Bronsome Beta - After Worlds Collide Part 3

Was it significant that Bates and Jeremiah Post, who had dug from the soil the wreck of the Other People's vehicle, were the first affected? And Maltby soon afterward was sick. Twenty-six persons altogether fell ill; and three died-Bates, and Wardlow, a chemist, and one of the girls who had served as a nurse to the sick-Lucy Grant. The rest made complete recoveries; no one else was later affected; the strange plague pa.s.sed from the camp.

But of the hundred and three emigrants from earth-perhaps the sole survivors of humanity in all creation-three were dead. And Tony Drake ordered the breaking of the strange soil of Bronson Beta for the first burials of Earth People! Three new interments to add to the uncountable graves of the Other People who were yet to be discovered!

Hendron, who himself had not fallen sick, was by far the most disturbed by these deaths that had come to the camp; thereafter he doubled his restrictions.

It was Higgins the botanist, who at length openly defied the leader.

Higgins took four of the younger men-and under other circ.u.mstances Tony unquestionably would have joined them -and went off. At that time Hendron was endeavoring to make a new set of gears, and a cha.s.sis and a body, for a second atomic-engine vehicle, using metal from the wall of the Ark; and although he engaged more than twenty people in the operation, it was progressing very slowly. Moreover they had just pa.s.sed through another three days of heavy rain, and while it was good for the gardens, nevertheless the people who lived in tents were extremely miserable. They were studying the possibility of having to live altogether in one or two of the round sections of the Ark during the coming winter, as it would be impossible to erect metal houses by that time; and every one was dejected over the idea of pa.s.sing nearly two earth years sleeping on the padded floor of a chamber in the Ark in one great communal group.

Higgins and his party were gone for four days, and anxiety about him became so acute that music was played on the great broadcasting machine constantly during the day, and at night a searchlight shot into the air a vertical beam which was visible for many miles.

Late on the afternoon of the fourth day the exploring party returned.

The five came down the Other People's road from the west, walking with rapid, swinging strides, plainly in triumphant excitement.

Higgins reported for them all when they halted, surrounded by their friends: "We covered about seventy-five miles. We saw a great desert We went into a valley where a mighty tangle of fern trees is beginning to rise toward the heavens. We saw glaciers on the top of those distant mountains. I have seen excavations in an old pit where the fossils of animals that were extinct during the civilized period on this planet were being dug out And we encountered, not ten miles from here, on the Other People's road, something that will very largely relieve one of our great difficulties."

With that he unstrapped his pack, opened it, and dumped out at Hendron's feet a dozen objects upon which Hendron dropped eagerly.

They were wood, chips of wood. Hard wood-soft wood. Finely grained wood, and wood with a coa.r.s.e, straight grain.

"Is there much of it?" Hendron asked, as he examined the chips.

Higgins nodded. "It isn't related to any of the wood on earth, and there are many interesting features about this vegetation which I will outline in a monograph later, but it is vegetation. It is wood. It comes from the trunks of trees, and there is enough of it standing, seasoned, perfectly preserved, to supply us with all the lumber we can use for generations.

"You have a.s.sumed," he continued, speaking directly to Hendron, "that this planet upon which we stand was long ago drawn away from its...o...b..t about some distant sun-some star. We had a.s.sumed that, for uncounted ages, this planet followed its prescribed course about its sun until, by the close pa.s.sing of some other star, its...o...b..t was disturbed, and this planet, with its companion world which destroyed our earth, was cast out into s.p.a.ce and cold and darkness.

"The appearance of the forest that we found completely accords with your theory of this planet's past history. There stood a great forest of many varieties of trees, none exactly resembling those of our world, yet of their general order. They seemed to have been deciduous trees mostly; their leaves had fallen: they lay on the ground; the boughs were bare.

