After Worlds Collide

by Philip Wylie

  Then, quite abruptly, he came to.

  He looked at them. He looked at the sleeping forms around him. He squinted toward the field, and saw what was there. He rubbed his head and winced.

  “Aches,” he said. “Aches like sin. You—you came back in time, eh?”

  “We laid for them,” Tony answered solemnly. “We got them.”

  “All of them,” Jack Taylor added.

  Dodson pointed at the sleepers. “Dead?”

  “All beathing. We wanted to get you around first—if anybody could be revived.”

  Dodson’s head slumped and then he sat up again. “Right. What’d you use?”

  “I gave you a shot of caffeine and strychnine and digitalis about an hour ago,” Vanderbilt said.

  Dodson grinned feebly. “Wake the dead, eh? Adrenalin might be better. Di-nitro-phenol might help. I’ve got a clue to this stuff. Last thing I thought of.” He looked at the sky. “It just rained down on us—out of nothing.”

  “Rained?” Tony repeated.

  “Yes. Rained—a falling mist. The people it touched never saw or smelled it—went out too fast. But I did both. Inside—we had a minute’s grace.” He struggled and finally rose to his feet. “Obviously something to knock us out. Nothing fatal. Let’s see what we can do about rousing somebody else. Probably’d sleep it off in time—a day, maybe. I want to make some tests.”

  He was very feeble as he rose, and they supported him.

  “I’ll put a shot in Runciman and Best and Isaacs first, I guess. They can help with the others.” Tony located Runciman, the brain-specialist. Dodson made a thorough examination of the man. “In good shape. Make a fine anesthetic—except for the headache.” He filled a hypodermic syringe, then methodically swabbed the surgeon’s arm with alcohol, squeezed out a drop of fluid to be sure no air was in the instrument, and pricked deftly. They moved on, looking for Best and Isaacs.

  As they worked, Dodson’s violent headache began to be dissipated. And the persons they treated presently commenced to writhe and mutter.

  Hendron was among the first after the medical men. Dodson lingered over him and shook his head.

  “Heart’s laboring—bad condition, anyway. I’m afraid—”

  Vanderbilt and Taylor and Tony knew what Dodson feared.

  In two hours a number of pale and miserable human beings were moving uncertainly around the camp. Best entered the Ark and brought other drugs to alleviate their discomfort. Tony had sent a warning to the southern camp. They replied that they had seen nothing, and were safe.

  The three men who were heroes of the raid went together to the landing-field. They walked from place to place examining the wreckage. They collected a host of trifles—buttons, a notebook, a fountain pen made in Germany, a pistol half melted, part of a man’s coat, fire-warped pfennig pieces—and found more grisly items which they did not touch.

  After they had made their telltale harvest among the still-hot débris, they stood together staring toward the northwest. An expedition in that direction would be necessary at once. It would not be a safe voyage.

  CHAPTER XI

  “TONY, I THROW THE TORCH TO YOU!”

  NIGHT came on with its long, deliberate twilight; and with this night came cold.

  The sentinels outside stood in little groups together, listening, and watching the sky. No lights showed. Wherever they were necessary within the offices and dwellings of the camp, they were screened or covered. The encampment could not risk an air-attack by night.

  Tony found himself continued in command; for Hendron held to his bed and made no attempt to give directions. Ransdell was quite himself again, but like all the others but Tony and Tayor and Vanderbilt, he had lain insensible through the attack and the savage, successful defense the three had made.

  Everybody came to Tony for advice and orders. Eve, like all the rest, put herself under his direction.

  “You’d better stay with your father,” Tony said to her. “Keep him quiet as you can. Tell him I’ll keep him informed of further developments; but I really expect no more to-night.”

  Eve disappeared into the darkness which was all but complete. In the north, toward Bronson Beta’s pole, hung a faint aurora, and above it shone some stars; but most of the sky was obscured. There was no moon, of course. Strange, still to expect the moon—a moon gone “with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.”

  Another girl joined the group of men standing and shivering near the great cannon-like tube aimed heavenward.

  “Anything stirring?” asked Shirley Cotton’s voice.

  “Not now,” replied Tony.

  “It’s cold,” said Shirley. “It’s surely coming on cold, these nights.”

  “Nothing to what it will be,” observed a man’s voice gloomily. It was Williamson, who had been insensible all through the fight, like the rest of the camp. Now he had completely recovered, but his spirits, like those of many of the others, seemed low.

  “How cold will it be—soon?” asked Shirley.

  “Do you want to know?” Williamson challenged. “Or are you just asking?”

  “I’ve heard,” said Shirley, taking no offense, “an awful lot of things. I know we’re going out toward Mars. But how cold is it out there?”

  “That’s been figured out a long time,” Williamson returned. “They taught that back in school on earth. The surface temperature of a planet like the earth at sixty-seven millions miles’ distance from the sun—the distance of Venus—would be one hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit. The mean temperature of the earth, at ninety-three million miles from the sun—where we used to be—was sixty degrees. The mean temperature of the earth, if it were a hundred and forty-one million miles from the sun—the distance of Mars—would be minus thirty-eight—thirty-eight degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.

