It was an asylum of peace, where perfect concord reigned, where astronomers disinterestedly consecrated their whole lives to the advancement of science, and mutually encouraged each other, without experiencing any of the pangs of envy, each forgetting his own merit to proclaim that of his colleagues. The director set the example, and when he spoke it was in the name of all.
He published a technical discussion, and he was listened to—for a moment. For the question appeared to be no longer one of astronomy. No one denied or disputed the meeting of the comet with the earth. That was a fact which mathematics had rendered certain. The absorbing question now was the chemical constitution of the comet. If the earth, in its passage through it, was to lose the oxygen of its atmosphere, death by asphyxia was inevitable; if, on the other hand, the nitrogen was to combine with the cometary gases, death was still certain; but death preceded by an ungovernable exhilaration, a sort of universal intoxication, a wild delirium of the senses being the necessary result of the extraction of nitrogen from the respirable air and the proportionate increase of oxygen.
The spectroscope indicated especially the presence of carbonic-oxide in the chemical constitution of the comet. The chief point under discussion in the scientific reviews was whether the mixture of this noxious gas with the atmosphere would poison the entire population of the globe, human and animal, as the president of the academy of medicine affirmed would be the case.
Carbonic-oxide! Nothing else was talked of. The spectroscope could not be in error. Its methods were too sure, its processes too precise. Everybody knew that the smallest admixture of this gas with the air we breathe meant a speedy death. Now, a later despatch from the observatory of Gaurisankar had more than confirmed that received from Mount Hamilton. This despatch read:
“The earth will be completely submerged in the nucleus of the comet, whose diameter is already thirty times that of the globe and is daily increasing.”
Thirty times the diameter of the earth! Even then, though the comet should pass between the earth and the moon, it would touch them both, since a bridge of thirty earths would span the distance between our world and the moon.