When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

Tony was aware that some one was shaking him.

“Morning?” he complained.

“Not morning,” Kyto’s voice admitted. “But the tide now—”

“Oh, yes,” said Tony, sitting up as he remembered. “Thank you, Kyto.”

“Coffee,” said Kyto modestly, “will be much as usual, I venture to hope.”

Tony arose and stalked to the window to look down at water, now rushing seaward. The roll of the world, while he had slept, had turned the city and the coast away from the Bronson Bodies so that now they sucked the sea outward; and the wash made whirlpools at the cross-streets.

It was the gray light of dawn which showed him the whirlpools. In the west, the awful Bronson Bodies had set; but Tony knew that, though now for twelve hours they would be invisible, the force of their baleful violence, even upon the side of the world which had spun away from them, was in no sense diminished. The tide which had risen under them would flow out for six hours, to be sure; but then—though they were on the opposite side of the world—they would raise the frightful flow again just six hours later.…

“Coffee,” reminded Kyto patiently, “you will need.”

“Yes,” admitted Tony, turning, “I’ll need coffee.”

“Miss Eve insists to pour it.”

“Oh, she’s up?”

“Very ready to see you.”

An airplane hummed overhead; at some small distance, several others. Ransdell undoubtedly was in one of them. Inspection from the air of effects upon the earth was one of his duties—a sort of reconnaissance of the lines of destruction. Tony thought of Ransdell looking down and wondering about Eve. The flyer’s admiration of her amounted to openly desirous adoration. There was the poet Eliot James, too.

They were bound with him—and with Eve—in the close company of the League of the Last Days whose function lay no longer in the vague future. The peculiar rules and regulations of the League already were operative in part; others would clamp their control upon him immediately.

Tony to-day resented it. He made no attempt to shake off his overpossessive jealousy of Ransdell or Eliot James over Eve. She would go home with him to-day—to his home, where his mother had been murdered. Eve and he would leave his home together—for what next destination? To return her to her father, who forbade Tony attempting to exercise any exclusive claim upon her? No; Tony would not return her to her father.

Hendron had arisen; and as if through the wall he had read Tony’s defiance, he opened the door and entered.

He offered his hand. “I have heard, Tony, the news which reached you after I retired. I am sorry.”

“You’re not,” returned Tony. It was no morning for perfunctory politeness.

“You’re right,” acceded Hendron. “I’m not. I know it is altogether better that your mother died now. I am sorry only for the shock to you which you cannot argue away. Eve tells me that she goes home with you. I am glad of that.… Last night, Tony, the Bronson Bodies were studied in every observatory on the side of the world turned to them. Of course they were closer than ever before, and conditions were highly favorable for observation. I would have liked to be at a telescope; but that is the prerogative of others. My duty was here. However, a few reports have reached me. Tony, cities have been seen.”

“Cities?” said Tony.

“On Bronson Beta. Bronson Alpha continues to turn like a great gaseous globe; but Bronson Beta, which already had displayed air and land and water, last night exhibited—cities.… We can see the geography of Bronson Beta quite plainly. It rotates probably at the same rate it turned, making day and night, when it was spinning about its sun. It makes a rotation in slightly over thirty hours, you may remember; and it happens to rotate at such an angle relative to us that we have studied its entire surface. Something more than two-thirds of the surface is sea; the land lies chiefly in four continents with two well-marked archipelagoes. We have seen not merely the seas and the lines of the shores, but the mountain ranges and the river valleys.

“At points upon the seacoasts and at points in the river valleys where intelligent beings—if they once lived on the globe—would have built cities, there are areas plainly marked which have distinct characteristics of their own. There is no doubt in the minds of the men who have studied them; there is no important disagreement. The telescopes of the world were trained last night, Tony, upon the sites of cities on that world. Tony, for millions of years there was life on Bronson Beta as there has been life here. For more than a thousand million years, we believe, the slow, cautious but cruel process of evolution had been going on there as it has here.

“Recall the calendar of geological time, Tony. Azoic time—perhaps a billion years while the earth was spinning around our sun with no life upon it at all—azoic time, showing no vestige of organic life. Then archeozoic time—the earliest, most minute forms of life—five hundred million years. Then proterozoic time—five hundred million more—the age of primitive marine life; then paleozoic time, three hundred million years more while life developed in the sea; then mesozoic time—more than a hundred million years when reptiles ruled the earth.

“A hundred million years merely for the Age of Reptiles, Tony, when in the seas, on the lands and in the very air itself, the world was dominated by a diverse and monstrous horde of reptiles!

“They passed; and we came to the age of mammals—and of man.

“Something of the sort must have transpired on Bronson Beta while it was spinning about its sun. That is the significance of the cities that we have seen. For cities, of course, cannot ‘occur.’ They must have thousands and tens of thousands of years of human strife and development behind them; and behind that, the millions of years of the mammals, the reptiles, the life in the seas.

“It is a developed world—a fully developed world which approaches us, Tony, with its cities that we now can see.”

“Not inhabited cities,” objected Tony.

“Of course not inhabited now; but once. There can be no possible doubt that every one on that world is dead. The point is, they lived; so very likely we also can live on their world—if we merely reach it.”

“Merely,” repeated Tony mockingly.