It was dawn; the slow sunrise of Bronson Beta was spreading its first faint shafts across the sky; and the ground below was beginning to be etched in its pattern of plain and hill and river and estuary from the sea.
The veinlike tracery of roads appeared-the lines left by the Vanished People. Tony gazed far ahead and to each side, searching for another or others of such marvelous, gigantic bubbles which would become, upon approach, other cities. But nothing of the sort came in sight. They spied smears and blotches below which became, when they turned the glass upon them, rows of ruins. They did not stop for these. Already they had much to report; already they were long overdue.
They sighted, far ahead, columns of smoke lifted lazily into the sky. Ransdell pointed and Tony, leaning to his ear, shouted: "Our camp-fires! Our camp!"
He could make out now, in the early morning light, that these were indeed camp-fires ending their duty of lessening the chill of the long night, perhaps, starting their services of cooking. The camp seemed unchanged; it was safe.
Tony compared its crudeness and rudeness with the marvelously proportioned perfections of the Sealed City; and a pang of nostalgia for this encampment suddenly assailed him. Here were his own; here was home.
He glanced aside and surprised his comrade Dave Ransdell, as he stared down. What thousand shattering fragments of thoughts must fill Ransdell's mind! One-and Tony plainly could see it-overwhelmed all the rest. Here, below, was Eve Hendron.
For it was a sudden softness and yearning that was in the eyes of the broad-shouldered, Herculean man at Tony's side. What would be in Eve's eyes when she saw him?
Tony's nostalgia of the moment before was replaced by a jerk of jealousy. Eve always had admired Dave and liked him-and more. More, yes, more than liked him, during those last desperate days on earth. Now he was here; and he had done well.
Yes; any one would say-Hendron himself would declare -that Dave Ransdell had done well indeed to have brought across space the ship intrusted to him with loss of less than half the party. Ransdell would be greeted ecstatically as a hero.
Tony caught his lip between his teeth and tried to establish better control of his inward tumult. If Eve preferred Dave to himself, let her!
He busied himself grimly with his throttles, putting down the ship on the bare soil more than a mile from camp.
They had been seen in the air and recognized; and the camp was outpouring toward them. The tractor was leading, piled with passengers.
Tony and Dave started to run toward them; then they halted. The people from the camp began to see that one figure was not that of Eliot James.
"Who is it? Who's with you?" came the cry from the tractor which was ahead of the runners.
"Ransdell! Dave Ransdell!" Tony yelled; and Dave stopped and lifted high his arms.
"Ransdell! Ransdell?" came back.
"Yes! They got over! The second ship got over!"
Then the welcome began.
'Tony," said Ransdell later, when for an instant they had a few words together, "how Hendron's changed!"
"Yes," said Tony, "of course he has." But he realized that to Ransdell, who had not seen their leader since the last day on earth, the alteration in Hendron's appearance and manner was more tragic. Indeed, it seemed to Tony that in the few days he had been gone, Hendron had become whiter and weaker.
Never had Tony heard Hendron's voice shake as now it did; and his hand, which clung to the list which Ransdell had given him, quivered as if with palsy.
It was the list of the survivors and of the dead from the second Ark, with which Hendron had insisted that he be supplied.
He had read it several times; but again and again, like a very old man, he went over it.
"It was the tubes, you say, David?" he kept reviewing the disaster at landing, with Ransdell. "Three of the tubes fused! That was the fault of the design-my fault," he blamed himself morbidly.
"Father!" whispered his daughter to him. "Father, you ought to be happier than any other man in the world."
"In the world!" repeated Hendron.
"In all the universe!" Eve quickly corrected. "You brought all the people in our ship over safely; and more than three hundred in the other Ark! Oh, Father, Father, no man in the universe could have done more!"
Hendron shook his head. "These people here, of whom Tony has told us. What metallurgists! They would have made a ship. Ah! Ah! Aha! Tony-David-Higgins! The rest of you! What do you think of this? The People of this planet are not here because they made good their escape through space! They made their own space-ships and better ones and more of them; and escaped when they were passing some habitable sphere as they scraped some star!"
"No, Father!"
"How do you know? I tell you, they probably did it; and accomplished it so much better than I, with my bungling, that I am an amateur-a murderer. How many did I kill, David? How many did you say?... What rows of names!"
"Father, you didn't kill them!"
"I tell you I did! The tubes fused-the tubes I figured and designed myself. The human factor did not fail. They piloted it properly. The tubes fused!"
No one could quiet him. His daughter had to lead him away with Tony and Ransdell both helping her. The excitement of Ransdell's news and, on top of it, Tony's had snapped his nerves, drawn too long to extreme tension. It was perfectly plain to all the company whom he had led that his day, as a man of resource, was done.
Tony, thoroughly realizing this, trembled himself as he helped lead his friend to his cabin. Partly it was from pity and compassion; for no one knew better than Tony with what mercilessness Hendron had driven himself and how he had borne so long his enormous burden. But partly this trembling was from an emotion far less worthy. It was jealousy again of Dave Ransdell.
