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Show fWHEN WORLDS : i COLLIDE ' I Copyright by Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylle S WN'U Service J wmer ron on me summits or swells .intil it was dispersed by the brown -lift". He looked back at the Ark. it stood mysteriously on the landscape land-scape a perpendicular cylinder, shining and marvelous, enormously foreign to the bare, brilliant landscape. land-scape. Behind it the chocolate-colored mountains stretched into opalescent opal-escent nowhere the mountain Into which the road ran. the road beside be-side which stood the stele adorned by a decoration like nothing else that had been seen In the world. Tony regarded his companions. Hendron slept on a curled arm. His flashing eyes were closed. His hair, now almost white, was disheveled on his white forehead. Reside him Duquesne slept, half-sitting, his arm folded on his ample abdomen, and an expression of deep study on this swarthy face. Eliot James sprawled on a 'ledge which the sun now was warming, his countenance r CHAPTER XIII jjTTKRE are you and I, Tony. tl Here !" Eve stooped to the ground and louched It; the dry fiber of a lichenlike grass was between her fingers. She pulled it, and stood with it In her hand. They had seen It, they both remembered ; It was what had made the ground brown in the light of the dying day. "This was green and fresh, Tony, perhaps ten million years ago; perhaps per-haps a hundred million. Then the dark and cold came; the very air froze and preserved it. Do you suppose sup-pose our cattle could eat it?" "Why, not?" said Tony. "What else may he here, Tony? How can we wait for the day?" "We aren't waiting." "No; we're not." For they were walking, hand in hand like children, chil-dren, over the bare, rough ground. The amazing aurora of this strange world lighted them, and the soil smoothed-, suddenly, under their feet. The change was so abrupt that It made them stare down, and they saw what they had stumbled upon; and they cried out together; "A road !" "We seem to have brought the world with us. I can never give you up. Eve; or share yon with anyone any-one else." "We're too fresh from the world, Tony, to know. We've a faith to keep with " "With whom? Sour father?" "With fate and the future. Let's go on, Tony. See, the road turns." "Yes." "What's that?" "Where?" She moved oft the road to the right, where stood something too square and straight-edged to be natural. nat-ural. Scarcely breathing, they touched it, and found metal with a cold, smooth surface indented under their fingertips. "A monument!" said Tony, and he burned a match. The little yellow yel-low flame lighted characters engraved en-graved Into metal characters like none either of them had ever seen before, but which proclaimed themselves them-selves symbols of meaning. Swiftly Tony searched the two faces of the motal; but nothing that could possibly be a portrait adorned it. There were decorations of strange beauty and symmetry. relased. his lips parted, his straggling strag-gling red beard metal-bright In the morning rays. Eve slept, or she had slept, near to Tony; and now she roused. She was lovely in the yellow light, and looked far fresher than the men. Their clothes were stained and worn; and none of them had shaved, so that they looked more like philosophical vagrants than like three of the greatest men produced pro-duced In the Twentieth century on the earth. Tony watched Eve as she gazed at them, anxiously, maternal. To be a mother in actuality, to become a mother of men, was to be her role on this reawakened world. ; The ribbon of It ran to the right and left not clear and straight, for 1 It had been washed over and blown over; but It was, beyond any doubt, ! a road ! Made by what hands, and for what feet? Whence and whither whith-er did it run? A -hundred million years ago! The clock of eternity ticked with the click of their heels on this hard ribbon of road, as they-turned, hand In hand, and followed it toward the aurora. "Where were they," said Tony, almost as if the souls of those a hundred million years dead might hear, "when they were whirled away from their sun? What stage had they reached? Is this one of their Roman roads on which one of their Varros was marching his men to meet a Hannibal at Bronson Beta's Cannae? What was at one end and what still awaits us there? A Nineveh of Sargon saved for us by the dark and cold? Or was this a motor road to a city like : our Paris of a year ago?