CHAPTER VII
MYSTERIOUS STAR, IMPERTURBABLY SHINING!
More than twice seventeen months went by. For me and for Dan the progress of the world, it seemed then, must always be in cycles of seventeen months. That is the length of time which Xenephrene took periodically to overtake and pass us in our orbit. Almost between us and the sun, every seventeen months; and at such times she was at her closest points to us, some sixteen to nineteen million miles away. Not very far, in terms of astronomical measurement, but to Dan and me very far indeed.
Two of these passings came and went. We had hoped there might be some sign from Xenephrene; even something hostile would had seemed to us better than nothing. Dan and I often sat in the night, gazing at the great purple-white star.
Romantic, mysterious world, imperturbably blazing up there! It held captive for Dan the woman he loved; for me, a beloved sister and my dear father. Held them captive—if indeed they were alive, which is the best we could hope—held them, and it gave no sign! Beautiful, mysterious world—and sinister! Gazing up at it, my fancy roamed.
What strange sights and sounds and beings were there! We had had but a little glimpse, no more—and then it was snatched away.
It is not important now for me to recount what these months brought on earth. The adjustment to new conditions, new climate, new night and day. Volumes of history describe it fully—the myriad shifting events over the world's great surface, the new nations, new mingling of races—everything new, it would seem. Everything but human nature, the old characteristics, love, hate, jealousy, friendship, greed, envy—nothing on earth has ever changed them, and nothing will.
We did not know why father, Hulda and Zetta were abducted; but that they were captured by the invaders and with them returned to Xenephrene we felt sure. Why the invaders came at all, and then so hastily withdrew, we could not guess. Zetta knew, and she had told father. But the secret went with them. Perhaps, we decided, the Creator intends this veil of mystery between the worlds. If that thought could be spiritual consolation to Dan and me, we tried to make the most of it.
Dan was distracted. Vainly he and I sought some way by which we might get to Xenephrene. It seemed impossible. Before that terrible winter when what they now call the "Great Change" began, any serious talk of going to a neighbor planet was always laughed at. But no one laughed now.
Scientists told Dan and me that at present, for us of earth, the thing was impossible. If father had left his notes, perhaps, instead of putting them in his pocket that fatal afternoon; if some vestige of apparatus had been left behind by the invaders; if only we still had even a portion of the mechanism of Zetta's small vehicle, that our scientists might study it, try to learn its secret—Ah, those ifs! They are all encompassed in the one phrase, which each of us mortals at one time or another in life has murmured sadly: "If only I had known!"
I was far older now in spirit than that winter thirty-five months before. We do not age in regular progression, but in spurts of stressed mental and physical suffering. I aged, for though I lost a sister and father, something else I lost, less tangible but unforgettable. The girl Zetta—the loss of what might have been, for me and for her.
Love born of a glance, now to stay with me always? It was not that. I was not so youthful that I could cherish such romantic illusion.
But this I knew. Something, that memorable afternoon when she and I first joined glances, sprang into being. As though over the gap from one world to another, from a man to a woman and back again, it sprang and clung reluctant to be broken. And it left its mark upon my mind and spirit. It was not to be; I believed that fully. But, it had been, the consciousness was within me that it would have been a thing very beautiful.
And I was older; and, I think, a better man, just for the memory.
Thirty-five months! A dreary, hopeless interval to Dan and me. Dreary, for in the midst of all the world's turmoil we seemed to stand apart; not actors, spectators merely, with our minds and spirits up there where the great purple star was shining. Thirty-five hopeless months, for it seemed that what we had lost was forever gone.
On February 4, 1956, Dan and I were living in Porto Rico. Freddie was in Miami. Father's post in Southern Chile was taken by one of his fellow scientists. The world rolls on! Father was lost, his post filled, and himself almost forgotten. How fatuously we mortals attach importance to ourselves! We strut our little moment upon the stage, some in the spotlight, some shrinking in the shadows by the back drop. We miss our cues, fumble, and are abashed or terrified. But in a moment no one cares. The curtain rings down; up again, with the old play, but new scenes and other actors; and the changing audience forgets we ever were on the stage at all.
Father's post was filled. Freddie and I had been down there in Chile one summer, but we did not like it and we came back. Summer! The very word had lost its meaning. They were beginning now to call it the Day.
