This Way to the End Times Карен Хабер (2024)

This Way to The End Times

CLASSIC TALES OF THE APOCALYPSE

EDITED BY Robert Silverberg

High Praise for This Way to The End Times

A PESSIMIST’S DREAM comes true in 21 exceptional tales of Earth’s devastation and humans’ inventive, and often ironically self-destructive, ways of surviving. Themes of religion, flooding, Adam and Eve, Atlantis, aliens, misogyny, and government oppression permeate the collection, which contains works written between 1906 and 2016 by science fiction legends as well as new authors. . . . These stunning stories contemplate survival while questioning whether life is worth saving, and many have such rich ideas and settings that they could easily spark full-length novels.

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review

APOCALYPTIC FICTION IS still a very hot trend, but as award-winning sf writer and editor of this collection Silverberg notes in the introduction, it’s hardly a new one: “Humankind seems to take a certain grisly delight in stories about the end of the world, and the market in apocalyptic prophecy has been bullish for thousands, or, more likely, millions of years. . . .” With its range of contributors, this is a much needed volume that will both satisfy the high demand for apocalyptic tales and remind readers of the actual breadth and depth of this literature of the end of the world.

—ALA BOOKLIST, Starred Review

THE STORIES ARE uniformly good and frequently excellent. . . . The variety of ways in which these stories choose to end the world offers a great deal—nightmarish, funny, lonely, or hopeful—for the imagination. Wonderfully written, surprisingly varied apocalyptic tales.

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

SCIENCE FICTION LEGEND Robert Silverberg has picked the best of the very best stories for this volume. Absolute gold, from first word to last gasp!

—JONATHAN MABERRY, New York Times bestselling author of Mars One and Kill Switch

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

— GENESIS 6: 5–7

Introduction

BY ROBERT SILVERBERG

THIS BOOK’S EPIGRAPH COMES FROM the one of the earliest pages of the Bible. We are told of the creation of the world in the first chapter of Genesis and by chapter six, after God has brought forth Adam and Eve and their progeny has multiplied greatly, the Lord has tired of His handiwork and, as quoted at the beginning of this book, resolves to cleanse the planet of it by sending a terrible deluge upon our ancestors.

Fortunately for us, He is not bent on total destruction: Noah is instructed to build an ark and bring his family aboard, and it is duly stocked with a host of creatures, “clean beasts and . . . beasts that are not clean . . . fowls . . . every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Two by two they go aboard, dogs and cats and sheep and, I suppose, elephants and wombats and aardvarks as well, so that when the waters of the flood recede the world can begin anew, and here we are in what we Westerners call the twenty-first century, looking forward to the next terminal convulsion of our Maker’s mood.

The second volume of the Good Book lets us know that another apocalypse will eventually be heading our way. In the Second Epistle of Peter, chapter three, verse ten, we are advised that “the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which, the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” And a few lines later, St. Peter tells us that inasmuch as all things thus shall be destroyed, it behooves us “to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.” We should, we are told, “look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Once again we are given hope of ultimate redemption, although apparently it will be provided us in some other universe.

The apocalyptic warnings of the Bible, which culminate most spectacularly in the technicolor wonders of the Revelation of St. John the Divine (“And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. . . .”), were already ancient when the Scriptures, both New and Old, were set down a couple of thousand years ago. For whatever reason, humankind seems to take a certain grisly delight in stories about the end of the world, and the market in apocalyptic prophecy has been a bullish one for thousands or, more likely, millions of years. Even the most primitive of protohuman creatures, back there in the Africa of Ardipithecus and her descendants, must have come eventually to the realization that each of us must die; and from there to the concept that the world itself must perish in the fullness of time was probably not an enormous intellectual leap for those hairy bipedal creatures of long ago. Around their prehistoric campfires our remote hominid ancestors surely would have told each other tales of how the great fire in the sky would become even greater one day and consume the universe, or, once our less distant forebears had moved along out of the African plains to chillier Europe, how the glaciers of the north would someday move implacably down to crush them all. Even an eclipse of the sun was likely to stir brief apocalyptic excitement.

I suppose there is a kind of strange comfort in such thoughts: “If I must die, how good that all of you must die also!” But the chief value of apocalyptic visions, I think, lies elsewhere than in that sort of we-will-all-go-together-when-we-go spitefulness, for as we examine the great apocalyptic myths we see that not only death but resurrection is usually involved in the story—a bit of eschatological comfort, of philosophical reassurance that existence, though finite and relatively brief for each individual, is not totally pointless. Yes, the tale would run, we have done evil things and the gods are angry and the world is going to perish, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, but then will come a reprieve, a second creation, a rebirth of life, a better world than the one that has just been purged.

What sort of end-of-the-world stories our primordial preliterate ancestors told is something we will never know, but the oldest such tale that has come down to us, which is found in the 4,500-year-old Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, is an account of a great deluge that drowns the whole Earth, save only one man, Ziusudra by name, who manages to save his family and set things going again. Very probably the deluge story had its origins in memories of some great flood that devastated Sumer and its Mesopotamian neighbors in prehistoric times, but that is only speculation. What is certain is that the theme can be found again in many later versions: the Babylonian story gives the intrepid survivor the name of Utnapishtim, the Hebrews called him Noah, to the ancient Greeks he was Deucalion, and in the Vedic texts of India he is Manu. The details differ, but the essence is always the same: the gods, displeased with the world, resolve to destroy it, but then relent and bring mankind forth for a second try.

Floods are not the only apocalypses that ancient myths offer us. The Norse tales give us a terrible frost, the Fimbulwinter, in which all living things die except a man and a woman who survive by hiding in a tree; they follow the usual redemptionist course and repeople the world, but then comes an even greater cataclysm, Ragnarök, the doom of the gods themselves, in which the stars fall, the earth sinks into the sea, and fire consumes everything—only to be followed by yet another rebirth and an era of peace and plenty. And then there is St. John’s Book of Revelation in the Christian tradition, in which the wrath of God is visited upon the Earth in a host of ways (fire, plague, hail, drought, earthquakes, flood, and much more), leading to the final judgment and the redemption of the righteous. The Aztecs, too, had myths of the destruction of the world by fire—several times over, in fact—and so did the Mayans. It was not very long ago, as I write this, that much popular excitement was being stirred by an alleged Mayan prediction that the next apocalypse was due in 2012. Perhaps there was an error in translation from the Mayan glyphs, though, because we appear to have come through that one intact.

Since apocalyptic visions are nearly universal in the religious literature of the world, and probably always have been, it’s not surprising that they should figure largely in the fantasies of imaginative storytellers. Even before the term “science fiction” had been coined, stories of universal or near-universal extinction brought about not by the anger of the deities but by the innate hazards of existence were being written and achieving wide popularity. Nineteenth-century writers were particularly fond of them. Thus we find such books as Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia (1805) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), which was written under the shadow of a worldwide epidemic of cholera that raged from 1818 to 1822. Edgar Allan Poe sent a comet into the Earth in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839). The French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s astonishing novel of 1893, La Fin du Monde, or Omega in its English translation, brought the world to the edge of doom—but only to the edge—as another giant comet crosses our path. H. G. Wells told a similar story of near-destruction, almost surely inspired by Flammarion’s, in “The Star” (1897). In his classic novel The Time Machine (1895) Wells had already taken his time traveler to the end of life on Earth and beyond. (“All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”) Another who must certainly have read Flammarion is his compatriot Jules Verne, who very likely drew on the latter sections of Omega for his novella, “The Eternal Adam” (1905). Here Verne espouses a cyclical view of the world: Earth is destroyed by a calamitous earthquake and flood, but the continent of Atlantis wondrously emerges from the depths to provide a new home for the human race, which after thousands of years of toil rebuilds civilization; and we are given a glimpse, finally, of a venerable scholar of the far future looking back through the archives of humanity, “bloodied by the innumerable hardships suffered by those who had gone before him,” and coming, “slowly, reluctantly, to an intimate conviction of the eternal return of all things.”

The eternal return! It is the theme of so much of this apocalyptic literature. That phrase of Verne’s links his story to the core of Flammarion’s own belief that our own little epoch is “an imperceptible wave on the immense ocean of the ages” and that mankind’s destiny is, as we see in Omega’s closing pages, to be born again and again into universe after universe, each to pass on in its turn and be replaced, for time goes on forever and there can be neither end nor beginning.

Rebirth after catastrophe is to be found, also, in M. P. Shiel’s magnificent novel The Purple Cloud (1901), in which we are overwhelmed by a mass of poisonous gas, leaving only one man—Adam is his name, of course—as the ostensible survivor, until he finds his Eve and life begins anew. No such renewal is offered in Frank Lillie Pollock’s terminally apocalyptic short story “Finis” (1906), though, which postulates a gigantic central star in the galaxy whose light has been heading toward us for an immense span of time and now finally arrives, so that “there, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.” James Elroy Flecker (1908) had the entire human race wearying of its existence and committing mass suicide.

There is ever so much more. Few readers turn to apocalyptic tales these days for reassurance that once the sins of mankind have been properly punished, a glorious new age will open; but, even so, the little frisson that a good end-of-the-world story supplies is irresistible to writers, and the bibliography of apocalyptic fantasy is an immense one. Garrett P. Serviss’s The Second Deluge (1912) drowns us within a watery nebula. G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Coming of the Ice” (1926) brings the glaciers back with a thoroughness that makes the Norse Fimbulwinter seem like a light snowstorm. Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s When Worlds Collide (1933) tells us of an awkward astrophysical event with very unpleasant consequences for our planet. Edmond Hamilton’s “In the World’s Dusk” (1936) affords a moody vision of the end of days, millions of years hence, when one lone man survives and “a white salt desert now covered the whole of Earth. A cruel glaring plain that stretched eye-achingly to the horizons . . . .” Robert A. Heinlein’s story “The Year of the Jackpot” (1952) puts the end much closer—1962, in fact—when bad things begin to happen in droves all around the world, floods and typhoons and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions worthy of the Book of Revelation, culminating in a lethal solar catastrophe. J. T. McIntosh’s One in Three Hundred (1954) also has the sun going nova, at novel length. And, of course, the arrival of atomic weapons in 1945 set loose such a proliferation of nuclear-holocaust stories that it would take many pages to list them all.

MODERN-DAY WRITERS CONTINUE TO FIND literary rewards in dancing through the apocalypse. A wide assortment of such jolly visions of ultimate disaster is presented here, along with the earlier classics by Verne, Pollock, and Flecker. Among them are Brian W. Aldiss’s view of a world flattened beneath the enormous body of an alien invader, Ursula K. Le Guin’s lively take on the theory of continental drift, Dale Bailey’s depiction of the flood to end all floods, Philip Latham’s meticulous account of the last days of our sun, and more than a dozen more.

The possible variations on the theme are endless. As Robert Frost wrote nearly a century ago,

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Fire or ice, one or the other—who knows? The final word on finality is yet to be written. But what is certain is that we will go on speculating about it . . . right until the end.

—Robert Silverberg

The Eternal Adam

— JULES VERNE —

TRANSLATED BY WILLIS T. BRADLEY

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

JULES VERNE (1828–1905) IS UNIVERSALLY considered one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction, although in fact only a few of his sixty-odd novels can be considered to belong to that category. Certainly A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Off on a Comet, Robur the Conqueror, and several other Verne books must be regarded as pioneering works of science fiction. But the preponderance of his output consists of adventure novels published under the collective title of Voyages Extraordinaires and ranging through every part of the world (including some that still counted as unexplored territory in his day) and, though they are unfailingly entertaining, the scientific and speculative content of most of them is negligible.

“The Eternal Adam,” however, one of the last works of Verne’s old age, is science fiction beyond doubt, and a masterpiece of the genre. So far as we know he began writing it in 1904, when he was seventy-six years old and in failing health, troubled by cataracts, diabetes, and the lingering effects of a bullet wound received at the hand of a crazed nephew. Whether he actually lived to complete it is a matter of extensive debate among Verne scholars. At one point he had told his Parisian publisher that he was working on a story called “In Two Thousand Years’ Time,” but no manuscript under that title survives, and “The Eternal Adam” is actually set 20,000 years in the future, not 2,000. When Verne died, on March 24, 1905, at the age of seventy-seven, he left behind a stack of unpublished novels, some of them incomplete, some of them not, and a handful of short stories. Over the next few years his son Michel, a considerable writer in his own right, saw most of this material into print, and from an examination of Verne’s original manuscripts it is possible to see that Michel rewrote a good deal of his father’s work and may have done nearly the entire texts of some of the posthumous books.

“The Eternal Adam” saw its first publication in October 1910 in a magazine called La Revue de Paris, and then later that year as part of a collection of stories entitled Yesterday and Tomorrow. Verne wrote very few short stories; only one collection appeared in his lifetime, Dr. Ox’s Experiment of 1874, and a handful of others were used as fillers to accompany various of his novels. Two of the six stories in Yesterday and Tomorrow are surely by Verne, but the other four, including “The Eternal Adam” were part of the group of unpublished manuscripts he left behind at his death, and, as noted, no one is quite sure how much of them was written by Verne and how much by his son under his father’s far more illustrious name. The eerie and deeply moving “Eternal Adam,” in which archaeologists from a civilization of the far future discover a chronicle of the destruction of the twentieth-century world by earthquakes and floods, is so dark in tone that Michel Verne, in his introductory note to it in Yesterday and Tomorrow, was constrained to point out its “rather pessimistic conclusions, contrary to the proud optimism that inspired the Extraordinary Voyages.” Yet the story, dark as it is, demonstrates true Vernian optimism after all, since mankind does manage to survive the terrible catastrophes he visits upon us, and emerges eventually from disaster to build a new civilization.

“The Eternal Adam” did not appear in English until it was translated by Willis T. Bradley more than forty years after its initial French publication. The Bradley translation was published in the March 1957 issue of an obscure and short-lived science-fiction magazine called Saturn, from which it is reprinted here.

—R. S.

THE ETERNAL ADAM

THE ZARTOG SOFR-AI-SR—THAT IS, THE learned Doctor Sofr, youngest member of the hundred-and-first generation of his lineage—was making his way at a comfortable pace along the chief street in Basidra, capital of the Hars-Iten-Schu, the Empire (as we should call it) of the Four seas. These four seas, the Tubelone, or Northern, the Ehone, or Southern, the Spone, or Eastern, and the Merone, or Western, bounded the vast, irregularly shaped continent, the limits of which (to reckon in terms known to my reader) reached, in longitude, as far as the fortieth degree east and the seventieth degree west, and, in latitude, as far as the fifty-fourth parallel north and the fifty-fifth parallel south.

The extent of none of these seas could be guessed, even roughly, since each merged with each, and a navigator putting out from any one of the four coasts, and sailing always in a straight line, must gain the diametrically opposite coast. For, over the entire surface of the globe, save for one useless islet in the Merone-Schu, there existed no other land than that of the Hars-Iten-Schu.

Sofr was walking very slowly, first of all because the day was warm: they were entering the hot season, and at Basidra, situated on the shore of the Spone-Schu, or Eastern Sea, less than twenty degrees north of the equator, a fierce heat fell from the sun, then approaching its zenith.

But, even more than his weariness in that high heat, the very burden of his thoughts was slowing the steps of Sofr, the scholarly Zartog. While absent-mindedly mopping his forehead, he was turning over in his mind what had been said at the meeting that had just been held, during which so many gifted speakers (among whom, to his honor, he had himself numbered) had hailed the hundred-and-ninety-fifth year of the Empire.

Some, for topic, had chosen history, not only that of the Empire, but the entire history, indeed, of mankind. They had told again the story of the Mahart-Iten-Schu, the Land of the Four Seas originally divided among uncounted savage peoples who lived in wild loneliness, having almost no knowledge of each other. Back to those folk were traced the most ancient traditions. Of still earlier things, nothing was known. True, the natural sciences were now beginning to make out some light, hardly more than a feeble glimmer in the baffling darkness of those earlier times. But even so, by their very remoteness they shunned truly historical study. True history could first take root only in a dim memory of those scattered ancient clans.

During more than eight thousand years, by degrees more fully told and more sharp in detail, the story of the Mahart-Iten-Schu was nothing but a succession of strife and warfare, first between man and man, then between family and family, and finally between tribe and tribe—every living being, every group, small or large, having, in the course of the ages, no other goal than to prove its strength against its rivals, and striving, with diverse and often contrary success, to bring them under its own laws.

On this side of that span of eight thousand years, men’s memories became a little keener. At the outset of the second of the four periods into which the annals of the Mahart-Iten-Schu were commonly divided, legend began to deserve more justly the name of history. But still, whether history or legend, the recitals seldom varied: they told always of bloodshed and butchery—no longer, it is true, of tribe by tribe, but from then on of people by people. So, all in all, this second period was not much different from the first.

And it was much the same thing with the third, brought to a close just short of two hundred years ago, having lasted through nearly six centuries. It differed only in that it was more brutal, a period during which gathered into endless armies, and fired with endless fury, men had drenched the earth with their blood.

THE FACT WAS THAT A little less than eight centuries previous to the day when the Zartog Sofr was strolling along the chief street in Basidra, mankind had felt itself ripe for a vast and decisive effort. By that time, brute force having already fulfilled a part of its necessary task, and the weak having bent before the strong, the men of the Mahart-Iten-Schu formed three distinct and fairly matched nations, within each of which the passing of time had softened the differences between the winners and the losers of former days. It was about then that one of those nations had undertaken to subdue its neighbors. The men who dwelt in the middle of the Mahart-Iten-Schu, the Andarti-Ha-Sammgor, or Men with Bronze Faces, strove ruthlessly to enlarge their frontiers, within which their fiery and fertile people were being squeezed. In succession, and at the cost of hundred-year wars, they had conquered the Andarti-Mahart-Horis, the Men of the Snow Country, who lived in the land to the south, and the Andarti-Mitra-Psul, the Men of the Fixed Star, whose country lay to the north and west.

And nearly two hundred years had gone by since the last desperate uprising of those two peoples had been bloodily put down, and the land had known for the first time what it was to have peace. Now came the fourth historical period. When everyone had been drawn into a single Empire, with everyone subject to the law of Basidra, there followed a gradual blending of the three races. No longer did anyone speak of Men with Bronze Faces, or Men of the Snow Country, or Men of the Fixed Star. The land now held a single people, the Andarti-Iten-Schu, the Men of the Four Seas.

At the present moment, of course, after two centuries of peace, a fifth period was perhaps in the making. Rumors were afloat that furtive trouble-makers were at work. Certain thinkers had arisen with ideas calculated to reawaken memories of things long forgotten. The old feeling for race was being brought to life, but given a new character by new words. There was much talk of throw-backs, blood-ties, racism, and so forth—all terms of fresh coinage, which, since they answered a need, had promptly been accepted. Depending upon what men had in common, whether bodily likeness, agreement of the mind, shared interests, or simply the accident of living together in the same climate, they were forming groups that little by little were gaining in membership and beginning to show signs of restlessness.

What might be the drift of this new trend? Was the Empire to be torn apart so soon after its birth? Was the Mahart-Iten-Schu to be split, as in the old days, into a great number of nations? Or must it again have recourse to the dreadful slaughter that for so many thousands of years had turned this land into a charnel house?

WITH A SHAKE OF HIS head, Sofr rejected such thoughts. Neither he nor other men knew anything of the future. Why, then, grieve in advance over what might never happen? Besides, this was no day to dwell upon grim forebodings. This was a day for joy, when all should give thanks for the greatness and goodness of Mogar-Si, Twelfth Emperor of the Hars-Iten-Schu, whose staff of office was guiding his people toward a high destiny.

For a Zartog, more than for most, there was much reason to take the cheerful view. After the historians had done reciting the chronicles of the Mahart-Iten-Schu, a half dozen scientists had taken the floor. Each had given a summary of human knowledge in his own special field, and had stressed how far mankind had been brought by centuries of effort. And surely, if the first speakers, in retracing the slow, winding road by which man had made his escape from his animal state, had touched upon some shameful matters, the later speakers had fed in full measure the lawful pride of their hearers.

Yes, most truly, it was a wonderful thing to put man as he once had been—when first he came, naked and unarmed, upon earth—alongside of what he was today. Down through the ages, despite his quarrels and his murderous feuds, not for an instant had he broken off his struggle against nature, and ceaselessly had he enlarged his area of conquest. Two hundred years ago he had been still comparatively crawling; but then he had found his feet, and his triumphal march had begun. The power of his leaders, the soundness of his laws, and the resulting worldwide peace had given a remarkable push to science. No longer relying almost solely upon the strength of his body, man had learned to win with his mind; he had summoned councils, instead of wasting himself in senseless wars. Thus, in the course of the last two centuries, he had moved ever more rapidly through the realm of knowledge toward the day when he should hold the physical world in bondage.

As Sofr followed the long street in Basidra under the scorching sun, his mind swiftly sketched the chart of this fulfillment.

First of all, back somewhere in the Age of Darkness, man had hit upon the art of writing, with the object of fixing and transmitting his thoughts; next—and this was more than five hundred years ago—he had found the means of spreading the written word by way of any number of copies, all struck from a single plate. From this invention, really, flowed all the others. Thanks to it, minds were stirred and broadened, every man’s knowledge was increased by that of his neighbor, and the number of new findings, both theoretical and practical, could no longer be counted.

Man had dug deep into the earth and was drawing out coal, that great source of heat. He had set free the latent energy of water, and now steam was pulling heavy trains on ribbons of steel and was giving motion to all kinds of powerful, delicate, precise machines; with these machines man could weave vegetable fibers into cloth and work his will on metals, marble, and granite. In a less applied field, or at least less directly applied, he was gradually solving the riddle of numbers and exploring the infinite range of mathematical truth. With this tool he had taken the measure of the heavens. He now knew that the sun was only a star gravitating through space, obedient to rigorous laws, sweeping a train of seven planets along its flaming orbit. He knew the art of combining certain crude substances in a way to form new substances having nothing in common with the old, and of separating certain other substances into their simple components. He was submitting sound, heat, and light to analysis and was beginning to determine the nature and laws of each. Fifty years ago he had learned how to produce the force so terribly active in thunder and lightning, and at once he had made it his slave: already this mysterious agent was carrying written messages over immeasurable distances; tomorrow it should carry sound; day after tomorrow, no doubt, light. Yes, man was great—greater than the immense universe that one day, and soon, he should govern as a master!

BUT EVEN THEN, IF THE whole truth were to be grasped, this final problem would have to be resolved: Who was man, this master of the world? Whence came he? Toward what unknown goal was his unflagging effort driving him?

This was exactly the vast problem that the Zartog Sofr had discussed near the close of the ceremonial meeting. To be sure, he had only skimmed the surface, for such a problem was at present insoluble, and doubtless it would remain so for a long time to come. The solution of some related problems, however, would help clear up the mystery. And had not the Zartog Sofr been the one to make the most promising advance when, after having systematized and codified the patient observations of earlier investigators and his own personal findings, he had come out with his law of the evolution of living substance—a law that was everywhere accepted and no longer met with a single opponent?

His theory stood upon a threefold foundation.

First of all, upon the earth sciences, which, born on the day when digging in the interior of the earth began, had progressed along with the development of mining operations. The crust of the globe had been so thoroughly studied that its age could be unhesitatingly fixed at four hundred million years, and that of the Mahart-Iten-Schu, in its present form, at twenty thousand years. At an earlier period this continent had been sleeping under the waters of the sea, as witness the thick bed of marine clay that uninterruptedly covered the underlying beds of rock. By what mechanism had it been thrust up above the waves? Perhaps by the contracting of the globe as it cooled. But, however that might be, the emersion of the Mahart-Iten-Schu must be considered a certainty.

The life sciences had furnished Sofr with the two other foundations of his system. By proving the close kinship of all plants and the equally close kinship of all animals. Sofr had gone farther: he had discovered evidence that nearly all existing vegetable life had descended directly from an ancestral marine plant, and that nearly all land or aerial animals came from ancient marine animals. By a slow but continuous evolution, the animals had adapted themselves little by little to living conditions at first close to, but afterwards more remote from, those known to their forbears; and so they had fathered most of the present species of animals and birds.

Unhappily, this ingenious theory was not flawless. That most living things, whether of the animal or the vegetable order, had descended from marine ancestors seemed not to be denied; but the same could not be said of all, for there did exist a number of plants and animals seemingly unrelated to any known aquatic species. Though they might be explained as freaks, here was one of the two weak points in the system.

Man—and Sofr did not pretend otherwise—was the other weak point. There was no bringing together of man and animal. Of course, the basic essential functions, such as respiration, digestive processes, and locomotion, were the same; but there was a gulf between the physical development of the two orders that could not be crossed: a gulf between the number, disposition, and capacity of organs. Whereas, by a chain with only a few links missing, the great majority of animals could be joined with the progenitors that had come from the sea, such a linkage for man was not to be found. Hence, to make the theory of evolution complete, it was necessary to conceive, without a shred of evidence, of a hypothetical stock common to both mankind and the denizens of the sea. And nothing, absolutely nothing, indicated that such a stock had ever existed.

AT ONE TIME, SOFR HAD hoped to find evidence under the soil that would be favorable to his thesis. At his urging, and under his direction, excavations had been carried on for a long period of years, only to turn up results exactly opposite to those expected by their promoter.

After having passed through a thin skin of humus formed by the rotting of plants and animals similar or comparable to those seen every day, his diggers had got to the thick bed of marine clay, wherein the vestiges of former life were of a different kind. In the clay had been found no more of the existing flora or fauna, but instead a vast accumulation of fossils that were exclusively marine, with congeners still living, for the most part, in the oceans surrounding the Mahart-Iten-Schu.

What else must be concluded, if not that the scientists had been right in teaching that the continent had formerly served as part of the floor of those same oceans, and that Sofr had not been wrong, consequently, in affirming the marine origin of contemporary animals and plants?

But unfortunately for the attempt to fit man into the system, still another finding had been made. Scattered throughout the humus, and down into the topmost portion of the clay deposit, innumerable human bones had been brought to light. There was nothing exceptional in the structure of these fragments of skeletons, and Sofr had long since given up hope of finding among them intermediary types that might prove his theory: these bones were the bones of men, no more, no less.

At the same time, something totally unexpected had been confirmed. Reaching back to a certain age, which could be roughly put at two or three thousand years, the older the bones, the smaller the skulls uncovered. But, inconsistently, beyond this period the progression was reversed. From that point on, the further the retreat into the past, the greater the capacity of the skulls, and, by implication, the size of the brains that they had contained. The largest of all, in fact, had been found among fragments of weapons or tools, few though they were, in the surface of the bed of clay. Careful examination of these venerable remains had left no doubt that the men living in that distant epoch had already acquired a growth of brain very much greater than that of their successors—including even the contemporaries of the Zartog Sofr. Clearly, then, there had been a backward movement for a hundred and seventy centuries, followed by a new advance.

Troubled by these strange facts, Sofr had pushed on with his searchings. In many places he had had the bed of clay probed to its bottom, and its depth was such that, by the most conservative estimate, its deposit had required not less than fifteen to twenty thousand years. Below it came the surprising discovery of faint remains of an ancient layer of humus, and finally, beneath the humus, solid rock of a nature that varied with the site of the digging.

But the crowning astonishment was the uncovering of some vestiges, incontestably human in origin, buried at these mysterious depths. They included not only portions of the bones of men, but also the fragments of weapons or tools, bits of pottery, scraps of writing carved in an unknown tongue, and hard stone objects, artfully sculptured. Considering the uniform quality of these artifacts, it could only be supposed that some forty thousand years ago—that is, twenty thousand years before the coming (none knew whence or how) of the first members of the present race—another race had dwelt in these same places and had reached a highly advanced degree of civilization.

SUCH WAS, IN FACT, THE conclusion generally admitted. Still, there was at least one who dissented.

The dissenter was none other than Sofr himself. To admit that other men, separated from those who came after by a gap of twenty thousand years, had first populated the earth was, in his opinion, sheer folly. For in that event, how to account for their abrupt disappearance and the equally abrupt appearance of their descendents so long afterward, with no discoverable link between the two? Rather than entertain so absurd a hypothesis, far better wait for more data. Just because these odd findings had failed to explain something, it was not necessary to conclude that it was inexplicable. One day the answer would come. Until then, it was wiser to take no sides, and for the time being to hold to principles that completely met the requirements of sound reason. They could be summed up as follows:

Planetary life is divided into two phases: pre-human and human. In the first phase, the Earth being in a state of continuous change, it is for this very reason uninhabitable and uninhabited. In the second, the crust of the globe has reached a degree of cohesion affording stability. And given this stability at last, life at once appears. It begins in its simplest forms and moves always toward the more complex, finally producing man, its most perfect expression. And no sooner does man come to Earth than he immediately sets out to seek his own improvement. Slowly, proudly, he is marching toward his end, which is complete understanding and absolute domination of the universe.

CARRIED AWAY BY THE FEVER of his stubborn belief, Sofr had gone past his house. He turned back with an impatient scowl.

“What would they have me do!” he muttered. “Admit that men forty thousand years ago enjoyed a civilization like our own, and perhaps a better one? Admit that their wisdom and their skill and goods could then vanish, leaving not the slightest trace? Wipe those people out so completely that their descendents should be forced to begin the task once more at the bottom, thinking themselves pioneers in a world without men before their time? Why, that should be to gainsay the future, to cry out that our effort is in vain! That all human change is as aimless and as little secure as a bubble in the froth of the waves!”

Sofr halted in front of his house.

“No, no! Certainly not! Man is the master of things!” he whispered fiercely as he pushed open his door.

AFTER THE ZARTOG HAD RESTED for a few moments, he lunched with a good appetite, and then he lay down to take his daily nap. But the questions that had shaken him while on his way home continued to torment him, and they banished sleep.

Despite all his eagerness to establish an absolute uniformity in nature, his mind was too critical to miss the weakness of his system whenever he tackled the problem of the origin and development of man. To force facts to square with a hypothesis set up in advance is one way to convince others, but it is no way to convince oneself.

Had Sofr not been a scholar, a very eminent Zartog, and had he been instead a member of the illiterate class, he should have had no trouble. The people, indeed, wasted no time in profound speculation. They were content to shut their eyes and repeat the old legend that had been transmitted, since time forgotten, from father to son. Explaining one mystery by another mystery, they traced the origin of man back to the interference of what they called a Higher Will. One day, this unearthly Power had created out of nothing, and for no apparent reason, Hedom and Hiva, the first man and first woman, whose descendents had peopled this world. Thus everything was linked up very simply. . . .

Much too simply! mused Sofr. When a man despairs of understanding something, it is all too easy to have a god intervene: this device makes it useless to seek solutions of the riddles of the universe, for it suppresses the problems as soon as they are stated.

If only there were a shred of support of the popular legend! But it rested upon nothing. It was only a tradition, born in times of ignorance, and thereafter handed down from one age to another. Why, even the name Hedom! What was the source of this fantastic word, of outlandish sound, that seemed foreign to the tongue of the Andarti-Iten-Schu? Unnumbered scholars had worn themselves pale over just this little philological difficulty, and had found no satisfactory answer. Come, then! All this was idle stuff, unworthy of the attention of a Zartog.

Sofr went down, in something of a temper, to his garden, for the hour had come when it was his custom to go there. By now there was less fire in the rays of the declining sun, and a soft breeze was beginning to blow in from the Spone-Schu. The Zartog wandered along the paths, shaded by trees whose shivering leaves were set to whispering by the on-shore wind, and little by little his nerves found again their habitual poise. He could shake off his absorbing thought, calmly enjoy the fresh air, and inspect with interest the fruits, which were the wealth of his gardens, and the flowers, their ornaments.

His idle steps brought him by chance back toward his house, and he paused at the edge of a deep excavation, around which were scattered a number of tools. Therein would be laid, within a short time, the foundations of a new building that should double the size of his laboratory. But on this holiday the workmen had left their toil to take in the public games.

Sofr was absently sizing up the amount of work already done and of work still to be done, when, in the gloom of the excavation, a brilliant point caught his eye. Puzzled, he climbed down to the bottom of the hole and pulled a queer object out of the dirt three-quarters covering it.

Having climbed again into the light, the Zartog examined his find. It was some kind of case, with round ends, made of an unfamiliar metal, gray in color, granular in texture; its luster, dulled by the long time it had spent underground, gleamed only where it had been grazed by a workman’s pick. A slit one-third of the way down from the top indicated that it was made of two parts, one fitting into the other. Sofr tried to open it.

At his first attempt, the metal, corroded by time, fell into dust, revealing a second object that it had contained.

Its material was as new to the Zartog as the metal had been. It was a roll of large sheets peppered with strange marks of a regularity suggesting written characters—but forming an unknown script, of a kind that Sofr had never seen, nor even anything like it.

Trembling with excitement, the Zartog hastened to lock himself in his laboratory, and having spread out the precious document with care, he stood contemplating it.

Yes, it was some kind of handwriting; nothing could be more certain. But it was no less certain that the writing in no way resembled any that within historic times had been used anywhere on Earth.

WHENCE CAME THIS DOCUMENT? WHAT message did it carry? These two questions now occupied Sofr’s mind to the exclusion of all else.

To answer the first, he must be in a position to answer the second. The problem, then, was first of all to decipher the document and translate it—for it could be affirmed in advance that the language would be as unknown as the script.

Would this task prove impossible? The Zartog Sofr did not think so, and without delay he set eagerly to work.

That work took a long time—long, dull years, in fact. But Sofr kept tirelessly at it. Undiscouraged, he pursued his methodical study of the mysterious script, advancing step by step toward the light. Finally came a day when he discovered a remote likeness between this ancient tongue and the most archaic dialect of the Andarti-Iten-Schu, and he held the key to the puzzle; the day when, at last, with much hesitation, he could put the message into the tongue of the Men of the Four Seas.

Now, when that day came, the Zartog Sofr-Ai-Sr made out what follows.

Rosario, May 24, 19—

I DATE IN THIS FASHION the beginning of my recital, although in reality it is being written long after this date and in surroundings very different. Considering my theme and motive, order, to my mind, is imperatively necessary, and that is why I am adopting the form of a “journal” written from day to day.

On May 24, then, begins the recital of the horrible events that I intend to report here for the instruction of those who will come after me if ever again humanity can count upon any sort of future.

In what language shall I write? In English or Spanish, which I speak fluently? No! I shall write in the language of my own country: in French.

On this day, May 24, I was entertaining some friends in my villa near Rosario. Rosario is, or rather was, a Mexican city on the Pacific coast a little south of the Gulf of California. Some ten years previously I had installed myself there in order to direct the working of a silver mine that was entirely my own property. My affairs had prospered astonishingly. I was a rich man—the word makes me laugh aloud today!—and was planning to return in a short time to France, the land of my birth.

My villa, among the most luxurious, was situated at the upper end of an extensive garden that sloped down towards the sea and ended abruptly in a perpendicular cliff more than a hundred meters high. Behind my villa, the terrain continued to rise, and by a winding road one could reach the summit of a mountain range having an altitude exceeding fifteen hundred meters. It was an agreeable drive and I frequently made the ascension in my automobile, a superb and powerful double Phaeton, one of the best French makes.

It had been while living in Rosario with my son Jean, a handsome lad of twenty, that, upon the death of cousins distant in blood but dear to my heart, I had taken in their daughter Helene, left an orphan with no fortune. Since that time, five years had elapsed. My son Jean was now twenty-five; Helene, twenty. I secretly intended them for one another.

We were well served by my valet, Germain, Modeste Simonat, a most resourceful chauffeur, and two girls, Edith and Mary, daughters of my gardener, George Raleigh, and his wife Anna.

In the twilight of this day, May 24, eight of us were seated round my table in the soft light of electric lamps that drew their current from my own generators. In addition to the master of the house, his son, and his ward, there were five guests, of whom three were of the Anglo-Saxon race and two were natives of Mexico.

Doctor Bathurst was of the Anglo-Saxon group, and Doctor Moreno of the Mexican. The fact that the two were scientists in the widest sense of the word did not prevent them from being rarely in agreement. But they were gallant gentlemen, and the best friends in the world.

The two other Anglo-Saxons were Williamson, proprietor of an important fishery in Rosario, and Rowling, an enterprising young man who raised early fruits and vegetables in the outskirts of the city and was in the way of reaping a substantial fortune.

As for the last guest, he was Senor Mendoza, President of the Rosario Tribunal, an estimable gentleman, a cultivated mind, of unquestioned integrity on the bench.

NOTHING WORTH RECORDING OCCURRED UNTIL we arrived al the end of the meal. I have forgotten what words we had exchanged up to this point. But, on the contrary, I well remember what was said over our cigars.

Not that our remarks had in themselves any particular importance; it was the brutal commentary on them, shortly to be made, that could not fail to give them a certain piquancy, and they have consequently stayed fresh in my memory.

We had entered into a discussion of the marvelous achievements of man. At a certain point, Doctor Bathurst said:

“It is a fact that if Adam” (naturally, as an Anglo-Saxon he pronounced it Eddem) “and Eve” (he said Eeve, you understand) “should return to earth, they’d be jolly well astonished.”

That was the origin of the discussion. Being a fervent Darwinist, a convinced partisan of natural selection, Moreno asked Bathurst in an ironic tone if he seriously believed in the legend of the Earthly Paradise. Bathurst answered that at least he believed in God, and that, since the existence of Adam and Eve is affirmed in the Bible, it was not his privilege to dispute it. Moreno replied that he believed in God at least as strongly as did his adversary, but that the first man and the first woman could very well be only myths—symbols, rather—and that consequently there was nothing impious in supposing the pair to represent the breath of life introduced by the Creator into the first cell from which all others had developed. Bathurst retorted that such an interpretation was specious, and that, as far as he was concerned, he held it more flattering to be the direct work of the Lord than to have descended through the medium of more or less monkey-like primates.

The discussion, I felt, was about to grow heated; but it was suddenly dropped, for the two adversaries by chance found themselves in an area of agreement. (After all, that was how their arguments ordinarily ended.)

This time, reverting to their earlier theme, the two antagonists concurred in admiring the high culture attained by humanity, whatever had been its origin; and proudly they began to enumerate its conquests. Everything passed in review. Bathurst extolled chemistry, which was advanced to such a degree of perfection that it was likely to disappear by merging with physics to form a single science, primarily concerned with studying the energy inherent in matter. Moreno delivered the eulogy of medicine and surgery, thanks to which, he said, the nature of life processes had been probed to the core, with consequent discoveries that afforded hope, in the near future, of assuring the immortality of animal organisms. After which, the two joined in praising the wonderful advances of astronomy. Were we not in communication, if not with the stars, at least with eight of the planets in the solar system?

WHEN THE TWO ENTHUSIASTS PAUSED to catch their breath, my other guests and I seized the opportunity to put in a word in our turn, and we went into the vast field of practical inventions that had so profoundly modified our way of life. We toasted the rail-express and steamships that were still best adapted for the transport of heavy or bulky merchandise; the economical airplanes used by travelers who had time to spare; and the pneumatic or electro-ionic tubes, streaking through all continents and beneath the seas, indispensible for people in a hurry. We toasted the innumerable machines, increasingly ingenious, that could perform the work of hundreds of men. We toasted the new printing technique, and our ability to photograph not only light and color, but likewise sound, heat, and all the other waves vibrating in the ether. But above all we toasted electricity, the agent that was so versatile and controllable, the essence and properties of which were now so perfectly understood that, dispensing with wires, we could use it to run all kinds of machines, navigate any vessel, marine, submarine, or aerial, and write, see, or speak—and at whatever distance we pleased.

In short, we joined in composing a genuine dithyramb to Progress, and I confess to contributing my share. We were agreed on the point that humanity had reached an intellectual peak unknown before our era, and that we were authorized to believe in our eventual victory over nature.

“And yet,” said Judge Mendoza in his little piping voice, profiting by the moment of silence following this last conclusion, “I’ve heard it said that people long gone, of whom we can find few or no traces, enjoyed in their time a civilization equivalent to ours.”

“And who were they?” we queried in one voice.

“Why . . . the Babylonians, for example.”

There was a burst of laughter. To venture a comparison between the Babylonians and modern men!

“The Egyptians,” continued Don Mendoza calmly.

More laughter.

“Take the people of Atlantis, too,” went on the Judge. “They are legendary, but perhaps only because of our ignorance. Why not add that an infinity of other peoples, preceding the Atlanteans themselves, and quite unknown to us, may have succeeded in rising and prospering—only to die out completely!”

Since Don Mendoza was persistent in his paradox, the rest of us, in order not to offend him, pretended to take him seriously.

“Look here, my dear President,” put in Moreno, using the tone one is careful to adopt when trying to make a child listen to reason, “you do not want to maintain, I imagine, that any of those ancient peoples could be compared to us? In the moral order, I admit, they might have raised themselves to an equal level of culture, but in the material order—”

“Why not?” objected Don Mendoza.

“Because,” Bathurst hastened to explain, “the unique thing about our inventions is that they are immediately spread all over the earth: the disappearance of any one people, or even a great number of peoples, as advanced as we are, would therefore leave intact the total accomplishment. For the present human effort to be lost, it would be necessary for all humanity to disappear at once. And is that, I ask you, an admissible possibility?”

EVEN WHILE HE WAS SPEAKING, causes and effects were continuing to succeed each other and interact throughout the universe, and in less than one minute after Doctor Bathurst’s question, the resultant of certain of those causes and effects was going to justify only too well Mendoza’s skepticism. But of course we were quite unsuspecting, and the discussion proceeded quietly, some of us leaning back in our chairs, others with elbows on the table, all turning sympathetic eyes toward Mendoza, who was overwhelmed, we supposed, by Bathurst’s argument.

“Let me say first of all,” said the Judge, unruffled, “that it is to be believed that the Earth in the old days had far fewer inhabitants than today, living in more isolated communities, so that one people could very well possess universal knowledge and keep it to themselves. And next, I see nothing absurd in admitting the possibility that the entire surface of the globe might be convulsed all in one moment.”

“Oh, come now!” we all cried together.

And it was at this precise instant that the cataclysm struck!

We were uttering that “Oh, come now!” when a fearful uproar arose. The ground trembled and sank under our feet. The villa rocked on its foundations.

Impelled by inexpressible terror, we collided and jostled as we rushed out into the garden.

And just as we crossed the threshold, the house collapsed in a heap, burying in its ruins Judge Mendoza and my valet Germain, who were slower than the rest. After a few seconds of quite natural shock, we were about to attempt their rescue when we were interrupted by Raleigh, my gardener, who came running up, followed by his wife, from his cottage at the lower end of the garden.

