“I’ve offered wages. In most cases they’ve been refused. I have more than three million dollars in gold available here for expenses encountered in dealing with people who still wish money for their time or materials.”
“I see. How long a trip do you contemplate?”
Hendron took the young man’s breath. “Ninety hours. That is, provided,”—and his voice began to shake,—“provided we can find proper materials with which to line our blast-tubes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to propel this thing for more than a few minutes. I—”
Eve looked at her father. “Dad, you’ve got to go to bed. You’d better take some veronal or something, and don’t worry so. We’ll find the alloy all right. We’ve done everything else, and the things we’ve done were even more difficult.”
Hendron nodded; and Tony, looking at him, realized for the first time how much the scientist had aged recently. They went through the door of the hangar in single file, and high up among the beams and buttresses that supported it, a shower of sparks fell from an acetylene welding-torch.
Outside, the wind was blowing. It sighed hotly in the near-by trees—wind that presaged a storm. The lights in the foundry and laboratories, the power-house and the dormitories made a ring around them, a ring of yellow fireflies faint beneath the glare of the Bronson Bodies. Tony looked up at them, and it seemed to him that he could almost feel and hear them in their awful rush through space: Beta, a dazzling white world, and Alpha, an insensible luminous disc of destruction. Both bodies seemed to stand away from the vault of the heavens.
Hendron left them. Soon afterward James withdrew with the apology that he wished to write to bring up to date his diary. Tony escorted Eve to the women’s dormitory. A phonograph was playing in the general room on the ground floor. One of the girls was singing, and another was sitting at a table writing what was apparently a letter. They could all be seen through the open windows, and Tony wondered what postman that girl expected would carry her missive. Eve bade him good night, then went inside.
Tony, left alone, walked over the gleaming ground to the top of a neighboring hill. Hendron’s village looked on the northern side like a university campus, and on the southern side like the heart of a manufacturing district. All around it stretched the Michigan wilderness. The ground had been chosen partly because of the age and grimness of its geological base, and partly because of its isolation.
He sat down on a large stone. The hot night wind blew with increasing violence, and the double shadows, one sharp and one faint, which were cast by all things in the light of the Bronson Bodies, were abruptly obliterated by the passage of a dark cloud.
Tony’s mind ran unevenly and irresolutely. “Probably,” he thought, “this little community is the most self-sufficient of any place on earth. All these people, these brilliant temperamental men and women, have subsided and made themselves like soldiers in Hendron’s service—amazing man.… Only a hundred people.… I wonder how many of those I brought to New York they’ll take.”
Fears assailed him: “Suppose they don’t complete the Ark successfully, and she never leaves the ground? Then all these people would have given their lives for nothing.… Suppose it leaves the earth and fails—falls back for hundreds of miles, gaining speed all
the way, so that when it hit the atmosphere it would turn red-hot and burn itself up just like a meteor? What hideous chances have to be taken! If only I were a scientist and could help them! If only I could sit up day and night with the others, trying to find the metal that would make the ship fly.…”
A larger cloud obscured the Bronson Bodies. The wind came in violent gusts. The great globes in the sky which disturbed sea and land, also enormously distorted the atmospheric envelope.
The steady sound of machinery reached Tony’s ears, and the ring of iron against iron. The wind wailed upon the æolian harp of the trees. Tony thought of the tides that would rise that night and on following nights; and faintly, like the palpitation of a steamer’s deck, the earth shook beneath his feet as if in answer to his meditation. And Tony realized that the heart of the earth was straining toward its celestial companions.
CHAPTER 13—THE APPROACH OF THE PLANETS
ON the night of the twenty-fifth, tides unprecedented in the world’s history swept every seacoast. There were earthquakes of varying magnitude all over the world. In the day that followed, volcanoes opened up, and islands sank beneath the sea; and on the night of the twenty-sixth the greater of the Bronson Bodies came within its minimum distance from the earth on this their first approach.
No complete record was ever made of the devastation.
Eliot James, who made some tabulation of it in the succeeding months, could never believe all that he saw and heard, but it must have been true.
The eastern coast of the United States sustained a tidal wave seven hundred and fifty feet in height, which came in from the sea in relentless terraces and inundated the land to the very foot of the Appalachians. Its westward rush destroyed every building, every hovel, every skyscraper, every city, from Bangor in Maine to Key West in Florida. The tide looped into the Gulf of Mexico, rolled up the Mississippi Valley, becoming in some places so congested with material along its foaming face that the terrified human beings upon whom it descended saw a wall of trees and houses, of stones and machinery, of all the conglomerate handiwork of men and Nature—rather than the remorseless or uplifted water behind it. When the tide gushed back to the ocean’s bed, it strewed the gullied landscape with the things it had uprooted.
