CHAPTER XXXVII
THE VERDICT OF SCIENCE
Although the Tsar had made trips with John Castellan in the _FlyingFish_, he had never had quite such an aerial experience as his trip toGreenwich. The _Auriole_ rose vertically in the air, soared upward in asplendid spiral curve, and vanished through the thin cloud layer to thenorth-eastward. Twenty minutes of wonder passed like so many seconds,and Admiral Hingeston, beside whom he was standing in the conning-tower,said quietly:
"We're about there, your Majesty."
"Greenwich already," exclaimed the Tsar, pulling out his watch. "It isforty miles, and we have not been quite twenty minutes yet."
"That's about it," said the Admiral, "this craft can do her two miles aminute, and still have a good bit in hand if it came to chasinganything."
He pulled back a couple of levers as he spoke and gave a quarter turn tothe wheel. The great airship took a downward slide, swung round to theright, and in a few moments she had dropped quietly to the turf ofGreenwich Park alongside the Observatory.
Lennard's calculations had already reached the Astronomer Royal, and heand his chief assistant had had time to make a rapid run through them,and they had found that his figures, and especially the inexplicablechange in the orbit, tallied almost exactly with observations of apossibly new comet for the last two months or so.
They were not quite prepared for the coming of an Imperial--andhostile--visitor in an airship, accompanied by the discoverer of thecomet, the millionaire who owned the great telescope, and an Americangentleman in the uniform of a British admiral; but those wereextraordinary times, and so extraordinary happenings might be expected.The astronomer and his staff, being sober men of science, whose businesswas with other worlds rather than this one, accepted the situationcalmly, gave their visitors lunch, talked about everything but the war,and then they all spent a pleasant and instructive afternoon in ajourney through Space in search of the still invisible CelestialInvader.
When they had finished, the two sets of calculations balancedexactly--to the millionth of a degree and the thousandth of a second. Atten seconds to twelve, midnight, May the first, the comet, if notprevented by some tremendously powerful agency, would pierce the earth'satmosphere, as Lennard had predicted.
"It is a marvellous piece of work, Mr Lennard, however good aninstrument you had. As an astronomer I congratulate you heartily, but ascitizens of the world I hope we shall be able to congratulate you stillmore heartily on the results which you expect that big gun of yours tobring about."
"I'm sure I hope so," said Lennard, toying rather absently with hispencil.
"And if the cannon is not fired, and the Pittsburg one does not happento be exactly laid, for there is a very great difference in longitude,what will be the probable results, Mr Astronomer?" asked the Tsar, uponwhom the lesson of the afternoon had by no means been lost.
"If the comet is what Mr Lennard expects it to be, your Majesty," wasthe measured reply, "then, if this Invader is not destroyed, hispredictions will be fulfilled to the letter. In other words, on thesecond of May there will not be a living thing left on earth."
At three minutes past ten that evening the Tsar looked into theeye-piece of the Greenwich Equatorial, and saw a double-winged yellowshape floating in the centre of the field of vision. He watched it forlong minutes, listening to the soft clicking of the clockwork, which wasthe only sound that broke the silence. During the afternoon he had seenphotographs of the comet taken every night that the weather made a clearobservation possible. The series tallied exactly with what he now saw.The gradual enlargement and brightening; the ever-increasing exactnessof definition, and the separation of the nucleus from the two wings. Allthat he had seen was as pitilessly inexorable as the figures whichcontained the prophecy of the world's approaching doom. He rose from hisseat and said quietly, yet with a strange impressiveness:
"Gentlemen, I, for one, am satisfied and converted. What the inscrutabledecrees of Providence may or may not be, we have no right to inquire;but whether this is a judgment from the Most High brought upon us by oursins, or whether it is merely an ordinary cataclysm of Nature againstwhich we may be able to protect ourselves, does not come into thequestion which is in dispute amongst us. Humanity has an unquestionedright to preserve its existence as far as it is possible to do so. If itis possible to arrange for another conference at Aldershot to-morrow, Ithink I may say that there will be a possibility of arriving at areasonable basis of negotiations. And now, if it is convenient, LordKitchener, I should like to get back to camp. Much has been given to meto think about to-night, and you know we Russians have a very soundproverb: 'Take thy thoughts to bed with thee, for the morning is wiserthan the evening.'"
"That, your Majesty, has been my favourite saying ever since I knew thatmen had to think about work before they were able to do it properly." Sospoke the man who had worked for fourteen years to win one battle, andcrush a whole people at a single stroke--after which he made the bestof friends with them, and loyal subjects of his Sovereign.
They took their leave of the astronomer and his staff, and a few minuteslater the _Auriole_, still flying the flag of truce, cleared thetree-tops and rose into the serene starlit atmosphere above them.
