After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“Shut your eyes. This is salve. Make you feel better. You’re shot; I can tell. I’ll stay here while you sleep, so you won’t need to worry about anything.”

He felt her hands—delicate, tender. Then he was asleep.

He woke slowly. He was being shaken. Waking was like falling up a long, black hill.

Light hit his eyes. James stood there.

“Tony! Wake up!”

He sat up, shook himself.

“We got that radio working. Were talking to Hendron’s camp. Suddenly the man at the other end coughed and yelled ‘Help!’—and now we can’t raise any one.”

Tony was up again—outdoors—running toward the plane. James was running behind him.

“Give me Vanderbilt and Taylor. We’ll go.”

“But—”

“What else can we do?”

* * *

As Tony descended upon Hendron’s encampment, three men peered tensely through the glass windows of the ship: Taylor, Vanderbilt, and Tony himself. Nothing seemed disturbed; the buildings were intact.

“Not a person in sight!” Taylor yelled suddenly.

They slid down the air.

Tony cut the motors so that their descent became a soft whistle.

Then they saw clearly.

Far below were human figures, the people of the cantonment, and all of them lay on the ground, oddly collapsed, utterly motionless.

CHAPTER X

WAR

TONY circled above the stricken camp of the colony from earth. He could count some sixty men and women lying on the ground.

They looked as if they were dead; and Tony thought they were dead. So did Jack Taylor at his side; and Peter Vanderbilt, his saturnine face pressed against the quartz windows of the plane, believed he was witnessing catastrophe to Hendron’s attempt to preserve humanity.

The Death spread below them might already have struck, also, the other camp—the camp from which these three had just flown. They might be the last survivors; and the Death might reach them now, at any instant, within their ship.

Tony thought of the illness which had come over the camp after the first finding of the wrecked vehicle of the Other People—the illness that had proved fatal to three of the earth people. He thought: “This might be some more deadly disease of the Other People which they caught.” He thought: “I might have brought the virus of it to them myself from the Sealed City. It might have been in or on some of the objects they examined after I left.”

This flashed through his mind; but he did not believe it. He believed that the Death so visible below was a result of an attack.

He looked at his companions, and read the same conviction in their faces. He pointed toward the earth, and raised his eyebrows in a question he could not make audible above a spurt from the plane’s jets.

Taylor shook his head negatively. The people below them were dead. Descent would doubtless mean their own death.

Vanderbilt shrugged and gestured to Tony, as if to say that the decision was up to him.

Tony cut the propulsive stream and slid down the air in sudden quiet. “Well?”