Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  "Not as our valet, I'm afraid," the South African said. "I hope you permit me the 'our' for the duration of my stay. I do fancy living like this, I must admit. I'll also tell you that I appreciate very much just being around where Miss Hendron is. I didn't know there really was a girl like her anywhere in the world."

  "Which is going to end, we must remember," Tony warned him. "Every time we mention the world, we must remember it is going to end."

  "Will you permit me, then, a particularly personal remark?" inquired the South African.

  "Shoot," said Tony.

  "It is-that if I were in your place, I wouldn't particularly care what happened."

  "My place, you mean, with-"

  "With Miss Hendron. In other words, I heartily congratulate you."

  "You don't know what you're talking about," said Tony- too brusquely, and realized it. "I beg your pardon. I mean, I thank you.... The Stock Exchange, I see, is going to be open to-day. In fact, it undoubtedly is open now; and I am not at my office watching the ticker and buying A. T. and T. on a scale down, and selling X-that's United States Steel- whenever it rises half a point, for somebody who wants to go short from lack of faith in the future. What am I talking about? Where is the future? What's happened to it?"

  "It seems to have regained its feet a bit to-day."

  "Yes. The stock market is open.... There's the phone- probably my office. Mr. Balcom wants my personal advice after my last talk with Cole Hendron. I'm out or asleep, and you won't disturb me. You have my permission to put me into a coma-anything.... I ought to have said to you, Ransdell, I'm glad you're staying on. Stay on right here with me, if you like.

  "There's no sense in my going to the office. There's no sense in anything on the world, now, but preparing and perfecting the Space Ship which-besides watching the stars- has been the business of the best brains in the League of the Last Days."

  "How far have they got?"

  "Not far enough; but of course there's no mother to invention like necessity. And necessity seems to be distinctly visible -at least through a telescope-now."

  Tony went downtown; he visited his office. Habit held him, as it was holding most of the hundreds of millions of humans in the world this day. Habit-and reaction.

  What was threatened, could not be! If Cole Hendron and his brother-scientists refused, there were plenty of other people to put out reassuring statements; and the dwellers on the rim of the world regained much of their assurance. The President of the United States pointed out that, at worst, the sixty scientists had merely suggested disturbances of importance; and he predicted that if they occurred, they would be less than was now feared.

  Professor Copley, known to Tony as a friend of Cole Hendron's, called at the office.

  "I've some things to sell," he said, plucking the pince-nez from the center of his ruddy, cheerful face. "When do you think you can get me the most for them?"

  And he laid down upon Tony's desk an envelope full of stock certificates. "I'm just back from Peru," he explained, "where I have been watching the progress of the Bronson bodies. Hendron tells me that you know the whole truth about them."

  "It is the truth, then?" asked Tony.

  "Do you mean, do I agree? Do you agree that the sun will rise to-morrow morning?" Professor Copley returned. "My dear friend, the Bronson bodies move from the effect of the same forces."

  "But," pursued Tony, "exactly what do you think will happen to us?"

  "What will happen," retorted Professor Copley, cheerfully enough, "if you toss a walnut in front of an eighteen-inch gun at the instant the shell comes out? The result, I should say, would be quite decisive and entirely final. So, I say, sell my stocks. My family, and my personal responsibilities, consist of only my wife and myself; there are many things we have desired to do which we have sacrificed in exchange for a certain security in the future. There being no future, why not start doing what we want immediately?-if now is the day to sell."

  "Your guess on that," said Tony, "will be as good as mine. To-day is better than yesterday; to-morrow the market may be nearer normal again-or there may be none at all. How do you find that people are taking it?"

  "Superficially, to-day they deny; but they have had a terrible shock. Shock-that's the first effect. Bound to be. Afterward-they'll behave according to their separate natures. But now they react in denials, because they cannot bear the shock.

  "All over the world! Some are standing in the Place de l'Op‚ra in Paris, hour after hour, I hear, silent for the most part, incredulous, numb. These are the few that are too intelligent merely to deny and reject, too stunned to substitute a sudden end of everything for the prospect of years ahead for which they scrimped and saved.

  "In Berlin there are similar groups. And imagine the reaction in Red Square, my friend! Imagine the Russians trying to realize that their revolution, their savage effort to remodel themselves and their inner nature, has gone for nothing. All wasted! It will be knocked aside by a mere pebble-a grain of sand sifting through the cosmos on an errand of its own. Knocked aside and annihilated, as if no Russian had ever lived! It is stupendous! Imagine being Stalin to-night, my friend. What horror! What humor! What merciless depths of tragedy!

  "Imagine the haughty Mussolini, when he finds that the secret he could not exhort from his iron-souled men of learning is the secret of Fascism's vanity. Vanity of vanities! All, in the end, is vanity! Dust!

