Philip Wylie - After Worlds Collide

Early in the middle third of the twentieth century a brilliant astronomer named Sven Bronson observed through a telescope in South Africa that two bodies were moving through space toward the solar system.

Bronsons calculations revealed to him that these wandering spheres would pass very close to the earth, make a circuit of our sun, and turn back toward space and infinity. The larger of the two wandering worlds would strike and annihilate the earth. Finer and more delicate calculations tended to show that the smaller body, which was of the same magnitude as the earth, would be caught by the sun and held in an orbit between the courses of Mars and Venus.

In other words, Bronsons discovery was an announcement of the end of the world.

It would be an end of the world preceded by the close passage of two mighty planets from some sun lost in the voidtwo planets which had been pulled from their pathways ages ago by a passing star. The world would be replaced by a new earth whose pathway would take it alternately out to the cold orbit of Mars and back again to the vicinity of Venus.

The bodies were named for their discoverer: the larger one, Bronson Alpha, and the smaller, Bronson Beta.

Sven Bronson knew the horrors that would attend the announcement of his awful findings.

He and Lord Rhondin, the Governor of the South African Dominion, summoned David Ransdell, a war veteran and flier, to carry the tangible demonstration to an American scientist, Cole Hendron. Ransdell started out with photographic plates which proved the discovery.

Cole Hendron, the greatest astrophysicist and engineer of the century, had already been notified of the approaching doom. He and his daughter Eve, who acted as his assistant, checked Bronsons calculations.

There was no doubt. The earth was doomed.

Hendron, Bronson and others united the foremost scientists of the world in a secret organization known as The League of the Last Days and these men kept the information from the public for some time. Among the first laymen to know, or guess the truth were Ransdell, the flier, and Anthony Drake, a young New York man-about-town who was in love with Eve Hendron.

Most of the informed scientists were ready to resign themselves to universal destruction.

Cole Hendron, however, perceived a possibility of escape: if the planet which was to occupy the earths position were habitable, and if a vessel capable of transporting human beings and their possessions through a few hundred thousand miles of space could be made, a small and select group of people might jump from the doomed earth to the new arrival in the solar system. This group could then set about reestablishing mankind on a new earth.

Hendron and his assistants set to work at once. Atomic energy adequate to drive such a vessel exactly as a rocket is propelled was released in his laboratories. At first it could not be harnessed, as it fused everything with which it came in contact. Nevertheless Hendron persisted in his plans for the space ship. The Ark was the name given to the ship eventually built.

For its construction, Hendron established a vast manufacturing city in Michigan, and to it he took a thousand selected human beingsmen and women with scientific training, healthy physiques, and great courage.

While Hendron labored frantically, the world found out what was in store for it.

Society disintegrated. The first, and relatively harmless passage of the Bronson bodies would be sufficiently close to cause vast terrestrial disturbances tides, cyclones, terrific volcanic disturbances, and earthquakes. All the seacoast cities of the world were evacuated. New York, Boston, Philadelphia were cleared of their population, which was moved inland at the order of the President.

One bit of fortune came in the discovery of a new metal in the material forced from the depths of the earth during the great eruptions. Ransdell found it and brought it to camp where Hendron tested it. This metal proved able to withstand the heat of the atomic blast. The problem of propulsion of the Ark was solved.

In the fantastic days that followed, Hendron and his band manufactured the Ark, and found time and materials to make a second ship so that the balance of their heroic group could be transported to Bronson Beta and not sacrificed. The Michigan cantonment was attacked by bloodthirsty and hungry mobs. The first passage killed more than half of the people of the earth.

Continents split apart. Seas rose. The internal fires of the earth burst to the surface. The moon was smashed to atoms.

Months afterward the celestial wanderers rounded the sun and returned. Hendrons two ships took off for Bronson Beta. Other ships, frantically constructed by other nations, also leaped into space as doom fell upon our world.

Bronson Alpha annihilated the earth and moved into the void.

Bronson Beta swung into a course about our sun.

Upon it, Hendron brought down the Ark. With him was a company of a hundred and three human beings. Tony Drake was one of them, and his Japanese servant, Kyto. Eliot James, the diarist and historian of the party was in the Ark. So was Dodson, the surgeon, and Duquesne, the French physicist who had been saved at the eleventh hour as the Ark stood ready to rise from Holocaust.

A safe landing was made. The air of Bronson Beta was found to be breathable.

But there was no word of the second shipthe vessel under Ransdells command which had left with them. It was given up for lost Ransdell, who also loved Eve, was presumed to have died somewhere in space with his brave companionsJack Taylor, the college boy who had become one of Tonys best friends, and Peter Vanderbilt, the cynical and fearless New Yorker, and Greve and Smith, and four hundred others.

The arrivals on Bronson Beta could rouse no answer to their radio signals. They were forced into the awful realization that of all humanity they alone survived. They were alone on an unknown world where a nameless and dead race had once built citieson a world which had been drifting through the absolute zero of space for nameless millenia. They faced the problem of survival. Responsibility for the future of the species was theirs.

Resolutely, they turned to their prodigious task.

Eliot James sat at a metal desk inside the space ship which had conveyed a few score human beings from the doomed earth to safety on the suns new planet Bronson Beta. In front of Eliot James was his already immemorial diary, and over it he poised a fountain pen.

He had written several paragraphs:

April what shall I call it? Is it the 2nd day of April, or is it the first? Have we, the last survivors of the earth, landed upon our new planet on All Fools Day? That would be ironic, and yet trivial in the face of all that has happened. But as I meditate on the date, I am in doubt about how to express time in my diary.

The earth is gonesmashed to fragments; and the companion of its destroying angel, upon which our band of one hundred and three Argonauts holds so brief and hazardous a residence, is still without names, seasons and months. But April has vanished with the earth; and for all I know, spring, winter, summer and fall may also be absent in the new world.

I have pledged myself to write in this diary every day, as Hendron assures me there will be no other record of our adventures here until we have become well enough established to permit the compilation of a formal history. And yet it is with the most profound difficulty that I compel myself to set down words on this, mans first morning in his new home.

What shall I say?

That question in truth must be read by the future generations as a cry at once of ecstasy and despair. Ecstasy because even while the heavens fell upon them, my companions remained firm and courageousbecause in the face of earthquakes, tornadoes, bloody battles and the unimaginable holocaust of Destruction Day itself, they not only preserved whatever claims the race of man may have to majesty, but by their ingenuity they escaped from the earth to this new planet, which has invaded and attached itself to our solar system.