After Worlds Collide

by Philip Wylie

  Tony found himself alone in the great council-chamber. Now and then some one else arrived to report; but all reports, which had to do with the search for Von Beitz and for the unknown people who might have captured him, were negative. The couriers returned to their exploring squads; and the others scattered in their wondering examination of the marvels of the city.

  There proved to be eight gates to this city, and four great central highways which met and crossed in the Place before the Hall of the Sciences, in which Hendron lay, and before also the splendid structure housing the council-chamber.

  From right to left, before the Hall, ran a wide roadway, and another equally splendid cut across it at right angles, while obliquely, so that seen from above they must have made a pattern like the Cross of St. George, were two other highways only slightly less majestic. Each of these roads ran straight to the edge of the city, where the huge transparent dome joined the ground; at the eight points where these four roads penetrated were the gates; and at each of these gates stood a squad on watch.

  High toward the top of the dome, on towers attained by arduous climbing, others of the men whom Hendron had brought from earth stood on watch, scanning the sky.

  Tony strode out into the sunlight of the wide square, and he halted and lifted his head in awe.

  He was in command in this city!

  He had had nothing to do with creating it. A million years, perhaps, before he was born, this city had been built; and then the light which fell upon it was from some sun to which the sun of the world—the sun which now shone upon it—was a distant twinkling star. Quadrillions and quintillions of miles of space—distances indescribable in terms that the mind could comprehend—separated this city from Tony Drake, who would not be born for a million years. But it had traveled the tremendous reaches of space after it lost its sun until it found the star—the sun—that lighted the earth! So Tony Drake to-day stood here in its central square—in command.

  He glanced up toward the orb of the sun; and he saw how small it was; and in spite of himself his shoulders jerked in a convulsive shiver.

  “Tony!”

  He heard his name, and turned. Eve had come out to the square, and she approached him, quietly and calmly.

  “We must—proceed now, Tony,” she said.

  “Proceed? Of course,” he assured her gently. He had ceased to be a commander of a city built a million years before his birth and endowed with marvels which men of his time—if they had remained on earth—might not have made for themselves for another millennium. He became again Tony Drake, recently—not three earthly years ago—a young broker in Wall Street, and friend of Eve Hendron, whose father was a scientist. On earth, Tony Drake had wanted her for his wife; here he wanted her also, and especially in her grief he longed to be her close comforter.

  “Your mind doesn’t help you much, does it, Tony?” she said.

  “At a time like this, you mean. No.”

  “I went once with Father and with a friend of his, Professor Rior, through the Pyramids, Tony—when we were back on earth.”

  “Of course,” said Tony.

  “It was before ever the Bronson Bodies were seen, Tony; when the earth seemed practically eternal. How out of fashion it had become to look to the end of the earth, Tony! Though once it was not.… I was saying that Professor Rior was showing us through the Pyramids, and he read us some of the Pyramid Texts. Did you know, Tony, that in all the Pyramid Texts the word death never occurs except in the negative, or applied to a foe? How the old Egyptians tried to defeat death by denying! Of course, the Pyramids themselves were their most tremendous attempt to deny death.”

  “Yes,” said Tony.

  “Over and over again, I remember, Tony, they declared that he, whom they put away, lived. I remember the words: ‘King Teti has not died the death; he has become a glorious one in the horizon!’ And, ‘Ho! King Unis! Thou didst not depart dead; thou didst depart living! Thou diest not!’ And ‘This King Pepi dies not; this King Pepi lives forever! This King Pepi has escaped his day of death!’

  “Tony, how pitiful those protests seemed to me to be! Yet now I myself am making them.

  “‘Men fall; their name is not,’ the Egyptian psalmist of the Pyramid Texts sang, Tony:

  “Men fall;

  Their name is not.

  Seize thou King Teti by his arm

  Take thou King Teti to the sky,

  That he die not on earth,

  Among men.”

  Tony reminded her, very gently: “Your father did not die on earth.”

  “No; he escaped to the sky, bringing us all with him.… There’s the sun. How small the sun has become, Tony.”

  “We are farther from the sun, Eve, than men of earth have ever been.”

  “But we’re going farther away, yet.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re swinging away from the sun; but they say—Father said, and so did M. Duquesne and the rest of the scientists—we shall swing back again when we have reached almost to the orbit of Mars. But shall we, Tony?”

  “Reach almost to the orbit of Mars?”

  “Shall we swing back then, I mean. Or shall we keep on out and out into the utter cold?”

  “You don’t believe your father—or Duquesne?” Tony asked.

  “Yes; I believe they believed it. Yet like the old Egyptians, they may have been declaring denials of a fact they could not face.”

  “But your father and Duquesne and the rest faced the end of the world, Eve.”

  “That’s true; but when they faced it,—and admitted it,—they already had schemed their escape, and ours. For this end, if Bronson Beta drifts out into the cold without return, there is no escape.”

  “No,” said Tony, and combated the chill within him.