  “The earth went round the sun almost in a circle—it never got nearer to the sun than ninety-one million miles, and never got farther away than about ninety-four million; so our temperatures there never varied, by season, beyond comfortable limits for most of the surface of the earth.

  “But riding this planet, we aren’t going around the sun in any such circle; our orbit now is an ellipse, with the sun in a focus but not in the center. So we’ll have a very hot summer when we go close to Venus, where the surface temperature averages a hundred and fifty-one; but before we get that summer, we go into winter out by Mars where normal temperatures average about forty below zero—a hundred degrees less than we’re used to. We’re headed there now.”

  “Didn’t—didn’t they know that, too?” Shirley gestured a white-clad arm toward the landing-field where the attackers of the camp had been annihilated.

  “They must have.”

  “Then why—why—”

  Peter Vanderbilt’s urbane voice finished for her: “Why didn’t they spend the last of the good weather trying to capture or kill us? Because they also came from that pugnacious planet Earth.”

  The reality of what had happened, while they were sunk in stupor, still puzzled some of Hendron’s people.

  “Why weren’t they content to let us alone? There’s room enough on Bronson Beta.… Good God! Imagine two groups of human beings as stranded as ourselves, as forlorn in the universe, as needful of peace and coöperation—fighting!”

  “Men never fought for room,” Walters, a biologist, objected. “That was just an excuse they gave when civilization advanced to the point when men felt they ought to give explanations for fighting. There surely was plenty of room in the North American continent in pre-Columbian times, with a total population of perhaps three million Indians in all the continent north of Mexico; but the principal occupation—or pastime or whatever you call it—was war. One tribe would sneak a hundred miles through empty forest to attack another. It wasn’t room that men wanted in ancient America—or in medieval Europe, for that matter.”

  “What was it, then?” asked Shirley.

  “Domination!” said Walters. “It’s an essentially human
instinct—the fundamental one which sets man off from all other animals. Did you ever know of any other creature which, by nature, has to dominate? Not even the king of the beasts, the lion. To realize how much more ruthless men are than lions were, imagine a man with the physical equipment of a lion, among other beasts, and imagine him letting all the weaker ones go their own way and killing only what he needed for food.

  “You might imagine one lion-man doing that, but you couldn’t imagine all lion-men so restrained. You know they would have cleaned up the neighborhood, just to show they could, and then fought among themselves to the finish of many of them.

  “That is the nature we brought with us from the world; it is too much to expect it to desert us all here. It couldn’t; it didn’t.”

  “That’s certainly clear,” Williamson agreed.

  “That element in our nature,” the biologist proceeded, “scarcely had opportunity to reassert itself because of our difficulties in merely maintaining ourselves. The enemy—the party that attacked us—solved their difficulties, evidently, by moving into one of the Other People’s cities. From what Tony told us of the city he examined, their city probably supplied them with everything they lacked, and with more equipment and appliances of various sorts than they dreamed existed.

  “They found themselves with nothing to do; they found already built for them dwellings, offices and palaces; they found machinery—even substances for food. They were first in possession of the amazing powers of the original people of this planet. They learned of our presence, and decided to dominate us.

  “I have come to believe that probably they would not have killed us; but they wanted us all under their control.”

  Eve returned to the group. She did not speak, and in the dim light of the stars she was indistinguishable from the other girls; yet Tony knew, as she approached him, that it was Eve.

  She halted a few steps away, and he went to her.

  “Father asks for you, Tony,” she said in a voice so constrained that he prickled with fear.

  “He’s weaker?” said Tony.

  “Come and see,” she whispered; and he seized her hand, and she his at the same time, and together through the dark they went to the cabin where lay the stricken leader.

  A cloth covered the doorway so when the door opened it let out no shaft of light to betray the camp to any hovering airman of the enemy. Tony closed the door behind him and Eve, thrust aside the cloth and faced Hendron, who was seated upright in bed, his hair white as the cover of his pillow.

  His eyes, large and restless, gazed at his daughter and at his lieutenant; and his thin white hands plucked at the blanket over him.

  “Have they come again, Tony?” he challenged. “Have they come again?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Those that came, they are all dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And none of us?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Arm some of yourselves unto the war, Tony.”

  “What, sir?”

  “‘Arm some of yourselves unto the war,’ Tony! ‘For the Lord spake unto Moses, saying:

  “‘Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites; afterwards shalt thou be gathered unto thy people.

  “‘And Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites.’

  “How many of the Midianites have you slain, Tony?”

  “More than fifty, sir,” said Tony.

  “There might be five hundred more. We don’t know the size of their ship; we don’t know how many came. It’s clear they have taken possession of one of the cities of the Other People.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then we must move into another. You must lead my people into the city you found, Tony—the city I shall never see.”

  “You shall see it, sir!” Tony cried.

  “Don’t speak to me as if to a child!” Hendron rebuked him. “I know better. I shall see the city; but I shall never enter it. I am like Moses, Tony; I can lead you to the wilderness of this world, but not to its promised places. Do you remember your Bible, Tony? Or did you never learn it?

