Читать книгу A Brand New World - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 3

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The new planet was first observed on the night of October 4, 1966, reported by the Clarkson Observatory, near London. A few hours later the observers at Washington saw it also; and still later, it was found and identified as unknown upon one of the photographic plates of the great refracting telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona. It was not seen by observers at Table Mountain, Cape Town, and the observatory near Buenos Aires, for it was in the northern heavens.

The affair brought a brief mention in the Amalgamated Broadcasters’ report the next day; and the newspapers carried a few lines of it on their pages. Nothing more.

I handled the item. My name is Peter Vanderstuyft. I was twenty-three years old, that autumn of 1966, a newsgatherer for the Amalgamated Broadcasters, attached to the New York City headquarters. The item meant nothing to me. It was the forerunner—the significant, tiny beginning—of the most terrible period of the history of the Earth; but I did not know that. I tossed it over to Freddie Smith, who was with me in the office that night.

“Father’s staff has found a new star—wonderful!”

But Freddie’s freckled face did not answer my grin. For once his pale blue eyes were solemn. “Professor Vanderstuyft phoned me from Washington awhile ago. It sure seems queer.”

“What’s queer?” I demanded.

Then he grinned. “Nope. Your father says you’d sell your soul for a news item. When we’ve got anything important to tell the world—we’ll tell you.”

“Go wrap up an electric spark,” I informed him.

He grinned again and went back to studying his interminable blueprints—his “thermodyne principle,” as he called it, for a new heatray motor. Father was financing him for the patents and working model. Freddie was father’s assistant in the Washington Observatory. But he was off duty now in New York arranging for the manufacture of his model.

This was in October. I was tremendously busy. A sensational murder case developed, and I was sent out to Indiana to cover it. A woman had presumably murdered her husband and a couple of children, but it looked as though she were going to be acquitted.

She was a handsome woman, and a good talker. She was taking full advantage of the new law regarding free speech, and every night from the jail she was broadcasting little talks to the public.

October passed, and then November, and still I had not been able to get back to New York. Freddie occupied my rooms there, busy with his invention; father was at his post in Washington, and my sister Hulda was in Puerto Rico, visiting our friends the Cains. Our plans—father’s and mine—were to join the Cains and Hulda in Puerto Rico for Christmas.

Father was leaving the Washington Observatory to assume charge of the Royal Dutch Astronomical Bureau, which had just completed an observatory in extreme Southern Chile, with the largest telescope in the world soon to be installed there. Freddie Smith was going with him as his assistant; and the A.B. Association had appointed me their representative, to live down there also.

None of these plans worked out, however. Christmas approached, and I was still engaged in Indiana with this accursed broadcasting murderess. And father wired me that he was too busy in Washington to leave.

During all these weeks there had been continual items in the news concerning the new planet—issued by father’s Washington staff, and by most of the observatories in the northern hemisphere. Father is a queer character; the Holland blood in us makes us phlegmatic, silent, and cautious—characteristics which apply more to father than to me. He is a true scientist, calmly judicial, unwilling to judge anything or form any decisive opinion without every possible fact before him.

Thus it was that during those weeks neither Hulda in Puerto Rico nor I had an intimation from father of the startling things he was learning. As he said finally, of what use to worry us until he was sure? Like the public in general, I became aware of conditions gradually. A news item here and there—items growing more insistent as the weeks passed, but still all crowded aside to make room for the sensational murder trial.

I recall some of the items. The new planet was approaching the general region of our solar system with extraordinary velocity. A planet of the fortieth magnitude. Then they said it was the thirtieth. Soon it was visible to the naked eye. I remember reading one account, not long after the planet’s discovery, in which its spectrum was reported to be sunlight! Our own solar spectrum! Reflected sunlight! This was no distant, gigantic, incandescent star blazing with its own light. It was not large and far away, but small and close. As small as our own Earth, and already it was within the limits of our solar system. A dark globe, like our Earth, or the moon, or Venus and Mars—dark and solid, shining only reflected sunlight!

