cables had been that every
powerful telescope in the civilised world had been turned upon that
distant region of the fields of Space out of which the Celestial Invader
was rushing at a speed of thousands of miles a minute to that awful
trysting-place, at which it and the planet Terra were to meet and
embrace in the fiery union of death.

From every observatory, from Greenwich to Arequipa, and from Pike's Peak
to Melbourne, came practically identical messages, which, in their
combined sense, came to this:

"Lennard's figures absolutely correct. Collision with comet apparently
inevitable. Consequences incalculable."

CHAPTER XXXVIII

WAITING FOR DOOM

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 pictur