After Worlds Collide

by Philip Wylie

Under the shield of the city, heat remained, and was renewed from the huge transformers fed from impulses far away.

  By mercy of the Midianites!

  By mercy, or by policy?

  They argued this under the great glass shield of the city of Hendron—known to its builders long ago as Khorlu—while their world slipped farther and farther from the sun.

  Hourly they argued this, especially at night, when the needed lights burned bright, and the ventilators spun, circulating the warmed currents of air to combat the bitter cold that settled on the shield. And machinery moved, because the power impulses sent from the station in control of the Midianites continued.

  The enemy made no attack. Indeed, only at a distance did they reappear at all; and then it was in the sky. Larks hovered but far away—watching; that was all. And Tony told his pilots, who also were flying larks, not to molest them, or even appear to attack them.

  What if they sent down a few flyers from the sky? Attack upon the city with a few planes would be absurd; attack from the ground would be fantastic. The defense, established in any of these great metal cities, must be impregnable; the advantage of cover was overwhelming. The Midianites themselves appreciated this. After the pursuit of Von Beitz, they made no move which even suggested an attack upon Hendron. To the contrary, they continued to send through the conduits under the ground the power-impulses which kept lighted and warm the city of Hendron, much as it had been when it was Khorlu, a million years ago.

  Khorlu, Wend, Strahl, Gorfulu, and Danot—so the Other People had named the five cities they had built in defiance of the destruction stealing upon them—the five cities forecast in the sketches of Lagon Itol.

  Wend was the great shielded metropolis which Tony and Eliot James first had visited; Strahl and Danot were the two similar cities seen, and mapped, to the south.

  Gorfulu was the greatest; and not only that—it was the control-city of the group; for it dominated the underground works which generated the power for the entire group of cities. It was Gorfulu that the Midianites had seized for themselves, and to which they had brought the survivors of the English space-ship, as captives.

  It had been easy enough to promise to the English girl who had escaped—Lady Cynthia, met on the road to Hendron-Khorlu—that Hendron’s people would rescue the English from the Midianites. But that promise appeared only more and more wild and fantastic as the new inhabitants of Hendron-Khorlu became more familiar with the peculiar strength of the shielded cities.

  Attack upon the city, with the weapons at hand and transportable, would be folly; every feature and material of construction of the cities gave overwhelming advantage to the defense.

  No one offered any scheme of attack that suggested any chance of success.

  Jack Taylor and Ransdell, and Tony and Eliot James and Peter Vanderbilt (for though he was not of the younger men, he remained of the boldest) met often and planned attack; but while they talked, they knew they were helpless.

  “The fact is,” said Eliot James once, putting frankly in open words what they all were feeling, “so far from being able to conquer them, we’re at their mercy this minute; and they know it.”

  Peter Vanderbilt nodded. “And as regards them, I have little illusion that the quality of mercy is much strained. Let us adjourn for a walk in the square, or—what have you?”

  “Tony, did you know that the portrait bust near the north gate is of Lagon Itol? Philbin assured me of it, quite positively, yesterday. He looked a good deal like Goethe, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll take another look at it,” said Tony; but he did not go out with the others. He sought Eve in the delightful apartment fitted for other lovers a million years ago, and lighted by the small distant sun whose heat was reinforced by warmth from power-impulses from machines engineered and prepared by the minds and hands of a million years ago, which had been repaired and were operated by the Midianites.

  For the power-impulses continued to come; and this fact persuaded many, in the city of Hendron-Khorlu, that a change of heart must have affected the party of men from earth who held control of the capitol of the Vanished People.

  They had come to their senses, some were sure as they worked, under the shield of the city of Hendron-Khorlu, at the emergency measures which the council of the Central Authority had ordered.

  But if some believed in the mercy of the men who had taken over the capital that controlled the conditions in all the cities, others did not become so credulous.

  “When are they going to shut us off?” they asked each other; and when they did not utter the words, they wanted to. The waiting had become an obsession.

  They felt themselves teased and tantalized by this unceasing, silent provision of light and heat and power which kept them comfortable—indeed in luxury—under the dome of the great transparent shield when the world without was frozen.

  The long rivers had turned to ice; the lake became a sheet of ice which the sun at noonday scarcely affected. Floes filled the seas, the pilots of the larks reported. Frequently at noonday, when the small sun stood nearly overhead, surfaces thawed, but when the world began to turn away, and long before the darkness, it was bitter cold again.

  It was at night that It came—at dinner-time.

  The company under Tony’s command were assembled in the great hall where meals were served. A few of the men stood at salient posts, always on watch. There was a watch at the top of the tallest towers, and at the eight gates. Guards were posted also at the passages to the chief channels below the city.…

  The lights went out. Later it was realized that, simultaneously, the movement of the currents of warmed air ceased; but at first this was appreciated only by those stationed near the fans, which whirred to a stop in a humming diminuendo.

  Not only the great halls were blackened, but the streets became tombs.

  It was an overcast night; and no single star showed even to the watchers on the towers. Light died and was buried; and all in silence.

