Philip Wylie - After Worlds Collide

by After Worlds Collide(Lit)

  Von Beitz scowled. "I can't believe it. Germans? Maybe- some Germans, Heitbrat, for example. But wouldn't it be better if we said nothing to the women? They might get hysterical."

  "These women don't get hysterical," Tony answered succinctly.

  He had scarcely finished his instructions when a message was brought to him to report at Hendron's house.

  He went in. Eve was in the living room-the room that had been headquarters for the camp since the building of the house. She was sitting at her father's desk, and Ransdell stood at a little distance from her. Dodson was there. The faces of all three were serious.

  "Hendron has collapsed," Dodson said to Tony. "Whether he will recover or not, I cannot say." Tony shook his head sadly. Eve spoke. "The camp must have a leader."

  "Yes," Tony answered.

  "Election might be unsatisfactory," she continued. "And it would take time." "Yes."

  "Father appointed no second-in-command. Whoever is in charge while he is ill must remain here. You and Eliot James alone can fly our single plane. We'll need it constantly now. A radio must be taken down to the other camp at once, for example."

  Tony looked at her with as little sign of emotion as he could show. This was a new Eve to him-a stern, impartial Eve. Grief and need had combined to make her so. "The static we've been having makes a radio useless," he said.

  "That static occurs only at night," she answered. "Sundown to sunup."

  "The lights in the city-" Tony murmured. He squared his shoulders. "I'll take a radio down at once."

  Eve rose and gestured Ransdell into her father's chair. She shook his hand. Dodson shook his hand. Tony shook his hand-Tony whose soul was at that moment in exquisite torment.

  Ransdell looked drawn and bleak.

  "One other thing," Tony said, his voice steady. "We may be in a new and to me fantastic danger." Like a soldier making a report, he detailed the knowledge Kyto had given him and told Ransdell what precautions he had already taken. Even as he spoke the air was filled with a hissing thunder and they waited to continue the conversation until tests of the blast tubes had been finished.

  "I'll get outposts established at once," Ransdell said. "I scarcely believe that such a thing could be-but we can take no chances."

  "I'd like to talk with Kyto," Eve said. She left the room even as Tony turned to bid her good-by.

  "That radio-" said Ransdell. Tony could not make his senses believe that the man who spoke to him now was the man with whom he had spent the latter part of the previous night in deep exultation. Rivalry over leadership-rivalry over Eve -they seemed inadequate things intellectually for the breaking of a friendship. Tony remembered the pact he and Ransdell had reached in Michigan, long ago. Now-it seemed broken!

  "I'll take it immediately, Dave," he answered.

  The use of his first name startled Ransdell somewhat from his barren mood: He rose and held out his hand.

  Tony shook it. "So long," he said.

  "Good luck."

  Tony opened the throttle regulating the supply of minute quantities of fuel to the atomic blast of his plane. The increase of speed as he fled southward took some of the strain from his nerves. His ears roared to the tune of the jets. The ground underneath moved in a steady blur. Beside him on the extra seat was the radio-a set taken from the ark of the air, and still crated.

  Tony had lost his hope of being leader. He had lost Eve. Ransdell came first in the hearts of his companions. Tony wondered how other men in the camp would adjust their philosophies to this double catastrophe. Duquesne would shrug: "C'est la vie." Vanderbilt would have an epigram. Eliot James would tell him to hope and to wait and to be courageous.

  Far ahead he saw the cantonment.

  He lost altitude, dropped in a tight spiral, straightened out, and landed at an unnecessarily furious speed.

  A few minutes later he was surrounded, and the radio was being carried from the plane by experts.

  James was at his side. "Lord, you look tired! I've got a bunk for you."

  "Thanks."

  Questions were being asked. "Got to sleep," Tony said, trying to smile. "Tell you later. Every one's all right-Hendron's somewhat ill-Ransdell's commanding up there. See you after I have a nap." They let him go.

  He stretched out under one of the shelters. James, after a private question or two, thoughtfully left him. He could not sleep, however. He did not even want to be alone. Then-some one entered the room where he lay. He turned. It was the girl Marian Jackson.

  "You're not asleep," she said easily.

  "No."

  She sat down on the side of his bed. "Want anything?"

  "Guess not."

  "Mind if I sit here?"

  "No."

  She brushed back the hair from his forehead and suddenly exclaimed. "You're all chapped and wind-burned!"

  He smiled. "Sure. Flying."

  "Wait." She was gone.

  A moron, Tony reflected. But she was very sweet. Thoughtful! A woman, just brushing back your hair when you were weary, could do strange things in the way of giving comfort. She returned.

  "Shut your eyes. This is salve. Make you feel better. You're shot; I can tell. I'll stay here while you sleep, so you won't need to worry about anything."

  He felt her hands-delicate, tender. Then he was asleep.

