Tony recalled how his earliest remembrances were of strangers coming to peer about the house which they called "historic," and how they raved about the things they called "old." The house was high on a hillside, and as he drove along the winding road, he rode over the mark where the water had risen the night before, and thought what a mere moment in geologic time the things "old" and "historic" here represented.
He tried not to think about his mother yet.
Eve, beside him, placed her hand over his which held the steering-wheel.
"You'll let me stay close beside you, Tony," she appealed.
"Yes. We're almost there."
Familiar landmarks bobbed up on both sides, everywhere: a log cabin he had built as a boy; here was the way to the old well-the "revolutionary well."
A thousand million years, at least, life had been developing upon this earth; a thousand million years like them had been required for the process which must have preceded the first molding of the bricks which built the cities on Bronson Beta -which, some countless ‘ons ago, had come to an end. For a thousand million years, since their inhabitants died, they might have been drifting in the dark until to-day, at last, they found our sun, and the telescopes of the world were turned upon them.
It was useful to think of something like this when driving to your home where your mother lay....
There was the tree where he had fashioned his tree dwelling; the platform still stood in the boughs. It was hidden from the house, but within hailing distance. Playing there, he could hear his mother's voice calling; sometimes he'd pretended that he did not hear.
How long ago was that? How old was he? Oh, that was fifteen years ago. Fifteen, in a thousand million years.
Time was beginning to tick on a different scale in Tony's brain. Not the worldly clock but the awful chronometer of the cosmos was beginning to space, for him, in enormous seconds. And Tony realized that Hendron, speaking to him as he had done, had not been heartless; he had attempted to extend to him a merciful morphia from his own, mind. What happened here this morning could not matter, in the stupendous perspective of time....
"Here we are."
The house was before them, white, calm, confident. A stout, secure dwelling with its own traditions. Tony's heart leaped. How he loved it-and her who had been its spirit! How often she had stood in that doorway awaiting him!
Some one was standing there now-an old woman, slight, white-haired. Tony recognized her-Mrs. Haskins, the minister's wife. She advanced toward Tony, and old Hezekiah Haskins took her place in the doorway.
"What happened?"
Not what happened to the world last night; not what happened to millions and hundreds of millions overswept or sent fleeing by the sea. But what happened here?
Old Haskins told Tony, as kindly as he could:
"She was alone; she did not feel afraid, though all the village and even her servants had fled. The band of men came by. She did not try to keep them out. Knowing her- and judging by what I found-she asked them in and offered them food. Some of them had been drinking; or they were mad with the intoxication of destruction. Some one shot her cleanly-once, Tony. It might have been one more thoughtful than the rest, more merciful. It is certain, Tony, she did not suffer."
Tony could not speak. Eve clung to his hand. "Thank God for that, Tony!" she whispered.
Briefly Tony unclasped his hand from Eve's and met the old minister's quivering grasp. He bent and kissed Mrs. Haskin's gray cheek.
"Thank you. Thank you both," he whispered. "You shouldn't have stayed here; you shouldn't have waited for me. But you did."
"Orson also remained," Hezekiah Haskins said. Old Orson was the sexton. "He's inside. He's-made what arrangements he could."
"I'll go in now," Tony said to Eve. "I'll go in alone for a few minutes. Will you come in, then, to-us?"
"Lord, thou hast been our refuge in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou are God from everlasting, and world without end."
Old Hezekiah Haskins and his wife, and Orson the sexton, and Tony Drake and Eve Hendron stood on the hilltop where the men of the Drake blood and the women who reproduced them in all generations of memory lay buried. A closed box lay waiting its lowering into the ground.
"Hear my prayer, O Lord; and with thine ears consider my calling.... For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.
"Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen."
Old Hezekiah Haskins held the book before him, but he did not read. A thousand times in his fifty years of the ministry he had repeated the words of that poignant, pathetic appeal voiced for all the dying by the great poet of the psalms: "For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were."
Tony's eyes turned to the graves of his fathers; their headstones stood in a line, with their birth-dates and their ages.
"The days of our age are three score years and ten."
What were three score and ten in a thousand million years? To-day, in a few hours, the tide would wash this hilltop.
Connecticut had become an archipelago; the highest hills were islands. Their slopes were shoals over which the tide swirled white. The sun stood in the sky blazing down upon this strange sea.
"Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."
Men and children of men on Bronson Beta too. Men millions and thousands of millions of years in the making. Azoic time-proterozoic time-hundreds of millions of years, while life slowly developed in the seas. Hundreds of millions more, while it emerged from the seas; a hundred million more, while reptiles ruled the land, the sky and water. Then they were swept away; mammals came; and man-a thousand millions years of birth and death and birth again before even the first brick could be laid in the oldest city on Bronson Beta, which men on earth had seen last night with their telescopes.
