“You’d better stay with your father,” Tony said to her. “Keep him quiet as you can. Tell him I’ll keep him informed of further developments; but I really expect no more to-night.”
Eve disappeared into the darkness which was all but complete. In the north, toward Bronson Beta’s pole, hung a faint aurora, and above it shone some stars; but most of the sky was obscured. There was no moon, of course. Strange, still to expect the moon—a moon gone “with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.”
Another girl joined the group of men standing and shivering near the great cannon-like tube aimed heavenward.
“Anything stirring?” asked Shirley Cotton’s voice.
“Not now,” replied Tony.
“It’s cold,” said Shirley. “It’s surely coming on cold, these nights.”
“Nothing to what it will be,” observed a man’s voice gloomily. It was Williamson, who had been insensible all through the fight, like the rest of the camp. Now he had completely recovered, but his spirits, like those of many of the others, seemed low.
“How cold will it be—soon?” asked Shirley.
“Do you want to know?” Williamson challenged. “Or are you just asking?”
“I’ve heard,” said Shirley, taking no offense, “an awful lot of things. I know we’re going out toward Mars. But how cold is it out there?”
“That’s been figured out a long time,” Williamson returned. “They taught that back in school on earth. The surface temperature of a planet like the earth at sixty-seven millions miles’ distance from the sun—the distance of Venus—would be one hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit. The mean temperature of the earth, at ninety-three million miles from the sun—where we used to be—was sixty degrees. The mean temperature of the earth, if it were a hundred and forty-one million miles from the sun—the distance of Mars—would be minus thirty-eight—thirty-eight degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.
“The earth went round the sun almost in a circle—it never got nearer to the sun than ninety-one million miles, and never got farther away than about ninety-four million; so our temperatures there never varied, by season, beyond comfortable limits for most of the surface of the earth.
“But riding this planet, we aren’t going around the sun in any such circle; our orbit now is an ellipse, with the sun in a focus but not in the center. So we’ll have a very hot summer when we go close to Venus, where the surface temperature averages a hundred and fifty-one; but before we get that summer, we go into winter out by Mars where normal temperatures average about forty below zero—a hundred degrees less than we’re used to. We’re headed there now.”
“Didn’t—didn’t they know that, too?” Shirley gestured a white-clad arm toward the landing-field where the attackers of the camp had been annihilated.
“They must have.”
“Then why—why—”
Peter Vanderbilt’s urbane voice finished for her: “Why didn’t they spend the last of the good weather trying to capture or kill us? Because they also came from that pugnacious planet Earth.”
The reality of what had happened, while they were sunk in stupor, still puzzled some of Hendron’s people.
“Why weren’t they content to let us alone? There’s room enough on Bronson Beta.… Good God! Imagine two groups of human beings as stranded as ourselves, as forlorn in the universe, as needful of peace and coöperation—fighting!”
“Men never fought for room,” Walters, a biologist, objected. “That was just an excuse they gave when civilization advanced to the point when men felt they ought to give explanations for fighting. There surely was plenty of room in the North American continent in pre-Columbian times, with a total population of perhaps three million Indians in all the continent north of Mexico; but the principal occupation—or pastime or whatever you call it—was war. One tribe would sneak a hundred miles through empty forest to attack another. It wasn’t room that men wanted in ancient America—or in medieval Europe, for that matter.”
“What was it, then?” asked Shirley.
“Domination!” said Walters. “It’s an essentially human
instinct—the fundamental one which sets man off from all other animals. Did you ever know of any other creature which, by nature, has to dominate? Not even the king of the beasts, the lion. To realize how much more ruthless men are than lions were, imagine a man with the physical equipment of a lion, among other beasts, and imagine him letting all the weaker ones go their own way and killing only what he needed for food.
“You might imagine one lion-man doing that, but you couldn’t imagine all lion-men so restrained. You know they would have cleaned up the neighborhood, just to show they could, and then fought among themselves to the finish of many of them.
“That is the nature we brought with us from the world; it is too much to expect it to desert us all here. It couldn’t; it didn’t.”
“That’s certainly clear,” Williamson agreed.
“That element in our nature,” the biologist proceeded, “scarcely had opportunity to reassert itself because of our difficulties in merely maintaining ourselves. The enemy—the party that attacked us—solved their difficulties, evidently, by moving into one of the Other People’s cities. From what Tony told us of the city he examined, their city probably supplied them with everything they lacked, and with more equipment and appliances of various sorts than they dreamed existed.
“They found themselves with nothing to do; they found already built for them dwellings, offices and palaces; they found machinery—even substances for food. They were first in possession of the amazing powers of the original people of this planet. They learned of our presence, and decided to dominate us.
“I have come to believe that probably they would not have killed us; but they wanted us all under their control.”
Eve returned to the group. She did not speak, and in the dim light of the stars she was indistinguishable from the other girls; yet Tony knew, as she approached him, that it was Eve.