Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide
Page 18
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 wome
n 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 themselves 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.
Machine-guns were spitting from the woods once more, and both lights were blinded.
A rocket rasped its yellow streak into the air and burst above in shower of stars. A Fourth of July rocket, unquestionably a signal!
Tony fired at random into the woods; all through the camp, rifles and machine-guns were going. But no attack came.
A second rocket rasped up and broke its spatter of stars. Now the camp held its fire and listened. It heard-Tony heard, only a whistle, like a traffic whistle, or the whistle that summoned squads to attacking order.
A third rocket went up.
"Here they come!" some one said; and Tony wondered how he knew it. Soaked in perspiration, Tony glared into the blackness of the woods. He longed for the lights; he longed for military rockets. But there never had been any of these. Hendron, in making his preparation, had not foreseen this sort of attack. He had imagined vagrants in groups, or even mobs of desperate men, but nothing that the wire would not stop or a few machine-guns scatter. That is, he had imagined nothing worse until it was too late to prepare, adequately, for-this.
Now machine-guns in the woods were sweeping the camp enclosure. The fire radiated from a few points; and as it was certain the attackers were not in the path of their own fire, but were in the dark spaces between, Tony swept these with his bullets.
The gun bucked under his tense fingers. Yells rewarded him. He was wounding, killing the attackers-units of that horde that had sent that murderous fire to mow down the men, the splendid men, the great men who had whispered their names quietly to Tony as he had bent over them before they died.
Shouts drowned the yells of the wounded-savage, taunting shouts. There must be a thousand men on this bit of the front alone, more than all the men in the camp. Tony heard his voice bawling over the tumult: "Get 'em! Get 'em! Don't let 'em by!"
His machine-gun was overheating. A little light came from somewhere; Tony could not see what it was, except that it flickered. Something was burning. Tony could see figures at the wire, now. He could not reckon their numbers, did not try to. He tried only to shoot them down. Once through that wire,-that wire so weak that he could not see it,-and that thousand with the thousand behind them would be over him and the men beside him, they would be over the line of older men behind; then they would reach the women.
Tony's lips receded from his teeth. He aimed the gun with diabolic care, and watched it take effect as wind affects standing wheat. The attackers broke, and ran back to the woods.
In the central part of the cantonment the growth afforded better cover and gave the assault shorter range. Men went in pairs to the tops of the buildings, and through loopholes which had been provided for such a contingency began sniping at those who moved in the territory around the buildings.
Every one was overmastered by the same sort of rage which had possessed Tony. The reason for their existence had been to them a high and holy purpose. They defended it with the fanaticism of zealots. They could not know that the flight of their planes to and from the Ransdell metal-supply had indicated to the frantic hordes that somewhere human beings lived in discipline and decency. They could not know how for weeks they had been spied upon by ravenous eyes. They could not know how the countryside around, and the distant cities, had been recruited to form an army to attack them. They could not know that nearly ten thousand men, hungry, desperate, most of them already murderers many times over, armed, supplied with crafty plans which had been formulated by disordered heads once devoted to important, intelligent pursuits-how these besieged them now, partly for spoils, but to a greater degree in a fury of lust and envy. They had traveled on broken roads, growing as they marched. It was a heathen horde, a barbaric and ruthless horde, which attacked the colony.
The siege relaxed to an intermittent exchange of volleys. At this machine-gun station, Tony, suffering acutely from thirst, with six of his comrades lying dead near by, fought intermittently.
Re‰nforcements came from the center of the camp-Jack Taylor and two more of the younger men.
"Hurt, Tony?" Taylor challenged him.
"No," replied Tony; and he did not mention his dead; for Taylor, creeping up, had encountered them. "Who's killed in the buildings?"
"Not Hendron," said Taylor, "or Eve-though she might have been. She was one of the girls that went out to attend to the wounded. Two of the girls were hit, but not Eve.... Hendron wants to see you, Tony."
"Now?"
"Right now."
"Where is he?"
Tony stumbled through the dark to the buildings, black except for faint cracks of light at the doors behind which the wounded were collected. He found Hendron inside the Space Ship, and there, since its metal made an armor for it, a light was burning. Hendron sat at a table; it was now his headquarters.
"Who's hurt?" said Tony.
"Too many." Hendron dismissed this. "What do they think they are doing?" he challenged Tony abruptly.
"Getting ready to come again," Tony returned.
"To-night, probably?"
Tony glanced at his wrist-watch; it was eleven o'clock. "Midnight, would be my guess, sir," he said.
"Will they get in next time?" Hendron demanded.
"They can."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean, if they come on more resolutely. They can do more than they have done."