The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories Read online

  THE STAR

  It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcementwas made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that themotion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planetsthat wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy hadalready called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocityin December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated tointerest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants wereunaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside theastronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faintremote 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 thatthe new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that itsmotion was quite different from the orderly progress of theplanets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite wasbecoming now of an unprecedented kind.

  Few people without a training in science can realise the hugeisolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets,its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in avacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond theorbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observationhas penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness,for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallestestimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest ofthe stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantialthan the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledgecrossed 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 ofthe sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it wasclearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barelysensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In alittle while an opera 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 realimportance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A PlanetaryCollision," one London paper headed the news, and proclaimedDuchaine's opinion that this strange new planet would probablycollide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic;so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, therewas an expectation, however vague of some imminent phenomenon inthe sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe,thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the old familiarstars just as they had always been.

  Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the starsoverhead grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filteringaccumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shoneyellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But theyawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the marketsstopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, thedrivers 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 thedusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at sea by seamenwatching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into thewestward sky!

  Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than theevening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white andlarge, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clearshining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where sciencehas not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of thewars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs inthe Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes,Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of thesunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.

  And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressedexcitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remotebodies had rushed together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gatherphotographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance andthat, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of aworld. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, fargreater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed intoflaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck, fairly andsquarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat ofthe concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into onevast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hoursbefore the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only asit sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere menmarvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could havemarvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars,who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it nowrise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead andsink westward with the passing of the night.

  And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds ofwatchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staringeastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with awhite glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, andthose who had seen it come into existence the night before criedout at the sight of it. "It is larger," they cried. "It isbrighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in thewest was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely inall its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circleof the strange new star.

  "It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets.But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath andpeered at one another. "_It is nearer_," they said. "_Nearer!_"

  And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and theclicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephonewires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered thetype. "It is nearer." Men writing in offices, struck with astrange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in athousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility inthose words, "It is nearer." It hurried along wakening streets, itwas shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men whohad read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-litdoorways shouting the news to the passersby. "It is nearer."Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestinglybetween the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they didnot feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very cleverpeople must be to find out things like that!"

  Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured thosewords to comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to benearer, for the night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmthfrom it if it _is_ nearer, all the same."

  "What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman kneelingbeside her dead.

  The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzledit out for himself--with the great white star shining broad andbright through the frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal,centripetal," he said, with his chin on his fist. "Stop a planetin 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 withthe later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange staragain. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but apale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In aSouth African City a great man had married, and the streets werealight to welcome his return with his bride. "Even the skies haveilluminated," said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negrolovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of oneanother, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flieshovered. "That is our star," they whispered, and felt strangelycomforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.

  The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushedthe papers from him. His calculations were already finished. Ina small white phial there still remained a little of the drug thathad kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day,serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to hisstudents, and then had come back at once to this momentouscalculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic fromhis drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought.Then he we
nt to the window, and the blind went up with a click.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 braveenemy. "You may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I canhold you--and all the universe for that matter--in the grip of thislittle brain. I would not change. Even now."

  He looked at the little phial. "There will be no need ofsleep again," he said. The next day at noon--punctual to theminute, he entered his lecture theatre, put his hat on the end ofthe table as his habit was, and carefully selected a large piece ofchalk. It was a joke among his students that he could not lecturewithout that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and once hehad been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He cameand looked under his grey eyebrows at the rising tiers of youngfresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness ofphrasing. "Circumstances have arisen--circumstances beyond mycontrol," he said and paused, "which will debar me from completingthe course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may putthe 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 twofaces remained intent upon his calm grey-fringed face. "It will beinteresting," he was saying, "to devote this morning to anexposition, so far as I can make it clear to you, of thecalculations that have led me to this conclusion. Let us assume--"

  He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in theway 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 motionhad carried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and itsbrightness was so great that the sky became a luminous blue as itrose, and every star was hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter nearthe zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of theBear. It was very white and beautiful. In many parts of the worldthat night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was perceptiblylarger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as ifit 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 ifit were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinaryprint by that cold clear light, and in the cities the lamps burntyellow and wan.

  And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughoutChristendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the countryside like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmuroustumult grew to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of thebells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the peopleto sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churchesand pray. And overhead, growing larger and brighter as the earthrolled on its way and the night passed, rose the dazzling star.

  And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, theshipyards glared, and whatever roads led to high country were litand crowded all night long. And in all the seas about thecivilised lands, ships with throbbing engines, and ships withbellying sails, crowded with men and living creatures, werestanding out to ocean and the north. For already the warning ofthe 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 andfaster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing massflew a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocityincreased. As it flew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred millionof miles wide of the earth and scarcely affect it. But near itsdestined path, as yet only slightly perturbed, spun the mightyplanet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid round the sun.Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and thegreatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of thatattraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from its orbitinto an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by hisattraction wide of its sunward rush, would "describe a curved path"and perhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close to, ourearth. "Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves,floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not whatlimit"--so prophesied the master mathematician.

