"Because it isn't visible to the naked eye," Dr. Johns retorted. "But it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. Slowed it down. And our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects so that we know if we could see it—it would be a purplish glow."
And there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently had located. I had heard that much—had mentioned it in one of my broadcasts.
"We call it a comet," Dr. Johns explained, "because there's a crimson radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the Sun. But its nucleus seems sizable—five hundred miles in diameter possibly. A planetoid, with a radiance. You might just possibly call it that."
"And it's just about now crossing the orbit of Mars," I said. "That was the last report made public, wasn't it?"
Dr. Johns nodded. "Our calculations of its orbit—made a month ago—showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of Earth. But that's all changed now. It's erratic."
I was beginning to see why he was startled. This new Crimson Comet wasn't obeying the normal laws of Celestial Mechanics. It was swimming erratically in Space. Could it be a solid body as big as five hundred miles in diameter? Solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of the Earth's axial and orbital disturbances?
"And this purple radiance," Dr. Johns said soberly, "we've just been wondering if that could be coming from the comet."
I need not specify all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But with him, a man of cold logic and careful science—well, it must have been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us?
You couldn't make such speculations public. People would laugh. But some wouldn't. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And Dr. Johns had sent for me—a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting of wild tales.