After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

Cole Hendron had no coffin. Over the body was an immense black tapestry—a hanging taken from the great Hall in which he had lain.

The procession reached the street, amid muffled sobs and the sound of feet.

At the gate, Eve pulled the control lever. Hendron’s closest friends and his daughter marched into the open.

It was cold.

The mourners filed up a great spiral ramp and stood watching.

Tony beside Ransdell, at the head of the bier, walked with his head down. Eve came last, a lone regal figure.

They surmounted the knoll. The body was lowered. They stood around the grave, shivering a little in the cold.

“The greatest American,” Tony said at last.

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“The greatest man,” said Duquesne, weeping openly.

Dodson, a person of expletives rather than of eloquence, looked down at the dark-swathed and pathetic bundle. “I doubt if ever before so much has depended upon one man. A race, maybe—or a religion—or a nation; but never a species.”

Eliot James spoke last. “He did not make mere history. He made a mark across cosmos and infinity. Only in memory can adequate honor be paid to him.… Good-by, Cole Hendron!”

Then, from the city, came suddenly the sound of earth’s voices raised in Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional”:

God of our fathers, known of old.…

The tumult and the shouting dies,

The captains and the kings depart.…

Earth’s voices singing to the skies, where never earth people had been before.

Tony sprinkled earth upon Hendron—earth not of the earth, but of the planet that had come from the edges of infinity to replace it. The grave was filled.

At the last Eve and Tony stood side by side, while the others rolled a great bowlder over the spot as a temporary marker.

Tony heard Eve whispering to herself. “What is it?” he said. “Tell me!”

“Only the Tenth Psalm, Tony,” she whispered: “Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?”

And in the far sky a speck passed and vanished beyond the hill, an abrupt and vivid reminder of the exigencies of the present.

CHAPTER XV

VON BEITZ RETURNS

ELIOT JAMES sat in the apartment which he had chosen for his residence, and looked from its unornamented gray walls out over the city of Hendron. Presently he began to write. In a cabinet at his side were drawers filled with notebooks upon which was scribbled the history of the migration from earth.

“In summary,” he began, “since there has been no time for detail, I will set down an outline of our conditions since our perilous removal to this city of the ancient people.

“We have shelter, the gorgeous shelter of these buildings rising in a hundred hues under their transparent dome. We have warmth, for although we are moving out into the cold at a prodigious speed, the air sucked into the city is heated. Around the rim of the dome are situated eight tremendous ventilating and air-conditioning plants. We have light in abundance—our city in the long dark of night is like day. Underground is food enough for us for unmeasured generations. Some of that food disagrees with us. Some is indigestible. In some there is no nourishment which our gastric juices can extract. Two varieties of vegetables are definitely poisonous to us. But the vast bulk of the stored produce is edible, delicious and healthful.

“We have a plethora of tools and machines. In the development of electricity the Other People have far outstripped us. Also in the extension of what we called ‘robot-control.’ They manufactured almost no machinery which needed human attention. A technique of photo-electric cell inspection and auxiliary engines makes every continuous mechanical process self-operating. The vast generators which run underground to supply light, the powerful motors of the ventilators, and the pumps which supply processed water from the river for our consumption, not only run by themselves but repair themselves.

“The northwest ventilator cracked a bearing last week—and in the presence of Tony and Ransdell it stopped itself, took itself apart, removed the cracked metal, put on a new bearing, reassembled itself and went into operation again. They said that the thing reminded them of the operation of one of those earthly phonographs which stops automatically and has a moving arm to take off played records and put on new ones. Only—the ventilator motor was thirty feet in height and proportionately broad and long.

“We have clothing. In our first camp there is still much clothing from earth, but we have not reclaimed it. The Bronson Betans wore very light and very little clothing. We know so much about them now, that we can follow their clothing trends over ages of their history. With domed cities, always warm, they needed clothes only for ornament—as do we—in reality. But they left behind not only vast stores of garments and goods, but the mills in which the materials were fabricated. We are using the materials now. No one has yet appeared, except for amusement, in a Bronson Betan costume. Their shoes, of soft materials, are all too wide for us. Their garments were like sweaters and shorts,—both for men and women,—although the women also wore flowing robes not unlike negligees. However, we do wear portions of their garments, and we use their materials—all intermingled with the remains of the clothes we brought from earth, so that we are a motley mob.