“Hello,” said Tony. “Hear you’ve been up awhile. You’ve altogether too many good habits.”
The South African smiled pleasantly. “I’ll need more than I have for a starter, if I’m joining the League of the Last Days,” he observed.
“Then you’ve decided to?” asked Tony. It was one of the topics they’d discussed last night.
“Yes. The New York chapter, for choice.”
“You’re not going back to Capetown?”
“No. Headquarters will be here—or wherever Dr. Hendron is.”
“That’s good,” said Tony, and glanced toward the paper, but did not pick it up. “Any special developments anywhere?”
“Apparently a rather unanimous opinion that yesterday’s announcement may be wrong.”
“Hendron said there’d be general reaction. When you think of yesterday, you’d see there’d have to be.”
And Tony took the paper to the breakfast-table, where Ransdell joined him for another cup of coffee.
The two young men, of widely differing natures and background and training, sipped their coffee and glanced at each other across the table.
“Well,” questioned Tony at last, “want to tell me how you really feel?”
“Funny,” confessed the South African. “I bring up the final proof that the world’s going to end; and on the trip find the dear old footstool a pleasanter place for me than I ever figured before it might be.…
“To mention the minor matters first,” Ransdell continued in his engagingly frank and outright way, “I’ve never lived like this even for a day. I’ve never been valeted before.”
Tony smiled. “That reminds me; wonder if they’ll let Kyto into the League?”
“Not as our valet, I’m afraid,” the South African said. “I hope you permit me the ‘our’ for the duration of my stay. I do fancy living like this, I must admit. I’ll also tell you that I appreciate very much just being around where Miss Hendron is. I didn’t know there really was a girl like her anywhere in the world.”
“Which is going to end, we must remember,” Tony warned him. “Every time we mention the world, we must remember it is going to end.”
“Will you permit me, then, a particularly personal remark?” inquired the South African.
“Shoot,” said Tony.
“It is—that if I were in your place, I wouldn’t particularly care what happened.”
“My place, you mean, with—”
“With Miss Hendron. In other words, I heartily congratulate you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Tony—too brusquely, and realized it. “I beg your pardon. I mean, I thank you.… The Stock Exchange, I see, is going to be open to-day. In fact, it undoubtedly is open now; and I am not at my office watching the ticker and buying A. T. and T. on a scale down, and selling X—that’s United States Steel—whenever it rises half a point, for somebody who wants to go short from lack of faith in the future. What am I talking about? Where is the future? What’s happened to it?”
“It seems to have regained its feet a bit to-day.”
“Yes. The stoc
k market is open.… There’s the phone—probably my office. Mr. Balcom wants my personal advice after my last talk with Cole Hendron. I’m out or asleep, and you won’t disturb me. You have my permission to put me into a coma—anything.… I ought to have said to you, Ransdell, I’m glad you’re staying on. Stay on right here with me, if you like.
“There’s no sense in my going to the office. There’s no sense in anything on the world, now, but preparing and perfecting the Space Ship which—besides watching the stars—has been the business of the best brains in the League of the Last Days.”
“How far have they got?”
“Not far enough; but of course there’s no mother to invention like necessity. And necessity seems to be distinctly visible—at least through a telescope—now.”
Tony went downtown; he visited his office. Habit held him, as it was holding most of the hundreds of millions of humans in the world this day. Habit—and reaction.