The Black Cloud

by Fred Hoyle

  Kingsley took out his pen, scribbled his name twice, and said:

  “You’re quite sure, A.R., that our plane to London is booked?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then that seems all right. Well, gentlemen, I shall be at your disposal at my hotel from five o’clock onwards. But in the meantime there are various important matters that I must attend to.”

  And with that Kingsley walked out of the Observatory.

  The astronomers in Herrick’s room looked at each other in surprise.

  “What important matters?’ said Marlowe.

  “Heaven knows,” answered the Astronomer Royal. “Kingsley’s ways of thinking and behaving are more than I pretend to understand.”

  Herrick left the east-bound plane at Washington. Kingsley and the Astronomer Royal flew on to New York, where they had a three-hour wait before boarding the London plane. There was some doubt as to whether they could take off because of fog. Kingsley was greatly agitated until eventually they were told to proceed to gate 13 and to have their boarding cards ready. Half an hour later they were in the air.

  “Thank God for that,” said Kingsley, as the plane headed steadily to the north-east.

  “I would agree that there are many things for which you ought to thank God, but I don’t see that this is one of them,” remarked the Astronomer Royal.

  “I would be glad to explain, A.R., if I thought that the explanation would commend itself to you. But as I fear it wouldn’t, let’s have a drink. What’ll you have?”

  Multifarious Activities

  The U.S. Government was the first official body to learn of the approach of the Black Cloud.

  It took Herrick some days to get through to the higher strata of the U.S. Administration, but when he did the results were far from disappointing. On the evening of 24 January, he received instructions to present himself at nine-thirty the following morning at the President’s office.

  “A very queer state of affairs you’ve come up with, Dr Herrick, very queer,” said the President. “But you and your team at Mount Wilson stand so high that I won’t waste any time doubting what you’ve told us. Instead I’ve called these several gentlemen together so that we can get down to settling what’s to be done about it.”

  Two hours’ discussion was aptly summed up by the Secretary of the Treasury:

  “Our conclusions seem to me quite clear, Mr President. Any really serious economic dislocation is likely to be prevented by the two favourable factors in the situation. Dr Herrick assures us that this — er, visitation is not expected to be prolonged much beyond a month. This is so short a time that, even if the fuel consumption rate rises enormously, the overall quantity required to maintain ourselves against the period of extreme cold remains very moderate. There is accordingly no serious problem in building up adequate fuel stocks — it is even possible that our present stocks might be sufficient. A more serious issue is whether we can transfer supplies fast enough from stock to the domestic and industrial consumer; whether we can pump gas and oil fast enough. This is something that must be looked into, but with nearly a year and a half in which to prepare there will surely be no difficulties that cannot be overcome.

  “The second favourable factor is the date of the visitation. We should have much of our harvest in by mid-July, which Dr Herrick gives as the likely beginning of the emergency. The same favourable situation applies the world over, so that food loss, which would have been really serious had the period of cold occurred in May or June, should also be quite moderate.”

  “Then I think we are all agreed on what immediate steps are to be taken,” added the President. “When we have decided on our own dispositions we shall have to consider the more awkward problem of what help we can offer to peoples throughout the world. But for the moment let us put our own house in order. Now I take it that you gentlemen will all be wishing to get back to various important matters, and there are a few questions that I would personally like to put to Dr Herrick.”

  When the meeting had broken up, and they were alone together, the President went on:

  “Now, Dr Herrick, you will understand that for the time being this is a matter that must be treated with the closest security. I see that, in addition to your own, there are three other names on your report. These gentlemen, I take it, are members of your staff? Can you also let me have the names of any others who may be aware of its contents?”

  Herrick in reply gave the President a short account of the circumstances that led up to the discovery, pointing out that it was inevitable that the information should have become common knowledge throughout the Observatory before its importance was realized.

