Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - When Worlds Collide

by When Worlds Collide(Lit)

  "Mr. Hendron, I-I-I-"

  "Never mind." The older man approached. "I think I know why you came. You wanted to be sure of the air before any of the rest of us left the ship."

  Tony did not reply. Hendron took his arm. "So did I. I couldn't sleep. I had to inspect our future home. I came out on the ladder half an hour ago." Hendron chuckled. "Duquesne was on my heels. I hid. He's gone for a walk. I heard him fall down and swear. What do you think of it? Did you see the aurora?"

  "No." Tony looked at the stars. He had a feeling that the sky overhead was not the sky to which he had been accustomed. The stars looked slightly mixed. As he stared upward, a crimson flame shot into the zenith from the horizon. It was followed by torches and sheets in all colors and shades. "Lord!" he whispered.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?" Hendron said softly. "Nothing like it on earth. It was in rippling sheets when I came out. Then in shafts-a colored cathedral. It made faint shadows of the landscape. I venture to say it's a permanent fixture. The gases here are different from those on earth. Different ionization of solar electrical energy. That red may be the neon. The blue- I don't know. Anyway-it's gorgeous."

  "You mean-this thing will play overhead all night every night?"

  "I think so. Coming and going. It seemed to me that it touched the ground over there-once." He pointed. "I thought I could hear it-crackling faintly, swishing. It's going to make radio broadcasting bad; and it'll affect astronomic observation. But it is magnificent."

  "Like the rainbow that came on Ararat," Tony said slowly.

  "Lord! So it is! God's promise, eh? Tony-you're an odd fellow for a football-player. Football! What a thing to hover in the mind here! Come-let's see if we can find Duquesne. The wily devil wanted to be first on Bronson Beta. He came out of the Ark like a shot. No. Wait-look."

  Tony glanced toward the Ark. The lock was opening again. The aurora shone luminously on the polished sides, revealing the black rectangle of the open door in sharp contrast.

  "Who is it?" Hendron whispered.

  "Don't know." Tony was smiling.

  They watched the fourth man to touch the new soil make his painful descent and run across the still hot earth. They saw him stop, a few yards away, and breathe. They heard his voice ecstatically. Then-they heard him weep.

  Hendron called: "Hello-James!"

  Tony saw Eliot James undergo the unearthliness of hearing that voice come through the empty air. Then James approached them.

  "How beautiful!" he whispered. "I'm sorry. I thought some one should try the air. And-I admit-I was keen to get out. Wanted to be first, I suppose. I'm humiliated-"

  Again Hendron laughed. "It's all right, my boy. I understand. I understand all of us. It was an act of bravery. When I came out, I half expected you others would be along. It's in your blood. The reason you came here one by one, alone and courageously, is the reason I picked you to come here with me. You all think, feel, act independently. You also all act for the common welfare. It makes me rather happy. Come on; Duquesne went this way."

  "Duquesne?" James repeated. Tony explained.

  They hunted for a long time. Overhead the stars showed brightly; and underneath them in varying intensity, with ten thousand spangles, the aurora played symphonies of light. Behind them was the tall cylinder of the ship, and behind it the range of hills. Ahead of them as they walked they could hear the increasing murmur of the sea.

  They found Duquesne sitting on a bluff-head overlooking the illimitable sea. He heard them coming and rose, holding out his hands.

  "My friends! Salut!"

  "I saw you pop out of the ship," Hendron said, "and I was sorry you fell down."

  The Frenchman was crestfallen. "You were out here?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Ahead of me?"

  "By a few minutes," Hendron answered.

  Duquesne stamped his foot several times, and then laughed. "Well-you should be! But I thought to fool you. Duquesne, I told myself-the great Duquesne-shall be first to set foot on the new earth. But it was not to be. It was a sin. I even brought a small flag of France-my beautiful France-and planted it upon the soil."

  "I saw it," Hendron said. "I took it down. We aren't going to have nations here. Just-people."

  Duquesne nodded in the gloom. "That too is right. I am foolish. I am like six years old. But to-night we will forget all this, n'est-ce pas? We will be friends. Four friends. The mighty Cole 'Endron. The brilliant Monsieur James. The brave Tony Drake. And myself-Duquesne the great. Sit."

  On the outcrop of stone ledge they seated themselves. They looked and breathed and waited.

  Occasionally one of them spoke. Usually it was Hendron -casting up from his thoughts between periods of silence memories of the past and plans for the future.

  "We are here alone. I cannot help feeling that our other ship has in some way failed to follow us. If, in the ensuing days, we hear nothing, we may be sure it is lost. Your French confrŠres, Duquesne-failed. We must admit that it seems probable that others failed. Bronson Beta belongs to us. It is sad-tragic. Ransdell is gone. Peter Vanderbilt is gone. Smith. That Taylor youngster you brought from Cornell. All the others. Yet-with all the world gone, who are we to complain that we have lost a few more of our friends?"

