THE CROWNING TERROR
There was so much happening everywhere in the world during those
fateful weeks that followed February 10, 1953--events so startling,
amazing, so stupendous of import, and of such diversity that I scarce
know how to recount them. Of necessity my mention of many must be
brief; and my picture of the whole, I fear, will be at best incoherent.
Yet in that quality, at least, it will be a true picture; the world
was incoherent, chaotic--everywhere a chaos of events unprecedented,
uncontrollable. And in the chaos which swept Freddie and me away, the
news from Dan Cain in Porto Rico, important though it was, at the time
concerned us little.
Father was in constant communication with the Cains; and later, after
father had gone to Miami when the Federal capital was moved there in
flight from Washington, he went to Porto Rico.
The announcement that our world was to have such different days and
nights, and a climate so utterly changed, struck the public with horror.
It is not my purpose to try to detail or to picture it. The chaos
everywhere; the paralyzation of industry throughout the northern
hemisphere which so far had been proceeding by man's will against all
the invading efforts of nature to wreck it; the panics that took place
in all the northern cities--crowds of refugees struggling to get south;
inadequate transportation; accidents; and a horrible crime-wave that
swept unchecked over every one of the large population centers.
Human activities in our modern world are very widely diversified; more
widely varied--and yet more intermingled, more interdependent--than any
one realizes until there comes an upset from the normal.
There is, in these modern times, nothing that anyone does which does
not almost immediately affect what some one else is doing. Had the
change come slowly, spread over a hundred, or a thousand or a hundred
thousand years as other great world changes have come and passed,
conditions would have adjusted themselves. No one would even have
noticed the change.
But this was happening in minutes where others had taken centuries.
New York, London, Paris and all the cities of the north were doomed
to six months of twilight and night and blighting cold. Snow now was
upon land, millions of acres of land, where crops soon would have been
growing if millions of people were to have food. Yet now we know those
millions of acres would be for months snow-buried.
Millions of homes soon would be without adequate heat or light; and the
people without adequate clothing. Rivers upon which the great power
plants depended were congealing into ice.
This for the north, with business, industry and nearly every human
activity paralyzed by the sudden public horror. But in the south, from
the Equator to the South Pole, lay the land of promise. Or at least the
public thought so.
Life lay there; life and the promise of food and warmth and the blessed
sunlight. For in the far Antarctic south, with the new light and heat
coming, millions upon millions of acres of land would be springing into
a new fertility to replace what the north had lost. But this, too, was
a fallacy; for after a few months, the pendulum would swing back; the
far south would go into night and cold.
Many hundred million people, suddenly giving up all their accustomed
work in the world's activities and trying to move to another region!
A migration greater than the sum total of all others in the world's
history. In a hundred years of systematic, careful planning and
execution it might have been accomplished without disaster. But now it
was a panic, a chaos, a flight, with distracted governments trying to
cope with it, impotent to bring even a semblance of order.
Our office of the Amalgamated Broadcasters was maintained in New
York City until well along in February. With government affiliation,
we broadcasted only what might be of help to the public; news of
conditions, generally censored to allay too great a fear; advice as to
what to do; information concerning transportation, and news from the
south. In this work, Freddie now joined me. There were days--almost
dark now except for a brief time before and after midday--when he and
I were in our cold office, one or the other of us at the microphone
throughout the twenty-four hours.
It was an office of incoherent men and disorganized service; without
light, some of the time; with frozen and burst heating pipes and no
one to repair them. We sat bundled in our overcoats, with snow piling
against the windows.
News came of crowds surging in the dark, snow-piled streets; food
giving out, with paralyzed transportation; news of raids by the public
upon all the markets; news of people trampled to death hourly at every
steamship dock, every bridge leading out of the city; uncontrollable
crowds at the tunnels, the railroad and plane terminals.
State troopers vainly patrolled streets made almost impassable by
snow which now could not be cleared away; people froze in the cold
with which they were not equipped to cope; crime was everywhere, with
criminals, like ghouls, battening on the tragedy.