  “Of course, that is natural enough,” remarked the President. “We must be thankful that the matter has not gone beyond the confines of the Observatory. I trust, I earnestly trust, Dr Herrick, that you can assure me of that.”

  Herrick remarked that as far as he was aware there were four men outside the Observatory with a full knowledge of the Black Cloud, Barnett and Weichart of the California Institute of Technology — but that was practically the same thing — and two English scientists, Dr Christopher Kingsley of Cambridge and the Astronomer Royal himself. The names of the last two appeared on the report. The President’s manner sharpened.

  “Two Englishmen!’ he exclaimed. “This is not at all good. How did it come about?”

  Herrick, realizing that the President could only have read a synopsis of his report, explained how Kingsley and the Astronomer Royal had independently deduced the existence of the Cloud, how Kingsley’s telegram had been received in Pasadena, and how the two Englishmen had been invited to California. The President softened.

  “Ah, they’re both in California, are they? You did well to send that invitation, perhaps better than you realized, Dr Herrick.”

  It was then that Herrick first realized the significance of Kingsley’s sudden decision to return to England.

  Some hours later, flying back to the West Coast, Herrick was still pondering his visit to Washington. He had hardly expected to receive the President’s quiet but firm censure, nor had he expected to be sent home so soon. Curiously the unmistakable censure worried him far less than he would have supposed. In his own eyes he had done his duty, and the critic that Herrick feared most was himself.

  It also took the Astronomer Royal some days to reach the fountainhead of government. The route to the summit lay through the First Lord of the Admiralty. The ascent would have been made sooner had he been willing to declare his purpose. But the Astronomer Royal would say nothing but that he desired an interview with the Prime Minister. Eventually he obtained an interview with the Prime Minister’s private secretary, a young man of the name of Francis Parkinson. Parkinson was frank: the Prime Minister was extremely busy. As the Astronomer Royal must know, quite apart from all the usual business of state, there was a delicate international conference in the offing, there was Mr Nehru’s visit to London in the spring, and the Prime Minister’s own coming visit to Washington. If the Astronomer Royal would not state his business, then quite certainly there would be no interview. Indeed the business would need to be of exceptional importance, otherwise with regret he must decline to be of any assistance whatever. The Astronomer Royal capitulated by giving Parkinson a very brief account of the affair of the Black Cloud. Two hours later he was explaining the whole matter, this time in full detail, to the Prime Minister.

  The following day the Prime Minister held an emergency meeting of the Inner Cabinet, to which the Home Secretary was also invited. Parkinson was there, acting as secretary. After giving a quite accurate précis of Herrick’s report, the Prime Minister looked round the table and said:

  “My purpose in calling this meeting was to acquaint you with the facts of a case that may possibly become serious, rather than to discuss any immediate action. Our first step must obviously be to satisfy ourselves of the correctness or otherwise of this report.”

  “And how may we do that?’ asked the
Foreign Secretary.

  “Well, my first step was to ask Parkinson to make discreet inquiries concerning the — er, scientific reputations of the gentlemen who have signed this report. Perhaps you would like to hear what he has to say?”

  The meeting signified that it would. Parkinson was slightly apologetic.

  “It wasn’t altogether easy to get really reliable information, especially about the two Americans. But the best I could get from my friends in the Royal Society was that any report bearing the signature of the Astronomer Royal or of the Mount Wilson Observatory will be absolutely sound from an observational point of view. They were, however, far less certain about the deductive powers of the four signatories. I gather that only Kingsley of the four might claim to be an expert on that side.”

  “What do you mean by “might claim to be”?’ asked the Chancellor.

  “Well, that Kingsley is known to be an ingenious scientist, but not everyone regards him as thoroughly sound.”

  “So what it amounts to is that the deductive parts of this report depend on only one man, and at that on a man who is brilliant but unsound?’ said the Prime Minister.

  “What I gleaned could be construed in that way, although it would be a somewhat extreme way of putting it,” answered Parkinson.

