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But there was no word of the second ship—the vessel under Ransdell’s coiven up for lost Ransdell, who also loved Eve, was presumed to have died somewhere in space with his brave coe boy who had become one of Tony’s 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 unknoorld where a nameless and dead race had once built cities—on a world which had been drifting through the absolute zero of space for nameless millenia They faced the probem of survival Responsibility for the future of the species was theirs

Resolutely, they turned to their prodigious task

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST DAY ON THE NEW PLANET

ELIOT JAMES sat at a metal desk inside the space ship which had conveyed a few score hus from the doomed earth to safety on the sun’s 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? T

hat 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 gone—sel, 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 neorld

“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 becoh established to permit the compilation of a formal history And yet it is with the most profound difficulty that I co in his new home

“What shall I say?

“That question in truth enerations as a cry at once of ecstasy and despair Ecstasy because even while the heavens fell upon theeous—because in the face of earthquakes, tornadoes, bloody battles and the uniinable holocaust of Destruction Day itself, they not only preserved whatever claienuity they escaped from the earth to this new planet, which has invaded and attached itself to our solar system

“And I am in despair not only because, so far as we can tell, all but one hundred and three members of the human race have perished, not only because my friends, my home, the cities that were familiar to me, the trees and flowers I knew, the rivers and the oceans, the scent of the wind and the accustomed aspects of the sky have forevermore disappeared fro down the eive rise, but for another reason: as vast, as stirring, as overwhel, the responsibility for half a billion years of evolution which terminated in man rests upon myself and one hundred and two others

“They stand there in the sunshine under the strange sky on our brown earth—forty-three —a ht seeners and do not know the words, but they also sing—with tears strea ‘The Processional’ and they sang ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ After that they sang ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ Then they sang ‘The Marseillaise’ with Duquesne leading—leading and bellowing the words, and weeping

“What a spectacle! Beside it, the picture of Leif Ericsson or Colunificance For those ancient explorers found the path to a mere continent, while this band has blazed a trail of fire through space to a new planet

“Cole Hendron is there, his rave under its thatch of nehitened hair No doubt replicas of Hendron’s head will be handed down through the ages, if ages are to follow us His daughter Eve has been near hi Drake one sees the essence of the change which has taken place in all the ay-hearted New Yorker is greatly changed So ned himself to death, and so e, audacity and good fortune, that he see, and it contains, side by side, ele unselfishness I have no doubt that if this colony survives, when the time comes to bury our leader and our hero,—the incomparable Cole Hendron,—it will be Drake who supersedes hireat person in that young e as a mere corollary of his remarkable character

“And now,”—the pen wavered,—“to what I iine whimsically as the new future readers of y This is our first day on Bronson Beta My impatience has exhausted my conscience I must lay down o out upon the face of this earth untrod by er”

Eliot Japlank that had been laid down froe metal cylinder had been melted by the blasts of its atoain A space of two or three hundred yards lay between the Ark and the cliff which beetled over the unknown sea In that space were the planetary pilgri Half of the the waters that rolled in from a nameless horizon The others were distributed over the landscape With a s from rock to rock, his pockets and his hands full of specimens of ferns and hted upon a new species of vegetation, and he knelt to gather it But his greediness resulted invariably in the spilling of specimens already collected, and the result was that he continued hopping about, dropping things and picking theanization of a distracted bird

Japlank and joined Tony, Eve and Cole Hendron

The leader of the expedition nodded to the writer “You certainly are a persistant fellow, James Some day I hope to find a situation so violent and unique that it keeps you fro on your diary”

“We have been through a number of such situations,” James answered