"However," said Hendron, "when the world encounters Bronson Alpha, we'll see that, I hope."
"See it-from the world?" said Tony.
"From space, I hope, if we succeed with our ship-from space on our way to Bronson Beta. What a show that will be, Tony, from space with no clouds to cut if off! And then landing on that other world, whose cities we have seen!"
"Yes," said Tony.
Chapter 15-Reconnaissance
SO through the darkness of that moon-lost night, Tony continued to work. He mustered new gangs for the dreary tasks of salvage, and of rehabilitating and reconstructing the shelters.
He organized, directed, exhorted and cheered men on, wondering at them as they responded and redoubled their efforts. He wondered no less at himself. What use, in the end, was all this labor? A few months, and they would meet the Bronson Bodies again; and this time, Bronson Alpha would not pass the world. As it had extinguished the moon, it would annihilate the earth too! This solid ground!
Tony stamped upon it.
No wonder, really, that these men responded and that he exhorted and urged them on. They, and he, could not realize that the world was doomed, any more than a man could realize that he himself must die. Death is what happens to others! So other worlds may perish; but not ours, on which we stand!
Tony clapped his hands together loudly. "All right, fellows! Come on! Come on!" Clouds gathered again, and rain was pouring down.
When light began again to filter through the darkly streaming heavens, Hendron re-awoke. He found Tony drunk with fatigue, carrying on by sheer effort of will, and refusing to rest.
Hendron called some of the men who had been taking Tony's commands, and had him carried bodily to bed....
Tony opened his eyes. One by one he collected all the disjointed memories of the past days. He perceived that he was lying on a couch in Hendron's offices in the west end of the machine-shop and laboratory building. He sat up and looked out the window. It was notably lighter, although the clouds were still dense; and as he looked, a stained mist commenced to descend. A slight noise in one corner of the room attracted his attention. A man sat there at a desk quietly scribbling. He raised his eyes when Tony looked at him. He was a tall, very thin man, with dark curly hair and long-lashed blue eyes. His age might have been thirty-five-or fifty. He had a remarkably high forehead and slim, tactile hands. He smiled at Tony, and spoke with a trace of accent.
"Good morning, Mr. Drake. It is not necessary to ask if you slept well. Your sleep was patently of the most profound order."
Tony swung his feet onto the floor. "Yes, I think I did sleep well. We haven't met, have we?"
The other man shook his head. "No, we haven't; but I've heard about you, and I should imagine that you have heard my name once or twice in the last few weeks." A smile flickered on his face. "I am Sven Bronson."
"Good Lord!" Tony walked across the room and held out his hand. "I'm surely delighted to meet the man who-" He hesitated.
The Scandinavian's smile returned. "You were going to say, 'the man who was responsible for all this.'"
Tony chuckled, shook Bronson's hand, and then looked down at the bedraggled garments which only partially covered him. "I've got to find some clothes and get shaved."
"It's all been prepared," Bronson said. "In the private office, there's a bath of sorts ready for you, and some clean clothes and a razor."
"Somebody has taken terribly good care of me," Tony said. He yawned and stretched. "I feel fine." At the door he hesitated. "What's the news, by the way? How are things? How is everybody?"
Bronson tapped his desk with his pencil. "Everybody is doing nicely. There are only a dozen people left in the hospital now. Your friend Taylor has the commissary completely rehabilitated, and everybody here is saying pleasant things about him. I don't know all the news, but it is picturesque, to say the least. Appalling, too! For instance the spot on which we now reside was very considerably raised last week. It has apparently been lifted again, together with no one knows how much surrounding territory, so the elevator sensations we felt in the field were decidedly accurate. We presume that many thousands of square miles may have been raised simultaneously; otherwise there would have been more local fracture. The radio station has been functioning again."
"Good Lord!" Tony exclaimed. "I forgot all about the radio station last night-that is to say, to-day is to-morrow, isn't it? What day is this?"
"This is the twenty-ninth." Tony realized that he has been asleep for twenty-four hours. "The man in the wireless division went to work on the station immediately. Anyway, not much has come in, though we picked up a station in New Mexico, and a very feeble station somewhere in Ohio. The New Mexico station reports some sort of extraordinary phenomena, together with a violent eruption of a volcanic nature in their district; the one in Ohio merely appealed steadily for help."
At once Tony inferred the import of Bronson's words. "You mean to say that you've only heard two stations in all this country?"
"You deduce things quickly, Mr. Drake. Of course the static is so tremendous still that it would be impossible to hear anything from any foreign country; and doubtless other stations are working which we will pick up later, as well as many which will be reconditioned in the future; but so far, we have received only two calls."
Tony opened the door to the adjacent office. "That means, then, that nearly everybody has been-"
The Scandinavian's long white hands locked, and his eyes affirmed Tony's speculation....
"I'll get myself cleaned up," said Tony.