  “I learned whole chapters of it, Tony, when I was a boy, nearly sixty years ago, in a little white house beside a little white church in Iowa. My father was a minister. So I knew the fate of the leader.

  “‘And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, thy days approach that thou must die: call Joshua’—that is you, Tony—‘and present yourselves, that I may give him a charge.

  “‘Charge Joshua and encourage him, and strengthen him; for he shall go over before this people, and he shall cause them to inherit the land which thou shalt see.’ Joshua—my Joshua, Tony, we must move, move, move to-night. Move into one of their cities. ‘Thou art to pass over Jordan this day,’ Tony, ‘to cities great and fenced up to heaven.’”

  Hendron stopped speaking and fell back on his pillow. His eyes closed.

  “Yes, sir,” Tony said softly.

  “The cities I shall never see!” Hendron murmured with infinite regret.

  “But, Father—” Eve whispered.

  The old man leaned forward again. “Go, Tony! I throw the torch to you. Your place is the place I occupied. Lead my people. Fight! Live! Become glorious!”

  “You’d better leave,” Eve said. “I’ll watch here.”

  Tony went out into the darkness. He whispered to a few people whom he encountered.

  Presently he stood inside the circular room that was all that remained of the Ark. No vent or porthole allowed light to filter into the cold and black night. With him were Ransdell and Vanderbilt and Jack Taylor, Dodson and Williamson, Shirley Cotton and Von Beitz, and many others.

  Tony stood in front of them: “We’re going to embark for one of the Other People’s cities—at once. The night is long, fortunately—”

  Williamson, who had once openly suggested that Tony should not become their leader, and who had welcomed the reappearance of Ransdell, now spoke dubiously.

  “I’m not in favor of that policy. We have the blast tubes—”

  “I cannot question it,” Tony answered. “Hendron decided.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?”

  There was silence in the room. Tony looked from face to face. His own countenance was stone-like. His eyes stopped on the eyes of Ransdell. His voice was low.

  “Hendron turned over the command to me.”

  “Great!” Ransdell was the first to grasp Tony’s hand. “I’m in no shape for the responsibility like that I had for a while.”

  Tony looked at him with gratitude burning in his eyes.

  “Orders, then?” Ransdell asked, grinning.

  That was better for Tony; action was his forte in life. He pulled a map from his pocket.

  “Copy of the globe James and I found in the Other People’s city,” he said.

  They crowded around it: a rough projection of imaginary parallels and meridians marked two circles.

  “Here,” said Tony, pointing with a pencil, “is where we are. To the south, Ransdell’s camp. West, the city we explored. The Midianites—” He smiled. “That’s Hendron’s term for the Asiatics and Japs and Germans; it comes from the Bible—the Midianites are camped somewhere to the northwest. You note a city at this point. They doubtless occupy that city. Now—”

  His pencil moved south and west of the position where they were camped. “You see that there’s another city here. It’s west of a line between here and Ransdell’s camp, and about equidistant from both. I suggest we go to that city—to-night, by the Other People’s road—and occupy it. The distance can’t be too great. We’ll use the tractors.”

  He then addressed those who could not see the map: “Imagine that we are camped in New York, Ransdell in Washington, the Midianites in Utica—then this other city is about fifty miles west of where Philadelphia would be, while the city James and I explored is say a hundred miles north of Pittsburgh. That’s about correct.”

  “
We’ll move?” Vanderbilt asked. “Everything?”

  “No. People—necessities. Come back for the rest.”

  Williamson stepped forward. “Congratulate you, Tony. Glad.”

  Others congratulated Tony. Then he began to issue orders.

  The exiles from earth prepared to march at last from the wilderness. They prepared hastily and in the dark. Around them in the impenetrable night were the alarms of danger. They hurried, packing their private goods, loading them onto the lumber-trucks, and gathering together food-supplies and those items of equipment and apparatus most valuable to the hearts of the scientific men who composed the personnel.

  An hour after issuing his orders, Tony stepped into Hendron’s house. Eve was there.

  “How is he?”

  She shook her head. “Delirious.”

  Tony stared at the girl. “I wonder—”

  She seized his hand. “I’m glad you said that!”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps because I’m half-hysterical with fatigue and anxiety. Perhaps because I want to justify him. But possibly because I believe—”

  “In God?”

  “In some kind of God.”

  “I do also, Eve. Have your father ready in half an hour.”

  “It’ll be dangerous to move him.”

  “I know—”

  Their voices had unconsciously risen—and now from the other room came the voice of Hendron: “‘And ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.’”

  They whispered then. “I’ll have him ready,” Eve said.

  “Right. I’m going out again.”

  “Tony!” It was Hendron again. “I know you are there! Hurry them. For surely the Midianites are preparing against you.”

  “Yes, Cole. We’ll go soon.”

  In the night and the cold again, Tony looked toward the aurora-veiled stars, as if he expected almost to catch sight of God there. To his ears came the subdued clatter of the preparation for departure.

  Vanderbilt called him, called softly. It was perhaps foolish to try to be quiet as well as to work in the dark—but the darkness somehow gave rise to an impulse toward the stealth.