Waiting For Doom

: The World Peril Of 1910

This was the all-important news which the inhabitants of every town

which possessed a well-informed newspaper read the next morning. It was,

in the more important of them, followed by digests of the calculations

which had made this terrific result a practical certainty. These, again,

were followed by speculations, some deliberately scientific, and some

wild beyond the dreams of the most hopeless hysteria.



Men and women who for a generation or so had been making large incomes

by prophesying the end of the world as a certainty about every seven

years--and had bought up long leaseholds meanwhile--now gambled with

absolute certainty on the shortness of the public memory, revised their

figures, and proved to demonstration that this was the very thing they

had been foretelling all along.



First--outside scientific circles--came blank incredulity. The ordinary

man and woman in the street had not room in their brains for such a

tremendous idea as this--fact or no fact. They were already filled with

a crowd of much smaller and, to them, much more pressing concerns, than

a collision with a comet which you couldn't even see except through a

big telescope: and then that sort of thing had been talked and written

about hundreds of times before and had never come to anything, so why

should this?



But when the morning papers dated--somewhat ominously--the twenty-fifth

of March, quarter day, informed their readers that, granted fine

weather, the comet would be visible to the naked eye from sunset to

sunrise according to longitude that night, the views of the man and the

woman who had taken the matter so lightly underwent a very considerable

change.



While the comet could only be seen, save by astronomers, in the

photographs that could be bought in any form from a picture-postcard to

a five-guinea reproduction of the actual thing, there was still an air

of unconvincing unreality about. Of course it might be coming, but it

was still very far away, and it might not arrive after all. Yet when

that fateful night had passed and millions of sleepless eyes had seen

the south-western stars shining through a pale luminous mist extended in

the shape of two vast filmy wings with a brighter spot of yellow flame

between them, the whole matter seemed to take on a very different and a

much more serious aspect.



The fighting had come to a sudden stop, as though by a mutually tacit

agreement. Not even the German Emperor could now deny that Lennard had

made no idle threat at Canterbury when he had given him the destruction

of the world as an alternative to the conquest of Britain. Still, he did

not quite believe in the possibility of that destruction even yet, in

spite of what the Tsar had told him and what he had learned from other

sources. He still wanted to fight to a finish, and, as Deputy European

Providence, he had a very real objection to the interference of

apparently irresponsible celestial bodies with his carefully-thought-out

plans for the ordering of mundane civilisation on German commercial

lines. Whether they liked it or not, it must be the best thing in the

end for them: otherwise how could He have come to think it all out?



Meanwhile, to make matters worse from his point of view, John Castellan

had refused absolutely to accept any modification of the original terms,

and he had replied to an order from headquarters to report himself and

the ships still left under his control by loading the said ships with

ammunition and motive power and then disappearing from the field of

action without leaving a trace as to his present or future whereabouts

behind him, and so, as far as matters went, entirely fulfilling the

Tsar's almost prophetic fears.



And then, precisely at the hour, minute and second predicted, five

hours, thirty minutes and twenty-five seconds, a.m., on the 31st of

March, the comet became visible in daylight about two and a half degrees

south-westward of the Morning Star. Twenty-four hours later the two

wings came into view, and the next evening the Invader looked like some

gigantic bird of prey swooping down from its eyrie somewhere in the

heights of Space upon the trembling and terrified world. The

professional prophets said, with an excellent assumption of absolute

conviction, that it was nothing less awful than the Destroying Angel

himself in propria persona.



At length, when excitement had developed into frenzy, and frenzy into an

almost universal delirium, two cablegrams crossed each other along the

bed of the Atlantic Ocean. One was to say that the Pittsburg gun was

ready, and the other that the loading of the Bolton Baby--feeding, some

callous humorist of the day called it--was to begin the next morning.

This meant that there was just a week--an ordinary working week, between

the human race and something very like the Day of Judgment.



The next day Lennard set all the existing wires of the world thrilling

with the news that the huge projectile, charged with its thirty

hundredweight of explosives, was resting quietly in its place on the top

of a potential volcano which, loosened by the touch of a woman's hand,

was to hurl it through space and into the heart of the swiftly-advancing

Invader from the outmost realms of Space.



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