After Worlds Collide

by Philip Wylie

  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 VIII

  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 mirr
ors, 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 describe 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.

  “Well, the first thing we investigated that morning was a store. It was a department store in the sense that it contained a great many kinds of things; but it did not contain, for example, clothes or, as far as we could discover, food. It had house-furnishings, and furniture and kitchen appliances—and by the way, cooking must have been a cinch for the Other People, because apparently they cooked things by induced heat and under high pressure with steam, so that it only took a few minutes. The store also exhibited some of those automobile-like vehicles like the one we found wrecked.

  “In the store,” he continued, “we also found a large department of games and sports, and one of children’s toys. The children had very peculiar blocks. Wires extend from their sides and corners so that they look like cockleburs and can be stuck together to make variously shaped figures in which the differently colored blocks are held apart by wires. It was Tony who solved the enigma of those blocks. ‘Molecules,’ he said, as we stood staring at them. And then I realized that each block was designed to represent an atom and that the children were taught by playing with the blocks the atomic structure of various elements.

  “I can give you no idea of the superlative order in which everything in it was arranged. It would be hopeless for me to try to tell you the skill with which those people combined use with beauty. Beauty and use with imaginative intelligence. I can only say two things—first, that you will all see it yourselves, and second, that while the streets, and the buildings, and the apartments of the city of the Other People fascinated us, we had intended to leave that morning.”

  Again Tony ceased to read. “We appreciated, of course,” he observed to his hearers, “that we ought to communicate with you; and after our breakfast, and a brief journey through some of the strange streets, we went out of the city by the way we had entered and returned to our ship where we tried to call you by radio. We failed utterly because of some puzzling interference.

  “We argued, then, whether we should return to you with what we had learned or whether we should first try to learn much more. The second argument was overwhelming in its appeal to us. We returned to the city; and on the second day, we discovered that it was not quite so intact as we had supposed. In no less than six places which we observed, the huge transparent dome was pierced and showed great jagged tears or holes and below were marks of demolition exhibiting great violence. Meteors had torn through. But except for the wreckage caused by these, I tell you we found almost nothing out of order in that remarkable city. They left it in order, we believe; the meteors probably were met after the city was deserted and during this sphere’s long journey through space.

  “Now I will give you a few more random details from Eliot’s diary:

  “One thing we noted on our return to the stores—if they were stores,” Tony read, “was that in none of them did there seem to have been a system for collecting money, or a medium of exchange, or of keeping books. Seemingly the Other People just came in and took what they wanted—or individuals must have kept their own books—or some system which we couldn’t imagine was used. For at the end of our three days’ stay we were pretty certain that they had no medium of exchange to correspond to money.

  “A department of that store was given over to musical instruments. Their chromatic scale is different from ours, and their way of writing music entirely different. They had a few stringed instruments, no wind instruments, many percussion instruments, but they had developed a vast variety of instruments which seem to have been operated by the transference of electrical impulses to sound. Unquestionably, music and the science of electricity had existed side by side for so long that the art had developed a science for its expression.

  “We found in profusion the small, light vehicles of the type which we first discovered wrecked on the road near our camp. It is plain these were operated by some sort of electric impulse; but we could do nothing with them.”

  Tony skipped more pages. “Imagine us with the sun rising and the flood of indirect illumination dimming away. Imagine us under that vast transparent bubble in the early morning, having a long look at one marvel after another. We went across bridges and up and down streets. We tramped along ramps and on a dozen levels. We visited civic centers and museums and theaters and recreation-grounds and central kitchens and other places of assembly, the purpose of which was not clear. All we lacked was some one to explain at frequent intervals just what the devil we were seeing, because while we were interested we oft
en could only guess, and sometimes none of our explanations made sense. We never found that some one. One thing was very clear, however: the Other People liked to spend a lot of time together. They had privacy in their own apartments, to be sure, but there were so many things and so many kinds of things for people to do in crowds that we became convinced that they were very gregarious. We felt too that their crowds were not comprised of mobs of unfriendly, unsympathetic, unacquainted individuals—like the crowds that once thronged the streets of New York—but were crowds of people who were associated in a most friendly and coöperative spirit with each other.

  “We followed a gallery underground where we found more great machines—engines—which we could not at all understand. We saw further descents into depths we decided not to explore. But we did come upon some of their stores of food—particularly grain.”

  “Samples of this grain,” Tony reminded them, looking up, “already you have examined for yourselves. Eliot and I tasted it; we ate it. It was starchy and not unpleasant. Whether or not it still contains vitamins, at least it has the starch base for nutrition. In the afternoon, we found one other thing of far greater importance to us than any other discovery, if I may except the food supply. This was a school.”

  “A school?” several voices cried.

  “We believe it was a school for their children from their early years up. Can you imagine the benefit of such a discovery to you? We have brought back some of the objects from that school. Some of them seem to be books—books of a different type, to be sure, than our volumes; yet they can be described as books. Other objects, which we believe to have been materials of instruction, are harder to describe. Neither Eliot nor I were able to operate them, but we formed the theory that they probably were mechanisms giving instruction visually or by sound.

  “Then we found a sphere. It was in the lobby of the school. It was a sphere about fifty feet in diameter upon which was a relief map which we must assume to be of this planet. Eliot James made a most painstaking sketch of that sphere. There were other maps.”