Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  Tony visited both of Hendron's stations. One was in Michigan and one in New Mexico. He brought back reports on the progress being made there in the construction of laboratories, machine-shops and dormitories. He returned on the day on which the President made his impassioned and soul-searching speech on courage. More than forty million persons heard the President's voice as it came over the radio. Tony, standing in the crowded aisle of a train between Philadelphia and New York, caught some of the President's words:

  "The world is facing an august manifestation of the handiwork of Almighty God. Whether this handiwork is provided as punishment for our failure to pursue His ways, or whether Nature in her inscrutable processes is testing the courage of her most tender product-man-we shall never know. But we stand on the brink of a situation from which we cannot hide, and which we cannot escape. We must meet this situation with fortitude, with generosity, with patience and endurance. We have provided punishments in our emergency decrees for the selfish. But so impoverished have our human resources become, that we can provide no reward for the noble, save that which they find in their own hearts.

  "Many nations have already faltered and fallen in the outpouring of their own blood. Some nations, with obtuse stubbornness, have failed to accept the truth, and in stupid carelessness are endeavoring to ignore that which will presently devour them. America, recognizing the magnitude of the coming upheavals, has taken every step, bent every effort, and enlisted every man and woman and child to do his and her utmost, not only, as a great predecessor in my office has said, 'that the Nation shall not perish from the earth,' but that humanity itself shall not perish from the earth. To you, my fellow-countrymen, I can offer but one word of advice, one single lamp to penetrate the onrushing gloom"-and his voice sank to a whisper more penetrating than any shout- "Courage."

  As Tony listened, his heart swelled with pride, and he saw in the abstracted eyes of his fellow-passengers a new light appear.

  Courage! Courage was needed.

  When Tony reached New York, he found Hendron sleepless and icily calm in the midst of his multitudinous enterprises.

  But Eve showed the strain more than her father, and during the first evening, which they spent together, she expressed her fear: "Father's greatest hope was that his ship would be successful. There is more information than has been given out about the Bronson bodies. We admit that they will come very close. Terribly close. We do not admit yet precisely how close."

  They were standing together on the balcony overlooking the brightly lighted and still noisy city. Their arms were locked together in defiance of their oath to the league.

  "He'll succeed," Tony said.

  "He has succeeded, except that every rocket he builds is limited in the distance it can fly and the power it can use by the fact that its propulsive tubes melt. There isn't a metal nor an alloy in the world that will withstand that heat."

  Tony did not answer. After a long silence she spoke again. "It's an awful thing, Tony. Look down there. Look down on the city. Think of the people. Look at the lights, and then imagine water, mountains of it. Water that would reach to here!"

  Tony held her arm more tightly. "Don't torture yourself, Eve."

  "I can't help it. Oh, Tony, just think of it!"

  "Well, that's the way things have to be, Eve." He could not say any more.

  When Tony went down, the street was still filled with people. All the people were talking. They walked, but it did not seem to matter to them what direction they took or what chance company they shared.

  The strange small moon, growing larger each night, shone palely in the sky.

  Tony hailed a cab. His eyes settled on his shoes when he sat down. He thought grayly and without rhythm. Into every thought darted the face of Eve as he had last seen it- a face growing hourly more haggard. He remembered the downcasting of her eyes.

  When he arrived at his apartment, Kyto was waiting. There was an expression of distinct anxiety on his usually inscrutable face. The emotion made him ludicrous-but Tony was more surprised than amused and Kyto commenced to talk immediately.

  "All people frightful, now."

  Tony tossed his hat aside. "Yes."

  "Serious consequences close, you will inform me?"

  "Of course. Do you want to leave now?"

  "Contrarily. Safety surrounds you. Also charming good luck. I therefore prefer to stick."

  "Right. And thanks."

  Kyto padded softly away, and Tony stood thoughtfully in the center of his living-room for fully two minutes.

  Next he called a number in Greenwich, Connecticut, waited an abnormally long time, then asked a maid for Mrs. Drake. His voice was warm and calm. "Hello, Mother. How are you?"

  His mother's reply was controlled, but nerves stabbed through every word she said. "Tony, darling! I've tried and tried to reach you. Oh! I'm just an inch short of fainting. I thought something had happened to you."

  "Sorry, Mother. I've been busy."

  "I know. Come right out and tell me all about it."

  "I can't."

  There was a pause. "You can't put it in words?"

  "No."

  There was another long pause. Mrs. Drake's voice was lower, more tremulous-and yet it was not the voice of an hysterical or an unreasoning woman. "Tell me, Tony, how bad is it now to be?"

  "The same as it was to be yesterday, Mother."

  "Not hiding new developments, are you, Tony?"

  "No, Mother; those we've announced that we expect, haven't really begun to happen yet."