  He woke slowly. He was being shaken. Waking was like falling up a long, black hill.

  Light hit his eyes. James stood there.

  'Tony! Wake up!"

  He sat up, shook himself.

  "We got that radio working. Were talking to Hendron's camp. Suddenly the man at the other end coughed and yelled 'Help!'-and now we can't raise any one."

  Tony was up again-outdoors-running toward the plane. James was running behind him.

  "Give me Vanderbilt and Taylor. We'll go."

  "But-"

  "What else can we do?"

  As Tony descended upon Hendron's encampment, three men peered tensely through the glass windows of the ship: Taylor, Vanderbilt, and Tony himself. Nothing seemed disturbed; the buildings were intact

  "Not a person in sight!" Taylor yelled suddenly.

  They slid down the air.

  Tony cut the motors so that their descent became a soft whistle.

  Then they saw clearly.

  Far below were human figures, the people of the cantonment, and all of them lay on the ground, oddly collapsed, utterly motionless.

  CHAPTER X WAR

  Tony circled above the stricken camp of the colony from earth. He could count some sixty men and women lying on the ground.

  They looked as if they were dead; and Tony thought they were dead. So did Jack Taylor at his side; and Peter Vanderbilt, his saturnine face pressed against the quartz windows of the plane, believed he was witnessing catastrophe to Hendron's attempt to preserve humanity.

  The Death spread below them might already have struck, also, the other camp-the camp from which these three had just flown. They might be the last survivors; and the Death might reach them now, at any instant, within their ship.

  Tony thought of the illness which had come over the camp after the first finding of the wrecked vehicle of the Other People-the illness that had proved fatal to three of the earth people. He thought: "This might be some more deadly disease of the Other People which they caught." He thought: "I might have brought the virus of it to them myself from the Sealed City. It might have been in or on some of the objects they examined after I left."

  This flashed through his mind; but he did not believe it. He believed that the Death so visible below was a result of an attack.

  He looked at his companions, and read the same conviction in their faces. He pointed toward the earth, and raised his eyebrows in a question he could not make audible above a spurt from the plane's jets.

  Taylor shook his head negatively. The people below them were dead. Descent would doubtless mean their own death.

  Vanderbilt shrugged and gestured to Tony, as if to say that the decision
was up to him.

  Tony cut the propulsive stream and slid down the air in sudden quiet. "Well?"

  "Maybe we should take a look," said Vanderbilt.

  "What got them," Taylor said slowly, "will get us. We'd better take back a warning to the other camp."

  Tony felt the responsibility of deciding. Ransdell was down there-dead. And Eve?

  He lost altitude and turned on power as he reached the edge of the landing-field.

  Neither of his companions had been in the Hendron encampment; but this was no time for attention to the equipment of the place. The plane bumped to a stop and rested in silence.

  No one appeared from the direction of the camp. Nothing in sight there stirred. There was a bit of breeze blowing, and a speck of cloth flapped; but its motion was utterly meaningless. It was the wind fluttering a cloak or a cape of some one who was dead.

  Tony put his hand on the lever that opened the hood of the cockpit.

  "I'll yank it open and jump out. Looks like gas. Slam it after I go, and see what happens to me."

  Either of his companions would have undertaken that terrifying assignment-would have insisted upon undertaking it; but Tony put his words into execution before they could speak. The hatch grated open. Tony leaped out on the fuselage; there was a clang, and almost none of the outer air had entered the plane.

  Taylor's knuckles on the hatch-handle were white.

  Vanderbilt peered through the glass at Tony, his face unmoving. But he whispered, "Guts!" as if to himself.

  Tony slipped to earth. The two men watching expected at any moment to see him stagger or shudder or fall writhing to the earth. But he did not. There was no fright on his face-his expression was locked and blank. He sweated. He sniffed in the air cautiously after expelling the breath he had held. Then he drew in a lungful, deeply, courageously. A light wind from the sea beyond the cliffs fanned him. He stood still-waiting, presumably, to die. He looked at the two men who were watching him, and hunched his shoulders as if to say that nothing had happened so far.

  A minute passed.

  The men inside the plane sat tensely. Taylor was panting.

  Two minutes.... Five. Tony stood and breathed and shrugged again.

  "Gas or no gas," Taylor said with an almost furious expression, "I'm going out there with Tony."

  He went.

  Vanderbilt followed in a manner both leisurely and calm.

  The three stood outside together watching each other for effects, each waiting for some spasm of illness to attack himself.

  "Doesn't seem to be gas," said Tony.

  "What, then?" asked Taylor.

  "Who knows? Some plague from the Other People? Some death-wave from the sky? Let's look at them."