By mid-December, at a convention of astronomers held in London, the new world was named Xenephrene. Father went over in one of the mail planes and read his afterward famous paper, suggesting the name, and giving his calculation of the elements of the orbit of this new heavenly body. It was the most startling announcement which had yet been made, and for one newspaper edition it got the first page. And I was ordered to give nine minutes of broadcasting time to it.

“Xenephrene” was a globe not quite, but very nearly as large as the Earth. It had come whirling in like a comet from the star-filled regions of outer space; presumably like a comet to encircle our sun and then, with a hyperbolic orbit, to depart from us forever.

It had come visually into our northern heavens, and crossed the Earth’s orbit on the opposite side of the sun from us. It circled the sun—this was in December—made its turn between the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and now was supposedly departing.

But according to father’s calculation of its new orbital elements, it was not about to depart! Its orbit had become an ellipse—a very nearly circular ellipse similar to those of Venus and the Earth! A new planet—a brand new world—had joined our solar family! A world only a fraction smaller than Venus and the Earth; larger than Mars, larger than Mercury. An interior planet, its orbit would be within that of the Earth—between the Earth and Venus.

On this date, December 20—so ran father’s announcement—Xenephrene was proceeding in its elliptical orbit, and the Earth was in advance of it. We could see Xenephrene in the sky now—anyone could see it who cared to look. It was no more than thirty million miles from us now. A new morning and evening star, which at times far outshone Venus.

See it indeed! Xenephrene, the magnificent! For weeks it had been visible throughout its erratic course as from the great unknown realms of outer space it swam into our ken. During October and November it had been visually too near the sun—and too far away as yet—to be much of a spectacle. But I saw it in early December, just before dawn, a morning star rising in the eastern sky. A glowing purple spot of light, blazing like a great sapphire in the pale gray-blue of the dawn.

Xenephrene, the new world! I stood gazing up at it, and a flood of romance surged over me. A new world, strange, mysterious, beautiful! I had occasion several times during those terrible, fearsome days which so soon were to come to all of us on Earth, to recall my fleeting mood of romance at first sight of Xenephrene. Mysterious globe! Romantic! How well could I have added—sinister!

What the scientists were thinking and doing during these weeks of December, 1966, and January, 1967, I did not know until later. Their fears, gropings, unceasing labor to verify their dawning suspicion of the truth, they withheld from the public. Until father’s culminating discovery, which he made public on February 10, 1967.

Christmas that winter was a depressing time for all of us. I think, everywhere in the world, a sense of ominous depression was gradually spreading. A great catastrophe impending, even though unheralded, must inevitably cast its forerunning shadow. I know I felt depressed, away from father and Hulda, alone out there in Indiana on my job, with father inexplicably too busy to let me join him.

Hulda’s Christmas letter from Puerto Rico was depressing: Miserable winter. Peter, it’s positively cold. Imagine—we had it 54 degrees yesterday. In Puerto Rico! Mrs. Cain says we wish you’d keep your icy blasts of the north to yourself. She was trying to be jocular, but Hulda too was depressed that Christmas. It was indeed a miserable winter. Extraordinarily cold, everywhere. For a week or two, the papers had been commenting upon it. Zero weather around New York and all out through Indiana to Chicago. A succession of gray, snowy days—gray afternoons with the twilight seeming to come in mid-afternoon. And at nearly eight o’clock in the morning it was still the twilight of dawn. The newspapers commented on that, jocularly remarking that the weather man was making our winter days short this year.

The weather, in truth, was so abnormal that it occasioned an increasing newspaper comment. Even by Christmas, Canada was enveloped by constant sub-zero temperatures, which occasionally swept down as far as Virginia with heavy snowfalls. Florida, in December, had its greatest freeze since 1888; damage to the fruit was enormous. In the West Indies, an unprecedented cool wave was experienced.