  “And could they know?” Eve persisted. “They could calculate—and undoubtedly they did—that the path of this planet has become an ellipse, that it will turn back again toward the sun; but it never has turned back toward the sun, Tony. Not once! This planet appeared out of space, approached the sun and swung about it, and now is going away from the sun. That we know; and that is all we do know; the rest we can merely calculate.”

  “You mean,” questioned Tony, “that your father said something privately, during those days he was dying, to make you believe he was deceiving us?”

  “No,” said Eve. “Yet I wonder, I cannot help wondering. But if we keep on away from the sun, don’t think, Tony, I’m—”

  “What?” he demanded as she faltered and stopped.

  “Unprepared,” she said; and she recited:

  “‘Thy seats among the Gods abide; Re leans upon thee with his shoulder.

  “‘Thy odor is as their odor, thy sweat is as the sweat of the Eighteen Gods.’”

  “What’s that?” asked Tony.

  “Something else I remembered from earth, from the Pyramid Texts, Tony. “‘Sail thou with the Imperishable Stars, sail thou with the Unwearied Stars!’”

  She returned to the great Hall of Science of the men a million years dead, the hall wherein lay her father.

  Several people crossed the square, some obviously on errands, others curiously wandering. Tony returned the hails of those who spoke to him, but encouraged no one to linger with him; he remained before the great hall, alone.

  He had taken completely on faith the assurance which Hendron and Duquesne had given him, together with the rest of the people, that the path of this planet had ceased to follow the pattern of a parabola, but had become closed to an ellipse, and that therefore Bronson Beta, bearing these few Emigrants from Earth, would circle the sun. Tony still believed that; he had to believe it; but the death of Eve’s father seemed to have shaken her from such a necessity.

  He gazed about at the magnificent façades of the City of the Vanished People—his city, where he had come to the command perhaps only to die in it, with all his refugees from Earth’s doomsday, as they drifted out into the coldness and darkness of space.

  As
this strange world had done once before with its own indigenous people! Where had they gone when the deadly drift began? Where lay the last builders of Bronson Beta?

  “Hello! How’s every little thing?” said a cheerful voice at his side.

  Tony faced about, and confronted the red-haired girl whom he had met in Ransdell’s camp, and who had not been selected for the voyage from earth; her name had not been on the lists in Michigan.

  Tony remembered her name, however—Marian Jackson. She had been an acrobatic dancer in St. Louis.

  She carried on her shoulder the animal stowaway of the second Ark, the little monkey, Clara.

  “Can you beat this place? Can you tie it?” Marian challenged Tony cheerfully. “Gay but not gaudy, I’d call it. D’you agree?”

  “I agree,” acquiesced Tony, grateful for the letdown. The girl might be mentally a moron; but morons, he was discovering, had their points. This girl simply could not take anything seriously.

  “But the taxi-service here is terrible,” objected Marian.

  “We hope to improve it,” offered Tony.

  The girl walked away. “Don’t go into any of the buildings alone!” Tony reminded. “And even on the streets, keep close to other people!”

  Marian halted, looking up. “Hello! Hello!” she cried out softly. “Look at the taxies!” And she pointed to one of the wide spiral ramps to the right.

  Down the ramp Tony saw descending two Bronson Beta vehicles of the type discovered wrecked beside the first-found roadway, and duplicates of which were stored by the hundred in the first Sealed City. Here there were hundreds or thousands more of the machines.

  The two that appeared were followed by two more, and these by two larger and heavier vehicles not of the passenger type, but of truck design.

  “By God,” cried Marian, “they got ’em going.—Hey! Hey!” she hailed them.

  Tony thrilled too, but tempered his triumph by realization that, since the cars came in sight they had been descending, so that they might not be under power at all, but having been pushed to the incline of the ramp, were coasting.

  The drivers seemed aware of this flaw in their demonstration, or else they could not yet be content to stop; for when they gained the ground in rapid procession, instantly they steered up the ascending spiral on the other side, and putting on power, climbed even faster than they had dropped.

  That ended any doubt of their means of propulsion. Tony felt his scalp tingling. One more secret of the mechanics of these people a million years dead was in possession of his own people!

  Now the vehicles, having vanished briefly, swept into sight again, still climbing; then they whirled down, sped into the square, and though braked somewhat raggedly, halted in line before Tony.

  Eliot James stepped from the first with a flourish.

  “Your car, sir!” He doffed his battered felt hat.

  From the second car stepped the English girl Lady Cynthia. Williamson piloted the third; Maltby, Jack Taylor and Peter Vanderbilt were the other drivers.

  Williamson, the electrical engineer, made his report to Tony as a hundred others gathered around.

  “We discovered the technique of charging the batteries, which are beyond anything we had on earth,” he said with envious admiration, “both in simplicity and in economy of power application. There is a station underground which They used. We are using it. All the batteries which we have discovered were discharged or had discharged themselves, naturally, in the tremendous time that the planet was drifting through space; but two out of three batteries proved capable of receiving a charge when placed in sockets of the charging station.”

  “You mean you found the charging station with its power on?” Tony asked.

  Williamson looked at Maltby as if to enlist his support when replying: “We found the power on.”

  “What sort of power?”

