After Worlds Collide

by Philip Wylie

  This flashed through his mind; but he did not believe it. He believed that the Death so visible below was a result of an attack.

  He looked at his companions, and read the same conviction in their faces. He pointed toward the earth, and raised his eyebrows in a question he could not make audible above a spurt from the plane’s jets.

  Taylor shook his head negatively. The people below them were dead. Descent would doubtless mean their own death.

  Vanderbilt shrugged and gestured to Tony, as if to say that the decision was up to him.

  Tony cut the propulsive stream and slid down the air in sudden quiet. “Well?”

  “Maybe we should take a look,” said Vanderbilt.

  “What got them,” Taylor said slowly, “will get us. We’d better take back a warning to the other camp.”

  Tony felt the responsibility of deciding. Ransdell was down there—dead. And Eve?

  He lost altitude and turned on power as he reached the edge of the landing-field.

  Neither of his companions had been in the Hendron encampment; but this was no time for attention to the equipment of the place. The plane bumped to a stop and rested in silence.

  No one appeared from the direction of the camp. Nothing in sight there stirred. There was a bit of breeze blowing, and a speck of cloth flapped; but its motion was utterly meaningless. It was the wind fluttering a cloak or a cape of some one who was dead.

  Tony put his hand on the lever that opened the hood of the cockpit.

  “I’ll yank it open and jump out. Looks like gas. Slam it after I go, and see what happens to me.”

  Either of his companions would have undertaken that terrifying assignment—would have insisted upon undertaking it; but Tony put his words into execution before they could speak. The hatch grated open. Tony leaped out on the fuselage; there was a clang, and almost none of the outer air had entered the plane.

  Taylor’s knuckles on the hatch-handle were white.

  Vanderbilt peered through the glass at Tony, his face unmoving. But he whispered, “Guts!” as if to himself.

  Tony slipped to earth. The two men watching expected at any moment to see him stagger or shudder or fall writhing to the earth. But he did not. There was no fright on his face—his expression was locked and blank. He sweated. He sniffed in the air cautiously after expelling the breath he had held. Then he drew in a lungful, deeply, courageously. A light wind from the sea beyond the cliffs fanned him. He stood still—waiting, presumably, to die. He looked at the two men who were watching him, and hunched his shoulders as if to say that nothing had happened so far.

  A minute passed.

  The men inside the plane sat tensely. Taylor was panting.

  Two minutes.… Five. Tony stood and breathed and shrugged again.

  “Gas or no gas,” Taylor said with an almost furious expression, “I’m going out there with Tony.”

  He went.

  Vanderbilt followed in a manner both leisurely and calm.

  The three stood outside together watching each other for effects, each waiting for some spasm of illness to attack himself.

  “Doesn’t seem to be gas,” said Tony.

  “What, then?” asked Taylor.

  “Who knows? Some plague from the Other People? Some death-wave from the sky? Let’s look at them.”

  The first person they approached, as they went slowly toward the camp and its motionless figures, was Jeremiah Post, the metallurgist. He it was, Tony remembered, who first was affected by the illness that followed the finding of the Other People’s car. There was no proof that Post was the first to have been affected by this prostration. They happened upon him first; that was all.

  The metallurgist lay on his side with his arms over his head. There was no blood or mark of violence upon him.

  “Not wounded, anyway,” Vanderbilt muttered.

  Taylor turned him over; and all three men started. Post’s breast heaved.

  “Good God!” Tony knelt beside him and opened his shirt. “Breathing! Heart’s beating—regularly. He’s—”

  “Only unconscious!” Taylor exclaimed.

  “I was going to say,” Tony replied, “it’s as if he was drugged.”

  “Or like anesthesia,” observed Vanderbilt.

  “Is he coming out of it?”

  “He’s far under now,” Vanderbilt commented. “If he’s been further under, who can say?”

  “Let’s look at the next!”

