The Black Cloud

by Fred Hoyle

  “But why should the Cloud behave in such a darned fashion?’ asked Weichart.

  “Because bastard inside, maybe,” suggested Alexandrov.

  Parkinson joined Marlowe and Kingsley that afternoon as they were walking in the grounds.

  “I’ve been wondering whether things are going to be altered in any important way by these new discoveries,” he said.

  “Difficult to say,” answered Marlowe, puffing smoke. “Too early to say. From now on we must keep our eyes wide open.”

  “Our time schedule may get changed,” remarked Kingsley. “We reckoned that the Cloud would reach the Sun in early July, but if this slowing down goes on it’ll take longer for the Cloud to move in. It may be late July or even August before things begin to happen. And I don’t give much for our estimates on heating inside the Cloud either. Changes of speed are going to alter all that.”

  “Do I understand that the Cloud is slowing down in rather the same way that a rocket might slow down, by firing off bits of material at high speed?’ asked Parkinson.

  “That’s what it looks like. We were just discussing possible reasons for it.”

  “What sort of thing have you in mind?”

  “Well,” continued Marlowe, “it’s quite likely that there’s a pretty strong magnetic field inside this Cloud. We’re already getting quite big perturbations of the Earth’s magnetic field. Might of course be corpuscles from the Sun, the usual sort of magnetic storm. But I’ve a hunch that it’s the magnetic field of the Cloud that we’re beginning to detect.”

  “And you think this business might be bound up with magnetism?”

  “It may be so. Some process caused by an interaction of the magnetic field of the Sun with that of the Cloud. It’s not at all clear just what is happening, but out of all the explanations we’ve been able to think of this seems the least unlikely.”

  As the three men turned a corner, a stocky man touched his cap.

  “Afternoon, gentlemen.”

  “Wonderful weather, Stoddard. How’s the garden?”

  “Yes, sir, wonderful weather. Tomatoes are ripening already. Never known it before, sir.”

  When they passed Kingsley said:

  “To be frank, if it were given to me to change places with that chap for the next three months, you know I wouldn’t hesitate. What a relief to have no horizon but the ripening of tomatoes!”

  Throughout the rest of June and July temperatures rose steadily all over the Earth. In the British Isles the temperature climbed through the eighties, into the nineties, and moved towards the hundred mark. People grumbled, but there was no serious distress.

  The death-roll in the U.S. remained quite small, thanks largely to the air-conditioning units that had been fitted during previous years and months. Temperatures rose to the lethal limit throughout the whole country and people were obliged to remain indoors for weeks on end. Occasionally air-conditioning units failed and it was then that fatalities occurred.

  Conditions were utterly desperate throughout the tropics as may be judged from the fact that 7,943 species of plants and animals became totally extinct. The survival of Man himself was only possible because of the caves and cellars he was able to dig. Nothing could be done to mitigate the stifling air temperature. The number who perished during this phase is unknown. It can only be said that in all phases together more than seven hundred million persons are known to have lost their lives. And but for various fortunate circumstances still to be recounted the number would have been far greater still.

  Eventually the temperature of the surface waters of the sea rose, not so fast as the air temperature it is true, but fast enough to produce a dangerous increase of humidity. It was indeed this increase that produced the distressing conditions just remarked. Millions of people between the latitudes of Cairo and the Cape of Good Hope were subjected to a choking atmosphere that grew damper and hotter inexorably from day to day. All human movement ceased. There was nothing to be done but to lie panting, as a dog pants in hot weather.

  By the fourth week of July conditions in the tropics lay balanced between life and total death. Then quite suddenly rain clouds condensed over the whole globe. Within three days not a break was anywhere to be found. The Earth was as completely cloud-shrouded as normally is the planet Venus. The temperature declined a little, owing no doubt to the clouds’ reflecting more of the Sun’s radiation back into space. But conditions could not be said to have improved. Warm rain fell everywhere, even as far north as Iceland. The insect population increased enormously, since the torrid hot atmosphere was as favourable to them as it was unfavourable to Man and the other mammals.

