery, and these men into the field of his famously acute vision. In that tremor two sentiments take up arms and rise against each other. The first combatant is despair: despair at his own folly, despair at the workers’ incompetence, despair at the human primitiveness that mocks the greatest accomplishments of industry and culture. But despair is dealt a wounding blow. Consider the nobility of this striving, by mule and man. Consider man’s ingenuity. Consider this project as a pure, uncompromised expression of human intelligence. Progress is slow, but the endeavor approaches completion. It will be completed. The fourth planet, high above the horizon in Sagittarius, unseen behind the screen of day, will be visible in the hours before morning dusk tomorrow, a fierce, unquenchable ember.
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