Philip Wylie - After Worlds Collide Read online

  There were no tides on Bronson Beta to make the river brackish at its mouth. Some one in camp had already announced that the sea was salt, saltier even than the ocean on Earth. Now Tony went to the river's edge, scooped up a handful of water and tasted it. He was mindful as he did so that he might be exposing himself to an unknown spore or an unheard-of bacterium, but recklessness had so long been a part of necessary risk, that he did not hesitate.

  Higgins raised his eyebrows.

  "Fresh," Tony said. "Fresh and cold." He unstrapped his canteen, poured out the drinking-water they had brought, and filled it with water from the river.

  "We might as well go back," said Tony, "and tell them."

  They collected samples of soil, then started back, side by side, avoiding the chimney by turning inland and following a gentle rise of ground over the promontory. They walked eagerly for a while, as they wished to hurry the news of their discovery to the camp; but they fell to talking, and their pace unconsciously slowed. It was not unusual that ardent conversation would occupy the colonists of Bronson Beta, for their problems were so grave, their hazards were so little understood, that they were constantly found in large or small groups, exchanging plans, suggestions, worries and ideas. Higgins was inclined, like many people of his type, to be pessimistic.

  "My interest," he explained to Tony, "in finding various new forms of plant life on Bronson Beta was purely scientific. I regard their discovery as a very bad omen."

  "Why?"

  "Wherever ferns and mosses will grow, fungi will grow. Fungi are parasitical. The seeds we have brought from Earth have been chosen through countless generations to resist the fungi of earth. But many of them, if not all of them, will doubtless fall prey to smuts and rots and root-threads and webs, which they have never encountered before and against which they have no resistance. It would have been better if what I had always maintained to be true were a fact."

  "Which was what?" Tony asked.

  Higgins snorted. "I wouldn't have believed it! For years I have been teaching that the theory that spores could survive absolute zero was ridiculous. I have had some very bitter quarrels with my colleagues on the subject. In fact,"-he frowned uncomfortably,-"I fear I have abused them about it. I called Dinwiddie, who made experiments with spores kept in liquid hydrogen, a pinhead. It is unfortunate that Dinwiddie has not survived, although I can imagine nothing more detestable and odious than to have to apologize to such an egotist. Dinwiddie may have been right about one matter, but he was indubitably wrong about hundreds of other theories."

  Tony grinned at this carry-over of this curious man's prejudices and attitudes. They surmounted the central ridge of the promontory and scanned the landscape. Tony's eyes lighted on a feature which was not natural, and he suddenly exclaimed: "By George, Higgins, we should have followed that road! It went south a little inland from the coast, and there it is."

  Higgins grunted. "So it is! But we'd have missed that splendid little climb of ours."

  They walked together to the road and stepped upon its smooth hard surface.

  "It will give us a perfect highway from that valley to the Ark," Tony said jubilantly. "Let's go back a few hundred yards."

  They returned along the highway to a point from which they could see its descent into the river valley, where it turned and ran west along the side of the watercourse. Having satisfied themselves that it served the valley, they turned again toward the Ark, following the road this time.

  For several miles they came upon no other sign of the creatures that had lived upon the planet in the past ages-not even another of the slabs of metal neatly engraved with the unreadable writing. The road curved only when the natural topography made the problem of grading it very difficult. As a rule the Bronson Betans had preferred to cut through natural barriers or raise up a high roadbed over depressions rather than to curve their road around such obstacles.

  "It looks," said Tony, "as if they built these roads for speed. They didn't like curves, and they didn't like bumps. They went through the hills and over the valleys, instead of up and down and around."

  There were a few bends, however; and upon rounding one of these, they came abruptly upon an object which made both of the men scramble from the road and stand and stare silently. The object was a machine-or rather what was left of a machine. It was crushed against a pinnacle of rock at the end of one of the rare curves in the road. The very manner in which it stood against the rock wall suggested how it had arrived there: it had been one of the vehicles which the creatures of the planet drove or rode, and rounding the curve at too high a speed, it had shot off the highway and smashed head-on into the wall of stone. The two men looked at it, then went closer and looked again.

  They bent over it and touched it. They exchanged glances without speaking. The thing still glittered in the sunlight-the metal which composed it being evidently rust-proof. The predominating color of that metal was crimson, although many parts were steel blue, and some were evidently made of copper. An unidentifiable fragment lay on the ground beside it; and Tony, picking it up, found to his surprise that it was extremely light, lighter even than aluminum. The engine was twisted and mangled, as was the rest of the car. It was impossible to guess what the original shape of the vehicle had been, but it was conceivable that an expert, examining the debris, might decide what type engine had driven it.