* * * * *
In those terrible days there were few concerned with astronomy. Yet I
recall that one of my orders was to detail--for such as might still be
listening--a simple version of how, astronomically, all this was coming
to pass.
"Perhaps," I broadcasted, "when we know the fundamentals of this
change--the scientific reasons for it--the thing may hold less terror
for us."
Useless words! Nothing could mitigate the terror!
"You all know in a general way," I went on, "the astronomical reasons
for our alternating day and night--our succession of seasons, spring,
summer, autumn and winter. Yet if you follow me closely now, and
picture what I tell you, the subject will be clearer to your mind, and
you will understand the change which is now upon us. Some of you, our
government has advised, should remain in the north and withstand the
rigors of the new climate. New York City will not be abandoned! That
is absurd! It is the sudden change, the upset to our normal routine,
which has now caused suffering.
"When we are equipped for the new conditions, New York and other cities
in its latitude will be perfectly habitable. We will have winter nights
several months long, and an arctic cold. Then spring, and a summer
with the sun giving us months of unending daylight. Those must be our
productive months--we must grow food then, to supply the southern
hemisphere, just as in the other months they must grow food down there.
"Do not be too hasty! We cannot all--every one on earth--rush at
once to the Equator! Even there at times it will be too hot, and a
twilight winter fairly cold. Cold enough, a month or two from now, to
disorganize everything.
"It is your panic--your haste--which is our greatest danger. Be calm!
Meet the conditions as they are. Help our government to maintain order,
here in the north. The world's work must be done--the new conditions
must be coped with sanely. We are not in desperate distress; only
through panic can real disaster come!"
* * * * *
These were our broadcasted words of government appeal. And then I
went on: "There is no need for panic. We want you to understand the
astronomical reasons for our new climate. I want you to imagine
yourself standing before your round, empty dining room table. Conceive
that the room is dark and that you have placed, almost in the center of
the table, a circular vacuum globe of yellow light. That represents the
sun.
"Take now an orange, and through its center put a lead pencil. The
orange is the earth. By holding in your fingers the ends of the lead
pencil, you can rotate the orange. The lead pencil then represents the
axis of the earth.
"Can you picture yourself in your darkened room under these conditions?
As you stand facing the round table with the light near its center, you
hold the orange on its lead pencil to the right of you near the edge
of the table. You hold the lead pencil vertical; its point, standing
directly up to the ceiling would be then our North Pole; its eraser,
pressed against the table edge, would be our South Pole.
"You will find now that the light from your 'sun' illuminates about
half the orange--the half which faces toward the sun. The orange is
lighted from the North Pole to the South Pole--on the sunward side. The
other side is in shadow.
"Now, rotate the orange, holding the pencil exactly upright. You will
see that the moving surface brings its shadowed side into the sunlight.
This rotation gives us our alternating night and day.
"Still holding the pencil upright, begin now slowly carrying it with
the orange around the edge of the table. You will realize, if you
think for a moment, that, _with the pencil held exactly vertical_, it
makes no difference whether the orange is on one side of the table or
the other. The sunlight on its surface is exactly the same in every
position around the table. Under this condition, therefore, we would
have uniformly alternating days and nights of equal length; and _no
change of season_. You can see the most intense light would always be
at the equator, and the least intense, down to perpetual twilight, at
the Poles. Thus it would always be midsummer at the equator, temperate
to the north and south equally, and winter equally and always at both
Poles.
"But this, of course, was not our condition. The axis of our earth
was not vertically upright, as I have asked you first to picture it.
Conceive now that you hold the orange and pencil again to your right at
the table edge. Instead now of having the pencil point directly upward,
slant it off _to the right_--_away from the sun_--toward the edge of
your ceiling where it joins the wall, for instance. To be more exact,
you are to tilt it over until it is about one-quarter of the way to a
horizontal position. Mathematically, this is twenty-three and a half
degrees from the vertical.
"The top of the pencil--the North Pole--is now tilted away from the
sun--the bottom is tilted toward the sun. You will realize now that the
sunlit half of the orange is not from Pole to Pole. The light extends
beyond and around the South Pole to the other side--and the light _does
not reach the North Pole at all_.
