“Is the creation of man the final climax toward which the whole Creation has moved? We said so, in the infancy of our thought, when we imagined the world made by God in six days, before we had any comprehension even of the nature of our neighboring stars, when we could not even have dreamed of the millions and millions of the distant stars shown us by our telescopes, when our wildest fancy would have failed before the facts of to-day—endless space spotted to the edges of time with spiral nebulæ, each a separate ‘universe’ with its billions of suns like our own.
“Behind us lay, on our own earth, five hundred millions of years of evolution; and billions of years before that, while matter cooled and congealed, the world was being made—for us?
“Can we say so? Or is it that our existence is a mere accidental and possibly quite unimportant by-product of natural processes, which—as Jeans, the Englishman, once suggested—really had some other and more stupendous end in view?”
“You mean,” said Hendron, “perhaps it concerns only ourselves in our vanity, and not the universe at all, that any of us escaped from the cataclysm of earth’s end and came here?”
“Exactly,” pronounced Duquesne. “It is nothing—if we merely continue the earth—here. When I recollect the filth of our cities, the greed of individuals and of nations, the savagery of wars, the horrors of pauperism permitted to exist side by side with luxury and wealth, our selfishness, hates, diseases, filth—all the hideousness we called civilization—I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments, utterly incapable of rehabilitation, about the sun. On the other hand, now we are here; and how are we to justify the chance to begin again?”
Tony moved away from them. He was stir
red with a great restlessness. He wandered toward the ship; and he saw, in that glowing, opalescent night, a woman’s form; and he knew before he spoke to her, that it was Eve.
“I was sure you’d be out,” he said.
“Tony!”
“Yes?”
“Here are you and I. Here!” She stooped to the ground and touched it; the dry fiber of a lichenlike grass was between her fingers. She pulled it, and stood with it in her hand. They had seen it, they both remembered; it was what had made the ground brown in the light of the dying day.
“This was green and fresh, Tony, perhaps ten million years ago; perhaps a hundred million. Then the dark and cold came; the very air froze and preserved it. Do you suppose our cattle could eat it?”
“Why not?” said Tony.
“What else may be here, Tony? How can we wait for the day?”
“We aren’t waiting!”
“No; we’re not.” For they were walking, hand in hand like children, over the bare, rough ground. The amazing aurora of this strange world lighted them, and the soil smoothed, suddenly, under their feet. The change was so abrupt that it made them stare down, and they saw what they had stumbled upon; and they cried out together: “A road!”
The ribbon of it ran to right and left—not clear and straight, for it had been washed over and blown over, but it was, beyond any doubt, a road! Made by what hands, and for what feet? Whence and whither did it run?
A hundred million years ago!
The clock of eternity ticked with the click of their heels on this hard ribbon of road, as they turned, hand in hand, and followed it toward the aurora.
“Where were they, said Tony, almost as if the souls of those a hundred million years dead might hear, “when they were whirled away from their sun? What stage had they reached? Is this one of their Roman roads on which one of their Varros was marching his men to meet a Hannibal at Bronson Beta’s Cannæ? What was at one end—and what still awaits us there? A Nineveh of Sargon saved for us by the dark and cold? Or was this a motor road to a city like our Paris of a year ago? Or was it a track for some vehicle we would have invented in a thousand more years? And is the city which we’ll find, a city we’d never dreamed of? Whatever it was, their fate left it for us; whereas our fate—the fate of our world—” He stopped.
“I was thinking about it,” said Eve. “Out there is space—in scattered stones circling in orbits of their own about the sun; the Pyramids and the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument and the Tomb of Napoleon, the Arch of Triumph! The seas and the mountains! Here the other thing happened—the other fate that could have been ours if the world had escaped the cataclysm. What sort were they who faced it here, Tony? Human, with bodies like our own? Or with souls like our own, but other shapes?”
“On this road,” said Tony, “this road, perhaps, we’ll see.”
“And learn how they faced it, too, Tony; the coming dark and the cold. I think, if I had the choice, I’d prefer the cataclysm.”
“Then you believe our world was better off?”
“Perhaps I wouldn’t have—if we had stayed,” amended Eve. “What happened here, at least left their world behind them.”
“For us,” said Tony.
“Yes; for us. What will we make of our chance here, Tony? Truly something very different?”
“How different do you feel, Eve?”
“Very different—completely strange even to myself, at some moments, Tony; and then at other times—not different at all.”
“Come here.”