by Philip Wylie
“But as it approaches the sun, the air and then the seas will thaw. The people cannot possibly come to life, nor the animals or birds or other things; but the cities will stand there unchanged, the implements, the monuments, their homes—all will remain and be uncovered again.
“If this world were not doomed, what an adventure to try for that one, Tony! And a possible adventure—a perfectly possible adventure, with the powers at our disposal to-day!”
Tony recollected, after a while, that Balcom had bid him to learn from Hendron, as definitely as possible, the date and nature of the next announcement. How would it affect stocks? Would the Stock Exchange open at all?
He remembered, at last, it was a business day; downtown he had duties—contracts to buy and orders to sell stocks, which he must execute, if the Exchange opened to-day. He did not venture to ask to have Hendron awakened to speak to him but, before ten o’clock, he did leave Eve.
He walked to the subway. His eyes stared at the myriad faces passing him. His body was jolted by innumerable brief contacts.
“Gimme five cents for a cup of coffee?”
Tony stopped, stared. This panhandler too was trapped, with him and Kyto and Eve and all the rest, on the rim of the world which was coming to its end. Did he have an inkling of it? Whether or not, obviously to-day he must eat. Tony’s hand went into his pocket.
Speculation about the masses assailed him. What did they think this morning? What did they want? How differently would they do to-day?
Near the subway, the newsboys were having a sell-out; a truck was dumping on the walk fresh piles of papers. Everybody had a paper; everybody was reading to himself or talking to somebody else. The man with the half inch of cigar-stub, the boy without a hat, the fat woman with packages under her arm, the slim stenographer in green, the actor with the beaver collar; they all read, stared, feared, planned, hoped, denied.
Some of them smirked or giggled, almost childishly delighted at something different even if it suggested destruction. It was something novel, exciting. Some of them seemed to be scheming.
CHAPTER 5—A WORLD CAN END
AT ten o’clock the gong rang and the market opened. There had been no addition to public knowledge in the newspapers. The news-ticker carried, as additional information, only the effect of the announcement on the markets in Europe, which already had been open for hours.
It was plain that the wild eyes of terror looked across the oceans and the land—across rice-fields and prairies, out of the smoke of cities everywhere.
The stock market opened promptly at ten with the familiar resonant clang of the big gong. One man dropped dead at his first glance upon the racing ticker.
On the floor of the Exchange itself, there was relative quiet. When the market is most busy, it is most silent. Phones were choked with regular, crowded speech. Boys ran. The men stood and spoke in careful tones at the posts. Millions of shares began to change hands at prices—down. The ticker lagged as never in the wildest days of the boom. And at noon, in patent admission of the obvious necessity, New York followed the example already set by London, Paris and Berlin. The great metals doors boomed shut. There would be no more trading for an indeterminate time. Until “the scientific situation became cleared up.”
Cleared up! What a phrase for the situation! But the Street had to have one. It always had one.
Tony hung on the telephone for half an hour after the shutting of the mighty doors. His empire—the kingdom of his accustomed beliefs, his job—lay at his feet. When he hung up, he thought vaguely that only foresight during the depression had placed his and his mother’s funds where they were still comparatively safe in spite of this threat of world-cataclysm.
Comparatively safe—what did that mean? What did anything mean, to-day?
Balcom came into his office; he put his head on Tony’s desk and sobbed. Tony opened a drawer, took out a whisky-bottle which had reposed in it unopened for a year, and poured a stiff dose into a drinking-cup. Balcom swallowed it as if it were milk, took another, and walked out dazedly.
Tony went out in the customers’ room. He was in time to see the removal of one of the firm’s clients—a shaky old miser who had boasted that he had beaten the depression without a loss—on a stretcher. The telephone-girl sat at her desk in the empty anteroom. Clerks still stayed at their places, furiously struggling with the abnormal mass of figures.