  "Precisely!" exclaimed Duquesne emphatically. "And what are we, after all? What was that mankind, of our earth, which we alone perhaps survive to represent and reproduce?"

  He had recoiled from his moment of inborn, instinctive patriotism, and become the scientist again.

  "Is the creation of man the final climax toward which the whole Creation has moved? We said so, in the infancy of our thought, when we imagined the world made by God in six days, before we had any comprehension even of the nature of our neighboring stars, when we could not even have dreamed of the millions and millions of the distant stars shown us by our telescopes, when our wildest fancy would have failed before the facts of to-day-endless space spotted to the edges of time with spiral nebul‘, each a separate 'universe' with its billions of suns like our own.

  "Behind us lay, on our own earth, five hundred millions of years of evolution; and billions of years before that, while matter cooled and congealed, the world was being made-for us?

  "Can we say so? Or is it that our existence is a mere accidental and possibly quite unimportant by-product of natural processes, which-as Jeans, the Englishman, once suggested-really had some other and more stupendous end in view?"

  "You mean," said Hendron, "perhaps it concerns only ourselves in our vanity, and not the universe at all, that any of us escaped from the cataclysm of earth's end and came here?"

  "Exactly," pronounced Duquesne. "It is nothing-if we merely continue the earth-here. When I recollect the filth of our cities, the greed of individuals and of nations, the savagery of wars, the horrors of pauperism permitted to exist side by side with luxury and wealth, our selfishness, hates, diseases, filth-all the hideousness we called civilization-I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments, utterly incapable of rehabilitation, about the sun. On the other hand, now we are here; and how are we to justify the chance to begin again?"

  Tony moved away from them. He was stirred with a great restlessness. He wandered toward the ship; and he saw, in that glowing, opalescent night, a woman's form; and he knew before he spoke to her, that it was Eve.

  "I was sure you'd be out," he said.

  "Tony!"

  "Yes?"

  "Here are you and I. Here!" She stooped to the ground and touched it; the dry fiber of a lichenlike grass was between her fingers. She pulled it, and stood with it in her hand. They had seen it, they both remembered; it was what had made the ground brown in the light of the dying day.

  "This was green and fresh, Tony, perhaps ten million years ago; perhaps a hundred million. Then the dark and cold came; the very air froze and preserved it. Do you suppose our cattle could eat it?"

  "Why not?" said Tony.

  "What else may be here, Tony? H
ow can we wait for the day?"

  "We aren't waiting!"

  "No; we're not." For they were walking, hand in hand like children, over the bare, rough ground. The amazing aurora of this strange world lighted them, and the soil smoothed, suddenly, under their feet. The change was so abrupt that it made them stare down, and they saw what they had stumbled upon; and they cried out together: "A road!"

  The ribbon of it ran to right and left-not clear and straight, for it had been washed over and blown over, but it was, beyond any doubt, a road! Made by what hands, and for what feet? Whence and whither did it run?

  A hundred million years ago!

  The clock of eternity ticked with the click of their heels on this hard ribbon of road, as they turned, hand in hand, and followed it toward the aurora.

  "Where were they, said Tony, almost as if the souls of those a hundred million years dead might hear, "when they were whirled away from their sun? What stage had they reached? Is this one of their Roman roads on which one of their Varros was marching his men to meet a Hannibal at Bronson Beta's Cannas? What was at one end-and what still awaits us there? A Nineveh of Sargon saved for us by the dark and cold? Or was this a motor road to a city like our Paris of a year ago? Or was it a track for some vehicle we would have invented in a thousand more years? And is the city which we'll find, a city we'd never dreamed of? Whatever it was, their fate left it for us; whereas our fate-the fate of our world-" He stopped.

  "I was thinking about it," said Eve. "Out there is space- in scattered stones circling in orbits of their own about the sun; the Pyramids and the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument and the Tomb of Napoleon, the Arch of Triumph! The seas and the mountains! Here the other thing happened-the other fate that could have been ours if the world had escaped the cataclysm. What sort were they who faced it here, Tony? Human, with bodies like our own? Or with souls like our own, but other shapes?"

  "On this road," said Tony, "this road, perhaps, well see."

  "And learn how they faced it, too, Tony; the coming dark and the cold. I think, if I had the choice, I'd prefer the cataclysm."

  "Then you believe our world was better off?"

  "Perhaps I wouldn't have-if we had stayed," amended Eve. "What happened here, at least left their world behind them."

  "For us," said Tony.

  "Yes; for us. What will we make of our chance here, Tony? Truly something very different?"

  "How different do you feel, Eve?"

  "Very different-completely strange even to myself, at some moments, Tony; and then at other times-not different at all."

  "Come here."

  "Why?"

  "Come here," he repeated, and drawing her close, he clasped her, and himself quivering, he could feel her trembling terribly. He kissed her, and her lips were hot on his. A little aghast, they dropped away.

  "We seem to have brought the world with us. I can never give you up, Eve; or share you with any one else."

  "We're too fresh from the world, Tony, to know. We've a faith to keep with-"

  "With whom? Your father?"

