After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“Did they live up there, do you suppose?” Eliot James appealed to Tony. Staring up, staring about, but keeping close together, they walked on the silent, utterly empty street. “Did they die up there? If we climbed, would we see—them?”

“The street,” said Tony, “might have been swept yesterday.”

“They swept it before they left—or died in here,” Eliot replied. “They drew their gates and shut out the wind. After they left—or died—what else could disturb it? But, my God, they were neat. No rubbish, no litter.”

“And everything locked,” Tony said, having halted to try a door. The order of everything, and the utter stillness, was getting his nerves again. “Where’ve they gone? Where’d they go—leaving it like this?”

Eliot James did not answer; he had run ahead.

“Tables!” he called. “Tables and chairs! This was a restaurant!”

His nose was pressed against the glass, and Tony swiftly joined him. Within stood rows of metal tables and what were, unquestionably, chairs of metal. All bare; and all, of course, empty. It resembled nothing so much as a restaurant; and looking in, no one from earth could doubt that that was what it had been.

The place looked immaculate, as if put in order an hour ago—and then deserted.

“Where are they?” Eliot James appealed again. “Oh, Tony, where did they go?”

“What were they?” Tony countered. “That’s what I want to know. Were they huge ants? Were they human-brained reptiles? Were they—”

“They sat in chairs,” said Eliot James. “They ate at tables. They ran a car that steered by pedals and a wheel. Their equipment would fit us; their floors and steps are on our scale. Let’s break in here.”

He tried the door, which was fitted with a handle; but this did not turn or budge, however pulled or pressed. There was no keyhole; no locking device was anywhere apparent; but the door was to be moved no more than those that they had tried before.

Tony looked about. A shudder convulsed him. A thousand windows looked down on this stretch of the silent street; a thousand pairs of eyes once had looked down. It seemed to Tony that they must—they must do it again. Eyes of what? Huge, sentient, intelligent insects? Reptiles of some strange, semihuman sort?

What lay dead by the tens of thousands in those silent rooms overhead?

Tony was pulling at his pistol. Somehow, it reassured him to hold it in his hand. He reversed it, and beat the butt on the great glass pane behind which stood the strange metal tables and chairs.

The glass did not give way. It twanged, not like glass but like sheet metal—metal utterly transparent.

Tony caught the butt in his palm, and he pulled the trigger. The shot roared and reëchoed. But the metal pane was not pierced. The bullet he had fired lay at Tony’s feet. Hysterically, he emptied his pistol.

With the last shot, he jerked about again and stared up at the rows and rows of windows. Did something up there stir?

Eliot James jumped and pointed; and Tony stiffened as he stared.

Something fluttered a hundred yards overhead and farther down the street; something light, like a cloth or a paper. One way, now another, it fluttered as it fell in the still air of that strange sealed city. It reached the street and lay there.

Ten thousand eyes gazed down, it seemed to Tony. It seemed to him that if he could look up twice as quick, he would catch them at their windows gazing down at him. But he never could catch them. Always, when he looked up, they had anticipated him; they were gone; they had snatched their heads away.

So he never saw anything but glass and metal—and the single fluttering object which had fallen down.

“We’ll go see what that is,” he said to Eliot James, wetting his dry lips so he could speak.

But before they gained the object, they forgot it. A window, evidently the vitrine of a gallery of art, confronted them; within the glass was a portrait.

Simultaneously, Tony and Eliot saw it. They stopped as if they were struck; and their breath left them. Breath of relief, and wonder!

They looked at the likeness of a woman!

She was a young woman, strange and fascinating. She was not fair; nor was she dark of skin. Her hair and brows were black—hair arranged with an air that might be individual but which, these discoverers of her felt, was racial.

And of what race?

Not the Caucasian, not the Mongolian; not the Ethiopian, surely; not the Indian. She was of no race upon earth; but she was human.

More than that, she had been sensitive, eager, filled with the joy of living. Her bosom and body were like that of a lovely woman on earth, slight and graceful. Her eyes were wide apart and gray; her cheek-bones were very far apart; and her lips, which were bright red, perhaps because they had been rouged, were pleasant and amiable.