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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1951 by John Russell Fearn
Copyright © 2002, 2010 by Philip Harbottle
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Claire Jane King
CHAPTER ONE
THE FAULT IN SPACE
For a single star suddenly to blaze from tenth to first magnitude in a matter of hours is by no means uncommon, and when it happened on the night of June 9th, no astronomer thought very much of the occurrence. Just routine. BZ/94 had probably become a nova, was recorded as such on the star-plates and spectroheliographs, and that was that.
But on the next night it happened again—and this time as many as three stars were involved. Unusual, yes, but nothing to become alarmed about. Once again astronomers faithfully logged the occurrence and continued with routine observations, the guardians of the world against the unexpected from space, unsung heroes as important to the safety of Earth as once had been the lighthouse keeper to shipping.
Dr. Gray, chief astronomer of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, was one of the many scientists who had witnessed this strange flaring up of stars in the vast depths of space, and he had had an unique view of the happening with the great reflector with which the observatory was equipped. Certainly he did not expect that June 11th would again see strange behaviour amongst the stars—but it happened!
He was in the midst of calculations essential to his profession, and the electric clock on the polished wall indicated three a.m. when an excited junior astronomer tapped hastily and entered the doyen’s retreat. He came hurrying over to the chief’s desk with manifest urgency. “Dr. Gray, if you can spare a moment? I just can’t make head or tail of what’s happening.”
“Happening?” Gray looked up in surprise.
“Tremendous increase in the brightness of the stars, sir. You know it happened last night, and the night before that, but this time—!” and the assistant stopped half in awe
With a frown Gray rose hurriedly to his feet and preceded the younger man into the main observatory. All the lights were dimmed to a mere glow and a solitary spot cast upon the small writing desk beside the eyepiece of the mammoth instrument. Dr. Gray seated himself and then controlled the gasp of surprise that almost escaped him. Straight ahead of him, in the reflector’s circular field, were Sagittarius, Hercules, and the myriad hosts of the constellations, and every star was of a brilliance that stung the eye.
Gray reached out and snapped a switch. Immediately a blue-tinted shield slid into the high-magnification eyepiece and this in itself was the first hint of the unusual. Never in astronomical history had the stars been so brilliant that they could not be studied with the unprotected eye.
Antares, Cepheus, Hercules—all of them flaming and scintillating with a brilliance never before seen by man.
Nor was it a wavering brightness but an intense and steady glare. The remoter constellations, riding far out into the Milky Way, were gleaming in supreme splendour. In fact the whole area within a peculiar V-shaped wedge was alive with uncanny brightness.
“Extraordinary,” Dr. Gray muttered, and the remark covered his emotions completely. He was too experienced a man to show how startled he really was. Pondering, he rose from the reflector-seat and wandered to the outer door of the dome, the assistant astronomer padding softly behind him. They stepped together onto the balcony surrounding the dome and gazed at the portion of the sky towards which the telescope was trained.
There was no doubt about it. Something was wrong up there! In the clear Californian air, rendered even clearer at this height on the mountain range, the stars in one particular area were infinitely more brilliant even than Sirius, occupying a different quarter of the heavens. It was as though sheer void existed up in that one section, and air—with its masking effect—everywhere else. Which, of course, was an impossibility.
“What do you make of it, sir?” the assistant asked, his voice tense.
Dr. Gray did not answer immediately. He looked down towards sleeping Los Angeles, then out into the remoter darkness where lay the night. Then once more he glanced towards the sky. Hands in his pockets he walked slowly back into the observatory and the assistant closed the door behind them.
“I never saw anything quite like this,” Gray admitted at length, switching on the main lights to reveal his grimly puzzled features. “Of course, stars do blaze up mysteriously sometimes, surging rapidly from tenth to first magnitude and then dying down again—but that all the stars in one section of the sky should behave that way is astounding! Even the constellations and nebulae are not immune.”
The assistant waited for more words of wisdom, but none came. Abruptly making up his mind, Dr. Gray hurried from the main observatory into the radio-television department. In a few minutes he had established contact with other observatories throughout the darkened hemisphere of Earth and notes were exchanged.
Not only on that night did Mount Wilson link up with Greenwich and the major observatories of every country, but for several nights afterwards. Finally the entire mass of information was sifted and pooled and a conference took place behind closed doors in an unnamed city.
“There seems to me to be no doubt about it, gentlemen,” Dr. Gray said seriously. “Earth is speeding at a million miles a minute towards an area of uncanny brightness. But what this brightness is we don’t know.”
“Correction,” responded the expert from Greenwich. “I have here the conclusions of Marsden and Yates, two of the best astrophysicists in the world. Their contention is that the increase in light is caused by a fault in space itself! Ahead
of us space is not behaving as it should. The old-time scientists used to refer to the ether of space, which they considered to be the only way in which we can explain the medium that carries light and heat vibration. A kind of universal sea in which all radiations move. Now we believe that the propagation of light-waves and other radiation is simply a property of space-time itself. In the past, small flaws in this over-all sea of space have apparently caused stars to flare up brilliantly, to die away again to normal afterwards when the flaw has corrected itself. We can none of us explain the sudden appearance of brilliant stars—but the theory of Marsden and Yates suggests that the actual fabric of space-time itself, like any other material medium, is liable to discontinuity. It can develop a warp, and from the look of things it has. A huge, terrifying warp, towards which Earth is flying nearer with every second.”
“Have—have the consequences of this phenomenon been fully weighed?” Gray asked presently.
The Greenwich astronomer gave, a grim nod. “In a matter of two weeks or so Earth will inevitably touch the outer edge of this fault in space and will then speed on into the core of the disturbance. What will happen we do not know yet, but in the two weeks left to us we can probably find out.”
“Governments must be informed immediately,” declared the representative from France.
“I disagree,” interposed Sweden. “I, at least, must have tangible evidence before I dare stampede my Government with this kind of thing. Science is so little understood by the masses. One word in the wrong place can start a panic.”
So the astronomers wrangled and argued, but they finally closed the meeting with the decision to work out every possibility as near as they could and then submit their findings to a conference of selected delegates from every country in the world—and this was exactly what they did.
The meeting took place ten days later, in secret. No television cameras whirred, no newspaper man was admitted. Here was a matter of the utmost solemnity affecting not a portion of the human race, but all of it. As on the earlier occasion Dr. Gray was chairman, and he explained the situation in detail.
“And how long will it be before we reach this—this figurative flaw in the fabric of space?” questioned the American delegate.