by Philip Wylie
“Not me,” said the old sexton. “Do not take me from the will of the Lord!”
Nor would the minister and his wife be moved. They would journey to-day, when the water receded, into the higher hills; but that was all they would do.
CHAPTER 12—HENDRON’S ENCAMPMENT
THE airplane settled to earth on the high ground between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, just as the Bronson Bodies, appallingly large, rose over the eastern horizon. Nearly a thousand people came from the great cantonment to greet Tony and Hendron’s daughter. The scientist had given up his New Mexico venture entirely, and brought his congregation of human beings all to his Michigan retreat.
Greetings, however, were not fully made until the Bronson Bodies had been observed. Beta now exceeded the moon, and it shone with a pearly luster and a brilliance which the moon had never possessed. Around it was an aureole of soft radiance where its atmosphere, thawed by the warmth of the sun it so rapidly approached, had completely resumed its gaseous state.
But Bronson Beta did not compare with the spectacle of Alpha. Alpha was gigantic—bigger than the sun, and seemingly almost as bright, for the clouds which streamed up from every part of its surface threw back the sun’s light, dazzling, white and hard. There was no night. Neither Eve nor Tony had seen the camp in its completion; and when wonderment over the ascending bodies gave way to uneasy familiarity, Eliot James took them on a tour of inspection.
Hendron had prepared admirably for the days which he had known would lie ahead of his hand-picked community. There were two prodigious dining-halls, two buildings not unlike apartment houses in which the men and women were domiciled. In addition there was a building resembling a hangar set on end, which towered above the surrounding forests more than a hundred feet. At its side was the landing-field, space for the sheltering of the planes, and opposite the landing-field, a long row of shops which terminated in an iron works.
It was to the machine-shops and foundry that Eliot James last took his companions.
“The crew here,” he said to Eve, “has already finished part of the construction of the Ark which your father is planning. If we wanted to, we could build a battleship here; in the laboratories anything that has been done could be repeated; and a great many things have been accomplished that have never been done before. By to-morrow night I presume that the entire New York equipment will have been reinstalled here.”
Tony whistled. “It’s amazing. Genius, sheer genius! How about food?”
Eliot James smiled. “There is enough food for the entire congregation as long as we will need it.”
“Now show us the ‘Ark.’”
Eve’s father came out from the hangar to act as their guide.
From the hysterical white glare of the Bronson Bodies they were taken into a mighty chamber which rose seemingly to the sky itself, where the brilliance was even greater. A hundred things inside that chamber might have attracted their attention—its flood-lighting system, or the tremendous bracing of its metal walls; but their eyes were only for the object in its center. The Ark on that late July evening—the focal-point, the dream and hope of all those whom Hendron had gathered together—stood upright on a gigantic concrete block in a cradle of steel beams. Its length was one hundred and thirty-five feet. It was sixty-two feet in diameter, and its shape was cylindrical. Stream-lining was unnecessary for travel in the outer reaches of space, where there was no air to set up resistance. The metal which composed it was a special alloy eighteen inches in thickness, electro-plated on the outside with an alloy which shone like chromium.
After Tony had looked at it for a long time, he said: “It is by far the most spectacular object which mankind has ever achieved.”
Hendron glanced at him and continued his exposition. “A second shell, much smaller, goes inside; and between the inner shell and its outer guard are several layers of insulation material. Inside the shell will be engines which generate the current, which in turn releases the blast of atomic energy, store-chambers for everything to be carried, the mechanisms of control, the aeration plant, the heating units and the quarters for passengers.”
Tony tore his eyes from the sight. “How many will she carry?” he asked quietly.
Hendron hesitated; then he said: “For a trip of the duration I contemplate, she would be able to take about one hundred people.”
Tony’s voice was still quieter. “Then you have nine hundred idealists in your camp here.”
The older man smiled. “Unless I am greatly mistaken, I have a thousand.”