Jealousy more bitter and hard than that which had possessed him when they both were on earth-and rivals. For here they were rivals again and with the conflict between them accentuated.
How Eve had hugged Dave and held to him and kissed him!
To be sure, they had all embraced him-men and girls. Every girl in the camp hysterically had kissed him. But Eve had not been hysterical, Tony knew. Eve-Eve- Well, it had changed this world for her that Dave Ransdell had reached it.
Then there was the talk which Tony had heard: the talk already to-night of Ransdell as the new leader of both camps; the leader of the survivors of earth to replace and follow Hendron.
Tony tingled alternately with hate of Dave, and with shame at himself, as he thought of this talk. He had quieted the talk of himself as leader and he honestly had not wanted it a few days ago; he would not permit himself to be considered a candidate against Hendron; but now that Hendron was surely done, he wanted his people-his people, he thought them- to want him for their leader. And some still did; but more, he thought miserably, to-night turned to Dave Ransdell.
This was unworthy; this was childish, this jealousy and hate of his strong, courageous comrade! So Tony told himself; but he could not conquer it.
Now they had come to Hendron's cabin; and Tony felt himself becoming officious in the endeavor to be of more use to Hendron and to Eve than Dave might be.
Ransdell felt this and drew back.
"Thank you, Tony," said Eve, in her gentle voice. "Now you go back to the people."
"All right," said Tony. "Come along, Dave."
"Let him stay here, Tony," said Eve.
"Him-and not me?" Tony stared.
"What more can he tell them?" Eve asked patiently. "He's given them his news, who're living and who"-she lowered her voice carefully so her father could not hear-"who are dead. He has no more to tell. You-you haven't begun to tell them what you must have to tell of the strange city!"
"Don't you want to hear it?" Tony persisted.
"I'm staying with Father now," said Eve.
Rebelliously-and yet ashamed of himself for his feeling- Tony turned away and left her with Ransdell.
CHAPTER VII THE CITY OF VANISHED PEOPLE
"
The best way to give you some idea of the city," Tony said, facing the entire company except Hendron and Eve, "is to read you extracts from the record made, on the spot and at the time, by Eliot James. Before I begin, however, I ask you to think of a city made of many colored metals built like the spokes of a wheel around a vast central building. Think of a dome of transparent metal over it. And then remember particularly, while I read, that every street, every building, every object in the whole metropolis was in an amazing state of preservation.
"Remember that there was not a single sign of human habitation. I have already told you that the people were human-very much like ourselves-but there was not a sign of them or any remains of them except for statues and paintings and representations which we called photographic for lack of a better word and for record on their remarkable visual machines.- Bear all that in mind. Here, for example, is what Eliot wrote on the evening of our first day there. It was the fifty-first day on Bronson Beta. I will skip the part that describes the city in general."
He began to read: "Tony and I are now seated in a bedroom of an apartment in one of the large buildings. The night of Bronson Beta has descended, but we have light. In fact, the adventure of light is the most bizarre which has befallen us since we penetrated this spectacular and silent city. As twilight descended we were about to return to our airplane. We were at the time on the street. We had visited one or two buildings, and the effect of the silence combined with the oncoming darkness was more than we could bear. I know that my scalp was tingling, the palms of my hands were clammy, and when I stood still I could feel my muscles shaking. We could not rid ourselves of the feeling that the city was inhabited; we could not cease looking quickly over our shoulders in the hope or the fear of seeing somebody. As we stood uncertainly on the street the sun vanished altogether, its orange light reflected by low-lying cumulus clouds. The sky took on a deeper green and at a word from Tony I would have run from the place. Suddenly, to our utter confoundation, the city was bathed in light. The light came on without a sound. Its source, or rather, its sources, were invisible. It shone down on the streets from behind cornices. It burst luminously upon the walls of the giant buildings.
"The interiors of many of them were also filled with radiance. All this, suddenly, silently, in the gathering gloom. I shall never forget the expression on Tony's face as he turned to me and whispered: 'It's too much!' My own mind, appalled at this new, marvelous manifestation of the genius of the Other People, was very close to lapsing into unconsciousness for a second. Then I found myself with my hands clenched, saying over and over to myself, 'It's light, just light. It was getting dark, so they turned on the lights.' Then I amended that to-'The lights come on here when it's dark.' Immediately Tony and I fell into an altercation. 'It's just the lights coming on,' I said.
" 'But that's impossible!'
" 'Nevertheless, they're on.'
"Tony, searching frantically for the shreds of his sanity, replied, 'But if the lights come on every night in this city, we'd have seen it through telescopes.'
" 'Maybe we didn't happen to catch it'
" 'It can't be.'
"Both of us thought of the same thing simultaneously: the lights had come on because the city had been entered. It was true that if the cities of Bronson Beta had been illuminated at night the fact would have been observed before their passing. And a new and utterly irrational feeling struck us. The people were dead, dead a million years-a hundred million years. But in this startling gesture of turning on the lights there was more than mechanical magic. There was hospitality. That was crazy, but it was the way we felt.
