Bronsome Beta - After Worlds Collide Part 10

Tony was up again-outdoors-running toward the plane. James was running behind him.

"Give me Vanderbilt and Taylor. We'll go."

"But-"

"What else can we do?"

As Tony descended upon Hendron's encampment, three men peered tensely through the gla.s.s windows of the ship: Taylor, Vanderbilt, and Tony himself. Nothing seemed disturbed; the buildings were intact "Not a person in sight!" Taylor yelled suddenly.

They slid down the air.

Tony cut the motors so that their descent became a soft whistle.

Then they saw clearly.

Far below were human figures, the people of the cantonment, and all of them lay on the ground, oddly collapsed, utterly motionless.

CHAPTER X.

WAR.

Tony circled above the stricken camp of the colony from earth. He could count some sixty men and women lying on the ground.

They looked as if they were dead; and Tony thought they were dead. So did Jack Taylor at his side; and Peter Vanderbilt, his saturnine face pressed against the quartz windows of the plane, believed he was witnessing catastrophe to Hendron's attempt to preserve humanity.

The Death spread below them might already have struck, also, the other camp-the camp from which these three had just flown. They might be the last survivors; and the Death might reach them now, at any instant, within their ship.

Tony thought of the illness which had come over the camp after the first finding of the wrecked vehicle of the Other People-the illness that had proved fatal to three of the earth people. He thought: "This might be some more deadly disease of the Other People which they caught." He thought: "I might have brought the virus of it to them myself from the Sealed City. It might have been in or on some of the objects they examined after I left."

This flashed through his mind; but he did not believe it. He believed that the Death so visible below was a result of an attack.

He looked at his companions, and read the same conviction in their faces. He pointed toward the earth, and raised his eyebrows in a question he could not make audible above a spurt from the plane's jets.

Taylor shook his head negatively. The people below them were dead. Descent would doubtless mean their own death.

Vanderbilt shrugged and gestured to Tony, as if to say that the decision was up to him.

Tony cut the propulsive stream and slid down the air in sudden quiet. "Well?"

"Maybe we should take a look," said Vanderbilt.

"What got them," Taylor said slowly, "will get us. We'd better take back a warning to the other camp."

Tony felt the responsibility of deciding. Ransdell was down there-dead. And Eve?

He lost alt.i.tude and turned on power as he reached the edge of the landing-field.

Neither of his companions had been in the Hendron encampment; but this was no time for attention to the equipment of the place. The plane b.u.mped to a stop and rested in silence.

No one appeared from the direction of the camp. Nothing in sight there stirred. There was a bit of breeze blowing, and a speck of cloth flapped; but its motion was utterly meaningless. It was the wind fluttering a cloak or a cape of some one who was dead.

Tony put his hand on the lever that opened the hood of the c.o.c.kpit.

"I'll yank it open and jump out. Looks like gas. Slam it after I go, and see what happens to me."

Either of his companions would have undertaken that terrifying a.s.signment-would have insisted upon undertaking it; but Tony put his words into execution before they could speak. The hatch grated open. Tony leaped out on the fuselage; there was a clang, and almost none of the outer air had entered the plane.

Taylor's knuckles on the hatch-handle were white.

Vanderbilt peered through the gla.s.s at Tony, his face unmoving. But he whispered, "Guts!" as if to himself.

Tony slipped to earth. The two men watching expected at any moment to see him stagger or shudder or fall writhing to the earth. But he did not. There was no fright on his face-his expression was locked and blank. He sweated. He sniffed in the air cautiously after expelling the breath he had held. Then he drew in a lungful, deeply, courageously. A light wind from the sea beyond the cliffs fanned him. He stood still-waiting, presumably, to die. He looked at the two men who were watching him, and hunched his shoulders as if to say that nothing had happened so far.

A minute pa.s.sed.

The men inside the plane sat tensely. Taylor was panting.

Two minutes.... Five. Tony stood and breathed and shrugged again.

"Gas or no gas," Taylor said with an almost furious expression, "I'm going out there with Tony."

He went.

Vanderbilt followed in a manner both leisurely and calm.

The three stood outside together watching each other for effects, each waiting for some spasm of illness to attack himself.

"Doesn't seem to be gas," said Tony.

"What, then?" asked Taylor.

"Who knows? Some plague from the Other People? Some death-wave from the sky? Let's look at them."

The first person they approached, as they went slowly toward the camp and its motionless figures, was Jeremiah Post, the metallurgist. He it was, Tony remembered, who first was affected by the illness that followed the finding of the Other People's car. There was no proof that Post was the first to have been affected by this prostration. They happened upon him first; that was all.

The metallurgist lay on his side with his arms over his head. There was no blood or mark of violence upon him.

"Not wounded, anyway," Vanderbilt muttered.

Taylor turned him over; and all three men started. Post's breast heaved.

"Good G.o.d!" Tony knelt beside him and opened his shirt. "Breathing! Heart's beating-regularly. He's-"

"Only unconscious!" Taylor exclaimed.

"I was going to say," Tony replied, "it's as if he was drugged."

"Or like anesthesia," observed Vanderbilt.

"Is he coming out of it?"

"He's far under now," Vanderbilt commented. "If he's been further under, who can say?"

"Let's look at the next!"

Near by lay two women; the three men examined them together. They were limp like Jeremiah Post, and like him, lying in a strange, profound stupor-like anesthesia, as Vanderbilt had said. The sleep of one of them seemed, somehow, less deep than that which held Post insensible; but neither of the women could be roused from it more than he.

"Feel anything funny yourself?" Tony challenged Taylor across the form of the girl over whom they worked.

