by Philip Wylie
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FOREWORD
EARLY in the middle third of the twentieth century a brilliant astronomer named Sven Bronson observed through a telescope in South Africa that two bodies were moving through space toward the solar system.
Bronson’s calculations revealed to him that these wandering spheres would pass very close to the earth, make a circuit of our sun, and turn back toward space and infinity. The larger of the two wandering worlds would strike and annihilate the earth. Finer and more delicate calculations tended to show that the smaller body, which was of the same magnitude as the earth, would be “caught” by the sun and held in an orbit between the courses of Mars and Venus.
In other words, Bronson’s discovery was an announcement of the end of the world.
It would be an end of the world preceded by the close passage of two mighty planets from some sun lost in the void—two planets which had been pulled from their pathways ages ago by a passing star. The world would be replaced by a new earth whose pathway would take it alternately out to the cold orbit of Mars and back again to the vicinity of Venus.
The bodies were named for their discoverer: the larger one, Bronson Alpha, and the smaller, Bronson Beta.
Sven Bronson knew the horrors that would attend the announcement of his awful findings.
He and Lord Rhondin, the Governor of the South African Dominion, summoned David Ransdell, a war veteran and flier, to carry the tangible demonstration to an American scientist, Cole Hendron. Ransdell started out with photographic plates which proved the discovery.
Cole Hendron, the greatest astrophysicist and engineer of the century, had already been notified of the approaching doom. He and his daughter Eve, who acted as his assistant, checked Bronson’s calculations.
There was no doubt. The earth was doomed.
Hendron, Bronson and others united the foremost scientists of the world in a secret organization known as “The League of the Last Days” and these men kept the information from the public for some time. Among the first laymen to know, or guess the truth were Ransdell, the flier, and Anthony Drake, a young New York man-about-town who was in love with Eve Hendron.
Most of the informed scientists were ready to resign themselves to universal destruction. Cole Hendron, however, perceived a possibility of escape: if the planet which was to occupy the earth’s position were habitable, and if a vessel capable of transporting human beings and their possessions through a few hundred thousand miles of space could be made, a small and select group of people might “jump” from the doomed earth to the new arrival in the solar system. This group could then set about reëstablishing mankind on a new earth.
Hendron and his assistants set to work at once. Atomic energy adequate to drive such a vessel exactly as a rocket is propelled was released in his laboratories. At first it could not be harnessed, as it fused everything with which it came in contact. Nevertheless Hendron persisted in his plans for the space ship. The “Ark” was the name given to the ship eventually built.
For its construction, Hendron established a vast manufacturing city in Michigan, and to it he took a thousand selected human beings—men and women with scientific training, healthy physiques, and great courage.
While Hendron labored frantically, the world found out what was in store for it.
Society disintegrated. The first, and relatively harmless “passage” of the Bronson bodies would be sufficiently close to cause vast terrestrial disturbances—tides, cyclones, terrific volcanic disturbances, and earthquakes. All the seacoast cities of the world were evacuated. New York, Boston, Philadelphia were cleared of their population, which was moved inland at the order of the President.
One bit of fortune came in the discovery of a new metal in the material forced from the depths of the earth during the great eruptions. Ransdell found it and brought it to camp where Hendron tested it. This metal proved able to withstand the heat of the atomic blast. The problem of propulsion of the “Ark” was solved.
In the fantastic days that followed, Hendron and his band manufactured the Ark, and found time and materials to make a second ship so that the balance of their heroic group could be transported to Bronson Beta and not sacrificed. The Michigan cantonment was attacked by bloodthirsty and hungry mobs. The first passage killed more than half of the people of the earth. Continents split apart. Seas rose. The internal fires of the earth burst to the surface. The moon was smashed to atoms.
Months afterward the celestial wanderers rounded the sun and returned. Hendron’s two ships “took off” for Bronson Beta. Other ships, frantically constructed by other nations, also leaped into space as doom fell upon our world.
Bronson Alpha annihilated the earth and moved into the void.
Bronson Beta swung into a course about our sun.
Upon it, Hendron brought down the “Ark.” With him was a company of a hundred and three human beings. Tony Drake was one of them, and his Japanese servant, Kyto. Eliot James, the diarist and historian of the party was in the “Ark.” So was Dodson, the surgeon, and Duquesne, the French physicist who had been saved at the eleventh hour as the Ark stood ready to rise from Holocaust.
A safe landing was made. The air of Bronson Beta was found to be breathable.
But there was no word of the second ship—the vessel under Ransdell’s command which had left with them. It was given up for lost. Ransdell, who also loved Eve, was presumed to have died somewhere in space with his brave companions—Jack Taylor, the college boy who had become one of Tony’s best friends, and Peter Vanderbilt, the cynical and fearless New Yorker, and Greve and Smith, and four hundred others.