  Near by lay two women; the three men examined them together. They were limp like Jeremiah Post, and like him, lying in a strange, profound stupor—like anesthesia, as Vanderbilt had said. The sleep of one of them seemed, somehow, less deep than that which held Post insensible; but neither of the women could be roused from it more than he.

  “Feel anything funny yourself?” Tony challenged Taylor across the form of the girl over whom they worked.

  “No; do you?”

  “No.… It was gas, I believe; but now it’s dissipated—but left its effect on everybody that breathed it.”

  “Gas,” said Vanderbilt calmly, “from where?”

  Tony’s mind flamed with the warning of Kyto’s words. A third Ark from the earth had reached Bonson Beta bearing a band of fanatic, ruthless men who would have the planet for their own, completely. They had brought with them some women, but they wished for many more in order to populate it with children of their own bodies and of their own fanatic faiths. These men already had obtained the Lark planes of the Other People, and mastered the secrets of their operation. These men long ago had entered some other Sealed City and had begun an exploration into the science of Dead People. Perhaps they had found some fomula for a gas that stupefied, but was harmless otherwise.

  Their plan and their purpose, then, would be plain. They would spread the gas and render Hendron’s people helpless; then they would return to the camp and control it, doing whatever they wished with the people, as they awoke.

  Tony scanned the sky, the surrounding hills. There was nothing in sight.

  Yet he leaped up. “Peter! Jack! They’ll be coming back! We’ll be ready for them!”

  “Who? Who are they?”

  “The men who did this! Come on!”

  “Where?”

  “To the tubes!” And Tony pointed to them, aimed like cannon into the air—the huge propulsion-tubes from the Ark, which Hendron and he had mounted on their swivels at the edges of the camp. From them could be shot into the air the awful blast that had propelled the Ark through space, and which melted every metal except the single substance with which they were lined.

  The nearest of these engines of flight, so expediently made into machines of defense, was a couple of hundred yards away; and now as the three made hastily for it, they noticed a grouping of the limp, unconscious forms that told its own significant story.

  Several of the men seemed to have been on the way to the great tube when they had collapsed.

  “You see?” gasped Tony; for the three now were running. “It was an attack! They saw it, and tried to get the tube going!”

  Two men, indeed, lay almost below the tube. Tony stared down at them as his hands moved the controls, and felt them in order.

  “Dead?” Tony asked of Taylor, who bent over the men.

  Jack shook his head. “Nobody’s dead. They’re all the same—they’re sleeping.”

  “Do you see Dodson? Have you seen Dodson anywhere?”

  “No; you want Dodson, especially?”

  “He might be able to tell us what to do.”

  Tony threw a switch, and a faint corona glowed along a heavy cable. The air crackled softly. “Our power-station’s working,” he said with satisfaction. “We can give this tube the ‘gun’ when we want to. You know how to give it the gun, Peter?”

  “I know,” said Vanderbilt calmly.

  “Then you stand by; and give it the gun, if anything appears overhead! Jack, see what you can do with that tube!” Tony pointed to the north corner of the camp. “I’ll loo
k over some more of the people; and see what happened to Hendron—and Eve—and Ransdell and Dodson. Dodson’s the one to help us, if we can bring him to.”

  He had caught command again—command over himself and his companions; Taylor already was obeying him; and Vanderbilt took his place at the tube.

  Tony moved back into the camp alone. At his feet lay men and girls and women motionless, sightless, deaf—utterly insensible in their stupor. He could do nothing for them but recognize them; and he went, bending over them, whispering their names to himself and to them, as if by his whispering he might exorcise away this sleep.

  He repeated to himself Eve’s name; but he did not find Eve. Where was she, and how? Had this sleep dropped into death for some? He wanted to find Eve, to assure himself that she at least breathed as did these others; but he realized that he should first of all locate Dodson.… Dodson, if he could be aroused, would be worth a thousand laymen. Then he recollected that he had last seen Dodson in Hendron’s dwelling.

  Tony rushed to it and flung open the door; but what lay beyond it halted him.