  In the unbreathing, Stygian oppressiveness of the dining-hall, Tony arose—an invisible figure. He felt blotted out. He wondered whether his voice, when he spoke, could be heard.

  “They’ve done it, my friends. This is no accident, no failure which they will repair. They have shut off our power-source. So immediately we put into effect our plans for this emergency! we go under the power-loss orders which you all already know.”

  Matches were struck and applied to torches previously fixed on brackets about the hall. Everybody pretended to like it; everybody sat down again. Dinner went on in a medieval gloom.

  Ransdell, charged with the security of the streets, went out and inspected the guard positions where he was challenged by his sentries, who examined him in the glare of flashlights attached to condenser batteries; but the stored electricity was to be used but sparingly. The company had charged the batteries by the thousand; but what were they against the darkness and cold to come?

  Combustible substances must be used for light wherever possible, and always for heat.

  “It’s begun,” said Dodson, the surgeon, to Eliot James.

  “I won’t worry about putting it down in my book to-night,” the diarist replied. “I’ll not forget it before to-morrow!”

  He was aware of an anger within him which had no parallel in his experience—a smoldering anger that grew and grew.

  “They’re doing this,” he said, scarcely more to Dodson than to himself. “They’re doing this deliberately to freeze us out to them—to take their terms.”

  “What terms exactly, d’you suppose?” some one inquired calmly.

  Eliot turned, and in the flickering glow of a flare, he faced Peter Vanderbilt.

  “We’ll hear soon enough, I’d say.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE FATE OF THE OTHER PEOPLE

  BUT no terms came.

  No proclamation, no communication at all, arrived from those in control of the capital city—and in control, therefore, of the five shielded ci
ties.

  Gorfulu maintained its illumination, as Eliot James and Ransdell ascertained by flying at dawn and sighting the great glowing dome of the ancient capital. Light pervaded that city as before; and beyond question, heat was there.

  Ransdell circled the city and turned back, as larks, piloted by the Midianites, rose into the sky. Ransdell had promised Tony neither to seem to offer attack, nor to provoke it. He flew directly home.

  Other pilots inspected the three other cities—Wend, Strahl and Danot, the shields of which, like the dome of the capital, remained aglow; and these pilots flew back also to Hendron-Khorlu, which alone of the five cities lay lightless and cold in the winter morning.

  In the great Hall of the Council, these pilots joined James and Ransdell and completed their reports:

  “They’ve cut us off—and us alone.”

  “Why not, then,” some one said, “move to another city? To Wend?”

  “Then wouldn’t they cut us off there?” countered Ransdell practically. “The only reason those cities aren’t cut off is because we aren’t there.”

  “But they’re not occupied, are they?”

  “Not in force,” replied Ransdell. “But they’ve an observation group in each of the other cities—as they had here.”

  “Then how about some other cities—elsewhere?”

  “Where else?” questioned Ransdell; for he had done much observation flying.

  “On some other continent—perhaps in the other hemisphere.”

  “There are no other cities suitable.”

  “Nowhere else in this world?”

  “None. The old globes which we found do not show them; and we have never found any others.”

  “But why were there only these five?”

  “Well,” said Ransdell, “why were there even as many as five cities at the end?”

  “But we have been told that the old population of the planet was one billion people!”

  “Not at the end, however!”

  “What happened?”

  Dave Ransdell, for reply, turned about to Tony.

  “We can give to-day at least a partial answer to that,” Tony said, looking about the little group of his Council. “And I think it can be considered pertinent to our discussion of our own emergency, for we are dealing with a mechanism of living—or of dying—created not by ourselves but by the original people of this planet. It certainly can only be of help to us to understand what they did. Professor Philbin,” he said, “please tell us.”

  The little linguist arose.

  “You have all heard, I may assume, something of the state of this planet at the time when the studies of the star approaching convinced the scientists of this planet that it was certain to disturb life here greatly.”

  Peter Vanderbilt arose quietly; when Philbin stopped, Vanderbilt suggested:

  “Should not every one hear this?”

  “Certainly,” said Tony. “Open the doors.” And into the great room hundreds came and stood. For the halls without had been crowded. Nearly everybody was there, except men on watch or detailed to definite errands. Men, women and girls crowded as close as they could to the council-table; even the children came—the two children saved from the doom of earth on the first space-ship.

  “I can assume,” the little linguist repeated, “that you all have learned what we, who have been interpreting the books, learned and reported some days ago of the time of Lagon Itol, which was approximately two hundred years before this planet was torn from its sun.

  “Lagon Itol—who was certainly a very great man, one of enormous perceptions and imagination—considers in his diary the fate facing one billion people; so we may put that as a rough figure for the population of this planet in his time. But he astutely observes that there would be nothing like that number finally to face their fate; and he was right. From his time, the people of this planet rapidly reduced themselves in number by diminishing births. In fact, before he died, he observed it and recorded it; he even speculated on the probable number who would be alive to face the catastrophe.

  “I have now discovered an official record of their year 16,584, Ecliptic.”

