by Philip Wylie
“‘“The theory of migration to the Western Plains,” the President told us, “was correct in so far as it concerned escape from the tides. It was mistaken only in that it underestimated the fury of the quakes, and particularly the force and velocity of the hurricane which accompanied them. I removed from Washington on the night of the twenty-fourth. At that time the migration was proceeding in an orderly fashion. Transcontinental highways, and particularly the Lincoln Highway, were choked with traffic, and railroads were overburdened; but the cantonments were ready, the food was here, the spring crops were thriving and I felt reasonably certain that with millions of my countrymen the onslaught might be survived. I doubted, and I still profoundly doubt, that the earth itself will be destroyed by a collision. Accurate as the predictions of the scientists may be, I still trust that God Himself will intervene if necessary with some unforeseen derangement and save the planet from total destruction.”
“‘The President then described the passing of the Bronson Bodies and their effect on the prodigious Plains Settlement on the night of the twenty-fifth.
“‘“We were as nearly ready as could be expected. People arrived in the area at the rate of three hundred thousand per hour that night. Tent colonies if nothing better, bulging granaries and a hastily made but strong supply organization were ready for them.
“‘“Then the blow fell. Throughout the district the earth opened up. Lava poured from it. On the western boundary of our territory, which extended into Eastern Colorado, a veritable sea of lava and molten metal poured into the country drained by the Solomon, Saline, Smoky Hill and Arkansas rivers. A huge volcanic range was thrown up along the North Platte. Many if not most of our flimsily constructed buildings were toppled to the ground in utter confusion. However, for the first few hours of this awful disaster most of our people escaped. It was the hurricane which went through our ranks like a scythe. In this flat country the wind blew unobstructed. Those who could, hastened into cyclone-cellars, of which there are many. These cellars, however, often collapsed from the force of the earthquakes, and many died in them. No one knows what velocity the wind attained, but an idea of it may be had by the fact that it swept the landscape almost bare, that it moved our stone buildings.
“‘“This wind-driven scourge, which continued for thirty-six hours, abated on a scene of ruin. When I emerged from the cellar in which I had remained, I did not believe that a single one of my countrymen had survived it until I saw them reappear slowly, painfully, more often wounded than not, like soldiers coming out of shell-holes after an extensive bombardment. Our titanic effort had been for nothing. With the remnant of our ranks, we collected what we could find of our provisions and stores. In that hurricane my hopes of a united and re-formed United States were dashed to the ground. I now am struggling to preserve, not so much the nation, but that fraction of the race which has been left under my command; and I struggle against tremendous odds.”
“‘Those were the words of the President of the United States. After the interview he wished us God-speed and good fortune in our projected journey; and we left him, a solitary figure whose individual greatness had been like a rock to his people.’”
Hendron put down the fifth of the notebooks from which he had been reading. “We now come,” he said, “to the last stages of this remarkable flight. James’ sixth diary describes the grant of fuel to them by the President, and their departure from the ruins of the great mushroom area that had grown up in Kansas and Nebraska, only to be destroyed. They made an attempt at flight over the Rockies, but found there conditions both terrestrial and atmospheric which turned them back. Hot lava still belched from the age-old hills; the sky was sulphurous and air-currents and temperature wholly uncertain. They had been flying for three weeks, sleeping little, living on bad food, and it was time for them to return if they were to keep their pledged date. They decided to go back by way of St. Paul and Milwaukee.
“On the way to St. Paul, they were forced down on a small lake and it was there that Ransdell noticed the unmelted metal in a flow of magma. The country was apparently deserted, and they investigated a tongue of molten metal after an arduous and perilous journey to reach it. When they were sure of its nature, they collected samples and brought them back to the plane. Repairs to the oil-feeding system were required, and they were made. They took off on the day before their return, and reached the vicinity of St. Paul safely. It was in St. Paul—which as you will realize, is less than two hundred miles from here—that they received the injuries with which they returned. St. Paul was in much the same condition as Pittsburgh, except that it had undergone the further decay occasioned by two additional weeks of famine and pestilence. They landed on the Mississippi River near the shore, late that night. Almost immediately they were attacked, doubtless because it was believed they possessed food. The last words in James’ diary are these, ‘Boats have put out toward us. One of them has a machine gun mounted in the bow. Ransdell has succeeded in starting the motors, but the plane is listing. I believe that bullets have perforated one of the pontoons, and that it is filling. We may never leave the water. Vanderbilt is throwing out every object that can be removed, in order to lighten the ship. Our forward progress is slow. It may be that it will be necessary to repulse the first boat-load before we can take off.… It is.’”
Hendron dropped the seventh notebook on the table. “You may reconstruct what followed, my friends. The hand-to-hand fight on the plane with a boatload of hunger-driven maniacs—a fight in which all three heroic members of the airplane company were hurt. We may imagine them at last beating back their assailants, and with their floundering ship taking off before a second boatload was upon them. We may imagine Ransdell guiding his ship through the night with gritted teeth while his occasional backward glances offered him little reassurance of the safety of his comrades. The rest we know. And this, my friends, completes their saga.”
