When I read in my morning’s paper of the “Nova” in the constellation of Sagittarius, I thought first of H. G. Wells’s story of “The New Star,” and smiled. Later, I turned with a little shiver of anxiety to that chapter in Professor Lowell’s Evolution of Worlds in which he describes the possible coming of a “dark stranger” out of the depths of space. Already there were points of striking resemblance between Lowell’s imaginative account and the details that were appearing casually, in the intervals between more important news, in the newspapers. This new star differed from those other novæ so many of which have been recorded at various times. They brought us tidings of a collision that had already occurred, blazing out suddenly into a short-lived splendour and quickly waning again to invisibility. This stranger, astronomers were agreed, shone not by its own light but by the reflected light of the sun. Then it must be, relatively, near. Lowell’s calculations gave us something like thirty years to prepare before the invader wrought the destruction of the solar system. But, obviously, that calculation depended on various assumptions that the reality need not verify. This strange visitor might be much smaller than he had assumed—he had taken the enormous mass of the sun as his standard—its albedo might be lower; its speed greater. Also Lowell’s stranger was assumed to be coming at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic; this one would, as it were, skim the edge of that swimming saucer. Would any of the outer planets be interposed between us and this dreadful visitor? Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, might any of them be a buffer to us—provide us, perhaps, with some stupendous display in the heavens, but save us from ultimate disaster?
Everyone treated the thing so lightly. Here and there alarmist paragraphs appeared, but they only displayed the hand of the sensation-monger. No one took the threat seriously. And yet the astronomers must know? They had had more than a week, now, in which to make their calculations.
And then the shadow fell with such suddenness that it was impossible to say how the certainty had come to us. Everyone knew. The astronomers confirmed one another without a dissentient. And there was nothing in the way. With a horrible unanimity the outer planets had left a clear space for the intruder, while the Earth, with that blundering indifference which is surely its chief characteristic, was stolidly marching straight into the path of destruction. Is there any esoteric significance in the fact that the Earth has a greater density than any other member of the solar system?
Everyone knew, but little was changed. We went on with our affairs; with little zest, no doubt—we could never forget the deepening shadow. But what else was there for us to do but go on? We could not instantly alter ourselves or our way of life. Religions blazed into a spasmodic fever as men and women sought refuge from the dreadful reality. Crimes of lust and greed increased for the same reason. But for the most part we continued in the old ways by sheer inertia, though there was a new and smaller moon visible to us in the night sky, a moon that waxed with infinite slowness towards the full, and grew larger night by night. We knew by then that the stranger was as big as Jupiter, and with a density little less than that of the Earth.
The first portents of disaster came when our own moon was approaching the new. The stranger’s mass had begun to affect the tides, and we were warned to evacuate all low lands, near the sea, upon the estuaries, and incidentally the river level in London. Four days before the highest tide the Thames flooded Farringdon Street, Westminster, and great districts on the south bank, and the retreating river laid bare the river-bed as far down as Greenwich.
The population of London had fled to the heights North and South before the great floods that devastated all the low lands of Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex. And with that rush for safety and the rapidly increasing portents of disaster the routine of civilisation was definitely broken. It seemed as if in the mass we were being gradually stripped of all our tediously-acquired virtues and vices, until but one instinct remained, the instinct for self-preservation. That, however, was only the effect produced by the panic movement of the crowd; when one came to individuals....
I can, however, only speak of two, myself and another man. We sat together on a hill in Derbyshire and watched through the last night.
A certain calmness had come to me, then, mingled with the queerest feelings of excitement and expectation. Within sight of death, I could still enjoy this amazing celestial adventure. The new planet that was rushing in upon us had already torn us from our steady path about the sun, and our old familiar moon dwindled to the size of a sixpence, and, diminishing almost visibly, was within a few hours of destruction. For the moon had fled its old allegiance to the Earth and was rushing to the arms of this great stranger like some passionate, unfaithful lover.
But the new planet itself drowned all consciousness of lesser things when it rose magnificently above the eastern horizon. That night it was a full circle of yellow light, and across its great expanse moved one circle of intense blackness, the size of our old moon, a circle that was slowly increasing in size, the shadow of our own Earth. So great a thing appeared this new planet, then, that when its lower rim was at last clear of the horizon, its upper limb towered half-way to the zenith. It had few markings, but from one pole, which was turned markedly towards us, radiated uneven, dark lines—chains of mountains, perhaps—that definitely produced the effect of a solid globe long before its actual convexity was recognisable. All the rest of the planet presented a smooth, unbroken expanse, possibly the vast bed of some long-vanished sea.