Tales of Space and Time, Page 3

  THE STAR

  It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made,almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of theplanet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about thesun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to asuspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of newswas scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whoseinhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, noroutside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of afaint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet causeany very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found theintelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the newbody was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quitedifferent from the orderly progress of the planets, and that thedeflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of anunprecedented kind.

  Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolationof the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust ofplanetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity thatalmost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there isspace, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmthor light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a millionmiles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversedbefore the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a fewcomets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever tohuman knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentiethcentury this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was,bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of thesky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearlyvisible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensiblediameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while anopera glass could attain it.

  On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of twohemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importanceof this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," oneLondon paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion thatthis strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leaderwriters enlarged upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of theworld, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of someimminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunsetround the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--theold familiar stars just as they had always been.

  Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overheadgrown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation ofdaylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windowsto show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw thething, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going totheir work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipationgoing home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats,and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home,all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at seaby seamen watching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly intothe westward sky!

  Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the eveningstar at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no meretwinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hourafter the day had come. And where science has not reached, men staredand feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that areforeshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, duskyHottentots, Gold Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stoodin the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange newstar.

  And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushedtogether, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatusand spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novelastonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, asister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that hadso suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck,fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heatof the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into onevast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours beforethe dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sankwestward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it,but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than thosesailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heardnothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climbzenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of thenight.

  And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers onhilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for therising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it,like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come intoexistence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger,"they cried. "It is brighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full andsinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, butscarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the littlecircle of the strange new star.

  "It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in thedim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at oneanother. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"

  And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clickingtelegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in athousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Menwriting in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down theirpens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesquepossibility in those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along awakeningstreets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages,men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood inyellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passers-by. "It is nearer."Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestinglybetween the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did notfeel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must beto find out things like that!"

  Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words tocomfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for thenight's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth from it if it _is_nearer, all the same."

  "What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman kneeling beside herdead.

  The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out forhimself--with the great white star, shining broad and bright through thefrost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal, centripetal," he said, withhis chin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of itscentrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls intothe sun! And this--!"

  "Do _we_ come in the way? I wonder--"

  The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the laterwatches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it wasnow so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost ofitself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great manhad married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with hisbride. "Even the skies have illuminated," said the flatterer. UnderCapricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits,for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where thefire-flies hovered. "That is our star," they whispered, and feltstrangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.

  The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papersfrom him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phialthere still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake andactive for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient asever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come backat once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a littledrawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lostin thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went u
p with aclick. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys andsteeples of the city, hung the star.

  He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "Youmay kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all theuniverse for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would notchange. Even now."

  He looked at the little phial. "There will be no need of sleep again,"he said. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he entered hislecture theatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was,and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among hisstudents that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumblein his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by theirhiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at therising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studiedcommonness of phrasing. "Circumstances have arisen--circumstances beyondmy control," he said and paused, "which will debar me from completingthe course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put thething clearly and briefly, that--Man has lived in vain."

  The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raisedeyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remainedintent upon his calm grey-fringed face. "It will be interesting," he wassaying, "to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can makeit clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to thisconclusion. Let us assume--"

  He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way thatwas usual to him. "What was that about 'lived in vain?'" whispered onestudent to another. "Listen," said the other, nodding towards thelecturer.

  And presently they began to understand.

  That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion hadcarried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was sogreat that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star washidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella,Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white andbeautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircledit about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of thetropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon.The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world was asbrightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to readquite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities thelamps burnt yellow and wan.

  And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughoutChristendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the countrysidelike the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grewto a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in amillion belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep nomore, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. Andoverhead, growing larger and brighter, as the earth rolled on its wayand the night passed, rose the dazzling star.

  And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyardsglared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded allnight long. And in all the seas about the civilised lands, ships withthrobbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men andliving creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For alreadythe warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all overthe world, and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet andNeptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever fasterand faster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flewa hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As itflew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of theearth and scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet onlyslightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moonssweeping splendid round the sun. Every moment now the attraction betweenthe fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And theresult of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected fromits orbit into an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by hisattraction wide of its sunward rush, would "describe a curved path" andperhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close to, our earth."Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and asteady rise in temperature to I know not what limit"--so prophesied themaster mathematician.

  And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazedthe star of the coming doom.

  To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemedthat it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weatherchanged, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and Franceand England softened towards a thaw.

  But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying throughthe night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing towardsmountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror becauseof the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world,and save for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the night,nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their commonoccupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there,opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertakerplied their trades, the workers gathered in the factories, soldiersdrilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked andfled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapersroared through the nights, and many a priest of this church and thatwould not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolishpanic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000--for then,too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star--mere gas--acomet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. Therewas no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was sturdy everywhere,scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful.That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at itsnearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take.The master mathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so muchmere elaborate self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heatedby argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So,too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went abouttheir nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, thebeast world left the star unheeded.

  And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the starrise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the nightbefore, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the mastermathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.

  But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew with aterrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a littlenearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it hadturned night into a second day. Had it come straight to the earthinstead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it musthave leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took fivedays altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become athird the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thawwas assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon, butblinding white to look at, and _hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew nowwith its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, anddown the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a drivingreek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hailunprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And uponall the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt thatnight, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick andturbid, and soon--in their upper reaches--with swirling trees and thebodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostlybrilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind theflying population of their valleys.

  And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tideswere higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the stormsdrove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning wholecities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising ofthe sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grewuntil all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsideswere sliding, fissures were openi
ng, and houses and walls crumbling todestruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vastconvulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swiftand liquid that in one day it reached the sea.

  So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidalwave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island andisland and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in ablinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible itcame--a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the longcoasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a spacethe star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in itsstrength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country;towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivatedfields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at theincandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of theflood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--a flightnowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, andthe flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then death.

  China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islandsof Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because ofthe steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth tosalute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below theseething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with theearthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalayawere melting and pouring down by ten million deepening convergingchannels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits ofthe Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below thehurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggledfeebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderlessconfusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways tothat one last hope of men--the open sea.

  Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terribleswiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and thewhirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plungedincessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.

  And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for therising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In athousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thitherfrom the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hillwatched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terriblesuspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon theold constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In England itwas hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, butin the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veilof steam. And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, thesun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a discof black.

  Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of thesky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had beenveiled. All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouthsof the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out ofwhich rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people.Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one intothe turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole landseemed a-wailing, and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnaceof despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out ofthe cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that ablack disc was creeping across the light. It was the moon, comingbetween the star and the earth. And even as men cried to God at thisrespite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprangthe sun. And then star, sun and moon rushed together across theheavens.

  So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun roseclose upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, andat last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at thezenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost tosight in the brilliance of the sky. And though those who were stillalive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity thathunger, fatigue, heat and despair engender, there were still men whocould perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and earth had been attheir nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed.Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of itsheadlong journey downward into the sun.

  And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, thethunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earthwas such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where thevolcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrentsof mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leavingmud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach withall that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, itschildren. For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soiland trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping outTitanic gullies over the country side. Those were the days of darknessthat followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for manyweeks and months, the earthquakes continued.

  But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courageonly slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries,and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that timecame stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through thenew marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsidedmen perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and thesun larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took nowfourscore days between its new and new.

  But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the savingof laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come overIceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that thesailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and couldscarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of themovement of mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward andsouthward towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only withthe coming and the passing of the Star.

  The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, althoughthey are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundlyinterested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint ofcourse. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that wasflung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it isastonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly,has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses ofthe seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be ashrinkage of the white discolouration (supposed to be frozen water)round either pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of humancatastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.