  “Something between the electrical impulses with which we were familiar on earth, and radio-activity. We believe the Bronson Beta scientists, before they died—or disappeared—learned to blend the two.”

  “Blend?” asked Tony.

  Maltby took up the task of explanation. “You remember that on earth we didn’t even know what electricity was; but we knew how to use it for some of our purposes. Still less did we understand the exact nature of radio-activity; but we used that too. Here we have come upon impulses which exhibit some of the phenomena of electricity, and others of radio-activity. We do not understand it; but we do find ourselves able to use it.”

  “But the power-station below ground in order and in operation!” objected Tony.

  “I think,” said Maltby, “it should not have been described as a power-station, but rather as a mere distributing station. The power, I believe, does not originate in the station which we discovered, and in which we charged the batteries of these machines. Our station is, I think, merely a terminus for the generating station.”

  “The generating station—where?”

  At this, Maltby and Williamson, the technicians, both gazed at the English girl; but she, without making direct reply, nodded to Maltby to proceed.

  “She believes that the chief generating station is under the city of our Midianites. It is a far larger city than this, and was probably the metropolis of the planet—or at least of this continent. She knows that the technicians with the Asiatic party got much of the machinery of the city going weeks ago.

  “We believe that their technicians are employing the power-generators of the ancient civilization here without thoroughly understanding it—or without understanding it at all beyond having learned how it works, and what they can do with the power impulses.

  “We believe that we get the power here because they cannot use it themselves without giving us some of it. Probably much of the power is disseminated without wires or cables. Undoubtedly the light-impulses are—those that light this city at night and illuminate interior apartments by day.

  “These impulses probably are spread in a manner similar to radio waves. Williamson feels sure that power in the charging station cannot be so explained. He feels sure that the charging station below this city must have a cable connection—underground, undoubtedly—with the generating station.

  “Now, if that generating station is under the city of the Midianites, either they know they are sending us that power—or they don’t know it. If they know it, they may be unable to cut off our power without also cutting off their own; but if they don’t know they are now giving us power, they may find it out at any moment—and cut us off. Duquesne thinks the latter; so he has remained below with all the men he needs to keep all the charging sockets busy, while we”—Maltby smiled deprecatingly—“allowed ourselves this celebration before busying ourselves above.”

  “At what?” asked Tony, half stupidly, half dazedly. “At what here above?” Too much was being told him at once; too much—if one had to think about it.

  Marian Jackson, who had remained beside him, had heard it all; but it had not confused her. It had merely amused her. She went to Eliot James and teased him to show her the controls of his machine; and she sat in it and started it.

  “Easy! Easy!” Eliot yelled, and running beside her, shut off the power. “It’s perfectly easy and obvious in its steering and controls. Anybody can run it; but from the little I’ve seen, it must do over two hundred miles an hour, or three hundred, if you open it up. So don’t open it up!”

  The other drivers argued only less emphatically with other experimenters, and the crowd followed the machines.

  “You see,” Maltby was explaining to Tony, “now we know how to use their power, we ought to get other things going besides the vehicles; we ought to get a part of the city, at least, in some sort of operation.”

  “Of course,” Tony comprehended. “Of course.” And he led Lady Cynthia aside, with Williamson and Maltby. “When we have power,” he challenged the English girl, “how much of its use can you show us?”

  “I know how to get in and out of t
he buildings which have doors operated by electricity—or whatever it is. I know how they run the kitchens and the lights and baths, and things like that.”

  Tony said: “Then you had better take these men through a few buildings. Show them everything you’ve seen in operation—how it seemed to work.… Williamson,—Maltby,—you choose the party to go with her. When you’re through with her, please ask her to come back to the Council Hall.”

  As Tony turned away, Jack Taylor approached him.

  “You don’t want a ride,” he tempted his friend, “in one of the new million-year-old machines through the city?”

  “Not yet,” Tony said.

  “Why not yet?”

  “You,” said Tony, “you take it for me, Jack.”

  “All right,” said Jack, staring at him almost understandingly. “Sure. I’ll take the ride for you!”

  Tony retired to his deserted Hall of the Central Authority. He would have liked nothing better than to feel free to ride the ramps to the highest pinnacles as, in the square below him, others—many of them no younger than he—were preparing to do. Those allowed to experiment with the vehicles were as eager and excited as children with their first velocipedes. Tony watched them for a time enviously. No one but himself stopped him from rejoining them and claiming his right to ride the amazing highroads of this city. But not yet!

  “Why?”

  He glanced up toward the sun, the small, distant sun, warm enough yet when the sky was clear, warm enough especially under the splendid shield spread over the city.

  He dropped back from the window and slumped down before the beautiful desk which had served its original purpose countless years ago when this world whirled about some other star. He still was alone.

  Two tiny images of men—men not of the world, but of this planet—decorated the desk, one standing at each of the far corners of the desk-top. They were not secured to the metal top, but could be plucked from their fastening without breaking. Tony toyed with them; they reminded him of little images brought from Egypt. There had been a name for them in the world. “Ush—ushab—” He could not quite recall it.