Although we were born rich, and received a huge income from the heritage of vast and various real estate holdings on Manhattan Island, both Henry and myself, strangely enough, had never splurged, and never married. I am sure the thought of matrimony never entered Jane's mind. Our natural emotions seemed to be stirred and exalted only by the importance of our family name and our wealth. Romantically, we were strangely neutral, as though, in the pursuit of riches, the family stock had been sort of washed out.
After our college days, Henry and I grew into old-fashioned, mellow bachelorhood, aloof from the world and very self-sufficient, and glad to have it so. Henry had just observed his sixty-fifth birthday when our lives became so tempestuous and convulsed. I was two years his junior. Jane had just turned sixty. As progeny, we seemed to have come into this world in swift successiveness, as though the marriage of our revered parents had fulfilled its promise in a bunch.
For an entire summer Henry lived virtually in seclusion in his observatory without any tangible result. Sweeping the sky with his telescope for anything that might happen. But nothing transpired. Yet he persisted. Finally, he detected a tiny comet, apparently on its way to the earth. At first it appeared no larger than a pin-prick of light, with a small, meteoric tail.
The night he made the discovery, he got me out of bed to see it, but I was in no mood or condition for sky gazing. In addition, looking into the eye-piece of the telescope made me a little sick and dizzy. I couldn't see a thing. Deciding that he was suffering from a delusion, I went back to bed.
The odd thing was that Henry was right. He had actually witnessed the phenomenon of impact of two small planets which produced the comet. As he explained it afterwards to a group of eminent scientists, this collision of two celestial bodies had produced a distinct flash of light, out of which had grown a spiral swarm of very brilliant particles, and he had watched them as they took on orbital motion.
The comet soon became the most impressive and magnificent sight I have ever seen, stretching its scimitar-like form half across the heavens. Its wonder and beauty dragged New Yorkers up in the small hours, to gaze at it with fascinating awe. Many regarded it with terror, others with superstitious dread. In churches throughout the land, the people prayed: "Lord save us from the devil, and Royce's comet!"
The comet was not only named after Henry but his discovery was acclaimed by scientists the world over, and he was chosen a fellow of the two leading scientific bodies of America and England. While still rated as an amateur in science, nevertheless, many learned men began to look upon him as the depository of authority and authenticity in matters relating to the mysteries of the solar system.
Having disclosed something to the world in the order of creation, Henry became imbued with an overpowering sense of his own importance as a man of science; his ambitions soared to unsurmountable heights. The discovery of the comet having been far easier than he had dared dream, he now turned with profound intentness to establish radio communication with Mars. He began talking in a familiar and chatty way about the people on Mars, and to hear him talk one would think that he was going there for a week-end of golf.
In this project, he had enlisted the able assistance of Serge Olinski, assistant research engineer of the National Radio Corporation, whose unexceptional qualifications included an honor degree in cosmic ray research, with distinction in astronomy. Their experimental activities, in trying to pick up and decode the galactic radio waves, which both believed constituted some kind of interstellar signaling, were carried on behind locked doors, either at Henry's observatory in the country, or in Olinski's laboratory in the NRC Building, in the new Radio Center Annex.
Olinski was a queer shrinking soul, and any sort of publicity to Henry was equally distasteful. They were two of a kind, in this respect. Notwithstanding all the praise and attention given to Henry by the press during the comet furore, he treated reporters with the utmost contempt, and accused them of being dishonest rogues. One reporter in particular he hated and feared. Just mention to him the name of Robert McGinity of the New York Daily Recorder, and his correctly chiselled and aristocratic features would crinkle up in rage and horrible chuckles would issue from his thin lips like unnamable profanities.