CHAPTER XXIV

_The End of a World_

I have from Drake his impressions of those last hours on Mita. A wild, chaotic picture his memory holds. Jumbled impressions--yet as I record them in that fashion, doubtless I will approximate the truth, for they were jumbled, frantic scenes of panic--millions of people struggling upon a doomed world!

Upon Drake there was a sense of despair; his own futility was so clearly shown, and the futility of his plans! He had sent Alt to have me come into the atom with automatics. He stood before Dianne's palace, gazing at a world gone mad. An automatic was in his hand, as futile as a cap pistol in the hands of a child.

By nature Drake was resourceful; cautious, but reckless too, when he thought reckless daring was necessary. He stood, there as a giant with Ahlma and Alt, and saw in the blood-red dawn Togaro's monstrous vehicle expanding into the sky. It did not need Alt's horrified words to bring realization to Drake; nor the wrecked city--the turmoil of the panic-stricken throngs--to make Drake realize that this was the end. He knew it.

A very human sense of utter failure made Drake stand and tell himself bitterly that there was no use trying to do anything. But the feeling passed. It is instinctive to struggle for life against every most desperate circumstance. Drake became aware that in the wrecked city spread there in the dawn before him, thousands of people were struggling for life. Doing nothing with any rational thought--and yet struggling.

Behind him, in the palace, he heard the shouts of the councilmen; the clatter of footsteps. The government, against all these odds, was striving to do something. Nobody was quitting.

It stung him into action.

"Alt, we must get back to normal size! Help them, Alt. This is death if we stand here."

They took the drug. The scene dwindled. The Togaro ship off there on the water seemed rising to new gigantic proportions. Its huge stern was coming toward the city. Projecting above the water now; Drake could see the space between the bottom of its hull and the lake surface. It came, that giant stern, shoving its way forward. The length of its hull extended like a gray wall off for miles to the horizon where it lay balanced, with other miles on beyond, the shape of it blurred by distance against the red sky of dawn.

Drake attained normal size. Ahlma clung to him.

Alt, too, was struggling to cope with a terror almost overpowering. "Drake--what--what can we do?"

They were down in the garden now, at the doorway of the palace. Officials were running in and out. Calling orders, with no one to hear them. Some of the police stood here, inactive, stupefied with terror.

"Come inside," said Drake. He pulled at the confused Alt. "Don't you understand? Our ship may be repaired by now. We've got to get it repaired! Herd the people into it! Make it large enough to take us all--all these people. Alt, we've got to send messengers--send them in giant size--to the other cities! The local airships--dispatch them to bring the people here--get them all into our vehicle and get away! You understand? This is the end of the world here! Abandon it! This is--the end!"

They ran into the turmoil of the palace.

In the chaos of those final hours Drake must have played a leading and a masterful part. He does not tell it so, but I think it is true. Authority--the routine of any official activity--was wholly gone. Of them all, it was Drake who held most of his wits, who gave orders and enforced obedience.

The time was very short. There was an hour--or even less--while the red dawn faded into full light of day. The monstrous hull of the Togaro ship projected like a black roof over all the scene. The shadow of it lay black upon the city, the palace and lake. It grew until up there in the sky nothing else could be seen.

Then it lifted. It moved up a few miles. It hovered up there. From one horizon to the other it loomed, a solid dark shape like a leaden cloud-bank. Its great pontoons were visible. The rectangles of floor windows showed in its bulging hull.

An expanding dark cloud. It soon was spread so wide that all across the sky was only one small section of its length--one pontoon, one window.

But during that hour Drake was accomplishing things in all the turmoil of people almost stricken of reason by terror. The space-ship was ready at last. The repairs fortunately had been almost finished before the panic began.

Messengers were sent into the burning city with orders to herd the crowd to the landing field. Local ships were sent to other cities. Some got started, some did not. But a few, at the very last, came back loaded with refugees. The young men of that army which Drake had expected to lead into smallness against Togaro, were now most useful of all. They understood the drugs and could be trusted with them. In the lower room of the palace Drake stood with the main supply of drugs. He dealt them out to this little army. A hundred or more. They stood, white-faced and silent; but alert, eager to obey.

"Alt, tell them--" Drake cursed his inability to speak with any fluency this native language. But Alt, always at his elbow, was swift to interpret. "Alt, tell these ten to get large, very large, and run to the water city."

Another ten, somewhere else; and others. In a size gigantic, they could circle this little globe on foot in an hour or so. They were to pick up as many of the people as possible and bring them back.

The lower room of the palace was dark now. The brief day was past. Night had come. Stars, and the moon. But the moon had only shown for a moment. The black cloud, the shape of the Togaro vehicle, was up there among the stars. The moon had swung crazily and was gone.

Into the palace windows came the mingled sounds of the night of chaos: screams, the roaring of futile orders in the garden, where a crowd was surging over the trampled neglected bodies. Darkness out there, painted by the lurid glare from the burning city.

Drake dispatched his men. They turned out into the frantic night, fought their way for space in the milling throngs, and took their drug. Soon they were rising as giants, moving cautiously to the open country, then running.

Drake had been to the landing field several times. The vehicle was ready. It lay gigantic, spreading all across the field. Thousands of refugees were in it. Others were momentarily arriving. Ten thousand now, the officials there told Drake. A thousand, hurt in the throngs or crushed by the passing of Togaro's giants, had also been carried here.

Drake sent the other men to search the city--to bring back from the littered streets any who seemed still alive. From the palace gardens and the nearest streets, the police were spurred to carry in the maimed.