  "Yet you know more; I can feel you know more than you have ever told me."

  "Mother, I swear you're being morbid-" How could he tell her that for her there was annihilation, but for himself some chance of escape? She would wish it for him, whatever happened to herself; but he could not accept it. A berth in the Space Ship, leaving her here! Leaving here millions of mothers-and children too!

  Hendron did not permit himself such reflections; Hendron hardened himself and forbade it. He had to. If he began to let himself even consider the saving of individuals, and allowed himself personal judgment as to who should go,-as individuals,-he'd go mad. Stark, raving, crazy! He simply had to confine himself to selection on the sole point of saving the species-the race.

  But probably no one at all would be saved, Tony recollected almost with relief. Work on the Space Ship, in recent days, was not really advancing. They were held up from lack of a material to withstand the power that science now could loose from the atom. The idea of escape was probably only a fantasy, utterly vain. So thinking, Tony ended his talk, and put up the receiver.

  Taxicabs had been sent for Tony and his party. They made their way immediately downtown to the big building which housed the Hendron laboratories. The cab had covered a few blocks when Tony realized that not only on the waterfront, but throughout its length and breadth, Manhattan had been depopulated. Here and there a lone figure was visible- usually a figure in the uniform of a policeman or a soldier. Once he thought he caught sight of a man skulking in the shadows of a doorway. But he was not sure. And there were no women, no children.

  After the sun had set, it was easy to appreciate why the last recalcitrant thousands of New York's populace had departed. The Bronson bodies, on this night, rose in frightful majesty: a sphere of lustrous white larger than the moon, and a second sphere much smaller, but equally brilliant. Their awesome illumination flooded the city, rendered superfluous the street-lights which, however, remained stubbornly burning. News of this augmented size had undoubtedly reached New York during the day-and the last unbeliever must surely have been convinced if he remained to witness the phenomenon.

  There were few lights in the skyscrapers. As the taxies bowled through the murk and dark, unchecked by traffic signals, Tony and Jack Taylor shuddered involuntarily to see the black buildings which man had deserted. Had they but known, a second shudder might have seized them-for already the tide was lapping the sea-wall at the Battery.

  At th
e elevator they were met by Eve. She kissed Tony, in an ecstasy of defiance, and then hurried to assist his group in the removal of their baggage, and in directing its disposal. Every one left the street reluctantly. The Bronson bodies were hypnotic.

  In the laboratories there was the utmost confusion. No longer was the inner door closed. Only a skeleton crew had remained in New York, under Hendron. The scientist himself was introduced by Tony to each of the new arrivals, and to each he said a few words of welcome. Several were already known to him.

  Then Hendron made an announcement to all of them-a statement which was repeated afterward in French and German. "Ladies and gentlemen-you will sleep in the dormitories above here to-night. To-morrow we will remove by airplane to my field station in Michigan. The others are already there. In bidding you good-night, I must also request no one to leave the building. A splendid view of the firmament may be had from the roof. But the streets are entirely unsafe. The last wave of emigration left New York at sundown this evening. The people who remain are either law officers or marauders. I regret that I will be unable to entertain you myself, but I leave you in the hands of my assistants."

  Jack Taylor was beside Tony when they reached the roof.

  "As God lives, that's a marvelous thing!" He stared at the two yellow discs in the sky. "Think of it! The heavens are falling upon us-and a few hundred men, here and there, are sitting on this stymied golf-ball figuring how to get away!"

  Chapter 11-The Last Night In New York

  "LOOK down, now," said a different voice, "at the street." It was a young man's voice, carefully controlled, but in spite of its constraint, ringing with an unusually vibrant and vital quality.

  Tony looked about at the speaker before he gazed down, and he recognized a recruit whom he had not himself selected. It was Eliot James, an Englishman from Oxford, and a poet. By profession and by nature, he was the most impractical of all the company; and one of the most attractive, in spite of his affectation-if it was that-of a small beard. The beard became him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, aquiline in feature, brown.

  The baleful moonlight of the Bronson Bodies glinted up from the street.

  "Water," some one said.

  "Yes; that's the tide. It's flowing in from the cross-streets from the Hudson, and from the East River too."

  "There's some coming up from the Battery along the avenues-see the flow down there!"

  "How high will it rise to-night? Oh, how high?"

  "Not above the bridges to-night. They're not in danger- to-night. But of course the power-houses will go."

  "And the tunnels will be filled?"

  "Of course."

  "There are people down there, wading in the street!... Why did they stay? They've been warned enough."

  "Why did we stay? We gave the warning."

  "We've business here."

  "So had they-they supposed, and as important to them as we imagined ours to be to us. Besides, they're safe enough to-night. Just that few of them. They can climb three stories in almost any building and be safe. The tide ebbs, of course, in six hours."