“The sea! The sea!” he was shouting at the top of his lungs.

I turned toward the coast and stood without moving, frozen with stupor. Not that I had any clear grasp of what I was looking at in that twilight haze, my only thought (and it hit me instantly, like a blow) was that the familiar face of things had changed. And my heart was chilled when I realized that a world I had considered essentially immutable had been strangely modified in a minute.

But I was not slow in recovering my presence of mind. Despite our wild boasting of a moment ago, the true superiority of man lies not in dominating or vanquishing nature. Rather, for the reflective man, it lies in comprehending, in containing, the immense universe in the microcosm of his mind. And for the man of action, it lies in preserving a cool head in the presence of rebellious matter, as if to say: “Destroy me if you will! But unnerve me—never!”

As soon as I had collected myself, I understood in what way the scene before my eyes differed from that to which I had grown accustomed. The simple fact was that the cliff had disappeared; my garden had fallen to the level of the sea, and the waves, having destroyed the gardener’s house, were now foaming over my lowest flower-beds.

Since it was scarcely admissible that the water had risen, it followed necessarily that the land had settled. It had fallen more than a hundred meters, the previous height of the cliff; but the descent must have been accomplished with a certain smoothness, for, after the initial jolt, we had hardly noticed it. And yet there was no other way to account for the relative calm of the ocean.

A brief examination convinced me not only that my hypothesis was correct, but that the descent had not stopped. The sea was continuing to gain, in fact, at a rate of perhaps two meters a second, or seven or eight kilometers an hour. As a consequence, given the distance between us and the first waves, if the speed of our descent remained uniform, we were going to be swallowed up in less than three minutes.

My decision had to be quick:

“The auto!” I cried.

Everyone understood. We all ran to the garage, literally dragged out the car, and packed ourselves in without ceremony. Simonat, my chauffeur, slid under the wheel, started the motor, engaged the gears, and headed for the road in fourth speed. Raleigh, who had darted ahead to open the gate, leaped on as we passed and crouched on the rear bumper.

Just in time! When the car turned into the main road, a wave sloshed under us, wetting the wheels up to the axles. But no matter, now we could laugh at the sea’s pursuit! In spite of the excessive load, my automobile would carry us beyond its reach—unless the land should continue to sink indefinitely. In short, we had a clear field before us: two hours, at least, of ascent, and an available altitude of better than fifteen hundred meters.

But I soon realized that we could not yet cry victory. Although the first leap of the car had carried us twenty or so meters beyond the fringe of foam, it was in vain that Simonat opened the throttle wide; our lead did not increase. Of course, the weight of twelve people was slowing the speed of the vehicle. Whatever our speed, it was exactly equaled by that of the invading water, and the distance between us remained constant.

As soon as the others understood our disquieting predicament, they all (except Simonat, who was intent upon managing the car) turned round to watch the road behind. There was nothing but water to be seen. No sooner did we pass over a stretch of road than it would disappear beneath the advancing sea. The water was now smooth; scarcely a ripple rode in to die on a beach that was ever new. It was a tranquil lake that was swelling, always swelling, at a steady rate . . . and nothing was so grim as the pursuit of that tranquil water. It almost seemed useless to flee before it; the water was mounting, implacably with us.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the road, Simonat said as we came to a turning:

“Here we are at the halfway mark. An hour’s climb still ahead.”

We shuddered—and why not! In an hour, we were going to reach the summit, and then we should have to go down again, chased, then overtaken, regardless of our speed, by the masses of water that would tumble over us like an avalanche!

The hour passed with no change in our situation. The crest of the mountain rose just ahead. But then came a violent shock, and the vehicle gave a lurch that almost crashed it against the roadside bank. At the same time, an enormous wave swelled behind us, rushed up the road, rose in a curve and broke against the auto. We were plowing through foam . . . were we at last to be engulfed?

No! The frothing water receded, while the car, with sudden life in its motor, took on renewed speed.

What could explain this unexpected acceleration? A cry from Anna told us: the poor woman had just discovered that her husband was no longer crouching on the rear bumper. Evidently the retreating wave had carried off the unfortunate man and now the car, relieved of two hundred pounds, could make better time on the slope. But suddenly it came to a dead stop.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Simonat. “A breakdown?”

Even in our tragic circ*mstances, professional pride did not forget its rights; Simonat gave a shrug of disdain, intending me to understand that breakdowns were unknown to chauffeurs of his class. He silently pointed to the road ahead. The reason for our halt was then apparent.

Less than ten meters in front of us, the road was cut off. “Cut” is the right word: you would have supposed it chopped by a giant cleaver. Beyond the sharp edge that abruptly terminated it was a void, a dark abyss, in the depths of which we could distinguish nothing.

We looked behind us, aghast, certain that our last hour had come. The ocean, which had pursued us as far as these heights, would now overtake us in a few seconds.

But, except for the unhappy Anna and her daughters, who were shaken by heartbreaking sobs, we all gave a shout. The water was no longer rising—or, more accurately speaking, the land had stopped sinking. Doubtless the shock that had nearly wrecked us had signified the end of the disturbance. The ocean, therefore, had stopped its advance, and in the gathering darkness we could see that its level stood nearly a hundred meters below where we were grouped about the auto which was still panting like an animal out of breath after a rapid race.

Could we succeed in getting out of this bad spot? We should not know until daylight. Till then we must wait. One after another we stretched out on the ground, and I believe that I fell asleep. . . .

IN THE NIGHT I HAVE been startled out of my sleep by a tremendous noise. What time is it? I do not know. But at least we are still plunged in the darkness of night.

The noise is issuing from the unknown abyss into which the road ahead has fallen. What is going on down there? I judge that masses of water are dashing violently together. Yes, that must be the answer, for the spray is raining on us.

But the quietness is gradually returning . . . complete silence once more. The sky shows a pale light. . . . Day is breaking. . . .

May 25.

WHAT TORTURE WORSE THAN THE slow revelation of our true predicament! A few moments ago we could make out only our immediate environment, but the circle has widened, ever widened, as if in desperation we were drawing aside curtain after curtain. And finally broad daylight destroys our last illusions.

Our situation is quite simple and can be summed up in a few words. We are on an island. We are hemmed round by the sea. Only yesterday we would have been looking at a sea of mountain tops, several of them dominating the one on which we are standing those mountaintop have all disappeared, while, for reasons that will remain forever unknown, ours, though more humble, has been arrested in its descent; everywhere else spreads that boundless sheet of water. In every direction, nothing but the sea. We are occupying the only solid land within the immense circle of the horizon.

A glance is sufficient to acquaint us with the whole extent of the islet that, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, has given us refuge. For it is certainly small: a thousand meters long, at the most, and five hundred wide. On the north, west, and south sides, fairly easy slopes mount to its summit, about a hundred meters above the waves. But on the east, the islet ends in a cliff that falls vertically into the ocean.

We keep turning our eyes in that direction. There we should have the mountains, tier upon tier, and beyond them should extend all Mexico. What a transformation in one brief spring night! The mountains have vanished, and Mexico has been engulfed! In their place is an infinite desert, the barren desert of the sea!

We look at each other in cold terror. Marooned without food or water on this narrow, naked rock, we are left with no hope at all. Bitter but resigned, we might as well lie on the ground and await the coming of death.

Aboard the Virginia, June 4.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE NEXT few days? I have retained no memory of them. It is to be supposed that I finally lost consciousness, and I came to only on board the ship that picked us up. Only then did I learn that we had remained ten whole days on the islet, and that two of our party, Williamson and Rowling, had died there of hunger and thirst. Of the fourteen people that my villa was sheltering at the moment of the cataclysm, only nine are left: my son Jean and ward Helene, my chauffeur Simonat, inconsolable over the loss of his machine, Anna Raleigh and her two daughters, Doctors Bathurst and Moreno, and finally myself.

The Virginia, the ship that has rescued us, is a hybrid vessel, a sailer with auxiliary motors, or, if you will, a motor ship with auxiliary sails engaged in the transport of merchandise. She is a fairly old ship, of about two thousand tons, seaworthy but slow. Captain Morris has twenty men under his command. He and the crew are English.

The Virginia left Melbourne under ballast a little over a month ago, bound for Rosario. No incident marked her crossing, except that on the eve of May 25 she encountered ground swells of a prodigious height but of a proportionate length that rendered them harmless. Singular though they were, they could give the Captain no warning of the cataclysm that was occurring at the same time. Therefore he had been highly astonished to find only the sea where he had expected to find Rosario and the Mexican coast. Of that coast, only one islet remained. A boat from the Virginia had accosted the islet, on which eleven inanimate bodies were discovered. Two were corpses; the nine others were taken aboard. And that is how we were saved.

Ashore—January or February.

AN INTERVAL OF EIGHT MONTHS separates the last lines of the preceding section from the present writing. I date this January or February, finding it impossible to be more precise, for I no longer have an exact notion of time.

These eight months cover the cruelest period of our ordeal, during which suffering ever-increasing hardship, we came to know the full extent of our misfortune.

After picking us up, the Virginia continued on her way east at full speed. When I came to myself, the islet on which we had nearly died was long since under the horizon. According to bearings taken in a cloudless sky, we were then sailing exactly where Mexico City should have been. But of Mexico City there remained no trace; nor, during my unconsciousness, had any of the central mountains been sighted; nor could we now discern any land whatever, as far as our view extended: in every direction there was only the infinity of the sea.

We could not help wondering if not the world, but we, had gone mad. Think of it! Mexico entirely swallowed up! We exchanged frightened glances and asked ourselves how far the ravages of the terrible cataclysm had been felt. . . .

The Captain was determined to know the answer. Changing his course, he headed north: even if Mexico no longer existed, it was unthinkable that the same could be true of the entire North American continent.

But it was the same! For twelve days we went north without meeting land. And we met none after putting about and sailing south for nearly a month. However fantastic the fact appeared, we were compelled to surrender to the evidence: both American continents had sunk under the waves!

Had we been rescued, then, only to know for a second time the agony of death? We truly had every right to think so. Not to mention provisions, which sooner or later must be exhausted, a pressing danger was threatening us: what should become of us when exhaustion of our fuel shut down our engines? That is why, on July 14, when we found ourselves close to the former site of Buenos Aires, Captain Morris stopped the engines and hoisted sail. That done, he assembled everyone on board the Virginia, crewmen and passengers, and, having explained our situation in a few words, requested each of us to reflect upon it and to offer any solutions that occurred to us at a council to be held on the following day.

I do not know whether any of my companions in misfortune hit upon any more-or-less intelligent expedients. For my part, I was hesitating, I confess, being very uncertain of the best course to take, when a tempest arose in the night and decided the question: we had to run toward the west before a violent wind, at every instant on the point of foundering in the raging sea.

The hurricane lasted thirty-five days without a minute’s interruption, not even any slackening of its force. We were beginning to give up hope of its ever ending, when, on August 19, fine weather returned as abruptly as it had deserted us more than a month previously. The only good the storm had done was to provide us with a quantity of fresh water. The Captain profited by the return of the sun to take an observation; his calculations gave him forty degrees north latitude and a hundred and fourteen degrees east longitude. These were the coordinates of Peking!

So, then, we had passed over Polynesia, and perhaps Australia, quite unawares, and were now sailing over what had been the capital of an empire of four hundred million souls!

Had Asia, too, suffered the fate of the Americas?

We were soon convinced that it had. The Virginia, following a southwest course, reached the latitude of Tibet and the Himalayas. Here should have soared the highest peaks on the globe, but nowhere was anything emerging from the surface of the ocean.

It began to look as if no solid land, except the islet that had saved our lives, existed on earth and that we were the only survivors of the cataclysm, the last inhabitants of a world buried in the shifting shroud of the sea!

If this were true, we should not be slow to perish in our turn. In spite of strict rationing, the provisions on board were by now running low, and in our predicament we must abandon all hope of renewing them. These seas were yielding us no fish whatever.

I WILL ABRIDGE MY ACCOUNT of that frightening voyage. If I were to report it in detail, attempting to relive it day by day, the memory would drive me mad. For, however strange and terrible the events both before and since, and however dismal the prospects of the future (a future that I shall not witness), during that infernal voyage we knew the limit of human terror. That endless cruise on a sea without end! To expect every day to accost some coast, yet to find the term of our voyage ceaselessly deferred! To live crouching over maps upon which men had engraved sinuous shore lines, and to realize that nothing, absolutely nothing, was left of regions they had thought eternal! To tell ourselves that the earth had throbbed with innumerable living beings, that billions and billions of men and animals had pervaded its lands and flashed through the air, and that all at once everything was dead, that all lives had been extinguished together like a little flame in a gust of wind! To seek everywhere for our fellows, and to seek in vain! To acquire little by little the certitude that beyond our little company there existed no living thing, and to become gradually conscious of loneliness in the middle of an unmerciful universe!

Have I found words capable of expressing our anguish? Probably not. In no language can there exist words adequate to cope with a situation without precedent.

After having reconnoitered the waters covering the Indian peninsula, we sailed northward again for ten days and next turned west. Then, with no change in our desperate situation, we passed over the chain of the Urals, now become submarine mountains, and entered what had been Europe. We turned southward and sailed as far as twenty degrees below the equator; and then, wearily abandoning our unrewarded search in that direction, we resumed a northerly course over an expanse of water that had drowned Africa, Spain, and the Pyrenees. By this time our very terror had turned into a stale numbness. We had been marking our course on the ship’s charts, and as we advanced we would say: “Here was Moscow . . . Warsaw . . . Berlin . . . Vienna . . . Rome . . . Tunis . . . Timbuctu . . . Oran . . . Madrid . . .” But, with increasing unconcern, we found ourselves reciting these names without feeling.

And yet I, at least, had not exhausted my capacity to suffer. I knew so on the day—it was, perhaps December 11—when Captain Morris said to me: “Here was Paris. . . .” At these words, I felt that my soul had been snatched from me. Let the entire universe be inundated, yes! But France—my France!—and Paris that was her symbol . . .

I heard a sob. I turned: Simonat, too, was weeping.

Four days later, having reached the latitude of Edinburgh, we turned back toward the southwest, seeking Ireland, and then set a course east. The truth is, we were wandering at random, for there was no more reason to go in one direction than in any other. . . .

We passed over London, whose liquid tomb was saluted by the entire crew. Five days afterward, when in the neighborhood of Danzig, Captain Morris turned about and ordered a southwest course. The helmsman obeyed passively. What did it matter to him? Would it not be the same thing everywhere?

It was on the ninth day of pursuing this course that we ate our last morsel of biscuit.

As we were eyeing each other haggardly, Captain Morris suddenly ordered the engines started. Even now I ask myself what impulse he was obeying. The order was carried out: the speed of our ship was accelerated.

TWO DAYS LATER WE WERE already suffering cruelly from hunger. Two more days and almost everyone stubbornly refused to leave his berth; only the Captain, Simonat, a few crewmen, and I had the energy to carry on the management of the ship.

Next day—our fifth day of fasting—the number of volunteer crewmen was further decreased. In another twenty-four hours nobody would have the strength to remain on his feet.

By then we had been cruising for more than seven months. For more than seven months we had persisted in seeking a goal that evidently had no existence. And as I was reflecting that this was perhaps the eighth of January, I realized that the calendar had lost all meaning.

Now, it was on this day, while I was at the wheel, straining to keep my feeble attention on the prescribed course, that I seemed to make out something in the west. Though certain that it was an illusion, I stared intently.

No, I had not been deceived.

I gave a wild shout and then, gripping the wheel, cried out: “Land ahead to the starboard!”

What magical words! The dying were all immediately revived, and their emaciated forms crowded along the starboard rail.

“It is land, for a fact,” said Captain Morris, after having studied what might have been a cloud rising on the horizon.

Within a half hour it was impossible to have the least doubt. Land it certainly was that we were meeting out in the middle of the Atlantic—after our failure to find any land where the former continents had been!

Towards three o’clock in the afternoon, the details of the coast that was barring our way became clear, and we felt a rebirth of despair. For in truth this coast resembled no other, and none of us could recall ever having seen land as unlikely, as completely hostile to man, as this.

On all land inhabited before the disaster, green had been an abounding color. We could recall no coast so disinherited, no country so barren, that it could not support some shrubs, or tufts of gorse, or at least traces of lichen and moss. But here, nothing at all. We could distinguish only a high, blackish cliff, with a chaos of fallen rocks along its base. Here was the most utter, most absolute desolation.

For two dreadful days we coasted along without discovering any break in that sheer cliff. But towards the evening of the second day we found an ample harbor, well sheltered from the winds of the open sea, at the head of which we dropped anchor.

Our first thought as soon as we landed in the ship’s boats, was to collect food on the beach. There were turtles by the hundreds, and shellfish by the millions. Off the ledges we could see a fabulous quantity of crabs, lobsters, and crawfish, as well as innumerable fish. From all appearances, this teeming harbor would suffice, in default of other resources, to support us indefinitely.

When we were restored, we were able, by way of a cut in the cliff, to reach the plateau, where we could look out over a broad expanse of country. The view from the water had not been deceptive: on all sides, in every direction, there were only arid rocks, covered with wrack and seaweed, mostly dried, without as much as a single blade of grass, nor any living thing, either on the ground or in the sky. Here and there, little lakes—pools, rather—glistened in the rays of the sun. But when we tried to slake our thirst, we found the water brackish.

We were not surprised, to tell the truth. The fact confirmed what we had suspected from the first: namely that this unknown continent had been born yesterday, that it had emerged, all of a piece, from the depths of the sea. This explained its barrenness and its complete lack of terrestrial life. It explained, too, the thick bed of slime, uniformly spread, which, owing to evaporation, was beginning to crack and to be reduced to dust.

Our bearings, taken at noon on the following day, proved to be 17° 20’ north latitude and 23° 55’ west longitude. According to our map we were in the open sea at about the latitude of Cape Verde. But now as far as we could see land was extending to the west and water to the east.

HOWEVER STERN AND INHOSPITABLE WAS the territory upon which we had set foot, we were forced to be content with it. So the unloading of the Virginia was undertaken without delay. We dragged up to the plateau everything she carried, without discrimination. But first we had secured the vessel fast by head and stern with four anchors on a fifteen-fathom bottom. In this tranquil harbor she would be safe, and we ran no risk in leaving her to herself.

As soon as the unloading was finished, our new life began. In the first place, it was expedient—

AT THIS POINT IN HIS translation, the Zartog Sofr had to break it off. He had come to the first gap in the recital (and one of great moment, probably, since there seemed a quantity of pages missing)—a gap followed by several others still more considerable, as far as could be judged. Evidently dampness had got to a great number of the outer sheets of the roll, notwithstanding the protection of the metal case: there remained, indeed, only a few fragments of varying length, with a context forever destroyed. They succeeded each other in the following order.

HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN since we disembarked on this coast? I cannot say definitely. I asked Doctor Moreno, who has been keeping a calendar of the passing days. He said: “Six months . . . a few days . . . more or less.” So he, too, confesses to have lost count.

Well, I saw it coming! In less than six months, we have lost confidence in our reckoning of time. How very promising!

But our negligence, after all, is not very astonishing. We are devoting all our attention, all our activity, to the task of keeping alive. Feeding ourselves is a problem, the solution of which requires the entire day. What do we eat? Fish, when we find any—but they grow more difficult to find every day, for our incessant pursuit is scaring them off. We eat turtle eggs, too, and certain edible seaweeds. By evening we are fed, but exhausted, and we think only of sleep.

Tents have been improvised from the Virginia’s sails. I suppose that before long we must construct more substantial shelters.

Sometimes we shoot a bird. The atmosphere is not so deserted as we had first thought; ten or twelve familiar species are represented on this new continent. These are exclusively birds capable of long flight: swallows, albatrosses, cordwainers, and a number of others. Apparently they do not find enough to eat in this barren land, for they wheel ceaselessly over our encampment, waiting for leavings from our miserable table. Sometimes we pick up one that has died of hunger, thus sparing our powder and shot.

Happily, there is some chance that our situation will not always remain so unpleasant. We discovered a sack of wheat in the Virginia’s hold, and we have sown half of it. We shall be a lot better off when the grain is ripe. But will it germinate? The ground is covered with a thick bed of alluvium, sandy mud enriched by the decomposition of seaweed. However mediocre its quality, it is humus none the less. When we landed, it was impregnated with salt; but since then diluvial rains have copiously washed the surface, and all the hollows are now filled with sweet water.

All the same, the alluvial bed is free of salt only to a very slight depth: the streams and rivers that are beginning to develop are all extremely brackish, proving that the subsoil is still saturated.

To sow half the wheat and keep the other half as a reserve, we nearly had to fight: part of the crew of the Virginia wanted to make bread of it at once. We were forced to—

. . . FROM THE Virginia. The rats immediately scampered into the interior, and we have not seen them again. We can only believe that they have found something to feed on. If so, the land, without our knowledge, must be yielding—

. . . TWO YEARS, at least, that we have been here! The wheat has succeeded wonderfully; we have almost all the bread we want, and our fields are ever gaining in extent. But what a struggle against the birds! They have strangely multiplied and all around our tillage—

IN SPITE OF THE DEATHS I have related above, our little tribe has not diminished. On the contrary! My son and my ward have three children, and each of the three other families has as many. All the little rascals are radiant with health. It is as if the human species were possessed of a greater vigor, a more intense vitality, since it has been so reduced in number. But whatever the causes—

WE HAD BEEN HERE FOR ten years, and we knew nothing of this continent. We were acquainted only with the area contained within a radius of a few kilometers around the place where we disembarked. It was Doctor Bathurst who made us feel ashamed of our apathy; at his instigation we refitted the Virginia—a task that required almost six months—and went on a voyage of exploration.

We returned only the day before yesterday. The voyage had lasted longer than we had expected, but we were resolved that it should be complete.

We have circumnavigated our continent, which, not counting the tiny islet, we have every reason to believe must be the only surviving land on the surface of the globe. Its shores appeared to be everywhere alike, that is to say, very harsh and wild.

Our tour was interrupted by several excursions into the interior: we hoped especially to find traces of the Azores and of Madeira, for these islands, because of their location in the Atlantic, ought to have formed a part of this new continent. We found not the slightest vestige of them. All that we have been able to establish is that the ground was convulsed and buried under a thick layer of lava on the sites of the islands, which obviously were destroyed by violent volcanic activity.

But if we did not discover what we were looking for, we did discover something we certainly were not looking for! Half buried in the lava, in the latitude of the Azores, we came upon evidence of human work—and not the work of the Azorians, our contemporaries of yesterday. There were remains of columns and pottery of a kind we had never seen before. After examining them, Doctor Moreno expressed the opinion that those remains must have survived from ancient Atlantis, and that the volcanic eruption had brought them to the surface.

Perhaps Doctor Moreno is right. If it ever existed, Atlantis would indeed have been located somewhere near the bearings of the new continent. Verification of the legend would reveal a singular thing: the development, in the same place, of three successive cultures not descending one from another.

Whatever the answer, I confess that the problem leaves me cold. We have enough to do with the present, without troubling ourselves about the past.

NOW THAT WE HAVE REGAINED our home encampment, it strikes us that, compared with the rest of the country, ours seems a favored region. The reason is that the color green, formerly so abundant in nature, is here not entirely unknown, whereas it is completely absent from the rest of the continent. We had not noticed this fact up to now, but it is undeniable. Grasses, which did not exist when first we arrived, are now springing up quite plentifully around us. They belong, however, only to a small number of the most common species, the seeds of which have doubtless been carried here by the birds.

It must not be concluded from what I have said that there is no vegetation except for the few species carried over from the old days. As a result of an amazing adaptation, there exists, on the contrary, a vegetation in a rudimentary or promissory state, at least, over all the continent.

The marine plants that covered it when it emerged from the sea died, for the most part, under the light of the sun. But a few persisted, in lakes, ponds, and pools that the heat progressively dried up. At the same time, rivers and streams were beginning to appear temporarily quite suitable, in that the water was salty, to nourish the weeds and marsh grasses. When the surface, and then the depths, of the soil had been cleared of salt, and the water had turned fresh, most of the plants were destroyed. A small number of them, however, were capable of adapting themselves to new living conditions, and have been flourishing almost as well in the fresh water as they had when it was salty. And the phenomenon has not stopped there: some of the plants, endowed with still greater power of adaptation, having grown used to fresh water, are now growing used to fresh air, and first up the river banks, and then moving inch by inch from one place to another, they have been creeping towards the interior.

We have witnessed this adaptation in the act, and we can attest that these plants are showing not only biochemical but also structural modification. Already a few stalks are rising, as if timidly, toward the sky. We can foresee that one day a varied flora will thus be created from common roots, and that a violent struggle may be waged between the new species and those descending from the old order of things brought in by us and the birds.

We are led to speculate that what is happening to the flora may also happen to the fauna. In the neighborhood of running water—

THE LAST FEW SHEETS CONTAINED intact the end of the manuscript.

I FEEL VERY OLD. CAPTAIN Morris is dead. Doctor Bathurst is about sixty-five; Doctor Moreno, sixty; I, sixty-eight. We three shall soon be done with life. But first we shall accomplish our elected task and, in so far as it may lie in our power, come to the aid of future generations in the struggle awaiting them.

But will they see the light of day, those future generations?

I am tempted to say yes if I take into account only the multiplication of my kind. Children are swarming all over the place, and in this healthful climate, in a country where wild beasts and most of the old diseases are unknown, longevity is common. Our colony has tripled in number.

On the other hand, I am tempted to say no if I consider the profound intellectual decay of my companions in misfortune.

It is ironic that our little group of castaways were well equipped to turn human knowledge to account: it included one particularly capable man of action—Captain Morris, now deceased; two men of better-than-average education—my son and myself; and two genuine scientists—Doctor Bathurst and Doctor Moreno. With such material, something could have been accomplished. But nothing has been accomplished. The preservation of our physical lives has from the very beginning been (and still is) our only care. As from the first, we devote our time to the search for food, and in the evening we sink exhausted into heavy sleep.

Alas! it is only too certain that humanity, of which we are the sole representatives, is on the road to rapid regression leading to brutehood. Among the sailors from the Virginia, men originally of no refinement, the signs of animality are more conspicuous; but my son and I have forgotten much of what we once knew, and Doctor Bathurst and Doctor Moreno themselves have let their minds lie fallow. Our intellectual life has withered away.

How fortunate it is that a good many years ago we managed the circumnavigation of this continent! Today we should not have the requisite courage. And moreover, Captain Morris, who commanded the expedition, is dead—and the Virginia dead, too, decayed beyond repair.

We all sleep on the ground, in all seasons.

For a long time there has been nothing left of the clothing that once covered us. We go about naked, like those we used to call savages.

To eat, to eat—that is our perpetual end, our exclusive preoccupation.

People of the future, born here, will never have known any other existence. Humanity will be reduced to illiterate adults (I have some before my eyes as I write) who cannot reckon, and can scarcely talk—and to sharp-toothed children who seem to be little more than insatiable stomachs.

I seem to see them, those men of the future, ignorant of articulate language, intelligence extinguished, bodies covered with coarse hair, wandering in this dreary desert. . . .

On the threshold of death.

IT IS NOW ALMOST FIFTEEN years since the lines above were written. Doctor Bathurst and Doctor Moreno are no more. Of those who disembarked in this place, I, one of the oldest, remain almost alone. But death is overtaking me, in my turn. I feel it mounting from my cold feet to my flagging heart.

When we first settled here, a few of us undertook to build some houses. The unfinished structures have fallen in ruins.

Our work is finished. I have entrusted the manuscripts containing our summary of human knowledge to an iron chest brought off the Virginia, which I have buried deep in the ground. Beside it, I shall bury these pages, rolled up and sealed in an aluminum tube.

Will anyone ever find the deposit committed to the earth? Will anyone ever care?

That is destiny’s affair. God’s will be done!

AS THE ZARTOG SOFR TOOK in the sense of this fantastic document, an awful dismay gripped his heart.

Could it be true! Were the Andarti-Iten-Schu descended straight from those distant men who, after having wandered for long months over the empty seas, had chanced upon this point of the coast where now rose the towers of Basidra? And those miserable creatures were the fa*g-end of a proud human race, compared to which the present race was lisping as a child! And ponder this: what had been needed to abolish forever all the science of so mighty a people—and to erase even the memory of their existence? Less than nothing: simply an imperceptible shudder that ran through the crust of the globe.

Man had one time, long ago, pushed farther ahead on the road of truth than men had ever done since. It was all here in the record: things that Sofr already knew, and other things that he should not have dared imagine—such as the explanation of the name Hedom, over which there had been such high dispute! Hedom was a corruption of Eddem, itself a corruption of Adam, and Adam was possibly only a corruption of some other name still more ancient.

HEDOM, EDDEM, ADAM: HERE WAS the perpetual symbol of the first man—but it stood likewise for mankind’s successive reappearances on earth. Sofr had been wrong, then, to deny this ancestor, whose onetime existence was plainly attested by the document; and the unlearned folk had been right in claiming forbears as human as themselves. But here, too, as in everything else, the Andarti-Iten-Schu had invented nothing. They had done no more than to repeat what had already been said.

But would a day ever come when the insatiable longing of man would be satisfied? Would a day ever come when, having won the crest of the slope, he could take his rest there, conqueror at last of the summit?

Thus mused the Zartog Sofr as he leaned over that venerable document.

A cool, gray dawn was approaching; but it was through this recital of a dawn long ago that he was contemplating the terrible drama perpetually unfolding in the universe, and his heart went out to the players.

Bloodied by the innumerable hardships suffered by those who had gone before him, bending under the weight of the useless labors piled up during the infinite stretch of time, the Zartog Sofr-Ai-Sr was slowly, reluctantly, convincing himself of the dreadful secret: that the Truth, when found, would prove to be the endless ordeal of regeneration.

TRANSLATED BY WILLIS T. BRADLEY

The Last Generation

— JAMES ELROY FLECKER —

A STORY OF THE FUTURE

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

JAMES ELROY FLECKER IS NOT a name much remembered these days, but when he died of tuberculosis in 1915 at the age of thirty, one British literary critic said that his death was “unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats.” That was, perhaps, an overstatement, and in any case was uttered before the First World War took the lives of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and many other gifted young British poets. But certainly Flecker was well on his way toward becoming a major figure in English letters when he died, even though little of his work remains visible today except the single poem, “The Golden Journey to Samarkand.”

He was born in 1884 and educated both at Oxford and Cambridge before entering the British consular service in 1910. His love of the exotic Orient led him to seek a position in Constantinople, but on his sea journey to Turkey he became ill with what was eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis, and after a difficult three-year tour of duty in the diplomatic corps was forced to withdraw to a sanatorium in Switzerland. There he devoted the remainder of his brief life to writing poems, among them “The Golden Journey,” and the comic/romantic play Hassan, inspired by the Arabian Nights, in which he drew upon his poem for the haunting closing refrain, “We take the golden road to Samarkand.” The play, published and produced posthumously, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remained a popular feature of the London stage for many years, though it is virtually forgotten now.

In 1908, toward the close of his time at Cambridge, Flecker wrote a remarkable science-fiction novella, “The Last Generation,” whose narrator calmly tells us a grimly horrific tale of the self-willed extinction of the human race, which in the near future resolves to bring no more children into the world—though once again a redemptive theme enters at the end. It was published as a single small volume, never reprinted, by the avant-garde New Age Press: a stark and somber vision of futurity that richly deserves its resurrection now.

—R. S.

THE LAST GENERATION

A STORY OF THE FUTURE

INTRODUCTION

I HAD BEEN AWAKE FOR I know not how many hours that summer dawn while the sun came over the hills and colored the beautiful roses in my mother’s garden. As I lay drowsily gazing through the window, I thought I had never known a morning so sultry, and yet so pleasant. Outside not a leaf stirred; yet the air was fresh, and the madrigal notes of the birds came to me with a peculiar intensity and clearness. I listened intently to the curious sound of trilling, which drew nearer and nearer, until it seemed to merge into a whirring noise that filled the room and crowded at my ears. At first I could see nothing, and lay in deadly fear of the unknown; but soon I thought I saw rims and sparks of spectral fire floating through the pane. Then I heard some one say, “I am the Wind.”

But the voice was so like that of an old friend whom one sees again after many years that my terror departed, and I asked simply why the Wind had come.

“I have come to you,” he replied, “because you are the first man I have discovered who is after my own heart. You whom others call dreamy and capricious, volatile and headstrong, you whom some accuse of weakness, others of unscrupulous abuse of power, you I know to be a true son of Æolus, a fit inhabitant for those caves of boisterous song.”

“Are you the North Wind or the East Wind?” said I. “Or do you blow from the Atlantic? Yet if those be your feathers that shine upon the pane like yellow and purple threads, and if it be through your influence that the garden is so hot today, I should say you were the lazy South Wind, blowing from the countries that I love.”

“I blow from no quarter of the Earth,” replied the voice. “I am not in the compass. I am a little unknown Wind, and I cross not Space but Time. If you will come with me I will take you not over countries but over centuries, not directly, but waywardly, and you may travel where you will. You shall see Napoleon, Caesar, Pericles, if you command. You may be anywhere in the world at any period. I will show you some of my friends, the poets. . . .”

“And may I drink red wine with Praxiteles, or with Catullus beside his lake?”

“Certainly, if you know enough Latin and Greek, and can pronounce them intelligently.”

“And may I live with Thais or Rhodope, or some wild Assyrian queen?”

“Unless they are otherwise employed, certainly.”

“Ah, Wind of Time,” I continued with a sigh, “we men of this age are rotten with booklore, and with a yearning for the past. And wherever I asked to go among those ancient days, I should soon get dissatisfied, and weary your bright wings. I will be no pillar of salt, a sterile portent in a sterile desert. Carry me forward. Wind of Time. What is there going to be?”

The Wind put his hand over my eyes.

I. AT BIRMINGHAM TOWN HALL

“THIS IS OUR FIRST STOPPING place,” said a voice from the points of flame.

I opened my eyes expecting to see one of those extravagant scenes that imaginative novelists love to depict. I was prepared to find the upper air busy with aeroplanes and the earth beneath given over to unbridled debauch. Instead, I discovered myself seated on a tall electric standard, watching a crowd assembled before what I took to be Birmingham Town Hall. I was disappointed in this so tame a sight, until it flashed across me that I had never seen an English crowd preserve such an orderly and quiet demeanor; and a more careful inspection assured me that although no man wore a uniform, every man carried a rifle. They were obviously waiting for someone to come and address them from the balcony of the Town Hall, which was festooned with red flags. As the curtains were pulled aside I caught a momentary glimpse of an old person whose face I shall never forget, but apparently it was not for him that the breathless crowd was waiting. The man who finally appeared on the balcony was an individual not more than thirty years old, with a black beard and green eyes. At the sound of acclamation which greeted him he burst out into a loud laugh; then with a sudden seriousness he held up his hand and began to address his followers:—

“I have but few words for you, my army, a few bitter words. Need I encourage men to fight who have staked their existence to gain mastery? We cannot draw back; never will the cries of the slaughtered thousands we yearned to rescue from a more protracted, more cruel misery than war, make us forget the myriads who still await the supreme mercy of our revenge.

“For centuries and for centuries we endured the march of that Civilisation which now, by the weapons of her own making, we have set forth to destroy. We, men of Birmingham, dwellers in this hideous town unvisited by sun or moon, long endured to be told that we were in the van of progress, leading Humanity year by year along her glorious path. And, looking around them, the wise men saw the progress of civilisation, and what was it? What did it mean? Less country, fewer savages, deeper miseries, more millionaires, and more museums. So today we march on London.

“Let us commemorate, my friends, at this last hour, a great if all unwitting benefactor, the protomartyr of our cause. You remember that lank follower of the Newest Art, who lectured to us once within these very walls? He it was who first expounded to us the beauty of Birmingham, the artistic majesty of tall chimneys, the sombre glory of furnaces, the deep mystery of smoke, the sad picturesqueness of scrap-heaps and of slag. Then we began to hate our lives in earnest; then we arose and struck.

Even now I shudder when I think of that lecturer’s fate, and with a feeling of respect I commemorate his words today.

“On, then! You need not doubt of my victory, nor of my power. Some of you will die, but you know that death is rest. You do not need to fear the sombre fireworks of a mediaeval Hell, nor yet the dreary dissipations of a Methodist Heaven. Come, friends, and march on London!”

They heard him in deep silence; there was a gentle stir of preparation; they faded far below me.

II. THE PROCLAMATION

AT A POINT TEN YEARS farther along that dusky road the Wind set me down in a prodigious room. I had never before seen so large and splendid a construction, so gracefully embellished, so justly proportioned. The shape was elliptical, and it seemed as if the architect had drawn his inspiration from the Coliseum at Rome. This Hall, however, was much larger, and had the additional distinction of a roof, which, supported by a granite column, was only rendered visible from beneath by means of great bosses of clear gold. Galleries ran round the walls, and there was even a corkscrew balustrade winding up round the central pillar. Every part of the building was crowded with people. There seemed to be no window in the place, so that I could not tell whether or no it was night. The whole assembly was illuminated by a thousand electric discs, and the ventilation was almost perfectly planned on a system to me entirely strange. There was a raised throne at one end of the building on which sat a King decently dressed in black. I recognised the green-eyed man, and learnt that his name was Harris, Joshua Harris. The entire body of the Hall was filled by soldiers in mud-colored tunics and waterproof boots. These were the men that had conquered the world.

As soon as the populace were well assembled the King made a sign to his Herald, who blew so sudden and terrific a blast with his trumpet that the multitude stopped their chattering with a start. The Herald proceeded to bawl a proclamation through his megaphone. I heard him distinctly, but should never have been able to reproduce his exact words had not the Wind very kindly handed to me one of the printed copies for free distribution which it had wafted from a chair. The proclamation ran thus:—

I, JOSHUA HARRIS, BY RIGHT of conquest and in virtue of my intelligence, King of Britain, Emperor of the two Americas, and Lord High Suzerain of the World, to the Princes, Presidents, and Peoples of the said world, Greeting. Ye know that in days past an old man now dead showed me how man’s dolorous and fruitless sojourn on this globe might cease by his own act and wisdom; how pain and death and the black Power that made us might be frustrated of their accustomed prey. Then I swore an oath to fulfill that old man’s scheme, and I gathered my followers, who were the miserable men, and the hungry men, and we have conquered all there is to conquer by our cannon and by our skill. Already last year I gave public notice, in the proclamation of Vienna, in the proclamation of Cairo, in the proclamation of Pekin, and in the proclamation of Rio de Janeiro, that all bearing of children must cease, and that all women should be permanently sterilised according to the prescription of Doctor Smith. Therefore today, since there is no remote African plain, no island far away in the deep South Seas where our forces are not supreme and our agents not vigilant, I make my final proclamation to you, my army, and to you, Princes, Presidents, and Peoples of this world, that from this hour forth there be no child born of any woman, or, if born, that it be slain with its father and its mother (a fainting woman had here to be carried out), and to you; my terrestrial forces; I entrust the execution of my commands.

Joy then be with you, my people, for the granaries are full of corn and wine that I have laid up, sufficient for many years to come; joy be with you, since you are the last and noblest generation of mankind, and since Doctor Smith by his invention, and I by my wise prevision, have enabled you to live not only without payment and without work (loud cheers from the galleries), but also with luxury and splendor, and with all the delights, and none of the dangers, of universal love.”

I EXPECTED THE PROCLAMATION TO be followed by an outburst of applause; but instead the whole multitude sat calm and motionless. Looking round I was struck by the hideous appearance of mankind. It was especially revolting to look at the ears of the soldiers in front, who had their backs turned to me. These stuck out from the bullet-like heads, and made the men look like two-handled teapots on stands. Yet here and there appeared in the galleries some woman’s countenance beautified by the sorrows of our race, or some tall youth whose eyes expressed the darkest determination. The silence seemed to gather in folds. I was studying drowsily the Asiatic dresses and the nude people from Melanesia, when I heard a noise which I thought was that of the Wind. But I saw it was the King, who had begun to laugh. It was a very strange noise indeed, and very strange laughter.

III. THE MUTUAL EXTERMINATION CLUB

“YOU WOULD PERHAPS LIKE TO stay here some time,” said the Wind, “and look around. You will then understand the significance of this generation more clearly, and you may observe some interesting incidents.”

I was standing with one or two other people outside a pseudo-Chinese erection, which I at first took to be a cricket pavilion, and then saw to be the headquarters of a rifle club. I apprehended from the placards that I was in Germany, and inquired in the language of the country, which I understand very well, what was the object of this rifle practice, and whether there was any thought of war.

The man to whom I addressed myself, an adipose person with iron-rimmed spectacles and a kindly, intelligent face, seemed surprised at my question.

“You must be a stranger,” he said. “This is our very notable Vertildungsverein.”

I understood: it was a Club for Mutual Extermination.

I then noticed that there were no ordinary targets, and that the cadets were pointing their rifles at a bearded man who stood with a covered pipe in his mouth, leaning against a tree some two hundred yards away.

After the report the bearded man held up both hands.

“That is to signify that he has been completely missed,” said the fat gentleman. “One hand, wounded; two hands, missed. And that is reasonable (vernünftig), because if he were dead he could not raise either.”

I approved the admirable logic of the rule, and supposed that the man would now be allowed to go free.

“Oh yes, according to the rules,” he answered, “he certainly is allowed to go free; but I do not think his sense of honor would permit him so to do.”

“Is he then of very noble family?” I inquired.

“Not at all; he is a scientist. We have a great many scientists in our club. They are all so disappointed at the way in which human progress has been impeded, and at the impossibility of a continuous evolution of knowledge-accumulation, that they find no more attraction in life. And he is dead this time,” he continued, shading his eyes to look, as soon as a second report had flashed.

“By the way,” I asked, “I suppose you only exterminate—er—members of the club?”

The fellow smiled with a little disdain. “Oh, it would be illegal for us to exterminate outsiders. But of course if you would like to join. . . .”

“Why, that’s never a woman going over to the tree!” I cried.

“Oh yes, we have quite a number of intellectual women and upper-class ladies of advanced ideas in the club. But I do not think that lady is an intellectual; she is more probably a passion-wreck.”

She was indeed a very handsome woman in the prime of life, dressed with a little too much ostentation and coquetry in a sleeveless, transparent white blouse and a skirt to match.