CHAPTER 17—THE ATTACK
AUTUMN had set in, but it was like no autumn the world had ever known before. The weather remained unnaturally hot. The skies were still hazy. An enormous amount of fine volcanic dust, discharged mostly from the chain of great craters that rimmed the Pacific Ocean, remained suspended in the upper air-currents; and when some it settled, it was constantly renewed.
Vulcanists had enumerated, before the disturbance of the First Passage, some four hundred and thirty active volcanic vents. Counting the cones which, because of their slightly eroded condition, had been considered dormant, there had been several thousand. All of these, it now was calculated, had become active. Along the Andes, through Central America, through the Pacific States into Canada, then along the Aleutian chain of craters to Asia, and turning southward through Kamchatka, Japan and the Philippines into the East Indies stood the cones which continued to erupt into the atmosphere. The sun rose red and huge, and set in astounding haloes. Tropical rains, tawny with volcanic dust, fell in torrents. Steam and vapors, as well as lavas and dust, were pouring from innumerable vents out from under the cracked and fissured crust of the world.
The neighboring vent, opened in the vicinity of St. Paul, supplied Hendron with more than the necessary amount of the new metal, which could be machined but which withstood even the heat of the atomic blast. Hendron had not waited for his explorers to recover. On the day after the reading of the diaries, he had flown with another pilot, found a source of the strange material from the center of the earth; and he had loaded the plane. Repeated trips had thereafter provided more than enough metal for the tubes of the atomic engines.
The engine-makers could not melt the metal by any heat they applied; they could not fuse it; but they could cut it, and by patient machining, shape it into lining of tubes which, at last, endured the frightful temperatures of the atom releasing its power.
The problem of the engine for the Space Ship was solved. There existed no doubt that it could, when required, lift the ship from the earth, successfully oppose the pull of gravity and propel it into interplanetary
regions.
This transformed the psychology of the camp. It was not merely that hope appeared to be realized at last. The effect of Ransdell’s discovery was far more profound than that.
The finding of the essential metal became, in the over-emotionalized mind of the camp, no mere accident, or bit of good luck, or result of intelligence. It became an event “ordained,” and therefore endowed with more than physical meaning. It was a portent and omen of promise—indeed, of more than promise.
And now there ensued a period of frantic impatience for the return of the Bronson Bodies! For the camp, in its new hysteria, had become perfectly confident that the Space Ship must succeed in making its desperate journey. The camp was resolved—that part of it which should be chosen—to go.
“When a resolution is once taken,” observed Polybius nearly two millennia before, “nothing tortures men like the wait before it can be executed.”
Tony kept on at his work, tormented by a torture of his own. Together with Eliot James and Vanderbilt, who had been less hurt than he, Ransdell had now recovered from his wounds.
For his part in the great adventure which James had reported in detail, the pilot would have become popular, even if he had not also proved the discoverer of the metal that would not melt. That by itself would have lifted him above every other man in the camp.
Not above Hendron in authority; for the flyer never in the slightest attempted to assert authority. Ransdell became, indeed, even more retiring and reserved than before; and so the women of the camp, and especially the younger ones, worshiped him.
When Eve walked with Ransdell, as she often did, Tony became a potential killer. In reaction, he could laugh at himself; he knew it was the hysteria working in him—his fear and terrors at facing almost inevitable and terrible death, and at knowing that Eve also must be annihilated. It was these emotions that at moments almost broke out in a demonstration against Ransdell.
Almost but never did—quite.
When Tony was with Eve, she seemed to him less the civilized creature of cultured and sophisticated society, and more an impulsive and primitive woman.
Her very features seemed altered, bolder, her eyes darker and larger, her lips softer, her hair filled with a bright fire. She was stronger, also, and more taut.
“We’re going to get over,” she said to him one day. “To get over” meant to make the passage successfully to Bronson Beta, when it returned. The camp had phrases and euphemisms of its own for the hopes and fears it discussed.
“Yes,” agreed Tony. No one, now, openly doubted it, whatever he hid in his heart. “How do you—” he began, and then made his challenge less directly personal by adding: “How do you girls now like the idea of ceasing to be individuals and becoming ‘biological representatives of the human race’—after we get across?”
He saw Eve flush, and the warmth in her stirred him. “We talk about it, of course,” she replied. “And—I suppose we’ll do it.”
“Breed the race, you mean,” Tony continued mercilessly. “Reproduce the type—mating with whoever is best to insure the strongest and best children for the place, and to establish a new generation of the greatest possible variety from the few individuals which we can hope to land safely. That’s the program.”
“Yes,” said Eve, “that’s the purpose.”
For a minute he did not speak, thinking how—though he temporarily might possess her—so Ransdell might, too. And others. His hands clenched; and Eve, looking at him, said:
“If you get across, Tony, there probably must be other wives—other mates—for you too.”
“Would you care?”
“Care, Tony?” she began, her face flooded with color. She checked herself. “No one must care; we have sworn not to care—to conquer caring. And we must train ourselves to it now, you know. We can’t suddenly stop caring about such things, when we find ourselves on Bronson Beta, unless we’ve at least made a start at downing selfishness here.”
