The Black Cloud

by Fred Hoyle; Fred Hoyle

  Yet this flooding was of minor consequence compared with the storms that swept over the Earth. The release of energy in the atmosphere, caused by the condensation of vapour into raindrops, was beyond all precedent. It was sufficient to cause enormous fluctuations of atmospheric pressure, leading to hurricanes on a scale beyond human memory, and indeed beyond all credence.

  The manor house at Nortonstowe was largely destroyed in one such hurricane. Two workmen were killed in the tumbling ruins. The fatalities at Nortonstowe were not limited to this tragedy. Knut Jensen and his Greta, the same Greta Johannsen that Kingsley had written to, were caught in a fierce storm and killed by a falling tree. They were buried together, hard by the old manor.

  The temperature fell more and more. Rain changed to sleet and then to snow. The flooded fields were covered by ice and, as September wore on, the brawling rivers were gradually silenced as they were changed to immutable cascades of ice. The snow-covered land spread slowly down into the tropics. And as the whole Earth fell into the iron grip of frost, snow, and ice, the clouds cleared from the skies. Once more men could see out into space.

  It was now manifest that the weird red light of day did not come from the Sun. The light was spread almost uniformly from horizon to horizon, without any special point of focus. Every bit of the day sky was glowing a faint dull red. People were told by radio and television that the light was coming from the Cloud, not from the Sun. The light was caused, so scientists said, by the heating of the Cloud as it swept around the Sun.

  By the end of September the first gossamer-thin outposts of the Cloud reached the Earth. The impact heated the upper regions of the Earth’s atmosphere, as reports from Nortonstowe had predicted. But so far the incident gas was too diffuse to cause heating to hundreds of thousands or to millions of degrees. Even so, temperatures rose to some tens of thousands of degrees. This was sufficient to cause the upper atmosphere to radiate a shimmering blue light, easily visible by night. Indeed the nights became indescribably beautiful, although it is to be doubted whether many people were able to appreciate the beauty, for in truth beauty needs ease and leisure for its proper enjoyment. Yet perhaps here and there some hardy northern shepherd guarding his flocks may have regarded the violet-streaked night with wonder and awe.

  So as time went on, a pattern of dark red days and scintillating blue nights became established, a pattern in which neither Sun nor Moon played any part. And always the temperature fell lower and lower.

  Except in the heavily industrialized countries, vast legions of people lost their lives during this period. For weeks they had been exposed to well-nigh unbearable heat. Then many had died by flood and storm. With the coming of intense cold, pneumonia became fiercely lethal. Between the beginning of August and the first week of October roughly a quarter of the world’s population died. The volume of personal tragedy was indescribably enormous. Death intervened to part husband from wife, parent from child, sweetheart from sweetheart with irreversible finality.

  The Prime Minister was angry with the scientists at Nortonstowe. His irritation caused him to make a journey there, a journey that was bitterly cold and miserable and which did not improve his temper.

  ‘It appears that the Government has been very seriously misled,’ he told Kingsley. ‘First you said that the emergency might be expected to last for a month and no more. Well, the emergency has now lasted for more than a month and there is still no sign of an end. When may we expect this business to be over?’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ answered Kingsley.

  The Prime Minister glowered at Parkinson, Marlowe, Leicester, then most ferociously at Kingsley.

  ‘What, may I ask, is the explanation of this appalling misinformation? Might I point out that Nortonstowe has been afforded every facility? Not to put too fine a point on it, you have been cosseted – featherbedded as some of my colleagues would say. In return we have every right to expect a reasonable standard of competence. I may say that living conditions here are a great deal superior to the conditions in which the Government itself is obliged to work.’

  ‘Of course conditions are superior here. They are superior because we had the foresight to see what was coming.’

  ‘And that seems to have been the only foresight you have shown, a foresight for your own comfort and safety.’

  ‘In which we have followed a course remarkably similar to that of the Government.’

  ‘I fail to understand, sir.’

  ‘Then let me put the position more plainly. When this matter of the Cloud was first broached, the immediate concern of your Government, and indeed of all other Governments so far as I am aware, was to prevent the relevant facts becoming known to the people. The real object of this supposed secrecy was, of course, to prevent the people from choosing a more effective set of representatives.’

  The Prime Minister was thoroughly angry now.

  ‘Kingsley, let me tell you without reserve that I shall feel obliged to take steps that you will scarcely welcome when I return to London.’

  Parkinson noticed a sudden hardening in Kingsley’s easy-going, insulting manner.

  ‘I fear you will not be returning to London, you will be staying here.’

  ‘I can scarcely believe that even you, Professor Kingsley, can have the effrontery to suggest that I am to be kept a prisoner!’

  ‘Not a prisoner, my dear Prime Minister, no such thing,’ said Kingsley with a smile. ‘Let us rather put it this way. In the coming crisis you will be far safer at Nortonstowe than in London. Let us therefore say that we feel it preferable, in the public interest of course, that you should remain at Nortonstowe. And now as no doubt you and Parkinson have a great deal to talk over together, you will, I imagine, wish Leicester, Marlowe, and myself to withdraw.’

