IN order to adequately explain the origin of the peremptory recall which, although of course he obeyed it without question, seemed so incomprehensible to Alan, it will be necessary to go back to the night of the 12th of May.

While all Aeria was rejoicing over the return of the exiles and their restoration to the rights of citizenship, there was one of the inhabitants of the Valley who took little or no part in the festivities. This was Vassilis Cosmo, a man of between forty-six and forty-seven, and elder brother of the George Cosmo who had been chief engineer of the Narwhal, and was now first officer of the Avenger.

A striking distinction of personality and temperament had, ever since he had reached a thinking age, marked him as one apart from the rest of his fellow-countrymen.

He had little or none of the gaiety of disposition and social cordiality that were the salient characteristics of the Aerians as a people. He was serious almost to taciturnity, solitary and studious, and wholly engrossed in a single pursuit—the study of astronomy in its bearing on the great problem of interplanetary communication.

After twenty years of constant labour, assisted by all the knowledge and inventive progress which had placed the Aerians so far ahead of the rest of the world, he had at length solved this problem and realised the dream of ages six years[290] before Olga Romanoff had dropped her defiance from the skies.

As yet, however, his success had been confined to one planet, and this, as will have been learnt from the conversation between Alma and Isma on that memorable night on which Alan’s letter had been received from the island, was the planet Mars.

After infinite toil and innumerable failures, he had at length succeeded in establishing an intelligible system of what may here be described as photo-telegraphy, in which the rays of light passing between the earth and Mars were made to perform the functions of the electric wires in modern telegraphy.

His alphabet, so to speak, consisted of a hundred great electric suns disposed at equal intervals on the mountain peaks round the great oval of the Valley. These were in direct communication with the observatory of Aeria, which was situated at a height of sixteen thousand feet on Mount Austral, the highest of the two snow-capped peaks which stood at the southern end of the Valley.

A single switch key enabled him, when sitting by the huge telescope which embodied all the highest optical science of Aeria, to light and extinguish these brilliant globes as he chose, and it was by lighting and extinguishing them at certain intervals that he was able to transmit his signals to the Martian astronomer, who was waiting to receive them, and to reply to them by similar means across the gulf of thirty-four million miles which separates the two planets at their nearest approach to each other.

Momentous as were the events of the last few days, they were dwarfed to utter insignificance by the irregular and apparently meaningless recurrences of a tiny point of light in the centre of a great concave mirror situated at the base of the huge barrel of the telescope, through the side aperture of which Vassilis Cosmo was looking a few minutes before midnight on that memorable 12th of May.

The point of light appeared and vanished, and reappeared[291] again at irregular intervals, which the astronomer noted on an automatic registering instrument beside him. The moment the flash appeared he pressed a button, which he held down till it disappeared, then he released it, waited till the flash reappeared, and repeated the operation so long as the signals came.

For nearly five hours he received and registered the signals recorded by his reflector in silence, broken only by the monotonous ticking of the clockwork which, working synchronously with the movements of the two orbs, kept the image of Mars exactly in the centre of the object-glass, and by the soft whirring of the registering instrument.

Never before had human eyes read such a message as he read, sitting that night in silence and solitude in his observatory amid the snows, far above the lovely valley in which his countrymen were still holding high revel.

Well might his hands tremble and his eyes grow dim with something more than long watching when he reversed the mechanism of the register and a narrow slip of paper, divided by cross-lines into equal spaces a tenth of an inch long, issued from a slit in one end, and began to run slowly over a revolving drum.

On the tape was a series of straight black lines running longitudinally along it. They were of unequal length, and divided from each other by unequal spaces. Before the exact import of the message could be gained the length of each of these lines, and that of the space which separated it from the next, had to be accurately measured, but Vassilis knew his own code so perfectly that he had been able to read the general drift of the communication that had been sent along the light-rays from the sister world by approximately guessing the duration of the flashes and the intervals between them.

Day was beginning to dawn by the time the long tape had been unrolled and pinned down in equal lengths on a board for measuring. For more than five hours he had not uttered a syllable or even an exclamation, although he had received from another world what appeared to be tantamount, not[292] only to his own death-sentence, but to that of the whole human race.

But when the slips were at length pinned out and he had run his practised eye deliberately over the fatal marks, his white lips parted and a deep groan broke from his chest. He was alone in the observatory, or perhaps not even this sign of emotion would have escaped him.

With his hands pressed to his temples as though his brain were reeling under the frightful intelligence that had just been conveyed to it, he stood in front of the board and gasped in short, broken sentences—

“God of mercy, can that be really true! Has the world only four months more to live? Surely I have made some mistake—and yet everything has worked as usual. There has been no hitch. It has been a splendid night for transmission and they—no, they had not made a mistake for a thousand years, they are past it. It must—but no, I can do nothing more this morning. I should go mad if I did. I must think of it quietly and sleep a little if I can, and then I will transcribe it.”

He left the telescope tower and went out on to a little platform at the rear of the observatory which commanded a view of the whole Valley. He looked out over the lovely landscape lying calm and silent beneath the paling stars, and involuntarily exclaimed aloud—

“Is it for this that we have conquered the earth and bridged the abysses of space—for this that we have made ourselves as gods among men and throned ourselves here in this lovely land, lords of the world and masters of the nations?

“How shall I tell them down yonder? And yet, has not the Master told them already: ‘His shape shall be that of a flaming fire.’ ‘Your children of the fifth generation shall behold his approach’? Yes, the two exiles we welcomed back last night are the fifth generation from the Angel, and that will truly be a flaming fire, and truly it will go hard with this world and the men of it in the hour of its passing, as the Master has said.”

