Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "the Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (12 page)

All at once a sudden doubt flashed into her mind. An uneasy expression dawned across her face. Her eyes grew wild with a great fear; the fear of utter and absolute incomprehension.

Something about this room, this weird awakening, bore in upon her consciousness the dread tidings this was not a dream!

Something drove home to her the fact that it was real, objective, positive! And with a gasp of fright she struggled up amid the litter and the rubbish of that uncanny room.

"Oh!" she cried in terror, as a huge scorpion, malevolent, and with its tail raised to strike, scuttled away and vanished through a gaping void where once the corridor door had swung. "Oh, oh! Where am I? What, what has happened?"

Horrified beyond all words, pale and staring, both hands clutched to her breast, whereon her very clothing now had torn and crumbled, she faced about.

It seemed to her as though some monstrous, evil thing was lurking in the dim corner at her back. She tried to scream, but no sound, save a choked gasp, issued from her lips.

Then she started toward the doorway. Even as she took the first few steps her gown, a mere tattered mockery of raiment, fell away from her.

And, confronted by a new problem, she stopped short. She peered about her in vain for something to protect her disarray. There was nothing.

"Why, where's my chair? My desk?" she exclaimed thickly, starting toward the place by the window where they should have been, and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and impalpable dust which coated everything.

"My typewriter? Can that be my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's the matter here, with everything? Am I mad?"

There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some bits of rust, a corroded type-bar, or two, even a few rubber key-caps, still recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.

All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the rubber caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white powder.

With a shuddering cry, the girl sprang back, terrified.

"Merciful Heavens!" she whispered. "What does all this mean?"

For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion, numbed. Breathing not, she only stared in a wild kind of cringing amazement as perhaps you might if you should see a dead man move.

Then she ran to the door. Out into the hall she peered, this way and that, down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs, which were all cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.

Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help, help!" No answer. Even the echoes flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful and incredible isolation.

What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar hum of the metropolis now rose from what were swarming streets and miles on miles of habitations.

Instead, a blank, unbroken, leaden silence, that seemed part of the musty, choking atmosphere. A silence that weighed down on Beatrice like funeral palls.

Dumbfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering, back into the office. There in the dust her foot struck something hard.

She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.

"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?"

No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe, incredibly vast, some disaster cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had desolated the world.

"Oh, my mother!" she cried. "My mother—dead? Dead, now, how long?"

She did not weep, but just stood there, cowering, a chill of anguished horror racking her. All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake as with an ague.

For a moment, dazed and stunned, she remained there, not knowing which way to turn nor what to do. Then her terror-stricken gaze fell on the inner doorway, leading from her outer office to the inner one, the one where Stern had had his laboratory and his consultation room.

This door now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of wood, barely supported by the rusty hinges.

Toward it she staggered. She drew the sheltering masses of her hair about her, like a Godiva of another age; and to her eyes, womanlike, the hot tears mounted. As she went, she cried in a voice of horror:

"Mr. Stern! Oh, Mr. Stern! Are you dead, too? You can't be—it's too frightful!"

She reached the door. The mere touch of her outstretched hand disintegrated it. Down in a crumbling heap it fell. Thick dust bellied up in a cloud, through which a single sun-ray that entered the cobwebbed pane shot a radiant arrow.

Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other room, Beatrice peered through this dust-haze. A sick foreboding of evil possessed her at thought of what she might find there—yet she was more afraid of what she knew lay there behind her.

For an instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting on the moldy jamb. Then, with a cry, she started forward—a cry in which terror had given place to joy, despair to hope.

Forgotten now the fact that, save for the shrouding of her messy hair, she stood unclad. Forgotten the wreck, the desolation everywhere.

"Oh, thank Heaven!" she gasped.

There, in that inner office, half-rising from the wreck of many things that had been and were now no more, her startled eyes beheld the figure of a man—of Allan Stern!

He lived!

He peered at her with eyes that saw not, yet; toward her he groped a vague, unsteady hand. He lived! Not quite alone in this world-ruin, not all alone was she!

THE JOY IN Beatrice's eyes gave way to poignant wonder as she gazed on him. Could this be he?

Yes, well she knew it was. She recognized him even through the grotesquery of his clinging rags, even behind the mask of a long, red, dusty beard and formidable mustache, even despite the wild and staring incoherence of his whole expression.

Yet how incredible the metamorphosis! There flashed to her a memory of this man, her other-time employer—keen and smooth-shaven, alert, well-dressed, self-centered, dominant. The master of a hundred complex problems, the directing mind of engineering works innumerable.

Faltering and uncertain now he stood there. Then, at the sound of the girl's voice, he staggered toward her with outflung hands. He stopped, and for a moment stared at her.

For he had had no time as yet to correlate his thoughts, to pull himself together.

And, while one's heart might throb ten times, Beatrice saw terror in his blinking, bloodshot eyes.

But almost at once the engineer got a mastery over himself. Even as Beatrice watched him, breathlessly, from the door, she saw his fear die out; she saw his courage well up fresh and strong.

It was almost as though something tangible were limning the man's soul upon his face. She thrilled at sight of him.

And though for a long moment no word was spoken, while the man and woman stood looking at each other like two children in some dread and unfamiliar attic, an understanding leaped between them.

Then, womanlike, instinctively as she breathed, the girl ran to him. Forgetful of every convention and of her disarray, she seized his hand. And in a voice that trembled till it broke she cried:

"What is it? What does all this mean? Tell me!"

She clung to him.

"Tell me the truth and save me! Is it real?"

