A Cockeyed World

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Universal-International). One day, maybe the day after yesterday, seismographs around the world begin to jitter with the most violent tremors ever measured. Days later, the globe still quivers with secondary shocks. Torrential rains fall in improbable places. A sun eclipse occurs ten days early. In Rome the temperature rises to 139DEG, while in New York a blizzard piles twelve inches of snow on the city's streets. Steam billows up from the sea and rolls over Western Europe at a depth of 50 feet till a flurry of cyclones blows it away.

What in the world is going on? Millions wonder in rising alarm, then hear with horror that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, by fateful inadvertency, have ex ploded superbombs at almost exactly the same moment -- one near the South Pole, one near the North Pole. The geostrophic jolt, statesmen grimly reveal, has knocked the earth 11DEG off its axis and, what is in finitely worse, has steeply deflected its orbit. In four months, scientists estimate, the earth will pass so close to the sun that the world will end in fire, and humanity will roast in a hell of its own making.

This arrant piece of fiction is always sensational and sometimes silly, but it reminds the viewer, perhaps salutarily, that with a little nuclear encouragement this really could be a cockeyed world.

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