After Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 2)

Peter Vanderbilt had chosen what would have been called, on earth, a penthouse—a roof-dwelling, built, he was sure, by some connoisseur of living.

The place delighted Peter; it was on a roof but near an edge of the city where the shield sloped steeply down; so the roof there was not high, and was easily reached by foot, after the power failed.

Also it was especially well adapted for habitation in the present emergency when the heating apparatus prepared for the city had failed or rather, had been cut off. For the original builders had allowed for no such emergency; they had been dealing with elements in respect to which they had no reason to figure on that factor of failure—the internal heat and radio-activity of the core of the planet. Stoppage of that was unthinkable; and so, to them, was the cutting of the power-conduits to any of the cities. Therefore they had supplied no alternative heating arrangement.

As a consequence the present tenants had to employ the most primitive methods of keeping themselves warm in these lovely supercivilized chambers. They were driven to build bonfires in some of the great halls; but they spared those of exceptional splendor.

Peter Vanderbilt, being on the roof in his “penthouse,” had contrived a chimney and a fireplace which gave him heat without much smoke or soot.

It was before this fire that the five gathered.

“Wonderful place you have, Peter,” said Whittington, looking around. He had not visited it before, and he went about examining the metal panels of mountain, woodland, marsh and sea, all splendid in the colors of enamel paints baked on.

Peter asked him: “Are you complimenting me? All I’ve done is to choose it.… Do you know, not a thing was flecked or rubbed, not a thing was worn. The man who made it never used it.”

“It seems so with most of the buildings,” said Whittington. “It seems they must have gone on building them to complete their plan, after they knew they themselves would never fill them.”

“What else could they do,” asked Eliot, who had thought much about this, “while they waited? Could they just wait—for slow annihilation?”

“Philbin,” said Vanderbilt, “rendered a couple of lines of his poem ‘Talon.’ He says it gives no idea of the enormous melancholy of the original; but as he said modestly, it is better than no translation at all:

“‘And now the winds flow liquid,

The sole cascades to seek the sea.

At last these awful streams themselves are hardened.

The air that once was breath is metal, frozen.

Where, then, are we?’”

Nobody spoke until Taylor, after a moment, put wood on the fire.

“Did you hear, Peter,” he questioned, “what those girls—Marian and Shirley—were out to do?”

“Yes,” said Vanderbilt; and the five got immediately at the problem of how to gain entrance and control of Gorfulu.

“Seidel is in command, Von Beitz is sure,” Eliot James said. “Cynthia agrees that is most probable. He was pushing aside Morkev, who was nominally chief Commissar—he called himself that—when Lady Cynthia escaped.

“Von Beitz says that Seidel supplanted Morkev but did not kill him, Morkev had too many friends. It is perfectly certain that there are two factions among our friends the Midianites, which is complicated, of course, by their racial mixture. Their position is further complicated by the English, who obey them only because they must.

“Cynthia has told us, and Von Beitz has confirmed it, that the mixture on top is constantly afraid of what they call ‘a rising of the serfs’—that is, the English. They guard against it. The English are allowed to gather—even for work—only in very small groups, and always under supervision.”

“It looks like a set-up,” observed Whittington, optimistically, “if once we get in.”

Vanderbilt shook his head. “Eliot specialized, in that speech, on their elements of weakness. Their strength is utter ruthlessness. I believe that, when they attacked your camp,” he said to Eliot James, “you killed a good many of them, and some of the most violent fell. But enough were left. Von Beitz says that Seidel keeps himself surrounded by them. He has no use for the milder men. He has a despotism which he completely controls by intimidation; and no form of government is more merciless and efficient—at least at first. And this is very early in the life of this particular despotism.”

“There is a building which they call the Citadel,” Jack Taylor said, as if he had heard none of this. “It held the offices of administration of the Old People. Seidel occupies it with his inner ring.

“If three of us could get in—or two of us—and kill ten of them,—the ten top men, including Seidel,—we’d—”

“What?”

“We’d at least be able to start something,” Jack ended somewhat weakly.

“But the two of you would have to kill the ten of them and t

he top ten—before you could really begin,” said Peter Vanderbilt quietly. “How simple you make it seem!”