by Philip Wylie
“Right.” Hendron rushed up the stairs, followed by Tony.
“How about the animals? Should we try to get them out?”
The living creatures—mammals, birds, insects—had been tended and fed but not yet moved. Where, outside, could they yet be established?
“The animals,” said Tony, “will have to take their chances here.”
But Hendron and he awakened all the pilgrims who had been asleep. They were commencing to leave the Ark in an orderly but fast-moving line. Hendron was at the door of the Ark, and as the people emerged, he divided them into groups of five, and sent each group running in a different direction, thus dispersing over a wide area those of the colonists who were not hiding under the rim of the cliff.
The number of the astrolites increased with every passing minute, until the sky seemed full of them. The terrain was as brightly illuminated as by daylight; and from the gangplank Tony could see the little bands scurrying in their appointed directions.
When they had all emerged, Hendron said to Tony shortly: “You go to the cliff and disperse the people there. I’ll stay here with the last five.”
The air was filled with parched, hot odors and clouds of steam. In the distance, around the craters made where the meteors had struck earth, there was a red glow. Half an hour passed. The pyrotechnics stopped. During that half-hour Cole Hendron had been busy in the upper control-room of the Ark with two electrical engineers; and when after five or ten minutes of normal darkness, interrupted only by spurts of the soft multi-colored aurora which frequently flickered on Bronson Beta, a few of the groups of five began to return to the Ark, they were halted by Cole Hendron’s voice—a voice broadcast from the Ark by a mighty loud-speaker. It carried distinctly for a distance of two or three miles—a distance much greater than that which separated any of the bands.
“You will stay where you are,” Hendron’s voice commanded, “in groups of five for the remainder of the night. Try to sleep, if possible, but keep a long distance from the party nearest to you. I will summon you when the time comes.”
Tony had rejoined Eve in a group of five along the base of the precipice. Eliot James was in that group, and two women—one of them Shirley Cotton, who was already a prominent person among the hundred and one odd people who had been prominent on earth. The two men and the three women slept fitfully on the hard earth that night; and in the morning with the first rays of dawn, Hendron’s voice summoned every one together again.
No more meteors had fallen after the shower had ended. The human beings who trekked back over the bare landscape to the Ark were a little more grave than they had been on the previous day. Once again the frailness of their hold upon their new home had been made plain. Once again they had been reminded of the grim necessities by which they would have to live. For in order to insure that some of them, at least, would be safe, they had been compelled on a moment’s notice to desert all that they had brought with them from the earth, and run like dislodged insects into the night, into hiding.
All of them, because of their weariness, and in spite of the hard ground, had slept. Most of the bands had kept one member awake in turn as a watchman. Since the night on Bronson Beta was longer than the night on earth, they had used the additional time for rest. Hendron first summoned them by calling on the loud-speaker; and then, for those who had marched out of sight of the Ark, he gave an auditory landmark by broadcasting over the powerful loud-speaker a series of phonograph musical records. The men and women in clothes now earth-stained, the former not shaven, and the latter not made up, straggled to the Ark to the music of “The Hymn to the Sun” and of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.”
They answered a roll-call. No one had been harmed. The Ark was unscathed. They sat down to breakfast.
Hendron explained the unexpected dilemma of the previous night. “Unless I am greatly mistaken, our new planet passed through a cluster or path of fragments of the moon, destroyed, as you know, months ago. They would find orbits of their own about the sun; and we have approached again an area where we might encounter fragments of any size. I believe that the meteors which fell last night were débris from the moon—débris scattered and hurled into space by that cosmic collision.
“In the future we will probably be able to chart the position of such fragments, so that we will know when we are coming within range of them. It is my opinion that the phenomenon was more or less local here, that we attracted to our surface a unified group of fragments scattered along a curve coinciding with our orbit, so that they dropped virtually in one place.
“I regret that the night which I had planned should be so peaceful for all was so profoundly disturbed. You are courageous. I would like to extend our period of rest to include this, our second day, on Bronson Beta. But so divergent and so pressing are the necessities of our work here, that I cannot do so. We will start immediately after breakfast to construct a cantonment which will be adequate at least temporarily.”
CHAPTER II
CIVILIZATION RECOMMENCES
SUCH isolation, such solitude, such courage in the face of the unknown never before existed. One hundred and three people ate their breakfast—one hundred and three people laughing, talking, saluting each other, staring often at the ocean and the greenish sky, and still more often at the shining cylinder standing on end in their midst.
Cole Hendron walked over to Tony and Eliot James and his daughter, who were breakfasting together.
“Right after breakfast,” he said, “I want you, together with Higgins, to start prospecting for farm lands.”
Tony nodded. Two years before, the assignment would have appalled him. He would not have known whether beets were planted an inch under the surface of the soil or three feet, and whether one planted tubers or seeds; but he had been for a long time in charge of the farm in Michigan, and he was now well equipped for the undertaking.
“Bring back soil-samples. You understand the nature of the terrain which will be required—level and free from stones. It may be that you will find nothing in the vicinity that will be adequate; and if that is true we will consider moving the Ark. It is still good for a few hundred miles, I guess.”
