Crash

But Earth herself? Who, for all the harm frost could do her, might go on travelling round the dead sun forever.

The globe too, this orb of solid matter, will have an end; whether early, in time to preclude man’s separate dooms, or late, infinite ages after he has gone. Which end is collision, impact, dissolving crash.

Not probably with a comet. Though that derided chance, being also in the nature of a concussion, a catastrophe, may lift up high again its fiery head.

Nor with a meteor. No bolide or shooting-star ever experienced has been large enough to do the world grave damage, leave alone demolish it. No bethel ever fallen from heaven and erected on earth has stood higher than three of its worshippers; not great Diana of the Ephesians, nor the baetylical idol of Zeus Teleios at Tegea, nor Jacob’s pillar of thanksgiving at Luz-Bethel itself. That famous stone that fell in Phrygia, and was raised to godhead as Cybele, measured a yard or two. That scar in the Painted Desert, though the mightiest meteoric consequence alleged, is not half-a-mile in radius, not a furlong deep. There may of course be meteor-troops many times more numerous, with each trooper many times bigger, than anything deducible either from past knowledge, or from present acquaintance with friendly Aquarids and Gremenids and Leonids; since meteorites come from outside the solar system, how affirm anything absolute, whether as to their maximum size or their maximum speed? The meteor death-roll through history is so far two: a peasant once in India, a cow long ago in Brazil.

Nor with a planet. Their courses are ordered like our own, and will remain separate and regular while ours does.

Perhaps with the sun. If we his satellites, moving ever quicker, and ever nearer him, should one day fall on him bodily.

Probably with the moon. The Sagas knew it; it was revealed to the Prophet at Mecca. Of all the stories, as of all the theories, this one alone has found acceptance of pure mathematics, elsewhere so scornful; this one alone has been prophetically worked out to the last omega of the last perfect formula; if mathematics is valid, this is valid. For the solar tides are lengthening the period of rotation of the earth, till one day, some five hundred thousand million years from now, it must become longer than the period of rotation of the moon. This latter will then be retarded. After her untold ages of recession the moon will stand still. Then, very slowly, begin to return. By when in our sight she is equal to twenty suns, the fierce tides we shall raise on her will break her body up. She will bombard us with lunar pieces two miles, ten miles thick. The whole side of her facing the earth will burst open. She will torrent forth streams of white lava, liquid fragments larger than Sicily, to burn, bury and ravish the whole world’s face. She will split in two. Then the two halves in two, then again⁠—soon into a wild skyful of dwarf moons, moving ever closer to each other and to us, and forming at the last, to enshroud us, entomb us and adorn, a Saturn’s ring tight-encircling the earth.

Assuredly with a star. From the heavenly host will come the last charge of all, the ultimate cosmic concussion, and terminal collision of astral annihilation.

Sooner or later, in process of unwearying time (time that goes on forever), each star of heaven encounters each other star. Observed collisions are not rare; collisions unobservable from Earth must be taking place continually in the unsearched depths of the universe. One day, sooner or later, unobservable from the unsearched depths of the universe, our own collision will take place: our sun, with his whole solisequious convoy, rammed into steam by another.

Later, it may be.

The “crowded streets of space” are streets of voidness, and today, as it befalls, we are journeying along a particularly empty and uninhabited wide road. Dark unseen suns, once thought more numerous than seen ones, have, by new gravitational calculations on the speed of the latter, been reduced to the pure darkness of non-being. Of the seen ones, our three nearest neighbours, triune companions in the Centaur, are twenty-five billion miles away; the next nearest forty billion. In a circumference of some two hundred and fifty billion miles there are but four stars of us⁠—room to move without jostling.

None seeks to jostle. Like bees in a swarm, whom they truly resemble, stars keep out of each other’s way. From the nearest one fast moving upon us we are moving away as fast. The star we are making for, scared Vega in the Lyre, is making away in her turn. A star’s chance of collision, opines one authority (whose equations are given), is one in six hundred thousand billion, or six followed by seventeen noughts. We are as likely to crash (declares another doctor, whose calculations are however withheld) as two balloons sent up at different ends of Russia.

The stars have their orbits like the planets; on some regular plan, unknown but harmonious, their movements through the celestial spaces are adjusted. A collision only happens when something goes wrong: how often, how imminent, is that?

Sooner, it may be.

The streets of space are crowded; they are strewn with continual catastrophe. Of the seen stars, few no doubt at this instant are in our immediate vicinage. But the tramp stars⁠—dark suns wandering unglimpsed through the void, droves of dead worlds no equations can abolish⁠—are everywhere, more numerous than the lucid ones, as dead men than live; and it is a tramp star that our sun, then like to be a tramp star himself, is likest to encounter.

Not all the stars, live or dead, can be moving away from each other. In space Euclidean or non-Euclidean, in commonsense four-dimensional or three, as many must be moving nearer each other; towards disaster as away from it.

Some order in the star-streams, harmony of the heavens, music of the spheres, is predictable; the Empyrean as a perfect mechanism without flaw or disturbance is not. Disasters disprove it. Often, and imminently, something goes wrong.

Any moment we may strike a nebular stretch of heaven. Such regions are full of solid matter, stardust, in-drifting meteorites and the like. The nebula, acting as a brake on the sun’s motion, will reduce his pace at the very instant he enters an area where, other bodies being more numerous, pace to escape them is what he will chiefly need.

Nor, principally, is head-on collision requisite. Let another great star pass near⁠—one thousand million miles away. He will derange, de-orbit us; send us crashing, liquefying, into the riven and distorted sun. Let Antares or Arcturus, of terrible size and terrible speed, move by at tenfold, twelvefold the solar distance. The sun will be pulled into streamers, tearing forth to greet the Arcturian dragons of fire; in half-an-hour we shall be fused out of all identity, a drop in their chaos. And many a star is mightier than Arcturus; and many are nearer; many faster. One in Columba runs at two million miles an hour.

Sooner or later, assuredly with a star.

Yet collision, which thus includes grazing and mere propinquity, is too narrow a word.

Collision, which implies splintering impact of solid bodies, is too massive a word.

Collision, which, in lubberly portrayal of unliving earths in lumbering percussion, conjures up no vision of the dying crying souls upon them, is too abstract, too astronomical a word.

Collision, the one fate that will outstay the others, yet partakes of the nature of them all. Like the cold, irrevocable. Like the comet, coming at an hour unknown, from a direction unknown; a chance, not a process; a crash, not a geological creeping. Resembling the water-end or the waterless, according as the foe’s first deed would be to melt the mountain snows and flood us, or to parch. Resembling the fire-end; it is the Fire-End, destinate, ultimate, Sheol-Gehenna, the great balefire of combustion.

Collision, the one fate that destroys not only man but his home, alone is destroyer and creator. The twin cyclopean gas-streams, as they flare out across the furious infinite, will take the form of a double spiral; then of a gaseous nebula; then, condensing, of a star⁠—maybe with planets, with an earth, with us all reborn again, again long after to re-die. Death nova will be birth nova, as the nebula which gave us life was born itself of death, in the crash and ruin of life preceding. The heavenly colossal catastrophes are death; they are life. Collision makes; collision kills.

Out of the chance riot of stars came worlds, came living existence, came we. In new chance riot we shall depart. The heavens go crashing and whirling. The universe forms, un-forms, re-forms. The Terror rolls on. What is it? What means it? What is my soul in that universe? May God have mercy.