by Philip Wylie
Before midnight some caprice of the seismic disturbance snapped off the power. At one o’clock in the morning a truck from the kitchens of the dining-halls floundered through the mud with sandwiches and coffee. At two o’clock the temperature of the wind dropped again, and the wet multitude shivered and chattered with cold. Hail fell in place of rain.
Half an hour later the wind stopped abruptly, and in that sudden silence, between bursts of thunder, human voices rose in a loud clamor of a hundred individual conversations. The wind puffed, veered, and came back from the southwest. It blew fifty miles an hour, a hundred, and then rose from that velocity to an immeasurable degree. Leaves and whole branches shot through the air. Every man and woman was compelled to lie face down on the muddy earth, the undulations of which increased.
They lay for an hour or more, shivering, gasping for breath, hiding their faces. Then a particularly violent shock suddenly separated the landing-field into two parts, one of which rose eight or nine feet above the other, leaving a sharp diminutive precipice across the middle of the field. A dozen people had been actually straddling the point of fracture; and some fell on the lower side, while others, crawling away from the new and terrifying menace, were lifted up. Fortunately no crevice opened, although the split edges of the underlying rocks ground against each other with a noise that transcended the tumult. Toward morning the temperature of the wind began to rise.
There was no dawn, no daylight, only a diffused inadequate grayness through which the tumbling streaming clouds could be dimly apprehended. The people lay on the ground, each man wrapped in the terrors of his own soul, with fingers clutching the grass or buried in the earth. And so the day began. The air grew perpetually more warm. An augmented fury of the gale brought a faint odor of sulphur.
Midday held no respite. It was impossible to bring up food against the gale, impossible even to stand. The sulphurous odors and the heat increased. The driven rain seemed hot. Toward what would have been afternoon, and in the absolute darkness, there was a sudden abatement; and the wind, while it still blew strong, allowed the shaken populace to rise and to stare through the impenetrable murk. Fifty or more of the men made a rush for the dining-halls. They found them, and were surprised that they had not collapsed. The low hills around had furnished them with protection. There was no time to prepare food. Snatching what they could, and loading themselves with containers of drinking-water, they fought their way back to the field. There, like animals, the people drank and ate, finishing in time only to throw themselves once again on the bare ground under the renewed fury of the storm.
Night came again. The sulphur in the air, the fumes and gases, the heat and smoke and dust, the hot rain, almost extinguished their frantically defended lives. They lay now in the lee of the fault, but even there the down-swirl of the tempest and lash of the elements were almost unendurable. The dust and rain combined with the wind to make a diagonal downfall of fœtid mud which blistered them and covered the earth. Through that second night no one was able to talk, to think, to move, to do more than lie prone amid the chaos, gasping for breath.
CHAPTER 14—THE FIRST PASSING
THE respite brought by morning was comparative rather than real. The wind abated; the torrential rain became intermittent; and the visibility returned, though no one could have told whether it was early morning or twilight.
Tony rose to his feet the instant the wind slacked. Through all the long and terrible hours he had been absent from Eve. It would have been utterly unthinkable to attempt to locate her in the midst of that sound and fury. He found, however, that there was no use in looking for her immediately. So heavy had been the downpour of rain and ashes from the sky, that it not only reduced the field to a quagmire, but it covered the human beings who had lain there with a thick chocolate-colored coating, so that as one by one the people arose to sitting and standing postures, he found it difficult even to distinguish man from woman.
He was compelled to put Eve from his mind. It was necessary to think of all and not one. Succor was needed sorely. Many of those who had been in the field were unable to rise. Several had been injured. Of the older men a number were suffering perhaps fatally from exposure.
Tony found that his limbs would scarcely support him when he did regain them; but after he had staggered for some distance through the murk, his numbed circulation was restored, and his muscles responded. He held brief conversations with those who were standing:
“Are you all right?” If the answer was in the negative, he replied: “Sit down. We’ll take care of you. But when it was in the affirmative, he said: “Come with me. We’ll start things going again. I think the worst is over.”