  Plant life flourished to a fantastic degree. The deserts flowered as they had never done at any time while Man had walked the Earth. Ironically no advantage could be taken of the sudden fertility of hitherto barren soils. No crops were planted. Except in north-west Europe and the far northlands it was all Man could do to exist. No initiative could be taken. The lord of creation was beaten to his knees by his environment, the environment that for the previous fifty years he had prided himself on being able to control.

  But although there was no improvement, conditions got no worse. With little or no food, but now with plenty of water, many of those exposed to the extreme heat managed to survive. The death rate had climbed to a wholly grotesque level, but it rose no further.

  * * *

  A discovery of some astronomical interest was made at Nortonstowe about a week before the great cloudbank spread itself over the Earth. The existence of vast drifts of dust on the Moon was confirmed in a dramatic fashion.

  The rising temperature in July changed Britain’s usual cool summer to a tropical heat but no worse. The grass was soon burned and the flowers died. By the standards that prevailed over most of the Earth, Britain might be considered to have been little affected, even though the daytime temperature rose to 100° and fell during the night only to about 90°. Seaside resorts were crowded and caravans were to be found everywhere along the coast.

  Nortonstowe was now fortunate in possessing a large air-conditioned shelter in which more and more of the party were finding it preferable to sleep at night. Otherwise life proceeded normally, except that walks in the grounds were taken at night instead of in the heat of the Sun.

  One moonlit night Marlowe, Emerson, and Knut Jensen were strolling abroad when gradually the light seemed to change. Looking up, Emerson said:

  “You know, Geoff, that’s darned queer. I don’t see any cloud.”

  “Probably very high-level ice particles.”

  “Not in this heat!”

  “No, I suppose it can’t be.”

  “And there’s a queer yellow look that wouldn’t be ice crystals,” added Jensen.

  “Well, there’s only one thing to do. When in doubt take a look. Let’s go along to the telescope.”

  They made their way to the dome that housed the Schmidt. Marlowe directed the six-inch finder telescope on the Moon.

  “My God,” he exclaimed, “it’s boiling!”

  Emerson and Jensen took a look. Then Marlowe said:

  “Better go up to the house and call ’em all down. This is the sight of a lifetime. I’m going to take photographs on the Schmidt itself.”

  Ann Halsey accompanied the group that hurried to the telescope in response to the urgent call from Emerson and Jensen. When it came to her turn to look through the finder Ann did not know at all what to expect. True she had a general idea of the grey, scarred, sterile surface of the Moon, but she had no knowledge of its detailed topography. Nor did she understand the meaning of the excited remarks that were passing between the astronomers. It was rather in the sense of a duty to be done that she went to the telescope. As she adjusted the focusing knob, a wholly fantastic world jumped into view. The Moon was a lemon- yellow colour. The usual sharp details were dulled by a giant cloud that appeared to extend over and beyond the circular outline. The cloud was fed by jets that sprang out of the darker areas. Every
now and then new jets would emerge from these areas, which all the time were rippling and shimmering in an astonishing fashion.

  “Come on, Ann, don’t hog it. We’d like a look before the night’s over,” said someone. Reluctantly she yielded her place.

  “What does it mean, Chris?’ Ann asked Kingsley as they walked towards the shelter.

  “Do you remember what we were saying the other day about the Cloud slowing down? That it’s slowing down as it gets nearer the Sun instead of speeding up?”

  “I remember that everybody was worried about it.”

  “Well, the Cloud is slowing down by firing out blobs of gas at very high speed. We don’t know why it’s doing this or how, but the work that Marlborough and Leicester are doing shows pretty certainly that it is so.”

  “You’re not going to tell me that one of these blobs has hit the Moon?”

  “That’s exactly what I think it is. Those dark areas are gigantic drifts of dust, drifts perhaps two or three miles deep. What is happening is that the impact of the high-speed gas is causing the dust to be squirted hundreds of miles upwards from the surface of the Moon.”

  “Is there any chance that one of these blobs might hit us?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought the chance was very great. The Earth must be a very small target. But then the Moon is an even smaller target and one of ’em has just hit the Moon!”

  “What would happen if …?”

  “If one hit us? I hardly like to think. We’re worried enough about what’s likely to happen if the Cloud hits us at a speed of perhaps fifty kilometres a second. It would be appalling if we were hit at the speed of one of those blobs, which must be the best part of a thousand kilometres a second. I suppose the whole of the Earth’s atmosphere would simply be sprayed outwards into space, just like the Moon’s dust.”

