At Hendron’s camp forty-eight hours in the Pit were experienced; and yet Hendron’s camp was on one of the safest and least disturbed corners of the world.
The first black clouds which Tony had observed marked the beginning of an electrical storm. The tremor he felt presaged a steady crescendo of earth-shakings. He left his hill-top soon and found that the population of the colony which, an hour before, had retired for the night, was again awake. He met Hendron and several scientists making a last tour of inspection; and he joined them.
“The dormitories,” Hendron said, “are presumably quake-proof. I don’t think any force could knock over the buttr
esses we have put around the projectile.”
Even as he spoke, the wind increased, lightning stabbed the sky, the radiance of the Bronson Bodies was permanently extinguished, and the gusty wind was transformed to a steady tempest. Lights were on in every building; and as shock followed shock, people began to pour into the outdoors.
Tony tried to locate Eve, but was unable to do so in the gathering throng. The darkness outside the range of lights was absolute. The temperature of the wind dropped many degrees, so that it seemed cold in comparison to the heat of early evening. It was difficult to walk on the wide cleared area between the various buildings, for the ground underfoot frequently forced itself up like the floor of a rapidly decelerated elevator. The lightning came nearer. The thunder was continual. It was hard to hear the voice of one’s nearest neighbor. Word passed from person to person in staccato shouts that all buildings were to be evacuated. Tony himself, with half a dozen others, rushed into the brightly illuminated women’s dormitory and hurriedly brought from it into the tumult and rain those who had remained there.
By ten o’clock the violence of the quakes was great enough so that it was difficult to stand. The people huddled like sheep in a storm in the lee of the buildings. Lightning hammered incessantly on the tall steel tower which surrounded the space-flyer. Tony moved through the assembled people shouting words of encouragement he did not feel.
Shortly after eleven an extraordinarily violent shock lifted one end of the men’s building so that bricks and cement cascaded from its wall. Immediately Tony located Hendron, who was sitting wrapped in a tarpaulin on a stone in the center of the crowd, and made a suggestion which was forthwith carried out. The flood-lights were thrown on the landing-field, and every one migrated thither. They congregated again in the center of smooth open space, a weird collection in their hastily assumed wraps, with their white faces looking upward picked out through the rain by the flood-lights and the blue flashes from the heavens.
Before midnight some caprice of the seismic disturbance snapped off the power. At one o’clock in the morning a truck from the kitchens of the dining-halls floundered through the mud with sandwiches and coffee. At two o’clock the temperature of the wind dropped again, and the wet multitude shivered and chattered with cold. Hail fell in place of rain.
Half an hour later the wind stopped abruptly, and in that sudden silence, between bursts of thunder, human voices rose in a loud clamor of a hundred individual conversations. The wind puffed, veered, and came back from the southwest. It blew fifty miles an hour, a hundred, and then rose from that velocity to an immeasurable degree. Leaves and whole branches shot through the air. Every man and woman was compelled to lie face down on the muddy earth, the undulations of which increased.
They lay for an hour or more, shivering, gasping for breath, hiding their faces. Then a particularly violent shock suddenly separated the landing-field into two parts, one of which rose eight or nine feet above the other, leaving a sharp diminutive precipice across the middle of the field. A dozen people had been actually straddling the point of fracture; and some fell on the lower side, while others, crawling away from the new and terrifying menace, were lifted up. Fortunately no crevice opened, although the split edges of the underlying rocks ground against each other with a noise that transcended the tumult. Toward morning the temperature of the wind began to rise.
There was no dawn, no daylight, only a diffused inadequate grayness through which the tumbling streaming clouds could be dimly apprehended. The people lay on the ground, each man wrapped in the terrors of his own soul, with fingers clutching the grass or buried in the earth. And so the day began. The air grew perpetually more warm. An augmented fury of the gale brought a faint odor of sulphur.
Midday held no respite. It was impossible to bring up food against the gale, impossible even to stand. The sulphurous odors and the heat increased. The driven rain seemed hot. Toward what would have been afternoon, and in the absolute darkness, there was a sudden abatement; and the wind, while it still blew strong, allowed the shaken populace to rise and to stare through the impenetrable murk. Fifty or more of the men made a rush for the dining-halls. They found them, and were surprised that they had not collapsed. The low hills around had furnished them with protection. There was no time to prepare food. Snatching what they could, and loading themselves with containers of drinking-water, they fought their way back to the field. There, like animals, the people drank and ate, finishing in time only to throw themselves once again on the bare ground under the renewed fury of the storm.
Night came again. The sulphur in the air, the fumes and gases, the heat and smoke and dust, the hot rain, almost extinguished their frantically defended lives. They lay now in the lee of the fault, but even there the down-swirl of the tempest and lash of the elements were almost unendurable. The dust and rain combined with the wind to make a diagonal downfall of fœtid mud which blistered them and covered the earth. Through that second night no one was able to talk, to think, to move, to do more than lie prone amid the chaos, gasping for breath.
CHAPTER 14—THE FIRST PASSING
THE respite brought by morning was comparative rather than real. The wind abated; the torrential rain became intermittent; and the visibility returned, though no one could have told whether it was early morning or twilight.
Tony rose to his feet the instant the wind slacked. Through all the long and terrible hours he had been absent from Eve. It would have been utterly unthinkable to attempt to locate her in the midst of that sound and fury. He found, however, that there was no use in looking for her immediately. So heavy had been the downpour of rain and ashes from the sky, that it not only reduced the field to a quagmire, but it covered the human beings who had lain there with a thick chocolate-colored coating, so that as one by one the people arose to sitting and standing postures, he found it difficult even to distinguish man from woman.
