The Black Cloud

Arrival

From the end of July a night watch was kept at the Nortonstowe shelter. Joe Stoddard was on the rota, as was natural since his work as a gardener had ceased by that time. Gardening was not an activity suited to the tropical heat.

It came about that Joe’s watch fell on the night of 27 August. No dramatic action took place. Yet at 7.30 the following morning Joe knocked hesitantly on Kingsley’s bedroom door. The previous evening Kingsley together with quite a number of other worthies had caroused somewhat heartily. So at first he was scarcely aware that Joe was trying to give him some message. Gradually he realized that the cheerful gardener was unusually solemn.

“It’s not there, sir, it’s not there.”

“What’s not there? For heaven’s sake go and fetch me a cup of tea. I’ve got a mouth like the bottom of a parrot’s cage.”

“Cup of tea, sir!’ Joe hesitated but stood his ground stolidly. “Yes, sir. It’s just that you said I was to report anything unusual, and it really isn’t there.”

“Look here, Joe, much as I have regard for you, I say most solemnly that I’ll disembowel you, here and now, unless you tell me what it is that isn’t there.” Kingsley spoke slowly and loudly. “What isn’t there?”

“The day, sir! There’s no Sun!”

Kingsley grabbed his watch. It was about 7.42 a.m., long after dawn in August. He rushed out of the shelter into the open. It was pitch black, unrelieved even by starlight, which was unable to penetrate the thick cloud cover. An unreasoning primitive fear seemed to be abroad. The light of the world had gone.

In England and the western lands generally the shock was cushioned by night, for to them it was during the night hours that the light of the Sun became extinguished. One evening the light faded slowly away as is normally the case. But eight hours later there was no dawn. The advancing wall of the Cloud had reached the Sun during the intervening hours.

The people of the eastern hemisphere experienced in full measure the horror of the fading light. To them the total unrelieved blackness fell in what should have been full day. In Australia for instance, the sky began darkening about noon, and by three o’clock not a glimmer was to be seen, except where artificial illuminations had been switched on. There was fierce wild rioting in many of the world’s major cities.

For three days the Earth lived as a black world, except for those pockets of humanity that possessed the technological sufficiency to provide their own lighting. Los Angeles and the other American cities lived in the artificial blaze of millions of electric bulbs. But this did not entirely protect the American people from the terror that gripped the rest of mankind. Indeed one might say that Americans had more leisure and opportunity to appreciate the situation as they sat huddled over television sets, waiting for the latest pronouncements of authorities who were powerless to understand or control the march of events.

After three days two things happened. Light appeared again in the day sky, and the rains began to fall. The light was at first very faint, but day by day it increased in strength until eventually the intensity reached a level about midway between full moonlight and full sunlight. It is doubtful whether on balance the light brought any easement to the acute psychological stress that afflicted Man everywhere, for its deep red tone showed beyond all doubt that it was not a natural light.

At first the rains were warm, but the temperature fell slowly and steadily. The precipitation was enormous. The air had been so hot and humid that a vast quantity of moisture had been stored in it. With the lowering of temperature following the extinction of the Sun’s radiation, more and more of this moisture fell out as rain. Rivers rose swiftly and flooded their banks, destroying communications and rendering whole multitudes homeless. After weeks of heat exhaustion, the fate of those millions throughout the world who were thus overtaken by raging waters can scarcely be imagined. And always with them, reflected a dark red in the flood, was the unearthly half-light.

Yet this flooding was of minor consequence compared with the storms that swept over the Earth. The release of energy in the atmosphere, caused by the condensation of vapour into raindrops, was beyond all precedent. It was sufficient to cause enormous fluctuations of atmospheric pressure, leading to hurricanes on a scale beyond human memory, and indeed beyond all credence.

The manor house at Nortonstowe was largely destroyed in one such hurricane. Two workmen were killed in the tumbling ruins. The fatalities at Nortonstowe were not limited to this tragedy. Knut Jensen and his Greta, the same Greta Johannsen that Kingsley had written to, were caught in a fierce storm and killed by a falling tree. They were buried together, hard by the old manor.

