After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

TONY felt it utterly useless to attempt to speak to the throng; the people were too hysterical. More than three hundred of them were able-bodied, though many of these still bore bandages that testified to the injuries from which they were recovering. They had thought themselves recuperated from shock; but this intense excitement betrayed them.

Ransdell, restored from his faintness, proved the superior quality of his nerves by attaining composure first. He went to Tony and drew him away from the excited throng which continued to clamor about them.

“Eliot!” shouted Tony to his companion in this flight of exploration. “You try to tell them—as soon as they give you a chance.”

“O. K.!” Eliot yelled, and he stepped up on the tub which Tony had quitted. He shouted and made gestures and caught the crowd’s attention. Only a few trailed after Tony and their own leader, Ransdell.

Tony could not yet quiet his own inner tumult. He felt an arm about his shoulder, and found Jack Taylor beside him; and he thought how he had traveled on a train along the Hudson, back on the earth, on his way to Cornell University to meet this young man and ask him to become a member of Hendron’s party.

On the other side of him walked Peter Vanderbilt; and Tony thought of Fifth Avenue, and its clubs and mansions, so staid, so secure! Or they had felt themselves so. Now where were they?

Reveries of some similar sort were running through Vanderbilt’s head. His eyes met Tony’s, and he smiled.

“Tony, I woke up laughing, a night or so ago,” Peter Vanderbilt said.

“Laughing at what?” Tony inquired. They had passed from the noise of the crowd.

“At my dream. I dreamed, you see, Tony, that I was back on earth. Not only that, but I was on earth before the time these delectable Bronson Bodies were reported in the night skies. I was attending the ceremonies of installation of somebody’s statue—for the life of me, I can’t say whose—in the Hall of the Immortals! After I woke up, a meteor crossed this sky. I couldn’t help wondering if it mightn’t have been part of that statue!… Well, why not sit here? You can tell us a little more of what happened to you.”

So the four friends sat down on the ground close together, seeing each other in the distant radiance of the lights in the camp; and interrupting each other as they told, they traded their experiences in the flight from earth.

The account that Tony heard was far more tragic, of course, than that which he had to tell. The technicians under command of David Ransdell had made their calculations accurately, and the journey through space had been little more eventful than that of the ship in which Tony and his comrades had traveled. However, the second Ark had been built more hastily, and its greater size increased its difficulties; as it approached Bronson Beta, it become evident to its navigators that the lining of its propulsion-tubes was being rapidly fused. It approached the planet safely, however; and like its sister ship, found itself over the surface of a sea. Fortunately, the coast was not far away, or the great vessel would have dropped into the water and all aboard perished.

The coast which the second Ark approached—the coast upon which it now lay—was fog-bound. “In spite of the fog,” Ransdell said to Tony, “we had to land at once. Of course, the jets cleared away the fog below us, but only replaced it with a brilliant cloud of gases. We were flying ‘blind,’ and had to land by instrument. I ordered everybody to be strapped to the floor, and gave the command to set down the ship under the added pressure of the blast required for the delicate business of landing. Three of our tubes fused almost simultaneously. The ship careened and almost tipped over. In trying to right it, we rose perhaps fifty feet above this desert.” He swept his hand toward the surrounding darkness. “And then we crashed.”

Tony nodded. Ransdell went on: “Every bit of apparatus that was in the least fragile was, of course, demolished. On top of the crash, one of the jet-tubes burst, and its blast penetrated the storeroom. That might have been much worse; it might have annihilated half our party. Perhaps it did so, indirectly—it fused or destroyed more than half our stores and equipment. Since landing, we have not found it possible to construct even a radio. That is why you have heard no signals from us. We had more than we could do, for the first weeks, taking care of our injured and burying the dead—and salvaging and making usable what supplies were spared, in part. The searchlight you saw to-night was the best effort we accomplished.”