“They all know about the ship?”
“Something about it. Nearly half of them have been working on it, or on apparatus connected with it.”
“You pay no wages?”
“I’ve offered wages. In most cases they’ve been refused. I have more than three million dollars in gold available here for expenses encountered in dealing with people who still wish money for their time or materials.”
“I see. How long a trip do you contemplate?”
Hendron took the young man’s breath. “Ninety hours. That is, provided,”—and his voice began to shake,—“provided we can find proper materials with which to line our blast-tubes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to propel this thing for more than a few minutes. I—”
Eve looked at her father. “Dad, you’ve got to go to bed. You’d better take some veronal or something, and don’t worry so. We’ll find the alloy all right. We’ve done everything else, and the things we’ve done were even more difficult.”
Hendron nodded; and Tony, looking at him, realized for the first time how much the scientist had aged recently. They went through the door of the hangar in single file, and high up among the beams and buttresses that supported it, a shower of sparks fell from an acetylene welding-torch.
Outside, the wind was blowing. It sighed hotly in the near-by trees—wind that presaged a storm. The lights in the foundry and laboratories, the power-house and the dormitories made a ring around them, a ring of yellow fireflies faint beneath the glare of the Bronson Bodies. Tony looked up at them, and it seemed to him that he could almost feel and hear them in their awful rush through space: Beta, a dazzling white world, and Alpha, an insensible luminous disc of destruction. Both bodies seemed to stand away from the vault of the heavens.
Hendron left them. Soon afterward James withdrew with the apology that he wished to write to bring up to date his diary. Tony escorted Eve to the women’s dormitory. A phonograph was playing in the general room on the ground floor. One of the girls was singing, and another was sitting at a table writing what was apparently a letter. They could all be seen through the open windows, and Tony wondered what postman that girl expected would carry her missive. Eve bade him good night, then went inside.
Tony, left alone, walked over the gleaming ground to the top of a neighboring hill. Hendron’s village looked on the northern side like a university campus, and on the southern side like the heart of a manufacturing district. All around it stretched the Michigan wilderness. The ground had been chosen partly because of the age and grimness of its geological base, and partly because of its isolation.
He sat down on a large stone. The hot night wind blew with increasing violence, and the double shadows, one sharp and one faint, which were cast by all things in the light of the Bronson Bodies, were abruptly obliterated by the passage of a dark cloud.
Tony’s mind ran unevenly and irresolutely. “Probably,” he thought, “this little community is the most self-sufficient of any place on earth. All these people, these brilliant temperamental men and women, have subsided and made themselves like soldiers in Hendron’s service—amazing man.… Only a hundred people.… I wonder how many of those I brought to New York they’ll take.”
Fears assailed him: “Suppose they don’t complete the Ark successfully, and she never leaves the ground? Then all these people would have given their lives for nothing.… Suppose it leaves the earth and fails—falls back for hundreds of miles, gaining speed all
the way, so that when it hit the atmosphere it would turn red-hot and burn itself up just like a meteor? What hideous chances have to be taken! If only I were a scientist and could help them! If only I could sit up day and night with the others, trying to find the metal that would make the ship fly.…”
A larger cloud obscured the Bronson Bodies. The wind came in violent gusts. The great globes in the sky which disturbed sea and land, also enormously distorted the atmospheric envelope.
The steady sound of machinery reached Tony’s ears, and the ring of iron against iron. The wind wailed upon the æolian harp of the trees. Tony thought of the tides that would rise that night and on following nights; and faintly, like the palpitation of a steamer’s deck, the earth shook beneath his feet as if in answer to his meditation. And Tony realized that the heart of the earth was straining toward its celestial companions.
CHAPTER 13—THE APPROACH OF THE PLANETS
ON the night of the twenty-fifth, tides unprecedented in the world’s history swept every seacoast. There were earthquakes of varying magnitude all over the world. In the day that followed, volcanoes opened up, and islands sank beneath the sea; and on the night of the twenty-sixth the greater of the Bronson Bodies came within its minimum distance from the earth on this their first approach.