The temperature fell more and more. Rain changed to sleet and then to snow. The flooded fields were covered by ice and, as September wore on, the brawling rivers were gradually silenced as they were changed to immutable cascades of ice. The snow-covered land spread slowly down into the tropics. And as the whole Earth fell into the iron grip of frost, snow, and ice, the clouds cleared from the skies. Once more men could see out into space.

It was now manifest that the weird red light of day did not come from the Sun. The light was spread almost uniformly from horizon to horizon, without any special point of focus. Every bit of the day sky was glowing a faint dull red. People were told by radio and television that the light was coming from the Cloud, not from the Sun. The light was caused, so scientists said, by the heating of the Cloud as it swept around the Sun.

By the end of September the first gossamer-thin outposts of the Cloud reached the Earth. The impact heated the upper regions of the Earth’s atmosphere, as reports from Nortonstowe had predicted. But so far the incident gas was too diffuse to cause heating to hundreds of thousands or to millions of degrees. Even so, temperatures rose to some tens of thousands of degrees. This was sufficient to cause the upper atmosphere to radiate a shimmering blue light, easily visible by night. Indeed the nights became indescribably beautiful, although it is to be doubted whether many people were able to appreciate the beauty, for in truth beauty needs ease and leisure for its proper enjoyment. Yet perhaps here and there some hardy northern shepherd guarding his flocks may have regarded the violet-streaked night with wonder and awe.

So as time went on, a pattern of dark red days and scintillating blue nights became established, a pattern in which neither Sun nor Moon played any part. And always the temperature fell lower and lower.

Except in the heavily industrialized countries, vast legions of people lost their lives during this period. For weeks they had been exposed to well-nigh unbearable heat. Then many had died by flood and storm. With the coming of intense cold, pneumonia became fiercely lethal. Between the beginning of August and the first week of October roughly a quarter of the world’s population died. The volume of personal tragedy was indescribably enormous. Death intervened to part husband from wife, parent from child, sweetheart from sweetheart with irreversible finality.

The Prime Minister was angry with the scientists at Nortonstowe. His irritation caused him to make a journey there, a journey that was bitterly cold and miserable and which did not improve his temper.

“It appears that the Government has been very seriously misled,” he told Kingsley. “First you said that the emergency might be expected to last for a month and no more. Well, the emergency has now lasted for more than a month and there is still no sign of an end. When may we expect this business to be over?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” answered Kingsley.

The Prime Minister glowered at Parkinson, Marlowe, Leicester, then most ferociously at Kingsley.

“What, may I ask, is the explanation of this appalling misinformation? Might I point out that Nortonstowe has been afforded every facility? Not to put too fine a point on it, you have been cosseted — featherbedded as some of my colleagues would say. In return we have every right to expect a reasonable standard of competence. I may say that living conditions here are a great deal superior to the conditions in which the Government itself is obliged to work.”

“Of course conditions are superior here. They are superior because we had the foresight to see what was coming.”

“And that seems to have been the only foresight you have shown, a foresight for your own comfort and safety.”

“In which we have followed a course remarkably similar to that of the Government.”

“I fail to understand, sir.”

“Then let me put the position more plainly. When this matter of the Cloud was first broached, the immediate concern of your Government, and indeed of all other Governments so far as I am aware, was to prevent the relevant facts becoming known to the people. The real object of this supposed secrecy was, of course, to prevent the people from choosing a more effective set of representatives.”

The Prime Minister was thoroughly angry now.

“Kingsley, let me tell you without reserve that I shall feel obliged to take steps that you will scarcely welcome when I return to London.”

Parkinson noticed a sudden hardening in Kingsley’s easy-going, insulting manner.

“I fear you will not be returning to London, you will be staying here.”

“I can scarcely believe that even you, Professor Kingsley, can have the effrontery to suggest that I am to be kept a prisoner!”

