Tales of Space and Time
night'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 her
dead.
The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for
himself--with the great white star, shining broad and bright through the
frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal, centripetal," he said, with
his chin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its
centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into
the 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 later
watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was
now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of
itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man
had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his
bride. "Even the skies have illuminated," said the flatterer. Under
Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits,
for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the
fire-flies hovered. "That is our star," they whispered, and felt
strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.
The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers
from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial
there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and
active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as
ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back
at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little
drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost
in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a
click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and
steeples of the city, hung the star.
He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You
may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all the
universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would not
change. 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 his
lecture 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 his
students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble
in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by their
hiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at the
rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied
commonness of phrasing. "Circumstances have arisen--circumstances beyond
my control," he said and paused, "which will debar me from completing
the course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the
thing clearly and briefly, that--Man has lived in vain."
The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised
eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained
intent upon his calm grey-fringed face. "It will be interesting," he was
saying, "to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can make
it clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this
conclusion. Let us assume--"
He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that
was usual to him. "What was that about 'lived in vain?'" whispered one
student to another. "Listen," said the other, nodding towards the
lecturer.
And presently they began to understand.
That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had
carried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so
great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was
hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella,
Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and
beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled
it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the
tropics 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 as
brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read
quite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities the
lamps burnt yellow and wan.
And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout
Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the countryside
like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew
to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a
million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no
more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And
overhead, growing larger and brighter, as the earth rolled on its way
and the night passed, rose the dazzling star.
And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards
glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all
night long. And in all the seas about the civilised lands, ships with
throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and
living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already
the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over
the world, and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and
Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster
and faster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew
a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it
flew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of the
earth and scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only
slightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons
sweeping splendid round the sun. Every moment now the attraction between
the fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the
result of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from
its orbit into an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his
attraction wide of its sunward rush, would "describe a curved path" and
perhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close to, our earth.
"Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a
steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit"--so prophesied the
master mathematician.
And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazed
the star of the coming doom.
To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed
that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather
changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France
and England softened towards a thaw.
But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying through
the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing towards
mountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror because
of 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 common
occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there,
opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker
plied their trades, the workers gathered in the factories, soldiers
drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and
fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers
roared through the nights, and many a priest of this church and that
would not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish
panic. 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--a
comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There
was 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 its
nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take.
The master mathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so much
mere elaborate self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated
by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So,
too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about
their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the
beast world left the star unheeded.
And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star
rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the night
before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master
mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.
But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew with a
terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little
nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had
turned night into a second day. Had it come straight to the earth
instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must
have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took five
days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become a
third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw
was assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon, but
blinding white to look at, and _hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew now
with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and
down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving
reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail
unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon
all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that
night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and
turbid, and soon--in their upper reaches--with swirling trees and the
bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly
brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the
flying population of their valleys.
And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides
were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms
drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole
cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of
the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew
until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides
were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to
destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast
convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift
and 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 tidal
wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and
island and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in a
blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it
came--a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long
coasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a space
the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its
strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country;
towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated
fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at the
incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of the