  Marlowe and Leicester were in something of a daze as they followed Kingsley out of the room.

  ‘But you simply can’t do it, Chris,’ said Marlowe.

  ‘I can and I will do it. If he’s allowed to go back to London things will be done that’ll endanger the lives of everybody here from yourself, Geoff, down to Joe Stoddard. And that I simply will not allow. Heaven knows we’ve little enough chance as it is without making matters worse.’

  ‘But if he doesn’t go back to London they’ll send for him.’

  ‘They won’t. We’ll send a radio message to say that the roads here are temporarily impassable and that there may be a couple of days’ delay in his return. The temperature is dropping so quickly now – you remember what I told you when we were out in the Mohave Desert about the temperature going cracking down, well, it’s happening right now – in a few days the roads will be genuinely impassable.’

  ‘I don’t see that. There’s not likely to be more snow.’

  ‘Of course not. But soon the temperature will be too low for internal combustion engines to work. There’ll be no motorized transport either by road or air. I know that special engines can be made, but by the time they get round to that, things will have become so bad that nobody’ll give much thought to whether the Prime Minister is in London or not.’

  ‘I reckon that’s right,’ said Leicester. ‘We’ve only got to bluff for a week or so and then everything will be fine. I must say I wouldn’t welcome being winkled out of our cosy little shelter, especially after all the trouble we had building it.’

  Parkinson had seldom before seen the Prime Minister really angry. He had previously dealt with these situations by such yes-yessing and no-noing as seemed most appropriate. But this time he felt that he must take the full broadside of the Prime Minister’s wrath.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, after listening for some minutes, ‘but I fear you brought it on yourself. You shouldn’t have called Kingsley incompetent. The charge wasn’t justified.’

  The Prime Minister spluttered.

  ‘Not justified! Do you realize, Francis, that on the basis of that one month of Kingsley’s we’ve taken no special fuel precautions? Do you realize what sort
of a position that puts us in?’

  ‘The one-month crisis wasn’t due to Kingsley alone. We got exactly the same advice from America.’

  ‘One piece of incompetence doesn’t excuse another.’

  ‘I don’t agree, sir. When I was in London we always sought to minimize the situation. Kingsley’s reports always had a gravity that we were unwilling to accept. We were always trying to persuade ourselves that things were better than they seemed. We never considered the possibility that they might be worse than they seemed. Kingsley may have been wrong, but he was nearer being right than we were.’

  ‘But why was he wrong? Why were all the scientists wrong? That’s what I’ve been trying to find out, and nobody will tell me.’

  ‘They would have told you, if you’d taken the trouble to ask, instead of roaring their heads off.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think you’ve lived here for a little too long, Francis.’

  ‘I’ve lived here long enough to realize that scientists don’t claim to be infallible, that it’s really we laymen who attach infallibility to their statements.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, stop this philosophy, Francis. Please be good enough to tell me in plain terms what it is that has gone wrong.’

  ‘Well, as I understand it, the Cloud is behaving in a way that nobody expected and that nobody understands. Every scientist thought that it would gain speed as it approached the Sun, that it would sweep past the Sun and recede again into the distance. Instead it slowed down and by the time it reached the Sun it had slowed to practically no speed at all. So instead of sweeping outwards again it’s simply sitting there around the Sun.’

  ‘But how long is it going to stop there? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Nobody can tell you. It might stop a week, a month, a year, a millennium, or millions of years. Nobody knows.’

  ‘But good God, man, do you realize what you’re saying? Unless that Cloud moves out we can’t carry on.’

  ‘Do you think Kingsley doesn’t know that? If the Cloud stays a month, a lot more people will die, but quite a few will survive. If it stays two months, very few people will survive. If it stays three months, we at Nortonstowe will die in spite of all our preparations, and we shall be among the last to die. If it stays a year, not a living thing on the Earth will survive. As I say, Kingsley knows all this and that’s why he doesn’t take the political aspects of the matter very seriously.’

  Change For the Better

  Although nobody realized it at the time, the occasion of the Prime Minister’s visit was very nearly the worst moment in the whole episode of the Black Cloud. The first evidence of improving conditions was discovered by the radio astronomers, appropriately so since at no time did they discontinue their observations of the Cloud, even though this meant working out of doors in most distressing conditions. On 6 October John Marlborough called a meeting. Word went round that something important was in the offing, so the meeting was well attended

  Marlborough showed how his observations indicated that the amount of gas lying between the Earth and the Sun had been decreasing steadily throughout the previous ten days or so. It seemed as if the amount of gas had halved about every three days. If this behaviour continued for another fortnight the Sun would come clear altogether – but of course there was no certainty that it would continue.

  Marlborough was asked if the Cloud seemed to be moving away from the Sun altogether. To this he answered that there was no such evidence. What appeared to be happening was that the material of the Cloud was distributing itself in such a fashion that the Sun would be able to shine through in our direction, but not of course in all other directions.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit too much to hope that the Cloud will just happen to come clear in our direction?’ asked Weichart.

