After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“Where would I be?” A girl of about twenty-three stood up and walked toward him. Her eyes were gray; her chin was firm; her hair was darkly red. Tony noticed that she carried herself with a boldness different from the others.

“Her name,” Ransdell murmured as she approached, “is Marian Jackson. Lived in St. Louis. An acrobatic dancer. Kept her head during the chaos before the destruction. Read about our plans. Crawled into camp the night before we took off. Lived in the woods for three weeks before that—nobody knows what on.”

The girl reached the table and took Tony’s hand. “I’ve heard about you,” she said. “Often. You don’t look anything like I supposed you would.”

?

?I’m glad to meet you,” Tony replied.

Unabashed, she studied him. “You look shot,” she said finally.

Tony grinned. “I am a little tired.”

“You’re all in. But then, everybody’s tired around here always.”

“You better go back to your place,” Ransdell said.

“Sure,” the girl answered. She smiled buoyantly and returned.

Ransdell looked at her thoughtfully, sipped his coffee, and shook his head. Then he continued privately to Tony: “She’s really a moron, I suppose. I doubt if Hendron will approve of having a moron in our company; but her empty-headedness, her astonishment at everything, even her ignorance, which is pretty naïve, have delighted everybody. And she did a big thing for us.”

Tony looked thoughtfully at the red-headed girl as she sat down and resumed conversation with those beside her.

“What did she do?” he asked, returning his attention to Ransdell.

“The second night we were here, Eberville went mad. He decided early in the evening that it was against the will of God for us to be here, and that we should all be destroyed. But he quieted down, and he was left alone. Later he got up, got into the ship, started the only generator that would work, and turned on one of the lateral tubes. In the morning you can see a big black patch about four hundred yards to the left of where we were camped. He’d have wiped us out in ten seconds, but Marian jumped on him. She’s strong. So was Eberville, insanely strong. But she has teeth and nails. That is why we all escaped annihilation a second time.”

Tony shook his head slowly and thoughtfully, without speaking.

The little monkey, Clara, returned to him and squatted before him, peering up at him with its queerly humanlike, puzzled gaze.

She had no business here, Tony recollected. Monkeys were not on the list of necessary or useful creatures to be taken on the terrible transfer from earth to this planet; and a single representative of the tiny monkey clan was particularly impractical and useless. But Tony was glad that Clara was here.

Among the crowd he saw Marian Jackson’s red head moving; and he thought: “She had not been selected, either; but all these girls here of higher intelligence, and all the men too, would have been wiped out, but for her.”

He did not blame Hendron for the narrowness of the selections more than he blamed himself. He thought: “We must all have become a bit mad in those last days on earth—mad or at least fanatic. We could hope to save so few and became too intent on certain types.”

Suddenly Tony got up. Hendron, he remembered, knew none of their discoveries and events. He could delay no longer his return to Hendron.

But when he suggested to Eliot James that they return, others would not allow it.

“Not both of you!… You haven’t both got to go!”

There was altogether too much yet to tell, and to hear.

“Let Eliot stay here, Tony,” Dave Ransdell said. “I’ll go to Hendron with you. I ought to report to him; and I want so much to see him.”

“Just right,” Tony accepted this plan.

“That’s the thing to do.”

They were in the air, Tony Drake and Dave Ransdell together. In the plane with them, they freighted a fair half of the objects intelligible and unintelligible, which Tony and Eliot had brought from the Sealed City. With them was also Eliot James’ record, which he had read to the people in Ransdell’s camp.

* * *

It was dawn; the slow sunrise of Bronson Beta was spreading its first faint shafts across the sky; and the ground below was beginning to be etched in its pattern of plain and hill and river and estuary from the sea.

The veinlike tracery of roads appeared—the lines left by the Vanished People. Tony gazed far ahead and to each side, searching for another or others of such marvelous, gigantic bubbles which would become, upon approach, other cities. But nothing of the sort came in sight. They spied smears and blotches below which became, when they turned the glass upon them, rows of ruins. They did not stop for these. Already they had much to report; already they were long overdue.