Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  "We observed a few areas which, like our own, were relatively undisturbed. There were a number of oases in this destruction where forests still stood, apparently sheltered from the hurricanes and in no danger of conflagration. This district, as you know, is sparsely settled. I will complete my wholly inadequate report to you by satisfying what must be your major curiosity: we saw in the course of our flying a number of human beings. Some of them wandered over this nude, tumultuous country alone and obviously without resources for their sustenance. Others were gathered together in small communities in the glades and sheltered places. They had fires going, and they were apparently secure at least for the time being. All of them attempted to attract our attention to themselves, and it is with regret that I must say that not only is their rescue inadvisable from the sheer necessity of our own self-preservation, but that in most cases it would be difficult if not impossible, as we found no place in which we might have landed a plane, if the surface of the water that remains in Lake Superior be excepted, and a few other ponds and lakes. And it would be difficult indeed to go on foot to the succor of those unfortunates."

  After the speech, people crowded around James. Peter Vanderbilt, moving through the crowd, glimpsed Ransdell as he was walking through the front doors of the hall. The New Yorker stepped out on the porch beside the pilot; the sophisticated Manhattan dilettante with his smooth, graying hair, his worldly-wise and -weary eyes, his svelte accent, beside the rugged, tan-faced, blue-eyed, powerful adventurer. One, the product of millions, of Eastern universities and of society at its most sumptuous, the other a man whose entire resources always had been held in his own hands, and who had lived in a world of frontiers.

  "I wanted to ask you something," Vanderbilt said. Ransdell turned, and as usual he did not speak but simply waited.

  "Has Hendron commissioned you to do any more flying?"

  "No."

  "Do you think it would be possible to hop around the country during the next few months?"

  "With a good ship-an amphibian."

  Vanderbilt tapped his cigarette-holder delicately against one of the posts on the porch. "You and I are both supernumeraries around here, in a sense. I was wondering if it might not be a good idea to make an expedition around the country and see for ourselves just what has happened. If this old planet is really going to be smashed,-and from the evidence furnished two weeks ago I'll believe it,-yet there's something to see on its surface still. Let's look at it."

  Ransdell thought inarticulately of Eve. He was drawn to her as never to any girl before; but, he reckoned, she must remain here. Not only that, but under the discipline which was clamped upon the settlement, no rival could claim her while he would be gone. And the adventure that Vanderbilt offered tremendously allured him.

  "I'd like to try it," Ransdell replied simply.

  "Then I'll see Hendron; we must have his consent, of course, to take a ship."

  Ransdell was struck by a thought. "Shall we take James too? He'd join, I think."

  "Excellent," Vanderbilt accepted. "He could write up the trip. It would be ignominious, if any of us got to Bronson Beta, with no record of the real history of this old earth's last days."

  Together they broached the subject to Hendron. He considered them for several minutes without replying, and then said: "You realize, of course, that such an expedition will be extremely hazardous? You could carry fuel and provisions for a long flight, but nothing like what you'd need. You'd have to take pot-luck everywhere you went; gasoline would be almost impossible to find-what hasn't leaked away must have been burned, for the most part; and whenever you set the ship down, you would be a target for any and every person lurking in the vicinity. The conditions prevailing, physically, socially and morally, must be wholly without precedent."

  "That," replied Vanderbilt calmly, "is precisely why we cannot be men and fear to study them."

  "Exactly," jerked Hendron; and he gazed at Ransdell.

  The gray-blue eyes fixed steadily on Hendron's, and the scientist abruptly decided: "Very well, I'll sanction it."

  Ransdell and Vanderbilt knocked on the door of Eliot James' room, from which issued the sound of typewriting. The poet swung wide the door and greeted them with an expression of pleasure. "What's up?"

  They told him.

  "Go?" James repeated, his face alight with excitement. "Of course I'll go. What a record to write-whether or not any one lives to read it!"

  Tony received the news with mingled feelings. He could not help an impulse of jealousy at not being chosen for the adventure; but he understood that Ransdell hardly would have selected him. Also, he realized that his position as vice to Hendron in command of the cantonment did not leave him free for adventure.

  Yet it was almost with shame that Tony assisted in the takeoff of the big plane two days later. Eve emerged from the crowd at the edge of the landing-field and walked to Ransdell; and Tony saw the light in her eyes which comes to a woman watching a man embark on high adventure. The very needlessness, the impracticalness of it, increased her feeling for him-a feeling not to be roused by a man performing a merely useful service, no matter how hazardous. Tony walked around to the other side of the plane and stayed there until Eve had said good-by to the pilot.

