When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

“Why?”

“Come here,” he repeated, and drawing her close, he clasped her, and himself quivering, he could feel her trembling terribly. He kissed her, and her lips were hot on his. A little aghast, they dropped away.

“We seem to have brought the world with us. I can never give you up, Eve; or share you with any one else.”

“We’re too fresh from the world, Tony, to know. We’ve a faith to keep with—”

“With whom? Your father?”

“With fate—and the future. Let’s go on, Tony. See, the road turns.”

“Yes.”

“What’s that?”

“Where?”

She moved off the road to the right, where stood something too square and straight-edged to be natural. Scarcely breathing, they touched it, and found metal with a cold, smooth surface indented under their finger-tips.

“A monument!” said Tony, and he burned a match. The little yellow flame lighted characters engraved into the metal—characters like none either of them had ever seen before, but which proclaimed themselves symbols of meaning.

Swiftly Tony searched the two faces of the metal; but nothing that could possibly be a portrait adorned it. There were decorations of strange beauty and symmetry. Amazing that no one, in all the generations and in all the nations of the world, had drawn a decoration like this! It was not like the Chinese or Mayan or Egyptian, Greek or Roman, or French or German; but different from each and all.

Tony caught his breath sharply as he traced it with his fingers.

“They had an artist, Eve,” he said.

“With five hundred million years of evolution behind him.”

“Yes. How beautifully this writing is engraved! Will we ever read it?… Come on. Come on!”

But the monument, if it was that, stood alone; and consideration of others, if not prudence, dictated that they return.

But they did not reënter the ship. Duquesne was determined to spend the first night on the ground; and Hendron and James agreed with him. James had dragged out blankets from the Ark, and the five lay down on the ground of the new planet. And some of them slept.

Tony opened his eyes. The sun was rising into a sky not blue but jade green. A deep, bewildering color—the color of Bronson Beta’s celestial canopy.

There would be no more human beings who wrote poetry about the blue sky. They would shape their romantic stanzas—as the stanzas in those strange, beautifully engraved characters must be shaped, if they mentioned the sky—to the verdancy of the heavens.

Tony lifted himself on his elbow. Below him, the sea also was green. It had been gray on the steamy yesterday. But an emerald ocean was more familiar than an emerald sky. He watched the white water roll on the summits of swells until it was dispersed by the brown cliff. He looked back at the Ark. It stood mysteriously on the landscape—a perpendicular cylinder, shining and marvelous, enormously foreign to the bare, brilliant landscape. Behind it the chocolate colored mountains stretched into opalescent nowhere—the mountain into which the road ran, the road beside which stood the stele adorned by a decoration like nothing else that had been seen in the world.

Tony regarded his companions. Hendron slept on a curled arm. His flashing eyes were closed. His hair, now almost white, was disheveled on his white forehead. Beside him Duquesne slept, half-sitting, his arms folded on his ample abdomen, and an expression of deep study on his swarthy face. Eliot James sprawled on a ledge which the sun now was warming, his countentance relaxed, his lips parted, his straggling red beard metal-bright in the morning rays.

Eve slept, or she had slept, near to Tony; and now she roused. She was lovely in the yellow light, and looked far fresher than the men.

Their clothes were stained and worn; and none of them had shaved, so that they looked more like philosophical vagrants than like three of the greatest men produced in the Twentieth Century on the Earth.

Tony watched Eve as she gazed at them, anxiously maternal. To be a mother in actuality, to become a mother of men, was to be her rôle on this reawakened world.

As she arose quietly, so as to disturb none of the others, Tony caught her hand with a new tenderness. They set off toward their road together.

Suddenly Tony saw something that took the breath from his lungs. It was a tiny thing—on the ground. A mere splotch of color. He hurried toward it, not believing his eyes. He lay down and stared at it. In a slight damp depression was a patch of moss the size of hi

s hand.

He lay prone to examine it as Eve stooped beside him in excitement like his own. He did not know mosses—the vegetation resembled any other moss, on Earth. He recollected the hope that spores, which could exist in temperatures close to absolute zero for long periods, had preserved on Bronson Beta the power to germinate.

Mosses came—on Earth—from spores; and here, reawakened by the sun, was a remnant of life that had existed eons ago, light-years away.