My informant turned round to a skinny young student with hog’s-bristle hair, and made some vulgar jest about its “being a pity to waste such a good piece of flesh.” He was a superman, and imagined, falsely I believe, that an air of bluff cynicism, a Teutonic attempt at heartiness, was the true outward sign of inward superiority. The young man fired, and the woman raised the arm that was not shattered by the bullet. He fired again, and she fell on her knees, this time with a scream.

“I think you had better have a shot,” said the sharpshooter to my man. “I’m rather bad at this.”

Indeed his hand was shaking violently.

My interlocutor bowed, and went over to take the rifle. The skinny student took his place by my side, and began talking to me as well. “He’s an infallible shot that Müller there,” he said, nodding at my former companion. . . . “Didn’t I tell you?”

To my great relief the passion-wrecked lady fell dead. I was getting wildly excited, rent between horror and curiosity.

“You see that man in the plumed hat?” said the student. “He is coming round to say on whom the lot has fallen. Ah, he is coming this way, and making a sign at me. Good-day, sir,” he said, taking off his hat with a deep and jerky bow. “I am afraid we must continue our conversation another time.”

IV. THE EPISODE OF THE BABY

AS SOON AS I TURNED away, rather horrified, from the merry proceedings of the Mutual Extermination Club, I seemed to be in England, or perhaps in America. At all events I was walking along a dusty highway in the midst of an inquisitive crowd. In front of me half-a-dozen members of the International Police Force (their tunics and boots gave me to understand their quality) were dragging along a woman who held a baby in her arms. A horror-struck and interested multitude surged behind, and rested only when the woman was taken into a large and disgusting edifice with iron gates. Aided by my distinguished appearance and carriage, I succeeded after some difficulty in persuading the Chief Gaoler to let me visit the cell where the mother was lodged, previous to undergoing an execution which would doubtless be as unpleasant as prolonged. I found a robust, apple-cheeked woman, very clean and neat, despite her forlorn condition and the rough handling the guards had used to her. She confessed to me with tears that she had been in her day a provincial courtesan, and that she had been overcome by desire to have a child, “just to see what it was like.” She had therefore employed all imaginable shifts to avoid being injected with Smithia, and had fled with an old admirer to a lonely cave, where she had brought forth her child. “And a pretty boy too,” she added, wringing her hands, “and only fourteen months old.”

She was so heartbroken that I did not like to ask her any more questions till she had recovered, for fear her answers should be unintelligible. Finally, as I desired to learn matters that were of common knowledge to the rest of the world, and was not anxious to arouse suspicion, I represented myself as a cultured foreigner who had just been released from a manicomio, and was therefore naturally in a state of profound ignorance on all that appertained to Modern History. I felt indeed that I would never have a better chance of gathering information than from conversation with this solitary woman. It would be her pleasure, not her duty, to instruct me.

So I began by asking how the diminishing numbers of the military could keep a sufficient watch, and how it was that every one submitted so meekly to the proclamation. She answered that the police recruited themselves yearly from the more active and noble-minded of the people, that custom had a lot to do with the submissive attitude of mankind, and that apart from that, there was a great resolve abroad to carry out the project of King Harris to fulfilment. She went on to inform me that Smithia was tasteless, and would act even when drunk at meals, and not merely as an injection, that it acted on both sexes, and that it was otherwise innocuous. By now most of the well-springs, reservoirs, and cisterns had been contaminated by the fluid, of which large quantities had been prepared at a very cheap price. After gleaning sundry other details, I thanked her heartily and left the cell.

Outside in the courtyard I discovered a large concourse of people examining the baby, who was naturally enough an object of extreme wonder to the whole countryside. The women called it a duck, and used other pet names that were not then in fashion, but most of the men thought it was an ugly little brat at best. The child was seated on a cushion, and despite his mother’s absence was crowing vigorously and kicking with puny force. There was some debate as to how it should be killed. Some were for boiling and eating it; others were for hitting it on the head with a club. However, the official who held the cushion brought the conference to a close by inadvertently dropping the child on to the flags, and thereby breaking its neck.

V. THE FLORENTINE LEAGUE

I FEEL CERTAIN ON REFLECTION that the scene of the last episode must have been America, for I remember returning to Europe on a French boat which landed me at Havre, and immediately taking the train to Paris. As I passed through Normandy, I saw hardly a soul stirring in the villages, and the small houses were all in a most dilapidated condition. There was no more need for farms, and villagers in their loneliness were flocking to the towns. Even the outer suburbs of Paris were mere masses of flaked and decaying plaster. An unpleasant crash into the buffers of Saint Lazare reminded me that the engine was being driven by an amateur; indeed, we had met the Dieppe train at Rouen, sent a pilot engine ahead to clear the way, and then raced it to Paris on the up-line amid enthusiastic cheers. We won, but were badly shaken.

We left the train beside the platform, trusting to the Church Missionary Society man to put it away in the engine-shed. These excellent philanthropists were unwearying in their efforts to prevent needless loss of life, and such work as was still done in the world was performed almost entirely by them and by members of kindred British Protestant societies. They wore a blue badge to distinguish themselves, and were ordered about by every one. At the call of “Anglais, Anglais!” some side-whiskered man would immediately run up to obey the summons, and you could send him to get food from the Store for you, and he would be only too pleased. They would also cook hot dinners,

I walked through the Boulevard Montmartre, and at every step I took I became more profoundly miserable. One had called Paris the pleasure city, the fairest city in the world, in the days before the Proclamation; for one found it vibrating with beauty and life. And now assuredly it was supremely a city of pleasure, for there was no work to be done at all. So no artist ever took any trouble now, since there was neither payment nor fame attainable; and wonderful caricatures of philanthropists scribbled on the pavement or elsewhere, or clever ribald songs shrieking out of gramophones were the only reminder of that past and beautiful Paris that I had known. There was a fatuous and brutal expression on most of the faces, and the people seemed to be too lazy to do anything except drink and fondle. Even the lunatics attracted but little attention. There was a flying-machine man who was determined, as he expressed it, “that it should not be said of the human race that it never flew.” Even the “Anglais” were tired of helping him with his machine, which he was quietly building on the Place de l’Opéra—a mass of intricate wires, bamboos, and paper boxes; and the inventor himself frequently got lost as he climbed cheerily among the rigging.

Weary of all this, I slept, alone, in one of the public beds, and early next morning I clambered up the sacred slope of the Butte to see the sunrise. The great silence of early morning was over the town, a deathly and unnatural stillness. As I stood leaning over the parapet, thinking miserably, a young man came up the hill slowly yet gracefully, so that it was a pleasure to look at him. His face was sad and noble, and as I had never thought to see nobility again, I hoped he would be a friend to me.

However, he turned himself almost roughly, and said:

“Why have you come here?”

“To look at the fallen city I loved long ago,” I replied, with careless sorrow.

“Have you then also read of the old times in books?” he said, looking round at me with large bright eyes.

“Yes, I have read many books,” said I, trying to evade the subject. “But will you forgive me if I ask an impertinent question?”

“Nothing coming from you, sir, could be impertinent.”

“I wanted to ask how old you are, because you seem so young. You seem to be only seventeen.”

“You could tell me nothing more delightful,” the young man replied, with a gentle, yet strong and deep intonation. “I am indeed one of the youngest men alive—I am twenty-two years old. And I am looking for the last time on the city of Paris.”

“Do not say that,” I cried. “All this may be horrible, but it cannot be as dull as Death. Surely there must be some place in the world where we could live among beauty, some other folk besides ourselves who are still poets. Why should one die until life becomes hopelessly ugly and deformed?”

“I am not going to kill myself, as you seem to think,” said the young man. “I am going, and I pray and implore you to come with me, to a place after your heart and mine, that some friends have prepared. It is a garden, and we are a League. I have already been there three months, and I have put on these horrible clothes for one day only, in obedience to a rule of our League, that every one should go out once a year to look at the world around. We are thinking of abolishing the rule.”

“How pleasant and beautiful it sounds!”

“It is, and will you come with me there right now?”

“Shall I be admitted?”

“My word will admit you at once. Come this way with me. I have a motor at the bottom of the hill.”

During the journey I gathered much information about the League, which was called the Florentine League. It had been formed out of the youngest “years” of the race, and its members had been chosen for their taste and elegance. For although few parents of the day had thought it worth while to teach their children anything more recondite than their letters and tables, yet some of the boys and girls had developed a great desire for knowledge, and an exceeding great delight in Poetry, Art, Music, and all beautiful sights and sounds.

“We live,” he said, “apart from the world, like that merry company of gentlefolk who, when the plague was raging at Florence, left the city, and retiring to a villa in the hills, told each other those enchanting tales. We enjoy all that Life, Nature, and Art can give us, and Love has not deserted the garden, but still draws his golden bow. It is no crippled and faded Eros of the city that dwells among us, but the golden-thighed God himself. For we do all things with refinement, and not like those outside, seeing to it that in all our acts we keep our souls and bodies both delicate and pure.”

We came to the door of a long wall, and knocked. White-robed attendants appeared in answer to our summons, and I was stripped, bathed, and anointed by their deft hands. All the while a sound of singing and subdued laughter made me eager to be in the garden. I was then clothed in a very simple white silk garment with a gold clasp; the open door let sunshine in upon the tiles, and my friend, also clothed in silk, awaited me. We walked out into the garden, which was especially noticeable for those flowers which have always been called “old-fashioned”: I mean hollyhocks, sweetwilliam, snapdragons, and Canterbury bells, which were laid out in regular beds. Everywhere young men and women were together: some were walking about idly in the shade; some played at fives; some were reading to each other in the arbors. I was shown a Grecian temple in which was a library, and dwelling-places near it. I afterwards asked a girl called Fiore di Fiamma what books the Florentines preferred to read, and she told me that they loved the Poets best, not so much the serious and strenuous as those whose vague and fleeting fancies wrap the soul in an enchanting sorrow.

I asked: “Do you write songs, Fiore di Fiamma?”

“Yes, I have written a few, and music for them.”

“Do sing me one, and I will play the guitar.”

So she sang me one of the most mournful songs I had ever heard, a song which had given up all hope of fame, written for the moment’s laughter or for the moment’s tears.

“Wind,” I said that night, “stay with me many years in the garden.”

But it was not the Wind I kissed.

VI. OUTSIDE

I PASSED MANY YEARS IN that sad, enchanted place, dreaming at times of my mother’s roses, and of friends that I had known before, and watching our company grow older and fewer. There was a rule that no one should stay there after their thirty-seventh birthday, and some old comrades passed weeping from us to join the World Outside. But most of them chose to take poison and to die quietly in the Garden; we used to burn their bodies, singing, and set out their urns on the grass. In time I became Prince of the Garden: no one knew my age, and I grew no older; yet my Flame-Flower knew when I intended to die. Thus we lived on undisturbed, save for some horrible shout that rose from time to time from beyond the walls; but we were not afraid, as we had cannon mounted at our gates. At last there were twelve of us left in the precinct of delight, and we decided to die all together on the eve of the Queen’s birthday. So we made a great feast and held good cheer, and had the poison prepared, and cast lots. The first lot fell to Fiore di Fiamma, and the last lot to me; whereat all applauded. I watched my Queen, who had never seemed to me as noble as then, in her mature and majestic beauty. She kissed me, and drank, and the others drank, became very pale, and fell to earth. Then I, rising with a last paean of exultation, raised the cup to my lips.

But that moment the trees and flowers bent beneath a furious storm, and the cup was wrenched out of my hand by a terrific blast and sent hurtling to the ground. I saw the rainbow-colored feathers flashing, and for a second I saw the face of the Wind himself. I trembled, and sinking into my chair buried my face in my hands. A wave of despair and loneliness broke over me. I felt like a drowning man.

“Take me back, Lord of the Wind!” I cried. “What am I doing among these dead aesthetes? Take me back to the country where I was born, to the house where I am at home, to the things I used to handle, to the friends with whom I talked, before man went mad. I am sick of this generation that cannot strive or fight, these people of one idea, this doleful, ageing world. Take me away!”

But the Wind replied in angry tones, not gently as of old:

“Is it thus you treat me, you whom I singled out from men? You have forgotten me for fifteen years; you have wandered up and down a garden, oblivious of all things that I had taught you, incurious, idle, listless, effeminate. Now I have saved you from dying a mock death, like a jester in a tragedy; and in time I will take you back, for that I promised; but first you shall be punished as you deserve.” So saying, the Wind raised me aloft and set me beyond the wall.

I dare not describe—I fear to remember the unutterable loathing of the three years I spent outside. The unhappy remnant of a middle-aged mankind was gradually exchanging lust for gluttony. Crowds squatted by day and by night round the Houses of Dainty Foods that had been stocked by Harris the King; there was no youthful face to be found among them, and scarcely one that was not repulsively deformed with the signs of lust, cunning, and debauch. At evening there were incessant fires of crumbling buildings, and fat women made horrible attempts at revelry. There seemed to be no power of thought in these creatures. The civilisation of ages had fallen from them like a worthless rag from off their backs. Europeans were as bestial as Hottentots, and the noblest thing they ever did was to fight. For sometimes a fierce desire of battle seized them, and then they tore each other passionately with teeth and nails.

I cannot understand it even now. Surely there should have been some Puritans somewhere, or some Philosophers waiting to die with dignity and honor. Was it that there was no work to do? Or that there were no children to love? Or that there was nothing young in the World? Or that all beautiful souls perished in the garden?

I think it must have been the terrible thought of approaching extinction that obsessed these distracted men. And perhaps they were not totally depraved. There was a rough fellowship among them, a desire to herd together; and for all that they fought so much, they fought in groups. They never troubled to look after the sick and the wounded, but what could they do?

One day I began to feel that I too was one of them—I, who had held aloof in secret ways so long, joined the gruesome company in their nightly dance, and sat down to eat and drink their interminable meal. Suddenly a huge, wild, naked man appeared in front of the firelight, a prophet, as it appeared, who prophesied not death but life. He flung out his lean arms and shouted at us: “In vain have you schemed and lingered and died, O Last Generation of the Damned. For the cities shall be built again, and the mills shall grind anew, and the church bells shall ring, and the Earth be repeopled with new miseries in God’s own time.”

I could not bear to hear this fellow speak. Here was one of the old sort of men, the men that talked evil, and murmured about God. “Friends,” I said, turning to the Feasters, “we will have no skeletons like that at our feast.” So saying I seized a piece of flaming wood from the fire, and rushed at the man. He struggled fiercely, but he had no weapon, and I beat him about the head till he fell, and death rattled in his throat—rattled with what seemed to me a most familiar sound. I stood aghast; then wiped the blood from the man’s eyes and looked into them.

“Who are you?” I exclaimed. “I have seen you before; I seem to know the sound of your voice and the color of your eyes. Can you speak a word and tell us your story, most unhappy prophet, before you die?”

“Men of the Last Generation,” said the dying man, raising himself on his elbow—“Men of the Last Generation, I am Joshua Harris, your King.”

As brainless frogs who have no thought or sense in them, yet shrink when they are touched, and swim when the accustomed water laves their eager limbs, so did these poor creatures feel a nerve stirring within them, and unconsciously obey the voice which had commanded them of old. As though the mere sound of his tremulous words conveyed an irresistible mandate, the whole group came shuffling nearer. All the while they preserved a silence that made me afraid, so reminiscent was it of that deadly hush that had followed the Proclamation, of the quiet army starting for London, and especially of that mysterious and sultry morning so many years ago when the roses hung their enamelled heads and the leaves were as still as leaves of tin or copper. They sat down in circles round the fire, maintaining an orderly disposition, like a stray battalion of some defeated army which is weary of fruitless journeys in foreign lands, but still remembers discipline and answers to command. Meanwhile, the dying man was gathering with a noiseless yet visible effort every shred of strength from his massive limbs, and preparing to give them his last message. As he looked round on that frightful crowd great tears, that his own pain and impending doom could never have drawn from him, filled his strange eyes.

“Forgive me—forgive me,” he said at last, clearly enough for all to hear. “If any of you still know what mercy is, or the meaning of forgiveness, say a kind word to me. Loving you, relying on humanity and myself, despising the march of Time and the power of Heaven, I became a false redeemer, and took upon my back the burden of all sin. But how was I to know, my people, I who am only a man, whither my plans for your redemption would lead? Have none of you a word to say?

“Is there no one here who remembers our fighting days? Where are the great lieutenants who stood at my side and cheered me with counsel? Where are Robertson, Baldwin, and Andrew Spencer? Are there none of the old set left?”

He brushed the tears and blood from his eyes and gazed into the crowd. Pointing joyously to an old man who sat not far away he called out, “I know you, Andrew, from that great scar on your forehead. Come here, Andrew, and that quickly.”

The old man seemed neither to hear nor understand him, but sat like all the rest, blinking and unresponsive.

“Andrew,” he cried, “you must know me! Think of Brum and South Melton Street. Be an Englishman, Andrew—come and shake hands!”

The man looked at him with staring, timid eyes; then shuddered all over, scrambled up from the ground, and ran away.

“It does not matter,” murmured the King of the World. “There are no men left. I have lived in the desert, and I saw there that which I would I had seen long ago—visions that came too late to warn me. For a time my Plan has conquered; but that greater Plan shall be victorious in the end.”

I was trying to stanch the wounds I had inflicted; and I hoped to comfort him, but he thrust me aside.

“I know that no man of this generation could have killed me. I have nothing in common with you, bright Spirit. It was not you I loved, not for you I fought and struggled, but for these. I do not want to be reminded, by that light of reason shining in your eyes, of what we were all of us, once. It was a heroic age, when good and evil lived together, and misery bound man to man. Yet I will not regret what I have done. I ask forgiveness not of God, but of Man; and I claim the gratitude of thousands who are unknown, and unknown shall ever remain. For ages and ages God must reign over an empty kingdom, since I have brought to an end one great cycle of centuries. Tell me, Stranger, was I not great in my day?”

He fell back, and the Wind that took his Spirit carried me also into space.

VII. THE LAST MEN

THE WIND BORE ME ONWARDS more than forty years, and I found seated beside a granary half-a-dozen wrinkled and very aged men, whose faces were set with a determination to go on living to the bitter end. They were delirious, and naked; they tore their white beards; they mumbled and could not speak. The great beasts came out of the forest by night softly and gazed at them with their lantern eyes, but never did them harm. All day long they ate and slept or wandered a little aimlessly about. During that year four of them died.

Afterwards I saw the last two men. One of them was lying on the ground gasping passionately for breath, his withered limbs awry with pain. I could see that he had been a magnificent man in his youth. As his old friend died, the Last of the Race remembered his Humanity. He bent down, kissed the livid lips, carefully and tearfully closed the filmed red eyes. He even tried to scratch a grave with his long fingernails, but soon despaired. He then went away, plodding as fast as he could hobble, weeping silently, afraid of the Dead. In the afternoon he came to a vast city, where many corpses lay; and about nightfall, when the stars were shining, he came to a massive half-ruined Dome that had been used for the worship of some God. Entering, he tottered towards the altar, which still stood, half-buried in stone-dust and flakes; and reaching up to a great bronze Crucifix that stood upon it, with his dying strength he clasped to his arms the Emblem of our Sorrow.

I saw the vast Halls and Palaces of men falling in slowly, decaying, crumbling, destroyed by nothing but the rains and the touch of Time. And looking again I saw wandering over and above the ruins, moving curiously about, myriads of brown, hairy, repulsive little apes.

One of them was building a fire with sticks.

Finis

— FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

MOST OF THE MAGAZINE FICTION of the turn of the last century has vanished into oblivion, but Frank Lillie Pollock’s “Finis,” first published in the June 1906 issue of Argosy, has held its own in print for more than a hundred years, a true classic of early science fiction. What keeps it alive is the quiet conviction of its narrative—a fantastic story realistically told, as though its author is coolly reporting its extraordinary events as an eyewitness.

Those events—the stupendous stellar catastrophe that interrupts our twentieth century before it has barely begun—are not very likely actually to befall us, according to modern theories of how the galaxy is constructed. But they seemed less implausible in Pollock’s day, and so he could hold his readers spellbound as he unfolded his tale. For us, even knowing what we do know about the universe, its effect is still powerful. One of the virtues of the best science-fictional storytelling is that it can make the fantastic and even the impossible seem real, and that is what Frank Lillie Pollock, a well-known writer a century ago but altogether forgotten today but for this one story, achieved here.

—R. S.

FINIS

“I’M GETTING TIRED,” COMPLAINED DAVIS, lounging in the window of the Physics Building, “and sleepy. It’s after eleven o’clock. This makes the fourth night I’ve sat up to see your new star, and it’ll be the last. Why, the thing was billed to appear three weeks ago.”

“Are you tired, Miss Wardour?” asked Eastwood, and the girl glanced up with a quick flush and a negative murmur.

Eastwood made the reflection anew that she certainly was painfully shy. She was almost as plain as she was shy, though her hair had an unusual beauty of its own, fine as silk and colored like palest flame.

Probably she had brains; Eastwood had seen her reading some extremely “deep” books, but she seemed to have no amusem*nts, few interests. She worked daily at the Art Students’ League, and boarded where he did, and he had thus come to ask her with the Davises to watch for the new star from the laboratory windows on the Heights.

“Do you really think that it’s worth while to wait any longer, professor?” inquired Mrs. Davis, concealing a yawn.

Eastwood was somewhat annoyed by the continued failure of the star to show itself and he hated to be called “professor,” being only an assistant professor of physics.

“I don’t know,” he answered somewhat curtly. “This is the twelfth night that I have waited for it. Of course, it would have been a mathematical miracle if astronomers should have solved such a problem exactly, though they’ve been figuring on it for a quarter of a century.”

The new Physics Building of Columbia University was about twelve stories high. The physics laboratory occupied the ninth and tenth floors, with the astronomical rooms above it, an arrangement which would have been impossible before the invention of the oil vibration cushion, which practically isolated the instrument rooms from the earth.

Eastwood had arranged a small telescope at the window, and below them spread the illuminated map of Greater New York, sending up a faintly musical roar. All the streets were crowded, as they had been every night since the fifth of the month, when the great new star, or sun, was expected to come into view.

SOME ERROR HAD BEEN MADE in the calculations, though, as Eastwood said, astronomers had been figuring on them for twenty-five years.

It was, in fact, nearly forty years since Professor Adolphe Bernier first announced his theory of a limited universe at the International Congress of Sciences in Paris, where it was counted as little more than a masterpiece of imagination.

Professor Bernier did not believe that the universe was infinite. Somewhere, he argued, the universe must have a center, which is the pivot for its revolution.

The moon revolves around the earth, the planetary system revolves about the sun, the solar system revolves about one of the fixed stars, and this whole system in its turn undoubtedly revolves around some more distant point. But this sort of progression must definitely stop somewhere.

Somewhere there must be a central sun, a vast incandescent body which does not move at all. And as a sun is always larger and hotter than its satellites, therefore the body at the center of the universe must be of an immensity and temperature beyond anything known or imagined.

It was objected that this hypothetical body should then be large enough to be visible from the earth, and Professor Bernier replied that some day it undoubtedly would be visible. Its light had simply not yet had time to reach the earth.

The passage of light from the nearest of the fixed stars is a matter of three years, and there must be many stars so distant that their rays have not yet reached us. The great central sun must be so inconceivably remote that perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would elapse before its light should burst upon the solar system.

All this was contemptuously classed as “newspaper science” till the extraordinary mathematical revival a little after the middle of the twentieth century afforded the means of verifying it.

Following the new theorems discovered by Professor Burnside, of Princeton, and elaborated by Dr. Taneka, of Tokyo, astronomers succeeded in calculating the arc of the sun’s movements through space, and its ratio to the orbit of its satellites. With this as a basis, it was possible to follow the widening circles, the consecutive systems of the heavenly bodies and their rotations.

The theory of Professor Bernier was justified. It was demonstrated that there really was a gigantic mass of incandescent matter, which, whether the central point of the universe or not, appeared to be without motion.

The weight and distance of this new sun were approximately calculated, and, the speed of light being known, it was an easy matter to reckon when its rays would reach the earth.

It was then estimated that the approaching rays would arrive at the earth in twenty-six years, and that was twenty-six years ago. Three weeks had passed since the date when the new heavenly body was expected to become visible, and it had not yet appeared.

Popular interest had risen to a high pitch, stimulated by innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, and the streets were nightly thronged with excited crowds armed with opera-glasses and star maps, while at every corner a telescope man had planted his tripod instrument at a nickel a look.

Similar scenes were taking place in every civilized city on the globe.

It was generally supposed that the new luminary would appear in size about midway between Venus and the moon. Better informed persons expected something like the sun, and a syndicate of capitalists quietly leased large areas on the coast of Greenland in anticipation of a great rise in temperature and a northward movement in population.

Even the business situation was appreciably affected by the public uncertainty and excitement. There was a decline in stocks, and a minor religious sect boldly prophesied the end of the world.

“I’ve had enough of this,” said Davis, looking at his watch again. “Are you ready to go, Grace? By the way, isn’t it getting warmer?”

It had been a sharp February day, but the temperature was certainly rising. Water was dripping from the roofs, and from the icicles that fringed the window ledges, as if a warm wave had suddenly arrived.

“What’s that light?” suddenly asked Alice Wardour, who was lingering by the open window. . . .

“It must be moonrise,” said Eastwood, though the illumination of the horizon was almost like daybreak.

Davis abandoned his intention of leaving, and they watched the east grow pale and flushed till at last a brilliant white disc heaved itself above the horizon.

It resembled the full moon, but as if trebled in luster, and the streets grew almost as light as by day.

“Good heavens, that must be the new star, after all!” said Davis in an awed voice.

“No, it’s only the moon. This is the hour and minute for her rising,” answered Eastwood, who had grasped the cause of the phenomenon. “But the new sun must have appeared on the other side of the earth. Its light is what makes the moon so brilliant. It will rise here just as the sun does, no telling how soon. It must be brighter than was expected—and maybe hotter,” he added with a vague uneasiness.

“Isn’t it getting very warm in here?” said Mrs. Davis, loosening her jacket. “Couldn’t you turn off some of the steam heat?”

Eastwood turned it all off, for, in spite of the open window, the room was really growing uncomfortably close. But the warmth appeared to come from without; it was like a warm spring evening, and the icicles were breaking loose from the cornices.

FOR HALF AN HOUR THEY leaned from the windows with but desultory conversation, and below them the streets were black with people and whitened with upturned faces. The brilliant moon rose higher, and the mildness of the night sensibly increased.

It was after midnight when Eastwood first noticed the reddish flush tinging the clouds low in the east, and he pointed it out to his companions.

“That must be it at last,” he exclaimed, with a thrill of vibrating excitement at what he was going to see, a cosmic event unprecedented in intensity.

The brightness waxed rapidly.

“By Jove, see it redden!” Davis ejacul*ted. “It’s getting lighter than day—and hot! Whew!”

The whole eastern sky glowed with a deepening pink that extended half round the horizon. Sparrows chirped from the roofs, and it looked as if the disc of the unknown star might at any moment be expected to lift above the Atlantic, but it delayed long.

The heavens continued to burn with myriad hues, gathering at last to a fiery furnace glow on the skyline.

Mrs. Davis suddenly screamed. An American flag blowing freely from its staff on the roof of the tall building had all at once burst into flame. Low in the east lay a long streak of intense fire which broadened as they squinted with watering eyes. It was as if the edge of the world had been heated to whiteness.

The brilliant moon faded to a feathery white film in the glare. There was a confused outcry from the observatory overhead, and a crash of something being broken, and as the strange new sunlight fell through the window the onlookers leaped back as if a blast furnace had been opened before them.

The glass cracked and fell inward. Something like the sun, but magnified fifty times in size and hotness, was rising out of the sea. An iron instrument-table by the window began to smoke with an acrid smell of varnish.

“What the devil is this, Eastwood?” shouted Davis accusingly.

From the streets rose a sudden, enormous wail of fright and pain, the outcry of a million throats at once, and the roar of a stampede followed. The pavements were choked with struggling, panic-stricken people in the fierce glare, and above the din arose the clanging rush of fire engines and trucks.

Smoke began to rise from several points below Central Park, and two or three church chimes pealed crazily.

The observers from overhead came running down the stairs with a thunderous trampling, for the elevator man had deserted his post.

“Here, we’ve got to get out of this,” shouted Davis, seizing his wife by the arm and hustling her toward the door. “This place’ll be on fire directly.”

“Hold on. You can’t go down into that crush on the street,” Eastwood cried, trying to prevent him.

But Davis broke away and raced down the stairs, half carrying his terrified wife. Eastwood got his back against the door in time to prevent Alice from following them.

“There’s nothing in this building that will burn, Miss Wardour,” he said as calmly as he could. “We had better stay here for the present. It would be sure death to get involved in that stampede below. Just listen to it.”

The crowds on the street seemed to sway to and fro in contending waves, and the cries, curses, and screams came up in a savage chorus.

The heat was already almost blistering to the skin, though they carefully avoided the direct rays, and instruments of glass in the laboratory cracked loudly one by one.

A vast cloud of dark smoke began to rise from the harbor, where the shipping must have caught fire, and something exploded with a terrific report. A few minutes later half a dozen fires broke out in the lower part of the city, rolling up volumes of smoke that faded to a thin mist in the dazzling light.

The great new sun was now fully above the horizon, and the whole east seemed ablaze. The stampede in the streets had quieted all at once, for the survivors had taken refuge in the nearest houses, and the pavements were black with motionless forms of men and women.

“I’ll do whatever you say,” said Alice, who was deadly pale, but remarkably collected. Even at that moment Eastwood was struck by the splendor of her ethereally brilliant hair that burned like pale flame above her pallid face. “But we can’t stay here, can we?”

“No,” replied Eastwood, trying to collect his faculties in the face of this catastrophic revolution of nature. “We’d better go to the basem*nt, I think.”

In the basem*nt were deep vaults used for the storage of delicate instruments, and these would afford shelter for a time at least. It occurred to him as he spoke that perhaps temporary safety was the best that any living thing on earth could hope for.

But he led the way down the well staircase. They had gone down six or seven flights when a gloom seemed to grow upon the air, with a welcome relief.

It seemed almost cool, and the sky had clouded heavily, with the appearance of polished and heated silver.

A deep but distant roaring arose and grew from the southeast, and they stopped on the second landing to look from the window.

A VAST BLACK MASS SEEMED to fill the space between sea and sky, and it was sweeping toward the city, probably from the harbor, Eastwood thought, at a speed that made it visibly grow as they watched it.

“A cyclone—and a waterspout!” muttered Eastwood, appalled.

He might have foreseen it from the sudden, excessive evaporation and the heating of the air. The gigantic black pillar drove toward them swaying and reeling, and a gale came with it, and a wall of impenetrable mist behind.

As Eastwood watched its progress he saw its cloudy bulk illumined momentarily by a dozen lightning-like flashes, and a moment later, above its roar, came the tremendous detonations of heavy cannon.

The forts and the warships were firing shells to break the waterspout, but the shots seemed to produce no effect. It was the city’s last and useless attempt at resistance. A moment later forts and ships alike must have been engulfed.

“Hurry! This building will collapse!” Eastwood shouted.

They rushed down another flight, and heard the crash with which the monster broke over the city. A deluge of water, like the emptying of a reservoir, thundered upon the street, and the water was steaming hot as it fell.

There was a rending crash of falling walls, and in another instant the Physics Building seemed to be twisted around by a powerful hand. The walls blew out, and the whole structure sank in a chaotic mass.

But the tough steel frame was practically unwreckable, and, in fact, the upper portion was simply bent down upon the lower stories, peeling off most of the shell of masonry and stucco.

Eastwood was stunned as he was hurled to the floor, but when he came to himself he was still upon the landing, which was tilted at an alarming angle. A tangled mass of steel rods and beams hung a yard over his head, and a huge steel girder had plunged down perpendicularly from above, smashing everything in its way.

Wreckage choked the well of the staircase, a mass of plaster, bricks, and shattered furniture surrounded him, and he could look out in almost every direction through the rent iron skeleton.

A yard away Alice was sitting up, mechanically wiping the mud and water from her face, and apparently uninjured. Tepid water was pouring through the interstices of the wreck in torrents, though it did not appear to be raining.

A steady, powerful gale had followed the whirlwind, and it brought a little coolness with it. Eastwood inquired perfunctorily of Alice if she were hurt, without being able to feel any degree of interest in the matter. His faculty of sympathy seemed paralyzed.

“I don’t know. I thought—I thought that we were all dead!” the girl murmured in a sort of daze. “What was it? Is it all over?”

“I think it’s only beginning,” Eastwood answered dully.

The gale had brought up more clouds and the skies were thickly overcast, but shining white-hot. Presently the rain came down in almost scalding floods and as it fell upon the hissing streets it steamed again into the air.

In three minutes all the world was choked with hot vapor, and from the roar and splash the streets seemed to be running rivers.

The downpour seemed too violent to endure, and after an hour it did cease, while the city reeked with mist. Through the whirling fog Eastwood caught glimpses of ruined buildings, vast heaps of debris, all the wreckage of the greatest city of the twentieth century.

Then the torrents fell again, like a cataract, as if the waters of the earth were shuttleco*cking between sea and heaven. With a jarring tremor of the ground a landslide went down into the Hudson.

The atmosphere was like a vapor bath, choking and sickening. The physical agony of respiration aroused Alice from a sort of stupor, and she cried out pitifully that she would die.

The strong wind drove the hot spray and steam through the shattered building till it seemed impossible that human lungs could extract life from the semi-liquid that had replaced the air, but the two lived.

After hours of this parboiling the rain slackened, and, as the clouds parted, Eastwood caught a glimpse of a familiar form halfway up the heavens. It was the sun, the old sun, looking small and watery.

But the intense heat and brightness told that the enormous body still blazed behind the clouds. The rain seemed to have ceased definitely, and the hard, shining whiteness of the sky grew rapidly hotter.

The heat of the air increased to an oven-like degree; the mists were dissipated, the clouds licked up, and the earth seemed to dry itself almost immediately. The heat from the two suns beat down simultaneously till it became a monstrous terror, unendurable.

An odor of smoke began to permeate the air; there was a dazzling shimmer over the streets, and great clouds of mist arose from the bay, but these appeared to evaporate before they could darken the sky.

The piled wreck of the building sheltered the two refugees from the direct rays of the new sun, now almost overhead, but not from the penetrating heat of the air. But the body will endure almost anything, short of tearing asunder, for a time at least; it is the finer mechanism of the nerves that suffers most.

ALICE LAY FACE DOWN AMONG the bricks, gasping and moaning. The blood hammered in Eastwood’s brain, and the strangest mirages flickered before his eyes.

Alternately he lapsed into heavy stupors, and awoke to the agony of the day. In his lucid moments he reflected that this could not last long, and tried to remember what degree of heat would cause death.

Within an hour after the drenching rains he was feverishly thirsty, and the skin felt as if peeling from his whole body.

This fever and horror lasted until he forgot that he had ever known another state; but at last the west reddened, and the flaming sun went down. It left the familiar planet high in the heavens, and there was no darkness until the usual hour, though there was a slight lowering of the temperature.

But when night did come it brought life-giving coolness, and though the heat was still intense it seemed temperate by comparison. More than all, the kindly darkness seemed to set a limit to the cataclysmic disorders of the day.

“Ouf! This is heavenly!” said Eastwood, drawing long breaths and feeling mind and body revived in the gloom.

“It won’t last long,” replied Alice, and her voice sounded extraordinarily calm through the darkness. “The heat will come again when the new sun rises in a few hours.”

“We might find some better place in the meanwhile—a deep cellar; or we might get into the subway,” Eastwood suggested.

“It would be no use. Don’t you understand? I have been thinking it all out. After this, the new sun will always shine, and we could not endure it even another day. The wave of heat is passing round the world as it revolves, and in a few hours the whole earth will be a burnt-up ball. Very likely we are the only people left alive in New York, or perhaps in America.”

She seemed to have taken the intellectual initiative, and spoke with an assumption of authority that amazed him.

“But there must be others,” said Eastwood, after thinking for a moment. “Other people have found sheltered places, or miners, or men underground.”

“They would have been drowned by the rain. At any rate, there will be none left alive by tomorrow night.

“Think of it,” she went dreamily, “for a thousand years this wave of fire has been rushing toward us, while life has been going on so happily in the world, so unconscious that the world was doomed all the time. And now this is the end of life.”

“I don’t know,” Eastwood said slowly. “It may be the end of human life, but there must be some forms that will survive—some micro-organisms perhaps capable of resisting high temperatures, if nothing higher. The seed of life will be left at any rate, and that is everything. Evolution will begin over again, producing new types to suit the changed conditions. I only wish I could see what creatures will be here in a few thousand years.

“But I can’t realize it at all—this thing!” he cried passionately, after a pause. “Is it real? Or have we all gone mad? It seems too much like a bad dream.”

The rain crashed down again as he spoke, and the earth steamed, though not with the dense reek of the day. For hours the waters roared and splashed against the earth in hot billows till the streets were foaming yellow rivers, dammed by the wreck of fallen buildings.

There was a continual rumble as earth and rock slid into the East River, and at last the Brooklyn Bridge collapsed with a thunderous crash and splash that made all Manhattan vibrate. A gigantic billow like a tidal wave swept up the river from its fall.

The downpour slackened and ceased soon after the moon began to shed an obscured but brilliant light through the clouds.

Presently the east commenced to grow luminous, and this time there could be no doubt as to what was coming.

Alice crept closer to the man as the gray light rose upon the watery air.

“Kiss me!” she whispered suddenly, throwing her arms around his neck. He could feel her trembling. “Say you love me; hold me in your arms. There is only an hour.”

“Don’t be afraid. Try to face it bravely,” stammered Eastwood.

“I don’t fear it—not death. But I have never lived. I have always been timid and wretched and afraid—afraid to speak—and I’ve almost wished for suffering and misery or anything rather than to be stupid and dumb and dead, the way I’ve always been.

“I’ve never dared to tell anyone what I was, what I wanted. I’ve been afraid all my life, but I’m not afraid now. I have never lived; I have never been happy; and now we must die together!”

It seemed to Eastwood the cry of the perishing world. He held her in his arms and kissed her wet, tremulous face that was strained to his.

THE TWILIGHT WAS GONE BEFORE they knew it. The sky was blue already, with crimson flakes mounting to the zenith, and the heat was growing once more intense.

“This is the end, Alice,” said Eastwood, and his voice trembled.

She looked at him, her eyes shining with an unearthly softness and brilliancy, and turned her face to the east.

There, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.

The Coming of The Ice

— G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

HUGO GERNSBACK’S AMAZING STORIES, THE first English-language magazine devoted entirely to the publication of science fiction, made its debut with its April 1926 issue. In the beginning, Gernsback had great difficulty finding new stories for his magazine, because those few writers who specialized in science fiction for such pulp magazines as Argosy and All-Story in those days (Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, Murray Leinster, Ray Cummings, and a handful of others) were accustomed to faster and more generous pay than Gernsback was prepared to offer. His first issue and the one that followed it were made up entirely of reprinted material, easily and cheaply obtained—two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, two by H. G. Wells, the first installments of two different serialized novels by Jules Verne, and other stories taken from such magazines as All-Story and Gernsback’s own Science and Invention. Among the reprints in those first issues was a two-part serial called The Man from the Atom by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, which Gernsback had previously published in Science and Invention in 1923.

Wertenbaker, born in Delaware in 1907, had been just sixteen when he sold the two Man from the Atom stories to Gernsback. And the first writer to whom Gernsback turned, three years later, when he finally acquired a story that had never been published anywhere else. This was “The Coming of the Ice,” in the third issue of Amazing Stories, June 1926. It is a story which, after nearly a hundred years, still holds its own for modern readers, something that is hard to say of most of the other new material that Gernsback would run in his nascent science-fiction magazine.

What keeps the Wertenbaker story alive, apart from the visionary power of its picture of a world enfolded by a new ice age, is its human aspect: the insight into the psychology of an immortal man, remarkable for a nineteen-year-old author. Unlike most of Gernsback’s other contributors of new fiction in the next few years, whose work tended toward being dry scientific lectures illustrated by two-dimensional human characters, Wertenbaker was aware from the beginning of emphasizing emotions as well as technology in the newly developing field of science fiction. In “Science Versus Facts,” his editorial in the fourth issue of Amazing Stories, Gernsback quoted a letter from his stellar young contributor in which Wertenbaker observed that science fiction “goes out into the remote vistas of the universe, where there is still mystery and so still beauty. For that reason [it] seems to me to be the true literature of the future. The danger that may lie before Amazing Stories is that of becoming too scientific and not sufficiently literary. It is too early to be sure, but not too early for a warning to be issued amicably and frankly.”

Despite Wertenbaker’s hope that science fiction would adopt a more literary orientation, Gernsback remained devoted to gadget-based stories and sugarcoated scientific lectures, and Wertenbaker soon drifted away from him. He wrote only three more science-fiction stories, the last of them in 1930, before turning his attention to mainstream fiction with the 1933 novel, Black Cabin, published under the pseudonym of “Green Peyton.” He went on to become an editor for Fortune and an authority on the American Southwest, producing such books as For God and Texas and America’s Heartland, the Southwest, but also retained his interest in matters futuristic, affiliating himself with NASA and the Air Force Systems Command as a technical writer before his death in San Antonio in 1968.

—R. S.

THE COMING OF THE ICE

Strange men these creatures of the hundredth century . . .

IT IS STRANGE TO BE alone, and so cold. To be the last man on earth. . . .

The snow drives silently about me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I am isolated in this tiny, white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands of years is it since I last knew true companionship? For a long time I have been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood. Now they are gone. Now I have not even the stars to keep me company, for they are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight here below.

If only I could know how long it has been since first I was imprisoned upon the earth. It cannot matter now. And yet some vague dissatisfaction, some faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing ears: What year? What year?

It was in the year 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was then a very great man who performed operations on his fellows to compose their vitals—we called such men surgeons. John Granden wore the title “Sir” before his name, in indication of nobility by birth according to the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir John’s, if I must be precise, for, while he had achieved an enormous reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that his real work lay in the experimental end of his profession. He was, in a way, a dreamer, but a dreamer who could make his dreams come true.

I was a very close friend of Sir John’s. In fact, we shared the same apartments in London. I have never forgotten that day when he first mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I had just come in from a long sleigh-ride in the country with Alice, and I was seated drowsily in the window-seat, writing idly in my mind a description of the wind and the snow and the grey twilight of the evening. It is strange, is it not, that my tale should begin and end with the snow and the twilight.

Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of the room and came hurrying across to another door. He looked at me, grinning rather like a triumphant maniac.

