Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  No one went to bed that night until long after the usual hour. Then, reluctantly, those overwearied, those who had arduous tasks and heavy responsibilities on the morrow, regretfully withdrew. Fears now had voices.

  "They're so damn' resourceful, I can't believe they could miss out."

  "But-after all-what do we know about outside conditions?"

  "Think of the risks! God only knows what they might have faced. Anything, from the violence of a mob to a volcanic blast blowing them out of the sky."

  Tony was in charge of the landing arrangements. At three a.m. he was sitting on the edge of the field with Eve. Hendron had left, after giving instructions that he was to be wakened if they arrived. They had little to say to each other. They sat with straining eyes and ears. Coffee and soup simmered on a camp-stove near the plane-shed against which they leaned their chairs. Dr. Dodson lay on a cot, ready in case the landing should result in accident.

  At four, nothing had changed. It began to grow light. Since the passing of the Bronson Bodies, dawn had been minutes earlier than formerly.

  Eve stood up stiffly and stretched. "Maybe I'd better leave. I have some work laid out for morning."

  But she had not walked more than ten steps when she halted.

  "I thought I heard motors," she said.

  Tony nodded, unwilling to break the stillness. A dog barked in the camp. Far away toward the stockyards a rooster crowed. The first sun rays tipped the lowest clouds with gold.

  Then the sound came unmistakably. For a full minute they heard the rise and fall of a churning motor-remote, soft, yet unmistakable.

  "It's coming!" Eve said. She rushed to Tony and held his shoulder.

  He lifted his hand. The sound vanished, came back again -a waspish drone somewhere in the sky. Their eyes swept the heavens. Then they saw it simultaneously-a speck in the dawning atmosphere. The speck enlarged. It took the shape of a cross.

  "Tony!" Eve breathed.

  The ship was not flying well. It lurched and staggered in its course.

  Tony rushed to the cot where Dodson slept. "They're coming," he said, shaking the Doctor. "And they may need you."

  The ship was nearer. Those who beheld it now appreciated not only the irregularity of its course, but the fact that it was flying slowly.

  "They've only got two motors," somebody said. The words were not shouted.

  Scarcely breathing, they stood at the edge of the field. The pilot did not wiggle his wings or circle. In a shambling slip he dropped toward the ground, changing his course a little in order not to strike the ten-foot precipice which had bisected the field. The plane was a thousand yards from the ground. Five hundred.

  "She's going to crash!" some one yelled.

  Tony, Dodson and Jack Taylor were already in a light truck. Fire-apparatus and stretchers were in the space behind them. The truck's engine raced.

  The plane touched the ground heavily, bounced, touched again, ran forward and slewed. It nosed over. The propeller on the forward engine bent.

  Tony threw in the clutch of the car and shot toward it. As he approached, he realized that fire had not started. He leaped from the truck, and with the Doctor and Jack at his heels, he flung open the cabin door and looked into the canted chamber.

  Everything that the comfortable cabin had once contained was gone. Two men lay on the floor at the forward end- Vanderbilt and James. Ransdell was unconscious over the instrument panel. Vanderbilt looked up at Tony. His face was paper-white; his shirt was blood-soaked. And yet there showed momentarily in the fading light in his eyes a spark of unquenchable, deathless, reckless and almost diabolical glee. His voice was quite distinct. He said: "In the words of the immortal Lindbergh, 'Here we are.'" Then he fainted.

  James was unconscious.

  The truck came back toward the throng very slowly and carefully. In its bed, Dodson looked up from his three charges. He announced briefly as way was made for them: "They've been through hell. They're shot, bruised, half-starved. But so far, I've found nothing surely fatal." Then to Tony, who was still driving: "You can put on a little speed, Tony. I want to get these boys where I can treat them."

  Two or three hundred people waited outside the surgery door for an hour. Then a man appeared and said: "Announcements will be made about the condition of the flyers in the dining-hall at breakfast time."

  The waiting crowd moved away.

  An hour later, with every member of the community who could leave his post assembled, Hendron stepped to the rostrum in the dining-hall.

  "All three will live," he said simply.

  Cheering made it impossible for him to continue. He waited for silence. "James has a broken arm and concussion. Vanderbilt has been shot through the shoulder. Ransdell brought in the ship with a compound fracture of the left arm, and five machine-gun bullets in his right thigh. They undoubtedly have traveled for some time in that state. Ransdell's feat is one of distinguished heroism."

  Again cheering broke tumultuously through the hall. Again Hendron stood quietly until it subsided. "This evening we will meet again. At that time I shall read to you; from the diary which James kept during the past thirty days. I have skimmed some of its pages. It is a remarkable document. I must prepare you by saying, my friends, that those of our fellow human beings who have not perished, have reverted to savagery, almost without notable exception."

  A hush followed those words. Then Hendron stepped from the platform, and a din of excited conversation filled the room. The scientist stopped to speak to three or four people, then came over to his daughter. He seemed excited.

  "Eve," he said, "I want you and Drake to come to the office right away."

