When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

He bent and kissed her neck.

“You’ve breakfasted, Tony?”

“Yes—no. Can I sit with you here? I scarcely dreamed you’d be up, Eve, after your night.”

“You’ve seen the papers? We were through with them before three. That is, Father then absolutely refused to say any more or see any one else. He went to sleep.”

“You didn’t.”

“No; I kept thinking—thinking—”

“Of the end of everything, Eve?”

“Part of the time, I did; of course I did; but more of the time of you.”

“Of me—last night?”

“I hoped you’d come first thing to-day. I thought you would.… It’s funny what difference the formal announcement of it makes. I knew it all last night, Tony. I’ve known the general truth of it for weeks. But when it was a secret thing—something shared just with my father and his friends—it wasn’t the same as now. One knew it but still didn’t admit it, even to one’s self. It was theoretical—in one’s head, like a dream, not reality. We didn’t really do much, Father and I, last night. I mean do much in proving up the facts and figures. Father had them all before from other men. Professor Bronson’s plates and calculations simply confirmed what really was certain; Father checked them over. Then we gave it out.

“That’s what’s made everything so changed.”

“Yet you didn’t give out everything you know, Eve.”

“No, not everything, Tony.”

“You know exactly what’s going to happen, don’t you, Eve?”

“Yes. We know—we think we know, that is, exactly what’s going to happen.”

“It’s going to be doomsday, isn’t it?”

“No, Tony—more than doomsday.”

“What can be more than that?”

“Dawn after doomsday, Tony. The world is going to be destroyed. Tony, oh, Tony, the world is going to be most thoroughly destroyed; yet some of us here on this world, which most surely will come to an end, some of us will not die! Or we need not die—if we accept the strange challenge that God is casting at us from the skies!”

“The challenge that God casts at us—what challenge? What do you mean? Exactly what is it that is going to happen, Eve—and how?”

“I’ll try to tell you, Tony: There are two worlds coming toward us—two worlds torn, millions of years ago perhaps, from another star. For millions of years, probably, they’ve been wandering, utterly dark and utterly frozen, through space; and now they’ve found our sun; and they’re going to attach themselves to it—at our expense. For they are coming into the solar system on a course which will carry them close—oh, very close indeed, Tony, to the orbit of the earth. They’re not cutting in out on the edge where Neptune and Uranus are, or inside near Venus and Mercury. No; they’re going to join up at the same distance from the sun as we are. Do you understand?”

In spite of himself, Tony blanched. “They’re going to hit the earth, you mean? I thought so.”

“They’re not going to hit the earth, Tony, the first time around. The first time they circle the sun, they’re going to pass us close, to be sure; but they’re going to pass us—both of them. But the second time they pass us—well, one of them is going to pass us a second time too, but the other one isn’t, Tony. The smaller one—Bronson Beta, the one about the same size as the earth and, so far as we can tell, very much like the earth—is going to pass us safely; but the big one, Bronson Alpha, is going to take out the world!”

“You know that, Eve?”

“We know it! There must be a margin of error, we know. There may not be a direct head-on collision, Tony; but any sort of encounter—even a glancing blow—would be enough and much more than enough to finish this globe. And an encounter is certain. Every single calculation that has been made shows it.

“You know what an exact thing astronomy is to-day, Tony. If we have three different observations of a moving body, we can plot its path; and we’ve hundreds of determinations of these bodies. More than a thousand altogether! We know now what they are; we know their dimensions and the speed with which they are traveling. We know, of course, almost precisely the forces and attractions which will influence them—the gravitational power of the sun. Tony, you remember how precise the forecast was in the last eclipse that darkened New England. The astronomers not only foretold to a second when it would begin and end, but they described the blocks and even the sides of the streets in towns that would be in shadow. And their error was less than twenty feet.

“It’s the same with these Bronson bodies, Tony. They’re falling toward the sun, and their path can be plotted like the path of Newton’s apple dropping from the bough. Gravity is the surest and most constant force in all creation. One of those worlds, which is seeking our sun, is going to wipe us out, Tony—all of us, every soul of us that remains on the world when it collides. But the other world—the world so much like this—will pass us close and

go on, safe and sound, around the sun again.…

“Tony do you believe in God?”

“What’s that to do with this?”