  The first person they approached, as they went slowly toward the camp and its motionless figures, was Jeremiah Post, the metallurgist. He it was, Tony remembered, who first was affected by the illness that followed the finding of the Other People's car. There was no proof that Post was the first to have been affected by this prostration. They happened upon him first; that was all.

  The metallurgist lay on his side with his arms over his head. There was no blood or mark of violence upon him.

  "Not wounded, anyway," Vanderbilt muttered.

  Taylor turned him over; and all three men started. Post's breast heaved.

  "Good God!" Tony knelt beside him and opened his shirt. "Breathing! Heart's beating-regularly. He's-"

  "Only unconscious!" Taylor exclaimed.

  "I was going to say," Tony replied, "it's as if he was drugged."

  "Or like anesthesia," observed Vanderbilt.

  "Is he coming out of it?"

  "He's far under now," Vanderbilt commented. "If he's been further under, who can say?"

  "Let's look at the next!"

  Near by lay two women; the three men examined them together. They were limp like Jeremiah Post, and like him, lying in a strange, profound stupor-like anesthesia, as Vanderbilt had said. The sleep of one of them seemed, somehow, less deep than that which held Post insensible; but neither of the women could be roused from it more than he.

  "Feel anything funny yourself?" Tony challenged Taylor across the form of the girl over whom they worked.

  "No; do you?"

  "No.... It was gas, I believe; but now it's dissipated- but left its effect on everybody that breathed it."

  "Gas," said Vanderbilt calmly, "from where?"

  Tony's mind flamed with the warning of Kyto's words. A third Ark from the earth had reached Bronson Beta bearing a band of fanatic, ruthless men who would have the planet for their own, completely. They had brought with them some women, but they wished for many more in order to populate it with children of their own bodies and of their own fanatic faiths. These men already had obtained the Lark planes of the Other People, and mastered the secrets of their operation. These men long ago had entered some other Sealed City and had begun an exploration into the science of Dead People. Perhaps they had found some formula for a gas that stupefied, but was harmless otherwise.

  Their plan and their purpose, then, would be plain. They would spread the gas and render Hendron's people helpless; then they would return to the camp and control it, doing whatever they wished with the people, as they awoke.

  Tony scanned the sky, the surrounding hills. There was nothing in sight.

  Yet he leaped up. "Peter! Jack! They'll be coming back! We'll be ready for them!"

  "Who? Who are they?"

  "The men who did this! Come on!"

  "Where?"

  "To the tubes!" And Tony pointed to them, aimed like cannon into the air-the huge propulsion-tubes from the Ark, which Hendron and he had mounted on their swivels at the edges of the camp. From them could be shot into the air the awful blast that had propelled the Ark through space, and which melted every metal except the single substance with which they were lined.

  The nearest of these engines of flight, so expediently made into machines of defense, was a couple of hundred yards away; and now as the three made hastily for it, they noticed a grouping of the limp, unconscious forms that told its own significant story.

  Several of the men seemed to have been on the way to the great tube when they had collapsed.

  "You see?" gasped Tony; for the three now were running. "It was an attack! They saw it, and tried to get the tube going!"

  Two men, indeed, lay almost below the tube. Tony stared down at them as is hands moved the controls, and felt them in order.

  "Dead?" Tony asked of Taylor, who bent over the men.

  Jack shook his head. "Nobody's dead. They're all the same- they're sleeping."

  "Do you see Dodson? Have you seen Dodson anywhere?"

  "No; you want Dodson, especially?"

  "He might be able to tell us what to do."

  Tony threw a switch, and a faint corona glowed along a heavy cable. The air crackled softly. "Our power-station's working," he said with satisfaction. "We can give this tube the 'gun' when we want to. You know how to give it the gun, Peter?"

  "I know," said Vanderbilt calmly.

  "Then you stand by; and give it the gun, if anything appears overhead! Jack, see what you can do with that tube!" Tony pointed to the north corner of the camp. "I'll look over some more of the people; and see what happened to Hendron-and Eve-and Ransdell and Dodson. Dodson's the one to help us, if we can bring him to."

  He had caught command again-command over himself and his companions; Taylor already was obeying him; and Vanderbilt took his place at the tube.

  Tony moved back into the camp alone. At his feet lay men and girls and women motionless, sightless, deaf-utterly insensible in their stupor. He could do nothing for them but recognize them; and he went, bending over them, whispering their names to himself and to them, as if by his whispering he might exorcise away this sleep.

  He repeated to himself Eve's name; but he did not find Eve. Where was she, and how? Had this sleep dropped into death for some? He wanted to find Eve, to assure h
imself that she at least breathed as did these others; but he realized that he should first of all locate Dodson.... Dodson, if he could be aroused, would be worth a thousand laymen. Then he recollected that he had last seen Dodson in Hendron's dwelling.

  Tony rushed to it and flung open the door; but what lay beyond it halted him.