  Tony could not tell. He could see that it had not been a gasoline engine. It was not a reciprocating steam engine, or a turbine. Furthermore, it was not an atomic engine. There were wires and connections which suggested an electromotive force, but that was all. For a long time they looked at this mute record of age-old reckless driving. They could find no sign of the driver or of his clothing. Tony picked up the loose fragment of crimson, iridescent metal, and they went on down the road, for a while silent and thoughtful.

  "An automobile," Higgins said at last.

  "With an engine like none I have ever heard of."

  "I know very little about such things. It looks like drunken driving, though."

  "It must have been going frightfully fast."

  "Did you see the wheels?" 'They were big."

  "They didn't have pneumatic tires, just a ribbon of some yielding material around them."

  "You wouldn't need rubber tires on a road as smooth as this."

  "There were no people."

  "Would they have been-people?"

  Neither of them could answer that question. They walked quickly now and by and by in the distance they saw the summit of the Ark.

  They ran to the encampment, bringing their news.... Naturally the colonists were excited-even ecstatic-to know that apparently good farming land had been found within a few miles of the Ark. The value of the discovery was understood clearly by all of them. But they were human. It was the report of the strange machine wrecked by the roadside which set them ablaze with curiosity.

  Even Hendron made no pretense of concealing it. "The importance of finding the valley unquestionably outweighs your other discovery by a thousand to one. However, I share the feeling of every one else here. The minute you said you had found a vehicle, a score of questions burst into my mind. No matter how badly wrecked it is, we can certainly tell what its motive force was, and more than that, we can get some idea of the creature or creatures who operated it. We can tell from the position of its controls how big they were and how strong they were. In fact, although it had been my intention to postpone archaeological research until we were more comfortably situated,"-Hendron smiled,-"I know that I, for one, cannot stay away from that machine, and I am going to let everybody who feels they would like to see it, accompany me with you to the spot at once."

  An hour later nearly every one from the Ark was gathered around the machine. Bates and Maltby, who were perhaps the best engineers and mechanics among them, except Hendron, stepped out of the circle of fascinated onlookers. Behind them walked Jeremiah Post, the metallurgist of the company. These three men, together with Hendron, bega
n painstakingly and slowly to examine the wreck. They worked without spoken comment, although occasionally one of them would point to a connection, or trace a cable with his finger; and even more frequently questioning looks and nods would be exchanged. They studied particularly the twisted and battered remnants of what had been the controls.

  Finally Hendron, after a brief sotto voce colloquy with Post, Bates and Maltby, addressed the crowd of people, who had remained far enough away to leave room for those inspecting the discovery.

  "Well, friends," he said simply, "until we have had time to take this apparatus back to camp and study it more thoroughly, we will be unable to make a complete report on it. But we four are agreed on a good many things that will interest you. In the first place, judging from the area of space for passengers and the division of that area, whoever occupied and operated this machine could not have been much larger or much smaller than ourselves. You will note,"-he walked over to the wreck and pointed,-"that although the force of the crash has collapsed this portion of the vehicle, we may assume that its operator sat here.

  "I say sat, because this is manifestly a seat. The vehicle steered with a wheel which has been broken off. This is it. The braking mechanism was operated by either of two flat pedals on the floor; and on what corresponds to a dashboard there were manual controls. Whether the creatures on Bronson Beta had hands and feet like ours cannot be said. However, that they had four limbs, that they were able to sit upright, and that their upper pair of limbs terminated in members which could be used precisely as fingers are used, is very illuminating. In fact, I won't say that the builders of this very interesting and brilliant vehicle were human beings; but I will say that if the vehicle were intact, it could be operated by a human being."

  He paused for a full minute, while a babble of conversation swept his audience.

  The talking stopped, however, when he continued: "As for the machine itself, it was made very largely of beryllium. Beryllium was a very common element on earth. It is, roughly speaking, about half as heavy as aluminum, and about twice as strong as what we called duraluminum. It was rare and valuable in a pure state only because we had not as yet perfected a way of extracting beryllium cheaply. The brilliant coloring of the metal is due to the addition of chemicals during its refinement and smelting, and I think it is safe to assume that the color was added for decorative rather than for utilitarian purposes. It is interesting to remark in that connection that the metal, which was rust-proof and tarnish-proof, is very much superior to the enamel finishes which we used for similar purposes.

  "The principle upon which this vehicle was propelled is obvious in the sense that we have all agreed upon what was accomplished by its engine, although further study will be necessary to reveal precisely how it was done.

  "For the sake of those who are not physicists or engineers, I will explain that except for the atomic energy which we ourselves perfected, all terrestrial energy was thermal energy. In other words, it came from the sun. Oil represents the energy stored up in minute vegetation. Coal, the sunlight stored in larger plants. Water-power is derived from kinetic energy in water elevated by the sun to high places. Tidal energy may be also excepted, as it was caused by the attraction of the moon. Since we found electricity a more useful form of energy, we bent our efforts to the changing of thermal energy into electrical energy. Thus we burn coal and oil to run steam turbines, which in turn run dynamos, which generate electricity. We run other turbines by water-power, not to use their force directly, but in order again to generate electricity.