  Bronson and Dodson were already there when they arrived.

  A dozen other men joined them; and last to appear was Hendron himself. Every one was standing, and Hendron invited them to sit down. It was easy to perceive his excitement now. His surpassingly calm blue eyes were fiery. His cheeks concentrated their color in two red spots. He commenced to speak immediately.

  "My friends, the word I have to add to my announcement in the hall is of stupendous importance!

  "When we took off Ransdell's clothes, we found belted to his body, and heavily wrapped, a note, a map, and a chunk of metal. You will remember, doubtless, that Ransdell was once a miner and a prospector. His main interest had always been diamonds. And his knowledge of geology and metallurgy is self-taught and of the practical sort."

  Bronson, unable to control himself, burst into speech. "Good God, Hendron! He found it!"

  The scientist continued impassively: "The eruptions caused by the passage of the Bodies were of so intense a nature that they brought to earth not only modern rock, but vast quantities of the internal substance of the earth-which, as you know, is presumably of metal, as the earth's total density is slightly greater than that of iron. Ransdell noticed on the edge of such a flow a quantity of solid unmelted material. Realizing that the heat surrounding it had been enormous, he secured specimens. He found the substance to be a metal or natural alloy, hard but machineable. Remembering our dilemma here in the matter of lining for the power tubes for the Space Ship, he carefully carried back a sample-protecting it, in fact, with his life.

  "My friends,"-Hendron's voice began to tremble-"for the past seventy-five minutes this metal has withstood not only the heat of an atomic blast, but the immeasurably greater heat of Professor Kane's recently developed atomic furnace. We are at the end of the quest!"

  Suddenly, to the astonishment of his hearer, Hendron bowed his head in his arms and cried like a woman.

  No one moved. They waited in respect, or in a gratitude that was almost hysterical. In a few moments Hendron lifted his face.

  "I apologize. These are days when nerves are worn thin. But all of you must realize the strain under which I have labored. Perhaps you will forgive me. I am moved to meditate on the almost supernatural element of this discovery. At a time when nature has doomed the world, she seems to have offered the means of e
scape to those who, let us hope and trust, are best fitted to save her most imaginative gesture of creation-mankind."

  Hendron bowed his head once more, and Eve came wordlessly to his side.

  Hendron stood before an audience of nearly a thousand persons. It was a feverish audience. It had a gayety mingled with solemnity such as, on a smaller scale, overwhelmed the thoughtful on a night in November in 1918 when the Armistice had been signed.

  Hendron bowed to the applause.

  "I speak to you to-night, my friends, in the first full flush of the knowledge that your sacrifices and sufferings have not been in vain. Ransdell has solved our last technical problem. We have assured ourselves by observation that life on the planet-to-be will be possible. My heart is surging with pride and wonderment when I find myself able to say: man shall live; we are the forefathers of his new history."

  The wild applause proclaimed the hopes no one had dared declare before.

  "But to-night I wish to talk not of the future. There is time enough for that. I wish to talk-or rather to read-of the present." He picked up from a small table the topmost of a number of ordinary notebooks. "I have here James' record of the journey that brought us salvation. I cannot read you all of it. But I shall have it printed in the course of the next few days. I anticipate that printing merely because I understand your collective interest in the document.

  "This is the first of the seven notebooks James filled. I shall read with the minimum of comment."

  He opened the book. He read:

  "'August 16th. To-night Ransdell, Vanderbilt and I descended at six o'clock precisely on a small body of water which is a residue in a bed of Lake Michigan. We are lying at anchor about a mile from Chicago.

  " 'Our journey has been bizarre in the extreme. Following south along what was once the coast of Lake Michigan, we flew over scenes of desolation and destruction identical with those described after our first reconnaissance. In making this direct-line flight, it was forced upon our reluctant intelligence that the world has indeed been wrecked.

  " 'The resultant feeling of eeriness reached its quintessence when we anchored here. Sharply outlined against the later afternoon sun stood the memorable skyline of the metropolis-relatively undamaged! With an emotion of indescribable joy, after the hours of depressive desolation, I recognized the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, the 333 North Michigan Avenue Building, and others. My companions shouted, evidently sharing my emotions.

  " 'We had landed on the water from the north. We anchored near shore and quickly made our way to land. We exercised certain precautions, however. All of us were armed. Lots were drawn to determine whether Ransdell or Vanderbilt would remain on guard beside the ship. I was useless in that capacity, as I would be unable to fly it in case of emergency. It was agreed that the lone guard was to take off instantly upon the approach of any persons whatever. Our ship was our only refuge, our salvation, our life-insurance.

  " 'Vanderbilt was elected to remain. Ransdell and I started off at once toward the city. The pool on which we lay was approximately a mile in diameter and some two hundred feet below the level of the city. We started across the weird water-bottom. Mud, weeds, wrecks, debris, puddles, cracks, cliffs and steep ascents impeded our progress. But we reached the edge of what had been a lake, without mishap. The angle of our ascent had concealed the city during the latter part of our climb.

