When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

“Get Hendron,” he said; “he’ll be in the stern control-room now. Tell him Duquesne is here alone.” He operated the winch which moved the stairway back to the hull of the ship.

The short fat man trotted across the field, stopping frequently to gesticulate and shout: “Attendez! C’est moi, Duquesne!”

At last he scrambled up the steps of the concrete foundations to the ship. He rushed across the platform and arrived at the airlock. He was completely out of breath, and could not speak. Tony had an opportunity to look at him. He wore the remnants of a khaki uniform which did not fit him. Protruding from the breast pocket of the tunic was the butt of a revolver. He was black-haired, black-eyed and big-nosed. He regarded Tony with an intensity which was almost comical, and when he began to speak brokenly, he first swore in French and then said in English: “I am Duquesne! The great Duquesne! The celebrated Duquesne! The famous Duquesne. The French physicist, me, Duquesne. This I take for the ship of Cole ’Endron—yes? Then, so I am here. Tell him I have come from France in three months, running a steamboat by myself, flying across this foul country with my plane, which is broken down near what was Milwaukee, and to here I have walked by myself alone these many days. You are going now, yes? I see you are going. Tell him to go. Tell him Duquesne is here. Tell him to come and see me. Tell him to come at once. Tell him I leave those pigs, those dogs, those cows, those onions, who would build such a foolish ship as they will break their necks in. I said it would not fly, I, Duquesne. I knew this ’Endron ship would fly, so I have come to it. Bah! They are stupid, my French colleagues. More suitable for the motormen of trams than for flyers in outer space!”

At that instant Hendron arrived at the top of the spiral staircase.

He rushed forward with his eyes alight. “Duquesne! By God, Duquesne! I’m delighted. You’re in the nick of time. In forty minutes we would have been away from here.”

Duquesne gripped Hendron’s hand, and skipped around him as if he were playing a child’s game. With his free fist he smote upon his breast. Whether he was ecstatic with joy or rage could not have been told, for he shouted so that the entire chamber reverberated: “Am I a fool that you should have to tell me what hour was set for your departure? Have I no brains? Do I know nothing about astronomy? Have I never studied physics? Have I run barefoot across this whole United States of America for no other reason than because I knew when you would have to leave? Do I not carry the day on the watch in my pocket? Idiots, charming friends, glorious Americans, fools! Have I no brain? Can I not anticipate? Here I am.”

Suddenly after this broadside of violent speech he became calm. He let go of Hendron’s hand and stopped dancing. He bowed very gravely, first to Hendron, then to Tony, then to the crew. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let’s be going. Let’s be on our way.”

Hendron turned to Tony, who in reaction burst into a paroxysm of laughter. For an instant the French scientist looked deeply wounded and as if he might burst into expletives of anger; then suddenly he began to laugh. “I am ridiculous, am I not?” he shouted. He roared with laughter. He rocked with it. He wrapped his arms around his ample frame, and the tears rolled down his cheeks. “It is magnificent,” he said.

“Yes. It is to laugh.”

“What about the ships that were being built in other countries in Europe?” Hendron asked him.

“The English?” returned Duquesne. “They will get away. What then, who knows? Can you ‘muddle through’ space, Cole ’Endron? I ask it. But the English are sound; they have a good ship. But as to them, I have made my answer. I am here.”

“The Germans?” demanded Hendron.

The Frenchman gestured. “Too advanced!”

“Too advanced?”

“They have tried to take every contingency into account—too many contingency! They will make the most beautiful voyage of all—or by far the worst. Again I reply, I am here. As to all the other, again I observe, I have preferred to be here.”

And in that fashion Pierre Duquesne, France’s greatest physicist, was at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute added to the company of the Ark. He went off with Hendron to the control-room, talking volubly. Tony superintended the closing of the lock. He went up the spiral staircase to the first passenger deck. Fifty people lay there on the padded surface with the broad belts strapped around their legs and torsos. Most of them had not yet attached the straps intended to hold their heads in place. Their eyes were directed toward the glass screen, where alternately views of the heavens overhead and of the radiant landscape outside the Space Ship were being shown.

