world within the crystal. The things were in all cases seen by Mr. Cave,
and the method of working was invariably for him to watch the crystal and
report what he saw, while Mr. Wace (who as a science student had learnt
the trick of writing in the dark) wrote a brief note of his report. When
the crystal faded, it was put into its box in the proper position and the
electric light turned on. Mr. Wace asked questions, and suggested
observations to clear up difficult points. Nothing, indeed, could have
been less visionary and more matter-of-fact.
The attention of Mr. Cave had been speedily directed to the bird-like
creatures he had seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier
visions. His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered for a
time that they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then he thought,
grotesquely enough, that they might be cherubs. Their heads were round and
curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled
him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not
feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed fish and
with the same subtle play of colour, and these wings were not built on the
plan of bird-wing or bat, Mr. Wace learned, but supported by curved ribs
radiating from the body. (A sort of butterfly wing with curved ribs seems
best to express their appearance.) The body was small, but fitted with two
bunches of prehensile organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the
mouth. Incredible as it appeared to Mr. Wace, the persuasion at last
became irresistible that it was these creatures which owned the great
quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad
valley so splendid. And Mr. Cave perceived that the buildings, with other
peculiarities, had no doors, but that the great circular windows, which
opened freely, gave the creatures egress and entrance. They would alight
upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a smallness almost rod-like, and
hop into the interior. But among them was a multitude of smaller-winged
creatures, like great dragon-flies and moths and flying beetles, and
across the greensward brilliantly-coloured gigantic ground-beetles crawled
lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the causeways and terraces, large-headed
creatures similar to the greater winged flies, but wingless, were visible,
hopping busily upon their hand-like tangle of tentacles.
Allusion has already been made to the glittering objects upon masts that
stood upon the terrace of the nearer building. It dawned upon Mr. Cave,
after regarding one of these masts very fixedly on one particularly vivid
day that the glittering object there was a crystal exactly like that into
which he peered. And a still more careful scrutiny convinced him that each
one in a vista of nearly twenty carried a similar object.
Occasionally one of the large flying creatures would flutter up to one,
and folding its wings and coiling a number of its tentacles about the
mast, would regard the crystal fixedly for a space,--sometimes for as long
as fifteen minutes. And a series of observations, made at the suggestion
of Mr. Wace, convinced both watchers that, so far as this visionary world
was concerned, the crystal into which they peered actually stood at the
summit of the end-most mast on the terrace, and that on one occasion at
least one of these inhabitants of this other world had looked into Mr.
Cave's face while he was making these observations.
So much for the essential facts of this very singular story. Unless we
dismiss it all as the ingenious fabrication of Mr. Wace, we have to
believe one of two things: either that Mr. Cave's crystal was in two
worlds at once, and that while it was carried about in one, it remained
stationary in the other, which seems altogether absurd; or else that it
had some peculiar relation of sympathy with another and exactly similar
crystal in this other world, so that what was seen in the interior of the
one in this world was, under suitable conditions, visible to an observer
in the corresponding crystal in the other world; and _vice versa_. At
present, indeed, we do not know of any way in which two crystals could so
come _en rapport_, but nowadays we know enough to understand that the
thing is not altogether impossible. This view of the crystals as _en
rapport_ was the supposition that occurred to Mr. Wace, and to me at
least it seems extremely plausible...
And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence of
Mr. Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened rapidly--
there was a very brief twilight interval indeed--and the stars shone out.
They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged in the same
constellations. Mr. Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and
Sirius; so that the other world must be somewhere in the solar system,
and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of miles from our own.
Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learned that the midnight sky was a
darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the sun seemed a little
smaller. _And there were two small moons!_ "like our moon but
smaller, and quite differently marked," one of which moved so rapidly that
its motion was clearly visible as one regarded it. These moons were never
high in the sky, but vanished as they rose: that is, every time they
revolved they were eclipsed because they were so near their primary
planet. And all this answers quite completely, although Mr. Cave did not
know it, to what must be the condition of things on Mars.
Indeed, it seems an exceedingly plausible conclusion that peering into
this crystal Mr. Cave did actually see the planet Mars and its
inhabitants. And if that be the case, then the evening star that shone so
brilliantly in the sky of that distant vision was neither more nor less
than our own familiar earth.
For a time the Martians--if they were Martians--do not seem to have known
of Mr. Cave's inspection. Once or twice one would come to peer, and go
away very shortly to some other mast, as though the vision was
unsatisfactory. During this time Mr. Cave was able to watch the
proceedings of these winged people without being disturbed by their
attentions, and although his report is necessarily vague and fragmentary,
it is nevertheless very suggestive. Imagine the impression of humanity a
Martian observer would get who, after a difficult process of preparation
and with considerable fatigue to the eyes, was able to peer at London from
the steeple of St. Martin's Church for stretches, at longest, of four
minutes at a time. Mr. Cave was unable to ascertain if the winged Martians
were the same as the Martians who hopped about the causeways and terraces,
and if the latter could put on wings at will. He several times saw certain
clumsy bipeds, dimly suggestive of apes, white and partially translucent,
feeding among certain of the lichenous trees, and once some of these fled
before one of the hopping, round-headed Martians. The latter caught one in
its tentacles, and then the picture faded suddenly and left Mr. Cave most
tantalisingly in the dark. On another occasion a vast thing, that Mr. Cave
thought at first was some gigantic insect, appeared advancing along the
causeway beside the canal with extraordinary rapidity. As this drew nearer
Mr. Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and of
extraordinary complexity. And then, when he looked again, it had passed
out of sight.
