Tales of Space and Time
and the crystal had been clasped in his stone-cold hands. His face was
smiling, said Mrs. Cave, and the velvet cloth from the minerals lay on
the floor at his feet. He must have been dead five or six hours when he
was found.
This came as a great shock to Wace, and he began to reproach himself
bitterly for having neglected the plain symptoms of the old man's
ill-health. But his chief thought was of the crystal. He approached that
topic in a gingerly manner, because he knew Mrs. Cave's peculiarities.
He was dumbfoundered to learn that it was sold.
Mrs. Cave's first impulse, directly Cave's body had been taken upstairs,
had been to write to the mad clergyman who had offered five pounds for
the crystal, informing him of its recovery; but after a violent hunt in
which her daughter joined her, they were convinced of the loss of his
address. As they were without the means required to mourn and bury Cave
in the elaborate style the dignity of an old Seven Dials inhabitant
demands, they had appealed to a friendly fellow-tradesman in Great
Portland Street. He had very kindly taken over a portion of the stock at
a valuation. The valuation was his own and the crystal egg was included
in one of the lots. Mr. Wace, after a few suitable consolatory
observations, a little off-handedly proffered perhaps, hurried at once
to Great Portland Street. But there he learned that the crystal egg had
already been sold to a tall, dark man in grey. And there the material
facts in this curious, and to me at least very suggestive, story come
abruptly to an end. The Great Portland Street dealer did not know who
the tall dark man in grey was, nor had he observed him with sufficient
attention to describe him minutely. He did not even know which way this
person had gone after leaving the shop. For a time Mr. Wace remained in
the shop, trying the dealer's patience with hopeless questions, venting
his own exasperation. And at last, realising abruptly that the whole
thing had passed out of his hands, had vanished like a vision of the
night, he returned to his own rooms, a little astonished to find the
notes he had made still tangible and visible upon his untidy table.
His annoyance and disappointment were naturally very great. He made a
second call (equally ineffectual) upon the Great Portland Street dealer,
and he resorted to advertisements in such periodicals as were likely to
come into the hands of a _bric-a-brac_ collector. He also wrote letters
to _The Daily Chronicle_ and _Nature_, but both those periodicals,
suspecting a hoax, asked him to reconsider his action before they
printed, and he was advised that such a strange story, unfortunately so
bare of supporting evidence, might imperil his reputation as an
investigator. Moreover, the calls of his proper work were urgent. So
that after a month or so, save for an occasional reminder to certain
dealers, he had reluctantly to abandon the quest for the crystal egg,
and from that day to this it remains undiscovered. Occasionally,
however, he tells me, and I can quite believe him, he has bursts of
zeal, in which he abandons his more urgent occupation and resumes the
search.
Whether or not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and
origin of it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If
the present purchaser is a collector, one would have expected the
enquiries of Mr. Wace to have reached him through the dealers. He has
been able to discover Mr. Cave's clergyman and "Oriental"--no other than
the Rev. James Parker and the young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I am
obliged to them for certain particulars. The object of the Prince was
simply curiosity--and extravagance. He was so eager to buy, because Cave
was so oddly reluctant to sell. It is just as possible that the buyer in
the second instance was simply a casual purchaser and not a collector at
all, and the crystal egg, for all I know, may at the present moment be
within a mile of me, decorating a drawing-room or serving as a
paper-weight--its remarkable functions all unknown. Indeed, it is partly
with the idea of such a possibility that I have thrown this narrative
into a form that will give it a chance of being read by the ordinary
consumer of fiction.
My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr.
Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of
Mr. Cave's to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable,
way _en rapport_, and we both believe further that the terrestrial
crystal must have been--possibly at some remote date--sent hither from
that planet, in order to give the Martians a near view of our affairs.
Possibly the fellows to the crystals in the other masts are also on our
globe. No theory of hallucination suffices for the facts.
The Star
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 the
planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the
sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a
suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news
was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose
inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor
outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a
faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause
any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the
intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new
body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite
different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the
deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an
unprecedented kind.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation
of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of
planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that
almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is
space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth
or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million
miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed
before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few
comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to
human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth
century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was,
bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the
sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly
visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible
diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an
opera glass could attain it.
On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two
hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance
of this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one
London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that
this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader
writers enlarged upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the
world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of some
imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset
round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the
old familiar stars just as they had always been.
Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead
grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of
daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows
to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the
thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to
their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation
going 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 sea
by seamen watching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into
the westward sky!
Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening
star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere
twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour
after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared
and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are
foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky
Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood
in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new
star.
And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus
and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel
astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a
sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had
so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck,
fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat
of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one
vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before
the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank
westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it,
but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those
sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard
nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb
zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the
night.
And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on
hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the
rising 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 into
existence 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 and
sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but
scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little
circle of the strange new star.
"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the
dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one
another. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"
And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clicking
telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a
thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men
writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their
pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque
possibility in those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along awakening
streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages,
men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in
yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passers-by. "It is nearer."
Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly
between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not
feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be
to find out things like that!"
Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to
comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for the