After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

He was in command in this city!

He had had nothing to do with creating it. A million years, perhaps, before he was born, this city had been built; and then the light which fell upon it was from some sun to which the sun of the world—the sun which now shone upon it—was a distant twinkling star. Quadrillions and quintillions of miles of space—distances indescribable in terms that the mind could comprehend—separated this city from Tony Drake, who would not be born for a million years. But it had traveled the tremendous reaches of space after it lost its sun until it found the star—the sun—that lighted the earth! So Tony Drake to-day stood here in its central square—in command.

He glanced up toward the orb of the sun; and he saw how small it was; and in spite of himself his shoulders jerked in a convulsive shiver.

“Tony!”

He heard his name, and turned. Eve had come out to the square, and she approached him, quietly and calmly.

“We must—proceed now, Tony,” she said.

“Proceed? Of course,” he assured her gently. He had ceased to be a commander of a city built a million years before his birth and endowed with marvels which men of his time—if they had remained on earth—might not have made for themselves for another millennium. He became again Tony Drake, recently—not three earthly years ago—a young broker in Wall Street, and friend of Eve Hendron, whose father was a scientist. On earth, Tony Drake had wanted her for his wife; here he wanted her also, and especially in her grief he longed to be her close comforter.

“Your mind doesn’t help you much, does it, Tony?” she said.

“At a time like this, you mean. No.”

“I went once with Father and with a friend of his, Professor Rior, through the Pyramids, Tony—when we were back on earth.”

“Of course,” said Tony.

“It was before ever the Bronson Bodies were seen, Tony; when the earth seemed practically eternal. How out of fashion it had become to look to the end of the earth, Tony! Though once it was not.… I was saying that Professor Rior was showing us through the Pyramids, and he read us some of the Pyramid Texts. Did you know, Tony, that in all the Pyramid Texts the word death never occurs except in the negative, or applied to a foe? How the old Egyptians tried to defeat death by denying! Of course, the Pyramids themselves were their most tremendous attempt to deny death.”

“Yes,” said Tony.

“Over and over again, I remember, Tony, they declared that he, whom they put away, lived. I remember the words: ‘King Teti has not died the death; he has become a glorious one in the horizon!’ And, ‘Ho! King Unis! Thou didst not depart dead; thou didst depart living! Thou diest not!’ And ‘This King Pepi dies not; this King Pepi lives forever! This King Pepi has escaped his day of death!’

“Tony, how pitiful those protests seemed to me to be! Yet now I myself am making them.

“‘Men fall; their name is not,’ the Egyptian psalmist of the Pyramid Texts sang, Tony:

“Men fall;

Their name is not.

Seize thou King Teti by his arm

Take thou King Teti to the sky,

That he die not on earth,

Among men.”

Tony reminded her, very gently: “Your father did not die on earth.”

“No; he escaped to the sky, bringing us all with him.… There’s the sun. How small the sun has become, Tony.”

“We are farther from the sun, Eve, than men of earth have ever been.”

“But we’re going farther away, yet.”

“Yes.”

“We’re swinging away from the sun; but they say—Father said, and so did M. Duquesne and the rest of the scientists—we shall swing back again when we have reached almost to the orbit of Mars. But shall we, Tony?”

“Reach almost to the orbit of Mars?”

“Shall we swing back then, I mean. Or shall we keep on out and out into the utter cold?”