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Title: The Star

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: January 5, 2022 [eBook #67071]

Language: English

Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR ***





[Illustration: Above were the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the
seething floods and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the
earthquake.]


  Here is an impressive story based on the inter-action of
  planetary bodies and of the sun upon them. A great star is seen
  approaching the earth. At first it is only an object of interest
  to the general public, but there is an astronomer on the earth,
  who is watching each phase and making mathematical calculations,
  for he knows the intimate relation of gravitation between bodies
  and the effect on rotating bodies of the same force from an
  outside source. He fears all sorts of wreckage on our earth. He
  warns the people, but they, as usual, discount all he says and
  label him mad. But he was not mad. H. G. Wells, in his own way,
  gives us a picturesque description of the approach of the new
  body through long days and nights—he tells how the earth and
  natural phenomena of the earth will react. Though this star
  never touches our sphere, the devastation and destruction
  wrought by it are complete and horrible. The story is correct in
  its astronomical aspects.




THE STAR

By H. G. Wells

Author of “The War of the Worlds”, “The Time Machine”, Etc.


It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was
made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the
motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that
wheeled about the sun, had become erratic. Ogilvy had already called
attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December.
Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest the world
the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the
existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical
profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote speck of
light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any great
excitement.

Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable
enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly
growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different
from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of
Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.

Few people without training in science can realize the huge
isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets,
its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets swims in vacant
immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of
Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has
penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for
twenty billion times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate
of the distance to be traversed before the nearest of the stars is
attained. And, saving a few comets, more unsubstantial than the
thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed the
gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this wanderer
appeared.

A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning
out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By
the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a
speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near
Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it.

On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two
hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real
importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary
Collision,” one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed
Duchine’s opinion that this strange new planet would probably
collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic. So
that in most of the capitals of the world, on Jan. 3, there was an
expectation, however vague, of some eminent phenomenon in the sky;
and as the night followed the sunset round the globe thousands of
men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as
they had always been.

Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting, and the stars
overhead grown pale. The winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering
accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone
yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the
yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the market
stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the
drivers of news carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale,
homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country,
laborers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky
quickening country it would be seen—and out at sea by seamen
watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the
westward sky!

Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the
evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large,
no mere twinkling spot of light but a small round clear shining
disk, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not
reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and
pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the
heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes,
Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the glow of the sunrise
watching the setting of this strange new star.

And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together. There had been a hurrying to and fro to gather
photographic apparatus and spectroscope; to gather this appliance
and that, to record the novel astonishing sight, the destruction of
a world,—for it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far
greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into
flaming death. Neptune it was, which had been struck, fairly, and
squarely, by the planet from outer space and the heat of concussion
had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of
incandescence.

Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid
great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun
mounted above it. Everywhere man marveled at it, but of all those
who saw it none could have marveled more than those sailors,
habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard
nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and
climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the
passing of the night.

And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers
on hilly slopes, on house roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward,
waiting for the rising of the new star. It rose with a white glow in
front, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it
come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it.
“It is larger,” they cried. “It is brighter!” And, indeed, the moon
a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size
beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much
brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.

“It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets. But in
the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at
one another. “It is nearer,” they said. “Nearer!”

And voice after voice repeated. “It is nearer,” and the clicking
telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and
in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. “It is
nearer.” Men writing in offices, struck with strange realization,
flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly
came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, “It is nearer.” It
hurried along awakening streets, it was shouted down the
frost-stilled ways of quiet villages, men who had read these things,
from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the
news to the passers-by. “It is nearer.” Pretty women flushed and
glittering, heard the news told jestingly between dances, and
feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel. “Nearer! Indeed.
How curious! How clever people must be to find out things like
that!”

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words
to comfort themselves—looking skyward. “It has need to be nearer,
for the night’s as cold as charity. Don’t seem much warmth from it
if it is nearer, all the same.”

“What is a new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside
her dead.

The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out
for himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright
through the frost-flowers of his window. “Centrifugal, centripetal,”
he said, with his chin on his fist. “Stop a planet in its flight,
rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and
down it falls into the sun! And this——!”