  The motor was turning over slowly. The mechanics had made their last inspection. The maximum amount of fuel had been taken aboard, and all provisions, supplies, ammunition, instruments and paraphernalia which were deemed needful. Many of the more prominent members of the colony were grouped near the plane shaking hands with Vanderbilt and Eliot James. Bronson was there, Dodson, Smith and a dozen more, besides Hendron. Vanderbilt's farewells were debonair and light. "We'll send you postcards picturing latest developments." Eliot James was receiving last-minute advice from the scientists, who had burdened him with questions, the answers of which they wished him to discover by observation. Ransdell came around the fuselage of the plane, Eve behind him.

  He cast one look at the sky, where the heavy and still numerous clouds moved on a regular wind, and one at the available half of the landing-field, on which the sun shone tentatively.

  "Let's go," he said.

  There were a few last handshakes; there was a shout as the chocks were removed from the wheels of the plane. It made a long bumpy run across the field, rose slowly, circled once over the heads of the waving throng, and gradually disappeared toward the south.

  Eve signaled Tony. "Aren't they fine, those three men? Going off into nowhere like that."

  Tony made his answer enthusiastic. "I never thought I'd meet three such people in my life-one, perhaps, but not three. And there are literally hundreds of people here who are capable of the same sort of thing."

  Eve was-still watching the plane. "I like Dave Ransdell."

  "No one could help liking him," Tony agreed.

  "He's so interested in everything, and yet so aloof," went on Eve, still watching. "In spite of all he's been through with us, he's still absolutely terrified of me."

  "I can understand that," said Tony grimly.

  "But you've never been that way around me."

  "I didn't show it that way; no. But I know-and you know -what it means."

  "Yes, I know," Eve replied simply.

  The sun, which had been shielded by a cloud, suddenly shone on them, and both glanced toward it.

  Off there to the side of the sun, hidden by its glare, moved the Bronson Bodies on their paths which would cause them to circle the sun and return-one to pass close to the earth and the other to shatter the world-in little more than seven months more.

  "If they are away only thirty days, we're not to count them missing," Eve was saying-of the crew of the airplane, of course. "If they're not back in thirty-we're to forget them. Especially we're not to send any one to search for them."

  "Who said so?"

  "David. It's the last thing he asked."

  Chapter 16-The Saga

  THE thirty days raced by. Under the circumstances, time could not dr
ag. Nine-tenths of the people at Hendron's encampment spent their waking and sleeping hours under a death-sentence. No one could be sure of a place on the Space Ship. No one, in fact, was positive that the colossal rocket would be able to leave the earth. Every man, every woman, knew that in six months the two Bronson Bodies would return from their rush into the space beyond the sun; even the most sanguine knew that a contact was inevitable.

  Consequently every day, every hour, was precious to them. They were intelligent, courageous people. They collaborated in keeping up the general morale. The various department heads in the miniature city made every effort to occupy their colleagues and workers-and Hendron's own foresight had assisted in the procedure....

  The First Passage was followed by relative calm. As soon as order had been restored, a routine was set up. Every one had his or her duty. Those duties were divided into five parts: First, the preparation of the rocket itself; second, the preparation of the rocket's equipment and load; third, observation of the receding and returning Bodies to determine their nature and exact course; fourth, maintenance of the life of the colony; fifth, miscellaneous occupations.

  Hendron, in charge of the first division, spent most of his time in the rocket's vast hangar, the laboratories and the machine-shop. Bronson headed the second division. The third duty was shared by several astronomers; and in this division Eve, with her phenomenal skill in making precise measurements, was an important worker. The maintenance division was under the direction of Dodson, and under Dodson, a subcommittee headed by Jack Taylor took charge of sports and amusements. Tony was assigned to the miscellaneous category, as were the three absent adventurers.

  The days did not suffice for the work to be done, particularly in preparation of the Space Ship.

  Hendron had the power. Under the pressure of impending doom, the group laboring under him had "liberated" the amazing energy in the atom-under laboratory conditions. They had possessed, therefore, a potential driving power enormously in excess of that ever made available before. They could "break up" the atom at will, and set its almost endless energies to work; but what material could harness that energy and direct it into a driving force for the Space Ship?

  Hendron and his group experimented for hour after desperate hour through their days, with one metal, another alloy and another after another.

  At night, in the reaction of relaxation, there were games, motion pictures which had been preserved, and a variety of private enterprises which included organization and rehearsal of a very fine orchestra. There were dances, too; and while the thin crescents of the Bronson Bodies hung in the sky like cosmic swords of Damocles, there were plays satirizing human hopes and fates in the shed next to that wherein the Space Ship, still lacking its engine, was being prepared.

  The excellent temper of the colony was flawed rarely. However, there were occasional lapses. One night during a dance a girl from California suddenly became hysterical and was carried from the hall shouting: "I won't die!" On another occasion a Berlin astronomer was found dead in his bed-beside him an empty bottle of sleeping-powders holding down a note which read: "Esteemed friends: The vitality of youth is required to meet the tension of these terrible days with calmness. I salute you." The astronomer was buried with honors.

