“Water,” some one said.
“Yes; that’s the tide. It’s flowing in from the cross-streets from the Hudson, and from the East River too.”
“There’s some coming up from the Battery along the avenues—see the flow down there!”
“How high will it rise to-night? Oh, how high?”
“Not above the bridges to-night. They’re not in danger—to-night. But of course the power-houses will go.”
“And the tunnels will be filled?”
“Of course.”
“There are people down there, wading in the street!… Why did they stay? They’ve been warned enough.”
“Why did we stay? We gave the warning.”
“We’ve business here.”
“So had they—they supposed, and as important to them as we imagined ours to be to us. Besides, they’re safe enough to-night. Just that few of them. They can climb three stories in almost any building and be safe. The tide ebbs, of course, in six hours.”
“Then comes again higher!”
“Yes—much higher. For the Bronson Bodies are rushing at us now.”
“Exactly how,” asked Eliot James, “do they look through the telescope?”
“The big one—Bronson Alpha,” replied Jack Taylor, as they all looked up from the street, “not very different from before. It seems to be gaseous, chiefly—it always was chiefly gaseous, unlike the earth and Mars, but like Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune. Its approach to the sun has increased the temperature of its envelope, but has brought out no details of its geography, if you could call it that. Bronson Alpha offers us no real surface, as such. It seems to be a great globe with a massive nucleus surrounded by an immense atmosphere. What we see is only the outer surface of the atmosphere.”
“Could it ever have been inhabited?” the poet asked.
“In no such sense as we understand the word. For one thing, if we found ourselves on Bronson Alpha, we would never find any surface to live on. There is probably no sudden alteration of material such as exists on the earth when air stops and land and water begin.”
“But the other world—Bronson Beta—is different.”
“Very different from its companion up there, but not so different from our world, it seems. It has a surface we can see, with air and clouds in its atmosphere. The clouds shift or disappear and form again; but there are fixed details which do not change, and which prove a surface crust exists. The atmosphere was frozen solid in the long journey through space, but the sun has thawed out the air and has started, at least, on thawing out the seas.”
“You’re sure there are seas too?”
“There are great spaces that seem to be seas, that satisfy every visual and spectroscopic test of seas.”
“Have you seen,” asked the poet, “anything like—cities?”
“Cities?”
“The ruins of cities, I mean. That globe seems to be so much like the earth; and sometimes it has had its sun. It lived in the sunshine of a star that was an octillion, octillion miles away. I thought just now, looking at it, that perhaps on it were cities like this, where people once watched the coming of whatever pulled them loose from their sun, and dropped them into the black mouth of space.”
Some of the company about him were looking up and listening; others paid no attention to him. He did not care; a few had shared his feeling; and among them was Eve, who stood near him.
“Would you rather we went that way?” she said to him.
“Slipping into space, falling away, all of us in the world together retreating farther and farther away from our sun, gradually freezing as we went into darkness?” Eliot James shook his handsome head. “No; if I had my choice, I think I’d elect our way. Yet I wonder how they faced it—what they did?”
“I wonder,” said Eve, her eyes upon the yellow orb, “if we’ll ever know.”
“Look,” proclaimed some one else who was gazing down, “the lights are beginning to go.”
He meant the street-lamps of New York, which had been switched on as usual and maintained to this minute.