Tony procured his hat and walked out. Everyone else was on the street—people in herds and throngs never seen on Wall Street or Broad Street or on this stretch of Broadway, but who now were sucked in by this unparalleled excitement from the East Side, the river front, the Bowery and likewise down from upper Fifth and from Park Avenues. Women with babies, peddlers, elderly gentlemen, dowagers, proud mistresses, wives, schoolchildren and working-people, clerks, stenographers—everywhere.
All trapped—thought Tony—all trapped together on the rim of the world. Did they know it? Did they feel it?
No parade ever produced such a crowd. The buildings had drained themselves into the streets; and avenues and alleys alike had added to the throng.
The deluge of humanity was possessed of a single insatiable passion for newspapers. A boy with an armful of papers would not move from where he appeared before he sold his load. News-trucks, which might have the very latest word, were almost mobbed.
But the newspapers told nothing more. Their contents, following the repetition of the announcement of the morning, were of a wholly secondary nature, reflecting only the effect of the statement itself. A hundred cranks found their opinions in big type as fast as they were uttered—absurd opinions, pitiful opinions; but they were seized upon. There were religious revivals starting in the land. But the scientists—those banded together who had worked faithfully first to learn the nature of the discovery and then to keep it secret until today—they had nothing more to say.
Tony dropped into a restaurant, where, though it was only afternoon, an evening hilarity already had arrived. The Exchange was closed! No one knew exactly why or what was to happen. Why care? That was the air here.
Two men of Tony’s age, acquaintances in school and friends in Wall Street, stopped at his table. “We’re going the rounds. Come along.”
Tony returned with them to the warm, sunlit street where the exhilaration of night—the irresponsibility of after-hours with offices closed and work done—denied the day.… Their taxi squeezed through Broadway in which frantic policemen wrestled vainly with overwhelming crowds. It stopped at a brownstone house in the West Forties.
A night-club, and it was crowded, though the sun was still shining. The three floors of the house were filled with people in business clothes drinking and dancing. On the top floor two roulette-wheels were surrounded by players. Tony saw heaps of chips, the piles of bills. He looked at the faces of the players and recognized two or three of them. They were hectic faces. The market had closed. This was a real smash,—not merely a money smash,—a smash of the whole world ahead. Naturally money was losing its value, but men played for it—cheered when they won, groaned when they lost, and staked again. The limit had been taken off the game.
Downstairs, at the bar, were three girls to whom Tony’s two friends immediately attached themselves. They were pretty girls of the kind that Broadway produces by an overnight incubation: Girls who had been born far from the Great White Way. Girls whose country and small-town attitudes had vanished. All of them had hair transformed from its original shade to ashen blonde. Around their eyes were beaded lashes; their voices were high; their silk clothes adhered to their bodies. They drank and laughed.
“Here’s to old Bronson!” they toasted. “Here’s to the ol’ world coming to an end!”
Tony sat with them: Clarissa, Jacqueline, Bettina. He gazed at them, laughed with them, drank with them; but he thought of Eve, asleep at last, he hoped. Eve, slender as they, young as they, far, far lovelier than they; and bearing within her mind and soul the frightful burden of the full knowledge of this day.
The room was hazy with smoke. People moved through it incessantly. After a while Tony looked again at the motley crowd; and across the room he saw a friend sitting alone in a booth. Tony rose and went toward the man. He was a person—a personage—worthy of notice. He was lean, gray-haired, immaculate, smooth. His dark eyes were remote and unseeing. First nights knew him. Mothers of very rich daughters, mothers of daughters of impeccable lineage, sought him. Wherever the gayest of the gay world went, he could be found. Southampton, Newport, Biarritz, Cannes, Nice, Deauville, Palm Beach. He was like old silver—yet he was not old. Forty, perhaps. A bachelor. He would have liked it if some one of authority had called him a connoisseur of life and living—an arbiter elegantiæ, a Petronius transferred from Nero’s Rome to our day. He would have been pleased, but he would not have revealed his pleasure. His name was Peter Vanderbilt. And he was trapped too,—Tony was thinking as he saw him,—trapped with him and Eve and Kyto and the panhandler and Bettina and Jacqueline and all the rest on the rim of the world which was going to collide with another world sent from space for that errand; but a world with still another spinning before it, which would pass close to our world—close and spin on, safe.
