CHAPTER XXXVIII
WAITING FOR DOOM
This was the all-important news which the inhabitants of every townwhich possessed a well-informed newspaper read the next morning. It was,in the more important of them, followed by digests of the calculationswhich had made this terrific result a practical certainty. These, again,were followed by speculations, some deliberately scientific, and somewild beyond the dreams of the most hopeless hysteria.
Men and women who for a generation or so had been making large incomesby prophesying the end of the world as a certainty about every sevenyears--and had bought up long leaseholds meanwhile--now gambled withabsolute certainty on the shortness of the public memory, revised theirfigures, and proved to demonstration that this was the very thing theyhad been foretelling all along.
First--outside scientific circles--came blank incredulity. The ordinaryman and woman in the street had not room in their brains for such atremendous idea as this--fact or no fact. They were already filled witha crowd of much smaller and, to them, much more pressing concerns, thana collision with a comet which you couldn't even see except through abig telescope: and then that sort of thing had been talked and writtenabout hundreds of times before and had never come to anything, so whyshould this?
But when the morning papers dated--somewhat ominously--the twenty-fifthof March, quarter day, informed their readers that, granted fineweather, the comet would be visible to the naked eye from sunset tosunrise according to longitude that night, the views of the man and thewoman who had taken the matter so lightly underwent a very considerablechange.
While the comet could only be seen, save by astronomers, in thephotographs that could be bought in any form from a picture-postcard toa five-guinea reproduction of the actual thing, there was still an airof unconvincing unreality about. Of course it might be coming, but itwas still very far away, and it might not arrive after all. Yet whenthat fateful night had passed and millions of sleepless eyes had seenthe south-western stars shining through a pale luminous mist extended inthe shape of two vast filmy wings with a brighter spot of yellow flamebetween them, the whole matter seemed to take on a very different and amuch more serious aspect.
The fighting had come to a sudden stop, as though by a mutually tacitagreement. Not even the German Emperor could now deny that Lennard hadmade no idle threat at Canterbury when he had given him the destructionof the world as an alternative to the conquest of Britain. Still, he didnot quite believe in the possibility of that destruction even yet, inspite of what the Tsar had told him and what he had learned from othersources. He still wanted to fight to a finish, and, as Deputy EuropeanProvidence, he had a very real objection to the interference ofapparently irresponsible celestial bodies with his carefully-thought-outplans for the ordering of mundane civilisation on German commerciallines. Whether they liked it or not, it must be the best thing in theend for them: otherwise how could He have come to think it all out?
Meanwhile, to make matters worse from his point of view, John Castellanhad refused absolutely to accept any modification of the original terms,and he had replied to an order from headquarters to report himself andthe ships still left under his control by loading the said ships withammunition and motive power and then disappearing from the field ofaction without leaving a trace as to his present or future whereaboutsbehind him, and so, as far as matters went, entirely fulfilling theTsar's almost prophetic fears.
And then, precisely at the hour, minute and second predicted, fivehours, thirty minutes and twenty-five seconds, a.m., on the 31st ofMarch, the comet became visible in daylight about two and a half degreessouth-westward of the Morning Star. Twenty-four hours later the twowings came into view, and the next evening the Invader looked like somegigantic bird of prey swooping down from its eyrie somewhere in theheights of Space upon the trembling and terrified world. Theprofessional prophets said, with an excellent assumption of absoluteconviction, that it was nothing less awful than the Destroying Angelhimself _in propria persona_.
At length, when excitement had developed into frenzy, and frenzy into analmost universal delirium, two cablegrams crossed each other along thebed of the Atlantic Ocean. One was to say that the Pittsburg gun wasready, and the other that the loading of the Bolton Baby--feeding, somecallous humorist of the day called it--was to begin the next morning.This meant that there was just a week--an ordinary working week, betweenthe human race and something very like the Day of Judgment.
The next day Lennard set all the existing wires of the world thrillingwith the news that the huge projectile, charged with its thirtyhundredweight of explosives, was resting quietly in its place on the topof a potential volcano which, loosened by the touch of a woman's hand,was to hurl it through space and into the heart of the swiftly-advancingInvader from the outmost realms of Space.