Eliot James grinned. “Or a few hundred million? Which?”
To the surprise of all three, Cole Hendron did not respond with a smile. Instead he said simply: “I’d risk taking it up if we had to move in order to find a suitable place to raise food.”
Tony understood that the leader of the expedition was entirely serious, and said with sudden intensity: “What’s the matter with the Ark?”
“In the laboratory tests,” the gray-haired man answered, “and in the smaller furnaces and engines we designed, Dave Ransdell’s metal did not fuse or melt. But under the atomic blast, as we came through space, it commenced to erode. About eighteen hours after we had started, we went off our course because, as I discovered, the lining of one of the outside stern jets was wearing out more rapidly than the others. I used one of the right-angle tubes to reëstablish our direction, and I made some effort to measure the rate of dissipation of Ransdell’s metal. I couldn’t be very accurate, since I could not turn off the jets, but I was not at all certain that the material would stand the strain until we had reached the point where we started falling on Bronson Beta.”
“You mean to say,” Eliot James exclaimed, “that we barely got here?”
Cole Hendron smiled, and yet his face was sober. “It turned out that we had a little margin. I examined the tubes yesterday, and I dare say we could use them for a trip of another five hundred miles. But at both ends of the ship our insulation is nearly gone. We could not, for example, circumnavigate this globe.”
The writer looked depressed. “I had imagined,” he said, “that we would be able to cruise at will on the surface of the planet from now on.”
Hendron turned his face toward the ship, which represented the masterpiece of his life of engineering achievements. He regarded it almost sadly. “We won’t be able to do that. In
any case we would move her over the surface of the planet only to find good farm land, because we’ve got to take her to pieces.”
“To pieces!”
Hendron assented. “We designed her for that very purpose. Those layer sections on the inside wall will be taken down, one by one, and set up again on the ground. The top section will be made into a radio station, so that we can make accurate measurements of our orbit and also study meteorological conditions. The next section below that will be a chemistry laboratory. The one below that will be a hospital, if we need it. The next three will be store-rooms, and we will turn the last section into a machine-shop. The steel on the outside hull will be our mineral source for the time being, and out of it we will make the things we need until it is exhausted.”
His eyes twinkled. “I had anticipated we might have a great deal of trouble in finding a source of iron ore and in mining it, but I dare say that some of the meteorites which fell here last night will not have buried themselves very deeply, so that we may have many tons of first-rate metal at our disposal when we need it.”
“An ill wind,” Eliot James said. “Still, I hate to think of the Ark being torn down. I had imagined we would go hunting for the others in it.”
Tony spoke. “I’d been thinking about that. It seems to me that if anybody had reached here, we would have heard some kind of signal from them by now.”
“I agree with you,” said Hendron.
“And when I thought about looking for them, it seemed darned difficult. After all, Bronson Beta has an area of more than five hundred million square kilometers, and any one of those five hundred million would be big enough to hide a ship like the Ark. Besides, we don’t even know where the land is, except in a general way.”
“I’ve got maps made for telescopic photographs,” Eve said, “but they’re not very good. Bronson Beta was mighty hard to observe—first with its atmosphere thawing, then its water. You could get a peek through the perpetual clouds at a little chunk of water or a small area of land now and again, but all the photographs I collected don’t give a very good idea of its geography.” She reached in her pocket and took out a piece of paper. “Here is a rough sketch I made of the East and West hemisphere; it isn’t very good cartography, but it will give you some idea of what little we do know of the planet’s surface.”
They bent over the map for a few moments. Hendron said: “It would be like looking for a haystack on a continent, so that you could look for a needle in the haystack when you found it.”
“And besides,” Tony continued, “you might go over the place, where the people you were looking for were, at night, and in that case your jets would completely annihilate them.”
Cole Hendron’s face showed amazement. Then he said:
“By George, Tony, you’re quite right! And do you know that although I spent a lot of time thinking about looking for other human beings here, and although I originally considered we would probably make long excursions in the Ark until I realized it would be more sensible to take it down at once, it never occurred to me for an instant that our jets would be dangerous to anybody underneath, even in spite of the fact that I used it to wipe out that army of hoodlums that attacked us. It just goes to show what you may omit when you think. Still, I am of the opinion that we arrived here alone out of all the expeditions. If our crops fail us entirely because of too much heat, or because it gets cold too soon, or for reasons we cannot anticipate now—” He paused.
“Twenty-five or thirty of us might get through the winter on the provisions I’ve brought. But all of us couldn’t.”
With the injection of that grim thought into their breakfast conversation, the meal was brought to an end.
“It therefore behooves me,” Tony said, “to look for farm lands, and get some sort of crops in.”
Half an hour later Tony started out with Higgins. Tony carried a knapsack in which there was food enough for two days for both of them. He also carried a pair of blankets and a revolver. He had objected to the revolver, as it had been his wish to appear in complete possession of himself. Reason argued that there would be no phenomenon on the new planet which might make firearms useful, but imagination made the possession of a gun a great comfort, and Hendron had insisted he take it.
