It was a question repeated by more than one in those days, for the great public having become interested in the matter was irritated by this silence on the part of Dr. Marlin and his fellow-scientists. Whatever they had learned or guessed as to the thing's cause, why did they not give their information to the Intelligence Bureau for distribution to the world? It was hinted freely that the whole matter was a hoax devised by Dr. Marlin, which had duped the astronomical world for the time being, and which they were reluctant to acknowledge. It was suggested also that the World President or the World Congress should take action to make the astronomers give out their usual reports. The public was quickly working itself into a state of indignation over the matter, when there suddenly burst upon it that doom-laden and terrible statement by Dr. Marlin, which was to loose an unprecedented terror upon the peoples of Earth. * * * * * It was on May 13th, the tenth day after Dr. Marlin's first announcement of the thing, that he gave to the world through the Intelligence Bureau that epochal statement, and in it he referred first to his silence and to the silence of his fellow-astronomers in the preceding few days. "In those days," he said, "every observatory in the world has been engaged in an intensive investigation of this acceleration of the sun's rotation, which I discovered. And in each of those days the sun's rotatory speed has continued to increase at exactly the same rate! In each day that speed has increased so much as to cut down the sun's rotatory period 4 hours more, so that now, ten days after the beginning of the thing, its rotatory period has been cut down by 40 hours. In other words, ten days ago the sun turned as it had always turned to our knowledge, at the rate of one turn in every 25 days, at its equator. Now the sun's rotatory speed has increased to the rate of one turn in every 23 days, 8 hours.