  "With fate-and the future. Let's go on, Tony. See, the road turns."

  "Yes."

  "What's that?"

  "Where?"

  She moved off the road to the right, where stood something too square and straight-edged to be natural. Scarcely breathing, they touched it, and found metal with a cold, smooth surface indented under their finger-tips.

  "A monument!" said Tony, and he burned a match. The little yellow flame lighted characters engraved into the metal -characters like none either of them had ever seen before, but which proclaimed themselves symbols of meaning.

  Swiftly Tony searched the two faces of the metal; but nothing that could possibly be a portrait adorned it. There were decorations of strange beauty and symmetry. Amazing that no one, in all the generations and in all the nations of the world, had drawn a decoration like this! It was not like the Chinese or Mayan or Egyptian, Greek or Roman, or French or German; but different from each and all.

  Tony caught his breath sharply as he traced it with his fingers.

  "They had an artist, Eve," he said.

  "With five hundred million years of evolution behind him."

  "Yes. How beautifully this writing is engraved! Will we ever read it?... Come on. Come on!"

  But the monument, if it was that, stood alone; and consideration of others, if not prudence, dictated that they return.

  But they did not reenter the ship. Duquesne was determined to spend the first night on the ground; and Hendron and James agreed with him. James had dragged out blankets from the Ark, and the five lay down on the ground of the new planet. And some of them slept.

  Tony opened his eyes. The sun was rising into a sky not blue but jade green. A deep, bewildering color-the color of Bronson Beta's celestial canopy.

  There would be no more human beings who wrote poetry about the blue sky. They would shape their romantic stanzas -as the stanzas in those strange, beautifully engraved characters must be shaped, if they mentioned the sky-to the verdancy of the heavens.

  Tony lifted himself on his elbow. Below him, the sea also was green. It had been gray on the steamy yesterday. But an emerald ocean was more familiar than an emerald sky. He watched the white water roll on the summits of swells until it was dispersed by the brown cliff. He looked back at the Ark. It stood mysteriously on the landscape-a perpendicular cylinder, shining and marvelous, enormously foreign to the bare, brilliant landscape. Behind it the chocolate colored mountains stretched into opalescent nowhere-the mountain into which the road ran, the road beside which stood the stele adorned by a decoration like nothing else that had been seen in the world.

  Tony regarded his companions. Hendron slept on a curled arm. His flashing eyes were closed. His hair, now almost white, was disheveled on his white forehead. Beside him Duquesne slept, half-sitting, his arms folded on his ample abdomen, and an expression of deep study on his swarthy face. Eliot James sprawled on a ledge which the sun now was warming, his countenance relaxed, his lips parted, his straggling red beard metal-bright in the morning rays.

  Eve slept, or she had slept, near to Tony; and now she roused. She was lovely in the yellow light, and looked far fresher than the men.

  Their clothes were stained and worn; and none of them had shaved, so that they looked more like philosophical vagrants than like three of the greatest men produced in the Twentieth Century on the Earth.

  Tony watched Eve as she gazed at them, anxiously maternal. To be a mother in actuality, to become a mother of men, was to be her role on this reawakened world.

  As she arose quietly, so as to disturb none of the others, Tony caught her hand with a new tenderness. They set off toward their road together.

  Suddenly Tony saw something that took the breath from his lungs. It was a tiny thing-on the ground. A mere splotch of color. He hurried toward it, not believing his eyes. He lay down and stared at it. In a slight damp depression was a patch of moss the size of his hand.

  He lay prone to examine it as Eve stooped beside him in excitement like his own. He did not know mosses-the vegetation resembled any other moss, on Earth. He recollected the hope that spores, which could exist in temperatures close to absolute zero for long periods, had preserved on Bronson Beta the power to germinate.

  Mosses came-on Earth-from spores; and here, reawakened by the sun, was a remnant of life that had existed eons ago, light-years away.

  Tony jumped up and ran about on the terrain; a few feet away, Eve stooped again. Other plants were burgeoning. Mosses, ferns, fungi-vegetation of species he could not classify, but some surely represented growths larger than mere mosses.

  He heaped Eve's hands and his own, and together they ran back to the three who were staring, as they earlier had gazed, at the green sky.

  Then Duquesne saw what Eve and Tony held. "Sacr‚ nom de Dieu!" He leaped to his feet. Hendron and James were beside him.

  With one accord, they rushed toward th
e Space Ship. "Get Higgins!" Hendron shouted. "Hell go mad! Think of it! A whole new world to classify!... And it means that we will live!"

  Before they reached the sides of the ship, the lock opened. The gangplank dropped to earth. Von Beitz appeared in the aperture, and Hendron shouted to him the news.

  People poured from the Ark; they stepped upon the new soil. They waved their arms. They stared at the hills, the sky, the sea. They breathed deep of the air. They handled the mosses, and ran about finding more of their own. They shouted, sang. They laughed and danced. The first day on the new earth had begun.

  The End