Bronsome Beta - After Worlds Collide Part 7

"Why?" asked Tony.

"Airplane," replied Vanderbilt succinctly.

"Where?"

"Where would it be?"

"I mean," said Tony, "it didn't land?"

"Not it. Nor too plainly appear."

"Neither did ours," said Tony.

"You mean you sent it? It was your machine?" Ransdell swiftly demanded.

"Not two weeks ago," Tony denied. "We had nothing in the air then. I mean, an airplane visited us too; and it didn't too plainly appear."

"But you saw it?''

"We got a glimpse of it- a glint of light on a wing through the clouds," explained Tony. "Did you see more here?"

"Yes," said Ransdell. "We got a shape-a silhouette. Queer type; we couldn't identify it. Long, back-pointing wings. Like larks' wings, somebody said. It looked like a giant lark in the sky."

Tony looked up from Ransdell to Eliot James, who had joined the circle.

Eliot softly whistled.

"Well," said Tony to Eliot.

"Well yourself!" Eliot James retorted. "You say it."

"Say what?" demanded Ransdell impatiently. "You know whose plane it was? What party brought that type over?"

"No party," said Tony bluntly.

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. No party from earth brought that s.h.i.+p with them. It wasn't brought over."

He had gone a little pale, as he spoke; and he wiped his forehead and then his hands with his handkerchief.

"What-the-h.e.l.l!" whispered Jack Taylor with awed deliberation.

"I said," iterated Tony solemnly, "it wasn't brought over. On the edge of the city of the Other People, of which we've been telling you-under the great gla.s.s dome, but near an edge where they could be run out, easily-was a sort of hangar of those things. We saw a-a hundred of them. Like larks, they'd look in the sky-all-metal larks of marvelous design. They had engines. Did you tell them of the engine in that car we found wrecked before we went off to find the city?" He appealed to Eliot James.

Eliot nodded; and several voices urged Tony on with: "Yes; he told us.... We know."

"Well," said Tony, "they had engines of that same small, powerful type. We recognized it; but we couldn't get one going. We tried to."

He stopped, wet his lips.

"Go on! For G.o.d's sake, go on!"

"All right," said Tony. "But where do I go from there? What am I to tell you? I can tell you this; for I know it. I saw it. I saw the machines; and I felt them with my hands; and as I told you, I tried to make the engine work, but Eliot and I couldn't."

"The Other People-the People a Million Years Dead- the inhabitants of Bronson Beta-had aircraft that would look, in the air, like nothing we had on earth but a lark. They had small, economical and evidently exceedingly powerful engines that propelled them by a motive-power we haven't learned to employ."

"I believe it was one of those machines which flew over you-and over us."

"Flew?" repeated Peter Vanderbilt calmly. "Of itself? No pilot?"

Tony shook his head.

"A pilot perhaps," p.r.o.nounced Vanderbilt softly, "a million years dead?"

Tony nodded; the inclination of his head in this affirmative made them jump.

"You don't believe it!" Peter Vanderbilt rebuked him.

"You," said Tony, "haven't been in their city. We were there three days, and never ceased to expect them to walk out any door!"

"After a million years dead?"

"How do we know how it might have been?"

"We know," Jack Taylor reminded him, "how long it must have been at the very shortest. Less than a million years, to be sure; but--plenty long in the dark and absolute zero. They never could have survived it."

Tony looked at him. "Why?"

"Because they couldn't, Tony."

"You mean, because we couldn't have. But we're not- They."

Peter Vanderbilt flicked a speck from his sleeve. "We have no need to be metaphysical," he suggested. "The machine could have come from one source, tie pilot from another. The machine could have survived the million years cold; we know that some did. You saw them. But the pilot need have survived no more than a pa.s.sage from earth-which some three hundred of us here have survived, and a hundred in your camp also."

"Of course," accepted Eliot James practically. "Another party could have got across-several parties; the Germans, the Russians, the j.a.panese or some others. Two weeks or more ago they may have found another Sealed City with the Other People's aircraft."

