Philip Wylie - After Worlds Collide

by After Worlds Collide(Lit)

  The coast which the second Ark approached-the coast upon which it now lay-was fog-bound. "In spite of the fog," Ransdell said to Tony, "we had to land at once. Of course, the jets cleared away the fog below us, but only replaced it with a brilliant cloud of gases. We were flying 'blind,' and had to land by instrument. I ordered everybody to be strapped to the floor, and gave the command to set down the ship under the added pressure of the blast required for the delicate business of landing. Three of our tubes fused almost simultaneously. The ship careened and almost tipped over. In trying to right it, we rose perhaps fifty feet above this desert." He swept his hand toward the surrounding darkness. "And then we crashed."

  Tony nodded. Ransdell went on: "Every bit of apparatus that was in the least fragile was, of course, demolished. On top of the crash, one of the jet-tubes burst, and its blast penetrated the storeroom. That might have been much worse; it might have annihilated half our party. Perhaps it did so, indirectly-it fused or destroyed more than half our stores and equipment. Since landing, we have not found it possible to construct even a radio. That is why you have heard no signals from us. We had more than we could do, for the first weeks, taking care of our injured and burying the dead-and salvaging and making usable what supplies were spared, in part. The searchlight you saw to-night was the best effort we accomplished."

  Suddenly Ransdell's voice failed him. He cleared his throat and continued very quietly: "To tell the truth, Tony, we wondered whether we should try to communicate with Hendron's party-assuming you had come through safe. We are so without supplies or resources, that we could only be a burden to you. We knew that at best you could barely manage for yourselves. It was that, as much as anything else, which stopped us from making efforts to find you. We decided not to drag you down and perhaps cause you, as well as ourselves, to perish."

  "You would," said Tony. "You would decide that-Vanderbilt and Taylor and you, Dave. But thank God, that point's past. I haven't told you half the news. Eliot James and I didn't come from our camp to you. We came from a city!"

  "City?"

  "Of the Other People, Dave!"

  "Other People?... What Other People?... Where?"

  "I mean a city of the old inhabitants of this planet!" Tony cried. "For it was inhabited, as we thought. And by what people! Eliot and I spent three days in one of their cities!"

  "But not-with Them?"

  "No," agreed Tony. "Not with them! They're gone! They're dead, I suppose-for a million years. But wait till you hear what they left behind them! And what the cold and the dark of space saved for us! Food, for one thing. Dave! Peter! Jack!" In their excitement, they were all standing up again, and Tony was beating each of them in turn upon the back. "Food- grain and other things saved for us by Space's wonderful refrigerator of absolute cold. Cheer up! Food-something to fill you-no longer's one of our troubles. Their food-if it doesn't kill us all. And it hasn't killed Eliot or me yet.... Listen! What's that?"

  For there was shouting in the camp.

  "I suspect," said Peter Vanderbilt, "that James has got to that point too. He's been telling them of the food you found. Perhaps now we better rejoin our comrades and-the ladies."

  Eliot James had reached that point; and it started a new hysteria; for they believed him, and had faith in the food-supplies he reported. The immediate effect was instinctive and practical; they ordered their own sparse supplies distributed more satisfyingly than on any occasion since the terrible landing on this earth.

  It was indeed salvation which Tony Drake and Eliot James had brought out of the night-salvation and the end of some of the hardships heroically borne. Tony did not realize then the extent of those hardships; but when half an hour later coffee was served for all of them in the improvised dining-hall, he was made to realize it by a simple statement of Ransdell's. "This is the first ration of coffee we have served, except to those in most desperate condition, since the day after we landed."

  It was a hilarious midnight picnic in the impromptu dining-hall, where the men and women dared to eat as much as they wanted for the first time since their epochal journey-where they sang hymns, shouted snatches of gay songs from lost days on the vanished earth, wept and laughed again, over-hilariously. Tony found himself compelled to repeat again and again details of the city which Eliot James and he had found; again and again he had to iterate how Hendron and Eve and all their people had fared; and now he told how the three had died from the strange disease.

  In return he gained other items from this and that of his companions, who enabled him gradually to piece together a more coherent account of the experience of the second band of Argonauts. Each detail was made vivid by the various narrators. The horrible day of the landing as the fog cleared away, revealing moment by moment the magnitude of the disaster which had overtaken them; the groans of the wounded; the crushed and mangled bodies of the dead; the desperate efforts of the doctors and surgeons among them to save those who were not beyond hope. Hastily constructed operating-tables under a sun which had once shone on the earth, and which now cast its radiance into the greenish-blue skies of Bronson Beta. The gradual emergence of order. The tallying of the lists of stores and tools. The shocking discovery that every one of the seeds so carefully stored on the ship had been burned by the unleashed atomic blast. The necessary destruction of the animals which had survived the crash, and the utilization of them for food. Rationing, then, and hunger. Long and weary expeditions on foot in search of sustenance. Efforts to find vegetation on Bronson Beta for food-efforts which in more than one case had led to illness, and twice had brought about death. The erection of the searchlight. The nights and days of waiting and hoping, complicated by fear to be found, because of the burden their discovery might constitute to those who discovered them.

