Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  A half-hour passed, and he did not budge. His face was taut. The dangers of space had been met. Now came the last great test. At his side again was Duquesne. Above him, in layers, were the terrified animals and the half-insensible passengers. So great was the pressure of retardation that it was almost impossible for him to move, and yet it was necessary to do so with great delicacy. A fractional miscalculation would mean that all his work had gone for nothing.

  In the optical instrument to which he screwed his eyes, the edges of Bronson Alpha had long since passed out of view. He stared at a bright foaming mass of what looked like clouds. A vast abyss separated him from those clouds, and yet its distance shortened rapidly. He looked at the gauge that measured their altitude from the surface of the planet, and at the gauge which reckoned their speed.

  Duquesne followed his movements with eyes eloquent of his emotions.

  Suddenly the clouds seemed to rush up toward him.

  Hendron pressed a stud. The retardation was perceptibly increased. Sound began to pour in awful volumes to their ears.

  Duquesne's eyes jerked up to the altimeter, which showed eighty-six miles. It was falling rapidly. The clouds on the screen were thicker. They fell through atmosphere. The roar increased and became as insufferable as it had been when they left the Earth. Perspiration leaked down Hendron's face and showed darkly through the heavy shirt he wore. The altimeter ran with diminishing speed from fifty miles to twenty-five. From twenty-five it crawled to ten. From ten to five. It seemed scarcely to be moving now.

  Suddenly Hendron's lips jerked spasmodically, and a quiver ran through the hand on the rheostat. He pointed toward the screen with his free hand, and Duquesne had his first view of the new world. The same view flashed through the remnants of cloud to all the passengers. Below them was a turbulent rolling ocean. Where the force of their blasts struck it, it flung back terrific clouds of steam. They descended to within a mile of its surface, and then Hendron, operating another lever, sent out horizontal jets, so that the ship began to move rapidly over the surface of this unknown sea.

  To every one who looked, this desolate expanse of ocean was like a beneficent blessing from God Himself. Here was something familiar, something interesting, something terrestrial. Here was no longer the incomprehensible majesty of the void.

  The Space Ship had reached the surface of Bronson Beta and was traveling now at a slow, lateral velocity above one of the oceans. Hendron worked frantically with the delicate controls to keep the ship poised and in regular motion; yet it rose and fell like an airplane bounding in rough winds, and it swayed on its horizontal axis so that its pilot ceaselessly played his fingertips on the releases of the quick blasts which maintained equilibrium.

  The sullen, sunless ocean seemed endless. Was there no land?

  Where were the continents, where the islands and plains and the sites of the "cities" which the great telescopes of earth-the telescopes of that shattered world which survived now only in fragments spinning around the sun-once had shown? Had the cities, had the mountains and plains, been mere optical illusions?

  That was impossible; yet impatience never had maddened men as now. Still the views obtainable from the side periscope flashed upon the screen and showed nothing but empty sea and lowering cloud.

  Then, on the far horizon, land appeared dimly.

  A cry, a shout that drowned in the tumult of the motors, broke from trembling lips. Speedily they approached the land. It spread out under them. It towered into hills. Its extent was lost in the mists. They reached its coast, a bleak inhospitable stretch of brown earth and rock, of sandy beach and cliff upon which nothing grew or moved or was. Inland the country rose precipitously; and Hendron, as if he shared the impatience of his passengers and could bear no more, turned the ship back toward a plateau that rose high above the level of the sea.

  Along the plateau he skimmed at a speed that might have been thirty terrestrial miles an hour. The Ark drew down toward the new Earth until it was but a few feet above the ground. The speed diminished, the motors were turned off and on again quickly, a maneuver which jolted those who lay strapped in their places. There was a very short, very rapid drop; bodies were thrown violently against the padded floor; the springs beneath them recoiled-and there was silence.

  Regardless of the fate of the others, the fate of Earth itself, Hendron with his hundred colonists had reached a new world alive.

  The ship settled at a slight angle in the earth and rock beneath it.

  The Ark was filled with a new sound-the sound of human voices raised in hysterical bedlam.

  Chapter 27-The Cosmic Conquerors

  COLE HENDRON turned to Duquesne. The bedlam from the passenger-cabin came to their ears faintly. On the visa-screen above them was depicted the view from one of the sides of the ship-a broad stretch of rolling country, bare and brown, vanishing toward ascending hills and gray mist. Hendron had relaxed for the first time in the past eight months, and he stood with his hands at his sides, his shoulders stooped and his knees bent. He looked as Atlas might have looked when Hercules lifted the world from his shoulders. It was an expression more descriptive than any words might have been.