The arrivals on Bronson Beta could rouse no answer to their radio signals. They were forced into the awful realization that of all humanity they alone survived. They were alone on an unknown world where a nameless and dead race had once built cities—on a world which had been drifting through the absolute zero of space for nameless millenia. They faced the probem of survival. Responsibility for the future of the species was theirs.
Resolutely, they turned to their prodigious task.
CHAPTER I
THE FIRST DAY ON THE NEW PLANET
ELIOT JAMES sat at a metal desk inside the space ship which had conveyed a few score human beings from the doomed earth to safety on the sun’s new planet Bronson Beta. In front of Eliot James was his already immemorial diary, and over it he poised a fountain pen.
He had written several paragraphs:
“April—what shall I call it? Is it the 2nd day of April, or is it the first? Have we, the last survivors of the earth, landed upon our new planet on All Fools Day? T
hat would be ironic, and yet trivial in the face of all that has happened. But as I meditate on the date, I am in doubt about how to express time in my diary.
“The earth is gone—smashed to fragments; and the companion of its destroying angel, upon which our band of one hundred and three Argonauts holds so brief and hazardous a residence, is still without names, seasons and months. But April has vanished with the earth; and for all I know, spring, winter, summer and fall may also be absent in the new world.
“I have pledged myself to write in this diary every day, as Hendron assures me there will be no other record of our adventures here until we have become well enough established to permit the compilation of a formal history. And yet it is with the most profound difficulty that I compel myself to set down words on this, man’s first morning in his new home.
“What shall I say?
“That question in truth must be read by the future generations as a cry at once of ecstasy and despair. Ecstasy because even while the heavens fell upon them, my companions remained firm and courageous—because in the face of earthquakes, tornadoes, bloody battles and the unimaginable holocaust of Destruction Day itself, they not only preserved whatever claims the race of man may have to majesty, but by their ingenuity they escaped from the earth to this new planet, which has invaded and attached itself to our solar system.
“And I am in despair not only because, so far as we can tell, all but one hundred and three members of the human race have perished, not only because my friends, my home, the cities that were familiar to me, the trees and flowers I knew, the rivers and the oceans, the scent of the wind and the accustomed aspects of the sky have forevermore disappeared from the universe, and not only because I am incapable of setting down the emotions to which those cosmic calamities give rise, but for another reason: as vast, as stirring, as overwhelming to the mind as those foregoing, the responsibility for half a billion years of evolution which terminated in man rests upon myself and one hundred and two others.
“They stand there in the sunshine under the strange sky on our brown earth—forty-three men, fifty-seven women, two children. They have been singing—a medley of songs which under other circumstances might seem irrelevant. Many of them are foreigners and do not know the words, but they also sing—with tears streaming down their faces and a catch in their voices. They sang ‘The Processional’ and they sang ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ After that they sang ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.’ Then they sang ‘The Marseillaise’ with Duquesne leading—leading and bellowing the words, and weeping.
“What a spectacle! Beside it, the picture of Leif Ericsson or Columbus reaching green shores at last is dimmed to insignificance. For those ancient explorers found the path to a mere continent, while this band has blazed a trail of fire through space to a new planet.
“Cole Hendron is there, his magnificent head thrown back, and his face grave under its thatch of newly whitened hair. No doubt replicas of Hendron’s head will be handed down through the ages, if ages are to follow us. His daughter Eve has been near him, and near to Tony Drake. In young Drake one sees the essence of the change which has taken place in all the members of our company. The fashionable, gay-hearted New Yorker is greatly changed. So many times in the past two years has he resigned himself to death, and so many times has he escaped from it only through courage, audacity and good fortune, that he seems superior to death. His face is no longer precisely young, and it contains, side by side, elements of the stoniest inflexibility and the most willing unselfishness. I have no doubt that if this colony survives, when the time comes to bury our leader and our hero,—the incomparable Cole Hendron,—it will be Drake who supersedes him in command. For by that day I am sure the great person in that young man will have availed itself of all our technical knowledge as a mere corollary of his remarkable character.
“And now,”—the pen wavered,—“to what I imagine whimsically as the new future readers of my notes, I make an apology. This is our first day on Bronson Beta. My impatience has exhausted my conscience. I must lay down my pen, leave the remarkable ship wherein I write, and go out upon the face of this earth untrod by man. I can restrain myself no longer.”
