THE PEOPLE OF THE COMET
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decessor, and each one bearing in its multitudes embryonic seeds that were to bear out in the complex fruit of modern civilization. Who were the original Aryans? No man knows. Why should I doubt the Sansars?
“ 'If there has been life about the North Pole,” I spoke, ‘I wish you would tell me about it. Most of all I would have you tell me how it comes that you are here tonight, and what a thumb has to do with a comet.’
CHAPTER FIVE
HE TURNED to the globe, spun it upon its axis, and placed his hand upon the spot indicated as the Polar regions.
“ 'This,’ he said, ‘was Sansar, this part of the Earth that you have marked down as the region of ice. Here was the land that I left behind me and here was the home of my people. Right here on the north tip of what you call the continent of Greenland was the city of Sansar, where I was born, raised, and educated as king.
“ 'I am Alvas the Astronomer, the King of the Sansars, the last of the scientific kings descended from the Great Alvas, who discovered the atom. And I am here tonight, the victim, you might say, of too much research.
“ 'In the beginning I shall speak broadly and not go into too much detail.
“ 'Here lived my people, the Sansars, and here was the first life possible upon your Earth and my Earth, right here about the poles that you have forgotten.
“ 'We had a civilization that was very advanced. We had about everything, I think, that you have in your life today, steam, electricity, spectroscopic analysis, gravitational control, atomic force. We had newspapers, literature, art, music, science. We were a healthy, sports-loving people. We had pleasures, theatres, operas, games of all sorts, and all the other amusements that interest the healthy and the intellectual. We were strong, robust, refined.
“ 'Our kings were known as the Alvas, kings who devoted themselves, not to wars, but to scientific research and the education of their people. I was an Alvas, the fourteenth in direct line from the great one who had discovered the atom. My father, known as Alvas the Wise, died when I was a child, and I was reared by a group of scientists. For the Sansars were careful of their princes, and were desirous that I be raised in an atmosphere that would make me a worthy ruler. All the Alvic line had been men of science. When I was old enough I was given my choice of a specialty. I chose astronomy.
“ 'On the day that I came to maturity, and received my rights of kingship, I was given my degree as an astronomer.
“ 'I was young and full of ambition, and I entertained, I am afraid, rather wild and speculative ideas concerning the science that I had chosen as my major. I had a strong notion of my own ability, and, I must say, a rather justifiable hope that I was to surpass any of my ancestors.
“ 'Most of all did this apply to the Great Alvas, he who had discovered the atom. I had a theory that I had evolved out of a reckless mind, a theory that I would prove with a comet. I was certain that I could carry the discoveries of the Great Alvas out of the atom and out into the stars. I had the laws of Alvas at my hand; and I would soon have a comet. For we were approaching the days of the Blood Red Comet.
“ 'I had always been interested in the laws of Alvas, and I had studied carefully all of his discoveries and speculations. He was the first to solve the atom and to prove that matter is everlasting. He had shown that the atom is nothing other than a solar system entirely analogous to our sun and planets, and that there is not a particle of difference in its Jaws other than a variance in the degree of vibration. For instance: that the movement in an atomic world is infinitely faster than in the world that we call our own. He proved that the component units of the atom are revolving at the terrific speed of forty thousand miles a second, traveling so fast as to be beyond human conception; and he demonstrated that, although revolving so fast, the separate parts of the atom are as much a cog of the Universe as our own solar system, and that each infinitesimal thing, no matter how far below human sight, is as important in the scheme of the whole as anything above it.
“ 'The only difference between our world and that of the atom, said he, is that we are attuned to the vibration in which we live; and that while we measure our relative time by the procession of our revolutions about the sun, we are not living a bit longer, in respect to ratio, than a mythical inhabitant of an atomic planet revolving about the nucleus (sun) of the atom. He even gave us figures. Taking 40,000 miles a second as a basis, he went into comparative values, giving a speed of 2,400,000 miles a minute, sixty times that to the hour, and twenty-four times that for one of our days; so that, granting that each revolution of their planetary world about the nucleus (sun) means a year within the atom, a single day of twenty-four hours with us would amount to 40,000 times 60 times 60 times 24, or 3,456,000,000 years within the atom.
“ 'And he demonstrated that it is infinitely more than that, for, instead of taking the length of the atomic planetary revolution (a thing impossible to compute) as a basis, he had used, for our understanding, merely the scale of miles per second. He made no assertion that the atomic world might be inhabited, though, for that matter, he made no statement to the contrary. Under his scheme, our solar system is but a larger unit in the sum of things that go to make up the unknown that we call the Universe. After he had formulated his speculative laws he set to work to harness the atom, and by the simple process of atomic explosion gave us the atomic engine.
“ 'By the time I had ascended the throne of Sansar his laws were so well established that you might say that the whole Polar civilization based upon the principle of atomic engineering. Nevertheless, I do not think that any one before my time had ever thought of taking the laws of the atom and applying them to the stars.
“ ‘Understand, we had attained a very high standard of civilization, and there was no one, even upon the streets, who did not regard astronomy as being the vanguard of all science. It was an age of astronomy. Every one was interested in its questions, in the moon and its inhabitants, whom we knew, but had not reached; in the planets, and in the whole continuous mystery of the solar system. For we would know the truth, not only of ourselves, but of our neighbors as well; and if possible, we would set up communication. I proposed to do it through the atom.
“ 'I had evolved a theory out of the discoveries of Alvas, a simple law; but one very difficult to prove. Namely, that our sun and its planets are nothing other than an atom, and that the whole scheme of visual stars is but a mere speck in the scheme of an outside Infinity, far beyond even the beginnings of imagination. In other words, I held that the people of Sansar were merely the inhabitants of a new atom, and that our sun, great as we thought it, is only an ion in relation to the vastness that is about it. And I maintained, further, that, even as the atoms below us are related, one to the other, and are bound together by one mighty force, so is our solar system bound up by cosmic law, and that our Universe is one and indivisible—Matter!
" 'We had never been able to explain the cohesion of the atoms that lay below us, how they hold together, and through