"No; do you?"

"No.... It was gas, I believe; but now it's dissipated- but left its effect on everybody that breathed it."

"Gas," said Vanderbilt calmly, "from where?"

Tony's mind flamed with the warning of Kyto's words. A third Ark from the earth had reached Bronson Beta bearing a band of fanatic, ruthless men who would have the planet for their own, completely. They had brought with them some women, but they wished for many more in order to populate it with children of their own bodies and of their own fanatic faiths. These men already had obtained the Lark planes of the Other People, and mastered the secrets of their operation. These men long ago had entered some other Sealed City and had begun an exploration into the science of Dead People. Perhaps they had found some formula for a gas that stupefied, but was harmless otherwise.

Their plan and their purpose, then, would be plain. They would spread the gas and render Hendron's people helpless; then they would return to the camp and control it, doing whatever they wished with the people, as they awoke.

Tony scanned the sky, the surrounding hills. There was nothing in sight.

Yet he leaped up. "Peter! Jack! They'll be coming back! We'll be ready for them!"

"Who? Who are they?"

"The men who did this! Come on!"

"Where?"

"To the tubes!" And Tony pointed to them, aimed like cannon into the air-the huge propulsion-tubes from the Ark, which Hendron and he had mounted on their swivels at the edges of the camp. From them could be shot into the air the awful blast that had propelled the Ark through s.p.a.ce, and which melted every metal except the single substance with which they were lined.

The nearest of these engines of flight, so expediently made into machines of defense, was a couple of hundred yards away; and now as the three made hastily for it, they noticed a grouping of the limp, unconscious forms that told its own significant story.

Several of the men seemed to have been on the way to the great tube when they had collapsed.

"You see?" gasped Tony; for the three now were running. "It was an attack! They saw it, and tried to get the tube going!"

Two men, indeed, lay almost below the tube. Tony stared down at them as is hands moved the controls, and felt them in order.

"Dead?" Tony asked of Taylor, who bent over the men.

Jack shook his head. "n.o.body's dead. They're all the same- they're sleeping."

"Do you see Dodson? Have you seen Dodson anywhere?"

"No; you want Dodson, especially?"

"He might be able to tell us what to do."

Tony threw a switch, and a faint corona glowed along a heavy cable. The air crackled softly. "Our power-station's working," he said with satisfaction. "We can give this tube the 'gun' when we want to. You know how to give it the gun, Peter?"

"I know," said Vanderbilt calmly.

"Then you stand by; and give it the gun, if anything appears overhead! Jack, see what you can do with that tube!" Tony pointed to the north corner of the camp. "I'll look over some more of the people; and see what happened to Hendron-and Eve-and Ransdell and Dodson. Dodson's the one to help us, if we can bring him to."

He had caught command again-command over himself and his companions; Taylor already was obeying him; and Vanderbilt took his place at the tube.

Tony moved back into the camp alone. At his feet lay men and girls and women motionless, sightless, deaf-utterly insensible in their stupor. He could do nothing for them but recognize them; and he went, bending over them, whispering their names to himself and to them, as if by his whispering he might exorcise away this sleep.

He repeated to himself Eve's name; but he did not find Eve. Where was she, and how? Had this sleep dropped into death for some? He wanted to find Eve, to a.s.sure himself that she at least breathed as did these others; but he realized that he should first of all locate Dodson.... Dodson, if he could be aroused, would be worth a thousand laymen. Then he recollected that he had last seen Dodson in Hendron's dwelling.

Tony rushed to it and flung open the door; but what lay beyond it halted him.

He found Eve. She lay where she had fallen, face forward on the desk; and Ransdell lay slumped beside her. His left hand clasped her right hand; they had been overcome together. Both of them breathed slowly; but they were completely insensible. Dodson had crumpled over a table. There was a pen in his hand, a paper in front of him. Cloth-Tony saw that the cloth was from dresses-had been stuffed around the door. In a bedroom lay Hendron, the rise and fall of his chest almost imperceptible. Tony shook Dodson.

Suddenly he realized that his head was spinning.

He plunged to the door and staggered into the fresh air. He breathed hard. But his head cleared so slowly that his thoughts ran slow as minutes. Gas, after all. The people in Hendron's house had seen it strike the others, and attempted to barricade themselves. They thought it was death. There were still fumes in there.

Dodson-he must get Dodson.

He ran back, and dragged the huge man into the open.

He stood over him, panting. Then he remembered that Dodson had been writing. A note-a record. Tony went for it. So strong had been the poison in the air that he found it hard to read.

"We've been ga.s.sed," Dodson had scrawled. "People falling everywhere. No attack visible. We're going to try to seal this room. They're all unconscious out there. I got a smell of it, closing a window. Nothing familiar. I think-"

Tony shook Dodson. He brought water and doused him. He found Dodson's medical kit and tried to make him swallow aromatic spirits of ammonia, then whisky. Dodson could not swallow.

Tony jerked about, as he heard some one move. It was Vanderbilt, who had left his post at the tube.

"Nothing's in sight out there," Vanderbilt said calmly. "Taylor stays on watch. I ought to be more use in here."

"What can you do?" Tony demanded.

"I'm two-thirds of a doctor-for first aid, anyway," Vanderbilt said. "I used to spend a lot of time at hospitals. Morbid, maybe." While he spoke his slow, casual words, he had taken Dodson's kit and had been working over the physician.... "I gave him a hypo of caffeine and strychnine and digitalis that would have roused a dead elephant. He's still out, though."

"Will any of them come to?"

"Only one thing will tell."

"What?"