  He found Eve. She lay where she had fallen, face forward on the desk; and Ransdell lay slumped beside her. His left hand clasped her right hand; they had been overcome together. Both of them breathed slowly; but they were completely insensible. Dodson had crumpled over a table. There was a pen in his hand, a paper in front of him. Cloth—Tony saw that the cloth was from dresses—had been stuffed around the door. In a bedroom lay Hendron, the rise and fall of his chest almost imperceptible. Tony shook Dodson.

  Suddenly he realized that his head was spinning.

  He plunged to the door and staggered into the fresh air. He breathed hard. But his head cleared so slowly that his thoughts ran slow as minutes. Gas, after all. The people in Hendron’s house had seen it strike the others, and attempted to barricade themselves. They thought it was death. There were still fumes in there.

  Dodson—he must get Dodson.

  He ran back, and dragged the huge man into the open.

  He stood over him, panting. Then he remembered that Dodson had been writing. A note—a record. Tony went for it. So strong had been the poison in the air that he found it hard to read.

  “We’ve been gassed,” Dodson had scrawled. “People falling everywhere. No attack visible. We’re going to try to seal this room. They’re all unconscious out there. I got a smell of it, closing a window. Nothing familiar. I think—”

  Tony shook Dodson. He brought water and doused him. He found Dodson’s medical kit and tried to make him swallow aromatic spirits of ammonia, then whisky. Dodson could not swallow.

  Tony jerked about, as he heard some one move. It was Vanderbilt, who had left his post at the tube.

  “Nothing’s in sight out there,” Vanderbilt said calmly. “Taylor stays on watch. I ought to be more use in here.”

  “What can you do?” Tony demanded.

  “I’m two-thirds of a doctor—for first aid, anyway,” Vanderbilt said. “I used to spend a lot of time at hospitals. Morbid, maybe.” While he spoke his slow, casual words, he had taken Dodson’s kit and had been working over the physician.… “I gave him a hypo of caffeine and strychnine and digitalis that would have roused a dead elephant. He’s still out, though.”

  “Will any of them come to?”

  “Only one thing will tell.”

  “What?”

  “Time, of course,” Peter Vanderbilt said. “Then, if it proves my treatment may have helped Dodson,—and not killed him,—we might try it on others.”

  Tony bent again over Eve and Ransdell; their respirations and their pulses seemed the same; and Hendron’s, though much weaker than theirs, had not further deteriorated.

  “They don’t seem to be slipping,” Tony said.

  “No. Anything in sight outside?”

  “No,” said Tony, but he went out for a better inspection, and for another patrol past those that lay senseless on the ground.

  He returned to Peter Vanderbilt and waited with him. They pulled Dodson and Eve and Ransdell out into the open air and laid them on the ground; they carried out Hendron too, and stretched him upon his mattress in the breeze and the sunlight.

  Nothing remained to do; so they sat watching the forms that breathed but otherwise did not move, and watching the sky. Three hundred yards away, Jack Taylor stood at his tube watching them and the sky, and the scattered, senseless, sleeping people.

  “Our other camp!” said Vanderbilt. “What do you suppose is happening there?”

  “I’ve been thinking of that, of course,” said Tony. “We ought to warn them by radio; but if we did, we’d warn the enemy too. He’s listening in, we may be sure; he’d know we were laying for him here; our chance to surprise him would be gone. No; I think our best plan is to lie low.”

  Vanderbilt nodded thoughtfully. “I agree. In all likelihood our enemy is taking on only one of our camps at a time. Having started here, he’ll probably finish here before beginning on the other.”

  “We’ve no idea what forces they have.”

  “No.”

  “There might be enough to take on both our camps at once.”

  “Yes.”

  Tony and Peter Vanderbilt moved toward their radio-station; and they were debating there what to do, when their dilemma was solved for them: The sound of a plane came dimly to his ears. Both stepped out of the radio-room and lay down on the ground where vision in every direction was unhampered. Tony saw Taylor slumping into an attitude of unconsciousness.

  Then his eye caught the glint of the plane. A speck far away. He lay motionless, like the others, and the speck rapidly enlarged.

