Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  Tony so fully agreed with him that he drew Eve away. He made the excuse that, her father having retired, she also should sleep; but having taken her away from the others, he kept her to himself,

  "Eve, we've got to marry!"

  "My dear, what would marriage mean now?"

  "But you feel it-don't you?"

  "Need for you-"

  "As never before, Eve?"

  "Yes, Tony. It's as he said-oh, my dear! The waters overwhelm you-the flood rising and rising, with scarcely a sound, and those two yellow discs doing it! And no one can stop them! They're coming on, Tony! They're coming on, to lift the waters higher and higher; they're coming on to crack open the shell of the earth! Tony-oh, hold me!"

  "I have you, Eve. You have me! Here we are, two of us together.... They're in pairs wherever they are in New York to-night, Eve. Didn't you see them? Wherever they waited, a woman waited with a man. There's only one answer to- annihilation. That's it."

  "Tony!"

  "My dear-"

  "What's that.... Your name? Some one's searching for you. A message seems to have come."

  "How could a message come?"

  Yet in the yellow light on the roof, they could see a uniformed boy; and Tony stepped out to meet him.

  He had arrived at the building an hour ago, the boy was saying; with the elevators stopped, he had climbed the roof by the stairs.

  Tony took his telegram, tore it open and, in the light of the two baleful Bodies, he read:

  MRS. MADELINE DRAKE MURDERED BY LOOTERS WHO RAIDED SEVERAL CONNECTICUT FARMS AND ESTATES LATE TO-DAY.

  The paper dropped from Tony's fingers. He slumped to a bench and covered his face with his hands.

  He felt Eve's hand and looked up, utter despair on his face.

  "Read that." He saw that she held his telegram.

  "I have read it. Tony-"

  "I should have gone to her; or I should have taken her away -but I believed it best to leave her in her home as long as possible. I was going to her to-morrow. Now-now-"

  She checked his flow of recrimination, sitting down on the bench beside him and reaching up to smooth his hair as if he were only a child. "You couldn't have done a thing, Tony. This might have happened wherever you had taken her. All over the country, bands of men have been running like wolves; and to-day they became more merciless."

  Tony leaped to his feet. "I'll go to her, and find them, and kill them!"

  "You'll never find them, Tony. They'll have moved on; and no one will have stayed to tell you who they were.... Besides, Tony, they'll be punished without any one raising a hand. Perhaps already they are dead."

  "But I must go to her!"

  "Of course; and I'll go with you; but we must wait for the tide to fall."

  "Tide?" He stalked to the edge of the roof and stared down; for, strangely, he had forgotten it. Now he saw the streets running full, not with the foul water of the harbor, but with a clean green flood. The Bronson Bodies lit it almost to dim daylight.

  Tony gazed up at them, aghast. "My mind, my mind can understand it, Eve; but, good God, she was my mother! Murdered! Cornered somewhere in her house-my home where I was a little boy, and where I ran to her with my triumphs and my troubles, Eve. I wonder where she was, in what room they struck her down, the damned cowards-" He did not finish. He was racked by a succession of great sobs.

  Eve caught his hand and brought him again to the bench. Still they were alone, and she sat close beside him, holding him in her arms.

  "Well go to her, Tony, as soon as we can.... This is happening to everybody. It's horrible, fiendish, unbelievable -and inevitable. It was frightful that they killed her; and yet probably, Tony, they did it instantly, and surely without agony for her; so perhaps it is much better that she went now, than that she should live through the next months as we know they will be-months of starvation and savagery and horror; leading only to the final catastrophe."

  Tony looked bleakly at the girl. "Yes, I know that! but I can feel only that they killed her."

  For a long time they said nothing more; then they arose, returned to the parapet and gazed down at the water.

  Strange sounds rose with the flow of the flood; the collapse of windows under the weight of water; the outrush of air, the inrush of the tide. Away on other streets not citadeled by the massive towers whose steel skeletons reached down to the living rock, the walls were beginning to fall. Smoke drifted like a mist between the buildings as the water, the final enemy of fire, began to cause conflagrations.

  Somewhere it "shorted" an electric current, perhaps; somewhere else it had sent a family fleeing before a fire which ought first to have been extinguished; or the water itself entered into chemical combinations which caused heat. Doubtless many a hand deliberately set the flames. But there was no wind to-night; so the flood isolated each fire; here and there a building burned; but the huge terraced towers of Manhattan stood dark and silent, intact.

  "You must try to sleep, Tony."

  "And you!"

  "Till the tide goes out; yes, Tony. I'll try, if you will." She kissed him, and they went in together, to separate at the door of the room where she was to sleep. Tony went on to the bed allotted him, and he lay down without undressing. In the next room Cole Hendron was actually asleep.

  Tony, trying not to think, occupied himself with separating the sounds which reached him through the opened window -a woman's shriek, a bass voice booming a strange song, a flute.