  Tony perceived an evidence of the increasing tension in Eve when they walked, late one afternoon, through the nearby woods.

  She saw on the pine-needle carpet of the forest a white flower. She plucked it, looked at it, smelled it and carried it away. After they had proceeded silently for some distance, she said: "It's strange to think about matters like this flower. To think that there will never be any more flowers like this again in the universe-unless we take seeds with us!"

  "That impresses you, perhaps," said Tony, "because we can come closer to realizing the verdict-no more flowers-than we can the verdict 'no more us.'"

  "I suppose so, Tony. Did David ever tell you that, in his first conference at Capetown with Lord Rhondin and Professor Bronson, they were excited over realizing there would be no more lions?"

  "No," said Tony, very quietly. "He never mentioned it to me."

  "Tell me, Tony," she asked quickly, "you aren't jealous?"

  "How, under the conditions laid down by your father," retorted Tony, "could anybody be 'jealous'? You're not going to be free to pick or choose your own husband-or mate-or whatever he'll be called, on Bronson Beta. And if we never get there, certainly I'll have nothing to be jealous about."

  The strain was telling, too, on Tony.

  "He may not even return to us here," Eve reminded. "And we would never know what happened to the three of them."

  "It would have to be a good deal, to stop them. Each one's damn' resourceful in his own way; and Ransdell is sure a flyer," Tony granted ungrudgingly. "Yet if the plane cracked, they'd never get back. There's not a road ten miles long that isn't broken by some sort of landslip or a chasm. Land travel has simply ceased. It isn't possible that there's a railroad of any length anywhere in operation; and a car would have to be an amphibian as well as a tank to get anywhere.

  "Sometimes, when day follows day and nobody arrives or passes, I think it must mean that every one else in the world is dead; then I remember the look of the land-especially of the roads, and I understand it. This certainly has become a mess of a world; and I suppose the best we can expect is some such state awaiting us," Tony smiled grimly, "if we get across to Bronson Beta.

  "No; that's one of the funny things about our possible future situation. If we get across to Bronson Beta, we'll find far less damage there."

  "Why?" Tony had not happened to be with the scientists when this had been discussed.

  "Because Bronson Beta seems certain to be a world a lot like this; and it has never been as close as we have been to Bronson Alpha. It wasn't the passing of Bronson Beta that tore us up so badly; it was the passing of the big one, Bronson Alpha. Now, Bronson Beta has never been nearly so close to Bronson Alpha, as we have been. Beta circles Alpha, but never gets within half a million miles of it. So if we ever step upon that world, we'll find it about as it has been."

  "As it has been-for how many years?" Tony asked.

  "The ages and epochs of travel through space.... You ought to talk more with Professor Bronson, Tony. He just lives there. He's so sure we'll get there! Exactly how, he doesn't bother about; he's passed that on to Father. His work assumes we can get across space in the Ship, and land. He starts with the landing; what may we reasonably expect to find there, beyond water and air-and soil? Which of us, who may make up the possible crew of the ship, will have most chances to survive under the probable conditions? What immediate supplies and implements-food and so on-must we have with us? What ultimate supplies-seeds and seedlings to furnish us with food later? What animals, what birds and insects and Crustacea, should we take along?

  "You see, that world must be dead, Tony. It must have been dead, preserved in the frightful, complete cold of absolute zero for millions of years.... You'd be surprised at some of the assumptions Professor Bronson makes.

  "He assumes, among other things, that we can find some edible food-some sort of grain, probably, which absolute zero would have preserved. He assumes that some vegetable life-the vegetation that springs from spores, which mere cold cannot destroy-will spring to life automatically.

  "Tony, you must see his lists of the most essential things to take with us. His work is the most fascinating here. What animals, do you suppose, he's figured we must take with us to help us to survive?"

  On the tenth of September, the inhabitants of the strangely isolated station which existed for the perfection of the Space Ship, began to look-although prematurely-for the return of the explorers into the world which had been theirs.

  The three had agreed on the fourteenth as the first possible day for their return; but so great was the longing to learn the state of the outside world, that on the twelfth even those who felt no particular concern for the men who ventured in the airplane, began to w
atch the sky, casting upward glances as their duties took them out of doors.

  It was difficult for anyone to work on the appointed day. The fourteenth was bright. The wind was gentle and visibility good-although the weather had never returned to what would have been considered normal for northern Michigan in the summer. There was always a moderate amount of haze. Sometimes the sky was obscured by new and interminable clouds of volcanic dust. The thermometer ranged between eighty and ninety-five, seldom falling below the first figure. From the laboratory, the dining-halls, the shops, powerhouse, kitchens and the hangar, men and women constantly emerged into the outdoors to stand silently, inspecting the sky.