It roared around South America, turning the Amazon Basin into a vast inland sea which stretched from what had been the east coast to the Andes Mountains on the west coast. The speed of this tide was beyond calculation.
Every river became a channel for it. It spilled over Asia. It inundated the great plain of China. It descended from the arctic regions and removed much of France, England and Germany, all of Holland and the great Soviet Empire, from the list of nations. Arctic water hundreds of feet deep flowed into the Caspian Sea and hurled the last of its august inertia upon the Caucasus.
Western Asia and Arabia, southern India, Africa and much of Australia remained dry land. Those who saw that tide from mountain-tops were never afterward able to depict it for their fellows. The mind of man is not adjusted for a close observation of phenomena that belong to the cosmos. To see that dark obsidian sky-clutching torrent of water moving inward upon the land at a velocity of many hundreds of miles an hour was to behold something foreign to the realm of Nature, as Nature even at its most furious has hitherto appeared to man.
More than half the population of the world died in the tides that rose and subsided during the proximity of the Bronson Bodies. But those who by design or through accident found themselves on land that remained dry were not necessarily spared.
The earthquake which Tony felt in Michigan was the first of a series of shocks which increased steadily in violence for the next forty-eight hours, and which never afterward wholly ceased. Hendron had chosen his spot well, for it was one of the relatively few portions of the undeluged world which was not reduced to an untenable wasteland of smoking rock and creeping lava.
Nothing in the category of earthquakes or eruption occurring within the memory of the race could even furnish criteria for the manifestations everywhere on the earth’s crust on that July twenty-sixth. Man had witnessed the explosion of whole mountains. He had seen the disappearance and the formation of islands. Yards of sea-coast had subsided before his very eyes. Fissures wide enough to contain an army had opened at his feet; but such occurrences were not even minutiæ in the hours of the closest approach of the Bronson Bodies.
As hour by hour the earth presented new surfaces to the awful gravitational pull of those spheres, a series of stupendous cataclysms took place. Underneath the brittle slag which man considers both solid and enduring lie thousands of miles of dense compressed molten material. The earth’s crust does not hold back that material. It is kept in place only by a delicate adjustment of gravity; and the interference of the Bronson Bodies distorted that balance. The earth burst open like a ripe grape! From a geological standpoint the tides which swept over were a phenomenon of but trifling magnitude.
The center of the continent of Africa split in two as if a mighty cleaver had come down on it, and out of the grisly incision poured an unquenchable tumult of the hell that dwells within the earth. Chasms yawned in the ocean floor, swallowing levels of the sea and returning it instantaneously in continents of steam. The great plateau of inner Thibet dropped like an express elevator nine hundred feet. South America was riven into two islands one extending north and south in the shape of a sickle, and the other, roughly circular, composed of all that remained of the high lands of Brazil. North America reeled and shuddered, split, snapped, boomed and leaped. The Rocky Mountains lost their immobility and danced like waves of water. From the place that had been Yellowstone Park a mantle of lava was spread over thousands of square miles. The coastal plain along the Pacific disappeared, and the water moved up to dash itself in fury against a range of active volcanoes that extended from Nome to Panama.
Gases, steam and ashes welled from ten thousand vents into the earth’s atmosphere. The sun went out, the stars were made visible. Blistering heat blew to the ends of the earth. The polar ice melted and a new raw land emerged, fiery and shattered, mobile and catastrophic.
Those human beings who survived the world’s white-hot throes were survivors for the most part through good fortune. Few escaped through design—on the entire planet only a dozen places which had been picked by the geologists as refuges remained habitable.
Upon millions poured oceans of seething magma carrying death more terrible than the death which rolled on the tongue of the great tides. The air which was breathed by other millions was suddenly choked with sulphurous fumes and they fell like gassed soldiers, strangling in the streets of their destroyed cities. Live steam, blown with the violence of a hurricane, scalded populous centers and barren steppes impartially. From a sky that had hitherto deluged mankind only with rain, snow and hail, fell now burning torrents and red-hot sleet. The very earth itself slowed in its rotation, sped up again, sucked and dragged through space at the caprice of the bodies in the sky above. It became girdled in smoke and steam, and blasts of hot gas; and upon it as Bronson Alpha and Beta drew away, there fell torrential rains which hewed down rich land to the bare rock, which cooled the issue from the earth to vast metallic oceans, and which were accompanied by lightnings that furnished the infernal scenery with incessant illumination, and by thunder which blended undetectably with the terrestrial din.