Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  " 'His comment perhaps is suitable for closing this record of the great city of Chicago: "Sitting alone, I realized what you were investigating; and for the first time, gentlemen, I understand what the end of the world would mean. I have never come so close to losing my nerve. It was awful."

  Hendron looked up from the book. "I think, my friends, we will all find ourselves in agreement with Mr. James and Mr. Vanderbilt." He turned a few pages; and their whisper was audible in the silence of his audience. "I am now skipping a portion of Mr. James' record. It covers their investigation of the Great Lakes and describes with care the geological uplifting of that basin. From Chicago they flew to Detroit. In Detroit they found a different form of desolation. The waters of Lake Huron had poured through the city and the surrounding district, completely depopulating it and largely destroying it. They were able to land their plane on a large boulevard, a section of which was unbroken, and they refueled in the vicinity. They were disturbed by no one, and they saw no one. Cleveland had suffered a similar fate. Then they continued their flight to Pittsburgh. I read from Mr. James' record:

  " 'Like God leading the children of Israel, Pittsburgh remains in my memory as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night! My astonishment may be imagined when I say that, as we approached the city after our visit to the ravaged metropolises of Ohio, we saw smoke arising against the sky. Presently the lichen-like area of buildings began to clarify in the morning haze. Vanderbilt dampered the motors and we dropped toward the Monongahela River, which was full to the brim of the levees and threatened to inundate the city. Earthquakes had half wrecked its structures. They lay broken and battered on "The Point" which lies between the two rivers. Smoke and steam emerged from a rent in Mt. Washington. The bridges were all down. I noticed that one of them had fallen directly upon a river steamer in which human beings had evidently sought to escape.

  " 'Our ship came to rest, and we taxied cautiously toward one of the submerged bridges-every landing on water was dangerous, because of the likelihood of unsuspected snags, and we always exercised the maximum of care. From the top of the pontoon I threw a rope over one of the girders, and we made fast, the perceptible current keeping us clear. We went ashore by way of the taut rope.

  " 'It was easy to perceive the cause of the smoke. A large area of Pittsburgh, or what remained of Pittsburgh, was in flames, and to our ears came clearly a not distant din. We had already guessed its identity in our descent. It was the din of battle. Rifles cracked incessantly; machine-guns clattered; and occasionally we heard the cough of a hand-grenade.

  " 'It was not wise to proceed farther. Nevertheless, bent upon discovering the nature of the combat, I insisted on going forward while my companions returned to guard our precious ship. I had not invaded the city deeply before I saw evidence of the fighting. Bullets buzzed overhead. I took cover. Not far away, in a street that was a shambles, I saw men moving. They carried rifles which they fired frequently; and they wore, I perceived, the tattered remnants of the uniform of the National Guard.

  " 'A squad of these men retreated toward me, and as they did so, I perceived their enemy. Far down the street a mass of people surged over the barricade-like ruins of a building. They were terrible to see, even at that distance. Half naked, savage, screaming, armed with every tool that might be used as a weapon-a mob of the most desperate sort. The retreating squad stopped, took aim and several of the approaching savages fell. In their united voices I detected the tones of women.

  "As the guardsmen reached my vicinity, one of them clapped his hand to his arm, dropped his rifle and staggered away from his fellows to shelter. The squad was at that instant re‰nforced by a number of soldiers who carried a machine-gun. The mob was temporarily checked by its clatter.

  " 'I made my way to the wounded man, and he gratefully accepted the ministrations I could offer from the small kit I carried in my pocket. His right arm had been pierced. It was from him that I was able to learn the story of Pittsburgh. Some day I hope I may expand his tale into a complete document, but since my time at the moment is short, and since we are now flying southward and writing is difficult, I will compress it.

  " "The man's name was George Schultz. He had been a bank-clerk, married, the father of two children, and had joined the National Guard because it offered an opportunity for recreation. He told me rather pitifully that he had doubted the menace of the Bronson Bodies, and that he had compelled his wife to keep the children in their flat, against her better judgment. His wife had wished to take them to their aunt's home in Kansas. On the night of the twenty-sixth, although frightened by the size of the Bronson Bodies, he had nonchalantly gone out to a drug-store for cigarettes, and the first tremor which struck Pittsburgh had shaken down his home on the heads of his family. He was not very clear about the next forty-eight hours.

  " 'The mills at Pittsburgh had been working to the last moment. The Government deemed that the great steel city was in no danger from the tides, and had used it for manufacturing during the last days. Schultz described to me the horrible effect of the earthquakes in the steel-mills, as blast furnaces were upset and as ladles tipped their molten contents onto the mill floors. Hundreds perished in the artificial hell that existed in the steel mills; but tens of thousands died in the city proper. In many parts of the city area the effect of the earthquakes was rendered doubly more frightful by the collapse of the honeycomb of mine galleries underlying the surface. Blocks of buildings literally dropped out of sight in some places.