And he stepped into a big galvanized tub of water that had been kept warm by a small electric heater. He bathed, shaved and dressed in his own clothes, which had been brought from his quarters in the partly demolished men's dormitory. Afterward he went to the laboratories and found Hendron.
"By George, you look fit, Tony!" were Hendron's first words. "Eve is impatiently waiting for you. She's at the dining-hall."
Tony found Eve cheerful and bright-eyed. With a dozen or more women, she was rearranging and redecorating the dining-hall, which had been immaculately cleaned. She went out on the long veranda with him.
"Notice how much clearer the air is?" Eve asked. "Most of the fumes have disappeared.... It's hard to shake the superstition that natural disasters are directed at you, isn't it, Tony?"
"Are we sure it's a superstition, Eve?"
"After all, what has happened to us is only the sort of thing that has happened before, thousands of times, on this earth of ours, Tony, on a smaller scale-at Pompeii, at Mt. Pel‚e and Krakatao and at other places. What can be the differences in the scale of the God of the cosmos, whether He shakes down San Francisco and Tokio twenty years apart, buries Pompeii when Titus was ruling Rome, and blows up Krakatao eighteen hundred years later-or whether he decides to smash it all at once? It's all the same sort of thing."
"Yes," agreed Tony. "It's only the scale of the performance that's different. Anyway, we've survived so far. I heard you were safe, Eve; and then when I could hear no more, I supposed you were safe. You had to be safe."
"Why, Tony?"
"If anything was to keep any meaning for me." He stared at her, himself amazed at what he said. "The moon's gone, I suppose you know!"
"Yes. It was known that it would go."
"And we-the world goes like the moon, with the return of Bronson Alpha!"
"That's still true, Tony," she said, standing before him, and quivering as he did.
He gestured about. "They all know that now."
"Yes," she said. "They've been told it."
"But they don't know it. They can't know a thing like that just from being told-or even from what they've just been through."
"Neither can we, Tony."
"No; we think we-you and I, at least-are going to be safe somehow. We are sure, down in our hearts-aren't we, Eve?-that you and I will pull through. There'll be some error in the calculations that will save us; or the Space Ship will take us away; or-som
ething."
She nodded. "There's no error in the calculations, Tony. Too many good men have made them, independently of each other."
"Did they all count in the collision with the moon, Eve?"
"All the good ones did, dear. There's no chance of escape because of the encounter with the moon. It deflected the Bronson Bodies a little, of course; but not enough to save the world. I know that with my head, Tony; but-you're right-I don't know it with my heart. I don't know it with -me."
Tony seized and held her with a fierceness and with a tenderness in his ferocity, neither of which he had ever known before. He looked down at her in his arms, and it was difficult to believe that any one so exquisite, so splendidly fragile, could have survived the orgy of elemental passion through which they all had passed. Yet that-he knew- was nothing to what would be.
He kissed her, long and deeply; and when he drew his lips away, he continued to stare down at her whispering words which she, with her lips almost at his, yet could not hear.
"What is it, Tony?"
"Only-an incantation, dear."
"What?" she asked; so he repeated it audibly:
" 'A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee!' Remember it, Eve?"
"The psalmist!" whispered Eve.
"He must have seen some one he loved, threatened," said Tony. " 'For he shall give his angels charge over thee,'" he continued, " 'to keep thee in all thy ways.
" 'They shall bear thee in their hands; that thou hurt not thy foot against a stone.'
"It stayed in my head, hearing it at the church where Mother used to take me. I'd read it in the responses, too. I remember that, I suppose, because it's beautiful-if no more."
"If no more," said Eve; and very gently, she freed herself from him; for, far more faithfully than he, she heeded her father.
He sighed. She looked up at him. "They tell me, Tony, that you kept the whole camp going single-handed," she returned him to practical affairs.
"I just rallied around and looked at people who were doing something and said: 'Great! Go ahead.' That's all I did."
She laughed, proud of him. "You put heart in them all again. That's you, Tony.... Did you know Professor Bronson is here?"
"Yes; I saw him-spoke to him. Funny feeling I had, when I heard his name. Bronson-of the Bronson Bodies. It made him almost to blame for them. How did he happen to come?"
"He'd arrived in the country and was almost here when the storm struck. He's known about what was to happen, and he's been figuring it out for a longer time than any one else. He's had the highest respect for Father. Of course you know it was to Father that he sent his results. They had to get together, Father and he. They agreed it was better to work here than in South Africa; so he did the traveling. He'll be invaluable-if we do get away."
"You mean, if we get away from the world."
"Yes. You see, Father's chief work has been-and will be-on the Space Ship; how to get away from the world and reach Bronson Beta, when it returns."
"And before Bronson Alpha smashes us as it did the moon," said Tony grimly.
Eve nodded. "That's all Father can possibly arrange- if not more. He can't take any time to figuring how we'll live, if we reach that other world. But Professor Bronson has been doing that for months. For more than a year he practically lived-in his mind-on Bronson Beta. So he's here to make the right preparation for the party that goes on the ship: who they should be, what they should carry, and what they must do to live-if they land there."