When the airship had gained a height of a thousand feet, and was headingsouth-west towards Aldershot at a speed of about a hundred miles anhour, the Admiral noticed a shape not unlike that of his own vessel, onhis port quarter, making almost the same direction as he was. The Tsarand Lord Kitchener were sitting one on either side of him, as he stoodat the steering-wheel, as the ominous shape came into view.
"I'm afraid that's one of your _Flying Fishes_, your Majesty, takingnews from the Continent to Aldershot. Yes, there goes her searchlight.She's found us out by now. She knows we're not one of her crowd, and soI suppose we shall have to fight her. Yes, I thought so, she meansfight. She's trying to get above us, which means dropping a few of thosetorpedoes on us, and sending us across the edge of eternity before weknow we've got there."
"You will, of course, do your duty, Admiral," replied the Tsar veryquietly, but with a quick tightening of the lips. "It is a mostunfortunate occurrence, but we must all take the fortune of war as itcomes. I hope you will not consider my presence here for a moment.Remember that I asked myself."
"There won't be any danger to us, your Majesty," replied the Admiral,with a marked emphasis on the "us." "Still, we have too many valuablelives on board to let him get the drop on us."
As he spoke he thrust one lever on the right hand forward, and pulledanother back; then he took the telephone receiver down from the wall,and said:
"See that thing? She's trying to get the drop on us. Full speed ahead:I'm going to rise. Hold on, gentlemen."
They held on. The Tsar saw the jumping searchlights, which flashed upfrom the little grey shape to the southward, suddenly fall away andbelow them. The Admiral touched the wheel with his left hand, and the_Auriole_ sprang forward. The other tried to do the same, but she seemedto droop and fall behind. Admiral Hingeston took down the receiver againand said:
"Ready--starboard guns--now: fire!"
Of course, there was no report; only a brilliant blaze of light to thesouthward, and an atmospheric shock which made the _Auriole_ shudder asshe passed on her way. The Tsar looked out to the spot where the blazeof flame had burst out. The other airship had vanished.
"She has gone. That is awful," he said, with a shake in his voice.
"As I said before, I'm sorry, your Majesty," replied the Admiral, "butit had to be done. If he'd got the top side of us we should have been inas little pieces as he is now. I only hope it's John Castellan's craft.If it is it will save a lot of trouble to both sides."
The Tsar did not reply. He was too busy thinking, and so was LordKitchener.
That night there were divided counsels in the headquarters of the Alliesat Aldershot, and the Kaiser and his colleagues went to bed between twoand three in the morning without having come to anything like a definitede
cision. As a matter of fact, within the last few hours things hadbecome a little too complicated to be decided upon in anything like ahurry.
While the potentates of the Alliance were almost quarrelling as to whatwas to be done, the _Auriole_ paid a literally flying visit to theBritish positions, and then the hospitals. At Caversham, Lennard foundNorah Castellan taking her turn of night duty by the bedside of LordWesterham, who had, after all, got through his desperate ride with acouple of bullets through his right ribs, and a broken left arm; but hehad got his despatches in all the same, though nearly two hourslate--for which he apologised before he fainted. In one of the wards atWindsor Camp he found Auriole, also on night duty, nursing with no lessanxious care the handsome young Captain of Uhlans who had taken LordWhittinghame's car in charge in Rochester. Mrs O'Connor had got abadly-wounded Russian Vice-Admiral all to herself, and, as she modestlyput it, was doing very nicely with him.
Meanwhile the news of the truce was proclaimed, and the opposingmillions laid themselves down to rest with the thankful certainty thatit would not be broken for at least a night and a day by the whistle ofthe life-hunting bullet or the screaming roar and heart-shaking crash ofthe big shell which came from some invisible point five or six milesaway. In view of this a pleasant little dinner-party was arranged for atthe Parmenter Palace at eight the next evening. There would be nocarriages. The coming and parting guests would do their coming and goingin airships. Mr Parmenter expressed the opinion that, under thecircumstances, this would be at once safer and more convenient.
But before that dinner-party broke up, the world had something verydifferent from feasting and merrymaking, or even invasion and militaryconquest or defeat, to think of.
The result of Lennard's telegrams and cables had been that everypowerful telescope in the civilised world had been turned upon thatdistant region of the fields of Space out of which the Celestial Invaderwas rushing at a speed of thousands of miles a minute to that awfultrysting-place, at which it and the planet Terra were to meet andembrace in the fiery union of death.
From every observatory, from Greenwich to Arequipa, and from Pike's Peakto Melbourne, came practically identical messages, which, in theircombined sense, came to this:
"Lennard's figures absolutely correct. Collision with comet apparentlyinevitable. Consequences incalculable."
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