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The Star by H. G. Wells
Recording by Jon Siegrist It was on the first day of the new year that
the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion
of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had
become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its
velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world
the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune,
nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote
speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement. Scientific
people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the
new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the
orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite
was becoming now of an unprecedented kind. Few people without a training in science can
realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust
of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats
the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation
has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million
times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before
the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial
than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space,
until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of
matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky
into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument,
as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In
a little while an opera glass could attain it.
On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware
for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens.
"A Planetary Collision," one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's
opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader
writers enlarged upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the world, on January
3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and
as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes
skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as they had always been.
Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The Winter's
dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles
shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman
saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work
betimes, milkmen, the drivers 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 the dusky quickening country it could be seen—and out at sea
by *** watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky!
Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest.
It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round
clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached,
men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed
by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes,
Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the 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 rushed
together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and
this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world.
For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed,
that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck, fairly
and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently
turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day,
two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward
and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw
it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who
far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and
climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.
And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on
house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising 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 into existence 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 and sinking in the west was
in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much
brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.
"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories
the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. "_It is nearer_," they said.
"_Nearer!_" And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer,"
and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in
a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men writing in offices,
struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places
suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, "It is nearer." It hurried
along awakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages,
men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting
the news to the passers-by. "It is nearer." Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard
the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an 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 to comfort themselves—looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for the
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 *** 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 flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night—a
flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and the flood
like a wall swift and white behind. And then death.
China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands of Eastern Asia
the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the steam and smoke and ashes the
volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and
ash, and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake
shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring
down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The
tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the
hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected
the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled
down the broad river-ways to that one last hope of men—the open sea.
Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible swiftness now.
The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths
from the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.
And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the rising of the
star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a thousand open spaces of down and upland
the people who had fled thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes
of hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense,
and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they
had counted lost to them forever. In England it was hot and clear overhead, though the
ground quivered perpetually, but in the tropics, 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 rose
close 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 the sky, 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 the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night,
out of which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret
was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters, as heat
and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing, and suddenly there swept a shadow
across that furnace of despair, and a breath 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 was creeping
across the light. It was the moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as
men cried to God at this respite, out of the East with 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 close upon each
other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last came to rest, star and
sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed
the star but was lost to sight in the brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still
alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat
and despair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs.
Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star
had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its headlong
journey downward into the sun. And then the clouds gathered, blotting out
the vision of the sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the
earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volcanoes
flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the
waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like
a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes,
its children. For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees
and houses in the way, and piling huge *** and scooping out Titanic gullies over the
country side. Those were the days of darkness that followed the star and the heat. All through
them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.
But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only slowly, might creep
back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped
the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through
the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived
that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun larger, and the moon,
shrunk to a third of its former size, took now fourscore days between its new and new.
But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving of laws and books
and machines, of the strange change that had come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores
of Baffin's Bay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious,
and could scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of
mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towards the poles of the earth.
It concerns 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 naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them
from their own standpoint of course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that
was flung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing what a
little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar
continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference
seems to be a shrinkage of the white discolouration (supposed to be frozen water) round either
pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance
of a few million miles. End of The Star
by H. G. Wells