No complete record was ever made of the devastation.
Eliot James, who made some tabulation of it in the succeeding months, could never believe all that he saw and heard, but it must have been true.
The eastern coast of the United States sustained a tidal wave seven hundred and fifty feet in height, which came in from the sea in relentless terraces and inundated the land to the very foot of the Appalachians. Its westward rush destroyed every building, every hovel, every skyscraper, every city, from Bangor in Maine to Key West in Florida. The tide looped into the Gulf of Mexico, rolled up the Mississippi Valley, becoming in some places so congested with material along its foaming face that the terrified human beings upon whom it descended saw a wall of trees and houses, of stones and machinery, of all the conglomerate handiwork of men and Nature—rather than the remorseless or uplifted water behind it. When the tide gushed back to the ocean’s bed, it strewed the gullied landscape with the things it had uprooted.
It roared around South America, turning the Amazon Basin into a vast inland sea which stretched from what had been the east coast to the Andes Mountains on the west coast. The speed of this tide was beyond calculation.
Every river became a channel for it. It spilled over Asia. It inundated the great plain of China. It descended from the arctic regions and removed much of France, England and Germany, all of Holland and the great Soviet Empire, from the list of nations. Arctic water hundreds of feet deep flowed into the Caspian Sea and hurled the last of its august inertia upon the Caucasus.
Western Asia and Arabia, southern India, Africa and much of Australia remained dry land. Those who saw that tide from mountain-tops were never afterward able to depict it for their fellows. The mind of man is not adjusted for a close observation of phenomena that belong to the cosmos. To see that dark obsidian sky-clutching torrent of water moving inward upon the land at a velocity of many hundreds of miles an hour was to behold something foreign to the realm of Nature, as Nature even at its most furious has hitherto appeared to man.
More than half the population of the world died in the tides that rose and subsided during the proximity of the Bronson Bodies. But those who by design or through accident found themselves on land that remained dry were not necessarily spared.
The earthquake which Tony felt in Michigan was the first of a series of shocks which increased steadily in violence for the next forty-eight hours, and which never afterward wholly ceased. Hendron had chosen his spot well, for it was one of the relatively few portions of the undeluged world which was not reduced to an untenable wasteland of smoking rock and creeping lava.
Nothing in the category of earthquakes or eruption occurring within the memory of the race could even furnish criteria for the manifestations everywhere on the earth’s crust on that July twenty-sixth. Man had witnessed the explosion of whole mountains. He had seen the disappearance and the formation of islands. Yards of sea-coast had subsided before his very eyes. Fissures wide enough to contain an army had opened at his feet; but such occurrences were not even minutiæ in the hours of the closest approach of the Bronson Bodies.
As hour by hour the earth presented new surfaces to the awful gravitational pull of those spheres, a series of stupendous cataclysms took place. Underneath the brittle slag which man considers both solid and enduring lie thousands of miles of dense compressed molten material. The earth’s crust does not hold back that material. It is kept in place only by a delicate adjustment of gravity; and the interference of the Bronson Bodies distorted that balance. The earth burst open like a ripe grape! From a geological standpoint the tides which swept over were a phenomenon of but trifling magnitude.
The center of the continent of Africa split in two as if a mighty cleaver had come down on it, and out of the grisly incision poured an unquenchable tumult of the hell that dwells within the earth. Chasms yawned in the ocean floor, swallowing levels of the sea and returning it instantaneously in continents of steam. The great plateau of inner Thibet dropped like an express elevator nine hundred feet. South America was riven into two islands one extending north and south in the shape of a sickle, and the other, roughly circular, composed of all that remained of the high lands of Brazil. North America reeled and shuddered, split, snapped, boomed and leaped. The Rocky Mountains lost their immobility and danced like waves of water. From the place that had been Yellowstone Park a mantle of lava was spread over thousands of square miles. The coastal plain along the Pacific disappeared, and the water moved up to dash itself in fury against a range of active volcanoes that extended from Nome to Panama.
