It was on May 13th, the tenth day after Dr. Marlin's first announcement of the thing, that he gave to the world through the Intelligence Bureau that epochal statement, and in it he referred first to his silence and to the silence of his fellow-astronomers in the preceding few days. "In those days," he said, "every observatory in the world has been engaged in an intensive investigation of this acceleration of the sun's rotation, which I discovered. And in each of those days the sun's rotatory speed has continued to increase at exactly the same rate! In each day that speed has increased so much as to cut down the sun's rotatory period 4 hours more, so that now, ten days after the beginning of the thing, its rotatory period has been cut down by 40 hours. In other words, ten days ago the sun turned as it had always turned to our knowledge, at the rate of one turn in every 25 days, at its equator. Now the sun's rotatory speed has increased to the rate of one turn in every 23 days, 8 hours.
"And that increase of rotatory speed continues. With each passing day the sun's rate of rotation is growing greater by the same amount, with each passing day it is lessening its rotatory period by 4 hours. And that steady increase of rotation of the sun, if it continues, spells destruction for the sun as we know it! All know that the sun in rotating generates in its own mass a certain amount of centrifugal force, force which tends to break up its mass. That force is not large enough, however, in our own sun to affect its great mass, since our sun's speed of rotation is not great. We know that over vast periods of time a sun's rotatory speed will increase, due to the slow shrinkage of its mass, and that when the speed has increased to a point where its centrifugal force is greater than its own power of cohesion, the sun breaks up like a bursting flywheel, breaks up or divides into a double or multiple star. Thousands upon tens of thousands of the stars of our universe are double or multiple stars, having been formed thus from dividing single suns, whose speed or rotation became too great.
"But as I have said, our own sun seemed in no danger of this fate, since the natural increase of a sun's rotatory speed, due to the shrinkage of its mass, is so unthinkably slow, requires such unthinkable ages, that it is out of all concern of ours. For our sun has rotated once in 25 days at its equator, and it has been calculated that it would need to reach a rotatory speed of once in one hour before its centrifugal force would be great enough to divide it, to break it up. And because of that eon-long slowness of a star's natural increase of rotatory speed, there seemed, indeed, no slightest peril of our own sun dividing or breaking up thus, because before it could reach that speed of rotation required, unthinkable ages must elapse.
"But now, due to some cause, which none of us have been able to guess, some great cause utterly enigmatic and unknown to us, our sun's rotatory speed has begun suddenly to grow greater, to increase! Faster and faster every day the sun is spinning, its speed of rotation increasing by the same amount each day, its rotatory period decreasing by exactly 4 hours each day! You see what that means? It means that if the sun's speed of spin continues to increase at that steady rate, if its rotatory period continues to decrease by that amount each day, as it shows every sign of doing, within 140 days more the sun's rate of rotation will have increased so much that it will be turning at the rate of one turn in one hour, will have reached that speed at which our calculations show that its great mass can no longer hold together! So that 140 days from now, if this increase of rotatory speed continues, our sun will infallibly divide into a double star!
"And that division means death for Earth and almost all its sister-planets! For when the sun divides into two great new suns, the first force of their division will send those two mighty balls of fire apart from each other, and pushing thus apart from each other, they will inevitably engulf in their fiery masses all the inner planets and most of the outer ones! Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars will undoubtedly be engulfed in the fires of the two dividing suns upon their first separation, their first division. Jupiter and Saturn and very probably Uranus will be drawn inevitably into fiery death also in one or another of those great suns, if they too are not overwhelmed in the first separation. Neptune alone, the outermost of all the sun's planets, will be far enough out to escape annihilation in the dividing suns when the terrific cataclysm occurs. For if the sun continues to spin faster, as it is now doing, that cataclysm must inevitably occur, and must as inevitably plunge our Earth to fiery doom and wreck our solar system, our universe!"
CHAPTER II
To Neptune!
"Doom faces us, a fiery doom in which the dividing sun will annihilate Earth and most of its sister-planets! Panic even now grips all the peoples of Earth, such panic as has never been known before, as that doom marches inevitably toward them! Yet inevitable, inescapable as that doom seems, we of the World Congress, we who represent here all the gathered peoples of Earth, must endeavor to find even now some last chance of lifting this awful menace from us!"
The World President paused, his dark, steady eyes searching out through the great room at whose end, upon a raised platform, he stood. Behind him on that platform sat a row of some two-score men and women, garbed like himself and all others in the modern short and sleeveless garments of differing colors, while before him in the great room stretched the rows of seated members of the great World Congress, the twelve hundred men and women who represented in it all the peoples of Earth. Just beneath the great platform's edge sat Markham, the Intelligence Chief, and myself; before us were the switches that controlled the communication-plates throughout the room that broadcast all proceedings in it to the world. And sitting there, I could glance up and see among those two-score behind the World President two figures well known to me; the strong figure of Dr. Marlin, with his intense gray eyes and gray-touched hair; and the lounging, dark-haired form of Dr. Robert Whitely, his somewhat sardonic countenance and cool eyes turned now with keen interest toward the World President before him. And as the latter began again to speak my own gaze shifted toward him.