A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

There was so much happening everywhere in the world during those fateful weeks that followed February 10, 1953 -- events so startling, amazing, so stupendous of import, and of such diversity that I scarce know how to recount them. Of necessity my mention of many must be brief; and my picture of the whole, I fear, will be at best incoherent.

Yet in that quality, at least, it will be a true picture; the world was incoherent, chaotic -- everywhere a chaos of events unprecedented, uncontrollable. And in the chaos which swept Freddie and me away, the news from Dan Cain in Porto Rico, important though it was, at the time concerned us little.

Father was in constant communication with the Cains; and later, after father had gone to Miami when the Federal capital was moved there in flight from Washington, he went to Porto Rico.

The announcement that our world was to have such different days and nights, and a climate so utterly changed, struck the public with horror.

It is not my purpose to try to detail or to picture it. The chaos everywhere; the paralyzation of industry throughout the northern hemisphere which so far had been proceeding by man's will against all the invading efforts of nature to wreck it; the panics that took place in all the northern cities -- crowds of refugees struggling to get south; inadequate transportation; accidents; and a horrible crime-wave that swept unchecked over every one of the large population centers.

Human activities in our modern world are very widely diversified; more widely varied -- and yet more intermingled, more interdependent -- than any one realizes until there comes an upset from the normal.

There is, in these modern times, nothing that anyone does which does not almost immediately affect what some one else is doing. Had the change come slowly, spread over a hundred, or a thousand or a hundred thousand years as other great world changes have come and passed, conditions would have adjusted themselves. No one would even have noticed the change.

But this was happening in minutes where others had taken centuries. New York, London, Paris and all the cities of the north were doomed to six months of twilight and night and blighting cold. Snow now was upon land, millions of acres of land, where crops soon would have been growing if millions of people were to have food. Yet now we know those millions of acres would be for months snow-buried.

Millions of homes soon would be without adequate heat or light; and the people without adequate clothing. Rivers upon which the great power plants depended were congealing into ice.

This for the north, with business, industry and nearly every human activity paralyzed by the sudden public horror. But in the south, from the Equator to the South Pole, lay the land of promise. Or at least the public thought so.

Life lay there; life and the promise of food and warmth and the blessed sunlight. For in the far Antarctic south, with the new light and heat coming, millions upon millions of acres of land would be springing into a new fertility to replace what the north had lost. But this, too, was a fallacy; for after a few months, the pendulum would swing back; the far south would go into night and cold.

Many hundred million people, suddenly giving up all their accustomed work in the world's activities and trying to move to another region! A migration greater than the sum total of all others in the world's history. In a hundred years of systematic, careful planning and execution it might have been accomplished without disaster. But now it was a panic, a chaos, a flight, with distracted governments trying to cope with it, impotent to bring even a semblance of order.

Our office of the Amalgamated Broadcasters was maintained in New York City until well along in February. With government affiliation, we broadcasted only what might be of help to the public; news of conditions, generally censored to allay too great a fear; advice as to what to do; information concerning transportation, and news from the south. In this work, Freddie now joined me. There were days -- almost dark now except for a brief time before and after midday -- when he and I were in our cold office, one or the other of us at the microphone throughout the twenty-four hours.

It was an office of incoherent men and disorganized service; without light, some of the time; with frozen and burst heating pipes and no one to repair them. We sat bundled in our overcoats, with snow piling against the windows.

News came of crowds surging in the dark, snow-piled streets; food giving out, with paralyzed transportation; news of raids by the public upon all the markets; news of people trampled to death hourly at every steamship dock, every bridge leading out of the city; uncontrollable crowds at the tunnels, the railroad and plane terminals.

State troopers vainly patrolled streets made almost impassable by snow which now could not be cleared away; people froze in the cold with which they were not equipped to cope; crime was everywhere, with criminals, like ghouls, battening on the tragedy.

In those terrible days there were few concerned with astronomy. Yet I recall that one of my orders was to detail -- for such as might still be listening -- a simple version of how, astronomically, all this was coming to pass.

"Perhaps," I broadcasted, "when we know the fundamentals of this change -- the scientific reasons for it -- the thing may hold less terror for us."

Useless words! Nothing could mitigate the terror!