After a time Mr. Wace aspired to attract the attention of the Martians,
and the next time that the strange eyes of one of them appeared close to
the crystal Mr. Cave cried out and sprang away, and they immediately
turned on the light and began to gesticulate in a manner suggestive of
signalling. But when at last Mr. Cave examined the crystal again the
Martian had departed.
Thus far these observations had progressed in early November, and then Mr.
Cave, feeling that the suspicions of his family about the crystal were
allayed, began to take it to and fro with him in order that, as occasion
arose in the daytime or night, he might comfort himself with what was fast
becoming the most real thing in his existence.
In December Mr. Wace's work in connection with a forthcoming examination
became heavy, the sittings were reluctantly suspended for a week, and for
ten or eleven days--he is not quite sure which--he saw nothing of Cave. He
then grew anxious to resume these investigations, and, the stress of his
seasonal labours being abated, he went down to Seven Dials. At the corner
he noticed a shutter before a bird fancier's window, and then another at a
cobbler's. Mr. Cave's shop was closed.
He rapped and the door was opened by the step-son in black. He at once
called Mrs. Cave, who was, Mr. Wace could not but observe, in cheap but
ample widow's weeds of the most imposing pattern. Without any very great
surprise Mr. Wace learnt that Cave was dead and already buried. She was in
tears, and her voice was a little thick. She had just returned from
Highgate. Her mind seemed occupied with her own prospects and the
honourable details of the obsequies, but Mr. Wace was at last able to
learn the particulars of Cave's death. He had been found dead in his shop
in the early morning, the day after his last visit to Mr. Wace, and the
crystal had been clasped in his stone-cold hands. His face was smiling,
said Mrs. Cave, and the velvet cloth from the minerals lay on the floor at
his feet. He must have been dead five or six hours when he was found.
This came as a great shock to Wace, and he began to reproach himself
bitterly for having neglected the plain symptoms of the old man's
ill-health. But his chief thought was of the crystal. He approached that
topic in a gingerly manner, because he knew Mrs. Cave's peculiarities. He
was dumfounded to learn that it was sold.
Mrs. Cave's first impulse, directly Cave's body had been taken upstairs,
had been to write to the mad clergyman who had offered five pounds for the
crystal, informing him of its recovery; but after a violent hunt, in which
her daughter joined her, they were convinced of the loss of his address.
As they were without the means required to mourn and bury Cave in the
elaborate style the dignity of an old Seven Dials inhabitant demands, they
had appealed to a friendly fellow-tradesman in Great Portland Street. He
had very kindly taken over a portion of the stock at a valuation. The
valuation was his own, and the crystal egg was included in one of the
lots. Mr. Wace, after a few suitable condolences, a little off-handedly
proffered perhaps, hurried at once to Great Portland Street. But there he
learned that the crystal egg had already been sold to a tall, dark man in
grey. And there the material facts in this curious, and to me at least
very suggestive, story come abruptly to an end. The Great Portland Street
dealer did not know who the tall dark man in grey was, nor had he observed
him with sufficient attention to describe him minutely. He did not even
know which way this person had gone after leaving the shop. For a time Mr.
Wace remained in the shop, trying the dealer's patience with hopeless
questions, venting his own exasperation. And at last, realising abruptly
that the whole thing had passed out of his hands, had vanished like a
vision of the night, he returned to his own rooms, a little astonished to
find the notes he had made still tangible and visible upon, his untidy
table.
His annoyance and disappointment were naturally very great. He made a
second call (equally ineffectual) upon the Great Portland Street dealer,
and he resorted to advertisements in such periodicals as were lively to
come into the hands of a _bric-a-brac_ collector. He also wrote
letters to _The Daily Chronicle_ and _Nature_, but both those
periodicals, suspecting a hoax, asked him to reconsider his action before
they printed, and he was advised that such a strange story, unfortunately
so bare of supporting evidence, might imperil his reputation as an
investigator. Moreover, the calls of his proper work were urgent. So that
after a month or so, save for an occasional reminder to certain dealers,
he had reluctantly to abandon the quest for the crystal egg, and from that
day to this it remains undiscovered. Occasionally, however, he tells me,
and I can quite believe him, he has bursts of zeal, in which he abandons
his more urgent occupation and resumes the search.
Whether or not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and origin
of it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If the present
purchaser is a collector, one would have expected the enquiries of Mr.
Wace to have reached him through the dealers. He has been able to discover
Mr. Cave's clergyman and "Oriental"--no other than the Rev. James Parker
and the young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I am obliged to them for
certain particulars. The object of the Prince was simply curiosity--and
extravagance. He was so eager to buy because Cave was so oddly reluctant
to sell. It is just as possible that the buyer in the second instance was
simply a casual purchaser and not a collector at all, and the crystal egg,
for all I know, may at the present moment be within a mile of me,
decorating a drawing-room or serving as a paper-weight--its remarkable
functions all unknown. Indeed, it is partly with the idea of such a
possibility that I have thrown this narrative into a form that will give
it a chance of being read by the ordinary consumer of fiction.
My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr.
Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of Mr.
Cave's to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable, way
_en rapport_, and we both believe further that the terrestrial
crystal must have been--possibly at some remote date--sent hither from
that planet, in order to give the Martians a near view of our affairs.
Possibly the fellows to the crystals on the other masts are also on our
globe. No theory of hallucination suffices for the facts.
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 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 seamen
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 negro 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 small 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----"