Tony looked at his number and found his place. Eve was near by him, with the two children beside her. She had sat up to welcome him. “I’ve been terribly nervous. Of course I knew you’d come, but it has been hard waiting here.”

“We’re all set,” Tony said. “And the funniest thing in the world has just happened.” He began to tell about the arrival of Duquesne, and everybody in the circular room listened to his story. As he talked, he adjusted himself on the floor harness.

Below, in the control-room, the men took their posts. Hendron strapped himself under the glass screen. He fixed his eyes to an optical instrument, across which were two hair lines. Very close to the point of their intersection was a small star. The instrument had been set so that when the star reached the center of the cross, the discharge was to be started. About him was a battery of switches which were controlled by a master switch, and a lever that worked not unlike a rheostat over a series of resistances. His control-room crew were fastened in their places with their arms free to manipulate various levers. Duquesne had taken the place reserved for one of the crew, and the man who had been displaced had been sent up to the passenger-cabins.

The French scientist glanced at his watch and put it back into his pocket without speaking. Voluble though he was, he knew when it was time to be silent. His black, sparkling eyes darted appreciatively from one instrument to another in the chamber, and on his face was a rapt expression as his mind identified and explained what he saw. Hendron looked away from the optical instrument. “You religious, Duquesne?”

The Frenchman shook his head and then said: “Nevertheless, I am praying.”

Hendron turned to the crossed hairs and began to count. Every man in the room stiffened to attention.

“One, two, three, four, five—” His hand went to the switch. The room was filled with a vibrating hum. “—Six, seven, eight, nine, ten—” The sound of the hum rose now to a feline shriek. “—Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—ready! Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—” His hand moved to the instrument that was like a rheostat. His other hand was clenched, white-knuckled, on his straps. “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five.” Simultaneously the crew shoved levers, and the rheostat moved up an inch. As he counted, signals flashed to the other ship. They must leave at the same moment.

A roar redoubling that which had resounded below the ship on the night of the attack, deafened all other sound.

Tony thought: “We’re leaving the earth!” But strangely, thought itself at such a moment supplied no sensation. The physical shocks were too overpowering.

A quivering of the ship that jarred the soul. An upthrust on the feet. Hendron’s lips moving in counting that could no longer be heard. The eyes of the men of the crew watching those lips so that when they reached fifty, a second switch was touched, and the room was plunged into darkness relieved only by the dim rays of tiny bulbs over the instruments themselves. A slight change in the feeling of air-pressure against the eardrums. Another forward motion of the steady hand on the rheostat. An increase of the thrust against the feet, so that the whole body felt leaden. Augmentation of the hideous din outside.

An exchange of glances between Hendron and Duquesne—both men’s eyes flashing with triumph.

In the passenger-cabin, Tony’s recitation of the arrival of Duquesne was suddenly interrupted by the fiendish uproar. “We’ve started!” fifty voices shouted, and the words were soundless. The deck on which they lay pressed up against them. The glass screen overhead went dark. Tony reached toward Eve, and felt her hand stretching to meet his.

CHAPTER 25—THE JOURNEY THROUGH SPACE

ON the doomed earth, observers must have seen the Space Ship lying brass-bright in the light of the Bronson Bodies and the cantonment flood-lamps, as immobile as if part of the earth. They must have seen it surrounded abruptly in golden fire, fire that drove toward the earth and lifted in immense clouds which bellowed and eddied toward the other larger ship simultaneously rising above a similar cloud. They must have heard the hideous torrent of sound, and then they must have seen the ship rise rapidly into the air on its column of flame. They must have watched it gain altitude vertically. They would have realized that it gathered momentum as it rose, and they would have seen that long trail of fire beneath each ship stretch and stretch as the shimmering cylinder shot into the night until it detached itself from the earth. But—there were no known observers left immediately below. If any one from outside the camp had happened to approach too closely, he must certainly have been annihilated by the blast.