He was compelled to put Eve from his mind. It was necessary to think of all and not one. Succor was needed sorely. Many of those who had been in the field were unable to rise. Several had been injured. Of the older men a number were suffering perhaps fatally from exposure.
Tony found that his limbs would scarcely support him when he did regain them; but after he had staggered for some distance through the murk, his numbed circulation was restored, and his muscles responded. He held brief conversations with those who were standing:
“Are you all right?” If the answer was in the negative, he replied: “Sit down. We’ll take care of you. But when it was in the affirmative, he said: “Come with me. We’ll start things going again. I think the worst is over.”
Out of the subsiding maelstrom he collected some thirty or forty persons, most of them men. They walked off the field together; and as they walked, slowly and painfully, their feet sucking in the quagmire and stumbling on débris, Tony proceeded with his organization.
“Any of you men working on the power plant?” he shouted.… “Right. You two come over here. Now who else here was in the machine-shop?… Good. You fellows get to work on starting up the lights. They’ll be the first thing. Now I want half of you to get beds in shape in the women’s hall.” He counted the number he required, slapping them on the shoulders and dispatching them toward the halls, which loomed in the distance. “If they don’t look safe,” he shouted after the disappearing men, “find a place that is safe, and put the beds there. We’ll have to have a hospital.”
With the remnant of his men he went to the dining-halls. One of these buildings was a complete wreck, but the other still stood. They entered the kitchen. Its floor was knee-deep in mud. He recognized among those still with him Taylor, the student of light, whom he had sent to Hendron from Cornell. “Take charge in here, will you, Taylor? I’ll leave you half these men. The rest of us are going out to round up the doctors and get medical supplies ready. They’ll want coffee out there, and any kind of food that they can eat immediately.” He saw Taylor’s mouth smile in assent, and heard Taylor begin to issue instructions for the lighting of a fire in one of the big stoves.
Once again he went outdoors. It was a little lighter. His anxious gaze traveled to the tower that housed the Ark, and from its silhouette he deduced that it was at least superficially intact. The shouting he had done had already rendered him hoarse, for the air was still sulphurous. It irritated the nose and throat, and produced in every one a dry frequent cough. Tony was apprehensive for fear the gases in the air might increase in volume and suffocate them, but he banished the thought from his mind: it was but one of innumerable apprehensions, many of them greater, which numbed his consciousness and the consciousness of all his fellows during that terrifying forty-eight hours. Besides the irritating vapors in the air, there was heat, not the heat expected any day in July, but such heat as surrounds a blast furnace—a sullen withering heat which blanched the skin, parched the lips and was unrelieved by the rivulets of perspiration that covered the body.
Tony went back alone to the flying-field. It was a little lighter. Mist motions were visible in the sky, and threads of vapor were flung over the Stygian landscape by the wind. People were returning from what had been the flying-field to the partial wreck at the camp in twos and threes, many of them limping, some of them being carried. They made a stream of humanity like walking wounded—a procession of hunger, thirst, pain and exhaustion struggling across a landscape that would have credited Dante’s Inferno itself, struggling through a nether gloom, slobbered with mire, breathing the hot metallic atmosphere. He found Eve at last, just as he reached the edge of the flying-field. She was helping two other girls, who were trying to carry a third. She recognized him and called to him.
“Are you all right, Eve?” His soul was in his rasping voice. He came close to her. He looked into her eyes. She nodded, first to him and then toward the unconscious girl. She put her lips close to his ear, for she could speak only in a whisper: “Give us a hand, Tony. This girl needs water. She fainted.”
He picked up the girl, and they followed him through the slough to the main hall of the women’s dormitory. Beds were being carried there, and many of the beds were already filled. Some one had found candles and stuck them in window-sills so that the room was lighted. Already two men who were doctors were examining the arrivals. Tony recognized one of the men as Dodson when he heard the boom of his voice: “Get hot water here, lots of it, boiling water. Don’t anybody touch those bandages. Everything has to be sterilized. See if you can find anybody who knows anything about nursing. Get the rest of the doctors.”
Somehow Dodson had already managed to wash, and his heavy-jowled face radiated power and confidence. In the candle-light Tony recognized other muddy faces on the beds. A German actress seemed to have a broken leg, and a dignified gray-haired Austrian pathologist was himself a victim of the barrage that had fallen from the heavens.
Tony went outdoors again. It seemed to him that the air had freshened somewhat, and that the temperature had dropped. A gong boomed in the kitchen, and he remembered his thirst and hunger. For almost forty-eight hours he had had little to eat and little to drink. He knew he could not deny the needs of his body any longer. He hastened in the direction of the gong. Around a caldron of coffee and a heap of sandwiches, which were replenished as fast as they disappeared, were grouped at least two hundred people. Tony stood in the line which passed the caldron, and was handed a cup of coffee and a sandwich. The coffee tasted muddy. The sandwich had a flavor not unlike the noxious odor in the air. Tony’s craving was for water, but he realized that for the time being all liquids would have to be boiled to eliminate their pollution. With his first sip of coffee he realized that brandy had been added to it. He wet his burning throat and swallowed his sandwich in three mouthfuls, and joined the line again.
His senses reasserted themselves. He realized that the wind was dying, the oppressiveness was departing and the temperature had lowered perceptibly. He was able for the first time to hear the conversation of people around him, and even in his shocked and shocking state, he was moved by mingled feelings of compassion and amusement. The heavy hand of the gods had scarcely been lifted. Its return might be expected imminently, and yet the marvelous resilience of humankind already was asserting itself.