- Or was As she arose quietly, so as to disturb none of the others, Tony caught her hand with a new tenderness. ten-derness. They set out toward their road together. Suddenly Tony saw something that took the breath from his lungs. It was a tiny thing on the ground. A. mere splotch of color. He hurried hur-ried toward it, not believing his eyes. He lay down and stared at It. In a slight damp depression was a patch of moss the size of his hand. . He lay prone to examine It as Eve stooped beside him in excitement excite-ment like his own. He did not know mosses the vegetation resembled re-sembled any other moss, on Earth. He recollected the hope that spores, which could exist in temperatures close to absolute zero for long periods, pe-riods, had preserved on Bronson Beta the power to germinate. Mosses came on Earth from spores ; and here, reawakened by the sun, was a remnant of life thai had existed eons ago, light-yeara away. Tony .lumped up and ran about on the terrain; a few feet away, Eve stooped again. Other plants were burgeoning. Mosses, ferns, fungi, vegetation of species he could not classify, but some surely resembling growths larger than mere mosses. He heaped Eve's hands and his own, and together they ran back to the three who were staring, aa they earlier had gazed, at the green sky. Then Duquesne saw what Eve and Tony held. "Sacre nom de Dieu !" He leaped to his feet. Hendron and James were beside him. With one accord, they rushed to. ward the Space Ship. "Get Hig. gins!" Hendron shouted. "He'll go mad! Think of it! A whole new world to classify! . . . And it means thai we will live." liofore they reached the sides of the ship the lock opened. The gang-, plank dropped to earlh. Van Beitz They Were Walking, Hand in Hand Like Children, Over the Bare, Rough Ground. The Amazing Aurora ot This Strange World Lighted Them. Amazing that no one, in all the generations gen-erations and in all the nations of the world, had drawn a decoration like this! It was not like the Chinese Chi-nese or Mayan or Egyptian, Greek or Roman, or French or German; but different from each and all. Tony caught his breath sharply as he traced it with his Ongers. "They had an artist, Eve," he said. "Yith five hundred million years of evolution behind him." "Yes. How beautiful this writing is engraved! Will we ever read it? . . . Come on. Come on!" But the monument, If it was that, stood alone; and consideration of others, if not prudence, dictated that they return. Hut they did not re-enter the ship. Duquesne was determined to spend the first night on the ground; It a track for some vehicle we would have invented In a thousand more years? And is the city which we'll find, a city we'd never dreamed of? Whatever it was, their fate left it for us; whereas our fate the fate of our worid " He stopped. "I was thinking about it," said Eve. "Out there is space in scattered scat-tered stones circling in orbits of their own about the sun; the Pyramids Pyra-mids and the Empire State building, the Washington monument and the tomb of Napoleon, the Arch of Triumph Tri-umph !-The seas and the mountains! moun-tains! Here the other thing happened hap-pened the other fate . that would have been ours if the world had escaped es-caped the cataclysm. What sort were they who faced it here, Tony? Human, with bodies like our own? Or with souls like our own, but other shapes?" "On this road," said Tony, "this road, perhaps, we'll see." "And learn how they faced it, too, Tony; the coming dark and the cold. I tninK, u i nau cne cnoice, I'd prefer the cataclysm." "Then you believe our world was better off?" "Perhaps I wouldn't have if we had stayed," amended Eve. "Whnt happened here, at least left their world behind them for us." "Come hone." Drawing her close, he clasped her, and himself quivering, quiver-ing, he could feel her trembling terribly. ter-ribly. He kissed her, and her lips were hot on his. A little aghast, Lher dmtmed awar. and Hendron and James agreed with him. James had dragged out blankets from the Ark, and the five lay down on the ground of the new planet. And some of them slept. Tony opened his eyes. The sun was rising jnto a sky not blue but jade green. He rested his body on his elbow. Helow him, the sea also was green. It had been gray on the steamy yesterday. But an emerald ocean was more familiar than an emerald emer-ald sky. He watched the whllp lip It ill UU ill L" ti jici hi i it, ami uuu- dron shouted to him the news. People poured from the Ark; they stepped upon the new soil. They waved their arms. They stared at the hills, the sky, the sea. They breathed deep of the air. They handled the mosses, and ran ahout finding more of their own. They shouted, sang. They laughed and dnnccd. The first day on the New Earth had begun. fTHE END- |