"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday; seeing that is past as a watch in the night.
"For when thou art angry, all our days are gone; we bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told."
The sexton and old Hezekiah alone could not lift the box to lower it. Tony had to help them with it. He did; and his mother lay beside her husband.
To-night, when the huge Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta with its visible cities of its own dead were on this side of the world again, the tide might rise over this hill. What matter? His mother lay where she would have chosen. A short time now, and all this world would end.
"I'll take you away," Tony was saying to the old minister and his wife and the older sexton. "We're flying west to-night to the central plateau. We'll manage somehow to take you with us."
"Not me," said the old sexton. "Do not take me from the will of the Lord!"
Nor would the minister and his wife be moved. They would journey to-day, when the water receded, into the higher hills; but that was all they would do.
Chapter 12-Hendron's Encampment
THE airplane settled to earth on the high ground between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, just as the Bronson Bodies, appallingly large, rose over the eastern horizon. Nearly a thousand people came from the great cantonment to greet Tony and Hendron's daughter. The scientist had given up his New Mexico venture entirely, and brought his congregation of human beings all to his Michigan retreat.
Greetings, however, were not fully made until the Bronson Bodies had been observed. Beta now exceeded the moon, and it shone with a pearly luster and a brilliance which the moon had never possessed. Around it was an aureole of soft radiance where its atmosphere, thawed by the warmth of the sun it so rapidly approached, had completely resumed its gaseous state.
But Bronson Beta did not compare with the spectacle of Alpha. Alpha was gigantic-bigger than the sun, and seemingly almost as bright, for the clouds which streamed up from every part of its surface threw back the sun's light, dazzling, white an
d hard. There was no night. Neither Eve nor Tony had seen the camp in its completion; and when wonderment over the ascending bodies gave way to uneasy familiarity, Eliot James took them on a tour of inspection.
Hendron had prepared admirably for the days which he had known would lie ahead of his hand-picked community. There were two prodigious dining-halls, two buildings not unlike apartment houses in which the men and women were domiciled. In addition there was a building resembling a hangar set on end, which towered above the surrounding forests more than a hundred feet. At its side was the landing-field, space for the sheltering of the planes, and opposite the landing-field, a long row of shops which terminated in an iron works.
It was to the machine-shops and foundry that Eliot James last took his companions.
"The crew here," he said to Eve, "has already finished part of the construction of the Ark which your father is planning. If we wanted to, we could build a battleship here; in the laboratories anything that has been done could be repeated; and a great many things have been accomplished that have never been done before. By to-morrow night I presume that the entire New York equipment will have been reinstalled here."
Tony whistled. "It's amazing. Genius, sheer genius! How about food?"
Eliot James smiled. "There is enough food for the entire congregation as long as we will need it."
"Now show us the 'Ark.'"
Eve's father came out from the hangar to act as their guide.
From the hysterical white glare of the Bronson Bodies they were taken into a mighty chamber which rose seemingly to the sky itself, where the brilliance was even greater. A hundred things inside that chamber might have attracted their attention-its flood-lighting system, or the tremendous bracing of its metal walls; but their eyes were only for the object in its center. The Ark on that late July evening-the focal-point, the dream and hope of all those whom Hendron had gathered together-stood upright on a gigantic concrete block in a cradle of steel beams. Its length was one hundred and thirty-five feet. It was sixty-two feet in diameter, and its shape was cylindrical. Stream-lining was unnecessary for travel in the outer reaches of space, where there was no air to set up resistance. The metal which composed it was a special alloy eighteen inches in thickness, electro-plated on the outside with an alloy which shone like chromium.
After Tony had looked at it for a long time, he said: "It is by far the most spectacular object which mankind has ever achieved."
Hendron glanced at him and continued his exposition. "A second shell, much smaller, goes inside; and between the inner shell and its outer guard are several layers of insulation material. Inside the shell will be engines which generate the current, which in turn releases the blast of atomic energy, store-chambers for everything to be carried, the mechanisms of control, the aeration plant, the heating units and the quarters for passengers."
Tony tore his eyes from the sight. "How many will she carry?" he asked quietly.
Hendron hesitated; then he said: "For a trip of the duration I contemplate, she would be able to take about one hundred people."
Tony's voice was still quieter. "Then you have nine hundred idealists in your camp here."
The older man smiled. "Unless I am greatly mistaken, I have a thousand."
"They all know about the ship?"
"Something about it. Nearly half of them have been working on it, or on apparatus connected with it."
"You pay no wages?"