  " 'After the quake, what was left of the administrative powers immediately organized the remnant of the police and National Guard. Food, water and medical attention were their first objectives, and policing only a secondary consideration. However, food ran low; medical supplies gave out; the populace rebelled.

  " 'Three days before our arrival, a mob had armed itself, stormed one of the warehouses in which a commissary functioned, and captured it. Encouraged by that success, the mob had attempted to take over the distribution of the remaining food and supplies.

  'I had appeared on the scene apparently after the mob and the forces of law and order had been fighting for three days; and it was not necessary for Schultz to explain to me that in a very short time the National Guardmen and police would be routed: their numbers were vastly inferior; their ammunition was being exhausted, and organized warfare was out of the question in that madman's terrain.

  " 'I abandoned Schultz to his comrades and made my way back to the river.

  " 'We lost no time in taking off; and as we flew over Pittsburgh, we could see below us, moving antlike through the ruins, the savage mob, with scattered bands of guardsmen and police opposing it.' "

  Again Hendron looked up from the notebook.

  "That, my friends, ends the account of the fate of Pittsburgh.

  "Mr. James' diary next describes a hazardous flight across the Appalachians and their arrival at Washington, or rather the site of Washington: 'It is not possible to describe our feelings when we actually flew over the site of Washington. We had passed the state in which emotions may be expressed by commonplace thought. We had reached a condition, in fact, where our senses rejected all feeling, and our brains made a record that might be useful in the future while it was insensible in the present. When I say that the ocean covered what had been the Capital of our nation, I mean it precisely. No spire, no pinnacle, no monument, no tower appeared above the blue water that rippled to the feet of the Appalachian chain. There was no trace of Chesapeake Bay, no sign of the Potomac River, no memory of the great works of architecture which had existed at the Capital. It was gone- gone into the grave of Atlantis; and over it was the inscrutable salt sea, stretching to the utmost reaches of the eye. The Eastern seaboard has dropped. We turned back after assuring ourselves that this condition obtained along the entire East Coast.'

  "Mr. James," Hendron said, "now describes their return across the mountains. He adds to our geographical knowledge by revealing that the whole Mississippi Basin, as well a
s the East Coast and Gulf States, has been submerged. Cincinnati is under water. The sea swells not only over Memphis but over St. Louis, where it becomes a wide estuary stretching in two great arms almost to Chicago and to Davenport.

  "They next investigated the refuge area in the Middle West. Here they found indescribable chaos, and although order was being made out of it, although they were hospitably received by the President himself in Hutchinson, Kansas, which had become the temporary Capital of the United States, they found the migrated population in a sorry plight. Mr. James uses the President's own words to describe that predicament. Again I refer to the diary.

  " 'Following the directions we had been given, we flew to Hutchinson. For a number of reasons, Hutchinson had been chosen as the temporary Capital of the States refuge area. It is normally fifteen hundred feet above sea level. It is in the center of a rich grain, farm, poultry, dairy, live-stock and lumber region. It has large packing plants, grain elevators, creameries, flour-mills. It is served by three railroads, and hence is an excellent site for the accumulation of produce. Thither, in the weeks preceding the passage of the Bronson Bodies, the multitudes of the United States flocked.

  " 'The speed of that migration accelerated greatly after the Bronson Bodies had appeared above the southern horizon, and the most obtuse person could appreciate in their visible diameter the approach of something definite and fearful. It is estimated that more than eleven million people from the East Coast and three million from the West Coast actually reached the Mississippi Valley before the arrival of the Bodies. More than half of them were exterminated by the tide which rushed up the valley and which remained in the form of a gigantic bay in the new sunken area that now almost bisects the United States. We found Hutchinson a scene of prodigious military and civil activity-it resembled more than anything else an area behind the front lines in some titanic war.

  "'After presentation of our credentials and a considerable wait, we left our plane, which was put under a heavy guard, and drove in an automobile to the new "White House"-a ramshackle rehabilitation of a huge metal garage. Here we found the President and his Cabinet; and here sitting around a table, we listened to his words. The President was -worn and thin. His hand trembled visibly as he smoked. We learned later that he had been living on a diet of beans and bacon. He looked at us with considerable interest and said: "I sent for you, because I wished to hear about Cole Hendron's project. I know what he is planning to do, and I'm eager to learn if he thinks he will be successful."

  " 'We explained the situation to the President, and he was delighted to know that we had survived the crises of the Passing. He then continued gravely: "I believe that Hendron will be successful. You alone, perhaps, may carry away the hope of humanity and the records of this life on earth; and I will return to the tasks confronting me here with the solace offered by the knowledge that the enterprise could be in no--" '"

  Here Hendron stopped, realizing that he was reading praise of himself to his colleagues. A subdued murmur of sympathetic amusement ran through the crowd of listeners, and the scientist read again from James' journal.

  "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 un-melted 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 h
as 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.