  "For a while," said Jack Taylor, "we believed that nobody else-no other ship from earth-got over. We felt that, desperate as our situation was, yet we were the luckiest."

  "But two weeks ago-two weeks of these peculiarly prolonged days, not to mention the similarly protracted nights," put in Peter Vanderbilt, "two weeks ago, we began to believe differently."

  "Why?" asked Tony.

  "Airplane," replied Vanderbilt succinctly.

  "Where?"

  "Where would it be?"

  "I mean," said Tony, "it didn't land?"

  "Not it. Nor too plainly appear."

  "Neither did ours," said Tony.

  "You mean you sent it? It was your machine?" Ransdell swiftly demanded.

  "Not two weeks ago," Tony denied. "We had nothing in the air then. I mean, an airplane visited us too; and it didn't too plainly appear."

  "But you saw it?''

  "We got a glimpse of it- a glint of light on a wing through the clouds," explained Tony. "Did you see more here?"

  "Yes," said Ransdell. "We got a shape-a silhouette. Queer type; we couldn't identify it. Long, back-pointing wings. Like larks' wings, somebody said. It looked like a giant lark in the sky."

  Tony looked up from Ransdell to Eliot James, who had joined the circle.

  Eliot softly whistled.

  "Well," said Tony to Eliot.

  "Well yourself!" Eliot James retorted. "You say it."

  "Say what?" demanded Ransdell impatiently. "You know whose plane it was? What party brought that type over?"

  "No party," said Tony bluntly.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What I say. No party from earth brought that ship with them. It wasn't brought over."

  He had gone a little pale, as he spoke; and he wiped his forehead and then his hands with his handkerchief.

  "What-the-hell!" whispered Jack Taylor with awed deliberation.

  "I said," iterated Tony solemnly, "it wasn't brought over. On the edge of the city of the Other People, of which we've been telling you-under the great glass dome, but near an edge where they could be run out, easily-was a sort of hangar of those things. We saw a-a hundred of them. Like larks, they'd look in the sky-all-metal larks of marvelous design.
They had engines. Did you tell them of the engine in that car we found wrecked before we went off to find the city?" He appealed to Eliot James.

  Eliot nodded; and several voices urged Tony on with: "Yes; he told us.... We know."

  "Well," said Tony, "they had engines of that same small, powerful type. We recognized it; but we couldn't get one going. We tried to."

  He stopped, wet his lips.

  "Go on! For God's sake, go on!"

  "All right," said Tony. "But where do I go from there? What am I to tell you? I can tell you this; for I know it. I saw it. I saw the machines; and I felt them with my hands; and as I told you, I tried to make the engine work, but Eliot and I couldn't."

  "The Other People-the People a Million Years Dead- the inhabitants of Bronson Beta-had aircraft that would look, in the air, like nothing we had on earth but a lark. They had small, economical and evidently exceedingly powerful engines that propelled them by a motive-power we haven't learned to employ."

  "I believe it was one of those machines which flew over you-and over us."

  "Flew?" repeated Peter Vanderbilt calmly. "Of itself? No pilot?"

  Tony shook his head.

  "A pilot perhaps," pronounced Vanderbilt softly, "a million years dead?"

  Tony nodded; the inclination of his head in this affirmative made them jump.

  "You don't believe it!" Peter Vanderbilt rebuked him.

  "You," said Tony, "haven't been in their city. We were there three days, and never ceased to expect them to walk out any door!"

  "After a million years dead?"

  "How do we know how it might have been?"

  "We know," Jack Taylor reminded him, "how long it must have been at the very shortest. Less than a million years, to be sure; but--plenty long in the dark and absolute zero. They never could have survived it."

  Tony looked at him. "Why?"

  "Because they couldn't, Tony."

  "You mean, because we couldn't have. But we're not- They."

  Peter Vanderbilt flicked a speck from his sleeve. "We have no need to be metaphysical," he suggested. "The machine could have come from one source, tie pilot from another. The machine could have survived the million years cold; we know that some did. You saw them. But the pilot need have survived no more than a passage from earth-which some three hundred of us here have survived, and a hundred in your camp also."

  "Of course," accepted Eliot James practically. "Another party could have got across-several parties; the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese or some others. Two weeks or more ago they may have found another Sealed City with the Other People's aircraft."

  "And they," said Tony, "may have got one of the engines going."

  "Exactly!"

  "All right," said Tony, "that's that. Then let's all sit down again. Why did the pilot, whoever he is, look us over and leave without message or signal? Why-"

  They sat down, but drew closer, talking together: "If some of the Other People survived, what would be their attitude to us, would you say?... Would they know who we were, and where we came from?"

