XX.
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 the sun,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 isolation ofthe 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 few cometsmore unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to humanknowledge crossed this gulf of space until early in the twentieth centurythis strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky,heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky intothe radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to anydecent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in theconstellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass couldattain it.
On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemisphereswere made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusualapparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one London paperheaded the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that this strange newplanet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader-writers enlargedupon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the world, on January3rd, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent phenomenonin the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe,thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the old familiar starsjust 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 windows toshow where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, thebusy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their workbetimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jadedand pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and, in thecountry, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over thedusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at sea by seamenwatching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into the westwardsky!
Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening starat its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinklingspot of light, but a small, round, clear shining disc, an hour after theday had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared,telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed bythese fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, GoldCoast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth ofthe 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 rushedtogether, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus andspectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel,astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, asister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had sosuddenly 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 one vastmass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before thedawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westwardand the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of allthose who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors,habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing ofits advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward andhang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.
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 clicking telegraphtook that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousandcities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men writing inoffices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, mentalking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility inthose words, "It is nearer." It hurried along awakening streets, it wasshouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages, men who had readthese things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shoutingthe news to the passers-by. "It is nearer," Pretty women, flushed andglittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feignedan 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 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, with hischin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugalforce, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! Andthis--!
"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 was nowso 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 hadmarried, 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 oneanother, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies hovered."That is our star," they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by thesweet brilliance of its light.
The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers fromhim. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial therestill remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active forfour long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he hadgiven his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to thismomentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic fromhis drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then hewent t
o the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half-way up thesky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys, and steeples of the city, hungthe star.
He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You maykill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all theuniverse for that matter--in the grip of this small brain. I would notchange. Even now."
He looked at the little phial. "There will be no need of sleep again," hesaid. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he entered his lecturetheatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was, andcarefully 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 their hidinghis supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at the rising tiersof young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness ofphrasing.
"Circumstances have arisen--circumstances beyond my control," he said, andpaused, "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? 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 make itclear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this conclusion. Letus assume----"
He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that wasusual to him. "What was that about 'lived in vain'?" whispered one studentto 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 carriedit some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so great thatthe sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was hidden inits turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius,and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and beautiful. In manyparts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It wasperceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemedas if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon. The frost was stillon the ground in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it weremidsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by thatcold, clear light, and in the cities the lamps burnt yellow and wan.
And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout Christendoma sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country-side like thebelling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to aclangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a millionbelfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sinno more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growinglarger 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 shipyardsglared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded allnight long. And in all the seas about the civilized 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 over theworld and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and Neptune,locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster and fastertowards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew a hundredmiles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew now,indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles, wide of the earth andscarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only slightlyperturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendidround the sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star andthe greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of thatattraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from its orbit intoan elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his attraction wide ofits sunward rush, would "describe a curved path," and perhaps collidewith, and certainly pass very close to, our earth. "Earthquakes, volcanicoutbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a steady rise in temperatureto I know not what limit"--so prophesied the master mathematician.
And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid blazed thestar of the coming doom.
To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached it seemed thatit was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, andthe frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and Englandsoftened 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, andsave for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the night, ninehuman beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations. Inall the cities the shops, save one here and there, opened and closed attheir proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, theworkers gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied,lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians plannedtheir schemes. The presses of the newspapers roared through the nights,and many a priest of this church and that would not open his holy buildingto further what he considered a foolish panic. The newspapers insisted onthe lesson of the year 1000--for then, too, people had anticipated theend. The star was no star--mere gas--a comet; and were it a star it couldnot possibly strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing.Common-sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclinedto persecute the obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen byGreenwich time, the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then theworld would see the turn things would take. The master mathematician'sgrim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborateself-advertisement. Common-sense at last, a little heated by argument,signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarismand savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightlybusiness, and, save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world leftthe 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 a terriblesteadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearerthe midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned nightinto a second day. Had it come straight to the earth instead of in acurved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt theintervening gulf in a day; but as it was, it took five days altogether tocome by our planet. The next night it had become a third the size of themoon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured. It rose overAmerica 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 andgathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrencevalley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder-clouds,flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was athaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth thesnow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out ofhigh 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 atlast, behind the flying population of their valleys.
And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides werehigher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove thewaters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And sogreat grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was likethe coming of a shadow. The
earthquakes began and grew until all downAmerica from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding,fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. Thewhole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult oflava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day itreached the sea.
So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,trailed the thunder-storms 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 its strength,showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns andvillages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated fields,millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at theincandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of the flood.And thus it was with millions of men that night--a flight nowhither, withlimbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and the flood like awall 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 of thesteam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute itscoming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seethingfloods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks.Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting andpouring down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plainsof Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles wereaflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around thestems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected theblood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude ofmen and women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last hope ofmen--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 hill watchedfor that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense,and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the oldconstellations they had counted lost to them for ever. In England it washot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, but in thetropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam.And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the sun roseclose upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a disc of 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 been veiled.All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of theGanges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rosetemples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaretwas a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbidwaters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing,and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and abreath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air.Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a black disc wascreeping across the light. It was the moon, coming between the star andthe earth. And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the Eastwith a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun,and moon rushed together across the heavens.
So it was that presently to the European watchers star and sun rose closeupon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at lastcame to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith ofthe sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in thebrilliance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded itfor the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat anddespair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning ofthese signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about oneanother, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter andswifter, in the last stage of its headlong 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 torrents ofmud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-siltedruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that hadfloated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For daysthe water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and housesin the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies overthe country-side. Those were the days of darkness that followed the starand the heat. All through them, and for many weeks and months, theearthquakes continued.
But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage onlyslowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, andsodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time camestunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the newmarks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided menperceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sunlarger, 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 saving oflaws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come overIceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the sailorscoming there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarcebelieve their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement ofmankind, now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towardsthe poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming and thepassing of the star.
The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although theyare very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly interestedby these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course."Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flungthrough our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing whata little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. Allthe familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remainintact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of thewhite discolouration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole."Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at adistance of a few million miles.