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

  To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, itseemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, theweather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europeand France and England softened towards a thaw.

  But you must not imagine because I have spoken of peoplepraying through the night and people going aboard ships and peoplefleeing toward mountainous country that the whole world was alreadyin a terror because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wontstill ruled the world, and save for the talk of idle moments andthe splendour of the night, nine human beings out of ten were stillbusy 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 workersgathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied,lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politiciansplanned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers roaredthrough the night, and many a priest of this church and that wouldnot open his holy building to further what he considered a foolishpanic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000--forthen, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was nostar--mere gas--a comet; and were it a star it could not possiblystrike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Commonsense 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. Thenthe world would see the turn things would take. The mastermathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so much mereelaborate 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, wentabout their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here andthere, the beast world left the star unheeded.

  And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States sawthe star rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it hadbeen the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh atthe master mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.

  But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grewwith a terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger eachhour, a little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter andbrighter, until it had turned night into a second day. Had it comestraight to the earth instead of in a curved path, had it lost novelocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in aday, but as it was it took five days altogether to come by ourplanet. The next night it had become a third the size of the moonbefore it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured. It roseover America near the size of the moon, but blinding white to lookat, and _hot_; and a breath of hot wind blew now with itsrising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, anddown the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through adriving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning,and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastatingfloods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow andice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out ofhigh country flowed thick and turbid, and soon--in their upperreaches--with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men.They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and cametrickling over their banks at last, behind the flying populationof their valleys.

  And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic thetides were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and thestorms drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland,drowning whole cities. And so great grew the heat during the nightthat the rising of the sun was like the coming of a shadow. Theearthquakes began and grew until all down America
from the ArcticCircle to Cape Horn, hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening,and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The whole side ofCotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of lavapoured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one dayit reached the sea.

  So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across thePacific, trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and thegrowing tidal wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager,poured over island and island and swept them clear of men. Untilthat wave came at last--in a blinding light and with the breath ofa furnace, swift and terrible it came--a wall of water, fifty feethigh, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and sweptinland across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotternow and larger and brighter than the sun in its strength, showedwith pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns andvillages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivatedfields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror atthe incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur ofthe flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--aflight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce andscant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And thendeath.

  China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and allthe islands of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull redfire because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes werespouting forth to salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gasesand ash, and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayedand rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snowsof Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring down by tenmillion deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burmah andHindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflamein a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around thestems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflectedthe blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion amultitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to thatone last hope of men--the open sea.

  Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with aterrible swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost itsphosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreathsfrom the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled withstorm-tossed ships.

  And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europewatched for the rising of the star that the world must have ceasedits rotation. In a thousand open spaces of down and upland thepeople who had fled thither from the floods and the falling housesand sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in vain. Hourfollowed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not.Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they hadcounted lost to them forever. In England it was hot and clearoverhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, but in thetropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil ofsteam. And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late,the sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its white heartwas a disc of black.

  Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind themovement of the sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, itslight had been veiled. All the plain of India from the mouth ofthe Indus to the mouths of the Ganges was a shallow waste ofshining water that night, out of which rose temples and palaces,mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret was aclustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbidwaters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemeda-wailing and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace ofdespair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, outof the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, sawthat a black disc was creeping across the light. It was the moon,coming between the star and the earth. And even as men cried toGod at this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicableswiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun and moon rushedtogether across the heavens.

  So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star andsun rose close upon each other, drove headlong for a space and thenslower, and at last came to rest, star and sun merged into oneglare of flame at the zenith of the sky. The moon no longereclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the brilliance of thesky. And though those who were still alive regarded it for themost part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat anddespair engender, there were still men who could perceive themeaning of these signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest,had swung about one another, and the star had passed. Already itwas 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 thesky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; allover the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never beforeseen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopythere descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters werepouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earthlittered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and thedead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days thewater streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees andhouses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanicgullies over the country side. Those were the days of darknessthat followed the star and the heat. All through them, and formany weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.

  But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gatheringcourage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities,buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escapedthe storms of that time came stunned and shattered and soundingtheir way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of oncefamiliar ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived thateverywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun 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, ofthe saving of laws and books and machines, of the strange changethat had come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin'sBay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them greenand gracious, and could scarce believe their eyes, this story doesnot tell. Nor of the movement of mankind now that the earth washotter, northward and southward towards the poles of the earth. Itconcerns itself only with the coming and the passing of the Star.

  The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars,although they are very different beings from men--were naturallyprofoundly interested by these things. They saw them from theirown standpoint of course. "Considering the mass and temperature ofthe missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun,"one wrote, "it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, whichit missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continentalmarkings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed theonly difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration(supposed to be frozen water) round either pole." Which only showshow small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distanceof a few million miles.