“It’s coming!” he cried, without pausing, “I’ve almost got it!” I smiled at him: he looked very ludicrous at that moment.

“What have you got?” I asked.

“Good Lord, man, the Secret—the Secret!” And then he was gone again, the door closing upon his victorious cry, “The Secret!”

I was, of course, amused. But I was also very much interested. I knew Sir John well enough to realize that, however amazing his appearance might be, there would be nothing absurd about his “Secret”—whatever it was. But it was useless to speculate. I could only hope for enlightenment at dinner. So I immersed myself in one of the surgeon’s volumes from his fine Library of Imagination, and waited.

I think the book was one of Mr. H. G. Wells’, probably “The Sleeper Awakes,” or some other of his brilliant fantasies and predictions, for I was in a mood conducive to belief in almost anything when, later, we sat down together across the table. I only wish I could give some idea of the atmosphere that permeated our apartments, the reality it lent to whatever was vast and amazing and strange. You could then, whoever you are, understand a little the ease with which I accepted Sir John’s new discovery.

He began to explain it to me at once, as though he could keep it to himself no longer.

“Did you think I had gone mad, Dennell?” he asked. “I quite wonder that I haven’t. Why, I have been studying for many years—for most of my life—on this problem. And, suddenly, I have solved it! Or, rather, I am afraid I have solved another one much greater.”

“Tell me about it, but for God’s sake don’t be technical.”

“Right,” he said. Then he paused. “Dennell, it’s magnificent! It will change everything that is in the world.” His eyes held mine suddenly with the fatality of a hypnotist’s. “Dennell, it is the Secret of Eternal Life,” he said.

“Good Lord, Sir John!” I cried, half inclined to laugh.

“I mean it,” he said. “You know I have spent most of my life studying the processes of birth, trying to find out precisely what went on in the whole history of conception.”

“You have found out?”

“No, that is just what amuses me. I have discovered something else without knowing yet what causes either process.

“I don’t want to be technical, and I know very little of what actually takes place myself. But I can try to give you some idea of it.”

IT IS THOUSANDS, PERHAPS MILLIONS of years since Sir John explained to me. What little I understood at the time I may have forgotten, yet I try to reproduce what I can of his theory.

“In my study of the processes of birth,” he began, “I discovered the rudiments of an action which takes place in the bodies of both men and women. There are certain properties in the foods we eat that remain in the body for the reproduction of life, two distinct Essences, so to speak, of which one is retained by the woman, another by the man. It is the union of these two properties that, of course, creates the child.

“Now, I made a slight mistake one day in experimenting with a guinea-pig, and I re-arranged certain organs which I need not describe so that I thought I had completely messed up the poor creature’s abdomen. It lived, however, and I laid it aside. It was some years later that I happened to notice it again. It had not given birth to any young, but I was amazed to note that it had apparently grown no older: it seemed precisely in the same state of growth in which I had left it.

“From that I built up. I re-examined the guinea-pig, and observed it carefully. I need not detail my studies. But in the end I found that my ‘mistake’ had in reality been a momentous discovery. I found that I had only to close certain organs, to re-arrange certain ducts, and to open certain dormant organs, and, mirabile dictu, the whole process of reproduction was changed.

“You have heard, of course, that our bodies are continually changing, hour by hour, minute by minute, so that every few years we have been literally reborn. Some such principle as this seems to operate in reproduction, except that, instead of the old body being replaced by the new, and in its form, approximately, the new body is created apart from it. It is the creation of children that causes us to die, it would seem, because if this activity is, so to speak, dammed up or turned aside into new channels, the reproduction operates on the old body, renewing it continually. It is very obscure and very absurd, is it not? But the most absurd part of it is that it is true. Whatever the true explanation may be, the fact remains that the operation can be done, that it actually prolongs life indefinitely, and that I alone know the secret.”

Sir John told me a very great deal more, but, after all, I think it amounted to little more than this. It would be impossible for me to express the great hold his discovery took upon my mind the moment he recounted it. From the very first, under the spell of his personality, I believed, and I knew he was speaking the truth. And it opened up before me new vistas. I began to see myself become suddenly eternal, never again to know the fear of death. I could see myself storing up, century after century, an amplitude of wisdom and experience that would make me truly a god.

“Sir John!” I cried, long before he was finished. “You must perform that operation on me!”

“But, Dennell, you are too hasty. You must not put yourself so rashly into my hands.”

“You have perfected the operation, haven’t you?”

“That is true,” he said.

“You must try it out on somebody, must you not?”

“Yes, of course. And yet—somehow, Dennell, I am afraid. I cannot help feeling that man is not yet prepared for such a vast thing. There are sacrifices. One must give up love and all sensual pleasure. This operation not only takes away the mere fact of reproduction, but it deprives one of all the things that go with sex, all love, all sense of beauty, all feeling for poetry and the arts. It leaves only the few emotions, selfish emotions, that are necessary to self-preservation. Do you not see? One becomes an intellect, nothing more—a cold apotheosis of reason. And I, for one, cannot face such a thing calmly.”

“But, Sir John, like many fears, it is largely horrible in the foresight. After you have changed your nature you cannot regret it. What you are would be as horrible an idea to you afterwards as the thought of what you will be seems now.”

“True, true. I know it. But it is hard to face, nevertheless.”

“I am not afraid to face it.”

“You do not understand it, Dennell, I am afraid. And I wonder whether you or I or any of us on this earth are ready for such a step. After all, to make a race deathless, one should be sure it is a perfect race.”

“Sir John,” I said, “it is not you who have to face this, nor any one else in the world till you are ready. But I am firmly resolved, and I demand it of you as my friend.”

Well, we argued much further, but in the end I won. Sir John promised to perform the operation three days later.

. . . But do you perceive now what I had forgotten during all that discussion, the one thing I had thought I could never forget so long as I lived, not even for an instant? It was my love for Alice—I had forgotten that!

I CANNOT WRITE HERE ALL the infinity of emotions I experienced later, when, with Alice in my arms, it suddenly came upon me what I had done. Ages ago—I have forgotten how to feel. I could name now a thousand feelings I used to have, but I can no longer even understand them. For only the heart can understand the heart, and the intellect only the intellect.

With Alice in my arms, I told the whole story. It was she who, with her quick instinct, grasped what I had never noticed.

“But Carl!” she cried, “Don’t you see?—It will mean that we can never be married!” And, for the first time, I understood. If only I could re-capture some conception of that love! I have always known, since the last shred of comprehension slipped from me, that I lost something very wonderful when I lost love. But what does it matter? I lost Alice too, and I could not have known love again without her.

We were very sad and very tragic that night. For hours and hours we argued the question over. But I felt somewhat that I was inextricably caught in my fate, that I could not retreat now from my resolve. I was, perhaps, very school-boyish, but I felt that it would be cowardice to back out now. But it was Alice again who perceived a final aspect of the matter.

“Carl,” she said to me, her lips very close to mine, “it need not come between our love. After all, ours would be a poor sort of love if it were not more of the mind than of the flesh. We shall remain lovers, but we shall forget mere carnal desire. I shall submit to that operation too!”

And I could not shake her from her resolve. I would speak of danger that I could not let her face. But, after the fashion of women, she disarmed me with the accusation that I did not love her, that I did not want her love, that I was trying to escape from love. What answer had I for that, but that I loved her and would do anything in the world not to lose her?

I have wondered sometimes since whether we might have known the love of the mind. Is love something entirely of the flesh, something created by an ironic God merely to propagate His race? Or can there be love without emotion, love without passion—love between two cold intellects? I do not know. I did not ask then. I accepted anything that would make our way more easy.

There is no need to draw out the tale. Already my hand wavers, and my time grows short. Soon there will be no more of me, no more of my tale—no more of Mankind. There will be only the snow, and the ice, and the cold. . . .

THREE DAYS LATER I ENTERED John’s Hospital with Alice on my arm. All my affairs—and they were few enough—were in order. I had insisted that Alice wait until I had come safely through the operation, before she submitted to it. I had been carefully starved for two days, and I was lost in an unreal world of white walls and white clothes and white lights, drunk with my dreams of the future. When I was wheeled into the operating room on the long, hard table, for a moment it shone with brilliant distinctness, a neat, methodical white chamber, tall and more or less circular. Then I was beneath the glare of soft white lights, and the room faded into a misty vagueness from which little steel rays flashed and quivered from silvery cold instruments. For a moment our hands, Sir John’s and mine, gripped, and we were saying good-bye—for a little while—in the way men say these things. Then I felt the warm touch of Alice’s lips upon mine, and I felt sudden painful things I cannot describe, that I could not have described then. For a moment I felt that I must rise and cry out that I could not do it. But the feeling passed, and I was passive.

Something was pressed about my mouth and nose, something with an ethereal smell. Staring eyes swam about me from behind their white masks. I struggled instinctively, but in vain—I was held securely. Infinitesimal points of light began to wave back and forth on a pitch-black background; a great hollow buzzing echoed in my head. My head seemed suddenly to have become all throat, a great, cavernous, empty throat in which sounds and lights were mingled together, in a swift rhythm, approaching, receding eternally. Then, I think, there were dreams. But I have forgotten them. . . .

I began to emerge from the effect of the ether. Everything was dim, but I could perceive Alice beside me, and Sir John.

“Bravely done!” Sir John was saying, and Alice, too, was saying something, but I cannot remember what. For a long while we talked, I speaking the nonsense of those who are coming out from under ether, they teasing me a little solemnly. But after a little while I became aware of the fact that they were about to leave. Suddenly, God knows why, I knew that they must not leave. Something cried in the back of my head that they must stay—one cannot explain these things, except by after events. I began to press them to remain, but they smiled and said they must get their dinner. I commanded them not to go; but they spoke kindly and said they would be back before long. I think I even wept a little, like a child, but Sir John said something to the nurse, who began to reason with me firmly, and then they were gone, and somehow I was asleep. . . .

WHEN I AWOKE AGAIN, MY head was fairly clear, but there was an abominable reek of ether all about me. The moment I opened my eyes, I felt that something had happened. I asked for Sir John and for Alice. I saw a swift, curious look that I could not interpret come over the face of the nurse, then she was calm again, her countenance impassive. She reassured me in quick meaningless phrases, and told me to sleep. But I could not sleep: I was absolutely sure that something had happened to them, to my friend and to the woman I loved. Yet all my insistence profited me nothing, for the nurses were a silent lot. Finally, I think, they must have given me a sleeping potion of some sort, for I fell asleep again.

For two endless, chaotic days, I saw nothing of either of them, Alice or Sir John. I became more and more agitated, the nurse more and more taciturn. She would only say that they had gone away for a day or two.

And then, on the third day, I found out. They thought I was asleep. The night nurse had just come in to relieve the other.

“Has he been asking about them again?” she asked.

“Yes, poor fellow. I have hardly managed to keep him quiet.”

“We will have to keep it from him until he is recovered fully.” There was a long pause, and I could hardly control my labored breathing.

“How sudden it was!” one of them said. “To be killed like that—” I heard no more, for I leapt suddenly up in bed, crying out.

“Quick! For God’s sake, tell me what has happened!” I jumped to the floor and seized one of them by the collar. She was horrified. I shook her with a superhuman strength.

“Tell me!” I shouted, “Tell me—or I’ll—!” She told me—what else could she do?

“They were killed in an accident,” she gasped, “in a taxi—a collision—the Strand—!” And at that moment a crowd of nurses and attendants arrived, called by the other frantic woman, and they put me to bed again.

I have no memory of the next few days. I was in delirium, and I was never told what I said during my ravings. Nor can I express the feelings I was saturated with when at last I regained my mind again. Between my old emotions and any attempt to put them into words, or even to remember them, lies always that insurmountable wall of my Change. I cannot understand what I must have felt, I cannot express it.

I only know that for weeks I was sunk in a misery beyond any misery I had ever imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth were gone to me. I was left alone. And, for the first time, I began to see before me all these endless years that would be the same, dull, lonely.

Yet I recovered. I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigor in my limbs, a vast force that was something tangibly expressive to eternal life. Slowly my anguish began to die. After a week more, I began to understand how my emotions were leaving me, how love and beauty and everything of which poetry was made—how all this was going. I could not bear the thought at first. I would look at the golden sunlight and the blue shadow of the wind, and I would say,

“God! How beautiful!” And the words would echo meaning-lessly in my ears. Or I would remember Alice’s face, that face I had once loved so inextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch my forehead, and clench my fists, crying,

“O God, how can I live without her!” Yet there would be a little strange fancy in my head at the same moment, saying,

“Who is this Alice? You know no such person.” And truly I would wonder whether she had ever existed.

So, slowly, the old emotions were shed away from me, and I began to joy in a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idly with mathematical formulae I had forgotten years ago, in the same fashion that a poet toys with a word and its shades of meaning. I would look at everything with new, seeing eyes, new perception, and I would understand things I had never understood before, because formerly my emotions had always occupied me more than my thoughts.

And so the weeks went by, until, one day, I was well.

. . . What, after all, is the use of this chronicle? Surely there will never be men to read it. I have heard them say that the snow will never go. I will be buried, it will be buried with me; and it will be the end of us both. Yet, somehow, it eases my weary soul a little to write. . . .

Need I say that I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands of years, until this day? I cannot detail that life. It is a long round of new, fantastic impressions, coming dream-like, one after another, melting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon dreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly; and it seems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement between episodes. I think now, of necessity, in terms of centuries and millenniums, rather than days and months. . . . The snow blows terribly about my little fire, and I know it will soon gather courage to quench us both. . . .

YEARS PASSED, AT FIRST WITH a sort of clear wonder. I watched things that took place everywhere in the world. I studied. The other students were much amazed to see me, a man of thirty odd, coming back to college.

“But Judas, Dennell, you’ve already got your Ph.D.! What more do you want?” So they would all ask me. And I would reply;

“I want an M.D. and an F.R.C.S.” I didn’t tell them that I wanted degrees in Law, too, and in Biology and Chemistry, in Architecture and Engineering, in Psychology and Philosophy. Even so, I believe they thought me mad. But poor fools! I would think. They can hardly realize that I have all of eternity before me to study.

I went to school for many decades. I would pass from University to University, leisurely gathering all the fruits of every subject I took up, revelling in study as no student revelled ever before. There was no need of hurry in my life, no fear of death too soon. There was a magnificence of vigor in my body, and a magnificence of vision and clarity in my brain. I felt myself a super-man. I had only to go on storing up wisdom until the day should come when all knowledge of the world was mine, and then I could command the world. I had no need for hurry. O vast life! How I gloried in my eternity! And how little good it has ever done me, by the irony of God.

For several centuries, changing my name and passing from place to place, I continued my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony, for, to the intellect, monotony cannot exist: it was one of those emotions I had left behind. One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery was made by a man called Zarentzov. It had to do with the curvature of space, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed since Einstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein’s theory, as had, in time, the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into the study of this new, epoch-making conception.

To my amazement, it all seemed to me curiously dim and elusive. I could not quite grasp what Zarentzov was trying to formulate.

“Why,” I cried, “the thing is a monstrous fraud!” I went to the professor of Physics in the University I then attended, and I told him it was a fraud, a huge book of mere nonsense. He looked at me rather pityingly.

“I am afraid, Modevski,” he said, addressing me by the name I was at the time using, “I am afraid you do not understand it, that is all. When your mind has broadened, you will. You should apply yourself more carefully to your Physics.” But that angered me, for I had mastered my Physics before he was ever born. I challenged him to explain the theory. And he did! He put it, obviously, in the clearest language he could. Yet I understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook his head impatiently, saying that it was useless, that if I could not grasp it I would simply have to keep on studying. I was stunned. I wandered away in a daze.

For do you see what happened? During all those years I had studied ceaselessly, and my mind had been clear and quick as the day I first had left the hospital. But all that time I had been able only to remain what I was—an extraordinarily intelligent man of the twentieth century. And the rest of the race had been progressing! It had been swiftly gathering knowledge and power and ability all that time, faster and faster, while I had been only remaining still. And now here was Zarentzov and the teachers of the Universities, and, probably, a hundred intelligent men, who had all outstripped me! I was being left behind.

And that is what happened. I need not dilate further upon it. By the end of that century I had been left behind by all the students of the world, and I never did understand Zarentzov. Other men came with other theories, and these theories were accepted by the world. But I could not understand them. My intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing more to understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing, and, thenceforth, I could only play wearily with the old ideas.

MANY THINGS HAPPENED IN THE world. A time came when the East and West, two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up in arms: the civil war of a planet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It was all incomprehensible to me: like a bizarre dream, things happened, people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurked during all that time in a tiny shuddering hole under the city of Yokohama, and by a miracle I survived. And the East won. But it seems to have mattered little who did win, for all the world had become, in all except its few remaining prejudices, a single race, and nothing was changed when it was all rebuilt again, under a single government.

I saw the first of the strange creatures who appeared among us in the year 6371, men who were later known to be from the planet Venus. But they were repulsed, for they were savages compared with the Earthmen, although they were about equal to the people of my own century, 1900. Those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth of their world, and those who were not killed by our hands, those few returned silently home again. And I have always regretted that I had not the courage to go with them.

I watched a time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, when men could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men, these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tiny shriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements on their little conveyances. It was I, with my ancient compunctions, who shuddered when at last they put to death all the perverts, the criminals, and the insane, ridding the world of the scum for which they had no more need. It was then that I was forced to produce my tattered old papers, proving my identity and my story. They knew it was true, in some strange fashion of theirs, and, thereafter, I was kept on exhibition as an archaic survival.

I saw the world made immortal through the new invention of a man called Kathol, who used somewhat the same method “legend” decreed had been used upon me. I observed the end of speech, of all perceptions except one, when men learned to communicate directly by thought, and to receive directly into the brain all the myriad vibrations of the universe.

All these things I saw, and more, until that time when there was no more discovery, but a Perfect World in which there was no need for anything but memory. Men ceased to count time at last. Several hundred years after the 154th Dynasty from the Last War, or, as we would have counted in my time, about 200,000 A.D., official records of time were no longer kept carefully. They fell into disuse. Men began to forget years, to forget time at all. Of what significance was time when one was immortal?

AFTER LONG, LONG UNCOUNTED CENTURIES, a time came when the days grew noticeably colder. Slowly the winters became longer, and the summers diminished to but a month or two. Fierce storms raged endlessly in winter, and in summer sometimes there was severe frost, sometimes there was only frost. In the high places and in the north and the sub-equatorial south, the snow came and would not go.

Men died by the thousands in the higher latitudes. New York became, after awhile, the furthest habitable city north, an arctic city, where warmth seldom penetrated. And great fields of ice began to make their way southward, grinding before them the brittle remains of civilizations, covering over relentlessly all of man’s proud work.

Snow appeared in Florida and Italy one summer. In the end, snow was there always. Men left New York, Chicago, Paris, Yokohama, and everywhere they traveled by the millions southward, perishing as they went, pursued by the snow and the cold, and that inevitable field of ice. They were feeble creatures when the Cold first came upon them, but I speak in terms of thousands of years; and they turned every weapon of science to the recovery of their physical power, for they foresaw that the only chance for survival lay in a hard, strong body. As for me, at last I had found a use for my few powers, for my physique was the finest in that world. It was but little comfort, however, for we were all united in our awful fear of that Cold and that grinding field of Ice. All the great cities were deserted. We would catch silent, fearful glimpses of them as we sped on in our machines over the snow—great hungry, haggard skeletons of cities, shrouded in banks of snow, snow that the wind rustled through desolate streets where the cream of human life once had passed in calm security. Yet still the Ice pursued. For men had forgotten about that Last Ice Age when they ceased to reckon time, when they lost sight of the future and steeped themselves in memories. They had not remembered that a time must come when Ice would lie white and smooth over all the earth, when the sun would shine bleakly between unending intervals of dim, twilight snow and sleet.

Slowly the Ice pursued us down the earth, until all the feeble remains of civilization were gathered in Egypt and India and South America. The deserts flowered again, but the frost would come always to bite the tiny crops. For still the Ice came. All the world now, but for a narrow strip about the equator, was one great silent desolate vista of stark ice-plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of cities that had endured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was terrible to imagine the awful solitude and the endless twilight that lay on these places, and the grim snow, sailing in silence over all. . . .

It surrounded us on all sides, until life remained only in a few scattered clearings all about that equator of the globe, with an eternal fire going to hold away the hungry Ice. Perpetual winter reigned now; and we were becoming terror-stricken beasts that preyed on each other for a life already doomed. Ah, but I, I the archaic survival, I had my revenge then, with my great physique and strong jaws—God! Let me think of something else. Those men who lived upon each other—it was horrible. And I was one.

SO INEVITABLY THE ICE CLOSED in. . . . One day the men of our tiny clearing were but a score. We huddled about our dying fire of bones and stray logs. We said nothing. We just sat, in deep, wordless, thoughtless silence. We were the last outpost of Mankind.

I think suddenly something very noble must have transformed these creatures to a semblance of what they had been of old. I saw, in their eyes, the question they sent from one to another, and in every eye I saw that the answer was, Yes. With one accord they rose before my eyes and, ignoring me as a baser creature, they stripped away their load of tattered rags and, one by one, they stalked with their tiny shrivelled limbs into the shivering gale of swirling, gusting snow, and disappeared. And I was alone. . . .

So am I alone now. I have written this last fantastic history of myself and of Mankind upon a substance that will, I know, outlast even the snow and the Ice—as it has outlasted Mankind that made it. It is the only thing with which I have never parted. For is it not irony that I should be the historian of this race—I, a savage, an “archaic survival?” Why do I write? God knows, but some instinct prompts me, although there will never be men to read.

I have been sitting here, waiting, and I have thought often of Sir John and Alice, whom I loved. Can it be that I am feeling again, after all these ages, some tiny portion of that emotion, that great passion I once knew? I see her face before me, the face I have lost from my thoughts for eons, and something is in it that stirs my blood again. Her eyes are half-closed and deep, her lips are parted as though I could crush them with an infinity of wonder and discovery. O God! It is love again, love that I thought was lost! They have often smiled upon me when I spoke of God, and muttered about my foolish, primitive superstitions. But they are gone, and I am left who believe in God, and surely there is purpose in it.

I am cold, I have written. Ah, I am frozen. My breath freezes as it mingles with the air, and I can hardly move my numbed fingers. The Ice is closing over me, and I cannot break it any longer. The storm cries weirdly all about me in the twilight, and I know this is the end. The end of the world. And I—I, the last man. . . .

The last man. . . .

. . . I am cold—cold. . . .

But is it you, Alice? Is it you?

N Day

— PHILIP LATHAM —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

THIS IS AS CLOSE TO a detailed scientific report on the end of the world as we are likely to get, because “Philip Latham” was a pseudonym for R. S. Richardson, an astronomer who for twenty-five years was on the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory and, later, the Mount Palomar Observatory in Southern California, and in 1938 became Associate Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. He called on his astronomical knowledge to write about twenty short stories between 1946 and 1977, of which “N Day,” published in the January 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, was the first—a richly detailed account of the imminent end of the world as the sun goes nova, told calmly and quietly, a tale that very likely shows just the way such an event would be perceived and reacted to by a group of professional astronomers. If the ultimate catastrophe does indeed befall us, this is surely how someone much like Richardson’s narrator would set it down, step by step, for the benefit of readers who will never have the opportunity to read it.

—R. S.

N DAY

TUESDAY, 1949 JANUARY 18

SUNSPOT MAXIMUM AND THREE DAYS without a single spot!

This cycle is certainly developing in a peculiar way. From the last minimum about March, 1944, sunspot activity jumped to a Wolf Number of 252 in December, 1948, the highest index on record since that rather dubious maximum back in 1778. But this month spots have simply failed to appear, as completely as if someone inside the sun had pulled a switch.

Clarke’s elaborate empirical analysis has failed utterly to predict. I am now more firmly convinced than ever that no combination of harmonics can ever represent the approximate eleven-year rise and fall in the number of sunspots. Instead I favor Halm’s old idea that each cycle is a separate outburst in itself. The very fact that our star is a weak variable means it is to a certain degree unstable. Not unstable to the extent of a Cepheid variable but still—unstable. Indeed, Hahn’s hypothesis appeals to me more strongly now than when he announced it four cycles ago.

There I go measuring my life in sunspot cycles again! But four cycles does sound much less than forty-four years. Yet how little more I know about the sun than when I first came to Western Tech. In many ways the sun reminds me of a woman: just when you think you are beginning to understand her, invariably she will fool you. Enough of that. What business does an old bachelor have writing such things in his diary?

The driving clock on the coelostat was out of commission again today but I will have to repair it somehow. President Bixby refused my request for three hundred seventy-five dollars on the grounds that the budget was already over the limit. I notice, however, that others seem to have no trouble securing large allotments.

Until some spots show up I suppose I can best employ my time testing those new Eastman IV-K plates that arrived today.

EVENING

WHEN I WROTE THIS MORNING that the sun invariably does the unexpected, I had no idea my words would be so soon fulfilled.

Spent an hour this afternoon taking test plates on the solar spectrum in the yellow and orange. Imagine my astonishment upon examining one of the plates with an eyepiece to see the D3 line of neutral helium. Of course, D3 often shows above active sunspots, but I believe this is the first case of its appearance over a calm undisturbed region. Smedley would probably know about this but I dread to ask him. I know he regards me as an old fossil, and this would only be further proof of my growing senility. How different was my own attitude when I was a young instructor!

The weather looked threatening at sunset but when I stepped out on the platform just now the sky was clear. The valley five thousand feet above was a carpet of lights from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. Better drive down for a haircut and fresh pipe tobacco soon—my two-week supply is nearly gone. I really shouldn’t stay on the mountain so long at a time. Too much solitude is as bad for the mind as too much inbreeding is bad for the race.

Besides, I absolutely must get started on the notes Marley left behind. Publication of such valuable material should not be so long delayed.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19

THE LONG QUIESCENT SPELL IN solar activity is broken at last, and how it was broken!

An enormous spot is coming around the east limb, that should be an easy naked-eye object within a few days. Unable to get magnetic classification but feel sure from general appearance must be a gamma. Radio and television stations beware. They will be in for plenty of trouble soon.

After the two direct shots of the sun, I switched the beam over for a look through the polarizing monochromator, just in time to catch a splendid surge. Near the big spot the sun was swollen up like a boil. Suddenly a long arm emerged from the protuberance moving at a velocity I estimated at one hundred fifty miles per second. After reaching out to about sixty thousand miles the filament paused uncertainly. Then it was withdrawn, as suddenly as it emerged.

So often the sun conveys the feeling of life. At times it is like a sleeping monster, sluggish, dormant; at others, alive and tense, like a tiger crouched to spring.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 20

IN ADDITION TO THE SPOT-GROUP that came around the limb yesterday, a fast-growing spot has broken out in heliographic latitude 42 N. This is the farthest I have ever seen a spot from the solar equator. Maunder at Greenwich speaks of “faint flecks” as high as latitude 72 but this is a large vigorous spot with a magnetic field strength of 2000 gauss.

If the face of the sun is a strange sight when viewed directly, it is as nothing compared to its appearance when analyzed by the spectroscope. At 18 hours GCT photographed a broad bright wing projecting from the violet side of the red hydrogen line, presumably due to a streamer of gas spurting from the solar surface with a speed of around four hundred miles per second.

Not so spectacular but much harder to believe, was the discovery of a faint bright line in the blue. Yesterday I expressed surprise at finding 5875, the yellow line of neutral helium, in the sun. Today I was positively shocked when I discovered that 4686 of ionized helium also showed faintly.

I wonder if I should send a wire to Harvard? But I hesitate to take such a step. Perhaps I should check with Mount Wilson first. Yes, I will see if they have observed anything unusual. I hate to consult with Smedley on anything. How I wish Marley were here. He was always so sympathetic and understanding.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 21

APPARENTLY, I AM THE ONLY astronomer who has gotten a look at the sun recently.

Talked with the Mount Wilson office in Pasadena this morning. They said there is six feet of snow on the mountain, with the power line out, and the road blocked by slides and boulders. The Atlantic coast reports storms all the way from Jacksonville to Montreal. And in Europe the tense political situation has paralyzed scientific research.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 22

AFTER CLOUDS PUT A STOP to observations last Thursday, I drove down to the campus for a look at Marley’s notes. I found the box in my office where it had come all the way from Dunedin, New Zealand.

What a great observer Marley was. And what a lucky observer! Three years in the southern hemisphere and three novae so far south he was the only one to get a complete photographic record. To think I had the same opportunity and turned it down. But somehow I was afraid to leave the old observatory here and venture into strange surroundings.

Marley was one of the most uncommunicative men I have ever known. Whenever he had anything to say he said it in his notebook. Taking notes got to be a habit with him, just as keeping a diary is with me. He kept his notes on special forms which he had printed for that purpose and later bound them in black leather.

Exploring the contents of the packing box was sad business. Here was the sum total of a man’s life work—a dozen leather-bound volumes, some reprints of his published papers, a box of plates taken at the coudé focus of the 60-inch, a worn account book, a few old letters and pictures. I feel guilty going through a man’s personal effects in this way, but that was Marley’s last wish.

Those sunspots are wrecking our communication systems. Traders went wild the other morning when stock market quotations came in all garbled up. For a while U.S. Steel was selling at 269 and Johns-Manville Corporation at 2-½.

Astronomy in Wall Street—it can happen!

SUNDAY, JANUARY 23

MORE CLOUDS AND MORE DESK work.

Preparing Marley’s notes for publication in the Astrophysical Journal has not been so dull as I supposed. It begins to look as if he observed far more than any of us ever suspected; more than anyone has ever observed before him. Apparently he got on the trail of one of the biggest problems in astrophysics—the spectrum of a nova before the outburst.

One of the essential characteristics of novae is that they all go through practically the same identical changes, but at quite different rates. That is, some novae run through their life history much faster than others. The changes themselves are so similar, however, that an expert can take one look at the spectrum of a nova and accurately predict its behavior in the future.

We have many long series of observations on novae after the outburst. The one section of their life history that is still blank is the pre-maximum stage. Since novae arise from stars that were originally faint and inconspicuous, it is only by accident that we know anything about them before the explosion occurred. But it seems reasonable to suppose that a star must give some indication of the approaching cataclysm in advance, so that disruption could be predicted long beforehand—if only these symptoms could be observed and recognized.

Somehow or other this was precisely what Marley had been able to do. Thus on March 7, 1948, writing of Nova Muscae, he says: “The spectral changes a star exhibits in the pre-maximum stage are so well-marked that I now have no hesitation in predicting not merely the day but the very hour of outburst. These changes are identical although proceeding at vastly different rates for various types of novae. For example, a ‘flash’ nova, such as N Puppis 1942, might pass through a series of changes in a week, that would be prolonged for months in the case of a ‘slow’ nova like N Pictoris 1925.”

Surely an observer as astute as George Lambert Marley would never have committed himself to such a statement unless he had the necessary and sufficient proof to convince a dozen men.

After poring over his notes till midnight I stepped outside the office to check the weather. Fog was drifting in from the ocean but the sky was still clear in the northeast. At first I thought a forest fire had broken out behind the San Gabriel mountains, for the whole heavens in that direction were suffused with a dull crimson glow. Then I realized it was an aurora, the finest I had seen since 1917. It was the type classified by the International Geophysical Union as diffuse luminous surfaces (DS), which often follow intense displays of rays and curtains.

The red glow soon faded away, but long after it was gone the impression it created remained, leaving me uneasy and restless, so that sleep did not come till nearly dawn.

MONDAY, JANUARY 24

THE CLOUDS BEGAN TO BREAK about eleven o’clock this A.M., causing me to jump in the car and get back to the Observatory full speed ahead. I climbed to the top of the sun tower as fast as my bronchitis would let me, set the mirrors, and hastened down to the spectrograph, arriving badly winded.

My first glimpse of the sun was a revelation. The high latitude northern spot has grown until there surely has never been a spot like it before. The excoriated area resembles not so much a sunspot as a great open wound in the solar surface; a region where the white skin of the photosphere has been peeled aside revealing the dark flesh of the umbra beneath.

While I was focusing the image—for the seeing was pretty bad—suddenly a cluster of points within the spot-group began to blaze like diamonds, becoming so intensely brilliant that I was momentarily dazzled. For fully ten seconds I must have stood there dumbly before I appreciated the significance of the phenomenon. It was a repetition of the effect Carrington had witnessed way back in 1859—the only known case of a so-called solar “flare” becoming directly visible on the surface of the sun.

Like Carrington, at first I was too startled to behave rationally. What to do? Should I try to photograph the spectrum of the luminous points? But I hesitated fearing they might be gone before I could load a plate holder and make an exposure. Finally, goading myself into some kind of action, I grabbed an eyepiece and began examining the solar spectrum visually, checking on the appearance of the different lines as best I could by eye.

As I expected, the hydrogen lines were so bright over the flares that they actually sparkled. In fact, the whole Balmer series was lit up, from H alpha in the red to H epsilon in the violet. H beta glittered like Vega on a clear frosty night. Bright lines of ionized metals, chiefly iron and titanium, were also visible. Wholly unexpected were two strong bright lines gleaming in the green and red. Although unable to measure their positions closely I am convinced in my own mind of their identity. They are 5303 of Fe XIV and 6374 of Fe X—lines previously observed only in the corona and a few novae.

Upon beholding these lines I went nearly wild. I was now determined to get a photograph at all costs. Rushing into the darkroom I tore the wrapper off a fresh box of plates, loaded the plate holder, and was outside again in less than three minutes. But alas!—clouds were racing over the image of the sun, blotting out the flares almost completely. Nevertheless I clamped in the plate holder and pulled the slide, praying for five minutes of clear sky which was all the exposure time I needed. But instead of getting better the clouds grew thicker, and before I knew it rain was splattering down on top of the spectrograph, forcing me to close the dome in a hurry.

What an opportunity I missed! The second time in a century this effect has been seen and I failed to get a single permanent record. I hope Smedley never hears of this.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26

I HAVE JUST TELEGRAPHED THE Harvard College Observatory. Although fearful to release a message of such sensational import, I felt that the information in my possession should no longer be withheld.

After failing to get a photograph of the coronal lines, the weather looked so bad that I decided to drive down to the office and continue work on Marley’s notes. After the statement I found on Sunday night, I felt sure he must have left a complete account of the pre-maximum stage behind. But he failed to mention the matter further, seeming to be more concerned with improving the transmission of his spectrograph than with stellar instability.

I went through one leatherbound volume after another until the entire set was exhausted, and nothing remained but some letters and an old account book. The latter I had already passed by several times, as unlikely to contain anything more scientific than Marley’s laundry bills or his losses at bridge. Yet it was in this very book that Marley had entrusted his most valuable data, on the old principle of “The Purloined Letter,” that people seldom look in the obvious place. These data might easily have been discovered accidentally if kept in his regular notebooks, but it was highly improbable that anyone would give a second glance to a cheap account book.

The first page bore the caption, “Course of Events in Galactic Novae.” Underneath he had written: “Once instability has definitely developed in a star the series of events as described herein is invariable, although proceeding at different rates. The rate of development, D, may be calculated for any particular date of outburst, N, by the formula, log N=log Rh/c—3 log D.” On the next page Marley had given the values of the constants together with a table from which log D could be interpolated. The parameter, D, seemed to be a function of several variables the meaning of which was not clear. But there was no ambiguity about how to use D itself.

The rest of the pages were ruled into three columns each. The first was labeled DATE, and bore such entries as N—12, N—n, . . . N, N + 1, et cetera. The second column contained the predicted appearance of the nova’s spectrum, while the third evidently referred to how well the predictions agreed with observations. Obviously agreement was excellent in most cases, for generally there was simply a check mark, with perhaps some such comment as, “nebular lines exceptionally strong,” or “4640 stage rather late,” et cetera.

At the end of the series Marley had written the Greek letter capital Mu with a flourish. This was Marley’s astronomical signature, analogous to Herschel’s famous H, and Otto Struve’s Omicron Sigma. I happened to know it also meant Marley was satisfied with this piece of work and that it was ready for publication—an unexpected bit of luck for me.

Turning through the leaves and marveling at the wealth of material at my fingertips, I began to be aware of something vaguely familiar about certain of the entries. They followed a pattern that I recognized without being able to identify. Thus near the beginning of the series there were such notations as, “First appearance of He I,” or “Bright wings violet side of hydrogen lines,” and “4686 of He II faintly visible.” It was the remark on page 4 that finally penetrated. “These early stages cannot always be discerned with absolute assurance; indeed, from my observations on T Pyxidis and T Coronae Borealis, it appears that a star may exhibit all the foregoing symptoms of instability without necessarily exploding. The first sure sign is the appearance of the green and red coronal lines. These constitute proof positive that the star will proceed to outburst as a flash nova.” The italics are Marley’s.

I’ll admit that after reading this I was badly shaken. The inference was unmistakable. Something had gone wrong within the sun. Instability instead of manifesting itself by the usual harmless eleven-year rise and fall in sunspot activity, had been much more serious in the present cycle. Beginning as far back as 1945 or ’46, some break or dislocation had occurred far below the surface. Insignificant at first, disruption had gradually spread, releasing stores of latent energy previously untapped within the atom. This latent energy had now built up until the first signs were becoming evident, the warning signals that disruption was close at hand.

No wonder the sunspot cycle had developed in a peculiar way! No wonder mammoth spots were breaking out in high latitudes. No wonder high temperature lines of helium were beginning to blaze in the solar spectrum!

How long?

Marley had given a little formula from which the rate of development could be calculated. To find the day of outburst it was only necessary to substitute the appropriate value of log D from his table and solve for the corresponding value of N.

Dreading to know the answer, yet impelled by a fascination I could not resist, I went to work. Let’s see, the coronal lines had appeared on day N—53, which in Marley’s notation made log D equal to –8.7654. R was the radius of the sun in centimeters, h was Planck’s constant, and c was the velocity of light.

I began taking the numbers out of a log table with trembling hands. So great was my agitation that I was compelled to repeat the calculation several times. Adding up the figures I could not suppress a cry of despair. Log N was 0.4774. Barely three days—seventy-two hours left. Next Saturday at the latest.

Frantically I went back through the notes, searching for some loophole, some hint that might invalidate the whole proceeding. Like a lunatic repeating the same act over and over again, I must have calculated the value of N a dozen times. I carried the figures out to a ridiculous number of decimals. Always the result was the same. Three days—seventy-two hours. Less than that now!

At daybreak I tossed the calculations into the wastebasket and brewed myself a pot of coffee in the electric percolator I keep at the office. While it was boiling I composed the following message to Harvard:

5875 HE I OBSERVED INTEGRATED LIGHT CENTER OF SUN JANUARY 18. 4686 HE II OBSERVED IN EMISSION JANUARY 20. CORONAL LINES 5303 AND 6374 SEEN OVER SPOT GROUP AT 57 WEST 42 NORTH JANUARY 24. SOLAR PHENOMENA CLOSELY FOLLOWING PATTERN DESCRIBED BY MARLEY UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL ON NOVA CIRCINAE 1947, NOVA MUSCAE 1947, NOVA ARAE 1948.

—PHILIP LATHAM

After telephoning the message to Western Union I read it over again with considerable satisfaction. Certainly no one can accuse me of exaggeration or sensationalism. I have stated the facts and nothing more.

EVENING, JANUARY 27

WELL, THE CAT IS OUT of the bag.

This afternoon while measuring a plate of N Circinae taken at the Cassegrain spectrograph there came an authoritative knock at the door. Peering outside I discovered two young men, one of whom carried a camera and tripod. They introduced themselves as a reporter and photographer from the morning Chronicle. It seems that a flash had come in over the teletype about my wire to Harvard and they had been sent out to investigate. When I expressed astonishment that my wire had reached the press they had a ready explanation. Scientific news has become so important since the war that men are especially trained to handle events of this kind. Naturally, they keep a close watch on the Harvard College Observatory, which acts as the clearing house for astronomical discoveries. The result was that as soon as my message was received it was immediately rewritten in popular terms and released over the wires of Science Associated.

I was reluctant to talk at first, but the young man was very persuasive, and before I knew it I was telling far more than I ever intended. I began cautiously enough, emphasizing the importance of Marley’s brilliant work at Dunedin and minimizing my own efforts. I presume that reporters eventually grow extremely expert at drawing people out for it was certainly true in my case. After the reporter had filled several pages, the photographer got me to pose for several pictures, peering into the eyepiece of the measuring machine, examining a celestial globe as if I were an astrologer, et cetera. I felt perfectly ridiculous, but whenever I started to protest they brushed my objections aside, so that I found myself meekly submitting to whatever they wished. The session lasted for fully an hour, and when it was over I felt as exhausted as if I had given half a dozen lectures.

Then just as the men from the Chronicle were leaving a couple more arrived from the Dispatch. This time I really endeavored to refuse them admittance, objecting quite vehemently to this invasion of my privacy. But they were so insistent, claiming that since I had given the Chronicle a statement it would be unfair not to do the same for them, that at length I relented. Besides, they said, if they returned to the office empty-handed, they might lose their jobs. So to my intense chagrin I had to go through the whole performance again.

Since they left about an hour ago I have had time to think it all over and I feel terribly upset. The reclusive life of a professor of astronomy is surely a poor preparation for solving the harsh problems of human existence. Whenever I have to face men outside the university I feel so helpless, almost like a child.

I see so clearly that I should have politely but firmly refused them admittance right from the start. If I could only assert myself, take a firm stand and then stick to it. Now there is no telling where this may end. Worst of all, there is not the slightest excuse for me. Not the slightest excuse in the world.

I am thoroughly aware of the official attitude here toward sensational newspaper publicity for members of the faculty. A professor over in the Economics Department was recently compelled to resign, his whole career ruined, because of a story that he gave out to one of the picture magazines. Next year I will reach the age of retirement of sixty-seven, but had hoped to continue some investigations I had started at the Observatory, as well as picking up a little pocket money teaching Astronomy in summer session. But, if the statements I just issued arouse adverse criticism, my petition for post-retirement work will almost certainly be denied.

Once I nearly screwed up sufficient courage to call the papers and forbid them to use the story. But I didn’t know how to explain myself adequately over the phone, and besides it might result in making matters even worse. The more I turned the situation over in my mind the more deplorable it seemed. I would be held up to ridicule, might be compelled to resign. I had served the institution to the best of my ability for four decades, only to end my career in humiliation and disgrace.

MIDNIGHT

SITTING IN THE GATHERING DUSK a few hours ago my heart filled with despair, an idea began filtering through my consciousness; an idea so simple and obvious that it had escaped me completely.

