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Cole Hendron stood now.
“Tony, my son!” His words rang like iron.
“Yes—”
The greatest scientist earth had ever produced stretched out his two hands tow
ard the city. “The promised land!” Now his voice was thunder.
Eve sobbed. Tony felt a lump swelling in his throat.
Hendron looked up to the cold stars—to Arcturus and Sirius and Vega.
“Father!” he said in a mighty voice. “We thank Thee!”
Then he pitched forward.
Tony caught him, or he would have fallen to the earth. He lifted him back on his pallet and opened his coat. Dodson pushed through the herded people.
The head of the physician bent over the old man’s chest. He looked up.
“His brain imagined this,” said Dodson. “He brought us here in his two hands, and with his courage as our spiritual flame we shall remain!”
It was an epitaph.
Eve wept silently. Tony stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders—mute consolation and strength.
“Hendron’s dead,” was whispered through the throng.
The city was now looming in front of them, the buildings inside visible in detail and rising high over the heads of the travelers.
Von Beitz was driving rapidly. This was the most dangerous part of the trip, this dash across the lighted exterior of the city, without protection of any kind.
They could see presently that the great gate was open. Figures stood beside it, motionlessly watching their approach.
Light poured over them. They were inside the city. They slowed to a stop at the mighty portals boomed shut behind them.
Ransdell had been one of those waiting. Tony leaped out, and Ransdell smiled.
“Welcome!”
“Hendron’s dead.”
“Oh!”
The people began to alight—but they were quiet and made no attempt to celebrate their security.
Others came up.
“We’ll take his body into one of these buildings,” said Tony. “In the morning we’ll bury him—out there, under the sun and the stars—in the bare earth of Bronson Beta.”
Behind the voyagers through the night was a wide avenue, and at its center in the city stood a magnificent building. Some one of those who came in the first caravan had brought a large American flag and fixed it on an improvised pole. It was hanging there when they entered the gates. Tony noticed it presently as it was being drawn down to half-mast.
No other symbol of the death of their leader was made that night. There were too many important things to do, things upon which their existence depended.
Dodson, Duquesne and Eve sat in a room with Hendron’s body—a room of weird and gorgeous decoration, a room of august dimensions, a room indirectly illuminated. If they had but known, they would have been glad that Cole Hendron lay in the hall of the edifice that had been home of the greatest scientists of Bronson Beta some incalculable age before them.
Tony left the watchers reluctantly and sought Ransdell. The former South African was in a smaller chamber in the building where the Stars and Stripes hung at half-mast.
