After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“I believe it was one of those machines which flew over you—and over us.”

“Flew?” repeated Peter Vanderbilt calmly. “Of itself? No pilot?”

Tony shook his head.

“A pilot perhaps,” pronounced Vanderbilt softly, “a million years dead?”

Tony nodded; the inclination of his head in this affirmative made them jump.

“You don’t believe it!” Peter Vanderbilt rebuked him.

“You,” said Tony, “haven’t been in their city. We were there three days, and never ceased to expect them to walk out any door!”

“After a million years dead?”

“How do we know how it might have been?”

“We know,” Jack Taylor reminded him, “how long it must have been at the very shortest. Less than a million years, to be sure; but—plenty long in the dark and absolute zero. They never could have survived it.”

Tony looked at him. “Why?”

“Because they couldn’t, Tony.”

“You mean, because we couldn’t have. But we’re not—They.”

Peter Vanderbilt flicked a speck from his sleeve. “We have no need to be metaphysical,” he suggested. “The machine could have come from one source, the pilot from another. The machine could have survived the million years cold; we know that some did. You saw them. But the pilot need have survived no more than a passage from earth—which some three hundred of us here have survived, and a hundred in your camp also.”

“Of course,” accepted Eliot James practically. “Another party could have got across—several parties; the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese or some others. Two weeks or more ago they may have found another Sealed City with the Other People’s aircraft.”

“And they,” said Tony, “may have got one of the engines going.”

“Exactly!”

“All right,” said Tony, “that’s that. Then let’s all sit down again. Why did the pilot, whoever he is, look us over and leave without message or signal? Why—”

They sat down, but drew closer, talking together: “If some of the Other People survived, what would be their attitude to us, would you say?… Would they know who we were, and where we came from?”

Tony led a dozen men to the ship in which Eliot and he had flown; and they bore to the camp the amazing articles from the Sealed City.

Nobody tired. There was no end to their speculations and questions. Tony, seated on the ground and leaning on his hand beside him, felt a queer, soft constriction of his forefinger. He drew his hand up, and the constriction clamped tighter, and he felt a little weight. Some small, living thing had clasped him.

It let go and leaped onto his shoulder.

“Hello!” cried Tony, as two tiny soft hands and two tiny-toed feet clung to him. “Hello! Hello!” It was a monkey.

“Her name’s Clara,” said Ransdell.

“Yours?” asked Tony. “You brought her over?”

“Nobody brought her over,” Ransdell replied. “You know the regulations before leaving earth. I tried to enforce them; but Clara was too good for us. She stowed away.”

“Stowed away?”

“We discovered her after things got calm in space,” Ransdell said, smiling. “When we were well away from the earth and had good equilibrium. Everybody denied they had anything to do with her being on board. In fact, nobody seemed able to account for her; nobody would even admit having seen her before; but there she was. And she survived the passage; and even our landing. Of course we kept her afterward.”

“Of course,” said Tony. “Good work, Clara.” He extended his finger, which Clara clasped solemnly, and “shook hands” by keeping her clasp as he waved his finger.

“Since we’re checking up,” added Ransdell, “you might as well know that we brought over one more passenger not on the last lists we made back there in Michigan. —Marian!” he called to the group about them. “You here?”