The Moon "Falls"
There came, finally, the thing I had been dreading, and if we had been
even a few feet nearer the sea level, we should have perished. The moon
filled the sky above us and we felt moisture falling on us.
"Rain!" exclaimed Jim. "No, it can't be. It's salt!"
"Tidal wave," I said, "and it's reached almost to the tops of the
mountains. We'll get more of it the next time the moon comes around."
A few hours later there was a new sound added to the roaring and
screeching of the wind. We looked at each other.
"It's come," I said. "Let's get inside the cabin. We'll be as safe
there as anywhere."
We had barely scrambled in and closed the door when simultaneously
with the first golden line of the moon over our eastern horizon there
appeared a white wall of turbulent water. It seemed higher because we
were looking up at it, but I believe now it was not more than six feet.
It poured down toward us while we wondered what it would do to us. As
it happened, it did nothing of consequence. It swept around the lower
part of the plane and came up over the cabin floor. Then it swept on,
following the rapidly moving moon toward the west.
"Next time it's going to get us," I remarked to Jim.
But there was no next time. We had seen the moon for the last time,
though of course we did not then know it.
It was about four hours later that the moon and the earth collided.
Fortunately for us, we were lying flat on the rocks in our sleeping
bags. It was our only way of keeping warm, and besides, we had thought
it better to get what rest we could before the moon appeared again
with its accompanying tidal wave. As I said, we had got so used to
earthquakes that we did not notice them.
Then it happened....
When I recovered consciousness, at first, I could not think where I
was. I looked around in bewilderment and at the same moment realized
that a warm rain was drenching me. My bones ached terribly. A few feet
away Jim lay as if he were dead.
I crawled out of my sleeping bag and went over and shook him. He opened
his eyes and looked at me blankly for a moment. Then he groaned and
tried to grin. "So we're not dead after all?"
"We'll be drowned if we stay here," I said wearily. "Let's try to get
inside the cabin. My, it's hot!"
"Hot?" questioned Jim, trying to rise. "So it is. I think all my bones
are broken."
After half rising and half crawling we made our way to the plane.
There was not a trace of ice or snow. The sky was covered with heavy
low-lying clouds from which the rain was pouring, but the burnished
copper glow had entirely disappeared. It was a perfectly normal sky, or
would have been in the tropics. It was daylight, but there was no sun
to be seen.
We had neither of us any clothes except those we wore. We stripped off
our dripping outer things and let them lie where they fell. There was
nothing else to do with them until the rain stopped. We found that
heavy woolen underclothing was not much more comfortable than furs in
that temperature. We settled down in the cabin and proceeded to make
the best of things, quite content to be alive.
It was evident that the moon and the earth had met, and that the
earth had come out of the encounter with less damage than anyone had
anticipated. The rise in temperature had been expected. Undoubtedly it
was much greater elsewhere than in the Arctic.
* * * * *
Two Survivors
Jim and I compared notes as to our actual experiences at the moment
of the collision. We both remembered the terrible shock and then had
known nothing further. We agreed that except for the shaking up we
felt no bad effects from the spell of unconsciousness. Scientists have
since assumed that in addition to the shock there was the result of
the sudden displacement of the fluids in the inner ear which establish
equilibrium. There is no reason to suppose that the experience was not
universal among those who survived.
Sitting in our monoplane cabin on the top of a Labrador mountain,
wiping the perspiration from our faces and waiting for the rain to
cease, we had no knowledge of the fearful destruction which almost
wiped out all human and animal life. Others have told of tidal waves of
boiling water, of the mountains that melted and the great craters which
opened in the earth, belching forth molten lava. We knew nothing of
this.
The first thing beside the temperature, that told us we were in a
different world, was that night did not come. We had let our watches
run down, but as the hours passed and daylight remained with us, we
began to wonder. Later in the year we would have expected short nights
in this latitude, but now there should be six hours of darkness out of
the twenty-four.
However, it did not grow dark, and it continued to rain. The idea of
what had actually occurred dawned on me even before we got our first
glimpse of the sun. That the revolution of a planet on its axis should
correspond with the period of its revolution around the sun was quite
easily understandable as a theoretical proposition. Its actual effect,
the axial revolution of the earth becoming 365 days, could hardly have
been predicted.
While the rain continued, Jim and I made no effort to leave our
mountain top. I think it was several hours after we had returned to
consciousness that we noticed the wind was no longer blowing. We had
got so used to its sound that we rather took it for granted, I suppose,
and paid no attention to it.
We were sitting in the cabin, listening to the beating rain, when Jim
suddenly exclaimed, "Where's that wind?"
"What?" I began, and then paused. There was a dead silence outside.
"It's stopped, apparently," I said after a moment. "I suppose that
means we can see what's happened without being blown to pieces. Come
on."
I jumped out of the cabin and raced through the pelting rain up the
slope of the depression in which we were sheltered. I am not certain
what I expected to see when I looked eastward, but it was certainly not
that which lay before me.
