Darkness and Dawn | Page 9

gaze was directed at a certain spot which she knew well.
"Oh, I can even see--into some of the offices on the eighteenth floor!" cried she. "There,
look?" And she pointed. "That one near the front! I--I used to know--"
She broke short off. In her trembling hands the telescope sank. Stern saw that she was
very pale.
"Take me down!" she whispered. "I can't stand it any longer--I can't, possibly! The sight
of that wrecked office! Let's go down where I can't see that!"
Gently, as though she had been a frightened child, Stern led her round the platform to the
doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so to the wreckage and dust-strewn
confusion of what had been his office.
And there, his hand upon her shoulder, he bade her still be of good courage.
"Listen now, Beatrice," said he. "Let's try to reason this thing out together, let's try to
solve this problem like two intelligent human beings.
"Just what's happened, we don't know; we can't know yet a while, till I investigate. We
don't even know what year this is.
"Don't know whether anybody else is still alive, anywhere in the world. But we can find
out--after we've made provision for the immediate present and formed some rational plan
of life.
"If all the rest are gone, swept away, wiped out clean like figures on a slate, then why we
should have happened to survive whatever it was that struck the earth, is still a riddle far
beyond our comprehension."
He raised her face to his, noble despite all its grotesque disfigurements; he looked into
her eyes as though to read the very soul of her, to judge whether she could share this fight,
could brave this coming struggle.
"All these things may yet be answered. Once I get the proper data for this series of

phenomena, I can find the solution, never fear!
"Some vast world-duty may be ours, far greater, infinitely more vital than anything that
either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place, now, to mourn or fear! Rather it is to
read this mystery, to meet it and to conquer!"
Through her tears the girl smiled up at him, trustingly, confidingly. And in the last
declining rays of the sun that glinted through the window-pane, her eyes were very
beautiful.

CHAPTER V
EXPLORATION
Came now the evening, as they sat and talked together, talked long and earnestly, there
within that ruined place. Too eager for some knowledge of the truth, they, to feel hunger
or to think of their lack of clothing.
Chairs they had none, nor even so much as a broom to clean the floor with. But Stern,
first-off, had wrenched a marble slab from the stairway.
And with this plank of stone still strong enough to serve, he had scraped all one corner of
the office floor free of rubbish. This gave them a preliminary camping-place wherein to
take their bearings and discuss what must be done.
"So then," the engineer was saying as the dusk grew deeper, "so then, we'll apparently
have to make this building our headquarters for a while.
"As nearly as I can figure, this is about what must have happened. Some sudden, deadly,
numbing plague or cataclysm must have struck the earth, long, long ago.
"It may have been an almost instantaneous onset of some new and highly fatal
micro-organism, propagating with such marvelous rapidity that it swept the world clean
in a day--doing its work before any resistance could be organized or thought of.
"Again, some poisonous gas may have developed, either from a fissure in the earth's crust,
or otherwise. Other hypotheses are possible, but of what practical value are they now?
"We only know that here, in this uppermost office of the Tower, you and I have somehow
escaped with only a long period of completely suspended animation. How long? God
alone knows! That's a query I can't even guess the answer to as yet."
"Well, to judge by all the changes," Beatrice suggested thoughtfully, "it can't have been
less than a hundred years. Great Heavens!" and she burst into a little satiric laugh. "Am I
a hundred and twenty-four years old? Think of that!"

"You underestimate," Stern answered. "But no matter about the time question for the
present; we can't solve it now.
"Neither can we solve the other problem about Europe and Asia and all the rest of the
world. Whether London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and every other city, every other land, all
have shared this fate, we simply don't know.
"All we can have is a feeling of strong probability that life, human life I mean, is
everywhere extinct--save right here in this room!
"Otherwise, don't you see, men would have made their way back here again,