the dark star have traversed
three thousand light-years of space in a week's time? It was
unthinkable! So stupendous a control of power, so gigantic a
manipulation of cosmic forces, so annihilating a possession of the
greatest secrets of the universe, was an unheard-of concentration of
energy and knowledge of stellar mechanics. But the evidence of his own
eyes and the path of the dark star with flaming suns to mark its
progress, told him in language which could not be refuted that the dark
star possessed all that immeasurable, titanic knowledge. It was the lord
of the universe. There was nothing which the dark star could not crush
or conquer or change. The thought of that immense, supreme power numbed
his mind. It opened vistas of a civilization, and a progress, and an
unparalleled mastery of all knowledge which was almost beyond
conception.

* * * * *

Already the news had raced across the world. On Phobar's television
screen flashed scenes of nightmare; the radio spewed a gibberish of
terror. In one day panic had swept the Earth; on the remaining members
of the Five World Federation the same story was repeated. Rioting mobs
drowned out the chant of religious fanatics who hailed Judgment Day.
Great fires turned the air murky and flame-shot. Machine guns spat
regularly in city streets; looting, murder, and fear-crazed crimes were
universal. Civilization had completely vanished overnight.

The tides roared higher than they ever had before; for every thousand
people drowned on the American seaboards, a hundred thousand perished in
China and India. Dead volcanoes boomed into the worst eruptions known.
Half of Japan sank during the most violent earthquake in history. Land
rocked, the seas boiled, cyclones howled out of the skies. A billion
eyes focused on Mecca, the mad beating of tom-toms rolled across all
Africa, women and children were trampled to death by the crowds that
jammed into churches.

"Has man lived in vain?" asked the philosopher.

"The world is doomed. There is no escape," said the scientist.

"The day of reckoning has come! The wrath of God is upon us!" shouted
the street preachers.

In a daze, Phobar switched off the bedlam and, walking like a man
asleep, strode out, he did not care where, if only to get away.

The ground and the sky were like a dying fire. The sun seemed a
half-dead cinder. Only the great swathe of radiance between the sun and
the dark star had any