“So much that this has got me thinking about God again, Tony. God—the God of our fathers—the God of the Old Testament, Tony; the God who did things and meant something, the God of wrath and vengeance, but the God who also could be merciful to men. For He’s sending two worlds to us, Tony, not one—not just the one that will destroy us. He’s sending the world that may save us, too!”
“Save us? What do you mean?”
“That’s what the League of the Last Days is working on, Tony—the chance of escape that’s offered by the world like ours, which will pass so close and go on. We may transfer to it, Tony, if we have the will and the skill and the nerve! We could send a rocket to the moon to-day, if it would do us any good, if any one could possibly live on the moon after he got there. Well, Bronson Beta will pass us closer than the moon. Bronson Beta is the size of the earth, and therefore can have an atmosphere. It is perfectly possible that people—who are able to reach it—can live there.
“It’s a world, perhaps very like ours, which has been in immutable cold and dark for millions of years, probably, and which now will be coming to life again.
“Think of it, Tony! The tremendous, magnificent adventure of making a try for it! It was a world once like ours, circling around some sun. People lived on it; and animals and plants and trees. Evolution had occurred there too, and progress. Civilization had come. Thousands of years of it, maybe. Tens of thousands of years—perhaps much more than we have yet known. Perhaps, also, much less. It’s the purest speculation to guess in what stage that world was when it was torn from its sun and sent spinning into space.
“But in whatever stage it was in, you may be sure it is in exactly that stage now; for when it left its sun, life became extinct. The rivers, the lakes, the seas, the very air, froze and became solid, encasing and keeping everything just as it was, though it wandered through space for ten million years.
“But as it approaches the sun, the air and then the seas will thaw. The people cannot possibly come to life, nor the animals or birds or other things; but the cities will stand there unchanged, the implements, the monuments, their homes—all will remain and be uncovered again.
“If this world were not doomed, what an adventure to try for that one, Tony! And a possible adventure—a perfectly possible adventure, with the powers at our disposal to-day!”
Tony recollected, after a while, that Balcom had bid him to learn from Hendron, as definitely as possible, the date and nature of the next announcement. How would it affect stocks? Would the Stock Exchange open at all?
He remembered, at last, it was a business day; downtown he had duties—contracts to buy and orders to sell stocks, which he must execute, if the Exchange opened to-day. He did not venture to ask to have Hendron awakened to speak to him but, before ten o’clock, he did leave Eve.
He walked to the subway. His eyes stared at the myriad faces passing him. His body was jolted by innumerable brief contacts.
“Gimme five cents for a cup of coffee?”
Tony stopped, stared. This panhandler too was trapped, with him and Kyto and Eve and all the rest, on the rim of the world which was coming to its end. Did he have an inkling of it? Whether or not, obviously to-day he must eat. Tony’s hand went into his pocket.
Speculation about the masses assailed him. What did they think this morning? What did they want? How differently would they do to-day?
Near the subway, the newsboys were having a sell-out; a truck was dumping on the walk fresh piles of papers. Everybody had a paper; everybody was reading to himself or talking to somebody else. The man with the half inch of cigar-stub, the boy without a hat, the fat woman with packages under her arm, the slim stenographer in green, the actor with the beaver collar; they all read, stared, feared, planned, hoped, denied.
Some of them smirked or giggled, almost childishly delighted at something different even if it suggested destruction. It was something novel, exciting. Some of them seemed to be scheming.
CHAPTER 5—A WORLD CAN END
AT ten o’clock the gong rang and the market opened. There had been no addition to public knowledge in the newspapers. The news-ticker carried, as additional information, only the effect of the announcement on the markets in Europe, which already had been open for hours.
It was plain that the wild eyes of terror looked across the oceans and the land—across rice-fields and prairies, out of the smoke of cities everywhere.
The stock market opened promptly at ten with the familiar resonant clang of the big gong. One man dropped dead at his first glance upon the racing ticker.
On the floor of the Exchange itself, there was relative quiet. When the market is most busy, it is most silent. Phones were choked with regular, crowded speech. Boys ran. The men stood and spoke in careful tones at the posts. Millions of shares began to change hands at prices—down. The ticker lagged as never in the wildest days of the boom. And at noon, in patent admission of the obvious necessity, New York followed the example already set by London, Paris and Berlin. The great metals doors boomed shut. There would be no more trading for an indeterminate time. Until “the scientific situation became cleared up.”
Cleared up! What a phrase for the situation! But the Street had to have one. It always had one.
Tony hung on the telephone for half an hour after the shutting of the mighty doors. His empire—the kingdom of his accustomed beliefs, his job—lay at his feet. When he hung up, he thought vaguely that only foresight during the depression had placed his and his mother’s funds where they were still comparatively safe in spite of this threat of world-cataclysm.
Comparatively safe—what did that mean? What did anything mean, to-day?
Balcom came into his office; he put his head on Tony’s desk and sobbed. Tony opened a drawer, took out a whisky-bottle which had reposed in it unopened for a year, and poured a stiff dose into a drinking-cup. Balcom swallowed it as if it were milk, took another, and walked out dazedly.
Tony went out in the customers’ room. He was in time to see the removal of one of the firm’s clients—a shaky old miser who had boasted that he had beaten the depression without a loss—on a stretcher. The telephone-girl sat at her desk in the empty anteroom. Clerks still stayed at their places, furiously struggling with the abnormal mass of figures.
Tony procured his hat and walked out. Everyone else was on the street—people in herds and throngs never seen on Wall Street or Broad Street or on this stretch of Broadway, but who now were sucked in by this unparalleled excitement from the East Side, the river front, the Bowery and likewise down from upper Fifth and from Park Avenues. Women with babies, peddlers, elderly gentlemen, dowagers, proud mistresses, wives, schoolchildren and working-people, clerks, stenographers—everywhere.
All trapped—thought Tony—all trapped together on the rim of the world. Did they know it? Did they feel it?
No parade ever produced such a crowd. The buildings had drained themselves into the streets; and avenues and alleys alike had added to the throng.
The deluge of humanity was possessed of a single insatiable passion for newspapers. A boy with an armful of papers would not move from where he appeared before he sold his load. News-trucks, which might have the very latest word, were almost mobbed.