Everywhere in the north temperate zone it was the same. And from South America we had the reverse reports. The summer in Rio and in Buenos Aires was unusually hot. Cape Town reported an abnormal spell; Australia and New Zealand were sweltering.

And there were other strange effects. Our winter days, for instance, were abnormally short. It was not fancy; it seemed an actual fact. And from the southern hemisphere reports gave reverse conditions. The days were growing unnaturally long; sunset and twilight extended abnormally far into the evening.

It occurred to me as strange that our A.B.A. never broadcasted a mention of this; that there were never any scientific, authoritative reports concerning it. Surely the scientists could determine with exactitude whether our sun were rising and setting at the times it should! They could, indeed! They could—and they were calculating it only too exactly! But, as I learned afterward, there was a world government censorship upon the whole subject.

This censorship was lifted on that memorable February 10, 1967, when father made his startling statement to the world.

On February 9th, my job in Indiana ended; the murderess was acquitted amid applause and public rejoicing. But the verdict only held a divided first-page place now with the planet Xenephrene. The new world had steadily been nearing the Earth; it was now only twenty-odd million miles away—a magnificent spectacle, a purple point of light blazing near the sun; with the naked eye it appeared twice the size of any star.

In the afternoon of February 9th, Freddie phoned me from New York. I had never heard his voice so strangely solemn.

“Pete, your father wants you to come to Washington at once.”

“What’s up?” I demanded.

“Nothing. He wants to see you and me. You come to New York—join me here—leave today. Will you?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’m through out here, fortunately.”

“I’ll wait for you here at your place. I wouldn’t try the planes, if I were you—not with storms like this. Come by train; it’s safer.”

He was so solemn! It wasn’t like Freddie Smith to bother about safety—a daredevil, if there ever was one. But he was right about the planes; the surest way to get to New York at the moment was to take it slowly.

For a week the whole western United States had been locked in the grip of a blizzard. The railroads were hung up; the strain of traffic and the fearful weather had been too much for the passenger planes. Every one was jammed; and several failed to get through and were stalled in the storm along the way. But the railroads now were getting their tracks cleared; service was improving.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told Freddie.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve got our accommodations on board the Congressional. Get here if you can.”

I got through, and we took the Congressional Limited for Washington. New York City was an almost unprecedented sight that dark-gray afternoon we left. It might have been a snowbound Canadian city, by its appearance. A heavy, silent fall of snow, thick, soft, pure-white flakes.

The north wind of the past few days had died away. The snow sifted almost vertically down between the canyons of buildings. Without a wind, the afternoon seemed only moderately cold. Freddie and I passed a street thermometer at the corner where we had gone to join our taxi, which could not get into the cross-street. The temperature was five below zero.

Freddie caught my expression. He said, “This isn’t New York cold. Can’t you tell the difference? This is the cold of the north.”

Our taxi with its clanking chains rumbled its way down Broadway and across to the Station. A white sheet, piled with soft, white snow which covered up its familiar configurations, buried its curbs, leveled street and pedestrian walks into one flat white surface. A strange Broadway; featureless, blankly expressionless, like a man’s face without hair or eyebrows.

There was little traffic. Pedestrians in a crowd tramped the street’s center. In the still cold the snow creaked and crunched under their tread.

At the shop windows, almost closed in by huge piles of snow left over from the storm of the week before, disconsolate proprietors gazed out from under the shadow of the overhead pedestrian levels. Three o’clock in the afternoon; the street lights were all winking on, turning the pure white of the snow a pale lurid green with their glare.

The crowd seemed taking it like a holiday, gay with shouts of laughter as people romped and shoved their way through the drifts. But there was no laughter within me. “The cold of the north,” Freddie had said. It brought me a vague shudder.

“Look there.” Freddie pointed to the second level at Forty-Second Street. At a department store entrance crowds were coming out and going in. A huge sign in moving electric lights gave the information that here Canadian winter equipment could be purchased. And as I gazed, a man in gaudy flannel costume of brilliant colors came from the store entrance. An advertisement, no doubt. He swung out to the pedestrian level on skis, poised, and came sliding gracefully down the incline to the main street level, amid shouts and applause from the crowd.