"There must have been a long, last autumn followed by a winter without parallel on our world and previously on this planet. All water froze; air froze, preserving the forest as it was at the end of that awful autumn when no thaw came through the millions of years in outer s.p.a.ce until this planet found our sun.

"I have said that the trees I examined were unlike the trees on earth; yet their trunks and boughs were wooden; their leaves enc.u.mbered the ground. Here are a few of the leaves.... I am taking the liberty of calling this one maple, and this one oak, and this one spruce, and this one elm."

The exiles from earth pushed close to finger the leaves and bits of wood, so strange and yet suggesting the familiar. These promised them homes, rooms of their own, chairs, tables, cupboards and book-shelves and writing desks, and a thousand other things dear to their emotional memories. And yet it was odd to see Duquesne, the great French physicist, weeping, and Dodson, the dignified dean of New York surgery, hurling an old felt hat into the air and yelling at the top of his lungs, simply because a wiry little man with a goatee had showed them a few chips of wood.

Tony drew close to Eve. "We'll be outcasts no longer- outcasts!" he emotionally murmured. "We'll have a house and a wood fire again!"

"We?" whispered Eve. "We? You and I? We'll be allowed to marry and live by ourselves?"

They were near to Hendron, but he seemed not to hear them.

"Did you go to the other edge of the forest?" he asked of Higgins.

"There was no sign of the edge as far as we went The road we followed went through the forest, and before we came to the woods, there were two crossroads. We considered both of them; but we went on, as we have told you, deep into the forest; and returned, as you see."

They were all sitting around a fire on that night, after those first moments of gentleness and of affection when they had been brought electrically back to the happy past, when once again their hopes had risen.

It was night, and dark; and there was no moon. Nor would there ever be a moon. They had been singing softly; and one of their number-Dimitri Kalov-had slipped away from the fire and talked to Hendron, and gone to the Ark and come back with a piano-accordion strapped around his shoulders. No one had seen him return, but suddenly from out of the darkness came a ripple of music.

The singing stopped, and they listened while Dimitri played. He played old songs, and he played some of the music from Russia which his father had taught him. Then, between numbers, when the applause died and a hush fell over the group, as they waited for him to begin again, there was a sound.

It was soft and remote, and yet it transfixed every one instantly, because it was a sound that did not belong to any human being. It was a sound that did not belong to their colony. A sound foreign and yet familiar. A sound that rose for a few instants, and then died out to nothing, only to return more strongly than before.

One by one they turned their faces up, for the sound was in the sky. It approached rapidly, above them, in the dark. There was no mistaking it now. It was the motor of an airplane. An airplane on Bronson Beta! An airplane piloted by other human beings, or perhaps-they did not dare to think about the alternative.

Nearer and nearer it came, until some of them could discern the splotch of darkness against the stars. But then the ship in the heavens seemed to see their fire on the ground and be alarmed by it, for it switched its course and started back in the direction from which it had come.

Hendron rushed toward the observatory and shouted to Von Beitz, who was on duty at the radio, to turn on a searchlight. Von Beitz must have heard the airplane too, for even as Hendron shouted, a long finger of light stabbed across the sky and began combing it for the vanishing plane. It caught and held upon the ship for a fraction of a second before it plunged through a sleazy cloud, but that second was not long enough for any one to tell what manner of ship it was, or even whether it was a ship such as might have been made by the people of the earth. A speck-a flash of wing surface. And the clouds.

They sat, stricken and numb. Surely, if there had been human beings in that ship-surely if it had contained other refugees from the destruction of the earth-it would have circled over their fire time and again in exultation.

But it had fled. What could that mean? Who could be in it? What intelligence could be piloting it?

The pulsations of the motor died. The light was snapped off. The colonists shuddered.

They were not alone on Bronson Beta.

CHAPTER IV.

WHAT WAS IT?.

Somebody threw a log onto the fire. It blazed up freshly, and illuminated the strained, immobile faces of the emigrants from earth. n.o.body spoke. They only looked at each other.

