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The air was filled with parched, hot odors and clouds of steam. In the distance, around the craters made where the meteors had struck earth, there was a red glow. Half an hour passed. The pyrotechnics stopped. During that half-hour Cole Hendron had been busy in the upper control-room of the Ark with two electrical engineers; and when after five or ten minutes of normal darkness, interrupted only by spurts of the soft multi-colored aurora which frequently flickered on Bronson Beta, a few of the groups of five began to return to the Ark, they were halted by Cole Hendron’s voice—a voice broadcast from the Ark by a mighty loud-speaker. It carried distinctly for a distance of two or three miles—a distance much greater than that which separated any of the bands.
“You will stay where you are,” Hendron’s voice commanded, “in groups of five for the remainder of the night. Try to sleep, if possible, but keep a long distance from the party nearest to you. I will summon you when the time comes.”
Tony had rejoined Eve in a group of five along the base of the precipice. Eliot James was in that group, and two women—one of them Shirley Cotton, who was already a prominent person among the hundred and one odd people who had been prominent on earth. The two men and the three women slept fitfully on the hard earth that night; and in the morning with the first rays of dawn, Hendron’s voice summoned every one together again.
No more meteors had fallen after the shower had ended. The human beings who trekked back over the bare landscape to the Ark were a little more grave than they had been on the previous day. Once again the frailness of their hold upon their new home had been made plain. Once again they had been reminded of the grim necessities by which they would have to live. For in order to insure that some of them, at least, would be safe, they had been compelled on a moment’s notice to desert all that they had brought with them from the earth, and run like dislodged insects into the night, into hiding.
All of them, because of their weariness, and in spite of the hard ground, had slept. Most of the bands had kept one member awake in turn as a watchman. Since the night on Bronson Beta was longer than the night on earth, they had used the additional time for rest. Hendron first summoned them by calling on the loud-speaker; and then, for those who had marched out of sight of the Ark, he gave an auditory landmark by broadcasting over the powerful loud-speaker a series of phonograph musical records. The men and women in clothes now earth-stained, the former not shaven, and the latter not made up, straggled to the Ark to the music of “The Hymn to the Sun” and of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.”
They answered a roll-call. No one had been harmed. The Ark was unscathed. They sat down to breakfast.
Hendron explained the unexpected dilemma of the previous night. “Unless I am greatly mistaken, our new planet passed through a cluster or path of fragments of the moon, destroyed, as you know, months ago. They would find orbits of their own about the sun; and we have approached again an area where we might encounter fragments of any size. I believe that the meteors which fell last night were débris from the moon—débris scattered and hurled into space by that cosmic collision.
“In the future we will probably be able to chart the position of such fragments, so that we will know when we are coming within range of them. It is my opinion that the phenomenon was more or less local here, that we attracted to our surface a unified group of fragments scattered along a curve coinciding with our orbit, so that they dropped virtually in one place.
“I regret that the night which I had planned should be so peaceful for all was so profoundly disturbed. You are courageous. I would like to extend our period of rest to include this, our second day, on Bronson Beta. But so divergent and so pressing are the necessities of our work here, that I cannot do so. We will start immediately after breakfast to construct a cantonment which will be adequate at least temporarily.”
CHAPTER II
CIVILIZATION RECOMMENCES
SUCH isolation, such solitude, such courage in the face of the unknown never before existed. One hundred and three people ate their breakfast—one hundred and three people laughing, talking, saluting each other, staring often at the ocean and the greenish sky, and still more often at the shining cylinder standing on end in their midst.
Cole Hendron walked over to Tony and Eliot James and his daughter, who were breakfasting together.
“Right after breakfast,” he said, “I want you, together with Higgins, to start prospecting for farm lands.”
Tony nodded. Two years before, the assignment would have appalled him. He would not have known whether beets were planted an inch under the surface of the soil or three feet, and whether one planted tubers or seeds; but he had been for a long time in charge of the farm in Michigan, and he was now well equipped for the undertaking.
“Bring back soil-samples. You understand the nature of the terrain which will be required—level and free from stones. It may be that you will find nothing in the vicinity that will be adequate; and if that is true we will consider moving the Ark. It is still good for a few hundred miles, I guess.”
Eliot James grinned. “Or a few hundred million? Which?”
To the surprise of all three, Cole Hendron did not respond with a smile. Instead he said simply: “I’d risk taking it up if we had to move in order to find a suitable place to raise food.”
Tony understood that the leader of the expedition was entirely serious, and said with sudden intensity: “What’s the matter with the Ark?”
“In the laboratory tests,” the gray-haired man answered, “and in the smaller furnaces and engines we designed, Dave Ransdell’s metal did not fuse or melt. But under the atomic blast, as we came through space, it commenced to erode. About eighteen hours after we had started, we went off our course because, as I discovered, the lining of one of the outside stern jets was wearing out more rapidly than the others. I used one of the right-angle tubes to reëstablish our direction, and I made some effort to measure the rate of dissipation of Ransdell’s metal. I couldn’t be very accurate, since I could not turn off the jets, but I was not at all certain that the material would stand the strain until we had reached the point where we started falling on Bronson Beta.”
“You mean to say,” Eliot James exclaimed, “that we barely got here?”
Cole Hendron smiled, and yet his face was sober. “It turned out that we had a little margin. I examined the tubes yesterday, and I dare say we could use them for a trip of another five hundred miles. But at both ends of the ship our insulation is nearly gone. We could not, for example, circumnavigate this globe.”
The writer looked depressed. “I had imagined,” he said, “that we would be able to cruise at will on the surface of the planet from now on.”
Hendron turned his face toward the ship, which represented the masterpiece of his life of engineering achievements. He regarded it almost sadly. “We won’t be able to do that. In
any case we would move her over the surface of the planet only to find good farm land, because we’ve got to take her to pieces.”
“To pieces!”
Hendron assented. “We designed her for that very purpose. Those layer sections on the inside wall will be taken down, one by one, and set up again on the ground. The top section will be made into a radio station, so that we can make accurate measurements of our orbit and also study meteorological conditions. The next section below that will be a chemistry laboratory. The one below that will be a hospital, if we need it. The next three will be store-rooms, and we will turn the last section into a machine-shop. The steel on the outside hull will be our mineral source for the time being, and out of it we will make the things we need until it is exhausted.”
His eyes twinkled. “I had anticipated we might have a great deal of trouble in finding a source of iron ore and in mining it, but I dare say that some of the meteorites which fell here last night will not have buried themselves very deeply, so that we may have many tons of first-rate metal at our disposal when we need it.”
“An ill wind,” Eliot James said. “Still, I hate to think of the Ark being torn down. I had imagined we would go hunting for the others in it.”
Tony spoke. “I’d been thinking about that. It seems to me that if anybody had reached here, we would have heard some kind of signal from them by now.”