"And they," said Tony, "may have got one of the engines going."

"Exactly!"

"All right," said Tony, "that's that. Then let's all sit down again. Why did the pilot, whoever he is, look us over and leave without message or signal? Why-"

They sat down, but drew closer, talking together: "If some of the Other People survived, what would be their att.i.tude to us, would you say?... Would they know who we were, and where we came from?"

Tony led a dozen men to the s.h.i.+p in which Eliot and he had flown; and they bore to the camp the amazing articles from the Sealed City.

n.o.body tired. There was no end to their speculations and questions. Tony, seated on the ground and leaning on his hand beside him, felt a queer, soft constriction of his forefinger. He drew his hand up, and the constriction clamped tighter, and he felt a little weight. Some small, living thing had clasped him.

It let go and leaped onto his shoulder.

"h.e.l.lo!" cried Tony, as two tiny soft hands and two tiny-toed feet clung to him. "h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo!" It was a monkey.

"Her name's Clara," said Ransdell.

"Yours?" asked Tony. "You brought her over?"

"n.o.body brought her over," Ransdell replied. "You know the regulations before leaving earth. I tried to enforce them; but Clara was too good for us. She stowed away."

"Stowed away?"

"We discovered her after things got calm in s.p.a.ce," Ransdell said, smiling. "When we were well away from the earth and had good equilibrium. Everybody denied they had anything to do with her being on board. In fact, n.o.body seemed able to account for her; n.o.body would even admit having seen her before; but there she was. And she survived the pa.s.sage; and even our landing. Of course we kept her afterward."

"Of course," said Tony. "Good work, Clara." He extended his finger, which Clara clasped solemnly, and "shook hands" by keeping her clasp as he waved his finger.

"Since we're checking up," added Ransdell, "you might as well know that we brought over one more pa.s.senger not on the last lists we made back there in Michigan. -Marian!" he called to the group about them. "You here?"

"Where would I be?" A girl of about twenty-three stood up and walked toward him. Her eyes were gray; her chin was firm; her hair was darkly red. Tony noticed that she carried herself with a boldness different from the others.

"Her name," Ransdell murmured as she approached, "is Marian Jackson. Lived in St. Louis. An acrobatic dancer. Kept her head during the chaos before the destruction. Read about our plans. Crawled into camp the night before we took off. Lived in the woods for three weeks before that-n.o.body knows what on."

The girl reached the table and took Tony's hand. "I've heard about you," she said. "Often. You don't look anything like I supposed you would."

"I'm glad to meet you," Tony replied.

Unabashed, she studied him. "You look shot," she said finally.

Tony grinned. "I am a little tired."

"You're all in. But then, everybody's tired around here always."

"You better go back to your place," Ransdell said.

"Sure," the girl answered. She smiled buoyantly and returned.

Ransdell looked at her thoughtfully, sipped his coffee, and shook his head. Then he continued privately to Tony: "She's really a moron, I suppose. I doubt if Hendron will approve of having a moron in our company; but her empty-headedness, her astonishment at everything, even her ignorance, which is pretty naave, have delighted everybody. And she did a big thing for us."

Tony looked thoughtfully at the red-headed girl as she sat down and resumed conversation with those beside her.

"What did she do?" he asked, returning his attention to Ransdell.

"The second night we were here, Eberville went mad. He decided early in the evening that it was against the will of G.o.d for us to be here, and that we should all be destroyed. But he quieted down, and he was left alone. Later he got up, got into the s.h.i.+p, started the only generator that would work, and turned on one of the lateral tubes. In the morning you can see a big black patch about four hundred yards to the left of where we were camped. He'd have wiped us out in ten seconds, but Marian jumped on him. She's strong. So was Eberville, insanely strong. But she has teeth and nails. That is why we all escaped annihilation a second time."

Tony shook his head slowly and thoughtfully, without speaking.

The little monkey, Clara, returned to him and squatted before him, peering up at him with its queerly humanlike, puzzled gaze.

