A Brand New World
By Ray Cummings
Copyright 1928 by The Frank A. Munsey Company
_A new planet in the solar system! And in its wake
come mystery, danger--and a most amazing confusion._
This story appeared originally in The Argosy All-Story Weekly,
beginning serialization September 22, 1928.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Famous Fantastic Mysteries September 1942.]
CONTENTS
I. THE COMING OF THE WORLD
II. THE WHITE GIRL IN THE MOONLIGHT
III. THE CROWNING TERROR
IV. ZETTA
V. CRIMSON SOUND!
VI. "IF I HAD BUT KNOWN!"
VII. MYSTERIOUS STAR, IMPERTURBABLY SHINING!
VIII. FROM ACROSS THE VOID
IX. PIONEERS INTO SPACE
X. LANDING TO FACE THE UNKNOWN
XI. "UNDER GARDENS"
XII. AT DAWN
XIII. "EMPEROR OF THE EARTH!"
XIV. BRAVE, FOOLISH LITTLE ZETTA!
XV. GRAFF'S TREACHERY
XVI. ON OUR WAY TO CONQUER THE EARTH!
XVII. PLANNING THE CONQUEST
XVIII. THE EARTH AT BAY!
XIX. RED MADNESS STALKING THE EARTH
XX. THE NIGHT PROWLERS
XXI. A NEST OF VERMIN
XXII. PEACE ON EARTH
[Illustration: As if affected by laughing gas, thousands of people were
seized with an insane mirth, following a period of strange depression.
A world gone mad! Actions were aimless, horror and suicides were
spreading everywhere! And always that terrible laughter. . . . What
would happen to the human race?]]
CHAPTER I
THE COMING OF THE WORLD
The new Star was first observed on the night of October 4, 1952,
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 of Flagstaff, Arizona. By observers at Table
Mountain, Cape Town, and the observatory near Buenos Aires, it was not
seen, 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 back pages. Nothing more.
I handled the item. My name is Peter Vanderstuyft. I was twenty-three
years old, that autumn of 1952, 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 blue
prints--his "thermodyne principle," as he called it, for a new heat-ray
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 Porto Rico, visiting our friends the Cains. Our plans--father's
and mine--were to join the Cains and Hulda in Porto 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 star--issued by father's Washington staff, and by
most of the observatories of 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 Porto Rico,
nor myself 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 Star was approaching the general
region of our solar system with extraordinary velocity. A star 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 star'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 by 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 encircled 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 little solar family! A world
only a fraction smaller than Venus and the earth; larger than Mercury,
larger than Mars. 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--any one 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--a morning star it was
then--just before dawn, 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, 1952, and January, 1953, 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 on February 10, 1953, he made public.
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 Porto Rico was depressing:
Miserable winter. Peter, it's positively cold. Imagine--we had it
54 degrees yesterday. In Porto Rico! Mrs. Cain says we wish you'd
keep your icy blasts of the north to yourself.
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 very 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 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.
* * * * *
For every unexplained condition of annoyance something must be blamed.
In the United States some enterprising feature man gathered the
information that authorities considered the radio broadcasters were
responsible for the bad weather. The World Press sent it out, and it
was widely used.
Many persons--so it said--had addressed the Anglo-American Radio
Commission and other governmental radio agencies stating that the
myriads of ether waves--the "electric waves"--sent out by the
broadcasting stations were the cause of the extreme weather conditions.
The "ether" was disturbed, so it was claimed; who could say what
dangerous floods, blizzards, torrid heat, wind storms, and icy blasts
might not be caused if this radio condition were not checked? It was
suggested that the world governments take action to restrict the output
of broadcasters.
Newspaper jealousy of us, of course! It had been growing for years,
ever since those early days when we first engaged in the audible
dissemination of news. Our organization now was prompt in repudiation.
The Amalgamated Broadcasters Association appealed immediately to the
Federated World Weather Bureaus.
Within a week we were enabled to broadcast that the weather bureau
physicists were emphatic in their declaration that the weather could
not be blamed on radio waves. In order to affect the weather, radio
would have to exert an influence on temperature, humidity or barometric
pressure--which emphatically it does not do. Even in radio laboratories
where the waves are most intensely produced, there never has been any
such recorded effect.
We also pointed out that in the past, freaks of weather were always
complained of; the coldest day in the history of Washington, D.C.,
which this December of 1952 had almost but not quite equaled, was
February 11th, 1899--which was long before there were any broadcasting
stations.
Nor did any of this take into account the obvious fact that radio could
scarcely be blamed for what seemed our abnormally short winter days.
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, 1953, 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, startling 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 oddly solemn.
"Peter, 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 to-day. 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--"
"No," I said. "Besides, they're jammed since the railroads are hung up."
"Wait your chance--come by train, it's--safer."
He was so oddly solemn! It wasn't like Freddie Smith to bother about
safety--a dare-devil, 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 northeastern 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 to-morrow," 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 that February 10th
for Washington. New York City was an almost unprecedented sight that
dark-gray afternoon we left. A snowbound Canadian city it might have
been 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," still with
that oddly solemn voice.
Our taxi with its clanking chains rumbled its way down Broadway and
across Thirty-Fourth Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I had never
seen Broadway like this. A white street, 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. A few enterprising sleighs, brought down these past weeks
from upstate, went by us loaded with people. The crowd was laughing,
shouting.
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 it romped and shoved its 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 skiis; 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, heavy-set 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, freckle-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 to-night, 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-shaved 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
to-night. 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--has disturbed, is now disturbing,
our earth. You know it--everybody knows it instinctively, though they
do not 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 with it.
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 on April 5 next. 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 just 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. "They think it is a joke now, this
strange new winter which has descended upon us. They're beginning, in
New York, 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. You don't know that because our government has been so
carefully suppressing the news.
"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!"