After Worlds Collide Page 5

  “Some of us still sleep in the Ark. Some sleep in the observatory, and some in two different groups of tents. We remain scattered because of the possibility of a recurrence of the meteoric shower.

  “One of the small atomic engines Hendron brought has been converted into the motor of a tractorlike machine which pulls a flat four-wheeled trailer back and forth to the river valley.

  “Tony and twenty other men and women live in that river valley. They have used the tractor to plow, and already they have several hundred acres under cultivation. They work frantically—not knowing how long the growing season will be—knowing only that our survival depends upon their success. The sun has been very hot these days, and the heat increases through a strange, tremendous noon. Several of the people, particularly the women, have been severely sun-burned, as the actinic rays appear to be much stronger on Bronson Beta than they were upon Earth.

  “None of us has yet adjusted himself to the difference in the length of the day, so that the hours of light seem interminable, and we reach darkness exhausted. I have seen workers on the Ark, and men and women on the farm, fall asleep at their jobs in the later afternoon. On the other hand, since we are accustomed to sleeping at the most nine or ten hours, we are apt to wake up long before dawn. We have ameliorated this problem somewhat by dividing the labor into eight-hour shifts, with eight more hours for recreation. But this brings the free periods of all of us frequently in the dark hours, and there is little in the way of recreation available then, or any time; so we go on working, although nearly always a number of those who are enjoying a rest-period may be found in the circular observation-building, watching Von Beitz or one of the other electrical engineers as they continue their long and manifestly hopeless vigil at the radio-receivers. They occasionally vary that vigil by sending out into the empty universe a description of our position and an account of our situation.

  “The soil at the farm was judged excellent by the chemists. Bacteria have been sowed in it. Ants have been loosed there. Our grasshoppers are fattening on the local flora; their buzzing is the only familiar living sound except our own, and the occasional noises of the animals we tend. Every day the tractor brings over the Other People’s road an iron tank of drinking- and cooking-water from the river. We had at first utilized sea-water, which we distilled; but the water in the river was found to be pure and apparently without bacteria, so we have given up our distillation.

  “We would like to restock the sea with fish, but we are doubtful about the possibility of establishing a biological economy there. We have numerous fishes in an aquarium on the Ark, and perhaps at some later date we shall make the attempt.

  “Shirley Cotton has fallen more or less in love with Tony. I would not enter this in a diary that is perhaps to be history, except for the fact that she announced it to every one the other day, and said that she was going to move for a system of marriage codes by which she could compel him to become her mate as well as Eve’s. It must have saddened Eve, although she has said nothing about it, and appears not to mind. But Shirley has pointed out what every one has often thought privately—there are thirteen more women than men. All the women but five are under forty years of age. Nearly half the men are more than fifty. Our other party, which appears lost, contained more of the younger people.

  “So at the end of two weeks we find ourselves disturbed by many questions, working hard, and realizing slowly the tremendous difficulties to be conquered.

  “Yesterday and the day before it rained. The days were like any rainy ones on earth, with gray skies and an incessant heavy drizzle that crescendoed to occasional downpours. The river at the farm rose. The earth around us became a slough of mud, and we tramped in and out of the Ark dejected, despondent, soaked and uncomfortable. When the skies cleared, however, Tony was jubilant. His wide acres were covered with even rows of green, and indeed, the farm was a beautiful spectacle. Hendron ordered Kyto to serve a meal which was an anticipatory thanksgiving.

  “We have moved our animals to the farm and put them in stockades where some—the most valuable, fortunately, the cows and sheep—thrive so far, on the ferns and mosses which we have mixed with the last of the fodder brought from earth. Other of the animals do not do so well; and if they die, it is the last we shall see of their species. But shall we ourselves survive?

  “On reading the above, it seems that my tone is melancholy; and I feel that it cannot be otherwise. Pressure of work and the reaction to our months of strain and danger, and contemplation of the awful though splendid perils of the flight from earth, have brought about this state of mind. We may be—are, for all we know—the only living, intelligent beings in all the cosmos; one hundred and three of us,—many past the prime of life,—stranded in this solitude with two cows and a bull, two sheep and rams, two deer, a few ants, grasshoppers, fungi, bacteria and bees that we have brought with us. We are now feeling the grinding despair that castaways must know, except that we cannot have the hope of rescue, and still worse, we have abandoned the hope of any other fellowship than our own. Solitude—exile—loneliness!

  “The children—the little boy and girl whom, thank God, we brought—are the bright lights in our emotional gloom. Their eagerness, their amusing behavior, their constant loyalty and affection, point us more powerfully than anything else to an untiring hope.

  “If there were more children—if babes were born among us, new members of our race, this awful feeling of the end might be lifted. But who would dare to bear children here? Eve? Shirley?”

  Eliot James, on this despairing note, interrupted his record.