" 'It was arranged,' Tony said. 'Arranged for somebody, sometime-so arranged that when they should come here everything would be ready for them. Consequently, unless we do something very stupid, nothing can happen to us.' I repeat that it was utterly irrational; but that was the way it made us feel.
"I was inclined to agree with him, and as my eyes traveled along the brilliant and magnificent streets of this metropolis, I too for the first time felt that the artificial light pouring indirectly upon us had lent to it a humanity that had been hitherto absent.
" 'Let's stay,' Tony said. 'Maybe we can find a place to sleep. We really ought to know more about it before we go back.'
"And so we stayed. We picked a building which we thought contained residences and after some experimenting succeeded in entering it. The ground floor was a hall, or lobby, which was decorated by statuary and bas-reliefs, of animals more fantastic and ferocious-looking than could be contrived in the wildest nightmare. And yet their presentation had a gay note, as if the sculptor had set them as humorous, rather than savage, embellishments in that lobby. At one side of the lobby was another large room which contained the apparatus for what we presently realized was a variety of games. They were like no games on our earth. One of them was played with large metal-like balls, which were extremely light and yet very hard, and with magnets. Another was played over a pool, evidently with jets of water, but we could not turn on the jets and the pool was empty. We did not take the time to puzzle out the technique of these sports, but proceeded by a large staircase to the floor above. There, as we had hoped, we found apartments. One of them, which faced the street from which we had entered the building, was open-and this we have made our own."
As Tony turned a page, his listeners waited almost breathlessly. He continued from the record:
"It is an apartment of indescribable beauty. The living room is more than twenty feet in height. Its walls are decorated with metal figures in various colors. There is no rug on the floor, but the floor is of a texture not unlike that of a very fine, deep rug. There are mirrors on many faces of the walls-the Other People must have enjoyed looking at themselves, or else they must have liked the added effect of distance lent by the mirrors, for large reflecting panels seem to be an important part of their interior decoration. We have also found beds. There were two bedrooms. The beds are very low. We had, I imagine, assumed that they would be of a luxurious softness, but they are rather hard, so that in spite of their comforts the Other People must have been Spartans in some measure. Apparently there are closets and bureaus set in the walls, but we have not been able to get open the panels which cover them. We have also found a bathroom, but we cannot make anything of it. It is a beautiful chamber of all bright metals, the colors of which are gold and azure, but it is filled with fixtures and other gadgets of great intricacy as well as beauty.
"We are leaving the problem of deciphering the Bronson Betans' bathing and toilet-making for experts.
"However, we are quite comfortable in that part of our quarters which we have had the courage to occupy.... It is now moderately late in the Bronson Beta night and we have decided to try to sleep. To be sure, we have placed a chair in the door to the hall so it will not magically close upon us, for although we are only one story above the street it is impossible to break these windows. We have also planned to keep our pistols at our sides, although a glance at this world of the Other People makes us quite sure that if there were any survivors and they were bent on our destruction, a revolver would be an extremely useless weapon. However, nobody has survived; of that we are convinced."
Tony looked up and regarded his fascinated audience. They were packed about him, crowding close, eager for his next words. But Eve was not there; nor Ransdell. He tried to dismiss thought of this as he proceeded to read:
"We did sleep, and we slept very well. However, we woke before the actual return of daylight, and feeling sufficiently refreshed, we decided to continue our explorations in the remarkable radiance of the artificial illumination which was so useful though so puzzling to us. You can scarcely understand how this affected us with the conviction that the place must be inhabited, and that around the next corner, beyond the next door, we must find some of the people. But we found no living thing."
Tony looked up again. "I find here a number of pages of notes of the most sober sort. They are Eliot James' attempt to describ
e and analyze some of the remarkable objects and implements which we examined. Of course neither he nor I are physicists, chemists or engineers, so our notions are probably valueless; those of you who are more expert than either of us will undoubtedly soon have a chance to inspect the engines and implements of the Other People.
"Along with such notes, I find the trivial record of what Eliot and I ate on that amazing morning. I will read that because it will show to you something of our state of mind. We seem to have been so stunned by what we had seen that it never occurred to Eliot that it was ridiculous to describe, along with the wonders of the Sealed City, our breakfast!"
His gaze returned to the notes.
"We got up in what we call the morning," Tony read, "although it was still dark, and we had a breakfast consisting of one bar of chocolate and a rather crumbled piece of hardtack which I had in my pocket, for what reason nobody will ever know. Then an extremely funny thing happened-at least we thought it was funny. We finished the last crumb of the hardtack-for our real food supply was in our ship outside the city -when I, looking for chance provender, felt in a pocket, and produced-to our mutual amazement-a stick of chewing-gum! This we broke evenly in half, and we embarked again on the streets of Bronson Beta chewing gum-a practice which I dare say was unknown on the planet in its earlier days.
Philip Wylie - After Worlds Collide Page 11
