After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

“Where else?” questioned Ransdell; for he had done much observation flying.

“On some other continent—perhaps in the other hemisphere.”

“There are no other cities suitable.”

“Nowhere else in this world?”

“None. The old globes which we found do not show them; and we have never found any others.”

“But why were there only these five?”

“Well,” said Ransdell, “why were there even as many as five cities at the end?”

“But we have been told that the old population of the planet was one billion people!”

“Not at the end, however!”

“What happened?”

Dave Ransdell, for reply, turned about to Tony.

“We can give to-day at least a partial answer to that,” Tony said, looking about the little group of his Council. “And I think it can be considered pertinent to our discussion of our own emergency, for we are dealing with a mechanism of living—or of dying—created not by ourselves but by the original people of this planet. It certainly can only be of help to us to understand what they did. Professor Philbin,” he said, “please tell us.”

The little linguist arose.

“You have all heard, I may assume, something of the state of this planet at the time when the studies of the star approaching convinced the scientists of this planet that it was certain to disturb life here greatly.”

Peter Vanderbilt arose quietly; when Philbin stopped, Vanderbilt suggested:

“Should not every one hear this?”

“Certainly,” said Tony. “Open the doors.” And into the great room hundreds came and stood. For the halls without had been crowded. Nearly everybody was there, except men on watch or detailed to definite errands. Men, women and girls crowded as close as they could to the council-table; even the children came—the two children saved from the doom of earth on the first space-ship.

“I can assume,” the little linguist repeated, “that you all have learned what we, who have been interpreting the books, learned and reported some days ago of the time of Lagon Itol, which was approximately two hundred years before this planet was torn from its sun.

“Lagon Itol—who was certainly a very great man, one of enormous perceptions and imagination—considers in his diary the fate facing one billion people; so we may put that as a rough figure for the population of this planet in his time. But he astutely observes that there would be nothing like that number finally to face their fate; and he was right. From his time, the people of this planet rapidly reduced themselves in number by diminishing births. In fact, before he died, he observed it and recorded it; he even speculated on the probable number who would be alive to face the catastrophe.

“I have now discovered an official record of their year 16,584, Ecliptic.”

“Ecliptic?” a woman, close to the table, questioned.

“Ecliptic—reckoned, I mean, from the first eclipse. The old people here,” Philbin explained, “had a very accurate and rational way of reckoning. For thousands of years, their determinations of time were exceedingly precise; but as on earth, of course their history went back through ages of rough record and without record into oral traditions. Undoubtedly they once had scores or hundreds of arbitrary points from which they reckoned the years locally—as our Egyptians reckoned years from the start of the reigns of each Pharaoh. As we all recollect, most of our civilized world finally agreed upon a year which we called the Year of Our Lord, from which we reckoned backward and forward.

“The people of Bronson Beta chose a year of a famous eclipse. For this planet, and its huge companion Bronson Alpha, circled their sun in such a way that eclipses sometimes—though rarely—occurred. They were not so frequent as with the earth; they happened, on the average, about once in fifty years. Each was, therefore, more notable; and early in the history of man on this planet, there was a special eclipse which was noted by many nations of the primitive people. Later civilized ages could identify that eclipse with certainty and assign it a definite date. It offered itself as a very convenient and logical point from which to reckon the start of rational processes—the first recorded eclipse.

“Lagon Itol first mentions the disturbing star in the year 16,481, Ecliptic. He died in the year 16,504—before which time, as I have told you, he saw the population of the planet rapidly being reduced.

“For the year 16,584 I have, I say, the official census figures; they total slightly over two hundred millions of people—a reduction of four-fifths in approximately a century, or a loss of eight hundred millions of people.”

Many gasped aloud. “What happened?” voices asked. “A world plague? The Black Death?”

“No plague, no unusual death,” the little linguist continued. “Merely a cessation of births—or what must have been, for a time, almost a cessation. Would we have done differently? Who of us brought babies into the world, in our last two years, only to be destroyed? How many of us would have wanted children against a destruction if it was still a hundred years away?

“What happened to this planet was one of the things that might have happened to our earth—”

Duquesne broke in: “In fact, my friends, what happened here was the commoner occurrence in the cosmos. The fate of our earth was one of the ends of existence which always was possible, but yet exceedingly rare. The fate of this planet was much more typical of the ends of the earths which have been happening, and must continue to happen, until the termination of time. What is the first state of a star? Loneliness. At last another star approaches; and from its own substance, streamers are torn forth. The disturbing star passes on; but it has begot—planets. For it is from the substance that streamed from the sun, when another sun came close, that worlds are born.

“They circle their solitary parent, the sun; they cool and grow old; and upon one or two, not too large or too small, or too near or too far away from the sun, life begins—and grows and changes, and becomes man.