  Two matters recommend themselves for comment at this point. One concerns Kyto, the quick-witted, obedient Japanese, who had so honorably, as he would have said, followed his master’s cause and was now one of the mysteries of Bronson Beta. Everybody talked to Kyto. Naturally, the little Jap was no longer Tony’s servant. No one would have servants again. His handiness in the matter of the preparation of meals had made him gravitate to the commissariat in the first few days. But it began to appear at once that Kyto was more than a good cook.

  On the third day, when Shirley Cotton had been instructed to inform Kyto on the matter of vitamins and balanced diets, she discovered that he knew fully as much about the subject as she. His budgeting of the food supply was a masterpiece. Unaided, he organized a storeroom system and made plans for its transference. Indeed the eventual discoveries about Kyto surpassed even the wildest guesses of the colonists.

  The other matter concerned Hendron:

  Others beside Eliot James had observed, and with concern, the change in the leader; and they began to discuss it.

  Tony knew that he himself was talked of as a candidate for commander of the group—governor of the camp—if Hendron was to be replaced; so Tony was especially careful to refrain from criticism. In addition to his sincere loyalty and devotion to Hendron, there was the further fact that Eve became even more fanatically devoted to her father as his difficulties increased.

  “Tony,” she asked him, “what do they—the opposition—say about Father?”

  “There’s no real opposition,” Tony denied. “We’d be crazy to oppose each other; we’d be stark insane! A hundred and three of us upon an empty planet. Surely we’ve more sense than that.”

  “Tony, tell me,” insisted Eve, “what you hear them say! Father’s through? They want another leader; isn’t that it?”

  “No,” denied Tony. “They want him to lead again; that’s all. He’s not doing it now as he did, you know.”

  “But he will again!”

  “Of course he will.”

  “They’re so unfair to Father!” Eve cried. “How much more can they expect of a man? He brought them—those who criticize him—he brought us all through the greatest venture and journey of mankind; and they complain that now he rests a little, that he does not immediately explore. Does it occur to nobody that perhaps Father is too wise to explore or to permit others to wander off—exploring?”

>   “I’ve told them I agree with your father,” Tony said. “I agree that our first procedure should be to establish ourselves where we are by hard work.”

  “But do you really agree, Tony?”

  “Well,” said Tony honestly, “it would certainly be more pleasant to explore.”

  “But it must not be done now; not yet. And you know why.”

  “Yes,” said Tony; for he too was familiar with Hendron’s fears—which were these: since the spores of certain plants had manifestly survived upon Bronson Beta, it was probable up to the practical point of certainty that spores of disease-inducing bacteria also had survived. These would be found where the previous “hosts” of the bacteria had dwelt and died—that is, in the villages and the cities of the Other People.

  So Hendron, in this new mood of his, feared the finding of dwellings of the Other People; he forbade, absolutely, further exploration.

  Hendron was tired; he had borne too much. He had brought his people over through space, having dealt with and conquered the most tremendous risks; and now he would risk no more. He became obsessed with a passion to preserve and keep safe these followers of his, whom he considered the last survivors of the human race.

  Yet, against all his care and caution, death came to the camp. On the morning of the twentieth day, after the slow, dragging dawn when the sun so leisurely arose, two men were found lying in a strange stuper. They were Bates and Jeremiah Post. Before sunset of that long day, twenty more—both men and women—were afflicted, and the physicians had isolated all the sick and ailing.

  The epidemic, while somewhat resembling the “sleeping sickness” of earthly days, differed from it in important aspects. It might be, Dodson announced, due to an infection carried from the world and which had developed on this new planet, and which, in the strange environment, exhibited different characteristics. It might be caused by some infective agent encountered on Bronson Beta.

  Was it significant that Bates and Jeremiah Post, who had dug from the soil the wreck of the Other People’s vehicle, were the first affected? And Maltby soon afterward was sick. Twenty-six persons altogether fell ill; and three died—Bates, and Wardlow, a chemist, and one of the girls who had served as a nurse to the sick—Lucy Grant. The rest made complete recoveries; no one else was later affected; the strange plague passed from the camp.

  But of the hundred and three emigrants from earth—perhaps the sole survivors of humanity in all creation—three were dead. And Tony Drake ordered the breaking of the strange soil of Bronson Beta for the first burials of Earth People! Three new interments to add to the uncountable graves of the Other People who were yet to be discovered!

  Hendron, who himself had not fallen sick, was by far the most disturbed by these deaths that had come to the camp; thereafter he doubled his restrictions.

  It was Higgins the botanist, who at length openly defied the leader.

  Higgins took four of the younger men—and under other circumstances Tony unquestionably would have joined them—and went off. At that time Hendron was endeavoring to make a new set of gears, and a chassis and a body, for a second atomic-engine vehicle, using metal from the wall of the Ark; and although he engaged more than twenty people in the operation, it was progressing very slowly. Moreover they had just passed through another three days of heavy rain, and while it was good for the gardens, nevertheless the people who lived in tents were extremely miserable. They were studying the possibility of having to live altogether in one or two of the round sections of the Ark during the coming winter, as it would be impossible to erect metal houses by that time; and every one was dejected over the idea of passing nearly two earth years sleeping on the padded floor of a chamber in the Ark in one great communal group.

