When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

Hendron called some of the men who had been taking Tony’s commands, and had him carried bodily to bed.…

Tony opened his eyes. One by one he collected all the disjointed memories of the past days. He perceived that he was lying on a couch in Hendron’s offices in the west end of the machine-shop and laboratory building. He sat up and looked out the window. It was notably lighter, although the clouds were still dense; and as he looked, a stained mist commenced to descend. A slight noise in one corner of the room attracted his attention. A man sat there at a desk quietly scribbling. He raised his eyes when Tony looked at him. He was a tall, very thin man, with dark curly hair and long-lashed blue eyes. His age might have been thirty-five—or fifty. He had a remarkably high forehead and slim, tactile hands. He smiled at Tony, and spoke with a trace of accent.

“Good morning, Mr. Drake. It is not necessary to ask if you slept well. Your sleep was patently of the most profound order.”

Tony swung his feet onto the floor. “Yes, I think I did sleep well. We haven’t met, have we?”

The other man shook his head. “No, we haven’t; but I’ve heard about you, and I should imagine that you have heard my name once or twice in the last few weeks.” A smile flickered on his face. “I am Sven Bronson.”

“Good Lord!” Tony walked across the room and held out his hand. “I’m surely delighted to meet the man who—” He hesitated.

The Scandinavian’s smile returned. “You were going to say, ‘the man who was responsible for all this.’”

Tony chuckled, shook Bronson’s hand, and then looked down at the bedraggled garments which only partially covered him. “I’ve got to find some clothes and get shaved.”

“It’s all been prepared,” Bronson said. “In the private office, there’s a bath of sorts ready for you, and some clean clothes and a razor.”

“Somebody has taken terribly good care of me,” Tony said. He yawned and stretched. “I feel fine.” At the door he hesitated. “What’s the news, by the way? How are things? How is everybody?”

Bronson tapped his desk with his pencil. “Everybody is doing nicely. There are only a dozen people left in the hospital now. Your friend Taylor has the commissary completely rehabilitated, and everybody here is saying pleasant things about him. I don’t know all the news, but it is picturesque, to say the least. Appalling, too! For instance the spot on which we now reside was very considerably raised last week. It has apparently been lifted again, together with no one knows how much surrounding territory, so the elevator sensations we felt in the field were decidedly accurate. We presume that many thousands of square miles may have been raised simultaneously; otherwise there would have been more local fracture. The radio station has been functioning again.”

“Good Lord!” Tony exclaimed. “I forgot all about the radio station last night—that is to say, to-day is to-morrow, isn’t it? What day is this?”

“This is the twenty-ninth.” Tony realized that he has been asleep for twenty-four hours. “The man in the wireless division went to work on the station immediately. Anyway, not much has come in, though we picked up a station in New Mexico, and a very feeble station somewhere in Ohio. The New Mexico station reports some sort of extraordinary phenomena, together with a violent eruption of a volcanic nature in their district; the one in Ohio merely appealed steadily for help.”

At once Tony inferred the import of Bronson’s words. “You mean to say that you’ve only heard two stations in all this country?”

“You deduce things quickly, Mr. Drake. Of course the static is so tremendous still that it would be impossible to hear anything from any foreign country; and doubtless other stations are working which we will pick up later, as well as many which will be reconditioned in the future; but so far, we have received only two calls.”

Tony opened the door to the adjacent office. “That means, then, that nearly everybody has been—”

The Scandinavian’s long white hands locked, and his eyes affirmed Tony’s speculation.…

“I’ll get myself cleaned up,” said Tony.

And he stepped into a big galvanized tub of water that had been kept warm by a small electric heater. He bathed, shaved and dressed in his own clothes, which had been brought from his quarters in the partly demolished men’s dormitory. Afterward he went to the laboratories and found Hendron.

“By George, you look fit, Tony!” were Hendron’s first words. “Eve is impatiently waiting for you. She’s at the dining-hall.”

Tony found Eve cheerful and bright-eyed. With a dozen or more women, she was rearranging and redecorating the dining-hall, which had been immaculately cleaned. She went out on the long veranda with him.

“Notice how much clearer the air is?” Eve asked. “Most of the fumes have disappeared.… It’s hard to shake the superstition that natural disasters are directed at you, isn’t it, Tony?”

“Are we sure it’s a superstition, Eve?”

“After all, what has happened to us is only the sort of thing that has happened before, thousands of times, on this earth of ours, Tony, on a smaller scale—at Pompeii, at Mt. Pelée and Krakatao and at other places. What can be the differences in the scale of the God of the cosmos, whether He shakes down San Francisco and Tokio twenty years apart, buries Pompeii when Titus was ruling Rome, and blows up Krakatao eighte

en hundred years later—or whether he decides to smash it all at once? It’s all the same sort of thing.”

“Yes,” agreed Tony. “It’s only the scale of the performance that’s different. Anyway, we’ve survived so far. I heard you were safe, Eve; and then when I could hear no more, I supposed you were safe. You had to be safe.”

“Why, Tony?”

“If anything was to keep any meaning for me.” He stared at her, himself amazed at what he said. “The moon’s gone, I suppose you know!”

“Yes. It was known that it would go.”

“And we—the world goes like the moon, with the return of Bronson Alpha!”