In three days the static in the air vanished to such an extent that messages from various parts of the world became audible. Out of those messages a large map was constructed in the executive offices. It was a speculative map, and its accuracy was by no means guaranteed. It showed islands where Australia had been, two huge islands in the place of South America, and only the central and southern part of Europe and Asia. There was a blank in place of Africa, for no one knew what had happened to the Dark Continent. A few points of land were all that was left of the British Isles, and over the air came the terrible story of the last-minute flight from London across the Channel, in which the populace was overwhelmed on the Great Lowland Plain. Among the minor phenomena reported was the disappearance of the Great Lakes, which had been inclined from west to east and tipped like trays of water into the valley of the St. Lawrence. On the fifth day they learned that an airplane flight had been made over what was the site of New York. The Hudson River Valley was a deep estuary; the sea rolled up to Newburgh; and the entire coast along its new line was scoured with east-to-west-running valleys which were piled high with the wreckage of a mighty civilization. Everywhere were still fotid plains of cooling lava; and in many areas, apparently, the flow from the earth had been not molten rock but metal, which lay in fantastic and solidified seas already red with rust.
It was impossible to make any estimate whatsoever of the number of people who had survived the catastrophe. Doubtless the figure ran into scores of millions; but except in a few fortunate and prearranged places, they were destitute, disorganized and doomed to perish of hunger and exposure.
On the tenth day the sun shone for the first time. It pierced the clouds for a few minutes only, and even at its strongest it was hazy, penetrating the belts of fog with scarcely enough strength to cast shadows....
At the end of two weeks it would have been difficult to tell that the settlement in Michigan had undergone any great cataclysm, save that the miniature precipice remained on the flying-field, and that great mounds of chocolate-colored earth were piled within view of the inhabitants.
On the evening of the fifteenth day a considerable patch of blue sky appeared at twilight, and for three hours afforded a view of the stars. The astronomers took advantage of that extended opportunity to make observation of the Bronson Bodies, which had become morning stars, showing rims like the planet Venus as they moved between the earth and the sun.
Carefully, meticulously, both by direct observation and by photographic methods, they measured and plotted the course of the two terrible strangers from space; and with infinitesimal differences, the results of all the observers were the same. Bronson Beta-the habitable world-on its return would pass by closer than before; but it would pass.
There would be no escape from Bronson Alpha.
In all the fifteen days the earth had not ceased trembling. Sometimes the shocks were violent enough to jar objects from shelves, but ordinarily they were so light as to be barely detectable.
In all those fifteen days, furthermore, there had been no visitor to the camp from the outside world, and the radio station had contented itself for the most part with the messages it received, for fear that by giving its position and broadcasting its comparative security, it might be overwhelmed by a rush of desperate and starving survivors.
At the end of three weeks one of the airplanes which had escaped the storm was put in condition, and Eliot James and Ransdell made a five-hundred-mile reconnaissance. At Hendron's request the young author addressed the entire gathering in the dining-hall after his return. He held spellbound the thousand men and women who were thirsty for any syllable of information about the world over the horizon.
"Mr. Ransdell and myself," James began, "took our ship off the ground this morning at eight o'clock. We flew due north for about seventy-five miles. Then we made a circle of which that distance was the radius, covering the territory that formerly constituted parts of Michigan and Wisconsin.
"I say 'formerly,' ladies and gentlemen, because the land which we observed has nothing to do with the United States as it once was, and our flight was like a journey of discovery. You have already been told that the Great Lakes have disappeared. They are, however, not entirely gone, and I should say that about one-third of Lake Superior, possibly now landlocked, remains in its bed.
"The country we covered, as you doubtless know, was formerly heavily wooded and hilly. It contained many lakes, and was a mining center. I w
ill make no attempt to describe the astonishing aspect of the empty lake-bed, the chasms and flat beaches which were revealed when the water uncovered them, or the broad cracks and crevices which stretch across the bed. I am unable to convey to you the utter desolation of the scene. It is easier, somewhat, to give an idea of the land over which we flew. Most of the forests have been burned away. Seams have opened underneath them, which are in reality mighty ca¤ons, abysses in the naked earth. Steam pours from them and hovers in them. All about the landscape are fumaroles, hot springs, geysers and boiling wells.
"In the course of our flight we observed the ruins of a moderate-sized town and of several villages. We also saw the charred remains of what we assumed were farms, and possibly lumber- and mining-camps. Not only have great clefts been made, but hills have been created, and in innumerable places the earth shows raw and multicolored-the purplish red of iron veins, the glaring white of quartz, the dark monotony of basalt intermingled in a giant's conglomerate. I can only suggest the majesty and the unearthliness of the scene by saying it closely resembled my conception of what the lunar landscape must have been.
Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide Page 14
