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The voices beyond the closed door shouted louder, and Tony released her. “Who’s here?”
“Six men: the Secretary of State, the Governor, Mr. Borgan, the chief of a newspaper chain, two more.” She was not thinking about them. “Sit down, but don’t sit near me, Tony; we’ve got to think things out.”
“Your father’s told them?” he asked.
“He’s told them what will happen first. I mean, when the Bronson bodies—both of them—just pass close to the world and go on around the sun. That’s more than enough for them now. It’s not time yet to tell them of the encounter. You see, the mere passing close will be terrible enough.”
“Why?”
“Because of the tides, for one thing. You know the tides, Tony; you know the moon makes them. The moon, which is hardly an eightieth of the world in mass; but it raises tides that run forty to sixty feet, in places like the Bay of Fundy.”
“Of course—the tides,” Tony realized aloud.
“Bronson Beta is the size of the earth, Tony; Bronson Alpha is estimated to have eleven or twelve times that mass. That sphere will pass, the first time, within the orbit of the moon. Bronson Beta will raise tides many times as high; and Bronson Alpha—you can’t express it by mere multiplication, Tony. New York will be under water to the tops of its towers—a tidal wave beyond all imaginations! The seacoasts of all the world will be swept by the seas, sucked up toward the sky and washed back and forth. The waves will wash back to the Appalachians; and it will be the same in Europe and Asia. Holland, Belgium, half of France and Germany, half of India and China, will be under the wave of water. There’ll be an earth tide, too.”
“Earth tide?”
“Earthquakes from the pull on the crust of the earth. Some of the men writing to Father think that the earth will be torn to pieces just by the first passing of Bronson Alpha; but some of them think it will survive that strain.”
“What does your father think?”
“He thinks the earth will survive the first stress—and that it is possible that a fifth of the population may live through it, too. Of course that’s only a guess.”
“A fifth,” repeated Tony. “A fifth of all on the earth
.”
He gazed at her, sober, painless, without a sense of time.
Here he was in a penthouse drawing-room on the top of a New York apartment, with a lovely girl whose father believed, and had told her, that four-fifths of all beings alive on the earth would be slain by the passing of the planets seen in the sky. A few months more, and all the rest—unless they could escape from the earth and live—would be obliterated.
Such words could stir no adequate feeling; they were beyond ordinary meanings, like statements of distance expressed in light years. They were beyond conscious conception; yet what they told could occur. His mind warned him of this. What was coming was a cosmic process, common enough, undoubtedly, if one considered the billions of stars with their worlds scattered through all space, and if one counted in eternities of endless time. Common enough, this encounter which was coming.
What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!
Eve was watching him. Through the years of their friendship and fondness, she had seen Tony as a normal man, to whom everything that happened was happy, felicitous and unbizarre. The only crises in which she observed him were emergencies on the football-field, and alarms in the stock-market, which in the first case represented mere sport, and in the second, money which he did not properly understand, because all his life he had possessed money enough, and more.
Now, as she watched him, she thought that she would meet with him—and she exulted that it would be with him—the most terrific reality that man had ever faced. So far as he had yet been called upon, he had met it without attempting to evade it; his effort had been solely for more complete understanding.
A contrast to some of those men—among them men who were called the greatest in the nation—whose voices rose loud again behind the closed doors.
Some one—she could not identify him from his voice, which ranted in a strange, shrill rage—evidently was battling her father, shouting him down, denying what had been laid before them all. Eve did not hear her father’s reply. Probably he made none; he had no knack for argument or dialectics.
But the ranting and shouting offended her; she knew how helpless her father was before it. She wanted to go to him; not being able to, she went to Tony.
“Somebody,” said Tony, “seems not to like what he has to hear.”
“Who is he, Tony?”
“Somebody who isn’t very used to hearing what he doesn’t like.… Oh, Eve, Eve! My dear, my dear! For the first time in my life, I’d like to be a poet; I wish for words to say what I feel. I can’t make a poem, but at least I can change one:
“Yesterday this day’s madness did prepare;
To-morrow’s silence, triumph, or despair;
Love! For you know not whence you came, nor why;
Love! For you know not why you go, nor where.”