We came back in June, chasing the daylight, and located in Porto Rico. Dan and his father were engaging in the new agriculture. The daylight and twilight months in the West Indies were found favorable for the raising of vegetables. Every one was groping. What could or could not be done was as yet scarcely known. But it promised to be a profitable business. Food of any kind, anywhere in the world, at any time, found a ready market. All the world governments were engaged in its purchase, its storage, and its distribution.
A new era was beginning; and in it some saw a more rational order than in the old. I am no economist; yet now I could see quite clearly the fallacy of much that the world had previously thought was best. Tariff walls between the nations were gone now. The world in its necessity became one big family, working to maintain itself as best it could.
In the daylight in Porto Rico, we were raising vegetables to feed the people who were living in the darkness and cold of the south. Six months later, they would be doing the same for us.
It is not my purpose to indulge in economic theories here, though Dan and I often discussed them. Freddie was not interested. We wanted him with us; but though he came to Porto Rico, he stayed in San Juan, often going up to Miami. The National Capital was still there; and Freddie had interested the government in his invention.
The world catastrophe had brought a great stimulus to scientific invention. New devices, born of the necessity of totally new world conditions, were being developed. Every government was ready to help with funds. Freddie had perfected his motor, financed by our government.
More important than that, however, they were interested in producing his heat-ray projector in more powerful form. His new projector, he told us, was very nearly ready. Not for war purposes, of course. With characteristic thoughtlessness, the world had already almost forgotten the brief invasion from Xenephrene. Such a thing as that naturally could never happen again. And after what the world had been through, war between our own races was unthinkable.
Freddie's heat-ray, he said, would be used in the six months' Night against the cold. It had a myriad uses. With it, a ship might blaze a path down a frozen river. Water power might be utilized further into the long Night; why, a city might even be sprayed with its beams and be kept spring-like despite the cold! Visions! But by such visions science moves ahead into the realism of achievement!
That long Night of '55 and '56 Dan and I spent housed in, with the comparative comfort of our newly rebuilt and heated plantation house. Throughout January and February it snowed heavily; the tumbled little mountains of Porto Rico were solid white.
Sometimes the leaden sky would clear; the stars and moon would glitter on the snow, so bright one could almost read outdoors. Our winter moon was magnificent. The moon's orbit about the earth was very little changed from before; its plane had shifted with us, scientists said, and the moon was pursuing very nearly its old path relative to us.
Dan and I had a small Arctic A flyer, and sleighs. We did not use the plane much. The indolence of the long night of enforced idleness was upon us. Most of the world was learning how to work hard in the daylight months, and to do nothing gracefully through the months of darkness. We read our books; listened to the radio; studied, planned and talked.
It would have been very pleasant, had there not been that constant sense of what we had lost. Father, Hulda—and Zetta. I had spoken very little of Zetta to Dan. The dreams of what might have been, were my own; even with him, I could not share them.
And then came February 4, 1956. The long night was fully upon us, the twilight days were passed—midwinter was in early April. Dan and I had been out after breakfast for a drive in the sleigh. We had returned for luncheon with Dan's parents; and I was on the veranda, enveloped in furs, pacing up and down in the snow. Dan, with his cigar, came out and joined me.
There is sometimes a very queer directness to the fate which governs our lives—and a very great unexpectedness. We walk in the dark, with an open road or a chasm yawning before us, all unaware of which it may be. Or we may be standing at the threshold of a shining garden of hope and happiness, walking in the dark toward its gate, with heavy heart because we do not see it, or realize it is there.
Dan and I were like that now. January, 1956, had been the second time that Xenephrene passed at its closest point to earth. We had hoped that something might happen to give us news of father. But nothing did.
Gradually our hope had been dying. The January days dragged through their brief twilights into the solid winter night. We gave up hope. Xenephrene was drawing ahead of the earth again, with millions of miles of lengthening distance between the worlds. No sign from the great purple star; and we both felt that now all hope of hearing from father was gone.
Thoughts like these possessed me as I paced the veranda that afternoon. They were in Dan's mind too, I am sure; but when he joined me we neither of us spoke of them.