  "Then comes again higher!"

  "Yes-much higher. For the Bronson Bodies are rushing at us now."

  "Exactly how," asked Eliot James, "do they look through the telescope?"

  "The big one-Bronson Alpha," replied Jack Taylor, as they all looked up from the street, "not very different from before. It seems to be gaseous, chiefly-it always was chiefly gaseous, unlike the earth and Mars, but like Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune. Its approach to the sun has increased the temperature of its envelope, but has brought out no details of its geography, if you could call it that. Bronson Alpha offers us no real surface, as such. It seems to be a great globe with a massive nucleus surrounded by an immense atmosphere. What we see is only the outer surface of the atmosphere."

  "Could it ever have been inhabited?" the poet asked.

  "In no such sense as we understand the word. For one thing, if we found ourselves on Bronson Alpha, we would never find any surface to live on. There is probably no sudden alteration of material such as exists on the earth when air stops and land and water begin."

  "But the other world-Bronson Beta-is different."

  "Very different from its companion up there, but not so different from our world, it seems. It has a surface we can see, with air and clouds in its atmosphere. The clouds shift or disappear and form again; but there are fixed details which do not change, and which prove a surface crust exists. The atmosphere was frozen solid in the long journey through space, but the sun has thawed out the air and has started, at least, on thawing out the seas."

  "You're sure there are seas too?"

  "There are great spaces that seem to be seas, that satisfy every visual and spectroscopic test of seas."

  "Have you seen," asked the poet, "anything like-cities?"

  "Cities?"

  "The ruins of cities, I mean. That globe seems to be so much like the earth; and sometimes it has had its sun. It lived in the sunshine of a star that was an octillion, octillion miles away. I thought just now, looking at it, that perhaps on it were cities like this, where people once watched the coming of whatever pulled them loose from their sun, and dropped them into the black mouth of space."

  Some of the company about him were looking up and listening; others paid no attention to him. He did not care; a few had shared his feeling; and among them was Eve, who stood near him.

  "Would you rather we went that way?" she said to him.

  "Slipping into space, falling away, all of us in the world together retreating farther and farther away from our sun, gradually freezing as we went into darkness?" Eliot James shook his handsome head. "No; if I had my choice, I think I'd elect our way. Yet I wonder how they faced it-what they did?"

  "I wonder," said Eve, her eyes upon the yellow orb, "if we'll ever know."

  "Look," proclaimed some one else who was gazing down, "the lights are beginning to go."

  He meant the street-lamps of New York, which had been switched on as usual and maintained to this minute.

  Thousands of them still prevailed, indeed; but a huge oblong, which had been lighted before, was darkened now.

  "The flood has caught the conduits!" And with the word, the little gleaming rows which etched the streets throughout another district died; but the rest burned on in beautiful defiance.

  The city officially was abandoned; but men remained. Some men, whatever the warning, whatever the danger, refused to surrender; they stuck to their duties and to their services to the last. Some men and some boys; and some women and girls too. And so, on this night, New York had lights; it kept communication-telephone and telegraph too.

  But now another pattern of blocks disappeared; Brooklyn went black. Beacons burned-airplane-guides and lighthouses. Ships, having their own electric installations, could be seen seeking the sea.

  That too, thought Tony, was only a splendid gesture; yet the sight of the ships, like the stubborn persistence of the lights, threw a tingle in his blood and made him more proud of his people. They couldn't give up-some of them! To leave the ships at the dock to take the tide that now was flooding in, was certain destruction. What use to steer them out to sea? For what would they be saved? Yet captains and crews could be found to steer and stoke them.

  More blocks were black; the lights from the awful orbs of the Bronson Bodies slanted sharp across the streets, their shadows unbroken by the last lamps of the city's defiance.

  Now the street gave up sounds-the rush of water as the loud edge of the flood advanced filling the last floor of the ca¤ons between the buildings. All over the world at the seaboard it must be the same, except that some cities already were overswept and this tide was now retiring. To rise higher yet twelve hours later; and then still higher!

  Eliot James moved closer to Eve.

  "What does it do to you?" he said.

  She answered: "Too much."

  "Yes," he said. "And it's only begun?"

  "It's
not begun," whispered Eve. "This-this is really nothing. To-night, the waters will merely rise over the lower buildings of the city, and then subside. We will all leave in the ebb tide."

  "Which, I suppose, will drain the rivers dry? There was clearly no practical purpose for staying this twelve hours longer; but I am glad we did. I would not have escaped this sensation. I wonder where the people have gone who also stayed for it-whom we saw in the streets awhile ago?"

  Eve attempted no answer; nor did Tony.

  "I imagine," persisted the poet, "they are also glad they remained. It is a new intoxication-annihilation. It multiplies every emotion."