  “Possibly,” went on the Prime Minister, “but at any rate it gives us fair grounds for a measure of scepticism. Evidently we must look further into it. What I want to discuss with you all is the means we should now adopt for gaining further information. One possibility would be to ask the Council of the Royal Society to appoint a committee who would carry out a thorough probe of the whole matter. The only other line of attack that recommends itself to me is a direct approach to the U.S. Government, who must surely also be much concerned with the veracity, or perhaps I should say the accuracy, of Professor Kingsley and others.”

  After several hours’ discussion it was decided to communicate immediately with the U.S. Government. This decision was reached largely through the powerful advocacy of the Foreign Secretary, who was not short of arguments to support an alternative that would place the matter in the hands of his own department.

  “The decisive point,” he said, “is that an approach to the Royal Society, however desirable from other points of view, must of necessity place quite a number of people in possession of facts that would at the present stage best be left secret. I think we can all agree on this.”

  They all did. Indeed the Minister of Defence wanted to know: ‘What steps can be taken to ensure that neither the Astronomer Royal nor Dr Kingsley shall be allowed to disseminate their alarmist interpretation of the presumed facts?”

  “This is a delicate and important point,” answered the Prime Minister. “It is one that I have already given some thought to. That is actually the reason why I asked the Home Secretary to attend this meeting. I had intended raising the question with him later.”

  It was generally agreed that the point be left to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, and the meeting broke up. The Chancellor was thoughtful as he made back to his offices. Of all those at the meeting he was the only one to be very seriously perturbed, for he alone appreciated how very rickety the nation’s economy was, and how very little would be needed to topple it in ruins. The Foreign Secretary on the other hand was rather pleased with himself. He felt he had shown up rather well. The Minister of Defence thought that the whole business was rather a storm in a tea-cup and that in any case it was quite definitely nothing to do with his department. He wondered why he had been called to the meeting.

  The Home Secretary, on the other hand, was very pleased to have been called to the meeting, and he was very pleased to be staying on to discuss further business with the Prime Minister.

  “I am quite sure,” said he, “that we can dig up some regulation that will enable us to detain the two of them, the Astronomer Royal and the man from Cambridge.”

  “I am quite sure of it too,” answered the Prime Minister. “The Statute Book doesn’t go back so many centuries for nothing. But it would be much better if we can manage things tactfully. I have already had the opportunity of a conversation with the Astronomer Royal. I put the point to him and from what he said I feel we can be quite sure of his discretion. But from certain hints that he let drop I gather that it may be rather different with Dr Kingsley. At all events it is clear that Dr Kingsley must be contacted without delay.”

  “I will send someone up to Cambridge immediately.”

  “Not someone, you must go yourself. Dr Kingsley will be — er — shall I say flattered if you go to see him in person. Ring him up saying that you will be in Cambridge tomorrow morning and would like to consult him on an important matter. That I think should be quite effective, and it will be much simpler that way.”

  Kingsley was extremely busy from the moment he returned to Cambridge. He made good use of the few days that elapsed before the political wheels began to turn. A number of letters, all carefully registered, were sent abroad. An observer would probably have made special note of the two addressed to Greta Johannsen of Oslo and to Mlle Yvette Hedelfort of the University of Clermont-Ferrand, these being Kingsley’s only female correspondents. Nor could a letter to Alexis Ivan Alexandrov have passed notice. Kingsley hoped that it would reach its intended destination, but one could never be certain of anything sent to Russia. True, Russian and Western scientists, when they met together at international conferences, worked out ways and means whereby letters could pass between them. True, the secret of those ways and means was extremely well kept, even though it was known to many people. True, many letters did pass successfully through all censorships. But one could never be quite sure. Kingsley hoped for the best.