“Not a prisoner, my dear Prime Minister, no such thing,” said Kingsley with a smile. “Let us rather put it this way. In the coming crisis you will be far safer at Nortonstowe than in London. Let us therefore say that we feel it preferable, in the public interest of course, that you should remain at Nortonstowe. And now as no doubt you and Parkinson have a great deal to talk over together, you will, I imagine, wish Leicester, Marlowe, and myself to withdraw.”

Marlowe and Leicester were in something of a daze as they followed Kingsley out of the room.

“But you simply can’t do it, Chris,” said Marlowe.

“I can and I will do it. If he’s allowed to go back to London things will be done that’ll endanger the lives of everybody here from yourself, Geoff, down to Joe Stoddard. And that I simply will not allow. Heaven knows we’ve little enough chance as it is without making matters worse.”

“But if he doesn’t go back to London they’ll send for him.”

“They won’t. We’ll send a radio message to say that the roads here are temporarily impassable and that there may be a couple of days’ delay in his return. The temperature is dropping so quickly now — you remember what I told you when we were out in the Mohave Desert about the temperature going cracking down, well, it’s happening right now — in a few days the roads will be genuinely impassable.”

“I don’t see that. There’s not likely to be more snow.”

“Of course not. But soon the temperature will be too low for internal combustion engines to work. There’ll be no motorized transport either by road or air. I know that special engines can be made, but by the time they get round to that, things will have become so bad that nobody’ll give much thought to whether the Prime Minister is in London or not.”

“I reckon that’s right,” said Leicester. “We’ve only got to bluff for a week or so and then everything will be fine. I must say I wouldn’t welcome being winkled out of our cosy little shelter, especially after all the trouble we had building it.”

Parkinson had seldom before seen the Prime Minister really angry. He had previously dealt with these situations by such yes-yessing and no-noing as seemed most appropriate. But this time he felt that he must take the full broadside of the Prime Minister’s wrath.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, after listening for some minutes, “but I fear you brought it on yourself. You shouldn’t have called Kingsley incompetent. The charge wasn’t justified.”

The Prime Minister spluttered.

“Not justified! Do you realize, Francis, that on the basis of that one month of Kingsley’s we’ve taken no special fuel precautions? Do you realize what sort of a position that puts us in?”

“The one-month crisis wasn’t due to Kingsley alone. We got exactly the same advice from America.”

“One piece of incompetence doesn’t excuse another.”

“I don’t agree, sir. When I was in London we always sought to minimize the situation. Kingsley’s reports always had a gravity that we were unwilling to accept. We were always trying to persuade ourselves that things were better than they seemed. We never considered the possibility that they might be worse than they seemed. Kingsley may have been wrong, but he was nearer being right than we were.”

“But why was he wrong? Why were all the scientists wrong? That’s what I’ve been trying to find out, and nobody will tell me.”

“They would have told you, if you’d taken the trouble to ask, instead of roaring their heads off.”

“I’m beginning to think you’ve lived here for a little too long, Francis.”

“I’ve lived here long enough to realize that scientists don’t claim to be infallible, that it’s really we laymen who attach infallibility to their statements.”

“For heaven’s sake, stop this philosophy, Francis. Please be good enough to tell me in plain terms what it is that has gone wrong.”

“Well, as I understand it, the Cloud is behaving in a way that nobody expected and that nobody understands. Every scientist thought that it would gain speed as it approached the Sun, that it would sweep past the Sun and recede again into the distance. Instead it slowed down and by the time it reached the Sun it had slowed to practically no speed at all. So instead of sweeping outwards again it’s simply sitting there around the Sun.”

“But how long is it going to stop there? That’s what I want to know.”

“Nobody can tell you. It might stop a week, a month, a year, a millennium, or millions of years. Nobody knows.”

“But good God, man, do you realize what you’re saying? Unless that Cloud moves out we can’t carry on.”

“Do you think Kingsley doesn’t know that? If the Cloud stays a month, a lot more people will die, but quite a few will survive. If it stays two months, very few people will survive. If it stays three months, we at Nortonstowe will die in spite of all our preparations, and we shall be among the last to die. If it stays a year, not a living thing on the Earth will survive. As I say, Kingsley knows all this and that’s why he doesn’t take the political aspects of the matter very seriously.”