Wind And Sky

"Snowball."

Like "Let There Be Light" in Robert Heinlein's Future History, this is a story about a new source of cheap energy. Someone might summarize the technical details and economic ramifications. Not me.

"Autumn, the New England fall of rain and chill whistling wind, smoky days and flame-like leaves and the far wild honking of southbound geese."

We are on familiar territory here, especially with the "chill whistling wind." However, the paragraph continues by outlining human activities:

"The crash came in September: a reeling market hit bottom and stayed there. Gasoline sales were down twenty-five per cent already, and the industry was laying men off by the hundreds of thousands. That cut out their purchasing power and hit the rest of the economy."

A newly unemployed man who remembers the breadlines of thirties tries to kill the inventor of the destabilizing factor, capacitite.

During the depression, there are:

"...a leaden sky and a small whimpering wind."

As ever, a whimpering wind exactly expresses what is going on for the human characters.

And I thought that a leaden sky had played a significant role in James Blish's Black Easter:

There may be some textual evidence that the demons are not really at large. When Domenico wondered why an angel conjured by the white magicians appeared headless:

“The leaden skies returned him no answer.” ²⁹

And when Hess suggests that they are all insane, he does so “…in a leaden monotone.” ³⁰

Does Hess’ leaden monotone confirm that Domenico’s leaden skies are part of a collective hallucination? The word “leaden” seems significant. Blish would have known that he used it twice and that, by doing so, he linked an inner state, insanity, to an outer appearance, an unanswering sky. However, the Goat’s swallowing of the hysterically incredulous Hess seems even more significant, a decisive statement that demons are real.

-copied from here.