Page 55 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

and Waldron into one of the huge empty air tanks, as the chemist Herzog takes
his own life with a vial of poison. The final scene is both ghastly and ghoulishly
amusing as Waldron notices the odor of ozone and cries out, “Flint! Flint! The
oxygen is coming in!” (325) As a huge stream of pure oxygen from a ruptured valve
floods the tank, the brains of Flint and Waldron literally began to “combust”:

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” rang Waldron’s crazy laughter. . . . All at once his cigar burst into
flame. Cursing, he hurled it away, staggering back against the ladder and stood
there swaying [panting, with crimson face], clutching it to hold himself from
falling. . . . “Help! Help!” [Flint] screamed. “Save me—my God—save me—Let
me out, let me out! A million, if you let me out! A billion—the whole world! . . . It’s
mine—I own it—all, all mine!” (326–327)

With a final burst of energy, “his heart flailing itself to death under the piti-
less urge of the oxygen,” Flint runs across the tank screaming blasphemies and
slams into the opposite wall, where he falls sprawling, stone dead. Tiger Wal-
dron attempts a final dash up the ladder to reach the door at the top of the
tank. “Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety”—until his overtaxed heart too
bursts and he falls to his death. “And still the rushing oxygen, with which they
two had hoped to dominate the world, poured [in]—senseless matter, blindly
avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously had sought to cage
and master it!” (328).
As the plant goes up in flames, the oxygen tank explodes in a huge ball of fire.
Thus the socialists foil the attempt to control the air supply of the world—and
thus the world itself—and inaugurate the “Great Emancipation” of humanity
from the clutches of greedy capitalists. In the words of the protagonist Arm-
strong, “Academic discussion becomes absurd in the face of plutocratic savagery”
that seeks a “complete monopoly of the air, with an absolute suppression of all
political rights.” Slavery and violent revolution are the only options.

tales of the rainmakers

“The Rain-Maker,” by Margaret Adelaide Wilson, a short story that appeared in
Scribner’s Magazine in 1917, recounts the hopes and dreams of William Con-
verse, who operates, like the real Charles Hatfield at the time (chapter 3), by mix-
ing and evaporating chemicals on a high tower: “The chemicals are holding the
storm-centre right overhead, and the evaporation is tremendous. The rain will
come this time if it holds off, the wind holds off—if only it holds off.” 15

38 | StorieS of Control