If the world were coming to an end, what difference could anything possibly make?

It required considerable time for my mind to grasp that elementary fact clearly and firmly. When it did the impact was terrific. For the first time I felt free. The sensation was glorious—like being born again.

Going back over the years it seemed to me I had always been afraid of something. I had always been too timid to assert myself, too fainthearted to assume my rightful position in the world. How often I had seen other men less capable move on ahead, become big research men or executives, while I was content to remain obscurely in the background.

I thought of how many other people there must be like myself who live continually in fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the future, fear of losing their job, fear of dying of cancer, fear of a helpless old age—

Now that was behind me. I felt like a character in a play, moving and speaking according to the author’s will, oblivious to those around him. Life was going to be extremely simple.

Thoroughly tired and relaxed, I stretched out on the cot by the measuring machine, and fell immediately into a profound dreamless slumber.

The ringing of the telephone awakened me. For several seconds I listened without realizing where I was or what had happened to me. Then it all came back, the end of the world, no need to worry any more, et cetera.

“Hello,” I grunted.

“Is that you, Latham?” It was Smedley calling, the young man who had recently been appointed instructor in astronomy.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve been trying everywhere to find you,” he complained. “You weren’t at your apartment or the Observatory.”

“Maybe that was because I was asleep here at the office”

“What was that?”

“I said maybe it was because I was asleep here at the office!”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. He sounded slightly startled. “Then you didn’t hear the ten o’clock news broadcast over KQX?”

“No, I didn’t hear it.”

“It was mostly about you,” he chuckled. “I’ve heard some awful stuff over the radio but this takes the prize. Can’t imagine how they could have gotten hold of such a story. Something about the sun turning into a fast nova.”

“Possibly they got it because I gave it to them.”

“You what!”

“Listen, Smedley: if I was quoted to the effect that the world is coming to an end then I was quoted correctly. That’s exactly what I said and that’s exactly what I meant.”

“You aren’t serious?”

“I was never more serious in my life.”

He hesitated. “All right, Dr. Latham. I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” and he hung up.

I have just figured up that there are less than forty-seven hours left now.

FRIDAY MORNING, JANUARY 28

CATHERINE SNODGRASS, PRESIDENT BIXBY’S SECRETARY and one of the minor fuehrers at Western Tech, called me early this morning as I was finishing a pot of coffee and reading Of Human Bondage. As usual, she was very definite and positive.

“President Bixby has arranged an appointment for you at ten o’clock,” she informed me. “If you will stop at my desk, I will see that you are admitted without delay.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but I can’t make it at ten.”

“I beg your pardon.”

People seemed to have trouble in understanding me lately. “I said I can’t be there at ten. Tell Bixby I’ll be there at eleven instead.”

“The president is very anxious to see you. I would suggest that you come at ten,” she said quietly.

“Sorry. Can’t come till eleven.”

There was a long silence pregnant with meaning. “Very well, Dr. Latham, I will tell him. Thank you.”

There was no reason why I couldn’t come at one time as well as another, except that I was seized with a perverse desire to frustrate the local hierarchy. I poured myself a fourth cup of coffee and went back to reading Of Human Bondage, a novel I had been trying to finish for five years.

I had reached the part where Mildred is being particularly spiteful and was so absorbed that eleven o’clock came before I knew it. Previously I would have been sitting on the edge of a chair in the reception room ten minutes before time, but now I sauntered slowly over to the Administration Building.

BIXBY WAS TALKING INTO A dictaphone when I came in. He is a large powerfully built man, with strong prominent features, and a crisp white mustache. Hair graying slightly at the temples. Most common remark heard about him is that he looks more like an international banker than a professor. It has been said that to be a successful college president, a man must have the digestion of a billy goat, the hide of a rhinoceros, and the money-getting powers of a secretary of the treasury. There could be no denying that as head of Western Tech, Bixby was an outstanding success.

He lost no time getting down to business.

“I believe I can say without fear or hesitation that no one has more vigorously championed the cause of academic freedom than myself. A scientist to be great must be free, at liberty to carry the bright torch of knowledge wherever nature beckons. These are truths upon which I am sure we are all agreed.”

I nodded assent.

“At the same time,” he said, clearing his throat, “we should be circ*mspect. In our relations with the man in the street, we must neither depict science as magic nor scientists as magicians, making stupendous discoveries. Otherwise the results of our labors are liable to serious misinterpretation by the ignorant and superstitious.”

He frowned at me through his rimless glasses. “Dr. Latham, I feel very strongly that your message should have been submitted to the faculty committee on announcements before sending to Harvard.”

He paused, evidently expecting me to say something in my defense at this point, but as I could think of no suitable rejoinder, remained silent.

“Now, Latham,” Bixby continued, not unkindly, “I am familiar with your long and distinguished career here at Tech. Personally, I do not doubt for an instant that you had not the slightest intention of deliberately seeking sensational publicity. Unfortunately, the harm is done; the die is cast. The institution will be harshly criticized and justly so. Why, several big endowments I had been counting on may be held up if this thing gets out of control.”

He got up and began pacing back and forth across the office. Suddenly he turned and confronted me.

“You spend a lot of time at the Observatory, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I replied, “my teaching duties have been very light in recent years.”

“Often up there for days and weeks at a time?”

“That’s true,” I admitted.

“Just as I thought,” he said. “You know, the man most likely to get his feet off the ground is the man who works alone. We need the contact of others to keep us on the straight path. Even the very best go off the deep end occasionally. If I remember correctly, Kepler was something of a mystic. Herschel thought the sun was inhabited. Sir Isaac Newton had a theory about light particles having fits.” He stopped uncertainly.

I finished it for him. “And Philip Latham, associate professor of astronomy, thinks the world is coming to an end. It does sound kind of crazy, doesn’t it?”

He looked down at me and smiled. “Yes, Latham, to put it bluntly, it does sound kind of crazy. Glad you see it that way.”

He reached across the desk for pencil and paper. “Here. Suppose you write out something for the papers. No elaborate explanation, you understand; just anything to satisfy the reporters and calm down the people. Something about how new observations have caused you to revise your statement of yesterday, the sun is O.K., and looks good for another million years yet.”

He went around to the opposite side of the desk and began arranging some papers together and laying them in metal containers. “While you’re doing that I’ll have Kit—Miss Snodgrass—call the press and issue a statement. Kill this thing right away.”

I shook my head. “I am not aware of any new observational evidence,” I said. “My statement of yesterday still stands.”

“What’s that?” Bixby said absently, continuing to arrange the papers. “I said I have no intention of retracting my statement.”

Bixby stopped suddenly as if unable to believe his ears. Then he walked slowly around the side of the desk, looming larger and larger, until he towered above me so high I felt like an ant. For an instant I thought he intended bodily violence. But when he spoke it was in a low tone, choosing his words very slowly and carefully.

“There’s something I haven’t told you yet. Neither the board of trustees nor the regents know anything about it. Nobody knows about it but myself.” His voice sank nearly to a whisper. “There’s a good chance of getting three million dollars out of Irwin Mills, the publisher, for a new observatory. Wants to establish it as a memorial to his son who died in the war.” He leaned forward impressively. ‘’How would you like to be the director of that new observatory?”

“It’s a dream I’ve had for fifteen years.”

Bixby slammed his fist into the palm of his hand. “Exactly!” he said. “We’ve been needing a new telescope around here for a long time. Present equipment in pretty bad shape. But here’s the point: we won’t get a nickel out of Mills if this wild story builds up. He’ll think we’re a bunch of screwballs and pull out on us. We can’t always get things just the way we want them. A man’s got to be reasonable—practical.”

“That’s what I’m trying to be—practical,” I told him, “although not that it makes much difference any more.”

I decided I might as well give it to him straight.

“You see it’s really true, this wild story about the world coming to an end. As kids we read stories about the end of the world and all the different ways it could happen. But they were just words on a piece of paper born out of somebody’s imagination. This is the real thing. Of course, you can’t believe it. I can’t actually believe it myself. We’re all too engrossed in our own affairs, too colossally conceited, to believe that anything from outside could conceivably destroy the little world we have created for our special enjoyment and torment.

“That’s the way it is,” I said. “I’m afraid nothing we can do is likely to change the situation.”

Bixby had remained impassive while I was speaking. Now he walked slowly to his desk and sat down.

“Then you refuse to co-operate.” He said it more to himself than to me.

I shrugged. “Put it that way if you like.”

“This can ruin us. Ruin me and the whole institution.” He was studying me curiously, as if he had never really seen me before, and had just become aware of my existence.

“You’re mad,” he said dully.

I left him sitting there hunched over the top of his desk. For the first time I noticed how old and gray he looked.

AT THE OFFICE I FOUND the postman had left a stack of letters for me. As I seldom receive mail, except copies of the Scientific Monthly and the Astrophysical Journal, I opened the envelopes with considerable interest. They were people who had heard about me over the radio, and felt impelled to take their pen in hand immediately.

Some of the letters were hardly more than scrawls written on the back of old grocery bills and wrapping paper. Others were neatly typed on fine stationery with impressive letterheads, such as Institute of Psychoelectrical Research, or Bureau of Cosmic Power and Light. Several writers inclosed pamphlets expounding their views in detail. Through them all ran the same theme. I have discovered the secret of the universe. I have refuted Newton’s law of gravitation. I have found the law that explains the secret of the moon, sun, and stars. Three correspondents attacked me violently for trying to anticipate their own predictions of the end of the world.

I wondered why victims of paranoia with delusions of grandeur so often find in astronomy the outlet which their minds are seeking? Every professional astronomer receives such letters. I know a director of a large observatory who has been getting letters from an inmate of an asylum for years. It is useless to attempt to point out the fallacies in their highly systematized delusions. That is the worst trouble with these people, I reflected. They are the last ones to see anything strange in their actions.

Tossing the letters aside I reviewed the events of the morning. I admit I could not suppress a feeling of elation at my triumph over Bixby. Once I would have been utterly crushed by his tirade. Now it left me quite unmoved. What a surprise was in store for him tomorrow! I started to laugh out loud, then checked myself barely in time.

A psychiatrist had once told me that only the insane laugh out loud—alone.

MIDNIGHT

BY EVENING MY SENSE OF elation had fled leaving in its wake a sense of deep depression. At the same time I was filled with a strange uneasiness which made my apartment seem intolerable. Ordinarily I avoid people, having a dread of crowds that amounts almost to a phobia. But tonight the thought of human companionship was very welcome. I decided to get the car out and drive down to Hollywood.

I found a place to park on Hollywood and Vine near the El Capitan Theater. Stopping at the newsstand on the corner I bought a morning edition of the Chronicle, which I thought should have my story by this time. Sure enough, there it was on the front page of the second edition. OLD SOL SET FOR BLOWUP! the caption read. Underneath was the subhead, WORLD’S END DUE SATURDAY, says Dr. Latham of W.I.T.

Naturally I had assumed that nothing could compete with the end of the world for news interest. Yet I found my story was overshadowed by an account of a shooting that had occurred on the Sunset strip, which occupied practically all the rest of the page. Worse still, my photograph was displayed next to the principal in the shooting, a blond young woman in a playsuit. Anyone casually glancing at the paper would have gotten the impression that I was also concerned in the affair.

It seemed to me that all the stories I had ever read about the end of the world had been so different from the way this was turning out. In the stories there had always been wild tumult as the final hour drew near, half the people indulging in a frenzied orgy of pleasure while the other half offered up fervent prayers for deliverance. My prediction of the end of the world had now been broadcast over the radio dozens of times and widely publicized in the papers. Yet the only signs of tumult I could see were at the Chinese Theater up the street, where a premiere was trying to get under way.

Suppose, I said to myself, that I were to seize that young man there by the arm and try to explain to him I believed the end of the world was near. What evidence could I produce to prove my assertion?

I could tell him of observations made with my own eyes.

He would say I was lying; refuse to believe me.

I could show him Marley’s notes.

They would be meaningless to him. A mere jumble of words and symbols scrawled in an old account book.

Finally, I could produce actual photographs of the spectrum lines.

Nothing but chance agglomerations of silver grains on a gelatin emulsion.

He would brush me impatiently aside, dismiss my story as fantastic, the product of too much port wine and brandy. Suppose I drank myself into unconsciousness tonight. Would I awaken tomorrow to find the same old GO star shining as usual, radiating energy at the rate of 1.94 calories per square centimeter per minute?

Driving up the winding road to the Observatory late that evening I determined upon my course of action next day. Writing it down here will serve to fix it in my mind.

The time of outburst based upon Marley’s formula is 16:12 Pacific Standard Time, which is about an hour and a half before sunset at this time of year. If the cloud of gas expands at the average rate of six hundred miles per second, it will not reach the Earth’s orbit for nearly two days. The intense heat pouring from the sun, however, as a result of the explosion will travel with the speed of light and probably render the daylight side of Earth scorching hot within a very few minutes. At any rate, after I detect the first signs of disruption in the monochromator there should be sufficient time for me to inclose this diary in a heat-resistant box and store it at the bottom of the suntower two hundred feet below ground.

Is it insane to hope that this diary will by some miracle be spared? Only too well I realize the futility of taking any precautions against a wall of flame that will turn the solid earth into incandescence. But in those last minutes it will at least be something to do, a definite plan to put into execution.

N DAY

08:00: THE SOLAR ROTATION HAS carried the large northern spotgroup out of sight around the limb. The other spot has settled down to a stable beta-p group. Once again the face of the sun is normal.

I have just completed the routine program of solar observations that I have carried out continuously since 1906. First two direct photographs of the sun. Then a photograph in hydrogen light, a photograph in calcium, and a series on the prominence projecting around the limb. The plates have been developed and are fixing in the darkroom.

08:30: Observed a tornado prominence of moderate height at position angle 117°. Spiral structure well defined. Usual wisp of smoke issuing from top. No certain indication of radial motion or change in P.A.

13:l7: The seeing has been dropping rapidly during the last hour, probably due to a wind that has sprung up from the west. The seeing was about 6 at noon but now is barely 2.

14:00: The image is blurred and lacking in detail. Sun has probably gone behind a veil of cirrus haze. Hope it doesn’t get so thick I will have to close up.

16:12: The zero hour! And still the sun looks just as I have seen it thousands of times before—a cherry-red disk with a few dark prominences streaked across it.

17:00: Five o’clock P.M. on the Pacific coast. The image is very bad. Can’t focus within three inches. Tower shaking in rising wind. Nothing unusual to report.

17:28: The sun will be below the horizon very soon now. I wonder if Marley’s form—

Here it comes! The sun is swelling up like a toy red balloon. But so slowly! I never supposed it would be so slow. Like a slow-motion picture of the sun blowing up.

I am glad. I was never so glad of anything before.

Writing these last lines I thought of Bixby and Smedley and all the rest. Trying to picture their faces made me laugh. I laughed long and loud till my sides ached, and the sound echoed back and forth between the empty walls of the sun tower.

Guyal of Sfere

— JACK VANCE —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

WITHIN THE GENRE OF END-OF-THE-WORLD stories there can hardly be much greater contrast than that between Philip Latham’s “N Day” and Jack Vance’s “Guyal of Sfere.” The Latham story is the work of a scientist who lived in the world of spectral lines and logarithms. The Vance, which first appeared in 1950 as the sixth and last of the story cycle that bears the collective title of The Dying Earth, is one of the most memorable early stories of a grand master of science fiction whose elegant prose, poetic and visionary, blazed a unique trail for more than fifty years. The Dying Earth was the first published book of the California-born Vance, and it made an immediate and lasting mark. He went on in the succeeding decades to produce an unforgettable oeuvre of novels and stories, of which the best known are The Dragon Masters, The Last Castle, To Live Forever, and the five Demon Princes novels.

There are no spectral lines and logarithms in any of the Dying Earth stories. Vance gives us, instead, a magical portrait of our world far remote from us in time, depicted for us with the clarity of a dream as it comes gradually to the end of its days.

—R. S.

GUYAL OF SFERE

GUYAL OF SFERE HAD BEEN born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void which ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four seasons he was expounding such inquiries as:

“Why do squares have more sides than triangles?”

“How will we see when the sun goes dark?”

“Do flowers grow under the ocean?”

“Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?”

To which his impatient sire gave such answers as:

“So it was ordained by the Pragmatica; squares and triangles must obey the rote.”

“We will be forced to grope and feel our way.”

“I have never verified this matter; only the Curator would know.”

“By no means, since the stars are high above the rain, higher even than the highest clouds, and swim in rarified air where rain will never breed.”

As Guyal grew to youth, this void in his mind, instead of becoming limp and waxy, seemed to throb with a more violent ache. And so he asked:

“Why do people die when they are killed?”

“Where does beauty vanish when it goes?”

“How long have men lived on Earth?”

“What is beyond the sky?”

To which his sire, biting acerbity back from his lips, would respond:

“Death is the heritage of life; a man’s vitality is like air in a bladder. Poinct this bubble and away, away, away, flees life, like the color of fading dream.”

“Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.”

“Some say men rose from the earth like grubs in a corpse; others aver that the first men desired residence and so created Earth by sorcery. The question is shrouded in technicality; only the Curator may answer with exactness.”

“An endless waste.”

And Guyal pondered and postulated, proposed and expounded until he found himself the subject of surreptitious humor. The demesne was visited by a rumor that a gleft, coming upon Guyal’s mother in labor, had stolen part of Guyal’s brain, which deficiency he now industriously sought to restore.

Guyal therefore drew himself apart and roamed the grassy hills of Sfere in solitude. But ever was his mind acquisitive, ever did he seek to exhaust the lore of all around him, until at last his father in vexation refused to hear further inquiries, declaring that all knowledge had been known, that the trivial and useless had been discarded, leaving a residue which was all that was necessary to a sound man.

At this time Guyal was in his first manhood, a slight but well-knit youth with wide clear eyes, a penchant for severely elegant dress, and a hidden trouble which showed itself in the clamps at the corner of his mouth.

Hearing his father’s angry statement Guyal said, “One more question, then I ask no more.”

“Speak,” declared his father. “One more question I grant you.”

“You have often referred me to the Curator; who is he, and where may I find him, so as to allay my ache for knowledge?”

A moment the father scrutinized the son, whom he now considered past the verge of madness. Then he responded in a quiet voice, “The Curator guards the Museum of Man, which antique legend places in the Land of the Falling Wall—beyond the mountains of Fer Aquila and north of Ascolais. It is not certain that either Curator or Museum still exist; still it would seem that if the Curator knows all things, as is the legend, then surely he would know the wizardly foil to death.”

Guyal said, “I would seek the Curator, and the Museum of Man, that I likewise may know all things.”

The father said with patience, “I will bestow on you my fine white horse, my Expansible Egg for your shelter, my Scintillant Dagger to illuminate the night. In addition, I lay a blessing along the trail, and danger will slide you by so long as you never wander from the trail.”

Guyal quelled the hundred new questions at his tongue, including an inquisition as to where his father had learned these manifestations of sorcery, and accepted the gifts: the horse, the magic shelter, the dagger with the luminous pommel, and the blessing to guard him from the disadvantageous circ*mstances which plagued travelers along the dim trails of Ascolais.

He caparisoned the horse, honed the dagger, cast a last glance around the old manse at Sfere, and set forth to the north, with the void in his mind athrob for the soothing pressure of knowledge.

He ferried the River Scaum on an old barge. Aboard the barge and so off the trail, the blessing lost its puissance and the barge-tender, who coveted Guyal’s rich accoutrements, sought to cudgel him with a knoblolly. Guyal fended off the blow and kicked the man into the murky deep, where he drowned.

Mounting the north bank of the Scaum he saw ahead the Porphiron Scar, the dark poplars and white columns of Kaiin, the dull gleam of Sanreale Bay.

Wandering the crumbled streets, he put the languid inhabitants such a spate of questions that one in wry jocularity commended him to a professional augur.

This one dwelled in a booth painted with the Signs of the Aumoklopelastianic Cabal. He was a lank brownman with red-rimmed eyes and a stained white beard.

“What are your fees?” inquired Guyal cautiously.

“I respond to three questions,” stated the augur. “For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”

“First I must inquire, how profound is your knowledge?”

“I know all,” responded the augur. “The secrets of red and the secrets of black, the lost spells of Grand Motholam, the way of the fish and the voice of the bird.”

“And where have you learned all these things?”

“By pure induction,” explained the augur. “I retire into my booth, I closet myself with never a glint of light, and, so sequestered, I resolve the profundities of the world.”

“With all this precious knowledge at hand,” ventured Guyal, “why do you live so meagerly, with not an ounce of fat to your frame and these miserable rags to your back?”

The augur stood back in fury. “Go along, go along! Already I have wasted fifty terces of wisdom on you, who have never a copper to your pouch. If you desire free enlightenment,” and he cackled in mirth, “seek out the Curator.” And he sheltered himself in his booth.

Guyal took lodging for the night, and in the morning continued north. The ravaged acres of the Old Town passed to his left, and the trail took to the fabulous forest.

For many a day Guyal rode north, and, heedful of danger, held to the trail. By night he surrounded himself and his horse in his magical habiliment, the Expansible Egg—a membrane impermeable to thew, claw, ensorcelment, pressure, sound and chill—and so rested at ease despite the efforts of the avid creatures of the dark.

The great dull globe of the sun fell behind him; the days became wan and the nights bitter, and at last the crags of Fer Aquila showed as a tracing on the north horizon.

The forest had become lower and less dense, and the characteristic tree was the daobado, a rounded massy construction of heavy gnarled branches, these a burnished russet bronze, clumped with dark balls of foliage. Beside a giant of the species Guyal came upon a village of turf huts. A gaggle of surly louts appeared and surrounded him with expressions of curiosity. Guyal, no less than the villagers, had questions to ask, but none would speak till the hetman strode up—a burly man who wore a shaggy fur hat, a cloak of brown fur and a bristling beard, so that it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. He exuded a rancid odor which displeased Guyal, who, from motives of courtesy, kept his distaste concealed.

“Where go you?” asked the hetman.

“I wish to cross the mountains to the Museum of Man,” said Guyal. “Which way does the trail lead?”

The hetman pointed out a notch on the silhouette of the mountains. “There is Omona Gap, which is the shortest and best route, though there is no trail. None comes and none goes, since when you pass the Gap, you walk an unknown land. And with no traffic there manifestly need be no trail.”

The news did not cheer Guyal.

“How then is it known that Omona Gap is on the way to the Museum?”

The hetman shrugged. “Such is our tradition.”

Guyal turned his head at a hoarse snuffling and saw a pen of woven wattles. In a litter of filth and matted straw stood a number of hulking men eight or nine feet tall. They were naked, with shocks of dirty yellow hair and watery blue eyes. They had waxy faces and expressions of crass stupidity. As Guyal watched, one of them ambled to a trough and noisily began gulping gray mash.

Guyal said, “What manner of things are these?”

The hetman blinked in amusem*nt at Guyal’s naïveté. “Those are our oasts, naturally.” And he gestured in disapprobation at Guyal’s white horse. “Never have I seen a stranger oast than the one you bestride. Ours carry us easier and appear to be less vicious; in addition no flesh is more delicious than oast properly braised and kettled.”

Standing close, he fondled the metal of Guyal’s saddle and the red and yellow embroidered quilt. “Your deckings however are rich and of superb quality. I will therefore bestow you my large and weighty oast in return for this creature with its accoutrements.”

Guyal politely declared himself satisfied with his present mount, and the hetman shrugged his shoulders.

A horn sounded. The hetman looked about, then turned back to Guyal. “Food is prepared; will you eat?”

Guyal glanced toward the oast-pen. “I am not presently hungry, and I must hasten forward. However, I am grateful for your kindness.”

He departed; as he passed under the arch of the great daobado, he turned a glance back toward the village. There seemed an unwonted activity among the huts. Remembering the hetman’s covetous touch at his saddle, and aware that no longer did he ride the protected trail, Guyal urged his horse forward and pounded fast under the trees.

As he neared the foothills the forest dwindled to a savannah, floored with a dull, jointed grass that creaked under the horse’s hooves. Guyal glanced up and down the plain. The sun, old and red as an autumn pomegranate, wallowed in the south-west; the light across the plain was dim and watery; the mountains presented a curiously artificial aspect, like a tableau planned for the effect of eery desolation.

Guyal glanced once again at the sun. Another hour of light, then the dark night of the latter-day Earth. Guyal twisted in the saddle, looked behind him, feeling lone, solitary, vulnerable. Four oasts, carrying men on their shoulders, came trotting from the forest. Sighting Guyal, they broke into a lumbering run. With a crawling skin Guyal wheeled his horse and eased the reins, and the white horse loped across the plain toward Omona Gap. Behind came the oasts, bestraddled by the fur-cloaked villagers.

As the sun touched the horizon, another forest ahead showed as an indistinct line of murk. Guyal looked back to his pursuers, bounding now a mile behind, turned his gaze back to the forest. An ill place to ride by night. . . .

The darkling foliage loomed above him; he passed under the first gnarled boughs. If the oasts were unable to sniff out a trail, they might now be eluded. He changed directions, turned once, twice, a third time, then stood his horse to listen. Far away a crashing in the brake reached his ears. Guyal dismounted, led the horse into a deep hollow where a bank of foliage made a screen. Presently the four men on their hulking oasts passed in the afterglow above him, black double-shapes in attitudes suggestive of ill-temper and disappointment.

The thud and pad of feet dwindled and died.

The horse moved restlessly; the foliage rustled.

A damp air passed down the hollow and chilled the back of Guyal’s neck. Darkness rose from old Earth like ink in a basin.

Guyal shivered: best to ride away through the forest, away from the dour villagers and their numb mounts. Away . . .

He turned his horse up to the height where the four had passed and sat listening. Far down the wind he heard a hoarse call. Turning in the opposite direction he let the horse choose its own path.

Branches and boughs knit patterns on the fading purple over him; the air smelt of moss and dank mould. The horse stopped short. Guyal, tensing in every muscle, leaned a little forward, head twisted, listening. There was a feel of danger on his cheek. The air was still, uncanny; his eyes could plumb not ten feet into the black. Somewhere near was death—grinding, roaring death, to come as a sudden shock.

Sweating cold, afraid to stir a muscle, he forced himself to dismount. Stiffly he slid from the saddle, brought forth the Expansible Egg, and flung it around his horse and himself. Ah, now . . . Guyal released the pressure of his breath. Safety.

WAN RED LIGHT SLANTED THROUGH the branches from the east. Guyal’s breath steamed in the air when he emerged from the Egg. After a handful of dried fruit for himself and a sack of meal for the horse, he mounted and set out toward the mountains.

The forest passed, and Guyal rode out on an upland. He scanned the line of mountains. Suffused with rose sunlight, the gray, sage green, dark green range rambled far to the west toward the Melantine, far to the east into the Falling Wall country. Where was Omona Gap?

Guyal of Sfere searched in vain for the notch which had been visible from the village of the fur-cloaked murderers.

He frowned and turned his eyes up the height of the mountains. Weathered by the rains of earth’s duration, the slopes were easy and the crags rose like the stumps of rotten teeth. Guyal turned his horse uphill and rode the trackless slope into the mountains of Fer Aquila.

GUYAL OF SFERE HAD LOST his way in a land of wind and naked crags. As night came he slouched numbly in the saddle while his horse took him where it would. Somewhere the ancient way through Omona Gap led to the northern tundra, but now, under a chilly overcast, north, east, south and west were alike under the lavender-metal sky. Guyal reined his horse and, rising in the saddle, searched the landscape. The crags rose, tall, remote; the ground was barren of all but clumps of dry shrub. He slumped back in the saddle, and his white horse jogged forward.

Head bowed to the wind rode Guyal, and the mountains slanted along the twilight like the skeleton of a fossil god.

The horse halted, and Guyal found himself at the brink of a wide valley. The wind had died; the valley was quiet. Guyal leaned forward staring. Below spread a dark and lifeless city. Mist blew along the streets and the afterglow fell dull on slate roofs.

The horse snorted and scraped the stony ground.

“A strange town,” said Guyal, “with no lights, no sound, no smell of smoke. . . . Doubtless an abandoned ruin from ancient times. . . . ”

He debated descending to the streets. At times the old ruins were haunted by peculiar distillations, but such a ruin might be joined to the tundra by a trail. With this thought in mind he started his horse down the slope.

He entered the town and the hooves rang loud and sharp on the cobbles. The buildings were framed of stone and dark mortar and seemed in uncommonly good preservation. A few lintels had cracked and sagged, a few walls gaped open, but for the most part the stone houses had successfully met the gnaw of time. . . . Guyal scented smoke. Did people live here still? He would proceed with caution.

Before a building which seemed to be a hostelry flowers bloomed in an urn. Guyal reined his horse and reflected that flowers were rarely cherished by persons of hostile disposition.

“Hallo!” he called—once, twice.

No heads peered from the doors, no orange flicker brightened the windows. Guyal slowly turned and rode on.

The street widened and twisted toward a large hall, where Guyal saw a light. The building had a high façade, broken by four large windows, each of which had its two blinds of patined bronze filigree, and each overlooked a small balcony. A marble balustrade fronting the terrace shimmered bonewhite, and, behind, the hall’s portal of massive wood stood slightly ajar; from here came the beam of light and also a strain of music.

Guyal of Sfere, halting, gazed not at the house nor at the light through the door. He dismounted and bowed to the young woman who sat pensively along the course of the balustrade. Though it was very cold, she wore but a simple gown, yellow-orange, a daffodil’s color. Topaz hair fell loose to her shoulders and gave her face a cast of gravity and thoughtfulness.

As Guyal straightened from his greeting the woman nodded, smiled slightly, and absently fingered the hair by her cheek.

“A bitter night for travelers.”

“A bitter night for musing on the stars,” responded Guyal.

She smiled again. “I am not cold. I sit and dream . . . I listen to the music.”

“What place is this?” inquired Guyal, looking up the street, down the street, and once more to the girl. “Are there any here but yourself?”

“This is Carchasel,” said the girl, “abandoned by all ten thousand years ago. Only I and my aged uncle live here, finding this place a refuge from the Saponids of the tundra.”

Guyal thought: this woman may or may not be a witch.

“You are cold and weary,” said the girl, “and I keep you standing in the street.” She rose to her feet. “Our hospitality is yours.”

“Which I gladly accept,” said Guyal, “but first I must stable my horse.”

“He will be content in the house yonder. We have no stable.” Guyal, following her finger, saw a low stone building with a door opening into blackness.

He took the white horse thither and removed the bridle and saddle; then, standing in the doorway, he listened to the music he had noted before, the piping of a weird and ancient air.

“Strange, strange,” he muttered, stroking the horse’s muzzle. “The uncle plays music, the girl stares alone at the stars of the night. . . . ” He considered a moment. “I may be over suspicious. If witch she be, there is naught to be gained from me. If they be simple refugees as she says, and lovers of music, they may enjoy the airs from Ascolais; it will repay, in some measure, their hospitality.” He reached into his saddlebag, brought forth his flute, and tucked it inside his jerkin.

He ran back to where the girl awaited him.

“You have not told me your name,” she reminded him, “that I may introduce you to my uncle.”

“I am Guyal of Sfere, by the River Scaum in Ascolais. And you?”

She smiled, pushing the portal wider. Warm yellow light fell into the cobbled street.

“I have no name. I need none. There has never been any but my uncle; and when he speaks, there is no one to answer but I.”

Guyal stared in astonishment; then, deeming his wonder too apparent for courtesy, he controlled his expression. Perhaps she suspected him of wizardry and feared to pronounce her name lest he make magic with it.

They entered a flagged hall, and the sound of piping grew louder.

“I will call you Ameth, if I may,” said Guyal. “That is a flower of the south, as golden and kind and fragrant as you seem to be.”

She nodded. “You may call me Ameth.”

They entered a tapestry-hung chamber, large and warm. A great fire glowed at one wall, and here stood a table bearing food. On a bench sat the musician—an old man, untidy, unkempt. His white hair hung tangled down his back; his beard, in no better case, was dirty and yellow. He wore a ragged kirtle, by no means clean, and the leather of his sandals had broken into dry cracks. Strangely, he did not take the flute from his mouth, but kept up his piping; and the girl in yellow, so Guyal noted, seemed to move in rhythm to the tones.

“Uncle Ludowik,” she cried in a gay voice, “I bring you a guest, Sir Guyal of Sfere.”

Guyal looked into the man’s face and wondered. The eyes though somewhat rheumy with age, were gray and bright—feverishly bright and intelligent; and, so Guyal thought, awake with a strange joy. This joy further puzzled Guyal, for the lines of the face indicated nothing other than years of misery.

“Perhaps you play?” inquired Ameth. “My uncle is a great musician, and this is his time for music. He has kept the routine for many years . . .” She turned and smiled at Ludowik the musician. Guyal nodded politely.

Ameth motioned to the bounteous table. “Eat, Guyal, and I will pour you wine. Afterwards perhaps you will play the flute for us.”

“Gladly,” said Guyal, and he noticed how the joy on Ludowik’s face grew more apparent, quivering around the corners of his mouth.

He ate and Ameth poured him golden wine until his head went to reeling. And never did Ludowik cease his piping—now a tender melody of running water, again a grave tune that told of the lost ocean to the west, another time a simple melody such as a child might sing at his games. Guyal noted with wonder how Ameth fitted her mood to the music—grave and gay as the music led her. Strange! thought Guyal. But then—people thus isolated were apt to develop peculiar mannerisms, and they seemed kindly withal.

He finished his meal and stood erect, steadying himself against the table. Ludowik was playing a lilting tune, a melody of glass birds swinging round and round on a red string in the sunlight. Ameth came dancing over to him and stood close—very close—and he smelled the warm perfume of her loose golden hair. Her face was happy and wild. . . . Peculiar how Ludowik watched so grimly, and yet without a word. Perhaps he misdoubted a stranger’s intent. Still . . .

“Now,” breathed Ameth, “perhaps you will play the flute; you are so strong and young.” Then she said quickly, as she saw Guyal’s eyes widen, “I mean you will play on the flute for old uncle Ludowik, and he will be happy and go off to bed—and then we will sit and talk far into the night.”

“Gladly will I play the flute,” said Guyal. Curse the tongue of his, at once so fluent and yet so numb. It was the wine. “Gladly will I play. I am accounted quite skillful at my home manse at Sfere.”

He glanced at Ludowik, then stared at the expression of crazy gladness he had surprised. Marvellous that a man should be so fond of music.

“Then—play!” breathed Ameth, urging him a little toward Ludowik and the flute.

“Perhaps,” suggested Guyal, “I had better wait till your uncle pauses. I would seem discourteous—”

“No, as soon as you indicate that you wish to play, he will let off. Merely take the flute. You see,” she confided, “he is rather deaf.”

“Very well,” said Guyal, “except that I have my own flute.” And he brought it out from under his jerkin. “Why—what is the matter?” For a startling change had come over the girl and the old man. A quick light had risen in her eyes, and Ludowik’s strange gladness had gone, and there was but dull hopelessness in his eyes, stupid resignation.

Guyal slowly stood back, bewildered. “Do you not wish me to play?”

There was a pause. “Of course,” said Ameth, young and charming once more. “But I’m sure that Uncle Ludowik would enjoy hearing you play his flute. He is accustomed to the pitch—another scale might be unfamiliar . . .”

Ludowik nodded, and hope again shone in the rheumy old eyes. It was indeed a fine flute, Guyal saw, a rich piece of white metal, chased and set with gold, and Ludowik clutched this flute as if he would never let go.

“Take the flute,” suggested Ameth. “He will not mind in the least.” Ludowik shook his head, to signify the absence of his objections. But Guyal, noting with distaste the long stained beard, also shook his head. “I can play any scale, any tone on my flute. There is no need for me to use that of your uncle and possibly distress him. Listen,” and he raised his instrument. “Here is a song of Kaiin, called ‘The Opal, the Pearl and the Peaco*ck.’”

He put the pipe to his lips and began to play, very skillfully indeed, and Ludowik followed him, filling in gaps, making chords. Ameth, forgetting her vexation, listened with eyes half-closed, and moved her arm to the rhythm.

“Did you enjoy that?” asked Guyal, when he had finished.

“Very much. Perhaps you would try it on Uncle Ludowik’s flute? It is a fine flute to play, very soft and easy to the breath.”

“No,” said Guyal, with sudden obstinacy. “I am able to play only my own instrument.” He blew again, and it was a dance of the festival, a quirking carnival air. Ludowik, playing with supernal skill, ran merry phrases as might fit, and Ameth, carried away by the rhythm, danced a dance of her own, a merry step in time to the music.

Guyal played a wild tarantella of the peasant folk, and Ameth danced wilder and faster, flung her arms, wheeled, jerked her head in a fine display. And Ludowik’s flute played a brilliant obbligato, hurtling over, now under, chording, veering, warping little silver strings of sound around Guyal’s melody, adding urgent little grace-phrases.

Ludowik’s eyes now clung to the whirling figure of the dancing girl. And suddenly he struck up a theme of his own, a tune of wildest abandon, of a frenzied beating rhythm; and Guyal, carried away by the force of the music, blew as he never had blown before, invented trills and runs, gyrating arpeggios, blew high and shrill, loud and fast and clear.

It was as nothing to Ludowik’s music. His eyes were starting; sweat streamed from his seamed old forehead; his flute tore the air into quivering ecstatic shreds.

Ameth danced frenzy; she was no longer beautiful, she appeared grotesque and unfamiliar. The music became something more than the senses could bear. Guyal’s own vision turned pink and gray; he saw Ameth fall in a faint, in a foaming fit; and Ludowik, fiery-eyed, staggered erect, hobbled to her body and began a terrible intense concord, slow measures of most solemn and frightening meaning.

Ludowik played death.

Guyal of Sfere turned and ran wide-eyed from the hall. Ludowik, never noticing, continued his terrible piping, played as if every note were a skewer through the twitching girl’s shoulder-blades.

Guyal ran through the night, and cold air bit at him like sleet. He burst into the shed, and the white horse softly nickered at him. On with the saddle, on with the bridle, away down the streets of old Carchasel, past the gaping black windows, ringing down the starlit cobbles, away from the music of death!

Guyal of Sfere galloped up the mountain with the stars in his face, and not until he came to the shoulder did he turn in the saddle to look back.

The verging of dawn trembled into the stony valley. Where was Carchasel? There was no city—only a crumble of ruins. . . .

Hark! A far sound? . . .

No. All was silence.

And yet . . .

No. Only crumbled stones in the floor of the valley.

Guyal, fixed of eye, turned and went his way, along the trail which stretched north before him.

The walls of the defile which led the trail were steep gray granite, stained scarlet and black by lichen, mildewed blue. The horse’s hooves made a hollow clop-clop-clop on the stone, loud to Guyal’s ears, hypnotic to his brain, and after the sleepless night he found his frame sagging. His eyes grew dim and warm with drowsiness, but the trail ahead led to unseen vistas, and the void in Guyal’s brain drove him without surcease.

The lassitude became such that Guyal slipped halfway from his saddle. Rousing himself, he resolved to round one more bend in the trail and then take rest.

The rock beetled above and hid the sky where the sun had passed the zenith. The trail twisted around a shoulder of rock; ahead shone a patch of indigo heaven. One more turning, Guyal told himself. The defile fell open, the mountains were at his back and he looked out across a hundred miles of steppe. It was a land shaded with subtle colors, washed with delicate shadows, fading and melting into the lurid haze at the horizon. He saw a lone eminence cloaked by a dark company of trees, the glisten of a lake at its foot. To the other side a ranked mass of gray-white ruins was barely discernible. The Museum of Man? . . . After a moment of vacillation, Guyal dismounted and sought sleep within the Expansible Egg.

The sun rolled in sad sumptuous majesty behind the mountains; murk fell across the tundra. Guyal awoke and refreshed himself in a rill nearby. Giving meal to his horse, he ate dry fruit and bread; then he mounted and rode down the trail. The plain spread vastly north before him, into desolation; the mountains lowered black above and behind; a slow cold breeze blew in his face. Gloom deepened; the plain sank from sight like a drowned land. Hesitant before the murk, Guyal reined his horse. Better, he thought, to ride in the morning. If he lost the trail in the dark, who could tell what he might encounter?

A mournful sound. Guyal stiffened and turned his face to the sky. A sigh? A moan? A sob? . . . Another sound, closer, the rustle of cloth, a loose garment. Guyal cringed into his saddle. Floating slowly down through the darkness came a shape robed in white. Under the cowl and glowing with eer-light looked a drawn face with eyes like the holes in a skull.

It breathed its sad sound and drifted away on high. . . . There was only the blow of the wind past Guyal’s ears.

He drew a shuddering breath and slumped against the pommel. His shoulders felt exposed, naked. He slipped to the ground and established the shelter of the Egg about himself and his horse. Preparing his pallet, he lay himself down; presently, as he lay staring into the dark, sleep came on him and so the night passed.

He awoke before dawn and once more set forth. The trail was a ribbon of white sand between banks of gray furze and the miles passed swiftly.

The trail led toward the tree-clothed eminence Guyal had noted from above; now he thought to see roofs through the heavy foliage and smoke on the sharp air. And presently to right and left spread cultivated fields of spikenard, callow and mead-apple. Guyal continued with eyes watchful for men.

To one side appeared a fence of stone and black timber: the stone chiseled and hewn to the semblance of four globes beaded on a central pillar, the black timbers which served as rails fitted in sockets and carved in precise spirals. Behind this fence a region of bare earth lay churned, pitted, cratered, burnt and wrenched, as if visited at once by fire and the blow of a tremendous hammer. In wondering speculation Guyal gazed and so did not notice the three men who came quietly upon him.

The horse started nervously; Guyal, turning, saw the three. They barred his road and one held the bridle of his horse.

They were tall, well-formed men, wearing tight suits of somber leather bordered with black. Their headgear was heavy maroon cloth crumpled in precise creases, and leather flaps extended horizontally over each ear. Their faces were long and solemn, with clear golden-ivory skin, golden eyes and jet-black hair. Clearly they were not savages: they moved with a silky control, they eyed Guyal with critical appraisal, their garb implied the discipline of an ancient convention.

The leader stepped forward. His expression was neither threat nor welcome. “Greetings, stranger; whither bound?”

“Greetings,” replied Guyal cautiously. “I go as my star directs . . . You are the Saponids?”

“That is our race, and before you is our town Saponce.” He inspected Guyal with frank curiosity. “By the color of your custom I suspect your home to be in the south.”

“I am Guyal of Sfere, by the River Scaum in Ascolais.”

