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The cause of the double shadow was evident at once but what can have produced this sudden disruption of the comet? It must have occurred since last evening, and already, if the calculated distance of the comet is correct, the parts of the severed head are 300,000 miles asunder!" Underneath this entry was scribbled: "Can this have anything to do with Cosmo Versal's flood?"
Meanwhile the unexpected respite furnished by the sudden cessation of the downpour from the sky had other important results, to which we now turn. When Professor Abiel Pludder indited his savage response to Cosmo Versal's invitation to become one of the regenerators of mankind by embarking in the Ark, he was expressing his professional prejudice rather than his intellectual conviction.
Cosmo Versal's voice sank into a whisper, and he shuddered slightly as he went on: "Only last night I was sweeping the sky with the telescope when I noticed, in Hercules and Lyra, and all that part of the heavens, a dimming of some of the fainter stars. It was like the shadow of the shroud of a ghost. Nobody else would have noticed it, and I wouldn't if I had not been looking for it.
And yet, although the fragments were scattered a dozen blocks away, hundreds of persons who were in the stations suffered no other injury than such as resulted from being flung violently to the floor, or against the walls. Cosmo Versal's great ark seemed charmed. Not a single discharge of lightning occurred in its vicinity, a fact which he attributed to the dielectric properties of levium.
Some of them were nervous, but the more adventurous spirits heartily applauded Cosmo Versal's design to give them a closer view of so extraordinary a spectacle. Even from their present distance the sight was one that might have filled them with terror if they had not already been through adventures which had hardened their nerves. The smoke was truly terrific in appearance.
Cosmo Versal's vogue as a prophet of disaster was soon gone, and once more everybody began to laugh at him. People turned again to their neglected affairs with the general remark that they "guessed the world would manage to wade through." Those who had begun preparations to build arks looked very sheepish when their friends guyed them about their childish credulity.
It was a suggestion whose boldness made even the owner and constructor of the Jules Verne stare for a moment, but evidently it was the only possible way in which the vessel might be saved; and knowing that, in case of failure, they could themselves float to the surface after removing the weights from the bottom of the suits, they unanimously decided to try Cosmo Versal's plan.
Like the gray coat of Napoleon on a battlefield, the sight of that mighty brow bred confidence. The utterance of the Carnegie Institution indeed fell flat, and Cosmo Versal's star reigned in the ascendent.
Cosmo Versal's pressing orders, accompanied by cash, displaced or delayed orders of the government commanding materials for the navy and the air fleet. In consequence, about the middle of July he received a summons to visit the President of the United States. Cosmo hurried to Washington on the given date, and presented his card at the White House.
Even if men did not yet fully believe in Cosmo Versal's theory of a whelming nebula, they were terrified to the bottom of their souls by the conviction, which nobody could resist, that the vast ice-fields of the north, the glaciers of Greenland, the icy mountains of Alaska, had melted away under the terrible downpour of heat, and were swelling the oceans over their brims.
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