"I've offered wages. In most cases they've been refused. I have more than three million dollars in gold available here for expenses encountered in dealing with people who still wish money for their time or materials."
"I see. How long a trip do you contemplate?"
Hendron took the young man's breath. "Ninety hours. That is, provided,"-and his voice began to shake,-"provided we can find proper materials with which to line our blast-tubes. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to propel this thing for more than a few minutes. I-"
Eve looked at her father. "Dad, you've got to go to bed. You'd better take some veronal or something, and don't worry so. We'll find the alloy all right. We've done everything else, and the things we've done were even more difficult."
Hendron nodded; and Tony, looking at him, realized for the first time how much the scientist had aged recently. They went through the door of the hangar in single file, and high up among the beams and buttresses that supported it, a shower of sparks fell from an acetylene welding-torch.
Outside, the wind was blowing. It sighed hotly in the near-by trees-wind that presaged a storm. The lights in the foundry and laboratories, the power-house and the dormitories made a ring around them, a ring of yellow fireflies faint beneath the glare of the Bronson Bodies. Tony looked up at them, and it seemed to him that he could almost feel and hear them in their awful rush through space: Beta, a dazzling white world, and Alpha, an insensible luminous disc of destruction. Both bodies seemed to stand away from the vault of the heavens.
Hendron left them. Soon afterward James withdrew with the apology that he wished to write to bring up to date his diary. Tony escorted Eve to the women's dormitory. A phonograph was playing in the general room on the ground floor. One of the girls was singing, and another was sitting at a table writing what was apparently a letter. They could all be seen through the open windows, and Tony wondered what postman that girl expected would carry her missive. Eve bade him good night, then went inside.
Tony, left alone, walked over the gleaming ground to the top of a neighboring hill. Hendron's village looked on the northern side like a university campus, and on the southern side like the heart of a manufacturing district. All around it stretched the Michigan wilderness. The ground had been chosen partly because of the age and grimness of its geological base, and partly because of its isolation.
He sat down on a large stone. The hot night wind blew with increasing violence, and the double shadows, one sharp and one faint, which were cast by all things in the light of the Bronson Bodies, were abruptly obliterated by the passage of a dark cloud.
Tony's mind ran unevenly and irresolutely. "Probably," he thought, "this little community is the most self-sufficient of any place on earth. All these people, these brilliant temperamental men and women, have subsided and made themselves like soldiers in Hendron's service-amazing man.... Only a hundred people.... I wonder how many of those I brought to New York they'll take."
Fears assailed him: "Suppose they don't complete the Ark successfully, and she never leaves the ground? Then all these people would have given their lives for nothing.... Suppose it leaves the earth and fails-falls back for hundreds of miles, gaining speed all the way, so that when it hit the atmosphere it would turn red-hot and burn itself up just like a meteor? What hideous chances have to be taken! If only I were a scientist and could help them! If only I could sit up day and night with the others, trying to find the metal that would make the ship fly...."
A larger cloud obscured the Bronson Bodies. The wind came in violent gusts. The great globes in the sky which disturbed sea and land, also enormously distorted the atmospheric envelope.
The steady sound of machinery reached Tony's ears, and the ring of iron against iron. The wind wailed upon the ‘olian harp of the trees. Tony thought of the tides that would rise that night and on following nights; and faintly, like the palpitation of a steamer's deck, the earth shook beneath his feet as if in answer to his meditation. And Tony realized that the heart of the earth was straining toward its celestial companions.
Chapter 13-The Approach Of The Planets
ON the night of the twenty-fifth, tides unprecedented in the world's history swept every seacoast. There were earthquakes of varying magnitude all over the world. In the day that followed, volcanoes opened up, and islands sank beneath the sea; and on the night of the twenty-sixth the greater of the Bronson Bodies came within its minimum distance from the earth on this their first approach.
No complete record was ever made of the devastation.
Eliot James, who m
ade some tabulation of it in the succeeding months, could never believe all that he saw and heard, but it must have been true.
The eastern coast of the United States sustained a tidal wave seven hundred and fifty feet in height, which came in from the sea in relentless terraces and inundated the land to the very foot of the Appalachians. Its westward rush destroyed every building, every hovel, every skyscraper, every city, from Bangor in Maine to Key West in Florida. The tide looped into the Gulf of Mexico, rolled up the Mississippi Valley, becoming in some places so congested with material along its foaming face that the terrified human beings upon whom it descended saw a wall of trees and houses, of stones and machinery, of all the conglomerate handiwork of men and Nature-rather than the remorseless or uplifted water behind it. When the tide gushed back to the ocean's bed, it strewed the gullied landscape with the things it had uprooted.
Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide Page 11
