Juggernaut of Space

We took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. It was a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the heavens. Shorty and I didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the White Mountains, on what Dr. Johns might have to say. Shorty wasn't much interested in astronomy, anyway--to him, as he often said, it was an uninteresting enigma. He mentioned that tonight.

"Good," I said. "Then, how is crime coming? Many people missing lately?"

Things were dull, he assured me. Nothing but the usual run of stuff that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few relatives were interested. As it happened, the Crimson Comet affair caused five mysterious disappearances, Shorty, myself and three others. I think I can understand now why it happened that I knew them all. I must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science. That involved Shorty, because he was so much with me. And as for the other three--looking back on it now I realize that each of them vanished soon after having been with me. I was being trailed and was seized last.

We landed on the private stage of the big Observatory about midnight and presently were with Dr. Johns in his study. What he had to tell us didn't seem very startling at the time. But in the light of what was to happen, looking back on it now I can see its deadly significance. Like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all the world! Grim, stealthy events creeping upon us--little things here on Earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars.

"Here at the Observatory," Dr. Johns was saying, "we thought that somehow we must be making miscalculations. A fraction of a second in the axial and orbital movements of the Earth, which involved the visual movement of all the starfield. But we checked and rechecked. And then other observatories reported it."

The Earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the Sun apparently were changing infinitesimally.

"Too bad," Shorty commented. "I'm sure sorry."

But Dr. Johns didn't smile. "There seem to be many unrelated things," he said. "You can shrug any of them off. But then, if it once occurs to you that they might be connected--"

"What other things?" I asked.

Meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. Nothing which had not occurred before, of course--unusual, freakish storms in many parts of the Earth.

"And for a month now," Dr. Johns went on, "there has been noticeable a peculiar purple radiance in the air at night."

"Purple radiance?" Shorty echoed. "Hadn't noticed it."

"Because it isn't visible to the naked eye," Dr. Johns retorted. "But it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. Slowed it down. And our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects so that we know if we could see it--it would be a purplish glow."

And there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently had located. I had heard that much--had mentioned it in one of my broadcasts.

"We call it a comet," Dr. Johns explained, "because there's a crimson radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the Sun. But its nucleus seems sizable--five hundred miles in diameter possibly. A planetoid, with a radiance. You might just possibly call it that."

"And it's just about now crossing the orbit of Mars," I said. "That was the last report made public, wasn't it?"

Dr. Johns nodded. "Our calculations of its orbit--made a month ago--showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of Earth. But that's all changed now. It's erratic."

I was beginning to see why he was startled. This new Crimson Comet wasn't obeying the normal laws of Celestial Mechanics. It was swimming erratically in Space. Could it be a solid body as big as five hundred miles in diameter? Solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of the Earth's axial and orbital disturbances?

"And this purple radiance," Dr. Johns said soberly, "we've just been wondering if that could be coming from the comet."

I need not specify all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But with him, a man of cold logic and careful science--well, it must have been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us?

You couldn't make such speculations public. People would laugh. But some wouldn't. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And Dr. Johns had sent for me--a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting of wild tales.

"You two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "And if it goes on, you can announce it, Bob." He shrugged again, and tried to laugh lugubriously. "I feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world with a couple of news-hounds. And yet, somehow, I also feel that maybe everyone of us on Earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was before!"

And we certainly were!

That was the general gist of our talk that night with Dr. Johns. I never found out more from him--I had no time. The thing struck at me four days later. During those four days, it happened that quite by chance I met the three other people who were destined to be plunged with Shorty and myself into adventure. The first was Peter Mack. I was walking at night in Washington Square, in New York City--small remaining tradition of little old New York. To me it's like a Monks' Garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building walls with the canyon of Fifth Avenue running into it.

The night was hot and clear. The little tent of blue over the Square was star-filled. I chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench.

"Got a light?" There was a young fellow on the bench with me. He shifted toward me. He was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age, hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. A slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. He had a grimy cigarette butt between his fingers.

"I can do better than that," I smiled. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him.