The Last Almanac

These papers were found bound together in the cellar of the Meridian Office, in a folder marked PRIVATE — DO NOT CIRCULATE. They are set down here as they were found, in the order they were kept. — The Editors

I. Memorandum to the Astronomer Royal. The fourteenth of March.

Sir — I can no longer lay this at the door of a faulty instrument.

For eleven months our pyrheliometers have measured a fall in the solar constant of four parts in ten thousand. A trifle, you will say; a flaw in the brasswork. But the curve does not flatten; it steepens. I have re-ground the lenses with my own hands. I have replaced the thermopiles. I sent young Hollis up to the mountain station to repeat every reading in the thin bright air, where no valley smoke could be blamed. The mountain agrees with the valley. The Sun is cooling, and it cools a little faster each week than it did the week before.

I have done the arithmetic I did not wish to do, and I have done it four times over. If the curve holds its present shape, the harvests thin within a single generation, and the great rivers stand still within two. I would give a year of my life for a fifth calculation that proved me a fool.

I await your instruction.

— J. Ambrose Hale, Keeper of the Solar Register

II. From the Astronomer Royal. The second of April. Marked CONFIDENTIAL.

Hale — Your figures have now been seen by three men above me, and by one above them, whose name I may not set down. You are not a fool. That is precisely the difficulty.

You will continue the measurements. You will speak of them to no one — not to your assistant, not to your wife, not to God in a crowded church. The word panic is an easy thing to write and an impossible thing to unwrite. Consider the corn factors and the banks; consider the mills standing idle; consider what men will do when they are told that the light itself is being taken from them, and that no law, no army, and no prayer can serve a writ upon the Sun.

A truth that can only be suffered, and never mended, is not a truth the public is owed. We shall tell them when at last there is some remedy to tell them of. Burn this when you have read it.

III. A private letter to his wife, Ellen, then at the coast with their daughters. The nineteenth of May.

My dear — forgive a strange letter, and ask me nothing when I am home.

Take the girls walking at noon this week, and next week, and every fair day you are given. Let them stand in the open with their faces turned up and their eyes shut, and do not hurry them along, though the light makes them squint and complain. I cannot tell you why. Only this: that I have spent my whole life measuring a thing I believed to be everlasting, and I have lately found the end of it written small in my own ledgers, in a hand no larger than the foot of a fly.

I want my daughters to have stood in a great deal of sunshine. I want it to be in them the way the warmth of a good summer stays in a stone wall long after the sun has gone down behind it.

Do not read the newspapers too closely this year. You will notice that they grow very cheerful about the weather. That is how you will know that I have told you the truth.

IV. From the private diary. The third of August.

To-day they "corrected" the almanac.

The printed tables for the coming year show the old solar constant — unchanged, serene, and false. My own name stands upon the title page, as Keeper of the Register. I sat a long hour with the proof sheet on one side of the lamp and my true figures on the other, two columns of numbers, and I understood that I had been made the author of the largest lie ever set in type: a lie the exact size of the Sun.

Hollis came to me white as chalk. He has done the sums for himself now; I saw it in his face before he spoke. "Do we truly say nothing?" he asked me.

I told him the thing I have come, wretchedly, to half-believe: that they are not entirely wrong. There is no ship to build against this, no dam to raise, no enemy to be defeated. There is only a slow and universal winter that no announcement on earth can shorten by so much as an hour. Perhaps a lie is the last kindness a government has it in its power to give. I do not know. I have unlearned my certainties this year, along with my Sun.

V. From the private diary. Some weeks later, undated.

Cold mornings, out of their proper season. The swallows are confused and gather early upon the wires. A neighbour leaned on my gate and remarked that the summers are not what they were when he was a boy, and laughed — and I laughed with him, and hated myself for it, and loved him for not knowing.

I have begun a second almanac. I keep it in this drawer, in my own hand, unprinted. It carries the true figures: the real and diminishing light, year upon year, down the whole length of the decline as far as my arithmetic dares to follow it. No one will read it while I live. Perhaps no one will read it at all.

And yet I cannot bear to be only the keeper of the false one. Somewhere the true tables must exist — even in a cellar, even in the dark — so that if any waking mind should outlast the warmth and come at last to the cold end of us, it may open this book and say: they knew. They knew, and were not permitted to speak; but one of them, at the least, sat down and wrote it true.

VI.

The last leaf in the folder is a public notice, printed for the year that followed. It promises a fine bright summer, long days, and an early and generous harvest. Along its margin, in ink, in Hale's own hand, three words are written:

Stand in it.

— The Editors