Out of the night, out of the darkness, out of the remote, infinitely distant, impersonal Nowhere, had come that humming, throbbing reality. Somewhere on Bronson Beta there were other human beings. Another still more dreadful thought curdled the imaginations of the people who sat around the camp-fires: were those other beings human?

Hendron, the leader of these brave people, had never felt upon himself pressure for greater leadership-had never felt himself more incompetent to explain the mystery of that night.

He moved among his fellows almost uncertainly. He walked up to the camp-fire and addressed his comrades. "I think," he said slowly, "that the thought now engraving the imaginations of many of you may be discarded. I mean the thought that the plane which approached our camp was piloted by other than human beings."

Eliot James interrupted, speaking with a confidence he did not feel. "It looked like an ordinary airplane."

Cole Hendron shook his head. "From the glimpse we had, no one could say. What we saw was merely a glint upon some sort of material. However, we must use our reason to rescue us from impossible conclusions. We must infer from our glimpse of that machine in the sky, and from the sound of its flight, that some other party on earth was successful in completing a ship capable of taking the leap from Earth to Bronson Beta; and that, also, they were fortunate in the flight; and that they have succeeded, as well as we, in establishing themselves here."

"They must be established very well," somebody else said grimly. "We haven't got a plane."

Hendron nodded. "No; nor did we include an airplane in the equipment of our larger Ark. Therefore it could not have been our comrades from our own camp on Earth whom we heard in this sky. Were they the English, perhaps? Or the Russians? The Italians? Or the j.a.panese?"

"If they were any people from earth," Jeremiah Post countered, "why should they have approached so near, and yet not give any sign they had seen us?"

Cole Hendron faced this objector calmly. He was aware that Post was one of the younger men who believed that he, the leader of the party on earth, and the captain on the voyage through s.p.a.ce, had served his purpose. "Have you come to believe," he challenged the metallurgist, "that any of the people native to this planet could have survived?"

"I believe," retorted Post, "that we certainly are not safe in excluding that possibility from our calculations. As you all know," he continued, addressing the whole group now rather than Hendron, "I have given extended study to the vehicle of the Other People which we have found. Not only in its mechanical design and method of propulsion was it utterly beyond any vehicle developed on earth, but its metallurgy was in a cla.s.s by itself-compared to ours. These People had far surpa.s.sed our achievement in the sole fields of science from which we yet have any sample. Is it not natural to suppose that, likewise, they were beyond us in other endeavors?"

"Particularly?" Hendron challenged him.

"Particularly, perhaps, in preservation of themselves. I will not be so absurd as to imagine that any large number of them could have survived the extreme ordeals of-s.p.a.ce. But is it utterly inconceivable that a few could?"

"How?" said Hendron.

"You know," Jeremiah Post cast back at his leader, "that is not a fair question. I suggest a possibility that some people of this planet may have survived through application of principles or processes far beyond our knowledge; and then you ask me to describe the method. Of course I can't."

"Of course not," agreed Hendron apologetically. "I withdraw that question. However, in order that each of us may form his and her own opinion of the possibilities, I will ask Duquesne to acquaint you with the physical experience of this planet as we now perceive it."

The Frenchman readily arose and loomed larger than ever in the flickering flare of the fire: "My friends, it is completely plain to all of us that once this world, which has given us refuge, was attached to some distant sun which we, on the world, saw as a star.

"That star might have been a sun of the same order as our sun, which this world has now found. If such were the case, it seems likely that Bronson Beta circled its original sun at some distance similar to our distance from our sun; for the climatic conditions here seem in the past to have been similar, at least, to the conditions on earth.

"There are two other alternatives, however. The original star, about which Bronson Beta revolved, might have been a much larger and hotter sun; in that case, this planet must have swung about that star in an enormous...o...b..t with a year perhaps ten or fifty times as long as our old years. On the other hand, the original sun might have been smaller and feebler-a "white dwarf,' perhaps, or one of the stars that are nearly spent. In that case, Bronson Beta must have circled it much more closely to have obtained the climate which once here prevailed, and which has been reestablished now that this planet has found our sun.