Eliot James stepped to the gangplank that had been laid down from the Ark. The earth around the huge metal cylinder had been melted by the blasts of its atomic propulsion-jets. But now it was cool again. A space of two or three hundred yards lay between the Ark and the cliff which beetled over the unknown sea. In that space were the planetary pilgrims. They had stopped singing. Half of them stood on the top of the precipice regarding the waters that rolled in from a nameless horizon. The others were distributed over the landscape. With a smile James noted the botanist, Higgins, leaping from rock to rock, his pockets and his hands full of specimens of ferns and mosses which he had collected. Every few seconds his eye lighted upon a new species of vegetation, and he knelt to gather it. But his greediness resulted invariably in the spilling of specimens already collected, and the result was that he continued hopping about, dropping things and picking them up, with all the energy and disorganization of a distracted bird.
James walked down the gangplank and joined Tony, Eve and Cole Hendron.
The leader of the expedition nodded to the writer. “You certainly are a persistant fellow, James. Some day I hope to find a situation so violent and unique that it keeps you from working on your diary.”
“We have been through a number of such situations,” James answered.
“Nevertheless—” Hendron said. He checked himself. Several of the people on the edge of the cliff had turned toward the Ark and were marching toward him.
“Hendron!” they hailed him again. “Hendron! Cole Hendron!”
Their hysteria had not yet cleared away; they remained in the emotional excitement of the earth-cataclysm they had escaped but witnessed, and of the incomparable adventure of their flight.
“Hendron! Hendron! What do you want us now to do?” they demanded; for their discipline, too, yet clung to them—the stern, uncompromising discipline demanded of them during the preparation of the Ship of Escape, the discipline of the League of the Last Days.
Too, the amazements of this new place paralyzed them; and for that they were not to be blamed. The wonder was that they had survived, as well, the emotional shocks; so they surrounded again their leader, who throughout had seen farther ahead and more clearly than them all; and who, through Doomsday itself, had never failed them.
Hendron stepped upon an outcrop of stone, and smiled down at them. “I have made too many speeches,” he said. “And this morning is scarcely a suitable hour for further thanksgiving. It may be proper and pleasant, later, to devote such a day as the Pilgrims, from one side of our earth to another, did; but like them, it is better to wait until we feel ourselves more securely installed. When such a time arrives, I will appoint an official day, and we shall hope to observe it each year.”
He cast his eyes over the throng and continued: “I don’t know at the moment how to express my thoughts. While I am not myself a believer in a personal God, it seems evident to me in this hour that there was a purpose in the invention of man. Otherwise it is difficult to understand why we were permitted to survive. Whether you as individuals consider that survival the work of a God, or merely an indication that we had reached a plane of sufficient fitness to preserve ourselves, is of small moment to me now. And since I know all of you so well, I feel it unnecessary to say that in the days ahead lies a necessity for a prodigious amount of work.
“Your tempers and intelligences will be tried sorely by the new order which must exist. Our first duty will be to provide ourselves with suitable homes, and with a source of food and clothing. Our next duty will be to arrange for the gathering of the basic materials of the technical side of our civilization-to-be. In all your minds, I know, lies the problem of perpetuating our kind. We have, partly through accident, a larger number of women than men. I wish to discontinue the use of the word morality; but what I must ins
ist on calling our biological continuum will be the subject of a very present discussion.
“In all your minds, too, is a burning interest in the nature and features of this new planet. We have already observed through our telescopes that it once contained cities. To study those cities will be an early undertaking. While there is little hope that others who attempted the flight to this planet have escaped disaster, radio listening must be maintained. Moreover, the existence of living material on this planet gives rise to a variety of possibilities. Some of the flora which has sprung up may be poisonous, even dangerous, to human life. What forms it will take and what novelties it will produce, we must ascertain as soon as possible. I think we are safe in believing that no form of animal life can have existed here, whether benign or perilous; but we cannot ignore the possibility that the plant life may be dangerous. I will set no tasks for this day,—it shall be one of rest and rejoicing,—except that I will delegate listeners for radio messages, and cooks to prepare food for us. To-morrow, and I use an Americanism which will become our watchword, we will all ‘get busy.’”
There was a pause, then cheering. Cole Hendron stepped down from the stone. Eve turned to Tony and took his arm. “I am glad we don’t have to work today.”
“No,” said Tony. “Your father knows better. He realizes that, in our reaction, we could accomplish nothing. It is the time for us to attempt to relax.”
“Can you relax, Tony?”
“No,” he confessed, “and I don’t want even to attempt to; but neither do I want to apply myself to anything. Do you?”
Eve shook her head. “I can’t. My mind flies in a thousand different directions simultaneously, it seems. Where are those cities which, from the world—our ended world, Tony—our telescopes showed us here? What remains may we find of their people? Of their goods and their gods and their machines? … What, when they found themselves being torn away from their sun, did they do? … That monument beside the road that we found, Tony—what was it? What did it mean? … Then I think of myself. Am I, Tony, to have children—here?”