We humans adjust ourselves very quickly to new conditions. And, for all the pessimists to the contrary, the human instinct is to laugh.... I saw a canvas sign over a small store, on a cross-street impassable at the moment with snowdrifts. It bore the ancient quip, “Whether the weather be cold or hot, we’ve got to have weather, whether or not. Buy your Arctic overshoes here.”

New York City, that February 10th, thought it was all a good joke.

Freddie and I had a compartment on the Congressional. We anticipated it would be nearly midnight by the time we got to Washington; Freddie flung himself moodily on the lounge as though he were prepared to sleep all the way, except when we might perhaps order in dinner.

Freddie at this time was twenty-seven. I had always liked him, though physically and temperamentally we were quite opposite types. I am typically Dutch, short and wide, heavyset and stocky. But not fat. Built as Freddie once told me, along the general lines of a young cart horse. And, as he has also remarked, I have the Dutch phlegmatic sparseness of speech, which in my case, he insists, often turns surly.

Freddie, not much taller than I, was slender almost to thinness. But wiry; I have wrestled with him, and he twists like an eel, with surprising strength. A sandy-haired, pale-blue-eyed, freckled-faced fellow, usually grinning, and with a swift, ready flow of speech.

His mind not only was alert, but keen. Scientifically inclined; and an extremely good mathematician. He had made good at astronomical work from the start. As a clocker of delicate star-transits, in father’s opinion he had no equal; and he could sit all day over tedious routine mathematics and never tire.

I eyed him now as he lay on the lounge in our train compartment. It was wholly abnormal for Freddie to be so morose.

“Whatever it is father’s got to tell me,” I commented, “it sits like lead on you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said abruptly. And he added, “He ordered me to say nothing, so I’m doing it.”

I found father equally solemn. It was eleven o’clock when after crossing the snow-filled Washington streets we reached my home. Father greeted us at the door with what was a very sick attempt at a smile.

“Come in, boys. You’re lucky to get here at all. Hello, Frederick. Brought your model? That’s good—we’ll look at it presently.... Hello, son—I understand you’ve been pampering a murderess.”

In the study, when we had discarded our overclothes his manner abruptly changed. We sat down, and he stood facing us, and then began restlessly pacing the little circular room, as though undecided how to begin telling me.

“Peter,” he said at last, “you’ll think it’s queer that I’ve said nothing to you, my son, of this—this thing that is upon us now—this catastrophe to the world—”

My heart leaped. Yet it was hardly a surprise. Knowledge of it all had been coming to me little by little for weeks; fragments here and there, like the meaningless parts of a puzzle which now his words, adding nothing new, pieced together to make my premonitions a complete realization. He spoke swiftly, fronting me with his squared, heavy shoulders; his dark eyes holding me with his somber gaze.

“No use to worry you, son, or to frighten Hulda—you could be of no help—and we’re all in it together, the whole world.... They’ve lifted the censorship. The time has come when it is best for everyone to know it—this inevitable thing. Peter, you can give it to your organization tonight, and to the world. The widest publicity—this statement from me and my organization—”

He stopped abruptly, seeming to realize the incoherence of his words, striving to master his emotions and tell me calmly. He seized a chair and sat facing me, smiling at Freddie; and he lighted a cigar.

But his fingers trembled. He was a man of sixty at this time; a squarely solid, commanding figure; a smooth-shaven face, square-jawed, dark, restless eyes, with gray-black, bushy brows and a shock of iron-gray hair. A crisp, forceful speaker. But he had not been so tonight. I have never seen him look so old, almost haggard. And the usual clear white of his eyes was shot with blood.