“You call it selfishness?”
“I know it’s not the word, Tony; but I’ve no word for it. Morals isn’t the word, either. What are morals, fundamentally, Tony? Morals are nothing but the code of conduct required of an individual in the best interests of the group of which he’s a member. So what’s ‘moral’ here wouldn’t be moral at all on Bronson Beta.”
“Damn Bronson Beta! Have you no feeling for me?”
“Tony, is there any sense in making more difficult for ourselves what we may have to do?”
“Yes; damn it,” Tony burst out again, “I want it difficult. I want it impossible for you!”
Wanderers from other places began to discover the camp. While they were few in number, it was possible to feed and clothe and even shelter them, at least temporarily. Then there was no choice but to give them a meal and send them away. But daily the dealings with the desperate, reckless groups became more and more ugly and hazardous.
Tony found that Hendron long ago had forseen the certainty of such emergencies, and had provided against it. Tony himself directed the extension of the protection of the camp by a barrier of barbed-wire half a mile beyond the buildings. There were four gates which he sentineled and where he turned back all vagrant visitors. If this was cruelty, he had no alternative but chaos. Let the barriers be broken, and the settlement would be overwhelmed.
But bigger and uglier bands continued to come. It became a commonplace to turn them, back at the bayonet-point and under the threat of machine-guns. Tony had to forbid, except in special cases, the handing out of rations to the vagrants. The issuance of food not only permitted the gangs to lurk in the neighborhood, but it brought in others. It became unsafe for any one—man or woman—to leave the enclosure except by airplane.
Rifles cracked from concealments, and bullets sang by; some found their marks.
Ransdell scouted the surroundings from the air; and Tony and three others, unshaven and disheveled, crept forth at night and mingled with the men besieging the camp. They discovered that Hendron’s group was hopelessly outnumbered.
“What saves us for the time,” Tony reported to Hendron on his return, “is that they’re not yet united. They are gangs and groups which fight savagely enough among themselves, but in general tolerate each other. They join on only one thing. They want to get in here. They want to get us—and our women.
“There are women among them, but not like ours; and they are too few for so many men. Our women also would be too few—but they want them.
“They talk about smashing in here and getting our food, our shelters—and our women. They’d soon be killing each other in here, after they wiped us out. That desire—and hate of us—is their sole force of cohesion.”
Hendron considered silently. “There was no way for us to avoid that hate. And there is no hate like that of men who have lost their morale, against those who have retained it.”
Tony looked away. “If they get in, we’ll see something new in savagery.”
The attack began on the following night. It began with gunfire, raking the barriers. A siren on top of the powerhouse sounded a wholly unnecessary warning. “Women to cover! Men to arms!”
Low on the horizon that night, which was speckled here by gunfire, shone two new evening stars. They were the Bronson Bodies which now had turned about the sun and were rushing toward their next meeting-place with the earth: one of them to offer itself for refuge, the other to end the world forever.
CHAPTER 18—THE FINAL DEFENSE
TONY, directing the disposal of his men, longed for the moon—the shattered moon that survived to-night only in fragments too scattered and distant to lend any light. The stars had to suffice. The stars and the three searchlights fixed on the roofs of the laboratories nearest to the three fronts of the encampment.
One blazed out—and instantly became a target for a machine-gun in the woods before it. For a full minute, the glaring white beam swung steadily, coolly back and forth, picking out of the night men’s figures, that flattened themselv
es on the ground between the trees as the searchlight struck them.
Then the beam tipped up and ceased to move. The next moment, the great glaring pencil was snuffed out. The machine-gun in the woods had got the light-crew first, and then the light itself.
Other machine-guns and rifles, firing at random but ceaselessly, raked the entire camp. Tony stumbled over friends that had fallen. Some told him their names; some would never speak again. He recognized them by flashing, for an instant, his pocket-light on their still faces. Scientists, great men, murdered in mass! For this was not war. This was mere murder; and it would be massacre, if the frail defenses of the camp failed, and the horde broke in.
A defending machine-gun showed its spatter of flashes off to the right; Tony ran to it, and dropped down beside the gun-crew.
“Give me the gun!” he begged. He had to have a shot at them himself; yet when he had his finger on the trigger, he withheld his fire. The enemy—that merciless, murderous enemy—was invisible. They showed not even the flash of gunfire; and outside the wire barriers, there was silence.
The only firing, the only spatters of red, the only rattle, was within the defenses. It was impossible that, so suddenly, the attack had ceased or had been beaten off. No; this pause must have been prearranged; it was part of the strategy of the assault.
It alarmed Tony far more than a continuance of the surrounding fire. There was more plan, more intelligence, in the attack than he had guessed.
“Lights!” he yelled. “Lights!”
They could not have heard him on the roofs where the two remaining searchlights stood; but they blazed out, one sweeping the woods before Tony. The glare caught a hundred men before they could drop; and Tony savagely held the trigger back, praying to catch them with his bullets. He blazed with fury such as he never had known; but he knew, as he fired, that his bullets were too few and too scattered. His targets were gone; but had he killed them? The searchlight swept by and back again, then was gone.