Out of the subsiding maelstrom he collected some thirty or forty persons, most of them men. They walked off the field together; and as they walked, slowly and painfully, their feet sucking in the quagmire and stumbling on débris, Tony proceeded with his organization.
“Any of you men working on the power plant?” he shouted.… “Right. You two come over here. Now who else here was in the machine-shop?… Good. You fellows get to work on starting up the lights. They’ll be the first thing. Now I want half of you to get beds in shape in the women’s hall.” He counted the number he required, slapping them on the shoulders and dispatching them toward the halls, which loomed in the distance. “If they don’t look safe,” he shouted after the disappearing men, “find a place that is safe, and put the beds there. We’ll have to have a hospital.”
With the remnant of his men he went to the dining-halls. One of these buildings was a complete wreck, but the other still stood. They entered the kitchen. Its floor was knee-deep in mud. He recognized among those still with him Taylor, the student of light, whom he had sent to Hendron from Cornell. “Take charge in here, will you, Taylor? I’ll leave you half these men. The rest of us are going out to round up the doctors and get medical supplies ready. They’ll want coffee out there, and any kind of food that they can eat immediately.” He saw Taylor’s mouth smile in assent, and heard Taylor begin to issue instructions for the lighting of a fire in one of the big stoves.
Once again he went outdoors. It was a little lighter. His anxious gaze traveled to the tower that housed the Ark, and from its silhouette he deduced that it was at least superficially intact. The shouting he had done had already rendered him hoarse, for the air was still sulphurous. It irritated the nose and throat, and produced in every one a dry frequent cough. Tony was apprehensive for fear the gases in the air might increase in volume and suffocate them, but he banished the thought from his mind: it was but one of innumerable apprehensions, many of them greater, which numbed his consciousness and the consciousness of all his fellows during that terrifying forty-eight hours. Besides the irritating vapors in the air, there was heat, not the heat expected any day in July, but such heat as surrounds a blast furnace—a sullen withering heat which blanched the skin, parched the lips and was unrelieved by the rivulets of perspiration that covered the body.
Tony went back alone to the flying-field. It was a little lighter. Mist motions were visible in the sky, and threads of vapor were flung over the Stygian landscape by the wind. People were returning from what had been the flying-field to the partial wreck at the camp in twos and threes, many of them limping, some of them being carried. They made a stream of humanity like walking wounded—a procession of hunger, thirst, pain and exhaustion struggling across a landscape that would have credited Dante’s Inferno itself, struggling through a nether gloom, slobbered with mire, breathing the hot metallic atmosphere. He found Eve at last, just as he reached the edge of the flying-field. She was helping two other girls, who were trying to carry a third. She recognized him and called to him.
“Are you all right, Eve?” His soul was in his rasping voice. He came close to her. He looked into her eyes. She nodded, first to him and then toward the unconscious girl. She put her lips close to his ear, for she could speak only in a whisper: “Give us a hand, Tony. This girl needs water. She fainted.”
He picked up the girl, and they followed him through the slough to the main hall of the women’s dormitory. Beds were being carried there, and many of the beds were already filled. Some one had found candles and stuck them in window-sills so that the room was lighted. Already two men who were doctors were examining the arrivals. Tony recognized one of the men as Dodson when he heard the boom of his voice: “Get hot water here, lots of it, boiling water. Don’t anybody touch those bandages. Everything has to be sterilized. See if you can find anybody who knows anything about nursing. Get the rest of the doctors.”
Somehow Dodson had already managed to wash, and his heavy-jowled face radiated power and confidence. In the candle-light Tony recognized other muddy faces on the beds. A German actress seemed to have a broken leg, and a dignified gray-haired Austrian pathologist was himself a victim of the barrage that had fallen from the heavens.