I understood it as he talked; past weeks of anxiety, nights of sleepless observation at the telescope, watching Xenephrene, the new world; watching it come in to join our little solar family; observing by night—and all day busy with unending calculations of Xenephrene’s changing orbit as it rounded the sun and took its place among us.

Watching—at first with interest, surprise, awe; then with a dawning fear. Then, his hurried conferences with other scientists. He had been three times to London, I now learned—and once, a consultation of astronomers was held at the Chan observatory, in Tibet.

And then, conferences of the scientists with the world governments, at which time the censorship was ordered. And father went back to his post, to observe and calculate the daily abnormal changes in our sunrise and sunset. Until at last the truth could no longer be escaped. The future could be prognosticated, to a mathematical certainty; the censorship must be lifted and the world told.

Father’s voice, with its old dominating ring now, boomed at me.

“The world must be told, Peter. We cannot, dare not, hide it any longer. This new planet Xenephrene—I’ll give you all the technical details; I have them here.” He waved a sheaf of typewritten papers at me. “Your office can prepare it in any form you like. The coming of Xenephrene—its new bulk so near us—had disturbed, is now disturbing, our Earth. You know it—everybody knows it instinctively, though they don’t realize it or understand it.”

“The weather—” I began; and my pounding heart seemed nearly smothering me.

“Yes—the weather. And our queerly shortened winter days. All these abnormal conditions which have come upon us this winter. Xenephrene has affected us astronomically in just one way. The inclination of the axis of our Earth is altering. Do you know what that really means? Can you explain it to the public?”

“He can,” Freddie burst out. “He will.”

The axis of the Earth! Our seasons—our winter and summer—our climate—our days and nights—changing, permanently changing? It seemed, for an instant, nothing. And then it seemed a thought too amazing, too unnatural to encompass. The basic order of everything from time immemorial now to be changed? And as I listened to his swift, brusque words my head reeled.

The axis of the Earth was slowly swinging so that eventually our South Pole would point directly to the sun and there become stabilized. This would occur by next April 5. Our new seasons, our new astronomical year, would begin on that date.

“Can you realize what that will mean, Peter? When our South Pole points to the sun there will be a torrid zone in the southern hemisphere. The great antarctic polar continent will blaze into a tropical glory. Patagonia, the Magellan Straits, Australia, the Federated Cape Provinces, far southern Chile and the Argentine—all in the blazing tropics. Six months of that, with days months long in which the sun never sets! Then swinging back to winter.

“The new temperate zone will be at our equator. Not very temperate. Snow and ice alternating with months of blazing heat. And all our northern hemisphere—it will have six months, beginning next April, of total darkness and frightful cold.”

His voice rose to a grim power. “Ah, you’re beginning to realize what it will mean to us! New seasons, and new periods of day and night! Blazing noon at the South Pole! Dark, silent, congealed midnight in the north. Darkness like a cold black shroud over most of our northern hemisphere. Our greatest cities are here, Peter. London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Peking—from forty to fifty North Latitude. All will be buried for months in the darkness of arctic night!”

He laughed just a little wildly. “Some people think it is a joke now, this strange new winter which has descended upon us. In New York they’re beginning to treat it like a Canadian winter carnival. Fun while it lasts, and then spring and summer will come soon again—because they always have before. But this time, Peter, spring and summer won’t come soon again.

“The winter will grow colder. They have only seen its carnival aspect so far. But the cold of the north has fangs. It’s a monster—a hideous monster whose congealing breath is death. It’s lurking up there, ready to creep upon us. It’s in Canada now, in north Asia, in northern Europe.

“They’re laughing in New York because it gets dark so early in the afternoon. It’s fun to tumble in the snow in the early afternoon twilight. But they won’t laugh in another week or two. The blessed sunlight for New York is almost gone. Shorter days—still shorter—until soon there will be no day at all!

“Our huge cities here in the north, all buried in the snow and ice and darkness of a polar winter! The greatest catastrophe in the history of the world—we’re facing it now! No power on Earth can help us to escape it, for it’s inevitable!”