“Do we come in the way? I wonder——”

The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the
later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again,
And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale
yellow ghost of itself, rising huge in the sunset hour. In a South
African city a great man had married, and the streets were alight to
welcome his return with his bride. “Even the skies have
illuminated,” said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negro lovers,
daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another,
crouched together in a cane brake where the fireflies hovered. “That
is our star,” they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the
sweet brilliancy of its light.

The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the
papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small
white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept
him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene,
explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students,
and then had come back at once to his momentous calculation. His
face was grave, a little drawn, and hectic from his drugged
activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to
the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky,
over the clustering roofs, chimneys, and steeples of the city, hung
the star.

He looked at it as one might look into the eye of a brave enemy.
“You may kill me,” he said after a silence, “But I can hold you—and
all the universe for that matter—in the grip of this little brain. I
would not change even now.”

He looked at the little phial. “There will be no need of sleep
again,” he said. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he
entered his lecture theater, put his hat on the end of the table as
his habit was, and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was
a joke among his students that he could not lecture without that
piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and once he had been
stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came and looked
under his gray eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces,
and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing,
“Circumstances have arisen—circumstances beyond my control,” he said
and paused, “which will debar me from completing the course I had
designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the thing clearly
and briefly, that—man has lived in vain.”

The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad?
Raised eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces
remained intent upon his calm gray-fringed face. “It will be
interesting,” he was saying, “to devote this morning to an
exposition, so far as I can make it clear to you, of the
calculations that have led me to this conclusion. Let us assume——”

He turned toward the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way
that was usual to him. “What was that about ‘lived in vain’?”
whispered one student to another. “Listen,” said the other, nodding
toward the lecturer.

And presently they began to understand.

That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had
carried it some way across Leo toward Virgo, and its brightness was
so great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every
star and planet was hidden, save only Jupiter near the zenith,
Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, and the pointers of the Bear. It was
white and beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid
halo encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear
refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a
quarter of the size of the moon. The frost was still on the ground
in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it were
midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by
that cold clear light, and in the cities the lamps burnt yellow and
wan.

And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout
Christendom a somber murmur hung in the keen air over the
countryside like the buzzing of the bees in the heather, and this
murmurous tumult grew to a clangor in the cities. It was the tolling
of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the
people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their
churches and pray. And overhead, growing larger and brighter, as the
earth rolled on its way and the night passed, rose the dazzling
star.

And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the
shipyards glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit
and crowded all night long. And in all the seas about the civilized
lands ships with throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails,
crowded with men and living creatures, were standing out to ocean
and the north. For already the warning of the master mathematician
had been telegraphed over the world, and translated into a hundred
tongues. The new planet and Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were
whirling headlong, ever faster and faster, toward the sun. Already
every second this blazing mass flew a hundred miles, and every
second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew its course, it
must pass a hundred million of miles wide of the earth and scarcely
affect it.

But near its destined path, as yet only slightly perturbed, spun the
mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid around the
sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and the
greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of that
attraction? Inevitably Jupiter, would be deflected from its orbit to
a new elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his attraction
wide of its sunward rush, would “describe a curved path” and perhaps
collide with and certainly pass close to, our earth. “Earthquakes,
volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a steady rise
in temperature to I know not what limit”—so prophesied the master
mathematician.

And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid,
blazed the star of the coming doom.

To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it
seemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the
weather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe
and France and England softened towards a thaw.

But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying
through the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing
towards mountainous country that the whole world was already in a
terror because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still
ruled the world, and save for the talk of idle moments and the
splendor of the night, nine human beings out of ten were still busy
at their common occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one
here and there, opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor
and the undertaker plied their trades, and workers gathered in the
factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one
another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned their schemes.
The presses of the newspapers roared through the nights, and many a
priest of this church and that would not open his holy building to
further what he considered a foolish panic.