Tony cleared his brain. “Hello,” he said to Peter Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt looked up and his face showed welcome. “Tony! Jove! Of all people. Glad to see you. Sit. Sit and contemplate.” He beckoned a waiter and ordered. “You’re a bit on the inside, I take it.”
“Inside?”
“Friend of the Hendrons, I remember. You know a bit more of what’s going on.”
“Yes,” admitted Tony; it was senseless to deny it to this man.
“Don’t tell me. Don’t break confidences for my sake. I’m not one that has to have details ahead of others. The general trend of events is clear enough. Funny. Delicious, isn’t it, to think of the end of all this? I feel stimulated, don’t you? All of it—going to pieces! I feel like saying, ‘Thank God!’ I was sick of it. Every one was. Civilization’s a wretched parody. Evidently there was a just and judging God, after all.
“Democracy! Look at it, lad. Here are the best people, breaking the newest laws they made themselves. Imagine the fool who invented democracy! But what’s better on this world anywhere? So there is a God after all, and He’s taking us in hand again—the way He did in Noah’s time.… Good thing, I say.
“But Hendron and his scientists aren’t doing so well. They’re making a big mistake. They’ve done splendidly—hardly could have done better up to to-day. I mean, keeping it under cover and not letting it out at all until they had some real information. They had luck in the fact that these Bronson bodies were sighted in the south, and have been only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Not many observatories down there—just South Africa, South America and Australia. That was a break—gave them much more of a chance to keep it to themselves; and I say, they did well up to now. But they’re not well advised if they hold anything back much longer; they’d better tell anything—no matter how bad it is. They’ll have to, as they’ll soon see. Nothing can be as bad as uncertainty.
“It proves that all those names signed to this morning’s manifesto are top-notch scientists. The human element is the one thing they can’t analyze and reduce to figures. What they need is a counsel in public relations. Tell Cole Hendron I recommend Ivy Lee.”
Rising, he left Tony and vanished in the throng. Tony started to pay the check, and saw Vanderbilt’s ten-dollar bill on the table. He rose, secured his hat and went out.
The latest newspaper contained a statement from the White House. The President requested that on the morrow every one return to work. It promised that the Government would maintain stability in the country, and inveighed violently against the exaggerated reaction of the American people to the scientists’ statement.
Tony smiled. “Business as usual! Business going on, as usual, during alterations,” he thought. He realized more than ever how much his countrymen lived for and believed in business.
He wondered how much of the entire truth had been told to the President, and what the political angle on it would be. Amusing to think of the end of the world having a political angle; but of course, it had. Everything had.
He took a taxi to the Hendrons’ apartment. More than a block away from the building, he had to abandon the cab. The crowd and the police cordon about the apartment both had increased; but certain persons could pass; and Tony learned that he still was one of them.
Several men, whose voices he could overhear in loud argument, were with Cole Hendron behind the closed doors of the big study on the roof. No one was with Eve. She awaited him, alone.
She was dressed carefully, charmingly, as she always was, her lovely hair brushed back, her lips cool to look at, but so warm upon his own!
He pressed her to him for a moment; and for that instant when he kissed her and held her close, all wonder and terror was sent away. What matter the end of everything, if first he had her! He had never dreamed of such delight in possession as he felt, holding her; he had never dared dream of such response from her—or from any one. He had won her, and she him, utterly. As he thought of the cataclysm destroying them, he thought of it coming to them together, in each other’s arms; and he could not care.
She felt it, fully as he. Her fingers touched his face with a passionate tenderness which tore him.