Stern looked at her wonderingly. He smiled a strange, wan, mirthless smile.

He looked all about him. Then his lips moved, but for the moment no sound came.

He made another effort, this time successful.

"There, there," said he huskily, as though the dust and dryness of the innumerable years had got into his very voice. "There, now, don't be afraid.

"Something seems to have taken place here while—we've been asleep. What? What is it? I don't know yet. I'll find out. There's nothing to be alarmed about, at any rate."

"But—look!" She pointed at the hideous desolation.

"Yes, I see. But no matter. You're alive. I'm alive. That's two of us, anyhow. Maybe there are a lot more. We'll soon see. Whatever it may be, we'll win."

He turned and, trailing rags and streamers of rotten cloth that once had been a business suit, he waded through the confusion of wreckage on the floor, to the window.

If you have seen a weather-beaten scarecrow flapping in the wind, you have some notion of his outward guise. No tramp you ever laid eyes on could have offered so preposterous an appearance.

Down over his shoulders, fell the matted, dusty hair. His tangled beard reached far below his waist. Even his eyebrows, naturally rather light, had grown to a heavy thatch above his eyes.

Except that he was not gray or bent, and that he still seemed to have kept the resilient force of vigorous manhood, you might have thought him some incredibly ancient Rip Van Winkle come to life upon that singular stage, there in the tower.

But he gave little time to introspection or the matter of his own appearance. With one quick gesture he swept away the shrouding tangle of webs, spiders, and dead flies that obscured the window. He peered out.

"Good heavens!" he cried, and started back.

The girl ran to him.

"What is it?" she exclaimed breathlessly.

"Why, I don't know—yet. But this is something big! Something universal! It's—it's—no, no, you'd better not look out. Not just yet."

"I must know everything. Let me see."

Now she was at his side, and, like him, staring out into the clear sunshine, out over the vast expanses of the city.

A moment's utter silence fell. Quite clearly hummed the protest of an imprisoned fly in a web at the top of the window. The breathing of the man and woman sounded quick and loud.

"All—wrecked?" cried Beatrice. "But—then—"

"Wrecked? It looks that way," the engineer answered, holding his emotions in control with a strong effort. "Why not be frank about this?

You'd better make up your mind at once to accept the very worst. I see no signs of anything else."

"The worst? You mean—"

"I mean just what we see out there. You can interpret it as well as I."

Again the silence while they looked, with emotions that could find no voicing in words. Instinctively the engineer passed an arm about the frightened girl and drew her close to him.

"And the last thing I remembered," she whispered, "was just—just after you'd finished dictating those Taunton Bridge specifications. I suddenly felt—oh, so sleepy! Only for a minute, I thought, I'd close my eyes and rest, and then—then—"

"This?"

She nodded.

"Same here," said he. "What the deuce can have struck us? Us and everybody, and everything? Talk about your problems! Lucky I'm sane and sound, and—and—"

He did not finish, but fell once more to studying the incomprehensible prospect.

Their view was toward the east, out over the river and the reaches of what had once upon a time been Long Island City and Brooklyn. As familiar a scene in the other days as could be possibly imagined. But now how altered an aspect greeted them!

"It's surely all wiped out, all gone, gone into ruins," said Stern slowly and carefully, weighing every word. "No hallucination about that." He swept the sky-line with his eyes, that now peered keenly out from beneath those bushy brows. Instinctively he brought his hand up to his breast. He started with surprise.

"What's this?" he cried. "Why! I—I've got a full yard of whiskers. My good Lord! Whiskers on
me
? And I used to say—"

He burst out laughing. He plucked at his beard with merriment that jangled horribly on the girl's tense nerves. Suddenly he grew serious. For the first time he seemed to take clear notice of his companion's disarray.

"Why, what a time it must have been!" he cried. "Here's some calculation all cut out for me, all right. But you can't go that way, Miss Kendrick. It won't do, you know. Got to have something to put on. Great Heavens, what a situation!"

He tried to peel off his remnant of a coat, but at the merest touch it tore to shreds and fell away. The girl restrained him.

"Never mind," she said, with quiet, modest dignity. "My hair protects me very well for the present. If you and I are all that's left of all the people in the world, this is no time for trifles."

He studied her a moment. Then he nodded, and grew very grave.

"Forgive me," he whispered, laying a hand on her shoulder. Once more he turned to the window and looked out.

"So, then, it's all gone?" he said, speaking as to himself. "Only a skyscraper standing here or there? And the bridges and the islands—all changed.

"Not a sign of life anywhere; not a sound; the forests growing thick among the ruins? A dead world if—if all the world is like this part of it! All dead, except you and me!"

In silence they stood there, striving to realize the full import of the catastrophe. And Stern, deep down in his heart, caught some glimmering insight of the future and was glad.

SUDDENLY THE GIRL started, rebelling against the evidence of her own senses, striving again to force upon herself the belief that, after all, that which she saw could not be so.

"No, no, no!" she cried. "This can't be true. It mustn't be. There's a mistake somewhere. This simply must be all an illusion, a dream.

"If the whole world's dead, how does it happen we're alive?" How do we know it's dead? Can we see it all from here? Why, all we see is just a little segment of things. Perhaps if we could know the truth, look farther, and know—•"

The man shook his head.

"I guess you'll find it's real enough," he answered, "no matter how far you look. But, just the same, it won't do any harm to extend our radius of observation.

"Come, let's go on up to the top of the tower, up to the observation-platform. The quicker we know all the available facts the better. Now, if I only had a telescope."