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The sudden unmuffling of the voices warned them that a door from the study had opened. Instantly the voices were dulled again; but they turned, aware that some one had come out.
It was her father.
For a few moments he stood regarding them, debating what he should say. Beyond the closed door behind him, the men whom he had left increased their quarrel among themselves. He succeeded in clearing his mind of it.
“Father,” Eve said, “Tony and I—Tony and I—”
Her father nodded. “I saw you for a few seconds before you realized I was here, Eve—and Tony.”
Tony flushed. “We mean what you saw, sir,” he said. “We more than mean it. We’re going to be married as soon as we can—aren’t we, Eve?”
“Can we, Father?”
Cole Hendron shook his head. “There can’t be marrying or love for either of you. No time to tell you why now; only—there can’t.”
“Why can’t there be, sir?”
“There’s going to be altogether too much else. In a few months, you’ll know. Meanwhile, don’t spoil my plans for you by eloping or marrying in the Church Around the Corner. And don’t go on doing—what I just saw. It’ll only make it harder for both of you—as you’ll see when you figure out what’s before you. Tony, there’s nothing personal in that. I like you, and you know it. If the world were going to remain, I’d not say a word; but the world cannot possibly remain. We can talk of this later.”
The study door again opened; some one called him, and he returned to the argument in the next room.
“Now,” demanded Tony of Eve, “what in the world, which cannot possibly remain, does he mean by that? That we shouldn’t love and marry because we’re going to die? All the more reason for it—and quicker, too.”
“Neither of us can possibly guess what he means, Tony; we’d be months behind him in thinking; for he’s done nothing else, really, for half a year but plan what we—what all the human race—will have to do. He means, I think, that he’s put us in some scheme of things that won’t let us marry.”
The argument in the room broke up and the arguers emerged. In a few minutes they all were gone; and Tony sought Cole Hendron in his big study, where the plates which had come from South Africa were spread upon the table.
There were squares of stars, usually the same square of stars repeated over and over again. There seemed to be a score of exposures of the identical plate of close-clustered stars.
“You were downtown to-day, Tony?”
“Yes.”
“To-day they took it, didn’t they? They took it and closed the Exchange, I hear; and half the businesses in town had a holiday. For they’ve known for quite some time that something has been hanging over them, hanging over the market. This morning we half told them what it is; and they thought they believed it. Just now I told six men the other half—or most of it—and—and you heard them, Tony; didn’t you?”
“Yes; I heard them.”
“They won’t have it. The world won’t come to an end; it can’t possibly collide with another world, because—well, for one thing, it never has done such a thing before, and for another, they won’t have it. Not when you dwell upon the details. They won’t have it. To-morrow there’ll be a great swing-back in feeling, Tony. The Exchange will open again; business is going on. That’s a good thing; I’m glad of it. But there are certain drawbacks.
“The trouble is, men aren’t really educated up to the telescope yet, as they are to the microscope. Every one of those men who were just here would believe what the microscope tells them, whether or not they could see it or understand it for themselves. I mean, if a doctor took a bit of cell-tissue from any one of them, and put it under the microscope, and said, ‘Sorry, but that means you will die,’ there isn’t a man of them who wouldn’t promptly put his affairs in shape.
“None of them would ask to look through the microscope himself; he’d know it would mean nothing to him.
“But they asked for Bronson’s plates. I showed them; here they are, Tony. Look here. See this field of stars. All those fixed points, those round specks, every single one of them are stars. But see here; there is a slight—a very slight—streak, but still a streak. There, right beside it, is another one. Something has moved, Tony! Two points of light have moved in a star-field where nothing ought to move! A mistake, perhaps? A flaw in the coating of the plate? Bronson considered this, and other possibilities. He photographed the star-field again and again, night after night; and each time, you see, Tony, the same two points of light make a bit of streak. No chance of mistake; down there, where nothing ought to be moving, two objects have moved. But all we have to show for it are two tiny streaks on a photographic plate.
“What do they mean? ‘Gentlemen, the time has come to put your affairs in order!’ The affairs of all the world, the affairs of every one living in the world— Naturally, they can’t really believe it.
“Bronson himself, though he watched those planets himself night after night for months, couldn’t really believe it; nor could the other men who watched, in other observatories south of the equator.
“But they searched back over old plates of the same patch of sky; and they found, in that same star-field, what they had missed before—those same two specks always making tiny streaks. Two objects that weren’t stars where only stars ought to be; two strange objects that always were moving, where nothing ‘ought’ to move.
“We need only three good observations of an object to plot the course of a moving body; and already Bronson succeeded in obtaining a score of observations of these. He worked out the result, and it was so senational, that from the very first, he swore to secrecy every one who worked with him and with whom he corresponded. They obtained, altogether, hundreds of observations; and the result always worked out the same. They all checked.…
“Eve says she has told you what that result is to be.”
“Yes,” said Tony, “she told me.”
“And I told these men who demanded—ordered me—to explain to them everything we had. I told them that those specks were moving so that they would enter our solar system, and one of them would then come into collision with our world. They said, all right.
