But this one night Wayne’s mind was not on his work. His eye examined, and his pencil moved obediently, yet his thoughts were with Betty. In the solemn stillness of the observatory his uneasy feelings grew, assumed fantastic shapes. It was the first time in his life he had ever been the victim of such primitive fears.
Angrily he tried to concentrate on his duties. Messier 33, he parroted to himself, was an island universe, some nine hundred thousand light years away. There were millions of vast suns in that faint wisp of light, yet so incredibly distant was it that even the one-hundred-inch reflector could not resolve its featureless luminosity into discreet, starry individualities. Never would human eye behold—
His thoughts jerked from their ramblings, focused into razor-edged awareness. Wayne rubbed his eye vigorously. But the thing he saw did not disappear. Instead, it was increasing in visibility even as he watched incredulously.
In the very focus of the spiral luminosity that was Messier 33 an infinitesimal point of light had winked into being. Where, for thirty years of continuous observation, only wisps of extended light had greeted the eyes of astronomers, now John Wayne saw a tiny, stabbing sword of flame.
He sat rooted to the eyepiece, all thoughts of Betty swept from his mind, alive, alert to this incredible phenomenon.
A nova! A new star! Creation!
But a nova such as it had been given to no man to witness before. Figures danced in his brain, sent his senses reeling. This was in Messier 33, almost a million light years away. A star, born out of nebular filminess, flaring into birth. Infinitesimal it seemed, yet to span the yawning gulf between, to pierce his eye with individuality, that pin prick of flame must be of the order of a hundred million miles in diameter.
It was incredible, impossible! Barely a minute before he could have sworn that there had been no such focus of dazzlement in Messier 33; and now—
“Good Lord!” The exclamation burst involuntarily from his lips. In the half minute of his awareness, the pin point had grown, had extended its sway. And it was still growing, moving out in all directions, swelling before his astounded gaze, glowing with a baleful green. The flame of that darting sword across both space and time grew more intense; it seared and dazzled and scorched. A cry of agony wrenched itself from Wayne’s lips; perforce, he swung his eye from the lens. He was almost blinded.
Giles came running up in alarm. “What’s the matter?” he demanded anxiously.
Wayne rubbed his watering, wounded eye. “Something impossible is happening out in Messier 33. A nova is being born.”
“A nova? In an island universe?” Giles lurched toward the eyepiece. Just in time Wayne pulled him away. Grimly he pointed to the dome. Giles stared, gasped.
Directly above the eyepiece, at the focus of the light beams that traveled down the long braces of the telescope, to be gathered in the silvered reflector, and concentrated in the eyepiece, a brilliant spot of light was boring like an augur into the coated steel. A smell of smoldering paint assailed their nostrils.
Wayne sprang to the controls. Feverishly he swung the huge telescope to another section of the sky. In another minute that focused spear of flame from another universe would have irretrievably ruined the mighty instrument.
Then, animated by a common thought, the two astronomers dashed out into the night, stared up into the silent heavens. The mountaintop on which Kelton Observatory stood was a black backdrop of brooding quietness. The air was thin and keen and tart with the rising exhalations of a sleeping Earth. No lights showed in the surrounding huddle of buildings. They were alone in an immensity of time and space.
Now, Messier 33 is not visible to the naked eye. It is not a part of our galaxy; its distance is a million light years. Yet as two pair of eager eyes flung upward into the vastness of the heavens, trained eyes that knew just where to look, a fourth-magnitude star, of an angry, swelling green, glowed faintly where no star should have been—at the very focus of the quite invisible Messier 33.
The light was growing, waxing. Already it was of the order of the third magnitude, expanding on its way to the second. Giles gulped. “We’re witnessing a truly cosmic explosion,” he said in an awed voice.
Wayne gripped his shoulder with unwitting fingers of steel. “Do you realize what it means?” he cried harshly. “That nova is already over a billion miles in diameter—huger than any sun of which we have any knowledge in all the universe. And it is exploding at a rate far greater than the speed of light itself. It represents an entirely new principle in space time.”