The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000—for then,
too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star—mere gas—a
comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth.
There was no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was sturdy
everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the
obdurate fearful. That night at 7:15 by Greenwich time the star
would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the
turn things would take. The master mathematician’s grim warnings
were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self-advertisement.
Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its
unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism and
savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly
business: and save for a howling dog here and there the beast-world
left the star unheeded.

And yet, when at last the watchers in the European states saw their
star rise, an hour later, it is true, but no larger than it had been
the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the
master mathematician—to take the danger as if it had passed.

But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew—it grew with a
terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a
little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until
it had turned night into day. Had it come straight to the earth
instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it
must have leapt the intervening gulf in a day; but as it was it took
five days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had
become a third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes,
and the thaw was assured.

It rose over America nearly the size of the moon, but blinding white
to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its
rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia and Brazil and down
the St. Lawrence valley it shone intermittently through a driving
reek of thunder clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail
unprecedented. In Manitoba were a thaw and devastating floods. And
upon the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that
night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick
and turbid, and soon—in their upper reaches— with swirling trees and
the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the
ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last,
behind the flying population of their valleys.

And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic tides
were higher than they had ever been in the memory of man, and the
storms drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland,
drowning whole cities. And so great grew the heat during the night
that the rising of the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The
earthquakes began and grew until all down America from the Arctic
Circle to Cape Horn hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening,
and houses and walls crumbling to destruction.

China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the
islands of eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire
because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting
forth to salute its coming. Above were the lava, hot gases, and ash,
and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and
rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of
Tibet and the Himalayas were melting and pouring down by ten million
deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burma and
Hindustan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in
a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the stems
were dark objects that struggled feebly and reflected the blood red
tongues of fire. And in a ungovernable confusion a multitude of men
and women fled down the broad riverways to that one last hope of
men—the open sea.

Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a
terrible swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its
phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from
the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed
ships.

And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for
the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation.
In a thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled
thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of
hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a
terrible suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their
eyes upon the old constellations they had counted lost to them
forever. In England it was hot and clear overhead, though the ground
quivered perpetually; but in the tropics Sirius and Capella and
Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam. And when at last the great
star rose, near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in
the center of its white heart was a disk of black.

Over Asia the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the sky,
and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled.
All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of
the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of
which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people.
Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one
into the turbid waters as heat and terror overcame them. The whole
land seemed a-wailing, and suddenly there swept a shadow across that
furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of
clouds out of the cooling air. Men looking up, nearly blinded, at
the star, and saw that black disk creeping across the light. It was
the moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as men
cried to God at this respite, out of the east with a strange,
inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun, and moon
rushed together across the heavens.

So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun
rose close upon each other, drove headlong for a space, and then
slower, and at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare
of flame at the zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the
star, but was lost to sight in the brilliance of the sky. And though
those who were still alive regarded it for the most part with that
dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat, and despair engender,
there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs.
Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one
another, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter
and swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into
the sun.

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky;
the thunder and lightning wove a garment around the world; all over
the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never seen before;
and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there
descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off
the land, leaving mud stilted ruins, and the earth littered like a
storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of
the men and brutes, its children.

For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and
trees and houses in the way and piling huge dikes and scooping out
titanic gullies over the countryside. Those were the days of
darkness that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and
for many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.

But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering
courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried
granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the
storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their
way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once familiar
ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived that everywhere the
days were hotter than of yore, and the sun larger, and the moon,
shrunk to a third of its size, took now fourscore days between its
new and new.

But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the
saving of laws and machines, of the strange change that had Iceland
and Greenland the shores of Baffin’s Bay, so that the sailors coming
there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarce
believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of
mankind, now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward
towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the
coming and the passing of the star.

The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although
they are different beings from men—were naturally profoundly
interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint,
of course. “Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that
was flung through our solar system into the sun,” one wrote, “it is
astonishing what little damage the earth, which it missed so
narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and
the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference
seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be
frozen water) round either pole.” Which only shows how small the
vastest of human catastrophies may seem at a distance of a few
million miles.


[Transcriber’s Note. This story appeared in the June, 1926 issue of
_Amazing Stories_ magazine. The introduction (“Here is an impressive
story....”) was added by the publisher.]

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