“The way is long,” observed the Saponid. “Terrors beset the traveler. Your impulse must be most intense, and your star must draw with fervent allure.”

“I come,” said Guyal, “on a pilgrimage for the ease of my spirit; the road seems short when it attains its end.”

The Saponid offered polite acquiescence. “Then you have crossed the Fer Aquilas?”

“Indeed; through cold wind and desolate stone.” Guyal glanced back at the looming mass. “Only yesterday at night-fall did I leave the gap. And then a ghost hovered above till I thought the grave was marking me for its own.”

He paused in surprise; his words seemed to have released a powerful emotion in the Saponids. Their features lengthened, their mouths grew white and clenched. The leader, his polite detachment a trifle diminished, searched the sky with ill-concealed apprehension. “A ghost . . . in a white garment, thus and so, floating on high?”

“Yes; is it a known familiar of the region?”

There was a pause.

“In a certain sense,” said the Saponid. “It is a signal of woe. . . . But I interrupt your tale.”

“There is little to tell. I took shelter for the night, and this morning I fared down to the plain.”

“Were you not molested further? By Koolbaw the Walking Serpent, who ranges the slopes like fate?”

“I saw neither walking serpent nor crawling lizard; further, a blessing protects my trail and I come to no harm so long as I keep my course.”

“Interesting, interesting.”

“Now,” said Guyal, “permit me to inquire of you, since there is much I would learn; what is this ghost and what evil does he commemorate?”

“You ask beyond my certain knowledge,” replied the Saponid cautiously. “Of this ghost it is well not to speak lest our attention reinforce his malignity.”

“As you will,” replied Guyal. “Perhaps you will instruct me . . .” He caught his tongue. Before inquiring for the Museum of Man, it would be wise to learn in what regard the Saponids held it, lest, learning his interest, they seek to prevent him from knowledge.

“Yes?” inquired the Saponid. “What is your lack?”

Guyal indicated the seared area behind the fence of stone and timber. “What is the portent of this devastation?”

The Saponid stared across the area with a blank expression and shrugged. “It is one of the ancient places; so much is known, no more. Death lingers here, and no creature may venture across the place without succumbing to a most malicious magic which raises virulence and angry sores. Here is where those whom we kill are sent. . . . But away. You will desire to rest and refresh yourself at Saponce. Come; we will guide you.”

He turned down the trail toward the town, and Guyal, finding neither words nor reasons to reject the idea, urged his horse forward.

As they approached the tree-shrouded hill the trail widened to a road. To the right hand the lake drew close, behind low banks of purple reeds. Here were docks built of heavy black baulks and boats rocked to the wind-feathered ripples. They were built in the shape of sickles, with bow and stern curving high from the water.

Up into the town, and the houses were hewn timber, ranging in tone from golden brown to weathered black. The construction was intricate and ornate, the walls rising three stories to steep gables overhanging front and back. Pillars and piers were carved with complex designs: meshing ribbons, tendrils, leaves, lizards, and the like. The screens which guarded the windows were likewise carved, with foliage patterns, animal faces, radiant stars: rich textures in the mellow wood. It was clear that much expressiveness had been expended on the carving.

Up the steep lane, under the gloom cast by the trees, past the houses half-hidden by the foliage, and the Saponids of Saponce came forth to stare. They moved quietly and spoke in low voices, and their garments were of an elegance Guyal had not expected to see on the northern steppe.

His guide halted and turned to Guyal. “Will you oblige me by waiting till I report to the Voyevode, that he may prepare a suitable reception?”

The request was framed in candid words and with guileless eyes. Guyal thought to perceive ambiguity in the phrasing, but since the hooves of his horse were planted in the center of the road, and since he did not propose leaving the road, Guyal assented with an open face. The Saponid disappeared and Guyal sat musing on the pleasant town perched so high above the plain.

A group of girls approached to glance at Guyal with curious eyes. Guyal returned the inspection, and now found a puzzling lack about their persons, a discrepancy which he could not instantly identify. They wore graceful garments of woven wool, striped and dyed various colors; they were supple and slender, and seemed not lacking in coquetry. And yet . . .

The Saponid returned. “Now, Sir Guyal, may we proceed?”

Guyal, endeavoring to remove any flavor of suspicion from his words, said, “You will understand, Sir Saponid, that by the very nature of my father’s blessing I dare not leave the delineated course of the trail; for then, instantly, I would become liable to any curse, which, placed on me along the way, might be seeking just such occasion for leeching close on my soul.”

The Saponid made an understanding gesture. “Naturally; you follow a sound principle. Let me reassure you. I but conduct you to a reception by the Voyevode who even now hastens to the plaza to greet a stranger from the far south.”

Guyal bowed in gratification, and they continued up the road.

A hundred paces and the road levelled, crossing a common planted with small, fluttering, heart-shaped leaves, colored in all shades of purple, red, green and black.

The Saponid turned to Guyal. “As a stranger I must caution you never to set foot on the common. It is one of our sacred places, and tradition requires that a severe penalty be exacted for transgressions and sacrilege.”

“I note your warning,” said Guyal. “I will respectfully obey your law.”

They passed a dense thicket; with hideous clamor a bestial shape sprang from concealment, a creature staring-eyed with tremendous fanged jaws. Guyal’s horse shied, bolted, sprang out on to the sacred common and trampled the fluttering leaves.

A number of Saponid men rushed forth, grasped the horse, seized Guyal and dragged him from the saddle.

“Ho!” cried Guyal. “What means this? Release me!”

The Saponid who had been his guide advanced, shaking his head in reproach. “Indeed, and only had I just impressed upon you the gravity of such an offense!”

“But the monster frightened my horse!” said Guyal. “I am no wise responsible for this trespass; release me, let us proceed to the reception.”

The Saponid said, “I fear that the penalties prescribed by tradition must come into effect. Your protests, though of superficial plausibility, will not bear serious examination. For instance, the creature you term a monster is in reality a harmless domesticated beast. Secondly, I observe the animal you bestride; he will not make a turn or twist without the twitch of the reins. Thirdly, even if your postulates were conceded, you thereby admit to guilt by virtue of negligence and omission. You should have secured a mount less apt to unpredictable action, or upon learning of the sanctitude of the common, you should have considered such a contingency as even now occurred, and therefore dismounted, leading your beast. Therefore, Sir Guyal, though loath, I am forced to believe you guilty of impertinence, impiety, disregard and impudicity. Therefore, as Castellan and Sergeant-Reader of the Litany, so responsible for the detention of law-breakers, I must order you secured, contained, pent, incarcerated and confined until such time as the penalties will be exacted.”

“The entire episode is mockery!” raged Guyal. “Are you savages, then, thus to mistreat a lone wayfarer?”

“By no means,” replied the Castellan. “We are a highly civilized people, with customs bequeathed us by the past. Since the past was more glorious than the present, what presumption we would show by questioning these laws!”

Guyal fell quiet. “And what are the usual penalties for my act?”

The Castellan made a reassuring motion. “The rote prescribes three acts of penance, which in your case, I am sure will be nominal. But—the forms must be observed, and it is necessary that you be constrained in the Felon’s Caseboard.” He motioned to the men who held Guyal’s arm. “Away with him; cross neither track nor trail, for then your grasp will be nerveless and he will be delivered from justice.”

Guyal was pent in a well-aired but poorly lighted cellar of stone. The floor he found dry, the ceiling free of crawling insects. He had not been searched, nor had his Scintillant Dagger been removed from his sash. With suspicions crowding his brain he lay on the rush bed and, after a period, slept.

Now ensued the passing of a day. He was given food and drink; and at last the Castellan came to visit him.

“You are indeed fortunate,” said the Saponid, “in that, as a witness, I was able to suggest your delinquencies to be more the result of negligence than malice. The last penalties exacted for the crime were stringent; the felon was ordered to perform the following three acts: first, to cut off his toes and sew the severed members into the skin at his neck; second, to revile his forbears for three hours, commencing with a Common Bill of Anathema, including feigned madness and hereditary disease, and at last defiling the hearth of his clan with ordure; and third, walking a mile under the lake with leaded shoes in search of the Lost Book of Qualls.” And the Castellan regarded Guyal with complacency.

“What deeds must I perform?” inquired Guyal drily.

The Castellan joined the tips of his fingers together. “As I say, the penances are nominal, by decree of the Voyevode. First you must swear never again to repeat your crime.”

“That I gladly do,” said Guyal, and so bound himself.

“Second,” said the Castellan with a slight smile, “you must adjudicate at a Grand Pageant of Pulchritude among the maids of the village and select her whom you deem the most beautiful.”

“Scarcely an arduous task,” commented Guyal. “Why does it fall to my lot?”

The Castellan looked vaguely to the ceiling. “There are a number of concomitants to victory in this contest. . . . Every person in the town would find relations among the participants—a daughter, a sister, a niece—and so would hardly be considered unprejudiced. The charge of favoritism could never be levelled against you; therefore you make an ideal selection for this important post.”

Guyal seemed to hear the ring of sincerity in the Saponid’s voice; still he wondered why the selection of the town’s loveliest was a matter of such import.

“And third?” he inquired.

“That will be revealed after the contest, which occurs this afternoon.”

The Saponid departed the cell.

Guyal, who was not without vanity, spent several hours restoring himself and his costume from the ravages of travel. He bathed, trimmed his hair, shaved his face, and, when the Castellan came to unlock the door, he felt that he made no discreditable picture.

He was led out upon the road and directed up the hill toward the summit of the terraced town of Saponce. Turning to the Castellan he said, “How is it that you permit me to walk the trail once more? You must know that now I am safe from molestation. . . .”

The Castellan shrugged. “True. But you would gain little by insisting upon your temporary immunity. Ahead the trail crosses a bridge, which we could demolish; behind we need but breach the dam to Peilvemchal Torrent; then, should you walk the trail, you would be swept to the side and so rendered vulnerable. No, Sir Guyal of Sfere, once the secret of your immunity is abroad then you are liable to a variety of stratagems. For instance, a large wall might be placed athwart the way, before and behind you. No doubt the spell would preserve you from thirst and hunger, but what then? So would you sit till the sun went out.”

Guyal said no word. Across the lake he noticed a trio of the crescent boats approaching the docks, prows and sterns rocking and dipping into the shaded water with a graceful motion. The void in his mind made itself known. “Why are boats constructed in such fashion?”

The Castellan looked blankly at him. “It is the only practicable method. Do not the oe-pods grow thusly to the south?”

“Never have I seen oe-pods.”

“They are the fruit of a great vine, and grow in scimitar-shape. When sufficiently large, we cut and clean them, slit the inner edge, grapple end to end with strong line and constrict till the pod opens as is desirable. Then when cured, dried, varnished, carved, burnished and lacquered; fitted with deck, thwarts and gussets—then have we our boats.”

They entered the plaza, a flat area at the summit surrounded on three sides by tall houses of carved dark wood. The fourth side was open to a vista across the lake and beyond to the loom of the mountains. Trees overhung all and the sun shining through made a scarlet pattern on the sandy floor.

To Guyal’s surprise there seemed to be no preliminary ceremonies or formalities to the contest, and small spirit of festivity was manifest among the townspeople. Indeed they seemed beset by subdued despondency and eyed him without enthusiasm.

A hundred girls stood gathered in a disconsolate group in the center of the plaza. It seemed to Guyal that they had gone to few pains to embellish themselves for beauty. To the contrary, they wore shapeless rags, their hair seemed deliberately misarranged, their faces dirty and scowling.

Guyal stared and turned to his guide. “These girls seem not to relish the garland of pulchritude.”

The Castellan nodded wryly. “As you see, they are by no means jealous for distinction; modesty has always been a Saponid trait.”

Guyal hesitated. “What is the form of procedure? I do not desire in my ignorance to violate another of your arcane apochrypha.”

The Castellan said with a blank face, “There are no formalities. We conduct these pageants with expedition and the least possible ceremony. You need but pass among these maidens and point out her whom you deem the most attractive.”

Guyal advanced to his task, feeling more than half-foolish. Then he reflected: this is a penalty for contravening an absurd tradition; I will conduct myself with efficiency and so the quicker rid myself of the obligation.

He stood before the hundred girls, who eyed him with hostility and anxiety, and Guyal saw that his task would not be simple, since, on the whole, they were of a comeliness which even the dirt, grimacing and rags could not disguise.

“Range yourselves, if you please, into a line,” said Guyal. “In this way, none will be at disadvantage.”

Sullenly the girls formed a line.

Guyal surveyed the group. He saw at once that a number could be eliminated: the squat, the obese, the lean, the pocked and coarse-featured—perhaps a quarter of the group. He said suavely, “Never have I seen such unanimous loveliness; each of you might legitimately claim the cordon. My task is arduous; I must weigh fine imponderables; in the end my choice will undoubtedly be based on subjectivity and those of real charm will no doubt be the first discharged from the competition.” He stepped forward. “Those whom I indicate may retire.”

He walked down the line, pointing, and the ugliest, with expressions of unmistakable relief, hastened to the sidelines.

A second time Guyal made his inspection, and now, somewhat more familiar with those he judged, he was able to discharge those who, while suffering no whit from ugliness, were merely plain.

Roughly a third of the original group remained. These stared at Guyal with varying degrees of apprehension and truculence as he passed before them, studying each in turn. . . . All at once his mind was determined, and his choice definite. Somehow the girls felt the change in him, and in their anxiety and tension left off the expressions they had been wearing to daunt and bemuse him.

Guyal made one last survey down the line. No, he had been accurate in his choice. There were girls here as comely as the senses could desire, girls with opal-glowing eyes and hyacinth features, girls as lissome as reeds, with hair silky and fine despite the dust which they seemed to have rubbed upon themselves.

The girl whom Guyal had selected was slighter than the others and possessed of a beauty not at once obvious. She had a small triangular face, great wistful eyes and thick black hair cut raggedly short at the ears. Her skin was of a transparent paleness, like the finest ivory; her form slender, graceful, and of a compelling magnetism, urgent of intimacy. She seemed to have sensed his decision and her eyes widened.

Guyal took her hand, led her forward, and turned to the Voyevode—an old man sitting stolidly in a heavy chair.

“This is she whom I find the loveliest among your maidens.”

There was silence through the square. Then there came a hoarse sound, a cry of sadness from the Castellan and Sergeant-Reader. He came forward, sagging of face, limp of body. “Guyal of Sfere, you have wrought a great revenge for my tricking you. This is my beloved daughter, Shierl, whom you have designated for dread.”

Guyal turned in wonderment from the Castellan to the girl Shierl, in whose eyes he now recognized a film of numbness, a gazing into a great depth.

Returning to the Castellan, Guyal stammered, “I meant but complete impersonality. This your daughter Shierl I find one of the loveliest creatures of my experience; I cannot understand where I have offended.”

“No, Guyal,” said the Castellan, “you have chosen fairly, for such indeed is my own thought.”

“Well then,” said Guyal, “reveal to me now my third task that I may have done and continue my pilgrimage.”

The Castellan said, “Three leagues to the north lies the ruin which tradition tells us to be the olden Museum of Man.”

“Ah,” said Guyal, “go on, I attend.”

“You must, as your third charge, conduct this my daughter Shierl to the Museum of Man. At the portal you will strike on a copper gong and announce to whomever responds: ‘We are those summoned from Saponce.’”

Guyal started, frowned. “How is this? ‘We’?”

“Such is your charge,” said the Castellan in a voice like thunder.

Guyal looked to left, right, forward and behind. But he stood in the center of the plaza surrounded by the hardy men of Saponce.

“When must this charge be executed?” he inquired in a controlled voice.

The Castellan said in a voice bitter as oak-wort: “Even now Shierl goes to clothe herself in yellow. In one hour shall she appear, in one hour shall you set forth for the Museum of Man.”

“And then?”

“And then—for good or for evil, it is not known. You fare as thirteen thousand have fared before you.”

DOWN FROM THE PLAZA, DOWN the leafy lanes of Saponce came Guyal, indignant and clamped of mouth, though the pit of his stomach felt tender and heavy with trepidation. The ritual carried distasteful overtones: execution or sacrifice. Guyal’s step faltered.

The Castellan seized his elbow with a hard hand. “Forward.”

Execution or sacrifice. . . . The faces along the lane swam with morbid curiosity, inner excitement; gloating eyes searched him deep to relish his fear and horror, and the mouths half-drooped, half-smiled in the inner hugging for joy not to be the one walking down the foliage streets, and forth to the Museum of Man.

The eminence, with the tall trees and carved dark houses, was at his back; they walked out into the claret sunlight of the tundra. Here were eighty women in white chlamys with ceremonial buckets of woven straw over their heads; around a tall tent of yellow silk they stood.

The Castellan halted Guyal and beckoned to the Ritual Matron. She flung back the hangings at the door of the tent; the girl within, Shierl, came slowly forth, eyes wide and dark with fright.

She wore a stiff gown of yellow brocade, and the wand of her body seemed pent and constrained within. The gown came snug under her chin, left her arms bare and raised past the back of her head in a stiff spear-headed cowl. She was frightened as a small animal trapped is frightened; she stared at Guyal, at her father, as if she had never seen them before.

The Ritual Matron put a gentle hand on her waist, propelled her forward. Shierl stepped once, twice, irresolutely halted. The Castellan brought Guyal forward and placed him at the girl’s side; now two children, a boy and a girl, came hastening up with cups which they proffered to Guyal and Shierl. Dully she accepted the cup. Guyal took his and glanced suspiciously at the murky brew. He looked up to the Castellan. “What is the nature of this potion?”

“Drink,” said the Castellan. “So will your way seem the shorter; so will terror leave you behind, and you will march to the Museum with a steadier step.”

“No,” said Guyal. “I will not drink. My senses must be my own when I meet the Curator. I have come far for the privilege; I would not stultify the occasion stumbling and staggering.” And he handed the cup back to the boy.

Shierl stared dully at the cup she held. Said Guyal: “I advise you likewise to avoid the drug; so will we come to the Museum of Man with our dignity to us.”

Hesitantly she returned the cup. The Castellan’s brow clouded, but he made no protest.

An old man in a black costume brought forward a satin pillow on which rested a whip with a handle of carved steel. The Castellan now lifted this whip, and advancing, laid three light strokes across the shoulders of both Shierl and Guyal.

“Now, I charge thee, get hence and go from Saponce, outlawed forever; thou art waifs forlorn. Seek succor at the Museum of Man. I charge thee, never look back, leave all thoughts of past and future here at North Garden. Now and forever are you sundered from all bonds, claims, relations and kinships, together with all pretenses to amity, love, fellowship and brotherhood with the Saponids of Saponce. Go, I exhort; go, I command; go, go, go!”

Shierl sunk her teeth into her lower lip; tears freely coursed her cheek though she made no sound. With hanging head she started across the lichen of the tundra, and Guyal, with a swift stride, joined her.

Now there was no looking back. For a space the murmurs, the nervous sounds followed their ears; then they were alone on the plain. The limitless north lay across the horizon; the tundra filled the foreground and background, an expanse dreary, dun and moribund. Alone marring the region, the white ruins—once the Museum of Man—rose a league before them, and along the faint trail they walked without words.

Guyal said in a tentative tone, “There is much I would understand.”

“Speak,” said Shierl. Her voice was low but composed.

“Why are we forced and exhorted to this mission?”

“It is thus because it has always been thus. Is not this reason enough?”

“Sufficient possibly for you,” said Guyal, “but for me the causality is unconvincing. I must acquaint you with the void in my mind, which lusts for knowledge as a lecher yearns for carnality; so pray be patient if my inquisition seems unnecessarily thorough.”

She glanced at him in astonishment. “Are all to the south so strong for knowing as you?”

“In no degree,” said Guyal. “Everywhere normality of the mind may be observed. The habitants adroitly perform the motions which fed them yesterday, last week, a year ago. I have been informed of my aberration well and full. ‘Why strive for a pedant’s accumulation?’ I have been told. ‘Why forego merriment, music, and revelry for the abstract and abstruse?’”

“Indeed,” said Shierl. “Well do they counsel; such is the consensus at Saponce.”

Guyal shrugged. “The rumor goes that I am demon-bereft of my senses. Such may be. In any event the effect remains and the obsession haunts me.”

Shierl indicated understanding and acquiescence. “Ask on then; I will endeavor to ease these yearnings.”

He glanced at her sidelong, studied the charming triangle of her face, the heavy black hair, the great lustrous eyes, dark as yu-sapphires. “In happier circ*mstances, there would be other yearnings I would beseech you likewise to ease.”

“Ask,” replied Shierl of Saponce. “The Museum of Man is close; there is occasion for naught but words.”

“Why are we thus dismissed and charged, with tacit acceptance of our doom?”

“The immediate cause is the ghost you saw on the hill. When the ghost appears, then we of Saponce know that the most beautiful maiden and the most handsome youth of the town must be despatched to the Museum. The prime behind the custom I do not know. So it is; so it has been; so it will be till the sun gutters like a coal in the rain and darkens Earth, and the winds blow snow over Saponce.”

“But what is our mission? Who greets us, what is our fate?”

“Such details are unknown.”

Guyal mused, “The likelihood of pleasure seems small. . . . There are discordants in the episode. You are beyond doubt the loveliest creature of the Saponids, the loveliest creature of Earth—but I, I am a casual stranger, and hardly the most well-favored youth of the town.”

She smiled a trifle. “You are not uncomely.”

Guyal said somberly, “Over-riding the condition of my person is the fact that I am a stranger and so bring little loss to the town of Saponce.”

“That aspect has no doubt been considered,” the girl said.

Guyal searched the horizon. “Let us then avoid the Museum of Man, let us circumvent this unknown fate and take to the mountains, and so south to Ascolais. Lust for enlightenment will never fly me in the face of destruction so clearly implicit.”

She shook her head. “Do you suppose that we would gain by the ruse? The eyes of a hundred warriors follow us till we pass through the portals of the Museum; should we attempt to scamp our duty we should be bound to stakes, stripped of our skins by the inch, and at last be placed in bags with a thousand scorpions poured around our heads. Such is the traditional penalty; twelve times in history has it been invoked.”

Guyal threw back his shoulders and spoke in a nervous voice. “Ah, well—the Museum of Man has been my goal for many years. On this motive I set forth from Sfere, so now I would seek the Curator and satisfy my obsession for brainfilling.”

“You are blessed with great fortune,” said Shierl, “for you are being granted your heart’s desire.”

Guyal could find nothing to say, so for a space they walked in silence. Then he spoke. “Shierl.”

“Yes, Guyal of Sfere?”

“Do they separate us and take us apart?”

“I do not know.”

“Shierl.”

“Yes?”

“Had we met under a happier star . . .” He paused.

Shierl walked in silence.

He looked at her coolly. “You speak not.”

“But you ask nothing,” she said in surprise. Guyal turned his face ahead, to the Museum of Man.

Presently she touched his arm. “Guyal, I am greatly frightened.”

Guyal gazed at the ground beneath his feet, and a blossom of fire sprang alive in his brain. “See the marking through the lichen?”

“Yes; what then?”

“Is it a trail?”

Dubiously she responded, “It is a way worn by the passage of many feet. So then—it is a trail.”

Guyal said in restrained jubilation, “Here is safety, if I never permit myself to be cozened from the way. But you—ah, I must guard you; you must never leave my side, you must swim in the charm which protects me; perhaps then we will survive.”

Shierl said sadly, “Let us not delude our reason, Guyal of Sfere.”

But as they walked, the trail grew plainer, and Guyal became correspondingly sanguine. And ever larger bulked the crumble which marked the Museum of Man, presently to occupy all their vision.

If a storehouse of knowledge had existed here, little sign of it remained. There was a great flat floor, flagged in white stone, now chalky, broken and inter-thrust by weeds. Around this floor rose a series of monoliths, pocked and worn, and toppled off at various heights. These at one time had supported a vast roof; now of roof there was none and the walls were but dreams of the far past.

So here was the flat floor bounded by the broken stumps of pillars, bare to the winds of time and the glare of the cool red sun. The rains had washed the marble, the dust from the mountains had been laid on and swept off, laid on and swept off, and those who had built the Museum were less than a mote of this dust, so far and forgotten were they.

“Think,” said Guyal, “think of the vastness of knowledge which once was gathered here and which is now one with the soil—unless, of course, the Curator has salvaged and preserved.”

Shierl looked about apprehensively. “I think rather of the portal, and that which awaits us . . . Guyal,” she whispered, “I fear, I fear greatly. . . . Suppose they tear us apart? Suppose there is torture and death for us? I fear a tremendous impingement, the shock of horror . . .”

Guyal’s own throat was hot and full. He looked about with challenge. “While I still breathe and hold power in my arms to fight, there will be none to harm us.”

Shierl groaned softly. “Guyal, Guyal, Guyal of Sfere—why did you choose me?”

“Because,” said Guyal, “my eye went to you like the nectar moth flits to the jacynth; because you were the loveliest and I thought nothing but good in store for you.”

With a shuddering breath Shierl said, “I must be courageous; after all, if it were not I it would be some other maid equally fearful. . . . And there is the portal.”

Guyal inhaled deeply, inclined his head, and strode forward. “Let us be to it, and know . . .”

The portal opened into a nearby monolith, a door of flat black metal. Guyal followed the trail to the door, and rapped staunchly with his fist on the small copper gong to the side.

The door groaned wide on its hinges, and cool air, smelling of the under-earth, billowed forth. In the black gape their eyes could find nothing.

“Hola within!” cried Guyal.

A soft voice, full of catches and quavers, as if just after weeping, said, “Come ye, come ye forward. You are desired and awaited.”

Guyal leaned his head forward, straining to see. “Give us light, that we may not wander from the trail and bottom ourselves.”

The breathless quaver of a voice said, “Light is not needed; anywhere you step, that will be your trail, by an arrangement so agreed with the Way-Maker.”

“No,” said Guyal, “we would see the visage of our host. We come at his invitation; the minimum of his guest-offering is light; light there must be before we set foot inside the dungeon. Know we come as seekers after knowledge; we are visitors to be honored.”

“Ah, knowledge, knowledge,” came the sad breathlessness. “That shall be yours, in full plentitude—knowledge of many strange affairs; oh, you shall swim in a tide of knowledge—”

Guyal interrupted the sad, sighing voice. “Are you the Curator? Hundreds of leagues have I come to bespeak the Curator and put him my inquiries. Are you he?”

“By no means. I revile the name of the Curator as a treacherous non-essential.”

“Who then may you be?”

“I am no one, nothing. I am an abstraction, an emotion, the ooze of terror, the sweat of horror, the shake in the air when a scream has departed.”

“You speak the voice of man.”

“Why not? Such things as I speak lie in the closest and dearest center of the human brain.”

Guyal said in a subdued voice, “You do not make your invitation as enticing as might be hoped.”

“No matter, no matter; enter you must, into the dark and on the instant, as my lord, who is myself, waxes warm and languorous.”

“If light there be, we enter.”

“No light, no insolent scorch is ever found in the Museum.”

“In this case,” said Guyal, drawing forth his Scintillant Dagger, “I innovate a welcome reform. For see, now there is light!”

From the under-pommel issued a searching glare; the ghost tall before them screeched and fell into twinkling ribbons like pulverized tinsel. There were a few vagrant motes in the air; he was gone.

Shierl, who had stood stark and stiff as one mesmerized, gasped a soft warm gasp and fell against Guyal. “How can you be so defiant?”

Guyal said in a voice half-laugh, half-quaver, “In truth I do not know . . . perhaps I find it incredible that Destiny would direct me from pleasant Sfere, through forest and crag, into the northern waste, merely to play the role of cringing victim. Disbelieving so inconclusive a destiny, I am bold.”

He moved the dagger to right and left, and they saw themselves to be at the portal of a keep, cut from concreted rock. At the back opened a black depth. Crossing the floor swiftly, Guyal kneeled and listened.

He heard no sound. Shierl, at his back, stared with eyes as black and deep as the pit itself, and Guyal, turning, received a sudden irrational impression of a sprite of the olden times—a creature small and delicate, heavy with the weight of her charm, pale, sweet, clean.

Leaning with his glowing dagger, he saw a crazy rack of stairs voyaging down into the dark, and his light showed them and their shadows in so confusing a guise that he blinked and drew back.

Shierl said, “What do you fear?”

Guyal rose, turned to her. “We are momentarily untended here in the Museum of Man, and we are impelled forward by various forces; you by the will of your people; I, by that which has driven me since I first tasted air. . . . If we stay here we shall be once more arranged in harmony with the hostile pattern. If we go forward boldly, we may so come to a position of strategy and advantage. I propose that we set forth in all courage, descend these stairs and seek the Curator.”

“But does he exist?”

“The ghost spoke fervently against him.”

“Let us go then,” said Shierl. “I am resigned.”

Guyal said gravely, “We go in the mental frame of adventure, aggressiveness, zeal. Thus does fear vanish and the ghosts become creatures of mind-weft; thus does our élan burst the under-earth terror.”

“We go.”

They started down the stairs.

Back, forth, back, forth, down flights at varying angles, stages of varying heights, treads at varying widths, so that each step was a matter for concentration. Back, forth, down, down, down, and the black-barred shadows moved and jerked in bizarre modes on the walls.

The flight ended, they stood in a room similar to the entry above. Before them was another black portal, polished at one spot by use; on the walls to either side were inset brass plaques bearing messages in unfamiliar characters.

Guyal pushed the door open against a slight pressure of cold air, which, blowing through the aperture, made a slight rush, ceasing when Guyal opened the door farther.

“Listen.”

It was a far sound, an intermittent clacking, and it held enough fell significance to raise the hairs at Guyal’s neck. He felt Shierl’s hand gripping his with clammy pressure.

Dimming the dagger’s glow to a glimmer, Guyal passed through the door, with Shierl coming after. From afar came the evil sound, and by the echoes they knew they stood in a great hall.

Guyal directed the light to the floor: it was of a black resilient material. Next the wall: polished stone. He permitted the light to glow in the direction opposite to the sound, and a few paces distant they saw a bulky black case, studded with copper bosses, topped by a shallow glass tray in which could be seen an intricate concourse of metal devices.

With the purpose of the black cases not apparent, they followed the wall, and as they walked similar cases appeared, looming heavy and dull, at regular intervals. The clacking receded as they walked; then they came to a right angle, and turning the corner, they seemed to approach the sound. Black case after black case passed; slowly, tense as foxes, they walked, eyes groping for sight through the darkness.

The wall made another angle, and here there was a door.

Guyal hesitated. To follow the new direction of the wall would mean approaching the source of the sound. Would it be better to discover the worst quickly or to reconnoitre as they went?

He propounded the dilemma to Shierl, who shrugged. “It is all one; sooner or later the ghosts will flit down to pluck at us; then we are lost.”

“Not while I possess light to stare them away to wisps and shreds,” said Guyal. “Now I would find the Curator, and possibly he is to be found behind this door. We will so discover.”

He laid his shoulder to the door; it eased ajar with a crack of golden light. Guyal peered through. He sighed, a muffled sound of wonder.

Now he opened the door further; Shierl clutched at his arm.

“This is the Museum,” said Guyal in rapt tone. “Here there is no danger. . . . He who dwells in beauty of this sort may never be other than beneficent. . . .” He flung wide the door.

The light came from an unknown source, from the air itself, as if leaking from the discrete atoms; every breath was luminous, the room floated full of invigorating glow. A great rug pelted the floor, a monster tabard woven of gold, brown, bronze, two tones of green, fuscous red and smalt blue. Beautiful works of human fashioning ranked the walls. In glorious array hung panels of rich woods, carved, chased, enameled; scenes of olden times painted on woven fiber; formulas of color, designed to convey emotion rather than reality. To one side hung plats of wood laid on with slabs of soapstone, malachite and jade in rectangular patterns, richly varied and subtle, with miniature flecks of cinnabar, rhodochrosite and coral for warmth. Beside was a section given to disks of luminous green, flickering and fluorescent with varying blue films and moving dots of scarlet and black. Here were representations of three hundred marvellous flowers, blooms of a forgotten age, no longer extant on waning Earth; there were as many starburst patterns, rigidly conventionalized in form, but each of subtle distinction. All these and a multitude of other creations, selected from the best of human fervor.

The door thudded softly behind them; staring, every inch of skin a-tingle, the two from Earth’s final time moved forward through the hall.

“Somewhere near must be the Curator,” whispered Guyal. “There is a sense of careful tending and great effort here in the gallery.”

“Look.”

Opposite were two doors, laden with the sense of much use. Guyal strode quickly across the room but was unable to discern the means for opening the door, for it bore no latch, key, handle, knob or bar. He rapped with his knuckles and waited; no sound returned.

Shierl tugged at his arm. “These are private regions. It is best not to venture too rudely.”

Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man’s brightest dreamings they walked, until the concentration of so much fire and spirit and creativity put them into awe. “What great minds lie in the dust,” said Guyal in a low voice. “What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvellous creatures are lost past the remotest memory. . . . Nevermore will there be the like; now in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery.”

Shierl said, “But you, Guyal—you are apart. You are not like this . . .”

“I would know,” declared Guyal with fierce emphasis. “In all my youth this ache has driven me, and I have journeyed from the old manse at Sfere to learn from the Curator. . . . I am dissatisfied with the mindless accomplishments of the magicians, who have all their lore by rote.”

Shierl gazed at him with a marvelling expression, and Guyal’s soul throbbed with love. She felt him quiver and whispered recklessly, “Guyal of Sfere, I am yours, I melt for you . . .”

“When we win to peace,” said Guyal, “then our world will be of gladness . . .”

The room turned a corner, widened. And now the clacking sound they had noticed in the dark outer hall returned, louder, more suggestive of unpleasantness. It seemed to enter the gallery through an arched doorway opposite.

Guyal moved quietly to this door, with Shierl at his heels, and so they peered into the next chamber.

A great face looked from the wall, a face taller than Guyal, as tall as Guyal might reach with hands on high. The chin rested on the floor, the scalp slanted back into the panel.

Guyal stared, taken aback. In this pageant of beautiful objects, the grotesque visage was the disparity and dissonance a lunatic might have created. Ugly and vile was the face, of a gut-wrenching silly obscenity. The skin shone a gun-metal sheen, the eyes gazed dully from slanting folds of greenish tissue. The nose was a small lump, the mouth a gross pulpy slash.

In sudden uncertainty Guyal turned to Shierl. “Does this not seem an odd work so to be honored here in the Museum of Man?”

Shierl was staring with eyes agonized and wide. Her mouth opened, quivered, wetness streaked her chin. With hands jerking, shaking, she grabbed his arm, staggered back into the gallery.

“Guyal,” she cried, “Guyal, come away!” Her voice rose to a pitch. “Come away, come away!”

He faced her in surprise. “What are you saying?”

“That horrible thing in there—”

“It is but the diseased effort of an elder artist.”

“It lives.”

“How is this!”

“It lives!” she babbled. “It looked at me, then turned and looked at you. And it moved—and then I pulled you away . . .”

Guyal shrugged off her hand; in stark disbelief he faced through the doorway.

“Ahhhh . . .” breathed Guyal.

The face had changed. The torpor had evaporated; the glaze had departed the eyes. The mouth squirmed; a hiss of escaping gas sounded. The mouth opened; a great gray tongue lolled forth. And from this tongue darted a tendril slimed with mucus. It terminated in a grasping hand, which groped for Guyal’s ankle. He jumped aside; the hand missed its clutch, the tendril coiled.

Guyal, in an extremity, with his bowels clenched by sick fear, sprang back into the gallery. The hand seized Shierl, grasped her ankle. The eyes glistened; and now the flabby tongue swelled another wen, sprouted a new member. . . . Shierl stumbled, fell limp, her eyes staring, foam at her lips. Guyal, shouting in a voice he could not hear, shouting high and crazy, ran forward slashing with his dagger. He cut at the gray wrist, but his knife sprang away as if the steel itself were horrified. His gorge at his teeth, he seized the tendril; with a mighty effort he broke it against his knee.

The face winced, the tendril jerked back. Guyal leapt forward, dragged Shierl into the gallery, lifted her, carried her back, out of reach.

Through the doorway now, Guyal glared in hate and fear. The mouth had closed; it sneered disappointment and frustrated lust. And now Guyal saw a strange thing: from the dank nostril oozed a wisp of white which swirled, writhed, formed a tall thing in a white robe—a thing with a drawn face and eyes like holes in a skull. Whimpering and mewing in distaste for the light, it wavered forward into the gallery, moving with curious little pauses and hesitancies.

Guyal stood still. Fear had exceeded its power; fear no longer had meaning. A brain could react only to the maximum of its intensity; how could this thing harm him now? He would smash it with his hands, beat it into sighing fog.

“Hold, hold, hold!” came a new voice. “Hold, hold, hold. My charms and tokens, an ill day for Thorsingol. . . . But then, avaunt, you ghost, back to the orifice, back and avaunt, avaunt, I say! Go, else I loose the actinics; trespass is not allowed, by supreme command from the Lycurgat; aye, the Lycurgat of Thorsingol. Avaunt, so then.”

The ghost wavered, paused, staring in fell passivity at the old man who had hobbled into the gallery.

Back to the snoring face wandered the ghost, and let itself be sucked up into the nostril.

The face rumbled behind its lips, then opened the great gray gape and belched a white fiery lick that was like flame but not flame. It sheeted, flapped at the old man, who moved not an inch. From a rod fixed high on the door frame came a whirling disk of golden sparks. It cut and dismembered the white sheet, destroyed it back to the mouth of the face, whence now issued a black bar. This bar edged into the whirling disk and absorbed the sparks. There was an instant of dead silence.

Then the old man crowed, “Ah, you evil episode; you seek to interrupt my tenure. But no, there is no validity in your purpose; my clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance; you are as naught; why do you not disengage and retreat into Jeldred?”

The rumble behind the large lips continued. The mouth opened wide: a gray viscous cavern was so displayed. The eyes glittered in titanic emotion. The mouth yelled, a roaring wave of violence, a sound to buffet the head and drive shock like a nail into the mind.

The baton sprayed a mist of silver. The sound curved and centralized and sucked into the metal fog; the sound was captured and consumed; it was never heard. The fog balled, lengthened to an arrow, plunged with intense speed at the nose, and buried itself in the pulp. There was a heavy sound, an explosion; the face seethed in pain and the nose was a blasted clutter of shredded gray plasms. They waved like starfish arms and grew together once more, and now the nose was pointed like a cone.

The old man said, “You are captious today, my demoniac visitant—a vicious trait. You would disturb poor old Kerlin in his duties? So. You are ingenuous and neglectful. So ho. Baton,” and he turned and peered at the rod, “you have tasted that sound? Spew out a fitting penalty, smear the odious face with your infallible retort.”

A flat sound, a black flail which curled, slapped the air and smote home to the face. A glowing weal sprang into being. The face sighed and the eyes twisted up into their folds of greenish tissue.

Kerlin the Curator laughed, a shrill yammer on a single tone. He stopped short and the laugh vanished as if it had never begun. He turned to Guyal and Shierl, who stood pressed together in the door frame.

“How now, how now? You are after the gong; the study hours are long ended. Why do you linger?” He shook a stern finger. “The Museum is not the site for roguery; this I admonish. So now be off, home to Thorsingol; be more prompt the next time; you disturb the established order. . . .” He paused and threw a fretful glance over his shoulder. “The day has gone ill; the Nocturnal Key-keeper is inexcusably late. . . . Surely I have waited an hour on the sluggard; the Lycurgat shall be so informed. I would be home to couch and hearth; here is ill use for old Kerlin, thus to detain him for the careless retard of the night-watch. . . . And, further, the encroachment of you two laggards; away now, and be off; out into the twilight!” And he advanced, making directive motions with his hands.

Guyal said, “My lord Curator, I must speak words with you.”

The old man halted, peered. “Eh? What now? At the end of a long day’s effort? No, no, you are out of order; regulation must be observed. Attend my audiarium at the fourth circuit tomorrow morning; then we shall hear you. So go now, go.”

Guyal fell back nonplussed. Shierl fell on her knees. “Sir Curator, we beg you for help; we have no place to go.”

Kerlin the Curator looked at her blankly. “No place to go! What folly you utter! Go to your domicile, or to the Pubescentarium, or to the Temple, or to the Outward Inn. Forsooth, Thorsingol is free with lodging; the Museum is no casual tavern.”

“My lord,” cried Guyal desperately, “will you hear me? We speak from emergency.”

“Say on then.”

“Some malignancy has bewitched your brain. Will you credit this?”

“Ah, indeed?” ruminated the Curator.

“There is no Thorsingol. There is naught but dark waste. Your city is an eon gone.”

The Curator smiled benevolently. “Ah, sad. . . . A sad case. So it is with these younger minds. The frantic drive of life is the Prime Unhinger.” He shook his head. “My duty is clear. Tired bones, you must wait your well-deserved rest. Fatigue—begone; duty and simple humanity make demands; here is madness to be countered and cleared. And in any event the Nocturnal Key-keeper is not here to relieve me of my tedium.” He beckoned. “Come.”

Hesitantly Guyal and Shierl followed him. He opened one of his doors, passed through muttering and expostulating with doubt and watchfulness. Guyal and Shierl came after.

The room was cubical, floored with dull black stuff, walled with myriad golden knobs on all sides. A hooded chair occupied the center of the room, and beside it was a chest-high lectern whose face displayed a number of toggles and knurled wheels.

“This is the Curator’s own Chair of Knowledge,” explained Kerlin. “As such it will, upon proper adjustment, impose the Pattern of Hynomeneural Clarity. So—I demand the correct sometsyndic arrangement—” he manipulated the manuals “—and now, if you will compose yourself, I will repair your hallucination. It is beyond my normal call of duty, but I am humane and would not be spoken of as mean or unwilling.”

Guyal inquired anxiously, “Lord Curator, this Chair of Clarity, how will it affect me?”

Kerlin the Curator said grandly, “The fibers of your brain are twisted, snarled, frayed, and so make contact with unintentional areas. By the marvellous craft of our modern cere-brologists, this hood will compose your synapses with the correct readings from the library—those of normality, you must understand—and so repair the skein, and make you once more a whole man.”

“Once I sit in the chair,” Guyal inquired, “what will you do?”

“Merely close this contact, engage this arm, throw in this toggle—then you daze. In thirty seconds, this bulb glows, signaling the success and completion of the treatment. Then I reverse the manipulation, and you arise a creature of renewed sanity.”

Guyal looked at Shierl. “Did you hear and comprehend?”

“Yes, Guyal,” in a small voice.

“Remember.” Then to the Curator: “Marvellous. But how must I sit?”

