After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

Duquesne had delegated to other competent hands the continuous charging of the batteries; and he sat with Tony, as did also Eliot James in the office of the Hall of the Central Authority. So the three men listened to the girl and questioned her—to learn, with least delay, of the discoveries of the Midianites.

“We found no weapons in the city we entered,” Eliot James reminded Tony. “We have come on nothing like a weapon—except some implements in what must have been a museum—here.”

“The people of Bronson Beta,” pronounced Duquesne, “seem to have had no need of war in their later development. Why? Because morally they had passed beyond it? I do not believe it. Other causes and conditions intervened. No greater authority upon human development than Flinders Petrie lived on earth; and what did he say?

“‘There is no advance without strife. Man must strive with Nature or with man, if he is not to fall back and degenerate.’ Certainly these people did not degenerate; there is no sign in this city but of a struggle, magnifique—epic. But not of man against man. It was, of course, of man against Nature—even against the drift into the darkness of doom which they saw before them.

“In comparison with this struggle, strife between themselves became puny—imbecile. Long ago, long before the drift into the dark, they ceased to wage war; and so they left to our enemies none of their weapons.”

“They left material, however, which could be used as weapons,” the English girl corrected.

“Most certainly; the gas—gas that was merciful anesthetic for the Vanished People, probably.”

“How much progress,” Tony asked the girl who had been a prisoner in the other city, “did your captors make in reading the records of the Vanished People?”

“Very considerable, I am sure. They brought over from earth an especially strong staff of linguists. They seemed to have realized, even better than did our party—or perhaps than did you,” the English girl said, “the importance of solving quickly the secrets of the original civilization. And they went right at it.”

“How did they learn?”

“From repairing and putting into operation what seems to have been instruction-machines for the children of this planet—machines which in form are very unlike but in effect are like talking motion pictures. The machines illustrate an object, and print and pronounce a word at the same time. I have shown M. Duquesne similar machines found here.”

“Maltby and Williamson together,” said Duquesne to Tony, “are working on them now.”

Tony arose. Again the implications of what he heard were so tremendous that he could not think of them without confusion. He put them aside for the moment.

He paced up and down. “What was on that lake where your space-ship fell?” he asked the English girl.

“Nothing. It seemed to have been burned over all around the border. The water was fresh.”

“Half of you, you said, were drowned?”

“Nearly half.”

“All the survivors of the crash were captured?”

“Yes; and when I escaped, I figured that three hundred and ten of us were living.” She repeated the figure she had given in her first account.

“And how many were they—your captors—our ‘Midianites’?”

“More than our number, considerably. They never said how many they were, nor gave us a chance to count them. They were always on the move.”

“Where to?”

“Everywhere.”

“You mean they visited several other cities?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How many?”

“As many as they could find and reach. And I believe they could have found all within reach. For they had a globe of this planet. I heard about it; but they never let any of us slaves see it.”

“Every city of course has a globe—or several,” Tony said to himself, aloud, and asked her: “What did you pick up from them as to their opinion of the different cities?”

“They believed they had the best one.”

“Did they say why they believed it the best?”