"Rotate the orange with the pencil held at that tilted angle. There are
points at and near the South Pole which do not leave the light; and
points at and near the North Pole are always dark. That is our _normal_
condition in December. In the northern hemisphere we call it winter; in
the southern hemisphere they call it summer.
"Now move your orange around the edge of the table, halfway around
until you are on the other side. If you have kept the pencil tilted at
that same angle toward your ceiling corner, you will find now that its
top is pointing _toward the sun_. All the conditions on the orange's
surface are reversed. That is June; summer in the North, winter in the
South.
"Those days are gone. We are now faced with an axis change--disastrous
only because it is changing so quickly. And I want you to know just
exactly what the change is. Conceive again your orange at the right
hand of the table, with the pencil point tilted away from the sun at
that twenty-three and one-half degree angle. We were like that last
December. But since then a new world has come into the solar system.
Its coming has disturbed the old order of things with us. The eraser of
that lead pencil--our South Pole--is moving up further toward the sun!
"Take the orange a short distance along the table edge, and tilt the
pencil still further. That is where we are now, in February! Don't you
realize that more of our southern hemisphere is now in the constant
light, and more of the northern in the constant darkness? And now, tilt
the lead pencil further until it is horizontal to the table.
"The eraser--the South Pole--points directly to the sun! That is the
position we will reach next April. Rotate the orange, holding the
pencil level. You will see that the light remains on the southern half
of the orange, and the northern half remains dark! On April 5, we will
have no day and night!
"Six months later the earth will be halfway around its orbit. The axis
will remain in that new fixed position. The reverse condition then will
exist. Our North Pole will point to the sun! Light and heat in the
North! Darkness and cold in the South! So do not be too hasty in trying
to get away! These next few months will be bad, but after that we will
learn how to weather them. We cannot all live on the equator! Stay
where you are and help us fight it through!"
* * * * *
Futile words! But it was the panic of flight--the attempted rush of
so many millions of people--the disorganization of all those myriad
activities upon which life depends--which was our greatest danger.
Futile words! Impotent governments, themselves disingenuous, for they
were all preparing for hasty flight to warmer, more equable regions!
On February 22 the National Capital of the United States was moved
from Washington, District of Columbia, to temporary housing in Miami,
Florida. And even there, the great Florida city was disorganized,
snow-covered, with very nearly zero temperature.
The deaths throughout the northern hemisphere that February of 1953
will never be counted. A million? Many millions--I would hesitate to
guess.
There were some nine million people within the limits of Greater New
York on Christmas. By mid-February I suppose there were no more than a
scant fifty thousand left--and these, most of them, were trying to get
away. A dark, almost deserted, buried city--buried in a white shroud
which mercifully hid its tragedy.
I caught one last glimpse of the sun--the one clear day; the sun at
noon just creeping above the southern horizon and then plunging back.
The Arctic night was on us.
I saw the roads between New York and Washington--the great highways for
the through auto traffic. Refugees were trudging along them on foot,
carrying lights in the darkness. Plunging through the snow; walking
blindly southward when they could go no other way. Falling by the
roadside; all the traffic lines were littered with frozen bodies, soon
hidden by the snow.
We were not in Washington long; soon we were ordered to Miami. There
was a gray twilight there, which, with the buildings arranged for
temporary heating, were at least tolerable. And here we set up our
headquarters. The first of March came. Father was in Porto Rico. I
knew, by then, what strange things were transpiring there in the Cains'
plantation house.
I knew, too, what the astronomers--gathered now at Quito, Ecuador,
as the best place in the Western World for twilight observation--had
discovered.
Xenephrene was inhabited!
Father was convinced of it the day after that momentous February 10.
But the news--and the news from the secluded little plantation house
of the Cains--was withheld from the public. But on March 2, everything
was disclosed. For our distracted world one culminating blow remained.
As though all that had gone before were not enough, fate held one
crowning terror.
On March 2 it was broadcast that a hostile race of people in human form
had come from Xenephrene and landed on the earth! Invaders from this
brand new world! Landed two days before, north of New York; and now
were moving south upon the city!