She had no business here, Tony recollected. Monkeys were not on the list of necessary or useful creatures to be taken on the terrible transfer from earth to this planet; and a single representative of the tiny monkey clan was particularly impractical and useless. But Tony was glad that Clara was here.

Among the crowd he saw Marian Jackson's red head moving; and he thought: "She had not been selected, either; but all these girls here of higher intelligence, and all the men too, would have been wiped out, but for her."

He did not blame Hendron for the narrowness of the selections more than he blamed himself. He thought: "We must all have become a bit mad in those last days on earth-mad or at least fanatic. We could hope to save so few and became too intent on certain types."

Suddenly Tony got up. Hendron, he remembered, knew none of their discoveries and events. He could delay no longer his return to Hendron.

But when he suggested to Eliot James that they return, others would not allow it.

"Not both of you!... You haven't both got to go!"

There was altogether too much yet to tell, and to hear.

"Let Eliot stay here, Tony," Dave Ransdell said. "I'll go to Hendron with you. I ought to report to him; and I want so much to see him."

"Just right," Tony accepted this plan.

"That's the thing to do."

They were in the air, Tony Drake and Dave Ransdell together. In the plane with them, they freighted a fair half of the objects intelligible and unintelligible, which Tony and Eliot had brought from the Sealed City. With them was also Eliot James' record, which he had read to the people in Ransdell's camp.

It was dawn; the slow sunrise of Bronson Beta was spreading its first faint shafts across the sky; and the ground below was beginning to be etched in its pattern of plain and hill and river and estuary from the sea.

The veinlike tracery of roads appeared-the lines left by the Vanished People. Tony gazed far ahead and to each side, searching for another or others of such marvelous, gigantic bubbles which would become, upon approach, other cities. But nothing of the sort came in sight. They spied smears and blotches below which became, when they turned the gla.s.s upon them, rows of ruins. They did not stop for these. Already they had much to report; already they were long overdue.

They sighted, far ahead, columns of smoke lifted lazily into the sky. Ransdell pointed and Tony, leaning to his ear, shouted: "Our camp-fires! Our camp!"

He could make out now, in the early morning light, that these were indeed camp-fires ending their duty of lessening the chill of the long night, perhaps, starting their services of cooking. The camp seemed unchanged; it was safe.

Tony compared its crudeness and rudeness with the marvelously proportioned perfections of the Sealed City; and a pang of nostalgia for this encampment suddenly a.s.sailed him. Here were his own; here was home.

He glanced aside and surprised his comrade Dave Ransdell, as he stared down. What thousand shattering fragments of thoughts must fill Ransdell's mind! One-and Tony plainly could see it-overwhelmed all the rest. Here, below, was Eve Hendron.

For it was a sudden softness and yearning that was in the eyes of the broad-shouldered, Herculean man at Tony's side. What would be in Eve's eyes when she saw him?

Tony's nostalgia of the moment before was replaced by a jerk of jealousy. Eve always had admired Dave and liked him-and more. More, yes, more than liked him, during those last desperate days on earth. Now he was here; and he had done well.

Yes; any one would say-Hendron himself would declare -that Dave Ransdell had done well indeed to have brought across s.p.a.ce the s.h.i.+p intrusted to him with loss of less than half the party. Ransdell would be greeted ecstatically as a hero.

Tony caught his lip between his teeth and tried to establish better control of his inward tumult. If Eve preferred Dave to himself, let her!

He busied himself grimly with his throttles, putting down the s.h.i.+p on the bare soil more than a mile from camp.

They had been seen in the air and recognized; and the camp was outpouring toward them. The tractor was leading, piled with pa.s.sengers.

Tony and Dave started to run toward them; then they halted. The people from the camp began to see that one figure was not that of Eliot James.

"Who is it? Who's with you?" came the cry from the tractor which was ahead of the runners.

"Ransdell! Dave Ransdell!" Tony yelled; and Dave stopped and lifted high his arms.