  “Ecliptic?” a woman, close to the table, questioned.

  “Ecliptic—reckoned, I mean, from the first eclipse. The old people here,” Philbin explained, “had a very accurate and rational way of reckoning. For thousands of years, their determinations of time were exceedingly precise; but as on earth, of course their history went back through ages of rough record and without record into oral traditions. Undoubtedly they once had scores or hundreds of arbitrary points from which they reckoned the years locally—as our Egyptians reckoned years from the start of the reigns of each Pharaoh. As we all recollect, most of our civilized world finally agreed upon a year which we called the Year of Our Lord, from which we reckoned backward and forward.

  “The people of Bronson Beta chose a year of a famous eclipse. For this planet, and its huge companion Bronson Alpha, circled their sun in such a way that eclipses sometimes—though rarely—occurred. They were not so frequent as with the earth; they happened, on the average, about once in fifty years. Each was, therefore, more notable; and early in the history of man on this planet, there was a special eclipse which was noted by many nations of the primitive people. Later civilized ages could identify that eclipse with certainty and assign it a definite date. It offered itself as a very convenient and logical point from which to reckon the start of rational processes—the first recorded eclipse.

  “Lagon Itol first mentions the disturbing star in the year 16,481, Ecliptic. He died in the year 16,504—before which time, as I have told you, he saw the population of the planet rapidly being reduced.

  “For the year 16,584 I have, I say, the official census figures; they total slightly over two hundred millions of people—a reduction of four-fifths in approximately a century, or a loss of eight hundred millions of people.”

  Many gasped aloud. “What happened?” voices asked. “A world plague? The Black Death?”

  “No plague, no unusual death,” the little linguist continued. “Merely a cessation of births—or what must have been, for a time, almost a cessation. Would we have done differently? Who of us brought babies into the world, in our last two years, only to be destroyed? How many of us would have wanted children against a destruction if it was still a hundred years away?

  “What happened to this planet was one of the things that might have happened to our earth—”

  Duquesne broke in: “In fact, my friends, what happened here was the commoner occurrence in the cosmos. The fate of our earth was one of the ends of existence which always was possible, but yet exceedingly rare. The fate of this planet was much more typical of the ends of the earths which have been happening, and must continue to happen, until the termination of time. What is the first state of a star? Loneliness. At last another star approaches; and from its own substance, streamers are torn forth. The disturbing star passes on; but it has begot—planets. For it is from the substance that streamed from the sun, when another sun came close, that worlds are born.

  “They circle their solitary parent, the sun; they cool and grow old; and upon one or two, not too large or too small, or too near or too far away from the sun, life begins—and grows and changes, and becomes man.

  “Through millions of years!

  “And what saves him, through all these ages? Nothing but the solitary situation of his sun; it is the loneliness of the Life-giver—the loneliness of his sun in space—that permits man and his world to endure.

  “But at last the sun suffers it no longer; once more, it must speak to another star; and at last—for always sometime it must be so, even in the loneliness of the sky—another sun approaches; and before fresh material is sucked out to start another set of worlds, the spheres already old are drawn away and cast out into space. Such is the circle of life—and death—of worlds, to which all must, in the end, submit. Sometime one of those cast-off worlds may find another sun,
as this has done.”

  The Frenchman bowed to Philbin. “You were, monsieur, in the year of this planet the sixteenth thousand, five hundred and eighty-fourth, Ecliptic. I return you to it.”

  “It was a remarkable year,” said the little linquist, thrillingly, “if for no other reason, because of the production of the tremendous pessimistic poem ‘Talon.’

  “I translate the original title—Talon, a claw. The Talon of Time was meant. The people here understood the awful circle of the life, and death, of worlds as M. Duquesne has just sketched it. The poet of ‘Talon’ was the Omar Khayyám of their days of facing their fate. So in a poem of marvelous power he pictures man pursued by Time—a great tantalizing, merciless bird of prey which waits for him through the ages while he rises from a clod without soul to feel and brain to know, until he can appreciate and apperceive the awful irony of his fate; then the bird reaches out its great talon and tears him to pieces.

  “I despair adequately to render in our words the ironic tragedy of this poem; but Fitzgerald, translating our Omar, has rendered two lines like two of these:

  ‘And lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d

  The nothing it set out from. Oh, make haste!’

  “Like Omar, the poet preached pleasure; and he laughed at the ghastly futility of those who defied and fought the fated drift of their world into eternal darkness and cold.

  “Clearly he presented the prevailing mood of the period; but clearly, also, there was another mood. The spiritual and intellectual heirs of Lagon Itol had proceeded with his plans for these cities.

  “There was yet no complete agreement among the scientists that this world must be torn away from its sun. Its orbit was on the edge of the critical area of disturbance. Every one agreed that the five outer planets would surely be torn away; they agreed that the next planet inferior—that is, nearer its sun than this one—probably would not be torn away.

  “The name of that planet was Ocron; and by the way, these people knew that it was inhabited.

  “They agreed that this world on which we now stand would be severely altered in its orbit; yet they considered there was a chance it would not be torn away.