After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

Tony moved back into the camp alone. At his feet lay men and girls and women motionless, sightless, deaf—utterly insensible in their stupor. He could do nothing for them but recognize them; and he went, bending over them, whispering their names to himself and to them, as if by his whispering he might exorcise away this sleep.

He repeated to himself Eve’s name; but he did not find Eve. Where was she, and how? Had this sleep dropped into death for some? He wanted to find Eve, to assure himself that she at least breathed as did these others; but he realized that he should first of all locate Dodson.… Dodson, if he could be aroused, would be worth a thousand laymen. Then he recollected that he had last seen Dodson in Hendron’s dwelling.

Tony rushed to it and flung open the door; but what lay beyond it halted him.

He found Eve. She lay where she had fallen, face forward on the desk; and Ransdell lay slumped beside her. His left hand clasped her right hand; they had been overcome together. Both of them breathed slowly; but they were completely insensible. Dodson had crumpled over a table. There was a pen in his hand, a paper in front of him. Cloth—Tony saw that the cloth was from dresses—had been stuffed around the door. In a bedroom lay Hendron, the rise and fall of his chest almost imperceptible. Tony shook Dodson.

Suddenly he realized that his head was spinning.

He plunged to the door and staggered into the fresh air. He breathed hard. But his head cleared so slowly that his thoughts ran slow as minutes. Gas, after all. The people in Hendron’s house had seen it strike the others, and attempted to barricade themselves. They thought it was death. There were still fumes in there.

Dodson—he must get Dodson.

He ran back, and dragged the huge man into the open.

He stood over him, panting. Then he remembered that Dodson had been writing. A note—a record. Tony went for it. So strong had been the poison in the air that he found it hard to read.

“We’ve been gassed,” Dodson had scrawled. “People falling everywhere. No attack visible. We’re going to try to seal this room. They’re all unconscious out there. I got a smell of it, closing a window. Nothing familiar. I think—”

Tony shook Dodson. He brought water and doused him. He found Dodson’s medical kit and tried to make him swallow aromatic spirits of ammonia, then whisky. Dodson could not swallow.

Tony jerked about, as he heard some one move. It was Vanderbilt, who had left his post at the tube.

“Nothing’s in sight out there,” Vanderbilt said calmly. “Taylor stays on watch. I ought to be more use in here.”

“What can you do?” Tony demanded.

“I’m two-thirds of a doctor—for first aid, anyway,” Vanderbilt said. “I used to spend a lot of time at hospitals. Morbid, maybe.” While he spoke his slow, casual words, he had taken Dodson’s kit and had been working over the physician.… “I gave him a hypo of caffeine and strychnine and digitalis that would have roused a dead elephant. He’s still out, though.”

“Will any of them come to?”

“Only one thing will tell.”

“What?”

“Time, of course,” Peter Vanderbilt said. “Then, if it proves my treatment may have helped Dodson,—and not killed him,—we might try it on others.”

Tony bent again over Eve and Ransdell; their respirations and their pulses seemed the same; and Hendron’s, though much weaker than theirs, had not further deteriorated.

“They don’t seem to be slipping,” Tony said.

“No. Anything in sight outside?”

“No,” said Tony, but he went out for a better inspection, and for another patrol past those that lay senseless on the ground.

He returned to Peter Vanderbilt and waited with him. They pulled Dodson and Eve and Ransdell out into the open air and laid them on the ground; they carried out Hendron too, and stretched him upon his mattress in the breeze and the sunlight.

Nothing remained to do; so they sat watching the forms that breathed but otherwise did not move, and watching the sky. Three hundred yards away, Jack Taylor stood at his tube watching them and the sky, and the scattered, senseless, sleeping people.

“Our other camp!” said Vanderbilt. “What do you suppose is happening there?”

“I’ve been thinking of that, of course,” said Tony. “We ought to warn them by radio; but if we did, we’d warn the enemy too. He’s listening in, we may be sure; he’d know we were laying for him here; our chance to surprise him would be gone. No; I think our best plan is to lie low.”

Vanderbilt nodded thoughtfully. “I agree. In all likelihood our enemy is taking on only one of our camps at a time. Having started here, he’ll probably finish here before beginning on the other.”

“We’ve no idea what forces they have.”

“No.”