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Cole Hendron shook his head. “From the glimpse we had, no one could say. What we saw was merely a glint upon some sort of material. However, we must use our reason to rescue us from impossible conclusions. We must infer from our glimpse of that machine in the sky, and from the sound of its flight, that some other party on earth was successful in completing a ship capable of taking the leap from Earth to Bronson Beta; and that, also, they were fortunate in the flight; and that they have succeeded, as well as we, in establishing themselves here.”
“They must be established very well,” somebody else said grimly. “We haven’t got a plane.”
Hendron nodded. “No; nor did we include an airplane in the equipment of our larger Ark. Therefore it could not have been our comrades from our own camp on Earth whom we heard in this sky. Were they the English, perhaps? Or the Russians? The Italians? Or the Japanese?”
“If they were any people from earth,” Jeremiah Post countered, “why should they have approached so near, and yet not give any sign they had seen us?”
Cole Hendron faced this objector calmly. He was aware that Post was one of the younger men who believed that he, the leader of the party on earth, and the captain on the voyage through space, had served his purpose. “Have you come to believe,” he challenged the metallurgist, “that any of the people native to this planet could have survived?”
“I believe,” retorted Post, “that we certainly are not safe in excluding that possibility from our calculations. As you all know,” he continued, addressing the whole group now rather than Hendron, “I have given extended study to the vehicle of the Other People which we have found. Not only in its mechanical design and method of propulsion was it utterly beyond any vehicle developed on earth, but its metallurgy was in a class by itself—compared to ours. These People had far surpassed our achievement in the sole fields of science from which we yet have any sample. Is it not natural to suppose that, likewise, they were beyond us in other endeavors?”
“Particularly?” Hendron challenged him.
“Particularly, perhaps, in preservation of themselves. I will not be so absurd as to imagine that any large number of them could have survived the extreme ordeals of—space. But is it utterly inconceivable that a few could?”
“How?” said Hendron.
“You know,” Jeremiah Post cast back at his leader, “that is not a fair question. I suggest a possibility that some people of this planet may have survived through application of principles or processes far beyond our knowledge; and then you ask me to describe the method. Of course I can’t.”
“Of course not,” agreed Hendron apologetically. “I withdraw that question. However, in order that each of us may form his and her own opinion of the possibilities, I will ask Duquesne to acquaint you with the physical experience of this planet as we now perceive it.”
The Frenchman readily arose and loomed larger than ever in the flickering flare of the fire:
“My friends, it is completely plain to all of us that once this world, which has given us refuge, was attached to some distant sun which we, on the world, saw as a star.
“That star might have been a sun of the same order as our sun, which this world has now found. If such were the case, it seems likely that Bronson Beta circled its original sun at some distance similar to our distance from our sun; for the climatic conditions here seem in the past to have been similar, at least, to the conditions on earth.
“There are two other alternatives, however. The original star, about which Bronson Beta revolved, might have been a much larger and hotter sun; in that case, this planet must have swung about that star in an enormous orbit with a year perhaps ten or fifty times as long as our old years. On the other hand, the original sun might have been smaller and feebler—a ‘white dwarf,’ perhaps, or one of the stars that are nearly spent. In that case, Bronson Beta must have circled it much more closely to have obtained the climate which once here prevailed, and which has been reëstablished now that this planet has found our sun.
“These are fascinating points which we hope to clear up later; we can only speculate upon them now. However, whether the original sun for this planet was a yellow star of moderate size, like our own sun, or whether it was one of the giant stars, or a ‘white dwarf,’ this world must have been satisfactorily situated with regard to it for millions and hundreds of millions of years.
“Orderly evolution must have proceeded for an immense period to produce, for instance, that log—the material which we burn before me to give us, to-night, light and heat; and to produce the People who made the vehicle which my colleague Jeremiah Post so admirably has analyzed.
“Beings of a high order of intelligence dwelt here. We have evidence that in science they had progressed beyond us—unfortunately for themselves. Poor fellows!”
Dramatically, Duquesne stopped.
Some one—it was a girl—did not permit him the full moment of his halt. “Why unfortunately?”
“Their science must have showed them their doom so plainly and for so frightfully long a period—a doom from which there scarcely could have been, even for the most favored few, any means of escape. Theirs was a fate far more terrible than was ours—a fate incomparably more frightful than mere complete catastrophe.
“Attend! There they were, in some other part of the heavens, circling, at some satisfactory distance, their sun! For millions and millions of years this world upon which now we stand went its orderly way. Then its astronomers noticed that a star was approaching. A star—a mere point of light on its starry nights—swelled and became brighter.
“We may be sure that telescopes upon this world turned upon it; and the beings—whose actual forms we have yet to discover—made their calculations. Their sun, with its retinue of planets, was approaching another star. There would be no collision; we d
o not believe that such a thing occurred. There was merely an approach of another sun close enough to counteract, by its own attraction, the attraction of the original sun upon this planet, and upon Bronson Alpha.
“The suns—the stars—battled between themselves from millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of miles away; and neither conquered completely. The new sun tore the planets away from the first sun, but it failed to capture them for itself. Between the stars, this planet and its companion, which we called Bronson Alpha, drifted together into the darkness and cold of space.
“The point is, that this must have been a torturingly prolonged process for the inhabitants here. The approach of a star is not like the approach of a planet. We discovered Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta only a few months before they were upon us; the Beings here must have known for generations, for centuries, the approach of the stranger star!
“Knowing it, for hundreds of years, could any of the inhabitants here have schemed a way of saving themselves? That seems to be the question now before us.
“I cannot say that they could not. I can only say that we could not have devised anything adequate to meet their situation. Yet—they might have. They knew more than we: they had much more time, but their problem was terrific—the problem of surviving through nearly absolutely cold and darkness, a drift through space, of a million or millions of years. If any of you believe that problem could have been met by the Beings here, he has as much right to his opinion as I have to mine.”
“Which is?” Jeremiah Post demanded.
“That the People here tried to solve that problem,” replied Duquesne without evasion, “and failed; but that they made a magnificent attempt. When we find them, we will find—I hope and believe—the method of their tremendous attempt.”