  Some one, seated above the flood, was piping in the unnatural light of the Bronson Bodies as the sea swept over the city; but for the most part the people who had remained were silent-paired off, here and there, sharing in each other's arms the terrible excitement of dawning doomsday.

  Tony twisted on his bed and remembered his mother. When this tide turned-and enormous as it was, it must flow six hours, ebb for six before it flowed again, just like the moon tides-he must set off home for his last service to her.

  "Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live." The lines for the burial of the dead began echoing in his brain. "Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long; and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity."

  Tony had shut his eyes, and now he opened them to the light of the Bronson Bodies slanting into the room.... "For when thou art angry, all our days are gone; we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told."

  The woman had ceased to shriek; but the Negro's bass boomed on. Tony was sure it was a black man singing the weird chant which rode on the waters. The piper, too, played on....

  Tony was aware that some one was shaking him.

  "Morning?" he complained.

  "Not morning," Kyto's voice admitted. "But the tide now-"

  "Oh, yes," said Tony, sitting up as he remembered. "Thank you, Kyto."

  "Coffee," said Kyto modestly, "will be much as usual, I venture to hope."

  Tony arose and stalked to the window to look down at water, now rushing seaward. The roll of the world, while he had slept, had turned the city and the coast away from the Bronson Bodies so that now they sucked the sea outward; and the wash made whirlpools at the cross-streets.

  It was the gray light of dawn which showed him the whirlpools. In the west, the awful Bronson Bodies had set; but Tony knew that, though now for twelve hours they would be invisible, the force of their baleful violence, even upon the side of the world which had spun away from them, was in no sense diminished. The tide which had risen under them would flow out for six hours, to be sure; but then-though they were on the opposite side of the world-they would raise the frightful flow again just six hours later....

  "Coffee," reminded Kyto patiently, "you will need."

  "Yes," admitted Tony, turning, "I'll need coffee."

  "Miss Eve insists to pour it."

  "Oh, she's up?"

  "Very ready to see you."

  An airplane hummed overhead
; at some small distance, several others. Ransdell undoubtedly was in one of them. Inspection from the air of effects upon the earth was one of his duties-a sort of reconnaissance of the lines of destruction. Tony thought of Ransdell looking down and wondering about Eve. The flyer's admiration of her amounted to openly desirous adoration. There was the poet Eliot James, too.

  They were bound with him-and with Eve-in the close company of the League of the Last Days whose function lay no longer in the vague future. The peculiar rules and regulations of the League already were operative in part; others would clamp their control upon him immediately.

  Tony to-day resented it. He made no attempt to shake off his overpossessive jealousy of Ransdell or Eliot James over Eve. She would go home with him to-day-to his home, where his mother had been murdered. Eve and he would leave his home together-for what next destination? To return her to her father, who forbade Tony attempting to exercise any exclusive claim upon her? No; Tony would not return her to her father.

  Hendron had arisen; and as if through the wall he had read Tony's defiance, he opened the door and entered.

  He offered his hand. "I have heard, Tony, the news which reached you after I retired. I am sorry."

  "You're not," returned Tony. It was no morning for perfunctory politeness.

  "You're right," acceded Hendron. "I'm not. I know it is altogether better that your mother died now. I am sorry only for the shock to you which you cannot argue away. Eve tells me that she goes home with you. I am glad of that.... Last night, Tony, the Bronson Bodies were studied in every observatory on the side of the world turned to them. Of course they were closer than ever before, and conditions were highly favorable for observation. I would have liked to be at a telescope; but that is the prerogative of others. My duty was here. However, a few reports have reached me. Tony, cities have been seen."

  "Cities?" said Tony.

  "On Bronson Beta. Bronson Alpha continues to turn like a great gaseous globe; but Bronson Beta, which already had displayed air and land and water, last night exhibited- cities... We can see the geography of Bronson Beta quite plainly. It rotates probably at the same rate it turned, making day and night, when it was spinning about its sun. It makes a rotation in slightly over thirty hours, you may remember; and it happens to rotate at such an angle relative to us that we have studied its entire surface. Something more than two-thirds of the surface is sea; the land lies chiefly in four continents with two well-marked archipelagoes. We have seen not merely the seas and the lines of the shores, but the mountain ranges and the river valleys.

  "At points upon the seacoasts and at points in the river valleys where intelligent beings-if they once lived on the globe-would have built cities, there are areas plainly marked which have distinct characteristics of their own. There is no doubt in the minds of the men who have studied them; there is no important disagreement. The telescopes of the world were trained last night, Tony, upon the sites of cities on that world. Tony, for millions of years there was life on Bronson Beta as there has been We here. For more than a thousand million years, we believe, the slow, cautious but cruel process of evolution had been going on there as it has here.