"These are fascinating points which we hope to clear up later; we can only speculate upon them now. However, whether the original sun for this planet was a yellow star of moderate size, like our own sun, or whether it was one of the giant stars, or a 'white dwarf,' this world must have been satisfactorily situated with regard to it for millions and hundreds of millions of years.

"Orderly evolution must have proceeded for an immense period to produce, for instance, that log-the material which we burn before me to give us, to-night, light and heat; and to produce the People who made the vehicle which my colleague Jeremiah Post so admirably has a.n.a.lyzed.

"Beings of a high order of intelligence dwelt here. We have evidence that in science they had progressed beyond us- unfortunately for themselves. Poor fellows!" Dramatically, Duquesne stopped.

Some one-it was a girl-did not permit him the full moment of his halt. "Why unfortunately?"

"Their science must have showed them their doom so plainly and for so frightfully long a period-a doom from which there scarcely could have been, even for the most favored few, any means of escape. Theirs was a fate far more terrible than was ours-a fate incomparably more frightful than mere complete catastrophe.

"Attend! There they were, in some other part of the heavens, circling, at some satisfactory distance, their sun! For millions and millions of years this world upon which now we stand went its orderly way. Then its astronomers noticed that a star was approaching. A star-a mere point of light on its starry nights-swelled and became brighter.

"We may be sure that telescopes upon this world turned upon it; and the beings-whose actual forms we have yet to discover-made their calculations. Their sun, with its retinue of planets, was approaching another star. There would be no collision; we do not believe that such a thing occurred. There was merely an approach of another sun close enough to counteract, by its own attraction, the attraction of the original sun upon this planet, and upon Bronson Alpha.

"The suns-the stars-battled between themselves from millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of miles away; and neither conquered completely. The new sun tore the planets away from the first sun, but it failed to capture them for itself. Between the stars, this planet and its companion, which we called Bronson Alpha, drifted together into the darkness and cold of s.p.a.ce.

"The point is, that this must have been a torturingly prolonged process for the inhabitants here. The approach of a star is not like the approach of a planet. We discovered Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta only a few months before they were upon us; the Beings here must have known for generations, for centuries, the approach of the stranger star!

"Knowing it, for hundreds of years, could any of the inhabitants here have schemed a way of saving themselves? That seems to be the question now before us.

"I cannot say that they could not. I can only say that we could not have devised anything adequate to meet their situation. Yet-they might have. They knew more than we: they had much more time, but their problem was terrific-the problem of surviving through nearly absolutely cold and darkness, a drift through s.p.a.ce, of a million or millions of years. If any of you believe that problem could have been met by the Beings here, he has as much right to his opinion as I have to mine."

"Which is?" Jeremiah Post demanded.

"That the People here tried to solve that problem," replied Duquesne without evasion, "and failed; but that they made a magnificent attempt. When we find them, we will find-I hope and believe-the method of their tremendous attempt."

Shirley Cotton stood up. She always moved with an almost languid voluptuousness. Now, in these tense moments, her actions were seemingly doubly calculated to be slow and indolent.

"What, M. Duquesne," she inquired, "would be the att.i.tude of the Beings if they survived and found us here?"

The Frenchman shook his head. "Before imagining their att.i.tude, I must first imagine them surviving. I have confessed my failure at that task."

"But if some of them survived?" Shirley persisted.

"Their att.i.tude, after awaking from a million years' sleep, would combine, among other elements, surprise and caution, I should suggest," the Frenchman concluded courteously. "But, engaging as such speculations may be, our position demands that we be practical. We must a.s.sume that aircraft we saw in these skies came from earth. If there are other people from our world upon Bronson Beta, we prefer to be friends with them. That att.i.tude, besides being rational, is our natural inclination. However,"-he shrugged his huge shoulders eloquently,-"it does not therefore follow that another party of emigrants from earth would want to be friendly to us. We cannot a.s.sume that the same emotions sway them. It is possible that, finding themselves here, they prefer private possession of this planet."