Tony went outdoors again. It seemed to him that the air had freshened somewhat, and that the temperature had dropped. A gong boomed in the kitchen, and he remembered his thirst and hunger. For almost forty-eight hours he had had little to eat and little to drink. He knew he could not deny the needs of his body any longer. He hastened in the direction of the gong. Around a caldron of coffee and a heap of sandwiches, which were replenished as fast as they disappeared, were grouped at least two hundred people. Tony stood in the line which passed the caldron, and was handed a cup of coffee and a sandwich. The coffee tasted muddy. The sandwich had a flavor not unlike the noxious odor in the air. Tony’s craving was for water, but he realized that for the time being all liquids would have to be boiled to eliminate their pollution. With his first sip of coffee he realized that brandy had been added to it. He wet his burning throat and swallowed his sandwich in three mouthfuls, and joined the line again.
His senses reasserted themselves. He realized that the wind was dying, the oppressiveness was departing and the temperature had lowered perceptibly. He was able for the first time to hear the conversation of people around him, and even in his shocked and shocking state, he was moved by mingled feelings of compassion and amusement. The heavy hand of the gods had scarcely been lifted. Its return might be expected imminently, and yet the marvelous resilience of humankind already was asserting itself.
“… Ruined my dress, absolutely ruined!” he heard one woman say.
And some one else laughed. That sentence spread. “Her dress was ruined. Too bad!”
From the men there came a different sort of comment:
“When I say I never saw anything like it before in my life, I mean I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life.…”
The excited voice of one of the scientists: “Amazing, the way things survived. Almost nothing has been damaged in the machine-shops and the power-houses. Those places were built like bank vaults. Great genius for organization, that man Hendron.”
Another man spoke: “I inspected the seismograph first. The needle had shot clear off the roll the night before last and put it out of business. Then I looked at the barometric record. Air-pressure changed around here inches in minutes. The barometer went out of business too. You could almost feel what was happening to the earth. I had sensations of being lifted and lowered, and of pressure coming and going on my ears.
“I wonder how many people survived. The volcanic manifestations must have been awful. They must still be going on—although I can’t tell whether it’s earthquake now, or just my legs shaking. And smell the sulphur in the air.”
Tony saw Peter Vanderbilt sitting pacifically on a log, a cup of coffee in one hand, a sandwich in the other, and his bedraggled handkerchief spread over his knees for a napkin. The elegant Vanderbilt’s mustache was clogged with mud. His hair was a cake of mud. His shoes were gobs of mud. One of his pant-legs had been torn off at the knee. His shirt-tails had escaped his belt and festooned his midriff in stained tatters, and yet as Tony approached him, he still maintained his attitude of cosmic indifference, of urbanity so complete that nothing could succeed in ruffling it spiritually.
Vanderbilt rose. “Tony, my friend,” he exclaimed. “What a masquerade! What a disguise! I recognized you only by the gauge in which heaven made your shoulders. Sit down. Join me in a spot of lunch.”
Tony sat on the log, which apparently the wind had moved into position especially for Mr. Vanderbilt. “I’ll have a snack with you,” he replied. “Then I must get back to work.”
The quondam Beau Brummell of Fifth Avenue nodded understandingly. “Work, my dear fellow! I never saw so many people who were so avid for work, and yet there’s something exalting about it. And the storm was certainly impressive. I admit that I was impressed. In fact, I proclaim that I was impressed. Yet its whole moral was futility.”
“Futility?”
“Oh, don’t think that for a minute I was being philosophical. I wasn’t referring to the obvious futility of all man’s efforts and achievements. They were quite apparent before this—this—ah—disturbance. I was thinking of myself entirely. I was thinking of the many years I had spent as a lad in learning geography, and how useless all that knowledge was to me now. I should imagine that the geography I learned at twelve was now completely out of date.”
Tony nodded to the man on the log. “So I should imagine. You’ll excuse me, but I’m needed.”
Peter Vanderbilt smiled and put his cup beside Tony’s on the ground. Then without a word he rose and followed the younger man. They found Hendron emerging from the great hangar. His condition was neither worse nor better than that of the others. He seized Tony’s shoulder the minute his eyes lighted upon him. “Tony, son, have you seen Eve?”