  "All those systems were inefficient. The loss of energy between the water-fall and the power line, between the fire-box and the light bulb, was tremendous. It has been the dream of every physicist to develop a system whereby thermal energy could be converted directly into electrical energy. For most of you it will probably be difficult to understand more than that the engine of this vehicle of the ancient inhabitants of Bronson Beta was run by that precise method. Its machinery was capable of taking the energy of heat and turning it, in simple steps, into electricity."

  Cole Hendron glanced at Duquesne and Von Beitz, who stood near the vehicle. He spoke as if to them: "A stream of superheated, ionized steam was discharged at a tremendous velocity upon a dielectric, and the induced current ran the driving motor." He turned to the others. "We must go back and go to work. As soon as we can spare the time, I will have this machine studied in complete detail." He smiled. "I'd like to do it myself, as you can all imagine, but just now planting beans is more important. One other thing before we go back to our labors: you will probably all be interested to know that the reason this car is in such a demolished condition is that it must have been able to attain a speed of at least three hundred and fifty miles an hour."

  CHAPTER III SOLITUDE

  In Eliot James' diary appears the following anecdote. It is dated Day No. 14:

  "Higgins has classified most of the local flora, and in that connection an amusing thing happened.

  "For the first two weeks of our stay here he hopped around like a madman, gathering specimens; and except for his expedition with Tony, it was impossible to make him do anything else. The whole group was at lunch outdoors one day when he came running in with some miserable little fragments of vegetation, yelling: 'I've got the brother of one we had on earth! Identical! Identical in every way. One of the Pteridophyte. Light-pressure has probably carried these spores all through space. It is the Lycopodium Clavatum. Found a sample with a Prothallus bearing young sporophyte, with a single sporangium and adventitious roots!'

  "Even among our learned company this burst of botanical terminology caused a ripple of laughter. Hendron took the plant gravely from Higgin's hand, stared at it and said: 'It's club moss, isn't it?'

  "Higgins nodded so that he nearly shook off his little goatee. 'Exactly Hendron. Precisely. Club moss. We had it on earth.'

  "Hendron then turned to his comrades and said: 'Dr. Higgins has brought up a principle which I have long intended discussing with you.' He held up the plant. 'Here is an insignificant bit of vegetation, which was known on earth as club moss, and also by the three jawbreakers the eminent Doctor has pronounced. To my mind, club moss is a fine name. To my mind, the use of Latin as a basis for terminology of the sciences is a little silly, especially since the last vestige of Rome is now reduced literally to atoms. So I was going to suggest that for the sake of the headaches of all future generations of students, as well as for the convenience of the human race which can memorize club moss more readily than Lycopodium Clavatum, we base the nomenclature of our new sciences, and reestablish the terminology of the old, upon English.

  " 'We will have plants which belong to the genus Moss, the cohort Rock Moss, the species Club or Creeping Moss; and instead of cohort and genus we will say class and type. The main artery in the arm will not be known as the axilliary, brachial and radial, hereafter, depending upon just what part of the artery is meant, but it will be known as the main artery in the arm at the armpit, the elbow and the wrist. Of course, I speak carelessly now, and our simplification will have to be made so that no name-value is lost. But since we are going to be a strictly scientific civilization, I see no reason why science should remain esoteric; and I wish as much effort would be made to use familiar terms for our scientific facts and features as will be made to introduce scientific terms into common speech.'

  "Higgins stood before Henderson, crestfallen, amazed. 'It couldn't be,' he said suddenly, almost tearfully. 'Why, I've spent years acquiring my technical vocabulary I'

  "Hendron nodded. 'And you call a skunk-Mephitis Mephitica?'

  "Higgins said: 'Quite so.'

  " 'And what does Mephitis Mephitica mean?5

  "Higgins flushed. 'It means something like-a-er-smelliest of the smelly.'

  "Everybody giggled. Hendron, however, was serious. 'Quite so. Now, I think skunk is a better name than the smelliest of the smelly, so if we find any skunks on Bronson Beta-a discovery I seriously doubt,-we wil
l call them not Mephitis Mephitica, but just plain skunks. And in our classrooms we will teach the fact that they are nocturnal, burrowingr meat-eaters, but we will ignore the Mephitis Mephitica.'

  "Higgins shook his head sadly. 'It will mean the reorganization of all science. It will mean beginning at the bottom. It will be tragic. I suppose, my dear Hendron, that you will forget the Laminari‘ and the Fuci, and call their ash kelp.'