After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“You don’t believe your father—or Duquesne?” Tony asked.

“Yes; I believe they believed it. Yet like the old Egyptians, they may have been declaring denials of a fact they could not face.”

“But your father and Duquesne and the rest faced the end of the world, Eve.”

“That’s true; but when they faced it,—and admitted it,—they already had schemed their escape, and ours. For this end, if Bronson Beta drifts out into the cold without return, there is no escape.”

“No,” said Tony, and combated the chill within him.

“And could they know?” Eve persisted. “They could calculate—and undoubtedly they did—that the path of this planet has become an ellipse, that it will turn back again toward the sun; but it never has turned back toward the sun, Tony. Not once! This planet appeared out of space, approached the sun and swung about it, and now is going away from the sun. That we know; and that is all we do know; the rest we can merely calculate.”

“You mean,” questioned Tony, “that your father said something privately, during those days he was dying, to make you believe he was deceiving us?”

“No,” said Eve. “Yet I wonder, I cannot help wondering. But if we keep on away from the sun, don’t think, Tony, I’m—”

“What?” he demanded as she faltered and stopped.

“Unprepared,” she said; and she recited:

“‘Thy seats among the Gods abide; Re leans upon thee with his shoulder.

“‘Thy odor is as their odor, thy sweat is as the sweat of the Eighteen Gods.’”

“What’s that?” asked Tony.

“Something else I remembered from earth, from the Pyramid Texts, Tony. “‘Sail thou with the Imperishable Stars, sail thou with the Unwearied Stars!’”

She returned to the great Hall of Science of the men a million years dead, the hall wherein lay her father.

Several people crossed the square, some obviously on errands, others curiously wandering. Tony returned the hails of those who spoke to him, but encouraged no one to linger with him; he remained before the great hall, alone.

He had taken completely on faith the assurance which Hendron and Duquesne had given him, together with the rest of the people, that the path of this planet had ceased to follow the pattern of a parabola, but had become closed to an ellipse, and that therefore Bronson Beta, bearing these few Emigrants from Earth, would circle the sun. Tony still believed that; he had to believe it; but the death of Eve’s father seemed to have shaken her from such a necessity.

He gazed about at the magnificent façades of the City of the Vanished People—his city, where he had come to the command perhaps only to die in it, with all his refugees from Earth’s doomsday, as they drifted out into the coldness and darkness of space.

As

this strange world had done once before with its own indigenous people! Where had they gone when the deadly drift began? Where lay the last builders of Bronson Beta?

“Hello! How’s every little thing?” said a cheerful voice at his side.

Tony faced about, and confronted the red-haired girl whom he had met in Ransdell’s camp, and who had not been selected for the voyage from earth; her name had not been on the lists in Michigan.

Tony remembered her name, however—Marian Jackson. She had been an acrobatic dancer in St. Louis.

She carried on her shoulder the animal stowaway of the second Ark, the little monkey, Clara.

“Can you beat this place? Can you tie it?” Marian challenged Tony cheerfully. “Gay but not gaudy, I’d call it. D’you agree?”

“I agree,” acquiesced Tony, grateful for the letdown. The girl might be mentally a moron; but morons, he was discovering, had their points. This girl simply could not take anything seriously.

“But the taxi-service here is terrible,” objected Marian.

“We hope to improve it,” offered Tony.

The girl walked away. “Don’t go into any of the buildings alone!” Tony reminded. “And even on the streets, keep close to other people!”

Marian halted, looking up. “Hello! Hello!” she cried out softly. “Look at the taxies!” And she pointed to one of the wide spiral ramps to the right.