What was threatened, could not be! If Cole Hendron and his brother-scientists refused, there were plenty of other people to put out reassuring statements; and the dwellers on the rim of the world regained much of their assurance. The President of the United States pointed out that, at worst, the sixty scientists had merely suggested disturbances of importance; and he predicted that if they occurred, they would be less than was now feared.
Professor Copley, known to Tony as a friend of Cole Hendron’s, called at the office.
“I’ve some things to sell,” he said, plucking the pince-nez from the center of his ruddy, cheerful face. “When do you think you can get me the most for them?”
And he laid down upon Tony’s desk an envelope full of stock certificates. “I’m just back from Peru,” he explained, “where I have been watching the progress of the Bronson bodies. Hendron tells me that you know the whole truth about them.”
“It is the truth, then?” asked Tony.
“Do you mean, do I agree? Do you agree that the sun will rise to-morrow morning?” Professor Copley returned. “My dear friend, the Bronson bodies move from the effect of the same forces.”
“But,” pursued Tony, “exactly what do you think will happen to us?”
“What will happen,” retorted Professor Copley, cheerfully enough, “if you toss a walnut in front of an eighteen-inch gun at the instant the shell comes out? The result, I should say, would be quite decisive and entirely final. So, I say, sell my stocks. My family, and my personal responsibilities, consist of only my wife and myself; there are many things we have desired to do which we have sacrificed in exchange for a certain security in the future. There being no future, why not start doing what we want immediately?—if now is the day to sell.”
“Your guess on that,” said Tony, “will be as good as mine. To-day is better than yesterday; to-morrow the market may be nearer normal again—or there may be none at all. How do you find that people are taking it?”
“Superficially, to-day they deny; but they have had a terrible shock. Shock—that’s the first effect. Bound to be. Afterward—they’ll behave according to their separate natures. But now they react in denials, because they cannot bear the shock.
“All over the world! Some are standing in the Place de I’Opéra in Paris, hour after hour, I hear, silent for the most part, incredulous, numb. These are the few that are too intelligent merely to deny and reject, too stunned to substitute a sudden end of everything for the prospect of years ahead for which they scrimped and saved.
“In Berlin there are similar groups. And imagine the reaction in Red Square, my friend! Imagine the Russians trying to realize that their revolution, their savage effort to remodel themselves and their inner nature, has gone for nothing. All wasted! It will be knocked aside by a mere pebble—a grain of sand sifting through the cosmos on an errand of its own. Knocked aside and annihilated, as if no Russian had ever lived! It is stupendous! Imagine being Stalin to-night, my friend. What horror! What humor! What merciless depths of tragedy!
“Imagine the haughty Mussolini, when he finds that the secret he could not exhort from his iron-souled men of learning is the secret of Fascism’s vanity. Vanity of vanities! All, in the end, is vanity! Dust!
“He has jutted out his chin and lifted his hand in salute to his Black Shirts, mouthed his ringing sentences, and defied any one or anything to stay him; and behold! Ten billion, billion, billion miles away some trifling approach of stars made unstable the orbits of a couple of planets and sent them out into space so long ago that Mussolini’s ancestors were not yet hairy apes—and now they appear to confound him. Imagine our President trying to decry, now, this! Ah, I could weep. But I do not. Instead—I laugh. I laugh because few men—but some—some—some, my friend—even in the face of this colossal ignominy of fate, go on and on through the night, burning out their brains yet in the endeavor to guide their own destinies. What a gesture! But to-day—what appalling shock! And afterward—what a scene! When the world—the fifteen hundred millions of human beings realize, all of them, that nothing can save them, and they cannot possibly save themselves. What a scene! I hope to be spared for it. Meanwhile, sell my stocks for the best prices you can obtain, please; for my wife and I—we have saved for a long time, and denied ourselves too much.”
In a taxi later in the day, Tony found the street suddenly blocked by a delirious group of men with locked arms, who charged out of a door, singing—drunk, senseless.
Tony was on his way to the Newark Airport, where a certain pilot, for whom he was to inquire, would fly him to the estate in the Adirondacks which had been turned over to Cole Hendron.
CHAPTER 7—SOME DEMANDS OF DESTINY
EVE awaited him in a garden surrounded by trees. In the air was the scent of blossoms, the fragrance of the forest, the song of birds. It bore new qualities, a new interpretation of the external world, distinct from the tumultuous cacophony of the city.
She was in white, with her shoulders and arms bare, her slender body sheathed close in silk. All feminine, she was, too feminine, indeed, in her feeling for the task she set for herself. Would she succeed better at it if she had garbed herself like a nun.
An airplane droned in the twilight sky and dropped to its cleared and clipped landing-field. Eve arose from the bench beside the little pool, which was beginning to glint with the reflection of Venus, the evening star. She trembled, impatient; she circled the pool and sat down again.
Here he came at last and alone, as she hoped.
“Hello, Tony!” She tried to make it cool.
“Eve, my dear!”
“We mustn’t say even that! No—don’t kiss me or hold me so!”
“Why?… I know your father said not to. It’s discipline of the League of the Last Days. But why is it? Why must they ask it? And why must you obey?”
“There, Tony. Just touch my hands, like this—and I’ll try to explain to you. But first, how was it in the city to-day?”
Tony told her.
“I see. Now, Tony, let’s sit here side by side—but not your arm around me. I want it so much, I can’t have it. That’s why, don’t you see?
“We’re in a very solemn time, Tony. I spent a lot of to-day doing a queer thing—for me. I got to reading the Book of Daniel again—especially Belshazzar’s feast. I read that over and over. I can remember it, Tony.
“‘Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.