But the new planet itself drowned all consciousness of lesser things when it rose magnificently above the eastern horizon. That night it was a full circle of yellow light, and across its great expanse moved one circle of intense blackness, the size of our old moon, a circle that was slowly increasing in size, the shadow of our own Earth. So great a thing appeared this new planet, then, that when its lower rim was at last clear of the horizon, its upper limb towered half-way to the zenith. It had few markings, but from one pole, which was turned markedly towards us, radiated uneven, dark lines--chains of mountains, perhaps--that definitely produced the effect of a solid globe long before its actual convexity was recognisable. All the rest of the planet presented a smooth, unbroken expanse, possibly the vast bed of some long-vanished sea. For an hour or more my companion and I had sat in silence watching this gigantic spectacle; then he said quietly, “We are witnessing the failure of a negligible experiment.” I did not answer at once. I had not caught his drift. I was struggling with a foolish preoccupation, the result of an almost lifelong habit. As I watched I was searching for words to describe what I saw. I wanted to write my experience; yes, even there, under the sentence of death pronounced not only upon me, but upon all humanity, I was struggling with this meaningless desire to create a record that none could ever read. I made an effort and roused myself from this inane preoccupation. “Negligible?” I said, grasping at what seemed to be his most prominent word. “Proved to be negligible,” he asserted. “You are a serious man? You don’t cling to straws? You have no doubt that this is the end of the Earth? Very well then, you know that we are to be destroyed? By an accident? Possibly. Or it may be that this arrow that has been discharged at us was shot deliberately; with a definite purpose. “It isn’t as if the same thing had not happened before,” he continued after a pause. “We have seen it--seen the effects at least. When some temporary star blazed up in the sky, we inferred some such collision as this. It may very well be that from a planet in some other system men may catch sight of this tiny blaze of ours--and wonder. It will be relatively a very small affair. Some of those we’ve seen must have been many thousand times greater. “But the point is that this experiment of making men upon the Earth is now proved to be negligible. In a few hours it will be finished, wiped out. And whether that termination is the result of accident or design makes no difference to the effect. This is an answer to all our philosophies and religions. Either we are the creatures of some chance evolutionary process, or we are an experiment that has failed.” I looked at him, and noted with a curious stir of unplaceable recollection that his head was too large. “It is certain that we shall go off like an exploded shell?” I asked.