  ‘It’s odd certainly,’ answered Marlborough. ‘But I’m only giving you the evidence for what it’s worth. I’m not giving any interpretation.’

  What eventually turned out to be the correct explanation was suggested by Alexandrov, although nobody took much notice at the time, probably because of the way Alexandrov chose to express himself.

  ‘Disk stable configuration,’ said he. ‘Probably Cloud settling into … disk.’

  There were grins and someone exclaimed:

  ‘Need we have these military adjectives, Alexis?’

  Alexandrov looked surprised.

  ‘Not military. Am scientist,’ he insisted.

  After this diversion the Prime Minister said:

  ‘If I may return to more parliamentary language, do I understand from what has been said that the present crisis will be at an end in a fortnight from now?’

  ‘If the present trend continues,’ answered Marlborough.

  ‘Then we must keep a close watch and have ourselves apprised of the situation.’

  ‘Masterly conclusion!’ groaned Kingsley.

  It is safe to say that never in the history of science had measurements been made more anxiously than those conducted during the following days by the radio astronomers. The curve on which they plotted their results became quite literally a curve of life or death. If it continued to decline it meant life; if the decline ceased and the curve started to climb it meant death.

  A new point was added to the graph every few hours. All persons capable of appreciating the issues were to be found hanging around waiting for the next point, throughout the night as well as during the dusky, faint daytime. For four days and nights the curve continued to decline but on the fifth day the decline eased off, while on the sixth day there were signs of the decline changing to a rise. Scarcely anyone spoke, except for an occasional terse sentence. The tension was indescribably fierce. Then on the seventh day the decline was resumed and on the eighth day the curve was descending more steeply than ever. The intense stress was followed by violent reaction. By ordinary human standards, behaviour at Nortonstowe might have seemed somewhat promiscuous at all times and perhaps decidedly so at that time, although to those concerned, to those who experienced the anguish of the sixth day, nothing seemed at all untoward.

  Thereafter the curve continued its descent and as it did so the amount of gas between the Earth and Sun dwindled more and more. On 19 October a focus of yellow light could be seen in the day sky. It was still faint, but it moved across the sky as the hours passed. Without question it was the Sun, seen for the first time since the beginning of August, still seen through a veil of gas and dust. But the veil was getting thinner and thinner. By 24 October the Sun shone again in full strength on a frozen Earth.

  Those who have experienced the coming of sunrise after a cold night in the desert will have a faint idea of the joy brought by the dawn of 24 October 1965. A word about religion may be in order. During the approach of the Cloud all manner of religious beliefs had flourished mightily. During the spring, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had robbed all other speakers in Hyde Park of their audiences. Incumbents of the Church of England had been astonished to find themselves preaching to overflowing congregations. All this was swept aside on 24 October. Everyone, men and women of all creeds – Christian, Atheist, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Hindu, Jew – all became pervaded to their innermost beings with the emotional complex of the old Sun-worshippers. True, Sun-worship never became an established religion, for it had no central organization, but the undertones of the ancient religion were set vibrating and were never again damped out.

  Tropical areas were the first to thaw. Ice disappeared from the rivers. Snow melted with more flooding, but the effects were marginal compared with what had gone before. The thaw in North America and in Europe was only partial, for in the ordinary way of things winter was coming on.

  Vast as was the human suffering in the heavily industrialized countries, industrial populations fared far better than the less fortunate peoples, emphasizing the importance of inanimate energy and of the control of machines. It should be added that the situation in this respect might have been very different if the cold had continued to deepen, fo
r relief came at a time when industrialization was on the verge of widespread collapse.

  Somewhat paradoxically, among non-industrialized peoples, those of the tropics were hardest hit, while the genuinely nomadic Esquimaux came off best of all. In many parts of the tropics and semi-tropics as many as one person in two lost his life. Among the Esquimaux there was comparatively little loss of life, comparatively little more than in the normal way of things, that is to say. The heat had not been so great in the far north. The Esquimaux had found it highly unpleasant but no worse. Melting ice and snow interfered with their freedom of movement, thereby seriously reducing the area over which they could hunt. But the heat was not so great as to be lethal to them. Nor was the intense cold. They simply dug themselves into the snow and waited, and in this they were better off in many respects than the people of England.

  Governments everywhere were in a shaky condition. Now, if ever, was the time for Communism to sweep the world. Now was the time for the United States to stamp out Communism. Now was the time for dissident groups to capture their Governments. But nothing of the sort happened. In the days immediately following 24 October everyone was too overcome with relief and too beaten down to contemplate such seemingly trivial matters. And by the middle of November the opportunity had passed. Humanity had begun to organize itself again into its respective communities.

  The Prime Minister returned to London, feeling less unfavourably disposed towards Nortonstowe than might perhaps be expected. For one thing he had passed the time of the crisis far more comfortably than he would have done at Downing Street. For another he had shared the agony of suspense with the scientists at Nortonstowe and there is always a bond between those who have shared a common stress.