II

THE CATASTROPHE

On several occasions already the sun had given evident signs of
weakness. From year to year his spots increased in size and number, and
his heat sensibly diminished. People were lost in conjecture. Was his
fuel giving out? Had he just traversed in his journey through space an
exceptionally cold region? No one knew. Whatever the reason was, the
public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is
gradual and not sudden. The "solar anaemia," which moreover restored some
degree of animation to neglected astronomy, had merely become the
subject of several rather smart articles in the reviews. In general, the
_savants_, in their well-warmed studies, affected to disbelieve in the
fall of temperature, and, in spite of the formal indications of the
thermometer, they did not cease to repeat that the dogma of slow
evolution, and of the conservation of energy combined with the classical
nebular hypothesis, forbade the admission of a sufficiently rapid
cooling of the solar mass to make itself felt during the short duration
of a century, much more so during that of five years or a year. A few
unorthodox persons of heretical and pessimistic temperament remarked, it
is true, that at different epochs, if one believed the astronomers of
the remote past, certain stars had gradually burnt out in the heavens,
or had passed from the most dazzling brilliance to an almost complete
obscurity, during the course of barely a single year. They therefore
concluded that the case of our sun had nothing exceptional about it;
that the theory of slow-footed evolution was not perhaps universally
applicable; and that, sometimes, as an old visionary mystic called
Cuvier had ventured to put forward in legendary times, veritable
revolutions took place in the heavens as well as on earth. But orthodox
science combated with indignation these audacious theories.

However, the winter of 2489 was so disastrous, it was actually necessary
to take the threatening predictions of the alarmists seriously. One
reached the point of fearing at any moment a "solar apoplexy." That was
the title of a sensational pamphlet which went through twenty thousand
editions. The return of the spring was anxiously awaited.

The spring returned at last, and the starry monarch reappeared, but his
golden crown was gone, and he himself well-nigh unrecognisable. He was
entirely red. The meadows were no longer green, the sky was no longer
blue, the