Page 31 of When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)

“Yes. We’re almost there.”

Familiar landmarks bobbed up on both sides, everywhere: a log cabin he had built as a boy; here was the way to the old well—the “revolutionary well.”

A thousand million years, at least, life had been developing upon this earth; a thousand million years like them had been required for the process which must have preceded the first molding of the bricks which built the cities on Bronson Beta—which, some countless æons ago, had come to an end. For a thousand million years, since their inhabitants died, they might have been drifting in the dark until to-day, at last, they found our sun, and the telescopes of the world were turned upon them.

It was useful to think of something like this when driving to your home where your mother lay.…

There was the tree where he had fashioned his tree dwelling; the platform still stood in the boughs. It was hidden from the house, but within hailing distance. Playing there, he could hear his mother’s voice calling; sometimes he’d pretended that he did not hear.

How long ago was that? How old was he? Oh, that was fifteen years ago. Fifteen, in a thousand million years.

Time was beginning to tick on a different scale in Tony’s brain. Not the worldly clock but the awful chronometer of the cosmos was beginning to space, for him, in enormous seconds. And Tony realized that Hendron, speaking to him as he had done, had not been heartless; he had attempted to extend to him a merciful morphia from his own mind. What happened here this morning could not matter, in the stupendous perspective of time.…

“Here we are.”

The house was before them, white, calm, confident. A stout, secure dwelling with its own traditions. Tony’s heart leaped. How he loved it—and her who had been its spirit! How often she had stood in that doorway awaiting him!

Some one was standing there now—an old woman, slight, white-haired. Tony recognized her—Mrs. Haskins, the minister’s wife. She advanced toward Tony, and old Hezekiah Haskins took her place in the doorway.

“What happened?”

Not what happened to the world last night; not what happened to millions and hundreds of millions overswept or sent fleeing by the sea. But what happened here?

Old Haskins told Tony, as kindly as he could:

“She was alone; she did not feel afraid, though all the village and even her servants had fled. The band of men came by. She did not try to keep them out. Knowing her—and judging by what I found—she asked them in and offered them food. Some of them had been drinking; or they were mad with the intoxication of destruction. Some one shot her cleanly—once, Tony. It might have been one more thoughtful than the rest, more merciful. It is certain, Tony, she did not suffer.”

Tony could not speak. Eve clung to his hand. “Thank God for that, Tony!” she whispered.

Briefly Tony unclasped his hand from Eve’s and met the old minister’s quivering grasp. He bent and kissed Mrs. Haskin’s gray cheek.

“Thank you. Thank you both,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t have stayed here; you shouldn’t have waited for me. But you did.”

“Orson also remained,” Hezekiah Haskins said. Old Orson was the sexton. “He’s inside. He’s—made what arrangements he could.”

“I’ll go in now,” Tony said to Eve. “I’ll go in alone for a few minutes. Will you come in, then, to—us?”

* * *

“Lord, thou hast been our refuge in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou are God from everlasting, and world without end.”

Old Hezekiah Haskins and his wife, and Orson the sexton, and Tony Drake and Eve Hendron stood on the hilltop where the men of the Drake blood and the women who reproduced them in all generations of memory lay buried. A closed box lay waiting its lowering into the ground.

“Hear my prayer, O Lord; and with thine ears consider my calling.… For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.

“Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

Old Hezekiah Haskins held the book before him, but he did not read. A thousand times in his fifty years of the ministry he had repeated the words of that poignant, pathetic appeal voiced for all the dying by the great poet of the psalms: “For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.”

; Tony’s eyes turned to the graves of his fathers; their headstones stood in a line, with their birth-dates and their ages.

“The days of our age are three score years and ten.”

What were three score and ten in a thousand million years? To-day, in a few hours, the tide would wash this hilltop.

Connecticut had become an archipelago; the highest hills were islands. Their slopes were shoals over which the tide swirled white. The sun stood in the sky blazing down upon this strange sea.