  " 'Our first close view was had as we scrambled to the top of a sea-wall. The streets of the metropolis stretched before us-empty. The silence of the grave, of the tomb. Chicago was a dead city.

  " "We stood on the top of the wall for a few minutes. We strained our ears and eyes. There was nothing. No light in the staring windows. No plume of steam on the lofty buildings. We started forward together. Unconsciously, we had both drawn our revolvers.

  " 'Behind us and to the right was the Navy Pier, which I remember as the Municipal Pier. Directly ahead of us were the skyscrapers of the northern business district. We observed them from this closer point only after we had been reassured by the silence of the city, and had slipped our revolvers back into our pockets. Large sections of brick and stonework had been shaken from the sides of the buildings, leaving yawning holes which looked as if caused by shell-fire. The great windows had been shaken into the street, and wherever we went, we found the sidewalks literally buried in broken glass. A still more amazing phenomenon was noticeable from our position on the lake shore: the skyscrapers were visibly out of plumb. We made no measurements of this angulation, but I imagine some of the towers were off center by several feet, perhaps by as much as fifteen or twenty feet. No doubt the earthquakes in the vicinity had been relatively light, but the wavelike rise and fall of the land had been sufficient to tilt these great edifices, much as if they had been sticks standing perpendicularly in soft mud.

  " 'Ransdell and I commented on the strangeness of the spectacle, and then together we moved forward into the business district. We had crossed the railroad tracks before we found any bodies; but on the other side they appeared here and there-most of them lying underneath the cascades of glass, horribly mangled and now in a state of decomposition.

  " It was Ransdell who turned to me and in his monosyllabic, taciturn way said: "No rats. Noticed it?"

  " 'I was stricken by a double feeling of horror, first in the realization that upon such a ghastly scene the armies of rats should be marching, and second by the meaning of Ransdell's words-that if there were no rats, there must be some dreadful mystery to explain their absence.

  " 'We walked over the rubble and glass in the streets. Here and there it was necessary to circumvent an enormous pile of debris which had cascaded from the side of one of the buildings. It was immediately manifest that the people who had left Chicago had taken with them every object upon which they could lay their hands, every possession which they coveted, every article for which they thought they might find use. The stores were like open bazaars; their glass windows had been broken in by marauders or burst out by the quakes, and their contents had been ravaged.

  " 'We continued to notice that the dead on the street did not represent even a tithe of the metropolitan population, and I expressed the opinion that the passing of the Bronson Bodies must have caused a mighty exodus.

  " 'Ransdell's reply was a shrug, and abruptly my mind was discharged upon a new course. "You think they're all upstairs?" I asked.

  " 'He nodded. A block farther along, we came to an open fissure. It was not a large fissure in comparison with the gigantic openings in the earth which we had seen hitherto, but it appeared to go deep into the earth, and a thin veil of steam escaped from it. As we approached it, the wind blew toward us a wisp of this exuding gas, and instantly we were thrown into fits of coughing. Our lungs burned, our eyes stung and our senses were partially confounded, so that with one accord we snatched each other's arms and ran uncertainly from the place.

  "Gas," Ransdell said, gasping.

  " 'No other words were necessary to interpret the frightful fate of Chicago; nothing could better demonstrate how profound was the disturbance under the earth's crust. For in this region noted for its freedom from seismic shocks and remote from the recognized volcanic region, it was evident that deadly, suffocating gases such as previously had found the surface only through volcanoes, here had seeped up and blotted out the population. When the Bronson Bodies were nearest the earth and the stresses began to break the crust-when, doubtless, part of the population in that great interior metropolis were madly fleeing and another part was grimly holding on-there were discharged somewhere in the vicinity, deadly gases of the sort which suffocated the people about Mt. Pel‚e and La SoufriŠre. Only this emission of gas-whether through cracks in the crust or through some true new crater yet to be discovered-was incomparably greater. Like those gases, largely hydrochloric, it was heavier than air; and apparently it lay like a choking cloud on the ground. When those who escaped the first suffocating currents-and apparently they were in the majority-climbed to uppe
r floors to escape, they were followed by the rising vapors. That frightful theory explained why there were so few dead on the street, why no one had returned to the silent city, and above all, why there were no rats.

  " 'We would have liked to climb up the staircases of some of the buildings to test the accuracy of our concepts so far as it might concern the numbers who had remained in the city, to be smothered by gas, but darkness was approaching.

  " 'We were sure of Vanderbilt's safety, for we had heard no shot. It was odd to think that we could expect to hear such a shot at a distance of more than a mile when we were standing in a place where recently the machine-gun fire of gangsters had been almost inaudible in the roaring daylight. Moreover, our single experience with the potency of the gas even in dilution warned us that a deeper penetration of the metropolitan area was more than dangerous.

  " 'We found Vanderbilt sitting upon a stone on the shore beside the plane. We pushed out to it in the collapsible boat; and while we ate supper, we told him what we had seen.