The End of the World: And Other Catastrophes by Mike Ashley

Author:Mike Ashley [Ashley, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, apocalypse, post-apocalypse, Post-apocalyptic, disaster, nuclear, climate change, global warming, Short stories
Amazon: 0712352732
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2019-05-15T23:00:00+00:00

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In the first place, perhaps it had better be said at once that the greatest and most imminent peril that the planet Terra has ever been threatened with since it became a world suited to the habitation of men and monkeys, would never have been averted if, in the first place, Mr. Emerson G. Crellin had not made a practically uncountable and ever-increasing pile of dollars by almost every one of the multifarious methods known to the dollar-piling genius of the Great Republic; and if, in the second place, he had not been possessed of two hobbies, upon either of which he was prepared to spend the last dollar in his bottomless pockets.

As it would be difficult to say which of these hobbies was to him the more important, we may take as the first of them that which was calculated to bulk most largely in the eyes of the world. This was astronomy. Among the many millionaire countrymen of his who have so magnificently endowed the temples of this noblest of the sciences, Emerson G. Crellin was determined not to be the least. But what he had done for astronomy was done, not in his native land, but amidst the sylvan beauties of the Surrey hills, and it was here that his second hobby came in. He had a daughter, whom he had somewhat boldly but, as the event proved, justifiably, christened Auriole, and his twin ambition to that of finding the means of making wider and longer excursions into the realms of space than any one else had done was to see the glitter of a coronet—none of your new-creation, bobbed-up-with-the-last-social-earthquake coronets, as he put it, but one that dated back at least to the days when the world had not yet been enriched by the addition of what was some day to be the United States—shining on the brow of his darling Auriole.

It was this that had brought him with his millions and his motherless daughter to the country in which circumstances were most favourable to the making of such an investment, and this was also the reason why the famous Crellin Observatory and the immortal Crellin Reflector with its sixty-four-inch object-glass was located on the Surrey hills instead of on the Alleghanies or the slopes of the Rockies. The observatory was built on the summit of Leith Hill, which had been acquired by the further acquisition and gift in perpetuity to the nation of an addition of about a thousand acres to Hurtwood Common. Leith-hill Place had been included in the purchase and exchange, and here dwelt the millionaire and his daughter with another member of the household who may as well be introduced at once.

This was Arthur Lennox, a man still in the early thirties, who had not only been first of his year in mathematics at London and Cambridge—which is the same thing as saying he was Gold Medallist and Senior Wrangler—but he had so far distinguished himself in original astronomical research that he

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