Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud

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.”