Tales of Space and Time | Page 9

whole thing had passed out of his hands, had vanished like a
vision of the night, he returned to his own rooms, a little astonished to
find the notes he had made still tangible and visible upon his untidy
table.
His annoyance and disappointment were naturally very great. He made
a second call (equally ineffectual) upon the Great Portland Street dealer,
and he resorted to advertisements in such periodicals as were likely to
come into the hands of a bric-a-brac collector. He also wrote letters to
'The Daily Chronicle' and 'Nature', but both those periodicals,
suspecting a hoax, asked him to reconsider his action before they
printed, and he was advised that such a strange story, unfortunately so
bare of supporting evidence, might imperil his reputation as an
investigator. Moreover, the calls of his proper work were urgent. So
that after a month or so, save for an occasional reminder to certain
dealers, he had reluctantly to abandon the quest for the crystal egg, and
from that day to this it remains undiscovered. Occasionally however, he
tells me, and I can quite believe him, he has bursts of zeal, in which he
abandons his more urgent occupation and resumes the search.
Whether or not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and origin
of it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If the present
purchaser is a collector, one would have expected the enquiries of Mr.
Wace to have readied him through the dealers. He has been able to
discover Mr. Cave's clergyman and "Oriental--" no other than the Rev.
James Parker and the young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I am obliged
to them for certain particulars. The object of the Prince was simply
curiosity--and extravagance. He was so eager to buy, because Cave was
so oddly reluctant to sell. It is just as possible that the buyer in the
second instance was simply a casual purchaser and not a collector at all,
and the crystal egg, for all I know, may at the present moment be

within a mile of me, decorating a drawing-room or serving as a
paper-weight--its remarkable functions all unknown. Indeed, it is partly
with the idea of such a possibility that I have thrown this narrative into
a form that will give it a chance of being read by the ordinary consumer
of fiction.
My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr.
Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of
Mr. Cave's to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable,
way en rapport, and we both believe further that the terrestrial crystal
must have been--possibly at some remote date--sent hither from that
planet, in order to give the Martians a near view of our affairs. Possibly
the fellows to the crystals in the other masts are also on our globe. No
theory of hallucination suffices for the facts.

The Star
IT WAS on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was
made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion
of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about
the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to
a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of
news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of
whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune,
nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of
a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause
any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the
intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the
new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was
quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the
deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an
unprecedented kind.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation
of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of
planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity

that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there
is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without
warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a
million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be
traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a
few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had
ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the
twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of
matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black
mystery of the