  "He has jutted out his chin and lifted his hand in salute to his Black Shirts, mouthed his ringing sentences, and defied any one or anything to stay him; and behold! Ten billion, billion, billion miles away some trifling approach of stars made unstable the orbits of a couple of planets and sent them out into space so long ago that Mussolini's ancestors were not yet hairy apes-and now they appear to confound him. Imagine our President trying to decry, now, this! Ah, I could weep. But I do not. Instead-I laugh. I laugh because few men-but some-some-some, my friend-even in the face of this colossal ignominy of fate, go on and on through the night, burning out their brains yet in the endeavor to guide their own destinies. What a gesture! But to-day-what appalling shock! And afterward-what a scene! When the world-the fifteen hundred millions of human beings realize, all of them, that nothing can save them, and they cannot possibly save themselves. What a scene! I hope to be spared for it. Meanwhile, sell my stocks for the best prices you can obtain, please; for my wife and I-we have saved for a long time, and denied ourselves too much."

  In a taxi later in the day, Tony found the street suddenly blocked by a delirious group of men with locked arms, who charged out of a door, singing-drunk, senseless.

  Tony was on his way to the Newark Airport, where a certain pilot, for whom he was to inquire, would fly him to the estate in the Adirondacks which had been turned over to Cole Hendron.

  Chapter 7-Some Demands Of Destiny

  EVE awaited him in a garden surrounded by trees. In the air was the scent of blossoms, the fragrance of the forest, the song of birds. It bore new qualities, a new interpretation of the external world, distinct from the tumultuous cacophony of the city.

  She was in white, with her shoulders and arms bare, her slender body sheathed close in silk. All feminine, she was, too feminine, indeed, in her feeling for the task she set for herself. Would she succeed better at it if she had garbed herself like a nun.

  An airplane droned in the twilight sky and dropped to its cleared and clipped landing-field. Eve arose from the bench beside the little pool, which was beginning to glint with the reflection of Venus, the evening star. She trembled, impatient; she circled the pool and sat down again.

  Here he came at last and alone, as she hoped.

  "Hello, Tony!" She tried to make it cool.

  "Eve, my dear!"

  "We mustn't say even that! No-don't kiss me or hold me so!"

  "Why?... I know your father said not to. It's discipline of the League of the Last Days. But why is it? Why must they ask it? And why must you obey?"

  "There, Tony. Just touch
my hands, like this-and I'll try to explain to you. But first, how was it in the city to-day?"

  Tony told her.

  "I see. Now, Tony, let's sit here side by side-but not your arm around me. I want it so much, I can't have it. That's why, don't you see?

  "We're in a very solemn time, Tony. I spent a lot of to-day doing a queer thing-for me. I got to reading the Book of Daniel again-especially Belshazzar's feast. I read that over and over. I can remember it, Tony.

  " 'Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.

  " 'They brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God; and the king, and his princes, his wives and his concubines, drank in them.

  " 'They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.'

  "Isn't that a good deal like what we've-most of us-been doing, Tony?"

  " 'Now in the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

  " 'Then the king's countenance was changed; his knees smote together. The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers.'

  "And Daniel, you may remember, interpreted the writing on the wall. 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting. And in that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans, slain.'

  "It is something very like that which is happening to us now, Tony; only the Finger, instead of writing again on the wall, this time has taken to writing in the sky-over our heads. The Finger of God, Tony, has traced two little streaks in the sky-two objects moving toward us, where nothing ought to move; and the message of one of them is perfectly plain.

  " 'Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting,' that one says to us on this world. 'God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.' But what does the other streak say?

  "That is the strange one, Tony-the one that gives you the creeps and the thrills when you think of it. For that is the afterthought of God-the chance He is sending us!

  "Remember how the Old Testament showed God to us, stern and merciless. 'God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth!' it said. 'And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth. And the Lord said, I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man, and beast and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.' And then, God thought it over and softened a little; and He warned Noah to build the ark to save himself and some of the beasts, so that they could start all over again.

  "Well, Tony, it seemed to me the second streak in the sky says that God is doing the same thing once more. He hasn't changed His nature since Genesis; not in that short time. Why should He? It seemed to me, Tony, He looked us all over again and got disgusted.

  "Evolution, you know, has been going on upon this world for maybe five hundred million years; and I guess God thought that, if all we'd reached in all that time was what we have now, He'd wipe us out forever. So He started that streak toward us to meet us, and destroy us utterly. That's Bronson Alpha. But before He sent it too far on its way, maybe He thought it all over again and decided to send Bronson Beta along too.

  "You see, after all, God had been working on the world for five hundred millions of years; and that must be an appreciable time, even to God. So I think He said, `I'll wipe them out; but I'll give some of them a chance. If they're good enough to take the chance and transfer to the other world I'm sending them, maybe they're worth another trial. And I'll save five hundred millions of years.' For we'll start on the other world, Tony, where we left off here."

