第2章

Your readers will possibly comprehend that the Atlantic, in this parable, stands for the mighty ocean of ether through which we drift and that the bunch of corks represents the little and obscure planetary system to which we belong.A third-rate sun, with its rag tag and bobtail of insignificant satellites, we float under the same daily conditions towards some unknown end, some squalid catastrophe which will overwhelm us at the ultimate confines of space, where we are swept over an etheric Niagara or dashed upon some unthinkable Labrador.I see no room here for the shallow and ignorant optimism of your correspondent, Mr.

James Wilson MacPhail, but many reasons why we should watch with a very close and interested attention every indication of change in those cosmic surroundings upon which our own ultimate fate may depend.""Man, he'd have made a grand meenister," said McArdle."It just booms like an organ.Let's get doun to what it is that's troubling him."The general blurring and shifting of Fraunhofer's lines of the spectrum point, in my opinion, to a widespread cosmic change of a subtle and singular character.Light from a planet is the reflected light of the sun.Light from a star is a self-produced light.But the spectra both from planets and stars have, in this instance, all undergone the same change.Is it, then, a change in those planets and stars? To me such an idea is inconceivable.

What common change could simultaneously come upon them all? Is it a change in our own atmosphere? It is possible, but in the highest degree improbable, since we see no signs of it around us, and chemical analysis has failed to reveal it.What, then, is the third possibility? That it may be a change in the conducting medium, in that infinitely fine ether which extends from star to star and pervades the whole universe.Deep in that ocean we are floating upon a slow current.Might that current not drift us into belts of ether which are novel and have properties of which we have never conceived? There is a change somewhere.This cosmic disturbance of the spectrum proves it.

It may be a good change.It may be an evil one.It may be a neutral one.We do not know.Shallow observers may treat the matter as one which can be disregarded, but one who like myself is possessed of the deeper intelligence of the true philosopher will understand that the possibilities of the universe are incalculable and that the wisest man is he who holds himself ready for the unexpected.To take an obvious example, who would undertake to say that the mysterious and universal outbreak of illness, recorded in your columns this very morning as having broken out among the indigenous races of Sumatra, has no connection with some cosmic change to which they may respond more quickly than the more complex peoples of Europe? I throw out the idea for what it is worth.To assert it is, in the present stage, as unprofitable as to deny it, but it is an unimaginative numskull who is too dense to perceive that it is well within the bounds of scientific possibility.

"Yours faithfully, "GEORGE EDWARD CHALLENGER.

"THE BRIARS, ROTHERFIELD."

"It's a fine, steemulating letter," said McArdle thoughtfully, fitting a cigarette into the long glass tube which he used as a holder."What's your opeenion of it, Mr.Malone?"I had to confess my total and humiliating ignorance of the subject at issue.What, for example, were Fraunhofer's lines?

McArdle had just been studying the matter with the aid of our tame scientist at the office, and he picked from his desk two of those many-coloured spectral bands which bear a general resemblance to the hat-ribbons of some young and ambitious cricket club.He pointed out to me that there were certain black lines which formed crossbars upon the series of brilliant colours extending from the red at one end through gradations of orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo to the violet at the other.

"Those dark bands are Fraunhofer's lines," said he."The colours are just light itself.Every light, if you can split it up with a prism, gives the same colours.They tell us nothing.It is the lines that count, because they vary according to what it may be that produces the light.It is these lines that have been blurred instead of clear this last week, and all the astronomers have been quarreling over the reason.Here's a photograph of the blurred lines for our issue to-morrow.The public have taken no interest in the matter up to now, but this letter of Challenger's in the Times will make them wake up, I'm thinking.""And this about Sumatra?"

"Well, it's a long cry from a blurred line in a spectrum to a sick nigger in Sumatra.And yet the chiel has shown us once before that he knows what he's talking about.There is some queer illness down yonder, that's beyond all doubt, and to-day there's a cable just come in from Singapore that the lighthouses are out of action in the Straits of Sundan, and two ships on the beach in consequence.Anyhow, it's good enough for you to interview Challenger upon.If you get anything definite, let us have a column by Monday."I was coming out from the news editor's room, turning over my new mission in my mind, when I heard my name called from the waiting-room below.It was a telegraph-boy with a wire which had been forwarded from my lodgings at Streatham.The message was from the very man we had been discussing, and ran thus:--Malone, 17, Hill Street, Streatham.--Bring oxygen.--Challenger.

"Bring oxygen!" The Professor, as I remembered him, had an elephantine sense of humour capable of the most clumsy and unwieldly gambollings.Was this one of those jokes which used to reduce him to uproarious laughter, when his eyes would disappear and he was all gaping mouth and wagging beard, supremely indifferent to the gravity of all around him? I turned the words over, but could make nothing even remotely jocose out of them.

Then surely it was a concise order--though a very strange one.