After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“It’s all right.” She took Tony’s arm. “I want to go over and look at the ocean. It’s a funny thing—looking at the ocean. Every time I stared out to sea on earth, I always expected to see a shark’s fin, or a big turtle, or a jellyfish, or a sail, or the smoke of a steamship; and I keep looking for such things on this one. And yet there can be nothing. Nothing at all.” Her eyes traveled the expanse of ocean, and then she sighed. “Let’s take a walk.”

“Let’s go back and look at that road in daylight.”

Eve started. “We’ve left it all this time! Did you tell Father about it?”

“Not yet.”

They went over to Cole Hendron. “Last night,” Tony said, “Eve and I were out walking, and we found a road.”

Ten minutes later every one was gathered around the highway. It was made of a metal-like substance. It ran to the bluff along the sea and then turned south. Except for that single curve—a graded curve, which suggested that the vehicles that once traveled the road moved very swiftly, there was no other turn. In the opposite direction it drove straight toward the dim and distant hills. Its surface was very smooth. As the Argonauts had gathered around Duquesne’s natural lecture-platform, so they now gathered around the metal monument Tony and Eve had seen in match-light on the previous evening. Way was made for Bagsley, the paleontologist. He bent over and looked up with a curious smile.

“That isn’t a job for me.” His eyes were fastened on the inscription the metal slab bore. “You see, this is such a thing as might be found in the future of our earth, but not in the past. No ancient civilization in our world could make a road such as this, or use metal so skillfully.”

“How about the writing?” some one asked.

Bagsley replied: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I wonder if we won’t find that the curves in all those letters are mathematically perfect? That is, if they are letters. But I couldn’t give you the faintest notion of what it says. It is not remotely related to Sanskrit, or Chinese, or Mayan, or cuneiform, or hieroglyphics, or runes; and it is equally remote from any modern writing.”

Duquesne was taking again. “Anyway,” he said, “whoever lived here had a language to write, and eyes to read it. They had roads to travel and vehicles to go upon them. So they had places to go and to come from. The cities we saw, or thought we saw, must have been real. My friends, great as our adventures have been, there lie ahead adventures infinitely more astounding.”

In the face of so many necessities and so many unknown possibilities, any normal person would have lacked adequate judgment to do the right things in the right order. The colonists of Bronson Beta succeeded in a logical procedure because they had been chosen from a multitude of human beings better than normal.

On the first day of their sojourn they had rested.

On the evening of that day Bronson Beta had exhibited another phenomenon. Soon after dark, when more than half the members of the colony had gone to sleep from fatitgue, a colossal meteor blazed across the sky and disappeared over the edge of the sea. It passed so close to the place where the Ark rested, that they had been able to hear a soft roar from it. It left a blaze upon the sky—a livid pathway of greenish-white fire which faded slowly. It was followed by another smaller meteor, and then half a dozen.

During the ensuing two hours countless thousands of meteors hurtled across the atmosphere of Bronson Beta in the vicinity of the Ark, and many of them fell to earth within the visual range of that spot.

Tony and Eve were outside when the aërolites commenced to fall. At first they were spellbound by the majesty of the spectacle, but when a great hurtling mass of molten material splashed into the sea less than a mile offshore and set the ocean boiling all around, so that clouds of hot steam drifted over it, they became alarmed. Hendron

and Duquesne were alseep, but there were twenty-five or thirty people outdoors.

In the afternoon of that day Tony had made his way some distance down the coast, and he had found a precipice carved by an ancient ocean from living rock. At its base were shallow cave-like openings, and above it three or four hundred feet of solid stone.

When several of the great masses of material had hit the earth so hard that it trembled beneath their feet, Tony quickly commanded the little knot of people who were standing together, watching the spurts of fire across the sky, to go to these holes in the rock wall. They started, with Eve leading the way. Tony then entered the Ark and woke Hendron, whom he found lying on the padded floor in sound, exhausted slumber.

Hendron sat up. “What is it?”

So effective was the insulation of the ship that the fall of meteors was not perceptible on its interior.

“Meteors,” Tony answered. “Three of them have landed within a mile of here in the last few minutes. Big ones. Any one of them would annihilate this ship if it hit it. There were about thirty people outdoors. I sent them up the coast to some shallow caves at the foot of a basalt cliff. I thought it was safer there.”

As he said the last words, he was following Hendron down the spiral staircase. They debouched on the gangplank; and as they did so, a dazzling, dancing illumination and a crescendo roar announced the fall of another meteor. It hit on the brink of the cliff overlooking the sea some distance down the coast. A million bright, hot particles splashed over the barren landscape, and an avalanche of melted metal crashed into the ocean. Hendron looked up at the sky, and saw a dozen more of these spectacular missiles pursuing each other. He turned instantly to Tony. “If one of those things hit the cliff where you sent the people, would it knock the cliff down?”

“I don’t know. It’s safer than the Ark, anyway.”

“Right.” Hendron rushed up the stairs, followed by Tony.

“How about the animals? Should we try to get them out?”

The living creatures—mammals, birds, insects—had been tended and fed but not yet moved. Where, outside, could they yet be established?

“The animals,” said Tony, “will have to take their chances here.”

But Hendron and he awakened all the pilgrims who had been asleep. They were commencing to leave the Ark in an orderly but fast-moving line. Hendron was at the door of the Ark, and as the people emerged, he divided them into groups of five, and sent each group running in a different direction, thus dispersing over a wide area those of the colonists who were not hiding under the rim of the cliff.

The number of the astrolites increased with every passing minute, until the sky seemed full of them. The terrain was as brightly illuminated as by daylight; and from the gangplank Tony could see the little bands scurrying in their appointed directions.

When they had all emerged, Hendron said to Tony shortly: “You go to the cliff and disperse the people there. I’ll stay here with the last five.”