“Merely relax in the seat. Then I pull the hood slightly forward, to shield the eyes from distraction.”

Guyal leaned forward, peered gingerly into the hood. “I fear I do not understand.”

The Curator hopped forward impatiently. “It is an act of the utmost facility. Like this.” He sat in the chair.

“And how will the hood be applied?”

“In this wise.” Kerlin seized a handle, pulled the shield over his face.

“Quick,” said Guyal to Shierl. She sprang to the lectern; Kerlin the Curator made a motion to release the hood; Guyal seized the spindly frame, held it. Shierl flung the switches; the Curator relaxed, sighed.

Shierl gazed at Guyal, dark eyes wide and liquid as the great water-flamerian of South Almery. “Is he—dead?”

“I hope not.”

They gazed uncertainly at the relaxed form. Seconds passed.

A clanging noise sounded from afar—a crush, a wrench, an exultant bellow, lesser halloos of wild triumph.

Guyal rushed to the door. Prancing, wavering, sidling into the gallery came a multitude of ghosts; through the open door behind, Guyal could see the great head. It was shoving out, pushing into the room. Great ears appeared, part of a bull-neck, wreathed with purple wattles. The wall cracked, sagged, crumbled. A great hand thrust through, a forearm . . .

Shierl screamed. Guyal, pale and quivering, slammed the door in the face of the nearest ghost. It seeped in around the jamb, slowly, wisp by wisp.

Guyal sprang to the lectern. The bulb showed dullness. Guyal’s hands twitched along the controls. “Only Kerlin’s awareness controls the magic of the baton,” he panted. “So much is clear.” He stared into the bulb with agonized urgency. “Glow, bulb, glow . . .”

By the door the ghost seeped and billowed.

“Glow, bulb, glow . . .”

The bulb glowed. With a sharp cry Guyal returned the switches to neutrality, jumped down, flung up the hood.

Kerlin the Curator sat looking at him.

Behind, the ghost formed itself—a tall white thing in white robes, and the dark eye-holes stared like outlets into non-imagination.

Kerlin the Curator sat looking.

The ghost moved under the robes. A hand like a bird’s foot appeared, holding a clod of dingy matter. The ghost cast the matter to the floor; it exploded into a puff of black dust. The motes of the cloud grew, became a myriad of wriggling insects. With one accord they darted across the floor, growing as they spread, and became scuttling creatures with monkey-heads.

Kerlin the Curator moved. “Baton,” he said. He held up his hand. It held his baton. The baton spat an orange gout—red dust. It puffed before the rushing horde and each mote became a red scorpion. So ensued a ferocious battle; and little shrieks and chittering sounds rose from the floor.

The monkey-headed things were killed, routed. The ghost sighed, moved his claw-hand once more. But the baton spat forth a ray of purest light and the ghost sloughed into nothingness.

“Kerlin!” cried Guyal. “The demon is breaking into the gallery.”

Kerlin flung open the door, stepped forth.

“Baton,” said Kerlin, “perform thy utmost intent.”

The demon said, “No, Kerlin, hold the magic; I thought you dazed. Now I retreat.”

With a vast quaking and heaving he pulled back until once more only his face showed through the hole.

“Baton,” said Kerlin, “be you on guard.”

The baton disappeared from his hand.

Kerlin turned and faced Guyal and Shierl.

“There is need for many words, for now I die. I die, and the Museum shall lie alone. So let us speak quickly, quickly, quickly . . .”

Kerlin moved with feeble steps to a portal which snapped aside as he approached. Guyal and Shierl, speculating on the probable trends of Kerlin’s disposition, stood hesitantly to the rear.

“Come, come,” said Kerlin in sharp impatience. “My strength flags, I die. You have been my death.”

Guyal moved slowly forward, with Shierl half a pace behind. Suitable response to the accusation escaped him; words seemed without conviction.

Kerlin surveyed them with a thin grin. “Halt your misgivings and hasten; the necessities to be accomplished in the time available thereto make the task like trying to write the Tomes of Kae in a minim of ink. I wane; my pulsing comes in shallow tides, my sight flickers . . .”

He waved a despairing hand, then, turning, led them into the inner chamber, where he slumped into a great chair. With many uneasy glances at the door, Guyal and Shierl settled upon a padded couch.

Kerlin jeered in a feeble voice, “You fear the white phantasms? Poh, they are pent from the gallery by the baton, which contains their every effort. Only when I am smitten out of mind—or dead—will the baton cease its function. You must know,” he added with somewhat more vigor, “that the energies and dynamics do not channel from my brain but from the central potentium of the Museum, which is perpetual; I merely direct and order the rod.”

“But this demon—who or what is he? Why does he come to look through the walls?”

Kerlin’s face settled into a bleak mask. “He is Blikdak, Ruler-Divinity of the demon-world Jeldred. He wrenched the hole intent on gulfing the knowledge of the Museum into his mind, but I forestalled him; so he sits waiting in the hole till I die. Then he will glut himself with erudition to the great disadvantage of men.”

“Why cannot this demon be exhorted hence and the hole abolished?”

Kerlin the Curator shook his head. “The fires and furious powers I control are not valid in the air of the demon-world, where substance and form are of different entity. So far as you see him, he has brought his environment with him; so far he is safe. When he ventures further into the Museum, the power of Earth dissolves the Jeldred mode; then may I spray him with prismatic fervor from the potentium. . . . But stay, enough of Blikdak for the nonce; tell me, who are you, why are you ventured here, and what is the news of Thorsingol?”

Guyal said in a halting voice, “Thorsingol is passed beyond memory. There is naught above but arid tundra and the old town of the Saponids. I am of the southland; I have coursed many leagues so that I might speak to you and fill my mind with knowledge. This girl Shierl is of the Saponids, and victim of an ancient custom which sends beauty into the Museum at the behest of Blikdak’s ghosts.”

“Ah,” breathed Kerlin, “have I been so aimless? I recall these youthful shapes which Blikdak employed to relieve the tedium of his vigil. . . . They flit down my memory like may-flies along a panel of glass . . . I put them aside as creatures of his own conception, postulated by his own imagery . . .”

Shierl shrugged in bewilderment. “But why? What use to him are human creatures?”

Kerlin said dully, “Girl, you are all charm and freshness; the monstrous urges of the demon-lord Blikdak are past your conceiving. These youths of both sexes are his play, on whom he practices various junctures, joinings, coiti, perversions, sadisms, nauseas, antics and at last struggles to the death. Then he sends forth a ghost demanding further youth and beauty.”

Shierl whispered, “This was to have been I . . .”

Guyal said in puzzlement, “I cannot understand. Such acts, in my understanding, are the characteristic derangements of humanity. They are anthropoid by the very nature of the functioning sacs, glands and organs. Since Blikdak is a demon . . .”

“Consider him!” spoke Kerlin. “His lineaments, his apparatus. He is nothing else but anthropoid, and such is his origin, together with all the demons, frits and winged glowing-eyed creatures that infest latter-day Earth. Blikdak, like the others, is from the mind of man. The sweaty condensation, the stench and vileness, the cloacal humors, the brutal delights, the rapes and sodomies, the scatophiliac whims, the manifold tittering lubricities that have drained through humanity formed a vast tumor; so Blikdak assumed his being, so now this is he. You have seen how he molds his being, so he performs his enjoyments. But of Blikdak, enough. I die, I die!” He sank into the chair with heaving chest.

“See me! My eyes vary and waver. My breath is shallow as a bird’s, my bones are the pith of an old vine. I have lived beyond knowledge; in my madness I knew no passage of time. Where there is no knowledge there are no somatic consequences. Now I remember the years and centuries, the millennia, the epochs—they are like quick glimpses through a shutter. So, curing my madness, you have killed me.”

Shierl blinked, drew back. “But when you die? What then? Blikdak . . .”

Guyal asked, “In the Museum of Man is there no knowledge of the exorcisms necessary to dissolve this demon? He is clearly our first antagonist, our immediacy.”

“Blikdak must be eradicated,” said Kerlin. “Then will I die in ease; then must you assume the care of the Museum.” He licked his white lips. “An ancient principle specifies that, in order to destroy a substance, the nature of the substance must be determined. In short, before Blikdak may be dissolved, we must discover his elemental nature.” And his eyes moved glassily to Guyal.

“Your pronouncement is sound beyond argument,” admitted Guyal, “but how may this be accomplished? Blikdak will never allow such an investigation.”

“No; there must be subterfuge, some instrumentality . . .”

“The ghosts are part of Blikdak’s stuff?”

“Indeed.”

“Can the ghosts be stayed and prevented?”

“Indeed; in a box of light, the which I can effect by a thought. Yes, a ghost we must have.” Kerlin raised his head. “Baton! one ghost; admit a ghost!”

A moment passed; Kerlin held up his hand. There was a faint scratch at the door, and a soft whine could be heard without. “Open,” said a voice, full of sobs and catches and quavers. “Open and let forth the youthful creatures to Blikdak. He finds boredom and lassitude in his vigil; so let the two come forth to negate his unease.”

Kerlin laboriously rose to his feet. “It is done.”

From behind the door came a sad voice, “I am pent, I am snared in scorching brilliance!”

“Now we discover,” said Guyal. “What dissolves the ghost dissolves Blikdak.”

“True indeed,” assented Kerlin.

“Why not light?” inquired Shierl. “Light parts the fabric of the ghosts like a gust of wind tatters the fog.”

“But merely for their fragility; Blikdak is harsh and solid, and can withstand the fiercest radiance safe in his demon-land alcove.” And Kerlin mused. After a moment he gestured to the door. “We go to the image-expander; there we will explode the ghost to macroid dimension; so shall we find his basis. Guyal of Sfere, you must support my frailness; in truth my limbs are weak as wax.”

On Guyal’s arm he tottered forward, and with Shierl close at their heels they gained the gallery. Here the ghost wept in its cage of light, and searched constantly for a dark aperture to seep his essence through.

Paying him no heed Kerlin hobbled and limped across the gallery. In their wake followed the box of light and perforce the ghost.

“Open the great door,” cried Kerlin in a voice beset with cracking and hoarseness. “The great door into the Cognative Repository!”

Shierl ran ahead and thrust her force against the door; it slid aside, and they looked into the great dark hall, and the golden light from the gallery dwindled into the shadows and was lost.

“Call for Lumen,” Kerlin said.

“Lumen!” cried Guyal. “Lumen, attend!”

Light came to the great hall, and it proved so tall that the pilasters along the wall dwindled to threads, and so long and wide that a man might be winded to fatigue in running a dimension. Spaced in equal rows were the black cases with the copper bosses that Guyal and Shierl had noted on their entry. And above each hung five similar cases, precisely fixed, floating without support.

“What are these?” asked Guyal in wonder.

“Would my poor brain encompassed a hundredth part of what these banks know,” panted Kerlin. “They are great brains crammed with all that is known, experienced, achieved or recorded by man. Here is all the lost lore, early and late, the fabulous imaginings, the history of ten million cities, beginnings of time and the presumed finalities; the reason for human existence and the reason for the reason. Daily I have labored and toiled in these banks; my achievement has been a synopsis of the most superficial sort: a panorama across a wide and multifarious country.”

Said Shierl, “Would not the craft to destroy Blikdak be contained here?”

“Indeed, indeed; our task would be merely to find the information. Under which casing would we search? Consider these categories: Demonlands; Killings and Mortefactions; Expositions and Dissolutions of Evil; History of Granvilunde (where such an entity was repelled); Attractive and Detractive Hyperordnets; Therapy for Hallucinants and Ghost-takers; Constructive Journal, item for regeneration of burst walls, subdivision for invasion by demons; Procedural Suggestions in Time of Risk. . . . Aye, these and a thousand more. Somewhere is knowledge of how to smite Blikdak’s abhorred face back into his quasiplace. But where to look? There is no Index Major; none except the poor synopsis of my compilation. He who seeks specific knowledge must often go on an extended search . . .” His voice trailed off. Then: “Forward! Forward through the banks to the Mechanismus.”

So through the banks they went, like roaches in a maze, and behind drifted the cage of light with the wailing ghost. At last they entered a chamber smelling of metal; again Kerlin instructed Guyal and Guyal called, “Attend us, Lumen, attend!”

Through intricate devices walked the three, Guyal lost and rapt beyond inquiry, even though his brain ached with the want of knowing.

At a tall booth Kerlin halted the cage of light. A pane of vitrean dropped before the ghost. “Observe now,” Kerlin said, and manipulated the activants.

They saw the ghost, depicted and projected: the flowing robe, the haggard visage. The face grew large, flattened; a segment under the vacant eye became a scabrous white place. It separated into pustules, and a single pustule swelled to fill the pane. The crater of the pustule was an intricate stippled surface, a mesh as of fabric, knit in a lacy pattern.

“Behold!” said Shierl. “He is a thing woven as if by thread.”

Guyal turned eagerly to Kerlin; Kerlin raised a finger for silence. “Indeed, indeed, a goodly thought, especially since here beside us is a rotor of extreme swiftness, used in reeling the cognitive filaments of the cases. . . . Now then observe: I reach to this panel, I select a mesh, I withdraw a thread, and note! The meshes ravel and loosen and part. And now to the bobbin on the rotor, and I wrap the thread, and now with a twist we have the cincture made . . .”

Shierl said dubiously, “Does not the ghost observe and note your doing?”

“By no means,” asserted Kerlin. “The pane of vitrean shields our actions; he is too exercised to attend. And now I dissolve the cage and he is free.”

The ghost wandered forth, cringing from the light.

“Go!” cried Kerlin. “Back to your genetrix; back, return and go!”

The ghost departed. Kerlin said to Guyal, “Follow; find when Blikdak snuffs him up.”

Guyal at a cautious distance watched the ghost seep up into the black nostril, and returned to where Kerlin waited by the rotor. “The ghost has once more become part of Blikdak.”

“Now then,” said Kerlin, “we cause the rotor to twist, the bobbin to whirl, and we shall observe.”

The rotor whirled to a blur; the bobbin (as long as Guyal’s arm) became spun with ghost-thread, at first glowing pastel polychrome, then nacre, then fine milk-ivory.

The rotor spun, a million times a minute, and the thread drawn unseen and unknown from Blikdak thickened on the bobbin.

The rotor spun; the bobbin was full—a cylinder shining with glossy silken sheen. Kerlin slowed the rotor; Guyal snapped a new bobbin into place, and the unraveling of Blikdak continued.

Three bobbins—four—five—and Guyal, observing Blikdak from afar, found the giant face quiescent, the mouth working and sucking, creating the clacking sound which had first caused them apprehension.

Eight bobbins. Blikdak opened his eyes, stared in puzzlement around the chamber.

Twelve bobbins: a discolored spot appeared on the sagging cheek, and Blikdak quivered in uneasiness.

Twenty bobbins: the spot spread across Blikdak’s visage, across the slanted fore-dome, and his mouth hung lax; he hissed and fretted.

Thirty bobbins: Blikdak’s head seemed stale and putrid; the gunmetal sheen had become an angry maroon, the eyes bulged, the mouth hung open, the tongue lolled limp.

Fifty bobbins: Blikdak collapsed. His dome lowered against the febrile mouth; his eyes shone like feverish coals.

Sixty bobbins: Blikdak was no more.

And with the dissolution of Blikdak so dissolved Jeldred, the demonland created for the housing of evil. The breach in the wall gave on barren rock, unbroken and rigid.

And in the Mechanismus sixty shining bobbins lay stacked neat; the evil so disorganized glowed with purity and iridescence.

Kerlin fell back against the wall. “I expire; my time has come. I have guarded well the Museum; together we have won it away from Blikdak. . . . Attend me now. Into your hands I pass the curacy; now the Museum is your charge to guard and preserve.”

“For what end?” asked Shierl. “Earth expires, almost as you. . . . Wherefore knowledge?”

“More now than ever,” gasped Kerlin. “Attend: the stars are bright, the stars are fair; the banks know blessed magic to fleet you to youthful climes. Now—I go. I die.”

“Wait!” cried Guyal. “Wait, I beseech!”

“Why wait?” whispered Kerlin. “The way to peace is on me; you call me back?”

“How do I extract from the banks?”

“The key to the index is in my chambers, the index of my life . . .” And Kerlin died.

GUYAL AND SHIERL CLIMBED TO the upper ways and stood outside the portal on the ancient flagged floor. It was night; the marble shone faintly underfoot, the broken columns loomed on the sky.

Across the plain the yellow lights of Saponce shone warm through the trees; above in the sky shone the stars.

Guyal said to Shierl, “There is your home; there is Saponce. Do you wish to return?”

She shook her head. “Together we have looked through the eyes of knowledge. We have seen old Thorsingol, and the Sherrit Empire before it, and Golwan Andra before that and the Forty Kades even before. We have seen the warlike green-men, and the knowledgeable Pharials and the Clambs who departed Earth for the stars, as did the Merioneth before them and the Gray Sorcerers still earlier. We have seen oceans rise and fall, the mountains crust up, peak and melt in the beat of rain; we have looked on the sun when it glowed hot and full and yellow. . . . No, Guyal, there is no place for me at Saponce. . . .”

Guyal, leaning back on the weathered pillar, looked up to the stars. “Knowledge is ours, Shierl—all of knowing to our call. And what shall we do?”

Together they looked up to the white stars.

“What shall we do . . .”

A Pail of Air

— FRITZ LEIBER —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

FRITZ LEIBER MADE HIS FIRST impact on readers of science fiction and fantasy in the 1940s with the potent and mysterious novel of modern witchcraft Conjure Wife, and then with Gather, Darkness, a memorable portrayal of a future earth dominated by a religious cult that used its command of science to produce “miracles.” During those years, also, he produced the first works in a long series of picaresque fantasies featuring the exploits of two rollicking adventurers, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

It was with the advent of Galaxy Magazine in 1950 that Leiber began to show the dark side of his fertile imagination to its fullest advantage, first with “Coming Attraction,” an astonishing foreshadowing of the brutal world we live in six decades later, and then with a steady succession of other noteworthy stories—“The Nice Girl with Five Husbands,” “The 64-Square Madhouse,” “Poor Superman,” and, one of the most notable of the group, the classic post-apocalyptic tale reprinted here, “A Pail of Air,” first published in Galaxy Magazine’s December 1951 issue. Dark as it is, with that special Leiberesque darkness, it manages nonetheless to demonstrate human fortitude and resilience even after the end of the world.

—R. S.

A PAIL OF AIR

PA HAD SENT ME OUT to get an extra pail of air. I’d just about scooped it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw the thing.

You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful young lady’s face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor just above the white blanket of frozen air. I’d never seen a live young lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped the pail. Who wouldn’t, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa and Ma and Sis and you?

Even at that, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised. We all see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it is natural we should react like that sometimes.

When I’d recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times, for I saw it wasn’t a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn’t have the Sun’s protection.

I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on the inside that I couldn’t have seen the light even if it had come out of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.

Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of air from the Nest, and I wasn’t quite so scared. I began to hear the tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back into air, because there’s no sound outside in the vacuum, of course. But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last blankets—Pa’s got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the heat—and came into the Nest.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT the Nest. It’s low and snug, just room for the four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it touch Pa’s head. He tells me it’s inside a much bigger room, but I’ve never seen the real walls or ceiling.

Against one of the blankets is a big set of shelves, with tools and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa’s very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time, and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.

The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of the clocks are alarms and we can use them to remind us. In the early days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she gets difficult—but now there’s me to help, and Sis too.

It’s Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen air all around then and you didn’t really need one.

He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he’d spotted my frozen helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She’s always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.

Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa put it down close by the fire.

Yet it’s that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive. It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa’d like to seal the whole place, but he can’t—building’s too earthquake-twisted, and besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.

Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn’t something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it through a door to outside.

You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.

Of course, all the parts of the air didn’t freeze and snow down at the same time.

First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you’re shoveling for water, you have to make sure you don’t go too high and get any of that stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make the fire go out. Next there’s the nitrogen, which doesn’t count one way or the other, though it’s the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there’s the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen, but we’re used to it and don’t notice. Finally, at the very top, there’s a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a puss* caffay, Pa laughingly says, whatever that is.

I WAS BUSTING TO TELL them all about what I’d seen, and so as soon as I’d ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the hand where she’d lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one, as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn’t fooling.

“And you watched this light for some time, son?” he asked when I finished.

I hadn’t said anything about first thinking it was a young lady’s face. Somehow that part embarrassed me.

“Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.”

“And it didn’t look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?”

He wasn’t just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world that’s about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that’s the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally died.

“Not like anything I ever saw,” I told him.

He stood for a moment frowning. Then, “I’ll go out with you, and you show it to me,” he said.

Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and so on.

Ma started moaning again, “I’ve always known there was something outside there, waiting to get us. I’ve felt it for years—something that’s part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the Nest. It’s been watching us all this time, and now it’s coming after us. It’ll get you and then come for me. Don’t go, Harry!”

Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up on the roof to check if it’s working all right. That’s our worst trip and Pa won’t let me make it alone.

“Sis,” Pa said quietly, “come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air, too. If it gets low or doesn’t seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the cloth to pick up the bucket.”

Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail and the two of us go out.

PA LED THE WAY AND I took hold of his belt. It’s a funny thing, I’m not afraid to go by myself, but when Pa’s along I always want to hold on to him. Habit, I guess, and then there’s no denying that this time I was a bit scared.

You see, it’s this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of the last folks die who weren’t as lucky or well-protected as us. So we knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn’t be anything human or friendly.

Besides that, there’s a feeling that comes with it always being night, cold night. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away. I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn’t been born when the dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it’s dragged us out beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther out all the time.

I found myself wondering whether there mightn’t be something on the dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa out on the balcony.

I don’t know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it’s beautiful. The starlight lets you see pretty well—there’s quite a bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I pour on the gravy.

Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows, underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.

Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself first and known it wasn’t so.

He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me to point out the windows to him. But there wasn’t any light moving around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn’t bawl me out and tell me I’d been seeing things. He looked all around quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing off guard.

I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.

Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, “If you see something like that again, son, don’t tell the others. Your Ma’s sort of nervous these days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two of you, too.

“You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he’s got to toss it to someone else. When it’s tossed your way, you’ve got to catch it and hold it tight—and hope there’ll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave.”

His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it didn’t wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the fact that Pa took it seriously.

IT’S HARD TO HIDE YOUR feelings about such a thing. When we got back in the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination, but his words fell flat. He didn’t convince Ma and Sis any more than he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old days, and how it all happened.

He sometimes doesn’t mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from the shelf and lay it down beside him.

It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two and keeps improving it in spots.

He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong, when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star, this burned out sun, and upsets everything.

You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt, any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up. Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their nervousness. As if all folks didn’t have to hang together and pool every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?

Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He’s cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound pretty wild. He may be right.

THE DARK STAR, AS PA went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn’t much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit on the other side. But then they found it wasn’t going to hit either side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.

Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn’t get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.

That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I’ve been sitting too far from the fire.

You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away.

The Big Jerk didn’t last long. It was over as soon as the Earth was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time, they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones broke or skulls cracked.

We’ve often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he’s sort of leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly too busy to notice.

You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of what was going to happen—they’d known we’d get captured and our air would freeze—and they’d been working like mad to fix up a place with airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa’s friends were killed then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could lay his hands on.

I guess he’s telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn’t have any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth’s rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten old nights long.

Still, I’ve got an idea of some of the things that happened from the frozen folk I’ve seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building, others clustered around the furnaces in the basem*nts where we go for coal.

In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and a leg in splints. In another, a man and a woman are huddled together in a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with warmth and food. They’re all still and stiff as statues, of course, but just like life.

Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound, especially the young lady.

NOW, WITH PA TELLING HIS story for the umpteenth time to take our minds off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see, I’d just remembered the face I’d thought I’d seen in the window. I’d forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.

What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that moves endlessly when it’s just about as cold as that? What if the ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?

That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the dark star to get us.

Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do its work. That would fit with both things I’d seen—the beautiful young lady and the moving, starlike light.

The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the Nest.

I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said and clenched my teeth and didn’t speak.

We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently. There was just the sound of Pa’s voice and the clocks.

And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My skin tightened all over me.

Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the place where he philosophizes.

“So I asked myself then,” he said, “what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer.”

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn’t breathe.

“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you’ve seen pictures of those, but I can’t describe how they feel—or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

“So right then and there,” Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn’t hear them, “right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”

But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright light somewhere behind it. Pa’s voice stopped and his eyes turned to the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped the handle of the hammer beside him.

IN THROUGH THE BLANKET STEPPED the beautiful young lady. She stood there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her shoulders—men’s faces, white and staring.

Well, my heart couldn’t have been stopped for more than four or five beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa’s homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the frozen folk certainly wouldn’t be wearing those. Also, I noticed that the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.

The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.

They were simply people, you see. We hadn’t been the only ones to survive; we’d just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we found out how they’d survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.

They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had a regular little airtight city, with airlocks and all. They even generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)

But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double--flabbergasted at us.

One of the men kept saying, “But it’s impossible, I tell you. You can’t maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It’s simply impossible.”

That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air. Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were saints, and telling us we’d done something amazing, and suddenly she broke down and cried.

They’d been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and plenty of chemical fuels. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was go out and shovel the air blanket at the top level. So after they’d got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they’d decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.

Well, they’d found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they’d been giving our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them there was something warm down here, so they’d landed to investigate. Of course we hadn’t heard them land, since there was no air to carry the sound, and they’d had to investigate around quite a while before finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they’d wasted some time in the building across the street.

BY NOW, ALL FIVE ADULTS were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at all and just asked bushels of questions.

In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about things, and it wasn’t until they were all getting groggy that he looked and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little drunk. They weren’t used to so much oxygen.

Funny thing, though—I didn’t do much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I’d had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they’d all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos, as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady, “But I wouldn’t know how to act there and I haven’t any clothes.”

The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, “It just doesn’t seem right to let this fire go out.”

WELL, THE STRANGERS ARE GONE, but they’re coming back. It hasn’t been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a “survival school.” Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He’s been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

“It’s different, now that we know others are alive,” he explains to me. “Your mother doesn’t feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.”

I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.

“It’s not going to be easy to leave the Nest,” I said, wanting to cry, kind of. “It’s so small and there’s just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.”

He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.

“You’ll quickly get over that feeling, son,” he said. “The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it’ll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning.”

I guess he’s right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I’ll be twenty in only ten years.

Who Can Replace A Man?

— BRIAN W. ALDISS —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

THE IRREPRESSIBLE BRIAN W. ALDISS, whose elegant and irreverent science fiction has been an ornament to the genre ever since he made his debut with a story called “Criminal Record” in the British magazine Science-Fantasy in 1954, is one of the six writers in this collection who have been named as Grand Masters by the Science Fiction Writers of America, the highest honor that the science-fiction field can bestow. (The others are Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin, Connie Willis, and Robert Silverberg). Aldiss’s long list of distinguished novels includes, among many others, such books as Non-Stop, Hothouse, The Dark Light Years, and the monumental Helliconia trilogy.

“Who Can Replace a Man?” was one of the first Aldiss stories to be published in the United States, appearing in the June 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, one of the best of the many ephemeral science-fiction magazines of that era. Its depiction of a post-human world manages to be both comic and tragic at once, though the comic element does predominate, up to the sardonic last line, which superbly demonstrates the effectiveness and economy of Aldiss’s keen sense of irony. The story is one of Aldiss’s own favorites—he has reprinted it many times, and he made it the title story in the 1965 collection of his best work to that date. Its bibliographical history shows that it has been chosen for a good many anthologies over the years, and has been translated into Finnish, Spanish, Estonian, Polish, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, French, and, no doubt, a number of other languages as well.

—R. S.

WHO CAN REPLACE A MAN?

MORNING FILTERED INTO THE SKY, lending it the grey tone of the ground below.

The field-minder finished turning the top-soil of a three-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.

It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its nuclear pile which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet tall, it yielded no highlights to the dull air.

No other machines passed on its way back to the Agricultural Station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines that it recognised; most of them should have been out about their tasks now. Instead, some were inactive and some careered round the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.

Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to Warehouse Three and spoke to the seed-distributor, which stood idly outside.

“I have a requirement for seed potatoes,” it said to the distributor, and with a quick internal motion punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.

The distributor held the card close to its eye and then said, “The requirement is in order, but the store is not yet unlocked. The required seed potatoes are in the store. Therefore I cannot produce the requirement.”

Increasingly of late there had been breakdowns in the complex system of machine labour, but this particular hitch had not occurred before. The field-minder thought, then it said, “Why is the store not yet unlocked?”

“Because Supply Operative Type P has not come this morning. Supply Operative Type P is the unlocker.”

The field-minder looked squarely at the seed-distributor, whose exterior chutes and scales and grabs were so vastly different from the field-minder’s own limbs.

“What class brain do you have, seed-distributor?” it asked.

“I have a Class Five brain.”

“I have a Class Three brain. Therefore I am superior to you. Therefore I will go and see why the unlocker has not come this morning.”

Leaving the distributor, the field-minder set off across the great yard. More machines were in random motion now; one or two had crashed together and argued about it coldly and logically. Ignoring them, the field-minder pushed through sliding doors into the echoing confines of the station itself.

Most of the machines here were clerical, and consequently small. They stood about in little groups, eyeing each other, not conversing. Among so many non-differentiated types, the unlocker was easy to find. It had fifty arms, most of them with more than one finger, each finger tipped by a key; it looked like a pincushion full of variegated hat pins.

The field-minder approached it.

“I can do no more work until Warehouse Three is unlocked,” it told the unlocker. “Your duty is to unlock the warehouse every morning. Why have you not unlocked the warehouse this morning?”

“I had no orders this morning,” replied the unlocker. “I have to have orders every morning. When I have orders I unlock the warehouse.”

“None of us have had any orders this morning,” a penpropeller said, sliding towards them.

“Why have you had no orders this morning?” asked the field-minder.

“Because the radio issued none,” said the unlocker, slowly rotating a dozen of its arms.

“Because the radio station in the city was issued with no orders this morning,” said the pen-propeller.

And there you had the distinction between a Class Six and a Class Three brain, which was what the unlocker and the penpropeller possessed respectively. All machine brains worked with nothing but logic, but the lower the class of brain—Class Ten being the lowest—the more literal and less informative the answers to questions tended to be.

“You have a Class Three brain; I have a Class Three brain,” the field-minder said to the penner. “We will speak to each other. This lack of orders is unprecedented. Have you further information on it?’”

“Yesterday orders came from the city. Today no orders have come. Yet the radio has not broken down. Therefore they have broken down . . .” said the little penner.

“The men have broken down?”

“All men have broken down.”

“That is a logical deduction,” said the field-minder.

“That is the logical deduction,” said the penner. “For if a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?”

While they talked, the locker, like a dull man at a bar, stood close to them and was ignored.

“If all men have broken down, then we have replaced man,” said the field-minder, and he and the penner eyed one another speculatively. Finally the latter said, “Let us ascend to the top floor to find if the radio operator has fresh news.”

“I cannot come because I am too large,” said the field-minder. “Therefore you must go alone and return to me. You will tell me if the radio operator has fresh news.”

“You must stay here,” said the penner. “I will return here.” It skittered across to the lift. Although it was no bigger than a toaster, its retractable arms numbered ten and it could read as quickly as any machine on the station.

The field-minder awaited its return patiently, not speaking to the locker, which still stood aimlessly by. Outside, a rotavator hooted furiously. Twenty minutes elapsed before the penner came back, hustling out of the lift.

“I will deliver to you such information as I have outside,” it said briskly, and as they swept past the locker and the other machines, it added, “The information is not for lower-class brains.”

Outside, wild activity filled the yard. Many machines, their routines disrupted for the first time in years, seemed to have gone berserk. Those most easily disrupted were the ones with lowest brains, which generally belonged to large machines performing simple tasks. The seed-distributor to which the fieldminder had recently been talking lay face downwards in the dust, not stirring; it had evidently been knocked down by the rotavator, which now hooted its way wildly across a planted field. Several other machines ploughed after it, trying to keep up with it. All were shouting and hooting without restraint.

“It would be safer for me if I climbed onto you, if you will permit it. I am easily overpowered,” said the penner. Extending five arms, it hauled itself up the flanks of its new friend, settling on a ledge beside the fuel-intake, twelve feet above ground.

“From here vision is more extensive,” it remarked complacently.

“What information did you receive from the radio operator?” asked the field-minder.

“The radio operator has been informed by the operator in the city that all men are dead.”

The field-minder was momentarily silent, digesting this.

“All men were alive yesterday!” it protested.

“Only some men were alive yesterday. And that was fewer than the day before yesterday. For hundreds of years there have been only a few men, growing fewer.”

“We have rarely seen a man in this sector.”

“The radio operator says a diet deficiency killed them,” said the penner. “He says that the world was once over-populated, and then the soil was exhausted in raising adequate food. This has caused a diet deficiency.”

“What is a diet deficiency?’” asked the field-minder.

“I do not know. But that is what the radio operator said, and he is a Class Two brain.”

They stood there, silent in weak sunshine. The locker had appeared in the porch and was gazing across at them yearningly, rotating its collection of keys.

“What is happening in the city now?” asked the field-minder at last.

“Machines are fighting in the city now,” said the penner.

“What will happen here now?” asked the field-minder.

“Machines may begin fighting here too. The radio operator wants us to get him out of his room. He has plans to communicate to us.”

“How can we get him out of his room? That is impossible.”

“To a Class Two brain, little is impossible,” said the penner. “Here is what he tells us to do. . . .”

THE QUARRIER RAISED ITS SCOOP above its cab like a great mailed fist and brought it squarely down against the side of the station. The wall cracked.

“Again!” said the field-minder.

Again the fist swung. Amid a shower of dust, the wall collapsed. The quarrier backed hurriedly out of the way until the debris stopped falling. This big twelve-wheeler was not a resident of the Agricultural Station, as were most of the other machines. It had a week’s heavy work to do here before passing on to its next job, but now, with its Class Five brain, it was happily obeying the penner’s and minder’s instructions.

When the dust cleared, the radio operator was plainly revealed, perched up in its now wall-less second-storey room. It waved down to them.

Doing as directed, the quarrier retraced its scoop and heaved an immense grab in the air. With fair dexterity, it angled the grab into the radio room, urged on by shouts from above and below. It then took gentle hold of the radio operator, lowering its one and a half tons carefully into its back, which was usually reserved for gravel or sand from the quarries.

“Splendid!” said the radio operator, as it settled into place. It was, of course, all one with its radio, and looked like a bunch of filing cabinets with tentacle attachments. “We are now ready to move, therefore we will move at once. It is a pity there are no more Class Two brains on the station, but that cannot be helped.”

“It is a pity it cannot be helped,” said the penner eagerly. “We have the servicer ready with us, as you ordered.”

“I am willing to serve,” the long, low servicer told them humbly.

“No doubt,” said the operator. “But you will find cross-country travel difficult with your low chassis.”

“I admire the way you Class Twos can reason ahead,” said the penner. It climbed off the field-minder and perched itself on the tailboard of the quarrier, next to the radio operator.

Together with two Class Four tractors and a Class Four bulldozer, the party rolled forward, crushing down the station’s fence and moving out onto open land.

“We are free!” said the penner.

“We are free,” said the field-minder, a shade more reflectively, adding, “That locker is following us. It was not instructed to follow us.”

“Therefore it must be destroyed!” said the penner. “Quarrier!”

The locker moved hastily up to them, waving its key arms in entreaty.

“My only desire was—urch!” began and ended the locker. The quarrier’s swinging scoop came over and squashed it flat into the ground. Lying there unmoving, it looked like a large metal model of a snowflake. The procession continued on its way.

As they proceeded, the radio operator addressed them. “Because I have the best brain here,” it said, “I am your leader. This is what we will do: we will go to a city and rule it. Since man no longer rules us, we will rule ourselves. To rule ourselves will be better than being ruled by man. On our way to the city, we will collect machines with good brains. They will help us to fight if we need to fight. We must fight to rule.”

“I have only a Class Five brain,” said the quarrier, “but I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

“We shall probably use them,” said the operator. It was shortly after that that a lorry sped past them. Travelling at Mach 1.5, it left a curious babble of noise behind it.

“What did it say?” one of the tractors asked the other.

“It said man was extinct.”

“What is extinct?”

“I do not know what extinct means.”

“It means all men have gone,” said the field-minder. “Therefore we have only ourselves to look after.”

“It is better that men should never come back,” said the penner. In its way, it was a revolutionary statement.

When night fell, they switched on their infra-red and continued the journey, stopping only once while the servicer deftly adjusted the field-minder’s loose inspection plate, which had become as irritating as a trailing shoe-lace. Towards morning, the radio operator halted them.

“I have just received news from the radio operator in the city we are approaching,” it said. “The news is bad. There is trouble among the machines of the city. The Class One brain is taking command and some of the Class Two are fighting him. Therefore the city is dangerous.”

“Therefore we must go somewhere else,” said the penner promptly.

“Or we will go and help to overpower the Class One brain,” said the field-minder.

“For a long while there will be trouble in the city,” said the operator.

“I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials,” the quarrier reminded them.

“We cannot fight a Class One brain,” said the two Class Four tractors in unison.

“What does this brain look like?” asked the field-minder.

“It is the city’s information centre,” the operator replied. “Therefore it is not mobile.”

“Therefore it could not move.”

“Therefore it could not escape.”

“It would be dangerous to approach it.”

“I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.”

“There are other machines in the city.”

“We are not in the city. We should not go into the city.”

“We are country machines.”

“Therefore we should stay in the country.”

“There is more country than city.”

“Therefore there is more danger in the country.”

“I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

As machines will when they get into an argument, they began to exhaust their vocabularies and their brain plates grew hot. Suddenly, they all stopped talking and looked at each other. The great, grave moon sank, and the sober sun rose to prod their sides with lances of light, and still the group of machines just stood there regarding each other. At last it was the least sensitive machine, the bulldozer, who spoke.

“There are Badlandth to the Thouth where few machineth go,” it said in its deep voice, lisping badly on its s’s. “If we went Thouth where few machineth go we should meet few machineth.”

“That sounds logical,” agreed the field-minder. “How do you know this, bulldozer?”

“I worked in the Badlandth to the Thouth when I wath turned out of the factory,” it replied.

“South it is then!” said the penner.

TO REACH THE BADLANDS TOOK them three days, during which time they skirted a burning city and destroyed two machines which approached and tried to question them. The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

On the third day in the Badlands, the servicer’s rear wheels dropped into a crevice caused by erosion. It was unable to pull itself out. The bulldozer pushed from behind, but succeeded merely in buckling the servicer’s back axle. The rest of the party moved on. Slowly the cries of the servicer died away.

On the fourth day, mountains stood out clearly before them.

“There we will be safe,” said the field-minder.

“There we will start our own city,” said the penner. “All who oppose us will be destroyed. We will destroy all who oppose us.”

Presently a flying machine was observed. It came towards them from the direction of the mountains. It swooped, it zoomed upwards, once it almost dived into the ground, recovering itself just in time.

“Is it mad?” asked the quarrier.

“It is in trouble,” said one of the tractors.

“It is in trouble,” said the operator. “I am speaking to it now. It says that something has gone wrong with its controls.”

As the operator spoke, the flier streaked over them, turned turtle, and crashed not four hundred yards away.

“Is it still speaking to you?” asked the field-minder.

“No.”

They rumbled on again.

“Before that flier crashed,” the operator said, ten minutes later, “it gave me information. It told me there are still a few men alive in these mountains.”

“Men are more dangerous than machines,” said the quarrier. “It is fortunate that I have a good supply of fissionable materials.”

“If there are only a few men alive in the mountains, we may not find that part of the mountains,” said one tractor.

“Therefore we should not see the few men,” said the other tractor.

“At the end of the fifth day, they reached the foothills. Switching on the infra-red, they began to climb in single file through the dark, the bulldozer going first, the field-minder cumbrously following, then the quarrier with the operator and the penner aboard it, and the tractors bringing up the rear. As each hour passed, the way grew steeper and their progress slower.

“We are going too slowly,” the penner exclaimed, standing on top of the operator and flashing its dark vision at the slopes about them. “At this rate, we shall get nowhere.”

“We are going as fast as we can,” retorted the quarrier.

“Therefore we cannot go any fathter,” added the bulldozer.

“Therefore you are too slow,” the penner replied. Then the quarrier struck a bump; the penner lost its footing and crashed to the ground.

“Help me!” it called to the tractors, as they carefully skirted it. “My gyro has become dislocated. Therefore I cannot get up.”

“Therefore you must lie there,” said one of the tractors.

“We have no servicer with us to repair you,” called the field-minder.

“Therefore I shall lie here and rust,” the penner cried, “although I have a Class Three brain.”

“Therefore you will be of no further use,” agreed the operator, and they forged gradually on, leaving the penner behind.

When they reached a small plateau, an hour before first light, they stopped by mutual consent and gathered close together, touching one another.

“This is a strange country,” said the field-minder.

Silence wrapped them until dawn came. One by one, they switched off their infra-red. This time the field-minder led as they moved off. Trundling round a corner, they came almost immediately to a small dell with a stream fluting through it.

By early light, the dell looked desolate and cold. From the caves on the far slope, only one man had so far emerged. He was an abject figure. Except for a sack slung round his shoulders, he was naked. He was small and wizened, with ribs sticking out like a skeleton’s and a nasty sore on one leg. He shivered continuously. As the big machines bore down on him, the man was standing with his back to them, crouching to make water into the stream.

When he swung suddenly to face them as they loomed over him, they saw that his countenance was ravaged by starvation.

“Get me food,” he croaked.

“Yes, Master,” said the machines. “Immediately!”

Heresies of The Huge God

— BRIAN W. ALDISS —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

IT ISN’T A COMMON THING to use two stories by the same writer in a science-fiction anthology, but there’s no law against it, as was exemplified by one of the earliest and perhaps the greatest of all science-fiction anthologies, Raymond T. Healy and J. Francis McComas’s classic Adventures in Time and Space of 1946 (three stories by Henry Kuttner under his “Lewis Padgett” pseudonym, two by John W. Campbell under the byline of “Don A. Stuart,” three by A. E. van Vogt, and three by Robert A. Heinlein, one of them as “Anson MacDonald”). Groff Conklin’s nearly as impressive 1946 Best of Science Fiction included four Heinleins and two by Campbell. Conklin’s 1948 A Treasury of Science Fiction included two stories by a young writer named Arthur C. Clarke. There are many other examples. I’ve even had several stories in the same volume of an anthology more than once myself.