Giles, for all his years, almost capered. “Of course,” he said in a cracked voice, “it’s got to be. It’s taking on shape before our very eyes. The speed of propagation of expansion, of the transmission of light across the void, must run to billions of miles per second. The scientific world will be in an uproar to-morrow.”
Wayne said nothing, shielded his eyes as he stared upward. A shiver passed through him, a wild thought—somehow this mighty apparition was connected with his strange premonitions of the evening.
Sirius, a white jewel in Canis Major, paled before the stranger. Then Jupiter, kingly planet of the heavens, lost its proud preëminence. The nova outshone them all, seemed to gather new strength and intensity with the passing minutes. Its baleful green was concentrated, venomous even. Already it cast green, flickering shadows on the ground. It was an emerald sword, flashing an unsupportable radiance across æons of time and infinitudes of space, searing the eye of the beholder with a light not of this Earth.
“Do you notice,” Wayne said suddenly, “that its path through space is visible, like the long curve of a comet’s tail?”
Giles nodded weak agreement. He found it difficult to speak. From that flaming point, a million light years away, a huge arc swung across the universe, green-glowing like its source, its lancing tip skimming the rim of the risen moon by a few degrees, and darting on and out past the horizon.
The old astronomer finally found his voice. “Then it can’t be mere light waves,” he gasped. “Light is invisible in empty space.”
“I told you it is a new principle,” Wayne retorted quietly. “Perhaps it is a train of propagation in subspace itself; perhaps its energy content is of such incredible power that it burns the space of our dimensional order into dazzling luminance.”
The nova, still a pin point of green fire, was now as intense and brilliant as the full Moon itself. The far-flung arc it had thrown across the universe, the curving sword that seemed a pointed threat to all of space, increased in intensity to an almost unsupportable blaze of fiery wrath. And the Moon, rising slowly above the horizon according to immutable laws, was swimming grandly toward the path of that mighty portent.
Wayne felt his knees trembling; a flood of inexpressible fears coursed through his veins. When the Moon, in its appointed orbit, would enter the pith and center of that flaming signal from Messier 33—
Giles clutched at the younger man for support. His face was haggard and strange in the weird, green luminance. The rounded orb had reached the very edge of the arcing streamer, was entering—
Wayne felt the perspiration ooze from him. The Moon, a great ball of solid, tangible rock, was shriveling before his very eyes. The fierce green splendor lapped it round, bathed its battered countenance, penetrated every pore with blinding effulgence. And the Moon was shrinking, smoothly, rapidly, equally in all its parts, becoming tinier, tinier, until—it vanished. The Moon was gone!
Almost immediately the two men felt a strange weight settle in their beings, an added sluggishness of limb and body, as if—
“It’s an optical illusion,” Giles gibbered. “In a few minutes, when the Moon’s orbit carries it outside of the diffracting glare, we’ll see it again. We must!”
But when the required number of minutes had elapsed, there still was no Moon. Wayne’s face was a thunder-cloud as they raced back to the observatory. With feverish fingers they trained the fifty-inch refractor on the calculated elements of the Moon’s positi
on. But the satellite was not there. Even the enormous magnification did not disclose it. The orb had shrunk beyond the vision of the naked eye, beyond the vision of the telescope. It had collapsed to a mathematical point; it had passed even that last boundary into the unknown.
“The Moon is no longer there,” Wayne said with conviction. “I felt it the moment it disappeared. The change in the gravity of our limbs, of the pumping blood in our veins. Its gravity influence is completely removed. There’ll be no more tides; no more—”
“You’re talking sheer insanity,” Giles almost screamed. “How can it be possible? Even if that damned ray from Messier 33 blasted the Moon into invisible fragments, the impalpable dust of the explosion would exercise the same mass attraction. Even if the Moon were annihilated completely, the conversion from matter into energy would have released such forces as to have smashed the Earth wide open as well.”
