Things were dull, he assured me. Nothing but the usual run of stuff that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few relatives were interested. As it happened, the Crimson Comet affair caused five mysterious disappearances, Shorty, myself and three others. I think I can understand now why it happened that I knew them all. I must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science. That involved Shorty, because he was so much with me. And as for the other three—looking back on it now I realize that each of them vanished soon after having been with me. I was being trailed and was seized last.
We landed on the private stage of the big Observatory about midnight and presently were with Dr. Johns in his study. What he had to tell us didn't seem very startling at the time. But in the light of what was to happen, looking back on it now I can see its deadly significance. Like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all the world! Grim, stealthy events creeping upon us—little things here on Earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars.
"Here at the Observatory," Dr. Johns was saying, "we thought that somehow we must be making miscalculations. A fraction of a second in the axial and orbital movements of the Earth, which involved the visual movement of all the starfield. But we checked and rechecked. And then other observatories reported it."
The Earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the Sun apparently were changing infinitesimally.
"Too bad," Shorty commented. "I'm sure sorry."
But Dr. Johns didn't smile. "There seem to be many unrelated things," he said. "You can shrug any of them off. But then, if it once occurs to you that they might be connected—"
"What other things?" I asked.
Meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. Nothing which had not occurred before, of course—unusual, freakish storms in many parts of the Earth.
"And for a month now," Dr. Johns went on, "there has been noticeable a peculiar purple radiance in the air at night."
"Purple radiance?" Shorty echoed. "Hadn't noticed it."