  Duquesne's emotions found speech. "Miraculous! Marvelous! Superb! Ah, my friend, my good friend, my old friend, my esteemed friend! I congratulate you. I, Duquesne, I throw myself at your feet. I embrace your knees; I salute you. You have conquered Destiny itself. You have brought this astounding ship of yours to the Beta Bronson. To you, Christopher Columbus is a nincompoop. Magellan is a child drooling over his toys. Listen to them upstairs there, screaming. Their hearts are flooded. Their eyes are filled. Their souls expand. Through you, to-day, humanity opens a new epoch!"

  The Frenchman could not confine his celebration to the control-cabin. He seized Hendron and hauled him to the spiral staircase which functioned as well inverted as it had right-side up. He thrust Hendron before him into the first chamber, where the passengers from both decks were crowding. Duquesne himself was ignored; and he did not mind it.

  "Hendron!" rose the shout; and men and women, almost equally hysterical, rushed to him. They had to clap hands on him, touch him, cry out to him.

  Tony found himself shouting an excited harangue to which no one was paying attention. He discovered Eve at his side, struggling toward her father, and weeping. Some one recognized her and thrust her through the throng.

  Men and women were throwing their arms about each other, kissing, and screaming in each other's faces. Duquesne, ignored and indifferent to it, made his way through the throng thumping the backs of the men and embracing the women, and beating on his own chest. Eliot James, who had been deathly ill during the entire transit, abruptly forgot his sickness, was caught in the tumult of the first triumph, and then withdrew to the wall and watched his fellows rejoice.

  At last some one opened the larder and brought out food. People who had eaten practically nothing for the four days began to devour everything they could get their hands upon.

  Tony, meanwhile, had somewhat recovered himself. He made a quick census and shouted: "We all are here. Every one who started on this ship survived!"

  It set off pandemonium again, but also it reminded them of doubt of the safety of the second ship. "Where is it? Can it be sighted?... How about the Germans?... The English?... The Japanese?"

  Their own shouts quieted them, so that Hendron at last could speak.

  "We have had, for three days, no sight of our friends or of any of the other parties from earth," he announced. "That does not mean that they all have failed; our path through space was not the only one. Some may have been ahead of us and arrived when the other side of this world was turned; others may still arrive; but you all understand that we can count upon no one but ourselves.

  "We have arrived; that we know. And none of you will question my sincerity when I repeat to you that it is my conviction that fate-Destiny-far more than our own efforts has brought us through.

  "I repeat here, in my first w
ords upon this strange, new, marvelous world what I said upon that planet which for millions and hundreds of millions of years supported and nourished the long life of evolution which created us-I repeat, what I said upon that planet which now flies in shattered fragments about our sun; we have arrived, not as triumphant individuals spared for ourselves, but as humble representatives of the result of a billion years of evolution transported to a sphere where we may reproduce and recreate the life given us....

  "I will pass at once to practical considerations.

  "At this spot, it is now late in the afternoon of Bronson Beta's new day, which lasts thirty hours instead of the twenty-four to which we are accustomed. For the present, we must all remain upon the ship. The ground immediately under is still baked hot by the heat of our blast at landing. Moreover we must test the atmosphere carefully before we breathe it.

  "Of course, if it is utterly unbreathable, we will all perish soon; but if it proves merely to contain some unfavorable element against which we must be masked at first until we develop immunity to it, we must discover what it is.

  "While waiting, we will discharge one of the forward rocket tubes at half-hour intervals in the hope that our sister ship will see this signal and reply. We will also immediately put into operation an external radio system and listen for her. I wish to thank those of you who acted as my crew during this flight, and who in spite of shuddering senses and stricken bodies stuck steadfast to your posts. But there is no praise adequate in human language for the innumerable feats of courage, of ingenuity and perseverance which have been performed by every one of you. I trust that by morning we shall be able to make a survey of our world on foot, and I presume that by then we shall have heard from our sister ship."

  Eve and Tony walked back and forth through the throng of passengers, arm in arm. Greetings and discussions continued incessantly. Every one was talking. Presently some one began to sing, and all the passengers joined in.

  Up in the control-room Hendron and his assistants began their analysis of a sample of atmosphere that had been obtained through a small airlock. They rigged up the ship's wireless, and sent into the clouds the first beacon from the Ark's sky-pointing tubes. Lights were on all over the ship. Above the passenger quarters, several men were releasing and tending stock. The sheep and a few of the birds had perished, but the rest of the animals revived rapidly.

  One of Hendron's assistants put a slip of paper before his chief. He read it:

  Nitrogen 43%

  Oxygen 24%

  Neon 13%

  Krypton 6%

  Argon 5%

  Helium 4%

  Other gases 5%

  Hendron looked at the list thoughtfully and took a notebook from a rack over the table. He glanced at the assistant and smiled. "There's only about a three-per-cent error in our telescopic analysis. It will be fair enough to breathe."

  The assistant, Borden, smiled. He had been, in what the colonists came to describe as "his former life," a professor of chemistry in Stanford University. His smile was naive and pleasing. "It's very good to breathe. In fact, I drew in a large sample and breathed what was left over for about five minutes. It felt like air; it looked like air; and I think we might consider it a very superior form of air-remarkably fresh, too."