Wayne stared at him queerly. Perhaps Giles was right—he was going mad. But he had the answer. “The nova has done neither one nor the other. It has done something far more impossible. It has accomplished, on a far mightier scale, something of which we have had only faint adumbrations in the case of the heavy dwarfs—the white companion of Sirius, Van Maanen’s Star, the satellites of Procyon and Mira. They are stars of such incredible density that a mere pint of matter on their surfaces would weigh twenty-five tons on Earth. The atoms of which they are composed are compressed upon themselves; the electron-proton system of which the atoms, in turn, are formed are likewise packed into small compass.
“Suppose,” he went on slowly, “the explosion of this nova in Messier 33 has ripped open subspace, has set in motion forces across the universe which affect, not merely the three-dimensional aspects of the electron orbits, but also their subspace trains, those additional dimensions which Schroedinger’s equations imperiously demand.”
“Well?” Giles demanded as he paused.
Reluctantly Wayne continued. He was afraid of his own solution. “This must follow, as has followed on a much lesser scale in the case of the heavy dwarfs. The pressure of such an unimaginable force upon the multidimensional wave trains of electrons and protons would collapse them upon each other; would press them inward until the vast intervening spaces between electron and electron would shrink to almost contact. Van Maanen’s Star and the satellite of Sirius are but halfway stations on the downward path. Compressed as they are, their atoms are still echoing orbs of emptiness. We saw the Moon shrink, compress, as if a giant held it in a vise and squeezed. It passed the stage of the heavy dwarfs, crushed in upon itself until its component electrons actually jostled each other. Then it vanished.”
“Nonsense,” Giles said angrily. “Even if your theory is true, even if the Moon is almost a mathematical point, its mass would still exist, would still exercise all its original attractive power.”
Wayne arose. His clear-cut features were grim. “No,” he answered decisively. “You forget the Relativity Principle. If the Moon shrank to a point where it occupies but a few cubic yards in our space, and its mass focused to something like a million tons to the cubic inch, all our normal laws of gravitation would go by the board. What, after all, is gravitation?”
“The warping or bending of surrounding space because of the presence of matter,” Giles answered promptly.
“Exactly. But when matter is compressed to the incredible limits I have postulated, its warping powers over the neighboring field must be of such intensity as to curve the surrounding space time completely around itself. In other words, it has formed a closed unit, a spheroid sufficient to itself, even as our own Einsteinian space time is considered to be.”
Giles fell back. “You mean, then,” he croaked hoarsely, “that the Moon has been withdrawn from our order of space time into dimensions of its own; that it is there, yet as infinitely remote as the farthermost island universe?”
“Farther!” Wayne corrected. “We are in contact with Andromeda by the light which spans the gulf between, by our mutual gravitational attraction, no matter how weak. But the Moon and ourselves have sundered all such connections. It is invisible, for the light by which we see must forever swing around it; its gravitational sphere has no points of entrance into ours. Henceforth Earth must depend on the stars for night illumination, on the influence of the Sun for feeble tides.”
There was infinite sadness in the old man’s eyes as he stared up at the blank mockery of the heavens where the Moon had once been. “For sixty years,” he whispered, “whenever I was tired and weary, whenever life seemed profitless and arid, I had but to lift mine eyes to the calm, silver beauty of the orb of night and peace entered my soul. I have but few descending years—for me it no longer matters. But from whence shall future generations, the youth, the ardent lover, gain that refreshment, that spiritual enrichment which came from the contemplation of the Moon?”
Wayne stared at his chief in surprise. He had not suspected in their several years of association that poetic streak, that mystical core. He himself, far younger, was much more practical.
“If that were all, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Wayne retorted grimly. “But the loss of the Moon may have much more serious effects: the tides, for one; the elimination of the precession of the equinoxes; the possible dislocation of the Earth’s orbit; the incalculable gravity shift in the human body and its reaction on life and evolution.”
But Giles was not listening. A sudden spasm of alarm had contorted his aged features. “Good Lord!” he burst forth. “We stand here gabbing of nonsense when utter annihilation stares us in the face. Suppose the Earth, in its orbital swing, should enter the swath of that subspace eruption?”