Suddenly Ransdell’s voice failed him. He cleared his throat and continued very quietly: “To tell the truth, Tony, we wondered whether we should try to communicate with Hendron’s party—assuming you had come through safe. We are so without supplies or resources, that we could only be a burden to you. We knew that at best you could barely manage for yourselves. It was that, as much as anything else, which stopped us from making efforts to find you. We decided not to drag you down and perhaps cause you, as well as ourselves, to perish.”

“You would,” said Tony. “You would decide that—Vanderbilt and Taylor and you, Dave. But thank God, that point’s past. I haven’t told you half the news. Eliot James and I didn’t come from our camp to you. We came from a city!”

“City?”

“Of the Other People, Dave!”

“Other People?… What Other People?… Where?”

“I mean a city of the old inhabitants of this planet!” Tony cried. “For it was inhabited, as we thought. And by what people! Eliot and I spent three days in one of their cities!”

“But not—with Them?”

“No,” agreed Tony. “Not with them! They’re gone! They’re dead, I suppose—for a million years. But wait till you hear what they left behind them! And what the cold and the dark of space saved for us! Food, for one thing. Dave! Peter! Jack!” In their excitement, they were all standing up again, and Tony was beating each of them in turn upon the back. “Food—grain and other things saved for us by Space’s wonderful refrigerator of absolute cold. Cheer up! Food—something to fill you—no longer’s one of our troubles. Their food—if it doesn’t kill us all. And it hasn’t killed Eliot or me yet.… Listen! What’s that?”

For there was shouting in the camp.

“I suspect,” said Peter Vanderbilt, “that James has got to that point too. He’s been telling them of the food you found. Perhaps now we better rejoin our comrades and—the ladies.”

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Eliot James had reached that point; and it started a new hysteria; for they believed him, and had faith in the food-supplies he reported. The immediate effect was instinctive and practical; they ordered their own sparse supplies distributed more satisfyingly than on any occasion since the terrible landing on this earth.

It was indeed salvation which Tony Drake and Eliot James had brought out of the night—salvation and the end of some of the hardships heroically borne. Tony did not realize then the extent of those hardships; but when half an hour later coffee was served for all of them in the improvised dining-hall, he was made to realize it by a simple statement of Ransdell’s. “This is the first ration of coffee we have served, except to those in most desperate condition, since the day after we landed.”

It was a hilarious midnight picnic in the impromptu dining-hall, where the men and women dared to eat as much as they wanted for the first time since their epochal journey—where they sang hymns, shouted snatches of gay songs from lost days on the vanished earth, wept and laughed again, over-hilariously. Tony found himself compelled to repeat again and again details of the city which Eliot James and he had found; again and again he had to iterate how Hendron and Eve and all their people had fared; and now he told how the three had died from the strange disease.

In return he gained other items from this and that of his companions, who enabled him gradually to piece together a more coherent account of the experience of the second band of Argonauts. Each detail was made vivid by the various narrators. The horrible day of the landing as the fog cleared away, revealing moment by moment the magnitude of the disaster which had overtaken them; the groans of the wounded; the crushed and mangled bodies of the dead; the desperate efforts of the doctors and surgeons among them to save those who were not beyond hope. Hastily constructed operating-tables under a sun which had once shone on the earth, and which now cast its radiance into the greenish-blue skies of Bronson Beta. The gradual emergence of order. The tallying of the lists of stores and tools. The shocking discovery that every one of the seeds so carefully stored on the ship had been burned by the unleashed atomic blast. The necessary destruction of the animals which had survived the crash, and the utilization of them for food. Rationing, then, and hunger. Long and weary expeditions on foot in search of sustenance. Efforts to find vegetation on Bronson Beta for food—efforts which in more than one case had led to illness, and twice had brought about death. The erection of the searchlight. The nights and days of waiting and hoping, complicated by fear to be found, because of the burden their discovery might constitute to those who discovered them.

“For a while,” said Jack Taylor, “we believed that nobody else—no other ship from earth—got over. We felt that, desperate as our situation was, yet we were the luckiest.”