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Shirley Cotton stood up. She always moved with an almost languid voluptuousness. Now, in these tense moments, her actions were seemingly doubly calculated to be slow and indolent.
“What, M. Duquesne,” she inquired, “would be the attitude of the Beings if they survived and found us here?”
The Frenchman shook his head. “Before imagining their attitude, I must first imagine them surviving. I have confessed my failure at that task.”
“But if some of them survived?” Shirley persisted.
“Their attitude, after awaking from a million years’ sleep, would combine, among other elements, surprise and caution, I should suggest,” the Frenchman concluded courteously. “But, engaging as such speculations may be, our position demands that we be practical. We must assume that aircraft we saw in these skies came from earth. If there are other people from our world upon Bronson Beta, we prefer to be friends with them. That attitude, besides being rational, is our natural inclination. However,”—he shrugged his huge shoulders eloquently,—“it does not therefore follow that another party of emigrants from earth would want to be friendly to us. We cannot assume that the same emotions sway them. It is possible that, finding themselves here, they prefer private possession of this planet.”
Eve, sitting beside Tony, leaned toward him and whispered: “I can imagine that. Can’t you?”
Tony nodded. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I was in Russia during the days on earth,” he said, and repeated, “during the days on earth,” feeling how it seemed an epoch long ago, though it was not yet a month since they fled before the final catastrophe; and as Duquesne had reminded them, it was less than two years since they all had been living on the world unwarned that its end was at hand. Only a little more than two years ago, Tony had traveled as he liked on the world, and had visited, among other countries, Russia.
“Suppose that a Russian party made the hop,” Tony continued. “Since we did, why not? They worked along lines of their own, but they had some of the world’s best scientists. If they made it, you may be sure they packed their ship with first-class communists—the most vigorous and the most fanatic. When they found themselves here, what would they feel most?”
“I know,” Eve nodded. “They’d feel that they had a world to themselves, where they could work out the millennium according to their own ideals.”
“And,” Tony finished for her, “that they must beat down, at the very outset, possible interference.”
They were whispering only to each other; but many heads bent near to listen; and Hendron, seeing that Tony caught this attention, called to him: “You have a suggestion?”
“Two,” said Tony, rising to his feet. “I suggest, Cole, that we organize at once an adequate exploring expedition; and at the same time, prepare defenses.”
Nobody in the encampment had ever before called Hendron by his first name. Tony’s use of it was involuntary and instinctive. Having to oppose his leader in again urging exploration, he took from it any air of antagonism by addressing him as “Cole.”
Hendron appreciated this.
“Will you lead the exploring party—and choose its members?” he asked Tony.
“Gladly.”
“I,” said Hendron, “will be responsible for the defenses here.”
The people about Tony pressed closer. “Take me!… Me!… Tony, I want to go! Take me!”
From the gloom, where Eliot James sat rose his calm, twangy voice: “So we have come to the end of our honeymoon!”
Eve reached for Tony’s arm and clung to him as he moved out of the group gathered about him.
“Take me too, Tony.”
“Not you.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t on earth; why would I here? Besides, I want to come back to you. I want to feel, when I’m away, I’m risking whatever we happen to risk, for you. You see, I love you. It’s like on earth, when I’m with you away from the others. See the stars up there.” The clouds were cleared from a patch in the sky. “There’s Cepheus and the Dragon; and Vega and the Swan, as we’ve always seen them. And the earth hard and cold at our feet; so comfortably solid and substantial, this earth, which came to us torn from some distant star for a couch, sometime, for you and me!”
Night deepened. The company of emigrants from the earth heaped higher the fire with the wood from the forest which had leafed on this land of Bronson Beta a million years ago. Some of the company—men as well as women—shivered with a chill not instilled in their veins by the sharpness of night, as this side of the planet turned away from the sun it had found at the end of its incalculable wandering. Slowly, lazily, the stars swung in the sky; for this planet rotated much less swiftly than the earth upon its axis. The earth people had learned not to lie down too soon to sleep, but to wait out the first hours of the long night in talk; and doubts, terrors, phantasms, easier to dismiss by day, plagued them.
That night, as Eliot James had said, they felt “the honeymoon over.” The triumph of their flight, the enormous excitement and relief at finding themselves safe on the new world, could suffice them no longer. Others besides themselves were on this world.
Survivors of the People of the Past! That idea would not down. Contrarily, it increased with the night.
Survivors of the People of the Past—or other emigrants from Earth who had made the journey safely, established themselves and already were exploring, and who, having found this encampment, had swung away again to report. Report what? And to whom?
Nothing happened.
Days passed—the long, slow days of Bronson Beta. The murmuring specter of the sky put in no further appearance; but the consequences of its evanescent presence continued. The camp was roused to a feverish activity which reminded the emigrants of the days of the Ark-building on earth. Indeed, this was Ark-building again, but on a far smaller scale; for the Ark was being taken down, and its materials—especially the last of the lining of the propulsion tubes—were being adapted to an exploration ship.