  His main concern however was with the radio astronomy department. He chivvied John Marlborough and his colleagues into intensive observations of the approaching Cloud, south of Orion. It required a good deal of persuasion to get them started. The Cambridge equipment (for 21 cm work) had only just recently come into operation and there were many other observations that Marlborough wanted to make. But Kingsley eventually managed to get his own way without revealing his real purposes. And once the radio astronomers were fairly started on the Cloud the results that came in were so startling that Marlborough needed no persuasion to continue. Soon his team were working twenty-four hours continuously round the clock. Kingsley found himself hard put to it to keep up in reducing the results and in distilling significance out of them.

  Marlborough was elated and excited when he lunched with Kingsley on the fourth day. Judging the time to be ripe, Kingsley remarked:

  “It’s clear that we ought to aim at publishing this new stuff pretty soon. But I think it might be desirable to get someone to confirm. I’ve been wondering about whether one or other of us shouldn’t write to Leicester.”

  Marlborough swallowed the bait.

  “A good idea,” he said. “I’ll write. I owe him a letter, and there are some other things I want to tell him about.”

  What Marlborough really meant, as Kingsley well knew, was that Leicester had got in first on one or two matters recently and Marlborough wanted the opportunity to show him that he, Leicester, wasn’t the only fish in the sea.

  Marlborough did in fact write to Leicester at the University of Sydney, Australia, and so for good measure (and unknown to Marlborough) did Kingsley. The two letters contained much the same factual material but Kingsley’s also had several oblique references, references that would have meant much to anyone who knew of the threat of the Black Cloud, which of course Leicester did not.

  When Kingsley returned to College after his lecture next morning an excited porter shouted after him:

  “Dr Kingsley, sir, there’s an important message for you.”

  It was from the Home Secretary to the effect that he would be glad to be favoured by an interview with Professor Kingsley at three that afternoon. “Too late for lunch, too early for tea, but he probably expects to make a good meal for all tha
t,” thought Kingsley.

  The Home Secretary was punctual, extremely punctual. Trinity clock was striking three when the self-same porter, still excited, showed him into Kingsley’s rooms.

  “The Home Secretary, sir,” he announced with a touch of grandeur.

  The Home Secretary was both brusque and tactfully subtle at the same time. He came to the point straight away. The Government had naturally been surprised and perhaps a little alarmed at the report they had received from the Astronomer Royal. It was widely appreciated how much the report owed to Professor Kingsley’s subtle powers of deduction. He, the Home Secretary, had come specially to Cambridge with a two-fold purpose: to compliment Professor Kingsley on the swiftness of his analysis of the strange phenomena that had been brought to his notice, and to say that the Government would much appreciate being in constant touch with Professor Kingsley so that they might have the full benefit of his advice.

  Kingsley felt he could do little but demur at the eulogy and offer with the best grace he could muster to give the best help that he could.

  The Home Secretary expressed his delight, and then added, almost as an afterthought, that the Prime Minister himself had given close thought to what Professor Kingsley might think a small point, but which he, the Home Secretary, felt nevertheless to be a point of some delicacy: that for the immediate present awareness of the situation should be closely confined to a very select few, in fact to Professor Kingsley, to the Astronomer Royal, the Prime Minister, and to the Inner Cabinet, of which for this purpose he, the Home Secretary, was considered a member.

  “Cunning devil,” thought Kingsley, “he’s put me just where I don’t want to be. I can only get out of it by being damnably rude, and in my own rooms too. I’d better try to warm things up by degrees.”

  Aloud he said:

  “You may take it that I understand and fully appreciate the naturalness of your wish for secrecy. But there are difficulties that I think ought to be appreciated. First, time is short: sixteen months is not a long time. Secondly, there are quite a number of things that we urgently need to know about the Cloud. Thirdly, those things will not be found out by maintaining secrecy. The Astronomer Royal and I could not possibly do everything alone. Fourthly, secrecy can in any case only be temporary. Others may follow the lines of reasoning that are contained in the Astronomer Royal’s report. At most you can expect only a month or two’s grace. In any case by the late autumn the situation will be plain to anyone who cares to glance up at the sky.”