“Yes.”
“She’s all right?”
“She’s entirely all right. She’s working over at the emergency hospital.”
Behind Hendron stood a number of men. He turned to them. “You go ahead and inspect the machine-shop. I’ll join you in a minute.”
He then noticed that Tony had a companion. “Hello, Vanderbilt. Glad to see you’re safe.” And again he spoke to Tony. “What was the extent of the injury to personnel?”
Tony shook his head. “I don’t know yet.”
Vanderbilt spoke. “I just came from the field hospital before I had my coffee. I was making a private check-up. So far as is known, no one here was killed. There are three cases of collapse that may develop into pneumonia, several minor cases of shock, two broken legs, one broken arm, a sprained ankle; one of the men who made coffee during the storm got burned, and there are forty or fifty people with more or less minor scratches and abrasions. In all less than seventy-five cases were reported so far.”
Hendron’s head bobbed again. He sighed with relief. “Good God, I’m thankful! It was more terrifying out there, apparently, than it was dangerous.”
“It was not unlike taking a Turkish bath on a roller coaster in the dark,” Vanderbilt replied.
Hendron rubbed his hand across his face. “Did you men say something about coffee?”
“With brandy in it,” Tony said.
Vanderbilt took Hendron’s arm. “May I escort you? You’re a bit rocky, I guess.”
“Just a bit. Brandy, eh? Good.” Before he walked away, he spoke to Tony. “Listen, son—” The use of that word rocked Tony’s heart. “This was much more than I had anticipated, much worse. But by the mercy of Providence the major dangers have passed, and we seem to be bloody but unbowed. The ship is safe, although one side was dented against its cradle. That’s about all. If I had foreseen anything like this, I could have been better prepared for it, although perhaps not. An open field was about the only habitable sort of place. I’ve got to get some rest now. I’m just a few minutes away from unconsciousness. I want you to take over things, if you think you can stand up for another twelve hours.”
“I’m in the pink,” Tony answered.
“Good. You’re in charge, then. Have me waked in twelve hours.”
Tony began the rounds again. In the hall of the women’s dormit
ory, Dodson and Smith were hard at work. Their patients sat or lay in bed. There was a smell of anæsthetics and antiseptics in the air. Eve, together with a dozen other women, was acting as nurse. She had changed her clothes, and washed. She smiled at him across the room, and Dodson spoke to him. “Tell Hendron we’re managing things beautifully in here now. I don’t think there’s anybody here that won’t recover.”
“He’s asleep,” Tony replied. “I’ll tell him when he wakes.”
He looked at Eve again before he went out, and saw her eyes flooded with tears. Immediately he realized his thoughtlessness in not telling her at once that her father was safe, but there was no reproof in her starry-eyed glance. She understood that the situation had passed the point at which rational and normal thoughtfulness could be expected.
Tony went next to the machine-shop. A shift of men was at work clearing away the infiltrated dust on the engines and the mud that had poured over the floors. Another group of men lay in deep sleep wherever there was room enough to recline. One of the workers explained: “Nobody around here can work for long without a little sleep, so we’re going in one-hour shifts. Sleep an hour, clean an hour. Is that all right, Mr. Drake?”
“That’s fine,” Tony said.
At the power-house a voice hailed him.
“You’re just in time, Mr. Drake.”
“What for?”
“Come in.” Tony entered the power-house. The man conducted him to a walled panel and pointed to a switch. “Pull her down.”
Tony pulled. At once all over the cantonment obscurity was annihilated by the radiance of countless electric lights. The electrician who had summoned Tony grinned. “We’re using a little emergency engine, and only about a quarter of the lights of the lines are operating. That’s all we’ve had time to put in order. It’s jerry-made, but it’s better than this damn’ gloom.”
Tony’s hand came down firmly on the man’s shoulder. “It’s marvelous. You boys work in shifts now. All of you need sleep.”