  It was one of the Bronson Betan ships. It flew fast and with a purring roar which was caused not by its motor but by the sound of its propellers thwacking the air.

  It came low, slowed down, circled.

  Tony’s heart banged as he saw that one of the faces peering over was broad, bearded, strongly Slavic. Another of its occupants had close-cropped hair and spectacles. The slip-stream of the plane fanned him furiously and raised dust around him. People from earth! They completed their inspection, and rushed out of sight toward the northwest.

  Tony and Vanderbilt jumped up and ran toward Jack Taylor. The three men met for a frantic moment. “They’ll be back.” Tony shook with rage. “The swine! They’ll be back to take over this camp. I wonder if they’d kill the men. We’ll be ready. I’ll take the west tube. Wait till they’re all here. Wait till the first ship lands—I can rake hell out of that field. Then get ’em all! We can’t fool. We can’t do anything else.”

  They went to their positions again.

  An hour later a large armada flew from the northwest. They did not fly in formation, like battle-planes. Their maneuvers were not overskillful. Some of the ships were even flown badly, as if their pilots were not well versed in their manipulation.

  Tony counted. There were seventeen ships—and some of them were very large.

  The three defenders acted on a prearranged plan: They did not follow the fleet with their tubes. They did not even move them from their original angles. They could be swung fast enough. They hid themselves carefully.

  The ship circled the camp and the unconscious victims beneath. Then the leading ship prepared to land.

  Tony fired his tube. The crackling sound rose as the blast began.

  The enemy plane was almost on the ground. He could see lines of rivets in its bright metal body. He could see, through a small peephole, the taut face of the pilot. The wheels touched.

  Tony heaved, and the counter-balanced weapon described an arc. There was a noise like the opening of a door to hell. The landing-field became a volcano. The plane vanished in a blistering, tumultuous core of light. The beam swung up, left the ground instantaneously molten.

  It curved along the air, and broken and molten things dropped from the sky. Into that armada probed two other orange fingers of annihilation; and it melted, dissolved, vanished.

  It was not a
fair fight.… It was not a fight.

  The blasts yawed wide. They were fed by the horrible energy which had carried the Ark through space. Their voices shook the earth. They were more terrible than death itself, more majestic than lightning or volcanic eruption. They were forces stolen from the awful center of the sun itself.

  In less than a minutes they were stilled. The enemy was no more.

  Tony did not run, now. He walked back to the center of the camp. There he met Vanderbilt and Taylor.

  No one spoke; they sat down, white, trembling, horrified.

  Around them lay their unconscious comrades.

  Here and there on the ground over and beyond the landing-place, great fragments of twisted metal glowed and blistered.

  The sun shone. It warmed them from the green-blue sky of Bronson Beta.

  Jack Taylor, student, oarsman, not long ago a carefree college boy—Jack Taylor sucked in a tremulous breath and whispered: “God! Oh, God!”

  Vanderbilt rose and smiled a ghastly smile. He took a battered package of cigarettes from his pocket—tenderly, and as if he touched something rare and valuable. They knew he had been cherishing those cigarettes. He opened the package; four cigarettes were left. He passed them. He found a match, and they smoked. Still they did not speak.

  They looked at the people who lay where they had fallen—the people who had come through that hideous destruction without being aware of it.

  One of those people moved. It was Dodson.

  They rushed to his side.

  Dodson was stirring and mumbling. Vanderbilt opened his medical kit again and poured something into a cup. Tony held the Doctor’s head. After several attempts, they managed to make him swallow the stuff.

  He began a long, painful struggle toward consciousness. He would open his eyes, and nod and mutter, and go off to sleep for an instant, only to jerk and writhe and try to sit. Finally his fuddled voice enunciated Tony’s name. “Drake!” he said. “Gas!” Then a meaningless jumble of syllables. Then “Caffeine! Stick it in me. Gimme pills. Caffalooaloclooaloo. Gas. Rum, rum, rum, rum, rum—headache. I’m sick.”