When Worlds Collide Read online

  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 life 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. Débris 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 reechoing 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 débris 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.

  Tony recalled how his earliest remembrances were of strangers coming to peer about the house which they called “historic,” and how they raved about the things they called “old.” The house was high on a hillside, and as he drove along the winding road, he rode over the mark where the water had risen the night before, and thought what a mere moment in geologic time the things “old” and “historic” here represented.

  He tried not to think about his mother yet.

  Eve, beside him, placed her hand over his which held the steering-wheel.

  “You’ll let me stay close beside you, Tony,” she appealed.

  “Yes. We’re almost there.”

  Familiar landmarks bobbed up on both sides, everywhere: a log cabin he had built as a boy; here was the way to the old well—the “revolutionary well.”

  A thousand million years, at least, life had been developing upon this earth; a thousand million years like them had been required for the process which must have preceded the first molding of the bricks which built the cities on Bronson Beta—which, some countless æons ago, had come to an end. For a thousand million years, since their inhabitants died, they might have been drifting in the dark until to-day, at last, they found our sun, and the telescopes of the world were turned upon them.

  It was useful to think of something like this when driving to your home where your mother lay.…

  There was the tree where he had fashioned his tree dwelling; the platform still stood in the boughs. It was hidden from the house, but within hailing distance. Playing there, he could hear his mother’s voice calling; sometimes he’d pretended that he did not hear.

  How long ago was that? How old was he? Oh, that was fifteen years ago. Fifteen, in a thousand million years.

  Time was beginning to tick on a different scale in Tony’s brain. Not the worldly clock but the awful chronometer of the cosmos was beginning to space, for him, in enormous seconds. And Tony realized that Hendron, speaking to him as he had done, had not been heartless; he had attempted to extend to him a merciful morphia from his own mind. What happened here this morning could not matter, in the stupendous perspective of time.…

  “Here we are.”

  The house was before them, white, calm, confident. A stout, secure dwelling with its own traditions. Tony’s heart leaped. How he loved it—and her who had been its spirit! How often she had stood in that doorway awaiting him!

  Some one was standing there now—an old woman, slight, white-haired. Tony recognized her—Mrs. Haskins, the minister’s wife. She advanced toward Tony, and old Hezekiah Haskins took her place in the doorway.

  “What happened?”

  Not what happened to the world last night; not what happened to millions and hundreds of millions overswept or sent fleeing by the sea. But what happened here?

  Old Haskins told Tony, as kindly as he could:

  “She was alone; she did not feel afraid, though all the village and even her servants had fled. The band of men came by. She did not try to keep them out. Knowing her—and judging by what I found—she asked them in and offered them food. Some of them had been drinking; or they were mad with the intoxication of destruction. Some one shot her cleanly—once, Tony. It might have been one more thoughtful than the rest, more merciful. It is certain, Tony, she did not suffer.”

  Tony could not speak. Eve clung to his hand. “Thank God for that, Tony!” she whispered.

  Briefly Tony unclasped his hand from Eve’s and met the old minister’s quivering grasp. He bent and kissed Mrs. Haskin’s gray cheek.

  “Thank you. Thank you both,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t have stayed here; you shouldn’t have waited for me. But you did.”

  “Orson also remained,” Hezekiah Haskins said. Old Orson was the sexton. “He’s inside. He’s—made what arrangements he could.”

  “I’ll go in now,” Tony said to Eve. “I’ll go in alone for a few minutes. Will you come in, then, to—us?”

  * * *

  “Lord, thou hast been our refuge in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou are God from everlasting, and world without end.”

  Old Hezekiah Haskins and his wife, and Orson the sexton, and Tony Drake and Eve Hendron stood on the hilltop where the men of the Drake blood and the women who reproduced them in all generations of memory lay buried. A closed box lay waiting its lowering into the ground.

  “Hear my prayer, O Lord; and with thine ears consider my calling.… For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.

  “Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

  Old Hezekiah Haskins held the book before him, but he did not read. A thousand times in his fifty years of the ministry he had repeated the words of that poignant, pathetic appeal voiced for all the dying by the great poet of the psalms: “For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.”

 
; Tony’s eyes turned to the graves of his fathers; their headstones stood in a line, with their birth-dates and their ages.

  “The days of our age are three score years and ten.”

  What were three score and ten in a thousand million years? To-day, in a few hours, the tide would wash this hilltop.

  Connecticut had become an archipelago; the highest hills were islands. Their slopes were shoals over which the tide swirled white. The sun stood in the sky blazing down upon this strange sea.

  “Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men.”

  Men and children of men on Bronson Beta too. Men millions and thousands of millions of years in the making. Azoic time—proterozoic time—hundreds of millions of years, while life slowly developed in the seas. Hundreds of millions more, while it emerged from the seas; a hundred million more, while reptiles ruled the land, the sky and water. Then they were swept away; mammals came; and man—a thousand millions years of birth and death and birth again before even the first brick could be laid in the oldest city on Bronson Beta, which men on earth had seen last night with their telescopes.

  “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday; seeing that is past as a watch in the night.

  “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 sexton and old Hezekiah alone could not lift the box to lower it. Tony had to help them with it. He did; and his mother lay beside her husband.

  To-night, when the huge Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta with its visible cities of its own dead were on this side of the world again, the tide might rise over this hill. What matter? His mother lay where she would have chosen. A short time now, and all this world would end.

  “I’ll take you away,” Tony was saying to the old minister and his wife and the older sexton. “We’re flying west to-night to the central plateau. We’ll manage somehow to take you with us.”