The ocean had swept over all the land east of the mountains. It had
risen at least three thousand feet, and angry waves were tossing fifty
feet below the surface of our mountain. They were beaten down by the
rain, or the spray would have warned us of the ocean's nearness before
we saw it.
The rain made it difficult to see for any distance, but it was
evident that desolation lay before us. Still, we were prepared for
that and not discouraged. The steaming water was an evidence that the
water's temperature was higher than that of the air. We had no way of
determining what the exact temperature was, but I am sure it did not
become high enough in that region to destroy marine life. We stood for
some time looking out over the ocean in silence.
"It's sure dreary looking," said Jim presently. "I suppose they were
all drowned," sweeping his hand in the direction of the settlements we
had left. "I'd got to know them well enough so I liked them all," he
continued rather sadly.
"No use thinking about it," I answered. "They at least had a gorgeous
funeral. It isn't at all certain yet that we're much better off."
"Why? We're alive."
I had been looking west, over valleys and hills steaming like the
ocean. I pointed in that direction. "We don't know whether there is
anything left except ocean and some land like that. I doubt whether we
could subsist very long here."
"There must be animals of some sort we could hunt."
"How long will they live, do you suppose? As soon as these clouds
clear away the temperature will go up to an enormous figure, with the
sun beating down continuously and no night."
"How hot do you suppose it will get?"
"You can guess about it as well as I can. A hundred and fifty degrees,
maybe higher. Certainly hot enough to kill all animal and vegetable
life."
* * * * *
Off to a New Land
The tragedy seemed so overwhelming, as I stood on that sandstone cliff
and looked out over the water which had buried Newfoundland and Nova
Scotia and, as far as I knew, the whole civilized world, that it hardly
seemed worth-while for Jim and me to make an effort to survive.
He looked at me curiously. "Buck up, old boy. Things can't be any worse
than they seem, and they may be better. We can die fighting, anyway."
"I suppose we'll have to do that, but it hardly seems worth the
effort." I thought over the situation for a moment. "I guess the first
thing to do is to get the plane in condition to take off as soon as it
stops raining. We'll fly toward the pole."
"Maybe we'll find some other people who escaped," he suggested.
"Probably," I replied as we started back to the plane.
I taxied up the gently sloping top of the mountain to a position where
we would have room for the take-off. Then we went over it inch by inch
without finding anything wrong. I tuned up the engine and it ran as
smoothly as a tabby cat purring. We had food enough for several weeks
and fuel to carry us about fifteen hundred miles.
When we had satisfied ourselves that we could leave when we wanted to,
Jim and I sat down on the rocks and lighted our pipes. We had become
skilful in doing that in a driving rain even when the tobacco was damp.
There had been no opportunity to dry clothes, and we did not care to
wear wet ones even in that steaming temperature. Sickness was one thing
we could not afford to risk. Deprived of his normal senses it does
not take man long to revert to savagery. As it happened, after the
first feeling of strangeness, going without clothes seemed a perfectly
natural and sensible thing to do.
Other inhibitions carried over from the destroyed world were harder to
get rid of, as our conscientious lawmakers found out later, when they
began to reconstruct a civilization based on reason alone. However,
such considerations were far enough from the thoughts of Jim and me
as we sat there, looking at the sky where the clouds were beginning to
break away.
"The rain's stopping," I said. "We won't be able to stay here much
longer." Even as I spoke there was a gleam of sunshine.
"That means we've got to decide exactly what we'd better do," said Jim.
"Yes, and we can't afford to make a mistake. If we had enough fuel
we might try for Norway. Extreme northern Europe had a better chance
of surviving than the rest of the world. No use talking about that,
though."
Jim was silent for a minute. "You'll have to decide what's best
yourself. Whatever it is will be all right with me."
It seemed likely that if any concerted effort to escape had been made
by persons who had access to airplanes and dirigibles--and I had no
doubt there had been such an effort--they would have laid a course for
Greenland. Settlements on the coast of that great island had doubtless
been destroyed by the tidal waves, but the interior would have been a
refuge for anyone able to reach it. As far as I could remember, there
was not much known of the interior, except that it was mountainous
and permanently covered with glaciers. Even an ice covering like that
could not long survive the temperatures we were now experiencing. It
was possible that it would now be entirely habitable and that there we
might find refugees from the United States.
The nearest settlement on Greenland to our present location was
Frederiksdal, at the southern point of the island. I had not much hope
that it had escaped destruction, and I decided to set a course that
would bring us to one of the northern settlements. I outlined my plans
to Jim and he agreed that there was nothing to be done that seemed more
promising.
I remember that I had a feeling almost of panic as the plane arose and
sailed over the strange, turbulent steaming ocean. I felt as if we had
been carried back to the early days of the world, before continents
were formed and life emerged from chaos.
That feeling lasted only for a few minutes. The plane rose higher and
the ocean began to look as oceans always had looked. The clouds were
scattered and the sun was shining down on us.