A thousand people arrived while Drake stood there on the field. A local ship came down and landed with another thousand. Two of his men, gigantic, came dashing up with another thousand clinging to them whom they had collected in the near-by rural sections. Men and women, and children huddled in their parents' arms. Some had bundles of clothes, which for all this clinging to the back of a giant in the last hours of the end of a world they still were reluctant to abandon. Families, trudging aimlessly along country roads in the night or driving carts piled with household treasures, had been seized by these friendly giants and brought to the vehicle.

A lump was in Drake's throat. These few thousands of people, arriving here to what might or might not be ultimate safety--but there were ten million people here on this doomed little world!

Drake wondered how long he dared hold the vehicle here. The night itself was wildly crazy. He saw the moon vanish with a lunge. The stars were abnormally swaying. A wind was springing up from the lake, a violent, aimless wind. The water lashed against the shore.

The arriving giants reported storms in the other hemisphere. The sea had mounted and submerged many of the islands.

Then the next dawn came. The sun swung crazily up. Swiftly, abnormally mounting to the zenith. And there, against all reason of nature, it seemed to hang motionless; for an hour perhaps. Then it dropped visually sidewise, and came again, swaying like a pendulum.

The Togaro vehicle showed only occasionally now as a distant blur among the stars. Mita was wildly lurching. This was not day and night. A chaos!

Drake knew it was near the end. The sun presently hung motionless. It was growing hotter. Its heat and fiercely intensified light beat down. Soon they would be intolerable.

"A few hours more, Alt. That's all we can stay here."

Drake was horribly worried over Ahlma. She had pleaded:

"I am experienced with the drug. You must let me go, Drake. Let me get large--I will bring some of them back to safety--"

In his harassed activity he had yielded, had stood watching her huge robed figure running off into the night. She had not yet returned. A hundred times he had felt that he must drop everything and go after her. But he could not be spared; nor could he spare Alt.

Twice Drake had checked the embarking multitude and had ordered the vehicle to grow larger. It lay now across the field and over half a dozen near-by city streets. They had been cleared of people, and the growing vehicle had crushed the houses there into a wreckage of masonry.

The end was near. The sun was twice its normal size. The glaring heat was horrible. Jain, with other officials, were demanding the start.

"No! Not yet!" But Drake knew that not for very long could he force his way.

A few giants were still straggling in; Drake and Alt and a hundred other leaders were standing in a giant size at the vehicle doorway. The glare of sunlight was blinding. The lake was roaring with a hot, sulphurous wind plucking at it, lashing it.

But Ahlma had not come. Then off over the toy landscape, Drake saw the blur of her robe. Her head and shoulders mounted above the horizon. She came running with great leaps. As she arrived Drake saw the small figures upon her. Women and children, almost all of them.

"Ahlma!" He was her own size. He touched her; words would not come. But he knew that the safety of all these multitudes had meant less to him than the life of this one girl.

"Ahlma, go in. They'll unload them inside--There--the doorway--"

"Yes, Drake. How many are here?"

"We think about a hundred and ten thousand."

"Oh!"

It was so few, out of ten million!

Ahlma went into the ship. Drake turned to Jain. "Shall we start?"

"We must!"

A toy world lay wrecked at their feet. Clouds had come suddenly down. They swirled over the land--tumbling black mist, shot with lurid green and turgid yellow. But the sun beat through them. Rain had came in a downpour; but the sun beat it away and dried it up.

"Come in then, Jain."

No, there was another giant coming. He panted up with his cluster of refugees. And then another came.

They could wait no longer. There was a moment when no arriving giants were in sight. Ten million people on this doomed planet--only a few over a hundred thousand were here to depart. But the sun was too hot. The scene was strewn with people who had fallen in the heat. Drake was suddenly staggering. Jain pulled at him, and the door closed after them. From a stricken toy world, the vehicle struggled away.

The interior of the ship was a blur of murmuring sounds. A hundred or so giants, like Drake, to whom the ship was a thing a few hundred feet long; and a hundred and ten thousand people, small as ants, swarming it everywhere.

Drake stood at a window. He thinks he must have stood there for hours. The surface of Mita dropped away as the ship sped off into space. The stars showed, celestial space.

The Togaro vehicle was gone. Drake saw Mita through his window. A little ball. The sun lighted it upon one side, so that it showed as a reddish half moon, with the dark portion dimly visible.

Drake's ship was expanding. But after an hour or so its size-changing mechanism was shut off. It hovered--the Mitans in control of it lingering with fascinated gaze to witness the destruction of their world.

It took perhaps a few hours more. Mita was falling. The yellow-red ball of sun hung off there in the black field of space beneath Drake's window. Mita seemed above, falling slowly. The movement was hardly visible at first. But it accelerated. The two bodies visibly drawing together.

Then Mita was rushing. Drake thinks he remembers seeing a tail streaming out behind it. A tail, like a comet, as though by its fall it were turning incandescent and leaving a stream of glowing star-dust. Or perhaps with its rapid fall, its atmosphere was leaving it--dust-laden air streaming off into space where the dust caught the sunlight and glowed. There is no one to say.

A fall of millions of miles. It was that far, to Mita. I can fancy, in those last hours, the blazing heat withering everything upon the planet's surface. Its ten million inhabitants--save those few Drake had helped to rescue--I can think that long before the end, they were dead; shriveled, fallen in the heat. Smothered, choked by the gasses which must have polluted what little atmosphere was left.

Drake saw the end. The planet plunged. Fell like a plummet at the last and struck the blazing surface of its sun. There was a flash; a leaping, extra spurt of flame for just a moment in the sun's corona.

Then the sun blazed alone. What had been Mita was fused and gone. Non-existent!

From the window Drake turned shudderingly away. He had seen the end of a world.