As the two men started, the sound of hammering was already audible inside the Ark, and most of the members of the company were engaged in useful work.
A few watched their start. Tony reached into his pocket and took out a quarter. “I’ve carried this from Earth,” he said to Higgins, “for just such emergencies. Heads we go inland; tails we go along the coast.”
The coin landed with the eagle up. Tony flipped it again, saying as it spun in the air: “Heads we go north, tails we go south.” Again the eagle. Tony pointed toward the coastline and said: “Forward.”
The people who were seeing them off waved and called: “Good luck!”
“You’ll have to abandon your botanical pursuits, I’m afraid,” Tony said to the elderly scientist. “I usually hit a pretty fast pace. If I go too fast, let me know.”
“Very well,” Higgins said, and he chuckled dryly. “But I’d like to tell you, young man, that I’ve spent three sabbatical years climbing mountains in Tibet and Switzerland and the Canadian Northwest, and I dare say I’ll be able to keep up with you.”
Tony glanced at the scrawny, pedagogical little man at his side, and once more he felt almost reverent toward Hendron. Who would have thought that this student of plants, this desiccated college professor, was also a mountain-climber? Yet, since a plant biologist of the highest capabilities was essential to the company of the Ark, how much better it was to take a man who not only knew his subject magnificently, but who also could scale rugged peaks!
For an hour they walked along the bluff that faced the sea—a continuation of the landscape upon which the Ark had landed. It was rocky and barren, except for such ferns and mosses as they had already observed. Of dead vegetation there seemed to be nothing which had grown as large as a tree or indeed even a bush. The whole area appeared to have been what on earth would have been called a moor—though Higgins could recall no earthly moor of this character or evident extent. The ground inland was a plateau ranged with low hills, and in the remote distance the tops of a mountain-range could be seen.
At the end of an hour they saw ahead of them an arm of hills that ran at right angles down to the ocean and extended out in a long rocky promontory. At the foot of the promontory was a cove, and in the cove were beaches. They climbed to the highest near-by elevation and surveyed the arid, rock-strewn plateau.
“I don’t believe,” said Tony, “that there is any farm land in this area.”
Higgins shook his head. “I think if we can find a place to get down over the cliff to the edge, we can go around that point at water level.”
They continued along a little way, and presently Higgins pointed to a “chimney” in the precipice. He looked at Tony with a twinkle in his eyes. “How about it?”
Tony stared into the narrow slit in the rock. It was almost perpendicular, and only the smallest cracks and outcroppings afforded footholds and handholds. He was on the point of suggesting that they find a more suitable place to descend, when he realized that the older man was laughing at him.
Tony set his jaw. “Fine!”
Higgins started down the chimney. He had not let himself over the edge before it was apparent that he was not only a skillful climber, but a man of considerable wiry strength.
Tony had always felt an instinctive alarm in high places, and he had no desire for the task ahead of him. Perspiration oozed from him, and his muscles quivered, as he lowered himself into position for the descent. It was ticklish, dangerous work. Two hundred feet below them lay a heap of jagged rocks, and around that the beach. Tony did not dare look down, and yet it was necessary to look for places to put his feet; and from the corner of his eye he was continually catching glimpses of the depth of the abyss below. His composure was by no means
increased when the Professor below him called: “Maybe I should have gone last, because if you fall where you are now, you’ll probably knock me off.”
Tony said nothing. Twenty minutes later, however, he felt horizontal ground under his feet. He was standing on the beach. He was covered with perspiration; his clothes were soaked. His face was white. He looked up at the precipice which they had descended; and he said, with his best possible assumption of carelessness: “I thought that was going to be difficult. There was nothing to it.”
The Professor gave him a resounding clap on the back. “My boy,” he exclaimed, “you’re all right! That was one of the nastiest little jobs I’ve ever undertaken.”
There was sand under their feet now, and they slogged through it up to the end of the promontory, where the sea rolled in and broke in noisy gusts.
They walked around it. Before them was a vast valley. It stretched two miles or more to another series of hills. It disappeared inland toward the high mountains, and down its center meandered a wide, slow river.
Tony and Higgins stared at the scene and then at each other. The whole valley was covered with new, bright green, where fresh vegetation had carpeted the soil!
They ran, side by side, out upon the expanse of knee-deep verdure until they arrived, panting, at the river’s edge. The water was cold and clouded. After they had regarded it, they turned their heads in unison toward the distant range; for they realized that this, the first river to be discovered on Bronson Beta, was the product of glaciers in the high mountains. Higgins stepped back from the bank a moment later, and pulled up a number of mosses and ferns, until he had cleared a little area of ground in which he began to dig with his hands. The soil was black and loamy, alluvial and rich. He beckoned Tony to look at it. They knew then that their mission had been fulfilled; for here, not more than half a dozen miles from the Ark, along the valley of this river, was as fine a farm land as could be found anywhere on the old Earth. Here too water would be available for irrigation, if no rains fell.