Gases, steam and ashes welled from ten thousand vents into the earth’s atmosphere. The sun went out, the stars were made visible. Blistering heat blew to the ends of the earth. The polar ice melted and a new raw land emerged, fiery and shattered, mobile and catastrophic.
Those human beings who survived the world’s white-hot throes were survivors for the most part through good fortune. Few escaped through design—on the entire planet only a dozen places which had been picked by the geologists as refuges remained habitable.
Upon millions poured oceans of seething magma carrying death more terrible than the death which rolled on the tongue of the great tides. The air which was breathed by other millions was suddenly choked with sulphurous fumes and they fell like gassed soldiers, strangling in the streets of their destroyed cities. Live steam, blown with the violence of a hurricane, scalded populous centers and barren steppes impartially. From a sky that had hitherto deluged mankind only with rain, snow and hail, fell now burning torrents and red-hot sleet. The very earth itself slowed in its rotation, sped up again, sucked and dragged through space at the caprice of the bodies in the sky above. It became girdled in smoke and steam, and blasts of hot gas; and upon it as Bronson Alpha and Beta drew away, there fell torrential rains which hewed down rich land to the bare rock, which cooled the issue from the earth to vast metallic oceans, and which were accompanied by lightnings that furnished the infernal scenery with incessant illumination, and by thunder which blended undetectably with the terrestrial din.
At Hendron’s camp forty-eight hours in the Pit were experienced; and yet Hendron’s camp was on one of the safest and least disturbed corners of the world.
The first black clouds which Tony had observed marked the beginning of an electrical storm. The tremor he felt presaged a steady crescendo of earth-shakings. He left his hill-top soon and found that the population of the colony which, an hour before, had retired for the night, was again awake. He met Hendron and several scientists making a last tour of inspection; and he joined them.
“The dormitories,” Hendron said, “are presumably quake-proof. I don’t think any force could knock over the buttr
esses we have put around the projectile.”
Even as he spoke, the wind increased, lightning stabbed the sky, the radiance of the Bronson Bodies was permanently extinguished, and the gusty wind was transformed to a steady tempest. Lights were on in every building; and as shock followed shock, people began to pour into the outdoors.
Tony tried to locate Eve, but was unable to do so in the gathering throng. The darkness outside the range of lights was absolute. The temperature of the wind dropped many degrees, so that it seemed cold in comparison to the heat of early evening. It was difficult to walk on the wide cleared area between the various buildings, for the ground underfoot frequently forced itself up like the floor of a rapidly decelerated elevator. The lightning came nearer. The thunder was continual. It was hard to hear the voice of one’s nearest neighbor. Word passed from person to person in staccato shouts that all buildings were to be evacuated. Tony himself, with half a dozen others, rushed into the brightly illuminated women’s dormitory and hurriedly brought from it into the tumult and rain those who had remained there.
By ten o’clock the violence of the quakes was great enough so that it was difficult to stand. The people huddled like sheep in a storm in the lee of the buildings. Lightning hammered incessantly on the tall steel tower which surrounded the space-flyer. Tony moved through the assembled people shouting words of encouragement he did not feel.
Shortly after eleven an extraordinarily violent shock lifted one end of the men’s building so that bricks and cement cascaded from its wall. Immediately Tony located Hendron, who was sitting wrapped in a tarpaulin on a stone in the center of the crowd, and made a suggestion which was forthwith carried out. The flood-lights were thrown on the landing-field, and every one migrated thither. They congregated again in the center of smooth open space, a weird collection in their hastily assumed wraps, with their white faces looking upward picked out through the rain by the flood-lights and the blue flashes from the heavens.