[293]

After a vain attempt to seek refuge from his thoughts in sleep he boarded his aerial yacht and went to the city to mingle with the merry-makers, more for appearance’ sake than from inclination, but he kept his own counsel strictly, for more reasons than one. The next night, as soon as Mars was high enough in the heavens, about half-past ten, the dwellers in the Valley saw the great lights on the mountain tops flash out and darken at irregular intervals time after time and hour after hour, until all but those in the sentinel ships went to rest, saying—

“Vassilis is talking to our neighbours in Mars. He will have something to tell us to-morrow.”

But when the next day came he had nothing to tell. He had spent the night repeating the message, sign for sign and word for word, and asking for confirmation lest he should have made any mistake in receiving it. Then in agonised anxiety he had waited for the reply on which he now felt the fate of mankind depended. It came with a terrible clearness and brevity, which left no room for doubt—

“Message read correctly. There is no error in our calculations. Terrestrial humanity is doomed, and must prepare to meet its fate.”

So far as he was concerned he was satisfied. He knew that a mistake was impossible to the finished science of the Martian astronomers, compared with whom he was but as a little child in knowledge. But still he kept his own counsel, for there was no need for him to cast the sudden shadow of death over the rejoicings of his countrymen.

At length the fleets departed, and Aeria, armed at all points, was awaiting the possible onslaught of her foes. These she would doubtless hurl back in triumphant disdain from her bulwarks, but far, far away in the depths of space, beyond even the range of the great equatorial on Mount Austral, there was approaching an enemy whose assault men could only meet with resignation or despair, as the case might be. Resistance was as much out of the question as escape.

Early on the morning of the 16th, soon after the Avenger[294] had struck the first blow in the world-war, Vassilis presented himself at the President’s palace and asked for an interview with him.

The President received him a few minutes later in his private room. It was the first time in his life that the silent, reserved astronomer had ever asked for an official interview, and as the President entered the room he held out his hand, saying—

“Good morning, Vassilis. We have seen very little of you lately, even less than usual. Have you come to see me about the work which has kept you from joining in the general rejoicings? I’m sure it must have been very important.”

“Yes, President, it was—the most important that a terrestrial student of astronomy could be engaged upon,” replied Vassilis, speaking slowly and very gravely.

The President looked curiously for a moment into his clear, thoughtful eyes, and noticed the lines of care on his pale, worn features, so different to those of the rest of his countrymen. Then he said, with an anxious ring in his voice—

“What is the matter, Vassilis? You look worn and ill, as though you had just passed through some great sorrow. Have you been keeping too long vigils with the stars? Tell me, what is it?”

Vassilis was silent for a moment as though he might have been wondering whether the President, strong as he was, would have strength to bear the blow that he must strike in his next sentence. The awful news had come to him slowly, sign by sign and word by word, and so he had been in a measure prepared for it when its full meaning became clear. But upon Alan Arnold it must fall at a single stroke. Still the words had to be spoken, and after a good minute’s pause he said—

“President, I bring you the most terrible news that one man can bring to another. The Master’s prophecy is about to be fulfilled. Three nights ago I received through the photo-telegraph what I believe to be the death-sentence of humanity upon earth. Here is the transcript of the message.”

[295]

Save for a sudden pallor and a quick uplifting of the eyelids, Alan Arnold betrayed no more emotion as he took the roll of paper which Vassilis handed to him, than he had done when he received his son’s letter from the island.

“It does not come to me unexpected,” he said in his firm quiet tones. “Your children and mine, Vassilis, are of the fifth generation, and it was foretold that they should see the sign in the sky. And so the threatened doom is not to pass us by?”

“No,” replied Vassilis. “Not unless some miracle happens, and there are no miracles in the astronomy or the mathematics of Mars. The Martians are long past the age of miracles or mistakes. These are the data and the calculations upon which the conclusion is based. I have repeated them back to Mars and received confirmation of them.

“I have also verified the times and distances and velocities myself, and have been unable to find the slightest error. As far as I can see, there is not the remotest chance of escape. The human race has only four months, five days, and twenty-three hours to live from midnight to-night.”

“It is the will of God!” said the President solemnly, slightly bending his head as he spoke. “It is not for us to question the designs of Eternal Wisdom, save in so far as we may strive to understand them. Death has always been inevitable to all of us, and this will only be dying together instead of alone. Do you wish anything done with these calculations?”

“Yes,” said Vassilis. “I would suggest that you appoint a committee of our best mathematicians and astronomers to examine and verify them once more, detail by detail, so that assurance may, if possible, be made surer. I shall receive another message from Mars to-night, and it will be well for the committee to be with me in the observatory. With the public aspect of the question I have, of course, nothing to do, that lies in the hands of yourself and the Council.”

“Very well,” said the President, “what you wish shall be done at once, and the Council will meet this morning to consider what public steps are to be taken.”

[296]

Within half an hour after the conclusion of the momentous interview the Council had met, and the most immediate result of its deliberations on the tremendous tidings that had come from the sister world was the issue of the order for the instant return of all Aerians who were abroad which had been delivered to Alan on the deck of the Avenger on the morning of the 18th.

Immediately on receiving his father’s letter, Alan signalled, “Cease firing and follow,” to the Isma, and the three Aerian vessels started southward towards Gibraltar, leaving Paris to its fate. At Gibraltar, which was reached in two hours and a half, he found that, in accordance with the orders of the Council, messages had already been sent out to all the stations within the European area of the Federation for all Aerians to rendezvous at the Rock as soon as possible.

The same orders had been transmitted along the teleph............