  "I see that," Tony said. "What's in that to forbid my loving you now, my taking you in my arms, my-"

  "I wish we could, Tony!"

  "Then why not?"

  "No reason not, if we were surely to die here, Tony-with all the rest of the world; but every reason not to, if we go on the Space Ship."

  "I don't see that!"

  "Don't you? Do you suppose, Tony, that the second streak in the sky-the streak that we call Bronson Beta which will come close to this world, and possibly receive us safe, before Bronson Alpha wipes out all the rest-do you suppose, Tony, that it was sent just for you and me?"

  "I don't suppose it was sent at all," objected Tony impatiently. "I don't believe in a God Who plans and repents and wipes out worlds He made."

  "I do. A few months ago, I wouldn't have believed in Him; but since this has happened, I do. What is coming is altogether too precise and exact to be unplanned by Intelligence somewhere, or to be purposeless. For those two streaks-the Bronson bodies-aren't cutting in on our little system out by Neptune or Jupiter, where they'd find no living thing. They've chosen, out of all space near us, the single sphere that's inhabited-they're directed for us. Directed-sent, that is, Tony. And if the big one is sent to wipe out the world, I don't believe the other is sent just to let me go on loving you and you go on loving me."

  "What is your idea, then?"

  "It's sent to save, perhaps, some of the results of five hundred million years of life on this world; but not you and me, Tony."

  "Why not? What are we?"

  Eve smiled faintly. "We're some of the results, of course. As such, we may go on the Space Ship. But if we go, we cease to be ourselves, don't you see?"

  "I don't," persisted Tony stubbornly.

  "I mean, when we arrive on that strange empty world,-if we do,-we can't possibly arrive as Tony Drake and Eve Hendron, to continue a love and a marriage started here. How insane that would be!"

  "Insane?"

  "Yes. Suppose one Space Ship got across with, say, thirty in its crew. We land and begin to live-thirty alone on an empty world as large as this. What, on that world, would we be? Individuals paired and set off, each from the others, as here? No; we become bits of biology, bearing within us seeds far more important than ourselves-far more important than our prejudices and loves and hates. We cannot then think of ourselves, only to preserve ourselves while we establish our kind."

  "Exactly what do you mean by that, Eve?"

  "I mean that marriage on Bronson Beta-if we reach it- cannot possibly be what it is here, especially if only a few, a very few of us, reach it. It will be all-important then-it will be essential to take whatever action the circumstances may require to establish the race."

  "You mean," said Tony savagely, remembering the remarks at breakfast, "if that flyer from South Africa-Ransdell-also made the passage on that Space Ship, and we all live, I may have to give you up to him-when circumstances seem to require it?"

  "I don't know, Tony. We can't possibly describe it now; we can't imagine the circumstances when we're starting all over again. But one thing we can know-we must not first fix relations between us here which may only give trouble."

  "Relations like love and marriage!"

  "They might not do at all, over there."

  "You're mad, Eve. Your father's been talking to you."

  "Of course he has; but there's only sanity in what he says. He has thought so much more about it, he can look so calmly beyond the end of the world to what may be next that-that he won't have us carry into the next world sentiments and attachments that may only bring us trouble and cause quarrels or rivalry and death. How frightful to fight and kill each other on that empty world! So we have to start freeing ourselves from such things here."

  "I'll be no freer pretending I don't want you more than anything else. What sort of thing does your father see for us -on Bronson Beta?"

  She evaded him. "Why bother about it, Tony, when there's ten thousand chances to one we'll never get there? But we'll try for it-won't we?"

  "I certainly will, if you're going to."

  "Then you'll have to submit to the discipline."

  His arms hungered for her, a
nd his lips ached for hers, but he turned away.

  Inside the house, he found her father, Cole Hendron.

  "Glad to see you, Tony. We're going ahead with our plans. I suppose you knew I had been counting on you."

  "For what?" Tony inquired brusquely.

  "For one of my crew. You've the health and the mind and the nerve, I think. It's going to take more courage, in the end, than staying here on the world. For we will all leave- we will shoot ourselves up into the sky while the world still seems safe. We leave, of course, before the end; and the end of the world will never be really believed till it comes. So I need men of your steadiness and quality. Can I count on you?"

  Tony looked him over. "You can count on me, Mr. Hendron."

  "Good.... I can guess that Eve has acquainted you with some features of the discipline of the League. I will tell you, in proper time, of others; nothing will be asked of you which will not be actually reasonable and necessary. But now I should advise you to learn something useful. Investment experience, and skill in trading, will scarcely be an asset on Bronson Beta, whereas knowledge of agriculture and proficiency in manual arts and elementary mechanics may be invaluable. You have time to learn the simple, primary processes by which life is maintained. You will have, I might say, approximately two years to prepare, before affairs here become acute with the approach of the planets on their first passage."