  Hendron chuckled. "All right, Borden. What about the temperature?"

  "Eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, top side of the ship-but the ground all around has been pretty highly heated, and the blast from the beacon also helped warm up the air. I should conjecture that the temperature is really about seventy-eight degrees. I didn't pick up much of that heat, because our thermometer is on the windward side."

  Hendron nodded slowly. "Of course I don't know our latitude and longitude yet, but that seems fair enough. Pressure?"

  "Thirty point one hundred thirty-five ten thousandths."

  "Wind-velocity?"

  "Eighteen miles an hour."

  "Humidity?"

  "Seventy-four per cent. But if I'm any judge of weather, it's clearing up."

  "That's fine. We'll go out in the morning."

  Another man approached the desk. "The radio set is working, Mr. Hendron. There's terrific static in bursts, but in the intervals listening has been pretty good. Everything's silent. I don't think anybody else made it."

  "Right. You take the receivers until midnight on the new time, put Tarleton on for four hours and let Grange have it until dawn, and then Von Beitz. No one will leave the ship to-night. I believe that the situation here is favorable; but we will need every advantage for our first experience upon this planet. So we will wait for the sun."

  The night came on clear. The visa-screen, which had been growing darker, showed now a dim, steady light. It was the light of the earth-destroyer Bronson Alpha, shining again upon the survivors of men as it set off on its measureless journey into infinite space. Other specks of light re‰nforced it; and the stars-glints from the debris of the world settling themselves in their strange circles about the sun.

  Exhaustion allied itself to obedience to Hendron's orders. The emigrants from Earth slumped down and slept. Hendron strode quietly through the dimly lighted chambers, looking at the sleeping people with an expression almost paternal on his face. Within him leaped an exultation so great that he could scarcely contain it....

  Tony lay down but did not sleep. Around him the members of the expedition lay in attitudes of rest. A thought had been stirring in his brain for a long time. Some one would have to take the risk of being the first to breathe the air of Bronson Beta. A small sample was not decisive. Tony did not know how accurately its composition might have been measured. He thought that it might have an evil smell. It might be sickening. It might be chemically possible to breathe, but practically, hopeless. It might contain a trace of some rare poison that, repeatedly breathed, would kill instantly or in time.

  He should test it himself. They should send him out first. If he did not go into spasms of nausea and pain, the rest could follow. It was a small contribution, in Tony's mind; but it would help justify his presence on the Ark. He had considered offering himself for this service for so long that he had created in his subconscious mind a true and very real fear of the possibilities in the atmosphere of Bronson Beta.

  "They might send some one useful," he thought. "Hendron might sacrifice himself in the test."

  The more he thought, the more he worried. His mind began to plan. If he wished, he could open the airlock and drop down to the ground. Of course, he could not get back without making a fuss-stoning the periscope outlet-and he might not remain conscious long enough. But in that case -his body would be a warning when they looked out in the morning....

  At last he rose. He went down the spiral staircase quietly. He shut doors behind him. In the bottom chamber he stood for a long time beside the airlock. He was trembling.

  It did not enter his mind that the honor of being the first to step on the soil of Bronson Beta rightfully belonged to Hendron. It was self-sacrifice and not ambition which prompted him.

  He lifted the levers that closed the inner door, balancing them so that they would fall automatically. He stepped between it and the outer door. The lock slammed; the levers fell. He was in pitch darkness.

  He opened the outside door. He leaned out-his heart in his mouth. He drew in a breath.

  A hot, rasping, sulphurous vapor smote his nostrils. He shuddered. Was this the atmosphere of the new planet? He remembered that the blast of the Ark had cooked the ground around it.

  Gasping, with running eyes, he lay down on the floor and felt with his feet for the iron rungs of the workmen's ladder that ran from the now inverted bow of the Ark to the upper door and matched that on the opposite end. He began to descend. He coughed and shuddered. With every step the heat increased.

  His foot touched the ground. It gave off heat like the earth around a geyser. He ran away from the looming bulk of the ship. His first fifty steps were taken in the stinging vapors.

  Then-cooler air
blew on his face. Sweet, fresh, cool air!

  He inhaled lungfuls of it. It had no odor. It was like earth air washed by an April rain. It did not make him dizzy or sick. He did not feel weakness or numbness or pain. He felt exhilarated.

  He flung out his arms in ecstasy. It was a dancer's gesture, a glorious, abandoned gesture. He could make it only because he was alone-alone on the new earth. Bronson Beta's atmosphere was magnificent.

  He flung his arms again.

  Beside him a voice said quietly: "It's splendid, isn't it, Tony?"

  He could have been no more startled if stones had spoken or a mummy had sat up in its sarcophagus. He stiffened, not daring to look. Then into his icy veins blood flowed. He had recognized the voice. He turned in the lush, starlit dark.