  Tony led a dozen men to the ship in which Eliot and he had flown; and they bore to the camp the amazing articles from the Sealed City.

  Nobody tired. There was no end to their speculations and questions. Tony, seated on the ground and leaning on his hand beside him, felt a queer, soft constriction of his forefinger. He drew his hand up, and the constriction clamped tighter, and he felt a little weight. Some small, living thing had clasped him.

  It let go and leaped onto his shoulder.

  "Hello!" cried Tony, as two tiny soft hands and two tiny-toed feet clung to him. "Hello! Hello!" It was a monkey.

  "Her name's Clara," said Ransdell.

  "Yours?" asked Tony. "You brought her over?"

  "Nobody brought her over," Ransdell replied. "You know the regulations before leaving earth. I tried to enforce them; but Clara was too good for us. She stowed away."

  "Stowed away?"

  "We discovered her after things got calm in space," Ransdell said, smiling. "When we were well away from the earth and had good equilibrium. Everybody denied they had anything to do with her being on board. In fact, nobody seemed able to account for her; nobody would even admit having seen her before; but there she was. And she survived the passage; and even our landing. Of course we kept her afterward."

  "Of course," said Tony. "Good work, Clara." He extended his finger, which Clara clasped solemnly, and "shook hands" by keeping her clasp as he waved his finger.

  "Since we're checking up," added Ransdell, "you might as well know that we brought over one more passenger not on the last lists we made back there in Michigan. -Marian!" he called to the group about them. "You here?"

  "Where would I be?" A girl of about twenty-three stood up and walked toward him. Her eyes were gray; her chin was firm; her hair was darkly red. Tony noticed that she carried herself with a boldness different from the others.

  "Her name," Ransdell murmured as she approached, "is Marian Jackson. Lived in St. Louis. An acrobatic dancer. Kept her head during the chaos before the destruction. Read about our plans. Crawled into camp the night before we took off. Lived in the woods for three weeks before that-nobody knows what on."

  The girl reached the table and took Tony's hand. "I've heard about you," she said. "Often. You don't look anything like I supposed you would."

  "I'm glad to meet you," Tony replied.

  Unabashed, she studied him. "You look shot," she said finally.

  Tony grinned. "I am a little tired."

  "You're all in. But then, everybody's tired around here always."

  "You better go back to your place," Ransdell said.

  "Sure," the girl answered. She smiled buoyantly and returned.

  Ransdell looked at her thoughtfully, sipped his coffee, and shook his head. Then he continued privately to Tony: "She's really a moron, I suppose. I doubt if Hendron will approve of having a moron in our company; but her empty-headedness, her astonishment at everything, even her ignorance, which is pretty na‹ve, have delighted everybody. And she did a big thing for us."

  Tony looked thoughtfully at the red-headed girl as she sat down and resumed conversation with those beside her.

  "What did she do?" he asked, returning his attention to Ransdell.

  "The second night we were here, Eberville went mad. He decided early in the evening that it was against the will of God for us to be here, and that we should all be destroyed. But he quieted down, and he was left alone. Later he got up, got into the ship, started the only generator that would work, and turned on one of the lateral tubes. In the morning you can see a big black patch about four hundred yards to the left of where we were camped. He'd have wiped us out in ten seconds, but Marian jumped on him. She's strong. So was Eberville, insanely strong. But she has teeth and nails. That is why we all escaped annihilation a second time."

  Tony shook his head slowly and thoughtfully, without speaking.

  The little monkey, Clara, returned to him and squatted before him, peering up at him with its queerly humanlike, puzzled gaze.

  She had no business here, Tony recollected. Monkeys were not on the list of necessary or useful creatures to be taken on the terrible transfer from earth to this planet; and a single representative of the tiny monkey clan was particularly impractical and useless. But Tony was glad that Clara was here.

  Among the crowd he saw Marian Jackson's red head moving; and he thought: "She had not been selected, either; but all these girls here of higher intelligence, and all the men too, would have been wiped out, but for her."

  He did not blame Hendron for the narrowness of the selections more than he blamed himself. He thought: "We must all have become a bit mad in those last days on earth-mad or at least fanatic. We could hope to save so few and became too intent on certain types."

  Suddenly Tony got up. Hendron, he remembered, knew none of their discoveries and events. He could delay no longer his return to Hendron.

  But when he
suggested to Eliot James that they return, others would not allow it.

  "Not both of you!... You haven't both got to go!"

  There was altogether too much yet to tell, and to hear.

  "Let Eliot stay here, Tony," Dave Ransdell said. "I'll go to Hendron with you. I ought to report to him; and I want so much to see him."

  "Just right," Tony accepted this plan.

  "That's the thing to do."

  They were in the air, Tony Drake and Dave Ransdell together. In the plane with them, they freighted a fair half of the objects intelligible and unintelligible, which Tony and Eliot had brought from the Sealed City. With them was also Eliot James' record, which he had read to the people in Ransdell's camp.