It was clear and cold. The snow on the veranda crunched and creaked under our tread. Beyond the incongruous coconut railing the knoll-top showed white, with a blue-white beam of light from one of the side windows slanting out on it. There was no moon; a deep purple sky, with the sharply glittering silver stars. To the south, below the horizon, we knew that the sun at this hour was hovering. But it was too far down even to pale the stars now. Xenephrene was down there near it, invisible to us of the north—
Dan and I paced in silence; or talked idly of the now commonplace things of the new era of our world.
"They claim they can keep the falls of the Iguazu open all year," said Dan. "And send the power by radio—even up as far as here."
The distribution of electric current by wireless had been greatly improved recently. It seemed really practical now. In a few years Niagara, in the Day, might supply power and light to the dark, frozen cities of the south throughout their Night.
There had been most disastrous floods throughout the world when, with the coming daylight, the snow and ice had melted. Watercourses were unable to handle the sudden, abnormal flow.
But new channels were forming; nature and man alike were making adjustments to the new conditions.
"If they could send us heat from the south," said Dan. "I mean direct, natural heat. These new transformers of the power-waves may be all right, but—"
"Freddie can—I don't mean send it, but produce it, at any rate—"
"Some day," said Dan, "we'll be able to spray all our land here with that contrivance of his. Hah! That would be a great idea, wouldn't it?" He chuckled with an ironical gibe at the absent Freddie; but still he was more than half serious.
"Imagine us, Peter, getting out in the June twilight, helping the snow to melt by spraying it with heat—warming up the frozen soil, getting it plowed and planted a month earlier. If we could get our perishable vegetables down to the Argentine ahead of the others, they would bring mighty big prices—I was reading what might be done with tomatoes, Peter—"
He checked himself abruptly, gripped my arm with a force that whirled me around. We stood at the veranda rail.
"Heavens, Peter, look at that!"
From overhead near the zenith, a shooting star came blazing down. I had never seen one so brilliant. A great yellow-red ball of fire, with a flame of tail. It seemed to take long seconds as it soundlessly fell across the sky before us—down with a blaze to the northern horizon where the Caribbean lay, a dim, dark purple in the starlight.
We breathed again. "That didn't burn itself out," said Dan. "I'll wager that was a meteorite—actually came down somewhere—"
"Northwest," I said. "Florida way. It certainly seemed close to us, didn't it?"
We went back to our pacing. There was nothing particularly unusual in seeing a meteor fall across the sky. But we were both silent, wondering. We had caught just a glimpse of the gateway to our renewed hope; we did not know it, but we both sensed it.
An hour passed. From within the house, old man Cain called, "Oh, Dan—come here, listen to this."
The radio announcer was relaying an item from Curaçao. In the twilight at Willamstadt they had seen what seemed to be a meteorite fall into the sea near the Venezuelan coast.
"Another!" exclaimed Dan.
An hour later, still another meteorite was reported. It had fallen somewhere in the region of Victoria Nyanza—in the lake, perhaps, or along its shores.
Still, this seemed nothing remarkable. But about five o'clock the radio-phone rang with our private call. It was Freddie, in Miami. The gateway to our hopes swung wide to receive us. Dan answered the call; I stood at his elbow, trembling with excitement—at first premonitory, then justified.
In the silence I could hear the tiny sound of Freddie's voice.
"Oh, Dan? Dan Cain?"
"Yes. That you, Freddie?"
"Yes. Listen—I'm in Miami. A meteorite fell—they've got it—Okechobee region. Listen—it cracked open. Was pretty well burned—but a big one. Hollow inside! They cracked into it—they found—Oh, Dan, they phoned me from Moorehaven just a little while ago. They"—Freddie's voice broke with his excitement.
"They—what, Freddie? Take it easy—can't understand you."
"I'm coming, Dan. By plane—I'll get away about eight o'clock. Peter there? Good! See you about midnight—soon as they bring it here to me, I'll bring it to you."
"Bring what? What, Freddie?"
"The cylinder. Whatever it is—haven't seen it. They're bringing it—they've got it. Heat-proof, insulated metal cylinder—they say it's engraved 'Peter Vanderstuyft, Porto Rico—Rush.' I'm bringing it, Dan. Tell Peter. It's a message from Xenephrene! It must be! A message from Peter's father!"