Thin-lipped, tight-browed, John Wayne sprang for pencil and paper, ripped from their shelves the Nautical Almanac, the Astronomical Tables, Star Atlases, leafed through their contents in an agony of haste. “Quick!” he called to Giles in a strangled voice, “get me the exact coördinates of the nova’s space ray.”
Without a word the old astronomer went rapidly to the equatorial telescope, set it upon the far-flung curve of green flame, took reading after reading. Then, still without a word, he turned his figures over to Wayne. For a long half hour the younger man’s pencil raced furiously, covering sheet after sheet with intricate calculations.
As the last equation spattered its length over white paper, Howard Giles leaned over, surveyed the intersecting coördinates, said in dull tones: “Earth, then, is doomed!”
Wayne lifted a white face. “It’s not quite as bad as that. We’ll skim the pressure beam tangentially—a thin, small segment of the Earth’s surface will impinge—an arc of about thirty miles, a depth of about ten. The rest of Earth will escape.”
“That’s splendid,” Giles started joyfully, and stopped. There was that in his assistant’s face which forbade all joy, all further delight. A swift premonition came to the old man. “Where,” he asked slowly, “is the point of contact?”
Strange how even, how toneless, Wayne’s voice was. “New York City!” he said.
“Oh!” Just that; nothing more. But Giles knew what that meant. A population of over ten million people, a center of world civilization, wiped out, vanished, as though they had never been. And Betty Middleton, for whom Howard Giles had a father’s affection, for whom John Wayne had far more—
He leaned forward sharply. Wayne seemed paralyzed, bereft of all faculties. “When will the orbits intersect?” he demanded.
“At twelve minutes past two to-morrow.”
The withheld breath expelled in a snort of derision. “You’re a fool, John Wayne!” his chief cried out. “That gives us ten hours. In ten hours all New York can be evacuated, and Betty saved.”
The young astronomer leaped to his feet. “Of course!” he shouted. “I am a fool!” He dived precipitously across the rotunda, ripped the receiver from its moorings, jiggled the hook frantically.
“Hello! Hello! Operator!” he screamed into the mouthpiece.
There was no answer. There
was no familiar buzz along the wire. The line was dead!
Suddenly ashen, he turned swiftly to Giles. “Something’s wrong. A break in the mountain line!” But already he knew the terrible truth—that the mighty subspace disruption had set up a storm of electromagnetic currents in the surrounding ether which would blanket all electrical systems, all electrical communications.
He could have verified his dread in a few minutes with delicate apparatus, but every second was precious now. He spoke rapidly, hurriedly, racing against time.
“I’m taking the observatory car,” he said. “It’s fifty miles to Lanesville; there’s a branch phone office there. I can make it in less than an hour. And if that line is dead, our only hope is Denver, two hundred and seventy miles along. Meanwhile, you try to establish connection here. ’By!”
“Hold on,” Giles declared firmly. “I’m going along. Sanderson can take over.”
Argument was futile, and time infinitely precious. In two minutes a thoroughly aghast staff had been aroused, and the car, with Wayne crouched desperately over the wheel and old Giles beside him, his few locks streaming in the wind, was roaring down the mountain trail.
It was a wild ride. Hairpin turns were negotiated at sixty miles an hour; tires screamed and skidded precariously over yawning precipices, while the speedometer needle crept farther and farther over the illuminated dial.
II.
Dawn was breaking over the mountains—a dawn compounded of long, slanting spearheads of the Sun and the tight, green scimitar thrust of the nova. Within the past half hour the latter had not swelled or increased its path; the incomprehensible explosion in Messier 33 had reached its maximum.
It was 4:56 a. m. when the little mining town of Lanesville swam into view, moveless, silent in the early-morning light. Heads thrust sleepily out of windows at their roaring progress, unknowing that in their slumber the familiar Moon had been ravished from the Earth.
When The Future Dies Page 19