Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 1 (1926-07).djvu/123

122 cried, suddenly overwhelmed with the awfulness of it all. The young astronomer shrugged his shoulders. "I do not know. But we shall not be the only dead world hurtling through space! The void is full of them. I think it was Tennyson who wrote"

"Never mind Tennyson!" I fairly shrieked. "Tell me, do you think this is the—the end?"

He nodded thoughtfully and then repeated: "Lord Tennyson wrote, 'Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanished race'."

"Say, this is as cheerful as a funeral service," said Zutell. "I'm going down with the women. I can hear them laughing together. They've got more grit and pluck than we have. You two old pessimists can go on with your calamity-howling. I'm going to get a few smiles yet before I look like a piece of refrigerator meat."

"Ed's right for once," I laughed. "We can't help matters this way."

gain nothing by a detailed account of the flight of Earth through interplanetary space. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months lost their significance to the isolated inhabitants of a world that had gone astray. Since time had always been reckoned by the movements of the Earth in relation to the sun there was no way to ascertain the correct passage of time. True, a few watches among the members of our group aided in determining approximately the passage of time in accordance with the old standards to which we had been accustomed. How we missed the light of day, no being can imagine who has never experienced what we lived through.

"Is the moon still with us?" I asked one time of Marden.

"I can not ascertain definitely," he replied. "With no sunlight to reflect to Earth from its surface, it has eluded my observation so far, but I have imagined a number of times that a dark object passes periodically between us and the stars. I shall soon have my observations checked up, however. How I do miss radio communication, for doubtless such questions are being discussed over the air pro and con! We are still turning on our axis, but once in every twenty-seven hours instead of twenty-four. I don't understand it!"

Oscar spent virtually all his time in the observatory. He did not always reward the rest of us with his discoveries there, as he was naturally taciturn. When he spoke it was usually because he had something really worth while to tell us.

"You remember I told you that the Earth continued to rotate, though slowly, on its axis even though it no longer revolved around the sun," he said on the day we completed approximately five months of our interstellar wandering. "I also told you that should such a calamity befall the Earth as its failing to rotate, the waters would pile up and cover the continents. I have not told you before, but I have calculated that the Earth is gradually ceasing to rotate. However, we need not fear the oceans, for they are solid ice. I may also add that with this decrease in our rate of rotation there is a great acceleration in our onward flight. In less than a month we shall be plunging straight forward at many times our present rate of speed."

It was as Oscar Marden had predicted, and in a few weeks the positions of the heavenly bodies showed that Earth was hurtling straight onward at the speed of light. At the end of two years our provisions were running very low in spite of the scanty rations which we had allowed. The telescope had become our only solace for lonely hours, and through