Eve, sitting beside Tony, leaned toward him and whispered: "I can imagine that. Can't you?"

Tony nodded. "That's what I've been doing. I was in Russia during the days on earth," he said, and repeated, "during the days on earth," feeling how it seemed an epoch long ago, though it was not yet a month since they fled before the final catastrophe; and as Duquesne had reminded them, it was less than two years since they all had been living on the world unwarned that its end was at hand. Only a little more than two years ago, Tony had traveled as he liked on the world, and had visited, among other countries, Russia.

"Suppose that a Russian party made the hop," Tony continued. "Since we did, why not? They worked along lines of their own, but they had some of the world's best scientists. If they made it, you may be sure they packed their ship with first-cla.s.s communists-the most vigorous and the most fanatic. When they found themselves here, what would they feel most?"

"I know," Eve nodded. "They'd feel that they had a world to themselves, where they could work out the millennium according to their own ideals."

"And," Tony finished for her, "that they must beat down, at the very outset, possible interference."

They were whispering only to each other; but many heads bent near to listen; and Hendron, seeing that Tony caught this attention, called to him: "You have a suggestion?"

"Two," said Tony, rising to his feet. "I suggest, Cole, that we organize at once an adequate exploring expedition; and at the same time, prepare defenses."

n.o.body in the encampment had ever before called Hendron by his first name. Tony's use of it was involuntary and instinctive. Having to oppose his leader in again urging exploration, he took from it any air of antagonism by addressing him as "Cole."

Hendron appreciated this.

"Will you lead the exploring party-and choose its members?" he asked Tony.

"Gladly."

"I," said Hendron, "will be responsible for the defenses here."

The people about Tony pressed closer. "Take me!... Me!... Tony, I want to go! Take me!"

From the gloom, where Eliot James sat rose his calm, tw.a.n.gy voice: "So we have come to the end of our honeymoon!"

Eve reached for Tony's arm and clung to him as he moved out of the group gathered about him.

"Take me too, Tony."

"Not you."

"Why not?"

"I wouldn't on earth; why would I here? Besides, I want to come back to you. I want to feel, when I'm away, I'm risking whatever we happen to risk, for you. You see, I love you. It's like on earth, when I'm with you away from the others. See the stars up there." The clouds were cleared from a patch in the sky. "There's Cepheus and the Dragon; and Vega and the Swan, as we've always seen them. And the earth hard and cold at our feet; so comfortably solid and substantial, this earth, which came to us torn from some distant star for a couch, sometime, for you and me!"

Night deepened. The company of emigrants from the earth heaped higher the fire with the wood from the forest which had leafed on this land of Bronson Beta a million years ago. Some of the company-men as well as women-shivered with a chill not instilled in their veins by the sharpness of night, as this side of the planet turned away from the sun it had found at the end of its incalculable wandering. Slowly, lazily, the stars swung in the sky; for this planet rotated much less swiftly than the earth upon its axis. The earth people had learned not to lie down too soon to sleep, but to wait out the first hours of the long night in talk; and doubts, terrors, phantasms, easier to dismiss by day, plagued them.

That night, as Eliot James had said, they felt "the honeymoon over." The triumph of their flight, the enormous excitement and relief at finding themselves safe on the new world, could suffice them no longer. Others besides themselves were on this world.

Survivors of the People of the Past! That idea would not down. Contrarily, it increased with the night.

Survivors of the People of the Past-or other emigrants from Earth who had made the journey safely, established themselves and already were exploring, and who, having found this encampment, had swung away again to report. Report what? And to whom?

Nothing happened.