  "Recall the calendar of geological time, Tony. Azoic time -perhaps a billion years while the earth was spinning around our sun with no life upon it at all-azoic time, showing no vestige of organic life. Then archeozoic time-the earliest, most minute forms of life-five hundred million years. Then proterozoic time-five hundred million more-the age of primitive marine life; then paleozoic time, three hundred million years more while life developed in the sea; then mesozoic time-more than a hundred million years when reptiles ruled the earth.

  "A hundred million years merely for the Age of Reptiles, Tony, when in the seas, on the lands and in the very air itself, the world was dominated by a diverse and monstrous horde of reptiles!

  "They passed; and we came to the age of mammals-and of man.

  "Something of the sort must have transpired on Bronson Beta while it was spinning about its sun. That is the significance of the cities that we have seen. For cities, of course, cannot 'occur.' They must have thousands and tens of thousands of years of human strife and development behind them; and behind that, the millions of years of the mammals, the reptiles, the life in the seas.

  "It is a developed world-a fully developed world which approaches us, Tony, with its cities that we now can see."

  "Not inhabited cities," objected Tony.

  "Of course not inhabited now; but once. There can be no possible doubt that every one on that world is dead. The point is, they lived; so very likely we also can live on their world -if we merely reach it."

  "Merely," repeated Tony mockingly.

  "Yes," said Hendron, ignoring his tone. "It is most likely that where they lived, we can. And think of stepping upon that soil up there, finding a road leading to one of their cities-and entering it!"

  He recollected himself suddenly and extended his hand. "You have an errand, Tony, to complete between the tides. I gladly lend you Eve to accompany you. She will tell you later what we all have to do."

  He led Tony to Eve's door but did not linger, thereafter. Tony went in alone.

  She was at a tiny table where a blue flame burned below a coffee percolator, and where an oil lamp, following the failure of electricity, augmented the faint gray of approaching dawn.

  Was it the light, he wondered, or was Eve this morning really so pale?

  He came to her, and whatever the rules for this day, he claimed her with his arms and kissed her.

  "Now," he said with some satisfaction, "you're not so pale."

  She did not disengage herself at once; and before she did, she clung tightly to him for a moment. Then she said:

  "You've got to have your coffee now, Tony."

  "I suppose so.... But there's no stimulant in the world like you, Eve."

  "I'll be with you all day."

  "Then let's not think of anything beyond."

  She turned the tiny tap of the silver coffeepot, filled a cup for him, one for herself. A few minutes later they went down together.

  The rushing ebb of the tremendous tide was swirling less than a foot deep over the pavement, and was falling so rapidly that the curb emerged even while they were watching. From upper floors, where many automobiles had been stored against the tide, cars were reaching the street. One drove in the splash before Tony and Eve and stopped. The driver turned it over to them; and Tony took the wheel with Eve beside him.

  They went with all possible speed, no longer encountering the tide itself, but lurching through vast puddles left by the retreating water. Debris from offices, shops and tenements swept by the tides bestrewed the street.

  A few people appeared; a couple of motorcycle police, not in the least concerned with cars, were making some last inspection of the city.

  Bodies lay in the street; and now on the right a haze of smoke drifted from an area that had burned down during the night.

  The morning, though the sun had not yet risen, felt sticky. The passage of water over Manhattan had laden the air with moisture so that driving between the forsaken skyscrapers was like journeying in a strange, gaunt jungle.

  Tony noticed many things mechanically, with Eve at his side, traversing the re‰choing streets; the rows of smashed windows along Fifth Avenue-tipped-over dummies, wrecked displays; piles of useless goods on the sidewalks, the result of looting; the Empire State Building standing proudly against the blue sky, ignorant of its destiny, still lord of man's creation.

  The East River, when they reached it, was a torrent low in its channel being sucked dry toward the sea. Wreckage strewed the strangely exposed bottom. The bridge; a few miles more of flood debris in steaming streets. Then towns and villages which also had been overswept.

  Now the country with its higher hills whereon Tony and Eve marked in the first sunlight, the line left by the water at its height. They dipped through empty villages and rose to hamlets whose inhabitants still lingered,
staring in a dulled wonderment at the speeding car. The effect of the vast desolation beat into the soul; derelict, helpless people, occasional burning houses, a loose horse or a wandering sheep-emptiness, silence.

  They dipped into a hollow which was a pool not drained but which could be traversed; they climbed a slope with a sharp turn which was blocked; and there two men sprang at them.

  Tony jerked out his pistol; but to-day-and though he was on his way to his mother who was murdered-he could not pull the trigger on these men. He beat down one with the butt, instead, and with the barrel cowed the other.

  He got the car clear and with Eve drove on, realizing they would have killed him and taken Eve with them. Why had he left them alive?

  Ah-here was the road home! Home! His home, where he had been born and where he was a little boy. Home, the home that had been his father's and his grandfather's and before that for four generations. Down this road from his home, some man named Drake had gone to fight in the Great War, the War of the Rebellion, in 1812, and to join the army of Washington.