  “What I can’t understand about you, Chris, is how you can know all these things and yet get so worked up about politics and politicians. It seems so unimportant and trivial.”

  “Ann, my dear, if I spent my time thinking about the situation as it really is, I should be off my head in a couple of days. Some men would go off their heads. Others’d take to drink. My form of escapism is to roar at politicians. Old Parkinson knows perfectly well that it’s only a sort of game we’re playing. But quite seriously, from now on survival is to be measured in hours.”

  She moved in closer to him.

  “Or perhaps I should put it more poetically,” he murmured.

  “Come kiss me, sweet and twenty

  Life’s a stuff will not endure.”

  Arrival

  From the end of July a night watch was kept at the Nortonstowe shelter. Joe Stoddard was on the rota, as was natural since his work as a gardener had ceased by that time. Gardening was not an activity suited to the tropical heat.

  It came about that Joe’s watch fell on the night of 27 August. No dramatic action took place. Yet at 7.30 the following morning Joe knocked hesitantly on Kingsley’s bedroom door. The previous evening Kingsley together with quite a number of other worthies had caroused somewhat heartily. So at first he was scarcely aware that Joe was trying to give him some message. Gradually he realized that the cheerful gardener was unusually solemn.

  “It’s not there, sir, it’s not there.”

  “What’s not there? For heaven’s sake go and fetch me a cup of tea. I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of a parrot’s cage.”

  “Cup of tea, sir!’ Joe hesitated but stood his ground stolidly. “Yes, sir. It’s just that you said I was to report anything unusual, and it really isn’t there.”

  “Look here, Joe, much as I have regard for you, I say most solemnly that I’ll disembowel you, here and now, unless you tell me what it is that isn’t there.” Kingsley spoke slowly and loudly. “What isn’t there?”

  “The day, sir! There’s no Sun!”

  Kingsley grabbed his watch. It was about 7.42 a.m., long after dawn in August. He rushed out of the shelter into the open. It was pitch black, unrelieved even by starlight, which was unable to penetrate the thick cloud cover. An unreasoning primitive fear seemed to be abroad. The light of the world had gone.

  In England and the western lands generally the shock was cushioned by night, for to them it was during the night hours that the light of the Sun became extinguished. One evening the light faded slowly away as is normally the case. But eight hours later there was no dawn. The advancing wall of the Cloud had reached the Sun during the intervening hours.

  The people of the eastern hemisphere experienced in full measure the horror of the fading light. To them the total unrelieved blackness fell in what should have been full day. In Australia for instance, the sky began darkening about noon, and by three o’clock not a glimmer was to be seen, except where artificial illuminations had been switched on. There was fierce wild rioting in many of the world’s major cities.

  For three days the Earth lived as a black world, except for those pockets of humanity that possessed the technological sufficiency to provide their own lighting. Los Angeles and the other American cities lived in the artificial blaze of millions of electric bulbs. But this did not entirely protect the American people from the terror that gripped the rest of mankind. Indeed one might say that Americans had more leisure and opportunity to appreciate the situation as they sat huddled over television sets, waiting for the latest pronouncements of authorities who were powerless to understand or control the march of events.

  After three days two things happened. Light appeared again in the day sky, and the rains began to fall. The light was at first very faint, but day by day it increased in strength until eventually the intensity reached a level about midway between full moonlight and full sunlight. It is doubtful whether on balance the light brought any easement to the acute psychological stress that afflicted Man everywhere, for its deep red tone showed beyond all doubt that it was not a natural light.

  At first the rains were warm, but the temperature fell slowly and steadily. The precipitation was enormous. The air had been so hot and humid that a vast quantity of moisture had been stored in it. With the lowering of temperature following the extinction of the Sun’s radiation, more and more of this moisture fell out as rain. Rivers rose swiftly and flooded their banks, destroying communications and rendering whole multitudes homeless. After weeks of heat exhaustion, the fate of those millions throughout the world who were thus overtaken by raging waters can scarcely be imagined. And always with them, reflected a dark red in the flood, was the unearthly half-light.

  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 t
he 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?”