“What’s done it for us so suddenly and so completely, Tony?”
“‘The shadow of the sword,’ I suppose, my dear—oh, my dear! I remember reading it in Kipling when I was a boy, but never understanding it. Remember the two in love when they knew that one would surely die? ‘There is no happiness like that snatched under the shadow of the sword.’”
“But we both shall die, if either does, Tony. That’s so much better.”
The voices beyond the closed door shouted louder, and Tony released her. “Who’s here?”
“Six men: the Secretary of State, the Governor, Mr. Borgan, the chief of a newspaper chain, two more.” She was not thinking about them. “Sit down, but don’t sit near me, Tony; we’ve got to think things out.”
“Your father’s told them?” he asked.
“He’s told them what will happen first. I mean, when the Bronson bodies—both of them—just pass close to the world and go on around the sun. That’s more than enough for them now. It’s not time yet to tell them of the encounter. You see, the mere passing close will be terrible enough.”
“Why?”
“Because of the tides, for one thing. You know the tides, Tony; you know the moon makes them. The moon, which is hardly an eightieth of the world in mass; but it raises tides that run forty to sixty feet, in places like the Bay of Fundy.”
“Of course—the tides,” Tony realized aloud.
“Bronson Beta is the size of the earth, Tony; Bronson Alpha is estimated to have eleven or twelve times that mass. That sphere will pass, the first time, within the orbit of the moon. Bronson Beta will raise tides many times as high; and Bronson Alpha—you can’t express it by mere multiplication, Tony. New York will be under water to the tops of its towers—a tidal wave beyond all imaginations! The seacoasts of all the world will be swept by the seas, sucked up toward the sky and washed back and forth. The waves will wash back to the Appalachians; and it will be the same in Europe and Asia. Holland, Belgium, half of France and Germany, half of India and China, will be under the wave of water. There’ll be an earth tide, too.”
“Earth tide?”
“Earthquakes from the pull on the crust of the earth. Some of the men writing to Father think that the earth will be torn to pieces just by the first passing of Bronson Alpha; but some of them think it will survive that strain.”
“What does your father think?”
“He thinks the earth will survive the first stress—and that it is possible that a fifth of the population may live through it, too. Of course that’s only a guess.”
“A fifth,” repeated Tony. “A fifth of all on the earth
.”
He gazed at her, sober, painless, without a sense of time.
Here he was in a penthouse drawing-room on the top of a New York apartment, with a lovely girl whose father believed, and had told her, that four-fifths of all beings alive on the earth would be slain by the passing of the planets seen in the sky. A few months more, and all the rest—unless they could escape from the earth and live—would be obliterated.
Such words could stir no adequate feeling; they were beyond ordinary meanings, like statements of distance expressed in light years. They were beyond conscious conception; yet what they told could occur. His mind warned him of this. What was coming was a cosmic process, common enough, undoubtedly, if one considered the billions of stars with their worlds scattered through all space, and if one counted in eternities of endless time. Common enough, this encounter which was coming.
What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!
Eve was watching him. Through the years of their friendship and fondness, she had seen Tony as a normal man, to whom everything that happened was happy, felicitous and unbizarre. The only crises in which she observed him were emergencies on the football-field, and alarms in the stock-market, which in the first case represented mere sport, and in the second, money which he did not properly understand, because all his life he had possessed money enough, and more.
Now, as she watched him, she thought that she would meet with him—and she exulted that it would be with him—the most terrific reality that man had ever faced. So far as he had yet been called upon, he had met it without attempting to evade it; his effort had been solely for more complete understanding.
A contrast to some of those men—among them men who were called the greatest in the nation—whose voices rose loud again behind the closed doors.
Some one—she could not identify him from his voice, which ranted in a strange, shrill rage—evidently was battling her father, shouting him down, denying what had been laid before them all. Eve did not hear her father’s reply. Probably he made none; he had no knack for argument or dialectics.