  Higgins and his party were gone for four days, and anxiety about him became so acute that music was played on the great broadcasting machine constantly during the day, and at night a searchlight shot into the air a vertical beam which was visible for many miles.

  Late on the afternoon of the fourth day the exploring party returned.

  The five came down the Other People’s road from the west, walking with rapid, swinging strides, plainly in triumphant excitement.

  Higgins reported for them all when they halted, surrounded by their friends:

  “We covered about seventy-five miles. We saw a great desert. We went into a valley where a mighty tangle of fern trees is beginning to rise toward the heavens. We saw glaciers on the top of those distant mountains. I have seen excavations in an old pit where the fossils of animals that were extinct during the civilized period on this planet were being dug out. And we encountered, not ten miles from here, on the Other People’s road, something that will very largely relieve one of our great difficulties.”

  With that he unstrapped his pack, opened it, and dumped out at Hendron’s feet a dozen objects upon which Hendron dropped eagerly.

  They were wood, chips of wood. Hard wood—soft wood. Finely grained wood, and wood with a coarse, straight grain.

  “Is there much of it?” Hendron asked, as he examined the chips.

  Higgins nodded. “It isn’t related to any of the wood on earth, and there are many interesting features about this vegetation which I will outline in a monograph later, but it is vegetation. It is wood. It comes from the trunks of trees, and there is enough of it standing, seasoned, perfectly preserved, to supply us with all the lumber we can use for generations.

  “You have assumed,” he continued, speaking directly to Hendron, “that this planet upon which we stand was long ago drawn away from its orbit about some distant sun—some star. We had assumed that, for uncounted ages, this planet followed its prescribed course about its sun until, by the close passing of some other star, its orbit was disturbed, and this planet, with its companion world which destroyed our earth, was cast out into space and cold and darkness.

  “The appearance of the forest that we found completely accords with your theory of this planet’s past history. There stood a great forest of many varieties of trees, none exactly resembling those of our world, yet of their general order. They seemed to have been deciduous trees mostly; their leaves had fallen; they lay on the ground; the boughs were bare.

  “There must have been a long, last autumn followed by a winter without parallel on our world and previously on this planet. All water froze; air froze, preserving the forest as it was at the end of that awful autumn when no thaw came through the millions of years in outer space until this planet found our sun.

  “I have said that the trees I examined were unlike the trees on earth; yet their trunks and boughs were wooden; their leaves encumbered the ground. Here are a few of the leaves.… I am taking the liberty of calling this one maple, and this one oak, and this one spruce, and this one elm.”

  The exiles from earth pushed close to finger the leaves and bits of wood, so strange and yet suggesting the familiar. These promised them homes, rooms of their own, chairs, tables, cupboards and book-shelves and writing desks, and a thousand other things dear to their emotional memories. And yet it was odd to see Duquesne, the great French physicist, weeping, and Dodson, the dignified dean of New York surgery, hurling an old felt hat into the air and yelling at the top of his lungs, simply because a wiry little man with a goatee had showed them a few chips of wood.

  Tony drew close to Eve. “We’ll be outcasts no longer—outcasts!” he emotionally murmured. “We’ll have a house and a wood fire again!”

  “We?” whispered Eve. “We? You and I? We’ll be allowed to marry and live by ourselves?”

  They were near to Hendron, but he seemed not to hear them.

  “Did you go to the other edge of the forest?” he asked of Higgins.

  “There was no sign of the edge as far as we went. The road we followed went through the forest, and before we came to the woods, there were two crossroads. We considered both of them; but we went on, as we have told you, deep into the forest; and returned, as you see.”

  They were all sitt
ing around a fire on that night, after those first moments of gentleness and of affection when they had been brought electrically back to the happy past, when once again their hopes had risen.

  It was night, and dark; and there was no moon. Nor would there ever be a moon. They had been singing softly; and one of their number—Dimitri Kalov—had slipped away from the fire and talked to Hendron, and gone to the Ark and come back with a piano-accordion strapped around his shoulders. No one had seen him return, but suddenly from out of the darkness came a ripple of music.

  The singing stopped, and they listened while Dimitri played. He played old songs, and he played some of the music from Russia which his father had taught him. Then, between numbers, when the applause died and a hush fell over the group, as they waited for him to begin again, there was a sound.

  It was soft and remote, and yet it transfixed every one instantly, because it was a sound that did not belong to any human being. It was a sound that did not belong to their colony. A sound foreign and yet familiar. A sound that rose for a few instants, and then died out to nothing, only to return more strongly than before.

  One by one they turned their faces up, for the sound was in the sky. It approached rapidly, above them, in the dark. There was no mistaking it now. It was the motor of an airplane. An airplane on Bronson Beta! An airplane piloted by other human beings, or perhaps—they did not dare to think about the alternative.

  Nearer and nearer it came, until some of them could discern the splotch of darkness against the stars. But then the ship in the heavens seemed to see their fire on the ground and be alarmed by it, for it switched its course and started back in the direction from which it had come.