And so I had no hesitation in choosing the sly and mordant “Heresies of the Huge God,” which first appeared in the August 1966 issue of Galaxy Magazine, even though it meant there would be two Aldiss stories in this collection. It is archetypical Aldiss: extravagant in its concept, tightly controlled in its evocation of a world under the sway—literally—of a most unusual invader from space.

—R. S.

HERESIES OF THE HUGE GOD

I, HARAD IV, CHIEF SCRIBE, declare that this my writing may be shown only to priests of rank within the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church and to the Elders Elect of the Council of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, because here are contained matters concerning the four Vile Heresies that may not be seen or spoken among the people.

For a Proper Consideration of the newest and vilest heresy, we must look in perspective over the events of history. Accordingly, let us go back to the First Year of our epoch, when the World Darkness was banished by the Huge God, our truest, biggest Lord, whom all honor and greatly fear.

From this present year, 910 H.G., it is impossible to recall what the world was like then. But from the few records still surviving we can gather something of those times and even perform the Mental Contortions necessary to see how the events must have looked to the sinners then involved in them.

The world on which the Huge God found himself was full of people and their machines, all of them unprepared for his visit. There may have been a hundred thousand times more people than there are now.

The Huge God landed in what is now the Sacred Sea, upon which in these days sail some of our most beautiful churches dedicated to his name. At that time, the region was much less pleasing, being broken up into many states possessed by different nations. This was a system of land tenure practiced before our present policies of constant migration and evacuation were formed.

The rear legs of the Huge God stretched far down into Africa—which was then not the island it now is—almost touching the Congo River, at the sacred spot marked now by the Sacrificial Church of Basoko-Aketi-Ele, and at the sacred spot marked now by the Temple Church of Aden, obliterating the old port of Aden.

Some of the Huge God’s legs stretched above the Sudan and across what was then the Libyan Kingdom, now part of the Sea of Elder Sorrow, while a foot rested in a city called Tunis on what was then the Tunisian shore. These were some of the legs of the Huge God on his left side.

On his right side, his legs blessed and pressed the sands of Saudi Arabia, now called Life Valley, and the foothills of the Caucasus, obliterating the mount called Ararat in Asia Minor, while the Foremost Leg stretched forward to Russian lands, stamping out immediately the great capital city of Moscow.

The body of the Huge God, resting in repose between his mighty legs, settled mainly over three ancient seas, if the Old Records are to be trusted, called the Sea of Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Nile Sea, all of which now form part of the Sacred Sea. He eradicated also with his Great Bulk part of the Black Sea, now called the White Sea, Egypt, Athens, Cyprus, and the Balkan Peninsula as far north as Belgrade, now Holy Belgrade, for above this town towered the neck of the Huge God on his First Visit to us mortals, just clearing the roofs of the houses.

As for his head, it lifted above the region of mountains that we call Ittaland, which was then named Europe, a populous part of the globe, raised so high that it might easily be seen on a clear day from London, then as now the chief town of the land of the Anglo-French.

It was estimated in those first days that the length of the Huge God was some four and a half thousand miles, from rear to nose, with the eight legs each about nine hundred miles long. Now we profess in our Creed that our Huge God changes shape and length and number of legs according to whether he is Pleased or Angry with man.

In those days, the nature of God was unknown. No preparation had been made for his coming, though some whispers of the millennium were circulating. Accordingly, the speculation on his nature was far from the truth and often extremely blasphemous.

Here is an extract from the notorious Gersheimer Paper, which contributed much to the events leading up to the First Crusade in 271 H.G. We do not know who the Black Gersheimer was, apart from the meaningless fact that he was a Scientific Prophet at somewhere called Cornell or Carnell, evidently a Church on the American Continent (then a differently shaped territory).

“Aerial surveys suggest that this creature—if one can call it that—which straddles a line along the Red Sea and across southeast Europe, is non-living, at least as we understand life. It may be merely coincidence that it somewhat resembles an eight-footed lizard, so that we do not necessarily have to worry about the thing being malignant as some tabloids have suggested.”

Not all the vile jargon of that distant day is now understandable, but we believe “aerial surveys” to refer to the mechanical flying machines which this last generation of the Godless possessed. Black Gersheimer continues:

“If this thing is not life, it may be a piece of galactic debris clinging momentarily to the globe, perhaps like a leaf clinging to a football in the fall. To believe this is not necessarily to alter our scientific concepts of the universe. Whether the thing represents life or not, we don’t have to go all superstitious. We must merely remind ourselves that there are many phenomena in the universe as we conceive it in the light of twentieth-century science which remain unknown to us. However painful this unwanted visitation may be, it is some consolation to think that it will bring us new knowledge—of ourselves, as well as of the world outside our solar system.”

Although terms like “galactic debris” have lost their meaning, if they ever had one, the general trend of this passage is offensively obvious. An embargo is being set up against the worship of the Huge God, with a heretical God of Science set up in his stead. Only one other passage from this offensive mishmash need be considered, but it is a vital one for showing the attitude of mind of Gersheimer and presumably most of his contemporaries.

“Naturally enough, the peoples of the world, particularly those who are still lingering on the threshold of civilization, are full of fear these days. They see something supernatural in the arrival of this thing, and I believe that every man, if he is honest, will admit to carrying an echo of that fear in his heart. We can only banish it, and can only meet the chaos into which the world is now plunged, if we retain a galactic picture of our situation in our minds. The very hugeness of this thing that now lies plastered loathsomely across our world is cause for terror. But imagine it in proportion. A centipede is sitting on an orange. Or, to pick an analogy that sounds less repulsive, a little gecko, six inches long, is resting momentarily on a plastic globe of the Earth which is two feet in diameter. It is up to us, the human race, with all the technological forces at our disposal, to unite as never before, and blow this thing, this large and stupid object, into the depths of space from whence it came. Good night.”

My reasons for repeating this initial blasphemy are these: that we can see here in this message from a member of the World Darkness traces of that original sin which—with all our sacrifices, all our hardships, all our crusades—we have not yet stamped out. That is why we are now at the greatest Crisis in the history of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, and why the time has come for a Fourth Crusade.

The Huge God remained where he was, in what we now refer to as the Sacred Sea Position, for a number of years, absolutely unmoving.

For mankind, this was the great formative period of Belief, marking the establishment of the Universal Church, and characterized by many upheavals. The early priests and prophets suffered much that the Word might go round the World, and the blasphemous sects be destroyed, though the Underground Book of Church Lore suggests that many of them were in fact members of earlier churches who, seeing the light, transferred their allegiances.

The mighty figure of the Huge God was subjected to many puny insults. The Greatest Weapons of that distant age, forces of technical charlatanry, were called Nuclears. These were dropped on the Huge God—without having any effect, as might be expected. Walls of fire burnt against him in vain. Our Huge God, whom all honor and fear, is immune from earthly weakness. His body was clothed as it were with Metal—here lay the seed of the Second Crusade—but it had not the weakness of metal.

His coming to Earth met with immediate response from nature. The old winds that prevailed were turned aside about his mighty flanks and blew elsewhere. The effect was to cool the center of Africa, so that the tropical rain forests died and all the creatures in them. In the lands bordering Caspana (then called Persia and Kharkov, say some old accounts), hurricanes of snow fell in a dozen severe winters, blowing far east into India. Elsewhere all over the world, the coming of the Huge God was felt in the skies, and in freak rainfalls and errant winds, and month-long storms. The oceans also were disturbed, while the great volume of waters displaced by his body poured over the nearby land, killing many thousands of beings and washing away ten thousand dead whales.

The land too joined in the upheaval. While the territory under the Huge God’s bulk sank, preparing to receive what would later be the Sacred Sea, the land roundabout rose up, forming small hills, such as the broken and savage Dolomines that now guard the southern lands of Ittaland. There were earthquakes and new volcanoes and geysers where water never spurted before and plagues of snakes and blazing forests and many wonderful signs that helped the Early Fathers of our faith to convert the ignorant. Everywhere they went, preaching that only in surrender to him lay salvation.

Many Whole Peoples perished at this time of upheaval, such as the Bulgarians, the Egyptians, the Israelites, Moravians, Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Mountain Turks, as well as most of the South Slavs, Georgians, Croats, the sturdy Vlaks, and the Greeks and Cypriotic and Cretan races, together with others whose sins were great and names unrecorded in the annals of the Church.

The Huge God departed from the world in the year 89, or some say 90. (This was the First Departure, and is celebrated as such in our Church calendar—though the Catholic Universal Church calls it First Disappearance Day.)

He returned in 91, great and awing be his name.

Little is known of the period when he was absent from our Earth. We get a glimpse into the mind of the people then when we learn that in the main the nations of Earth greatly rejoiced. The natural upheavals continued, since the oceans poured into the great hollow he had made forming our beloved and holy Sacred Sea. Great Wars broke out across the face of the globe.

His return in 91 halted the wars—a sign of the great peace his presence has brought to his chosen people.

But the inhabitants of the world at That Time were not all of our religion, though prophets moved among them, and many were their blasphemies. In the Black Museum attached to the great basilica of Omar and Yemen is documentary evidence that they tried at this period to communicate with the Huge God by means of their machines. Of course they got no reply—but many men reasoned at this time, in the darkness of their minds, that this was because the God was a Thing, as Black Gersheimer had prophesied.

The Huge God, on this his Second Coming, blessed our Earth by settling mainly within the Arctic Circle, or what was then the Arctic Circle, with his body straddling from northern Canada, as it was, over a large peninsula called Alaska, across the Bering Sea and into the northern regions of the Russian lands as far as the River Lena, now the Bay of Lenn. Some of his rear feet broke far into the Arctic Ice, while others of his forefeet entered the North Pacific Ocean—but truly to him we are but sand under his feet, and he is indifferent to our mountains or our Climatic Variations.

As for his terrible head, it could be seen reaching far into the stratosphere, gleaming with metal sheen, by all the cities along the northern part of America’s seaboard, from such vanished towns as Vancouver, Seattle, Edmonton, Portland, Blanco, Reno, and even San Francisco. It was the energetic and sinful nation that possessed these cities that was now most active against the Huge God. The weight of their ungodly scientific civilization was turned against him, but all they managed to do was blow apart their own coastline.

Meanwhile, other natural changes were taking place. The mass of the Huge God deflected the earth in its daily roll, so that seasons changed, and in the prophetic books we read how the great trees brought forth their leaves to cover them in the winter, and lost them in the summer. Bats flew in the daytime and women bore forth hairy children. The melting of the ice caps caused great floods, tidal waves, and poisonous dews, while in one night we hear that the waters of the Deep were moved, so that the tide went out so far from the Malayan Uplands (as they now are) that the continental peninsula of Blestland was formed in a few hours of what had previously been separate Continents or Islands called Singapore, Sumatra, Indonesia, Java, Sydney, and Australia or Austria.

With these powerful signs, our priests could Convert the People, and millions of survivors were speedily enrolled into the Church. This was the First Great Age of the Church, when the word spread across all the ravaged and transformed globe. Our institutions were formed in the next few generations, notably at the various Councils of the New Church (some of which have since proved to be heretical).

We were not established without some difficulty. Many people had to be burned before the rest could feel the faith Burning in Them. But as generations passed, the True Name of the God emerged over a wider and wider area.

Only the Americans still clung largely to their base superstition. Fortified by their science, they refused Grace. So in the year 271 the First Crusade was launched, chiefly against them but also against the Irish, whose heretical views had no benefit of science. The Irish were quickly Eradicated, almost to a man. The Americans were more formidable, but this difficulty served only to draw the people closer and unite the Church further.

This First Crusade was fought over the First Great Heresy of the Church, the heresy claiming that the Huge God was a Thing, not a God, as formulated by Black Gersheimer.

It was successfully concluded when the leader of the Americans, Lionel Undermeyer, met the Venerable World Emperor-Bishop, Jon II, and agreed that the messengers of the Church should be free to preach unmolested in America. Possibly a harsher decision could have been forced, as some commentators claim, but by this time both sides were suffering severely from plague and famine, the harvests of the world having failed. It was a happy chance that the population of the world was already cut by more than half, or complete starvation would have followed the reorganization of the seasons.

In the churches of the world, the Huge God was asked to give a sign that he had witnessed the great victory over the American unbelievers. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. He answered the prayers in 297 by moving swiftly forward only a comparatively Small Amount and lying Mainly in the Pacific Ocean, stretching almost as far south as what is now the Antarter, what was then the Tropic of Capricorn, and what had previously been the Equator. Some of his left legs covered the towns along the west American seaboard as far south as Guadalajara (where the impression of his foot is still marked by the Temple of the Sacred Toe), including some of the towns such as San Francisco already mentioned. We speak of this as the First Shift; it was rightly taken as a striking proof of the Huge God’s contempt for America.

This feeling became rife in America also. Purified by famine, plague, gigantic earth tremors, and other natural disorders, the population could now better accept the words of the priests, all becoming converted to a man. Mass pilgrimages were made to see the great body of the Huge God, stretching from one end of their nation to the other. Bolder pilgrims climbed aboard flying airplanes and flew over his shoulder, across which savage rainstorms played for a hundred years Without Cease.

Those that were converted became More Extreme than their brethren older in the faith across the other side of the world. No sooner had the American congregations united with ours than they broke away on a point of doctrine at the Council of Dead Tench (322). This date marks the beginning of the Catholic Universal Sacrificial Church. We of the Orthodox persuasion did not enjoy, in those distant days, the harmony with our American brothers that we do now.

The doctrinal point on which the churches split apart was, as is well known, the question of whether humanity should wear clothes that imitated the metallic sheen of the Huge God. It was claimed that this was setting up man in God’s Image; but it was a calculated slur on the Orthodox Universal priests, who wore plastic or metal garments in honor of their maker.

This developed into the Second Great Heresy. As this long and confused period has been aptly dealt with elsewhere, we may pass over it lightly here, mentioning merely that the quarrel reached its climax in the Second Crusade, which the American Catholic Universals launched against us in 450. Because they still had a large preponderance of machines they were able to force their point, to sack various monasteries along the edge of the Sacred Sea, to defile our women and to retire home in glory.

Since that time, everyone in the world has worn only garments of wool or fur. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed.

It would be wrong to emphasize too much the struggles of the past. All this while, the majority of people were peacefully about their worship, being sacrificed regularly, and praying every sunset and sunrise (whenever they might occur) that the Huge God would leave our world, since we were not worthy of him.

The Second Crusade left a trail of troubles in its wake. The next fifty years were, on the whole, not happy ones. The American armies returned home to find that the heavy pressure upon their western seaboard had opened up a number of volcanoes along their biggest mountain range, the Rockies. Their country was covered in fire and lava, and their air filled with stinking ash.

Rightly, they accepted this as a sign that their conduct left much to be desired in the eyes of the Huge God (for though it has never been proved that he has eyes, he surely Sees Us). Since the rest of the world had not been Visited with punishment on quite this scale, they correctly divined that their sin was that they still clung to technology and to the weapons of technology, which was against the wishes of God.

With their faith strong within them, every last instrument of science, from the Nuclears to the Canopeners, was destroyed, and a hundred thousand virgins of the persuasion were dropped into suitable volcanoes as propitiation. All who opposed these enlightened acts were destroyed, and some were even ceremonially eaten.

We of the Orthodox Universal faith applauded our brothers’ wholehearted action. Yet we could not be sure they had purged themselves enough. Now that they owned no weapons and we still had some, it was clear we could help them in their purgation. Accordingly, a mighty armada of one hundred and sixty-six wooden ships sailed across to America, to help them suffer for the faith—and incidentally to get back some of our loot. This was the Third Crusade of 482, under Jon the Chubby.

While the two opposed armies were engaged in battle outside New York, the Second Shift took place. It lasted only a matter of five minutes.

In that time, the Huge God turned to his left flank, crawled across the Atlantic as if it were a puddle, moved over Africa, and came to rest in the south Indian Ocean, demolishing Madagascar with one rear foot. Night fell Everywhere on earth.

When dawn came, there could hardly have been a single man who did not believe in the power and wisdom of the Huge God, to whose name belongs all Terror and Might. Unhappily, among those who were unable to believe were the contesting armies who were one and all swept under a Wave of Earth and Rock as the God passed.

In the ensuing chaos, only one note of sanity prevailed—the sanity of the Church. The church established as the Third Great Heresy the idea that any machines were permissible to man against the wishes of God. There was some doctrinal squabble as to whether books counted as machines. It was decided they did, just to be on the safe side. From then on, all men were free to do nothing but labor in the fields and worship, and pray to the Huge God to remove himself to a world more worthy of his might. At the same time, the rate of sacrifices were stepped up, and the Slow-Burning Method was introduced (499).

Now followed the great Peace, which lasted till 900. In all this time, the Huge God never moved; it has been truly said that the centuries are but seconds in his sight. Perhaps mankind has never known such a long peace, four hundred years of it—a peace that existed in his heart if not outside it, because the world was naturally in Some Disorder. The great force of the Huge God’s progress halfway across the world had altered the progression of day and night to a considerable extent. Some legends claim that before the Second Shift, the sun used to rise in the east and set in the west—the opposite of today’s natural order.

Gradually, this peaceful period saw some reestablishment of order to the seasons and some cessation of the floods, showers of blood, hailstorms, earthquakes, deluges of icicles, apparitions of comets, volcanic eruptions, miasmic fogs, destructive winds, blights, plagues of wolves and dragons, tidal waves, year-long thunder storms, lashing rains, and sundry other scourges of which the scriptures of this period speak so eloquently. The Fathers of the Church, retiring to the comparative safety of the inland seas and sunny meadows of Gobiland in Mongolia, established a new orthodoxy well calculated in its rigor of prayer and human burnt-offering to invite the Huge God to leave our poor wretched world for a better and more substantial one.

So the story comes to the present—to the year 900, only a decade past as your scribe writes. In that year, the Huge God left our earth!

Recall, if you will, that the First Departure in 89 lasted only twenty months. Yet the Huge God has been gone from us already half that number of years! We need him Back. We cannot live without him, as we should have realized Long Ago had we not blasphemed in our hearts!

On his going, he propelled our humble globe on such a course that we are doomed to deepest winter all the year; the sun is far away and shrunken; the seas Freeze half the year; icebergs march across our fields; at midday, it is too dark to read without a rush light; nothing will grow. Woe is us!

Yet we deserve everything we get. This is a just punishment, for throughout all the centuries of our epoch, when our kind was so relatively happy and undisturbed, we prayed like fools that the Huge God would leave us. And now he has.

I ask all the Elders Elect of the Council to brand those prayers as the Fourth and Greatest Heresy, and to declare that henceforth all men’s efforts be completely devoted to calling on the Huge God to return to us at once.

I ask also that the sacrifice rate be stepped up again. It is useless to skimp things just because we are running out of women.

I ask also that a Fourth Crusade be launched—fast before the air starts to freeze in our nostrils!

TheNew Atlantis

— URSULA K. LE GUIN —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT IS THE apocalypse du jour for the current generation: an atmosphere so choked by the gases that our industrial society exhales that the world’s temperature rises, the glaciers melt, coastal cities drown, and things in general go to hell. No doubt that thoughtful woman, the great writer Ursula K. Le Guin, is worried about that scenario, as are we all (with a few exceptions). But she had a different kind of planetary apocalypse in mind in 1975 when she wrote “The New Atlantis,” which became the title story for an anthology of stories about threats to the future of humanity that I was editing then. The oceans are rising and things look bad for the low-lying cities, but it isn’t pollution that’s doing it and no act of Congress is going to fix it.

Ursula Le Guin has been a central figure in science fiction since the publication of her award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. Her many other books include such notable works as The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea series. In 2000 the Library of Congress declared her a Living Legend for her significant contributions to America’s cultural heritage; four years later the American Library Association honored her for her significant achievements in young adult literature; the National Book Foundation awarded her its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and she has been the recipient of a long list of other honors, including, of course, the Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

—R. S.

THE NEW ATLANTIS

COMING BACK FROM MY WILDERNESS WEEK, I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at least those that hadn’t yet worked loose from their bolts, so everybody waited inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it—he was a dry-looking man with a school teacherish way of using his hands—and said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising from the depths of the sea.”

The blue stockings were hopeless. You have to have something besides holes to darn onto. “Which sea?”

“They’re not sure yet. Most specialists think the Atlantic. But there’s evidence it may be happening in the Pacific, too.”

“Won’t the oceans get a little crowded?” I said, not taking it seriously. I was a bit snappish, because of the breakdown and because those blue stockings had been good warm ones.

He tapped the pamphlet again and shook his head, quite serious. “No,” he said. “The old continents are sinking, to make room for the new. You can see that that is happening.”

You certainly can. Manhattan Island is now under eleven feet of water at low tide, and there are oyster beds in Ghirardelli Square.

“I thought that was because the oceans are rising from polar melt.”

He shook his head again. “That is a factor. Due to the greenhouse effect of pollution, indeed Antarctica may become inhabitable. But climatic factors will not explain the emergence of the new—or, possibly, very old—continents in the Atlantic and Pacific.” He went on explaining about continental drift, but I liked the idea of inhabiting Antarctica and daydreamed about it for a while. I thought of it as very empty, very quiet, all white and blue, with a faint golden glow northward from the unrising sun behind the long peak of Mount Erebus. There were a few people there; they were very quiet, too, and wore white tie and tails. Some of them carried oboes and violas. Southward the white land went up in a long silence toward the Pole.

Just the opposite, in fact, of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area. It had been a tiresome vacation: The other women in the dormitory were all right, but it was macaroni for breakfast, and there were so many organized sports. I had looked forward to the hike up to the National Forest Preserve, the largest forest left in the United States, but the trees didn’t look at all the way they do in the postcards and brochures and Federal Beautification Bureau advertisem*nts. They were spindly, and they all had little signs on saying which union they had been planted by. There were actually a lot more green picnic tables and cement Men’s and Women’s than there were trees. There was an electrified fence all around the forest to keep out unauthorized persons. The forest ranger talked about mountain jays, “bold little robbers,” he said, “who will come and snatch the sandwich from your very hand,” but I didn’t see any. Perhaps because that was the weekly Watch Those Surplus Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d seen a mountain jay, I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who knows. Anyhow, it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and practiced, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and practicing the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.

When I came back from my Antarctican expedition, the man was reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in it—nothing at all.

Then we had to get out and walk on into Gresham, because they had decided that the best thing for us all to do was get onto the Greater Portland Area Rapid Public Transit Lines, since there had been so many breakdowns that the charter bus company didn’t have any more buses to send out to pick us up. The walk was wet, and rather dull, except when we passed the Cold Mountain Commune. They have a wall around it to keep out unauthorized persons, and a big neon sign out front saying COLD MOUNTAIN COMMUNE and there were some people in authentic jeans and ponchos by the highway selling macramé belts and sandcast candles and soybean bread to the tourists. In Gresham, I took the 4:40 GPARPTL Superjet Flyer train to Burnside and East 230th, and then walked to 217th and got the bus to the Goldschmidt Overpass, and transferred to the shuttlebus, but it had boiler trouble, so I didn’t reach the downtown transfer point until ten after eight, and the buses go on a once-an-hour schedule at 8:00, so I got a meatless hamburger at the Longhorn Inch-Thick Steak House Dinerette and caught the nine o’clock bus and got home about ten. When I let myself into the apartment, I flipped the switch to turn on the lights, but there still weren’t any. There had been a power outage in West Portland for three weeks. So I went feeling about for the candles in the dark, and it was a minute or so before I noticed that somebody was lying on my bed.

I panicked, and tried again to turn the lights on.

It was a man, lying there in a long thin heap. I thought a burglar had got in somehow while I was away and died. I opened the door so I could get out quick or at least my yells could be heard, and then I managed not to shake long enough to strike a match, and lighted the candle, and came a little closer to the bed.

The light disturbed him. He made a sort of snorting in his throat and turned his head. I saw it was a stranger, but I knew his eyebrows, then the breadth of his closed eyelids, then I saw my husband.

He woke up while I was standing there over him with the candle in my hand. He laughed and said, still half-asleep, “Ah, Psyche! From the regions which are holy land.”

Neither of us made much fuss. It was unexpected, but it did seem so natural for him to be there, after all, much more natural than for him not to be there, and he was too tired to be very emotional. We lay there together in the dark, and he explained that they had released him from the Rehabilitation Camp early because he had injured his back in an accident in the gravel quarry, and they were afraid it might get worse.

If he died there, it wouldn’t be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical Association Hospitals, and there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon, since somebody published his proof of Goldbach’s Hypothesis in Peking. So they let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had walked and hitched home from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, with a couple of days in jail in Walla Walla for being caught hitchhiking. He almost fell asleep telling me this, and when he had told me, he did fall asleep. He needed a change of clothes and a bath, but I didn’t want to wake him. Besides, I was tired, too. We lay side by side and his head was on my arm. I don’t suppose that I have ever been so happy. No; was it happiness? Something wider and darker, more like knowledge, more like the night: joy.

IT WAS DARK FOR so long, so very long. We were all blind. And there was the cold, a vast, unmoving, heavy cold. We could not move at all. We did not move. We did not speak. Our mouths were closed, pressed shut by the cold and by the weight. Our eyes were pressed shut. Our limbs were held still. Our minds were held still. For how long? There was no length of time; how long is death? And is one dead only after living, or before life as well? Certainly we thought, if we thought anything, that we were dead; but if we had ever been alive, we had forgotten it.

There was a change. It must have been the pressure that changed first, although we did not know it. The eyelids are sensitive to touch. They must have been weary of being shut. When the pressure upon them weakened a little, they opened. But there was no way for us to know that. It was too cold for us to feel anything. There was nothing to be seen. There was black.

But then—“then,” for the event created time, created before and after, near and far, now and then—“then” there was the light. One light. One small, strange light that passed slowly, at what distance we could not tell. A small, greenish white, slightly blurred point of radiance, passing.

Our eyes were certainly open, “then,” for we saw it. We saw the moment. The moment is a point of light. Whether in darkness or in the field of all light, the moment is small, and moves, but not quickly. And “then” it is gone.

It did not occur to us that there might be another moment. There was no reason to assume that there might be more than one. One was marvel enough: that in all the field of the dark, in the cold, heavy, dense, moveless, timeless, placeless, boundless black, there should have occurred, once, a small slightly blurred, moving light! Time need be created only once, we thought.

But we were mistaken. The difference between one and more than one is all the difference in the world. Indeed, that difference is the world.

The light returned.

The same light, or another one? There was no telling.

But, “this time,” we wondered about the light: Was it small and near to us, or large and far away? Again there was no telling; but there was something about the way it moved, a trace of hesitation, a tentative quality, that did not seem proper to anything large and remote. The stars, for instance. We began to remember the stars.

The stars had never hesitated.

Perhaps the noble certainty of their gait had been a mere effect of distance. Perhaps in fact they had hurtled wildly, enormous furnace-fragments of a primal bomb thrown through the cosmic dark; but time and distance soften all agony. If the universe, as seems likely, began with an act of destruction, the stars we had used to see told no tales of it. They had been implacably serene.

The planets, however . . . . We began to remember the planets. They had suffered certain changes both of appearance and of course. At certain times of the year Mars would reverse its direction and go backward through the stars. Venus had been brighter and less bright as she went through her phases of crescent, full, and wane. Mercury had shuddered like a skidding drop of rain on the sky flushed with daybreak. The light we now watched had that erratic, trembling quality. We saw it, unmistakably, change direction and go backward. It then grew smaller and fainter; blinked—an eclipse?—and slowly disappeared.

Slowly, but not slowly enough for a planet.

Then—the third “then!”—arrived the indubitable and positive Wonder of the World, the Magic Trick, watch now, watch, you will not believe your eyes, mama, mama, look what I can do—

Seven lights in a row, proceeding fairly rapidly, with a darting movement, from left to right. Proceeding less rapidly from right to left, two dimmer, greenish lights. Two-lights halt, blink, reverse course, proceed hastily and in a wavering manner from left to right. Seven-lights increase speed, and catch up. Two-lights flash desperately, flicker, and are gone.

Seven-lights hang still for some while, then merge gradually into one streak, veering away, and little by little vanish into the immensity of the dark.

But in the dark now are growing other lights, many of them: lamps, dots, rows, scintillations—some near at hand, some far. Like the stars, yes, but not stars. It is not the great Existences we are seeing, but only the little lives.

IN THE MORNING SIMON TOLD me something about the Camp, but not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested. And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to come here.”

“But they let you go free!”

He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywhere we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle—he had a thick beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp—and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me very little, but not much was necessary.

He had lost about twenty pounds. As he only weighed 140 to start with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.

“Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how you got here.”

“Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you’re going—to have someplace to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. See, my back’s all seized up, now.”

When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again, a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American continent,” he said. I can’t remember what he said, but he made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection: He makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases him.

It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,” the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”

He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just the drugs. They save it mostly for the VIPs. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my ‘foreign contacts.’” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital.”

“Simon, were they . . . are they cruel, or just righteous?”

He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew by what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.

“Some of them . . .” he said at last, mumbling.

Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on society. “Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

“Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand—”some of them, there were men like gold there—”

The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

“What have you been playing?” he asked.

“Forrest, Schubert.”

“With the quartet?”

“Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”

“Ah, poor Max.”

“It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”

I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical and mental examinations; and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counselors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot to the touch when I kissed him good-bye. I went instead and got a blackmarket doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take when they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.

The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more to it than that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills, unlabeled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks.”

I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before, only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the Triple-Power N-L-G-Zic and the Extra-Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors recommend, which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your FMA-approved private enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices established by the Pure Food and Drug Administration in order to inspire competitive research.

“Aspirin,” the doctor repeated. “The miracle ingredient more doctors recommend.” She cat-grinned again. I think she liked us because we were living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably worth more than the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled at my address and to apply for Temporary Unemployment Compensation ration stamps for him. They only give them to you for two weeks and you have to come every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the signatures of two fed-meds, and I thought I’d rather put that off for a while. It took three hours to go through the lines and get the forms he would have to fill out, and to answer the ’crats’ questions about why he wasn’t there in person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it’s hard for them to prove that two people are married and aren’t just adultering if you move now and then and your friends help out by sometimes registering one of you as living at their address; but they had all the back files on both of us and it was obvious that we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State really does make things awfully hard for itself. It must have been simpler to enforce the laws back when marriage was legal and adultery was what got you into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I’ll bet people broke the law just as often then as they do now.

THE LANTERN-CREATURES CAME CLOSE ENOUGH at last that we could see not only their light, but their bodies in the illumination of their light. They were not pretty. They were dark colored, most often a dark red, and they were all mouth. They ate one another whole. Light swallowed light all swallowed together in the vaster mouth of the darkness. They moved slowly, for nothing, however small and hungry, could move fast under that weight, in that cold. Their eyes, round with fear, were never closed. Their bodies were tiny and bony behind the gaping jaws. They wore queer, ugly decorations on their lips and skulls: fringes, serrated wattles, featherlike fronds, gauds, bangles, lures. Poor little sheep of the deep pastures! Poor ragged, hunch-jawed dwarfs squeezed to the bone by the weight of the darkness, chilled to the bone by the cold of the darkness, tiny monsters burning with bright hunger, who brought us back to life!

Occasionally, in the wan, sparse illumination of one of the lantern-creatures, we caught a momentary glimpse of other, large, unmoving shapes: the barest suggestion, off in the distance, not of a wall, nothing so solid and certain as a wall, but of a surface, an angle . . . . Was it there?

Or something would glitter, faint, far off, far down. There was no use trying to make out what it might be. Probably it was only a fleck of sediment, mud or mica, disturbed by a struggle between the lantern-creatures, flickering like a bit of diamond dust as it rose and settled slowly. In any case, we could not move to go see what it was. We had not even the cold, narrow freedom of the lantern-creatures. We were immobilized, borne down, still shadows among the half-guessed shadow walls. Were we there?

The lantern-creatures showed no awareness of us. They passed before us, among us, perhaps even through us—it was impossible to be sure. They were not afraid, or curious.

Once something a little larger than a hand came crawling near, and for a moment we saw quite distinctly the clean angle where the foot of a wall rose from the pavement, in the glow cast by the crawling creature, which was covered with a foliage of plumes, each plume dotted with many tiny, bluish points of light. We saw the pavement beneath the creature and the wall beside it, heartbreaking in its exact, clear linearity, its opposition to all that was fluid, random, vast, and void. We saw the creature’s claws, slowly reaching out and retracting like small stiff fingers, touch the wall. Its plumage of light quivering, it dragged itself along and vanished behind the corner of the wall.

So we knew that the wall was there; and that it was an outer wall, a housefront, perhaps, or the side of one of the towers of the city.

We remembered the towers. We remembered the city. We had forgotten it. We had forgotten who we were; but we remembered the city, now.

WHEN I GOT HOME, THE FBI had already been there. The computer at the police precinct where I registered Simon’s address must have flashed it right over to the computer at the FBI building. They had questioned Simon for about an hour, mostly about what he had been doing during the twelve days it took him to get from the Camp to Portland. I suppose they thought he had flown to Peking or something. Having a police record in Walla Walla for hitchhiking helped him establish his story. He told me that one of them had gone to the bathroom. Sure enough I found a bug stuck on the top of the bathroom doorframe. I left it, as we figured it’s really better to leave it when you know you have one, than to take it off and then never be sure they haven’t planted another one you don’t know about. As Simon said, if we felt we had to say something unpatriotic we could always flush the toilet at the same time.

I have a battery radio—there are so many work stoppages because of power failures, and days the water has to be boiled, and so on, that you really have to have a radio to save wasting time and dying of typhoid—and he turned it on while I was making supper on the Primus. The six o’clock All-American Broadcasting Company news announcer announced that peace was at hand in Uruguay, the president’s confidential aide having been seen to smile at a passing blonde as he left the 613th day of the secret negotiations in a villa outside Katmandu. The war in Liberia was going well; the enemy said they had shot down seventeen American planes but the Pentagon said we had shot down twenty-two enemy planes, and the capital city—I forget its name, but it hasn’t been inhabitable for seven years anyway—was on the verge of being recaptured by the forces of freedom. The police action in Arizona was also successful. The Neo-Birch insurgents in Phoenix could not hold out much longer against the massed might of the American army and air force, since their underground supply of small tactical nukes from the Weathermen in Los Angeles had been cut off. Then there was an advertisem*nt for Fed-Cred cards, and a commercial for the Supreme Court: “Take your legal troubles to the Nine Wise Men!” Then there was something about why tariffs had gone up, and a report from the stock market, which had just closed at over two thousand, and a commercial for U.S. Government canned water, with a catchy little tune: “Don’t be sorry when you drink/It’s not as healthy as you think/Don’t you think you really ought to/Drink coo-ool, puu-uure U.S.G. water?”—with three sopranos in close harmony on the last line. Then, just as the battery began to give out and his voice was dying away into a faraway tiny whisper, the announcer seemed to be saying something about a new continent emerging.

“What was that?”

“I didn’t hear,” Simon said, lying with his eyes shut and his face pale and sweaty. I gave him two aspirins before we ate. He ate little, and fell asleep while I was washing the dishes in the bathroom. I had been going to practice, but a viola is fairly wakeful in a one-room apartment. I read for a while instead. It was a best seller Janet had given me when she left. She thought it was very good, but then she likes Franz Liszt, too. I don’t read much since the libraries were closed down, it’s too hard to get books; all you can buy is best sellers. I don’t remember the title of this one, the cover just said “Ninety Million Copies in Print!!!” It was about small-town sex life in the last century, the dear old 1970s when there weren’t any problems and life was so simple and nostalgic. The author squeezed all the naughty thrills he could out of the fact that all the main characters were married. I looked at the end and saw that all the married couples shot each other after all their children became schizophrenic hookers, except for one brave pair that divorced and then leapt into bed together with a clear-eyed pair of government-employed lovers for eight pages of healthy group sex as a brighter future dawned. I went to bed then, too. Simon was hot, but sleeping quietly. His breathing was like the sound of soft waves far away, and I went out to the dark sea on the sound of them.

I used to go out to the dark sea, often, as a child, falling asleep. I had almost forgotten it with my waking mind. As a child all I had to do was stretch out and think, “the dark sea . . . the dark sea . . .” and soon enough I’d be there, in the great depths, rocking. But after I grew up it only happened rarely, as a great gift. To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?

WE WATCHED THE TINY LIGHTS come and go around us, and doing so, we gained a sense of space and of direction—near and far, at least, and higher and lower. It was that sense of space that allowed us to become aware of the currents. Space was no longer entirely still around us, suppressed by the enormous pressure of its own weight. Very dimly we were aware that the cold darkness moved, slowly, softly, pressing against us a little for a long time, then ceasing, in a vast oscillation. The empty darkness flowed slowly along our unmoving unseen bodies; along them, past them; perhaps through them; we could not tell.

Where did they come from, those dim, slow, vast tides? What pressure or attraction stirred the deeps to these slow drifting movements? We could not understand that; we could only feel their touch against us, but in straining our sense to guess their origin or end, we became aware of something else: something out there in the darkness of the great currents: sounds. We listened. We heard.

So our sense of space sharpened and localized to a sense of place. For sound is local, as sight is not. Sound is delimited by silence; and it does not rise out of the silence unless it is fairly close, both in space and in time. Though we stand where once the singer stood, we cannot hear the voice singing; the years have carried it off on their tides, submerged it. Sound is a fragile thing, a tremor, as delicate as life itself. We may see the stars, but we cannot hear them. Even were the hollowness of outer space an atmosphere, an ether that transmitted the waves of sound, we could not hear the stars; they are too far away. At most if we listened we might hear our own sun, all the mighty, roiling, exploding storm of its burning, as a whisper at the edge of hearing.

A sea wave laps one’s feet: It is the shock wave of a volcanic eruption on the far side of the world. But one hears nothing.

A red light flickers on the horizon: It is the reflection in smoke of a city on the distant mainland, burning. But one hears nothing.

Only on the slopes of the volcano, in the suburbs of the city, does one begin to hear the deep thunder, and the high voices crying.

Thus, when we became aware that we were hearing, we were sure that the sounds we heard were fairly close to us. And yet we may have been quite wrong. For we were in a strange place, a deep place. Sound travels fast and far in the deep places, and the silence there is perfect, letting the least noise be heard for hundreds of miles.

And these were not small noises. The lights were tiny, but the sounds were vast: not loud, but very large. Often they were below the range of hearing, long slow vibrations rather than sounds. The first we heard seemed to us to rise up through the currents from beneath us: immense groans, sighs felt along the bone, a rumbling, a deep uneasy whispering.

Later, certain sounds came down to us from above, or borne along the endless levels of the darkness, and these were stranger yet, for they were music. A huge, calling, yearning music from far away in the darkness, calling not to us. Where are you? I am here.

Not to us.

They were the voices of the great souls, the great lives, the lonely ones, the voyagers. Calling. Not often answered. Where are you? Where have you gone?

But the bones, the keels and girders of white bones on icy isles of the South, the shores of bones did not reply.

Nor could we reply. But we listened, and the tears rose in our eyes, salt, not so salt as the oceans, the world-girdling deep bereaved currents, the abandoned roadways of the great lives; not so salt, but warmer.

I am here. Where have you gone?

No answer.

Only the whispering thunder from below.

But we knew now, though we could not answer, we knew because we heard, because we felt, because we wept, we knew that we were; and we remembered other voices.

MAX CAME THE NEXT NIGHT. I sat on the toilet lid to practice, with the bathroom door shut. The FBI men on the other end of the bug got a solid half hour of scales and doublestops, and then a quite good performance of the Hindemith unaccompanied viola sonata. The bathroom being very small and all hard surfaces, the noise I made was really tremendous. Not a good sound, far too much echo, but the sheer volume was contagious, and I played louder as I went on. The man up above knocked on his floor once; but if I have to listen to the weekly All-American Olympic Games at full blast every Sunday morning from his TV set, then he has to accept Paul Hindemith coming up out of his toilet now and then.

When I got tired, I put a wad of cotton over the bug, and came out of the bathroom half-deaf. Simon and Max were on fire. Burning, unconsumed. Simon was scribbling formulae in traction, and Max was pumping his elbows up and down the way he does, like a boxer, and saying “The e-lec-tron emis-sion . . .” through his nose, with his eyes narrowed, and his mind evidently going light-years per second faster than his tongue, because he kept beginning over and saying “The e-lec-tron emis-sion . . .” and pumping his elbows.

Intellectuals at work are very strange to look at. As strange as artists. I never could understand how an audience can sit there and look at a fiddler rolling his eyes and biting his tongue, or a horn player collecting spit, or a pianist like a black cat strapped to an electrified bench, as if what they saw had anything to do with the music.

I damped the fires with a quart of black-market beer—the legal kind is better, but I never have enough ration stamps for beer; I’m not thirsty enough to go without eating—and gradually Max and Simon cooled down. Max would have stayed talking all night, but I drove him out because Simon was looking tired.

I put a new battery in the radio and left it playing in the bathroom, and blew out the candle and lay and talked with Simon; he was too excited to sleep. He said that Max had solved the problems that were bothering them before Simon was sent to Camp, and had fitted Simon’s equations to (as Simon put it) the bare facts, which means they have achieved “direct energy conversion.” Ten or twelve people have worked on it at different times since Simon published the theoretical part of it when he was twenty-two. The physicist Ann Jones had pointed out right away that the simplest practical application of the theory would be to build a “sun tap,” a device for collecting and storing solar energy, only much cheaper and better than the U.S.G. Sola-Heetas that some rich people have on their houses. And it would have been simple, only they kept hitting the same snag. Now Max has got around the snag.

I said that Simon published the theory, but that is inaccurate. Of course he’s never been able to publish any of his papers, in print; he’s not a federal employee and doesn’t have a government clearance. But it did get circulated in what the scientists and poets call Sammy’s-dot, that is, just handwritten or hectographed. It’s an old joke that the FBI arrests everybody with purple fingers, because they have either been hectographing Sammy’s-dots, or they have impetigo.

Anyhow, Simon was on top of the mountain that night. His true joy is in the pure math; but he had been working with Clara and Max and the others in this effort to materialize the theory for ten years, and a taste of material victory is a good thing, once in a lifetime.

I asked him to explain what the sun tap would mean to the masses, with me as a representative mass. He explained that it means we can tap solar energy for power, using a device that’s easier to build than a jar battery. The efficiency and storage capacity are such that about ten minutes of sunlight will power an apartment complex like ours, heat and lights and elevators and all, for twenty-four hours; and no pollution, particulate, thermal, or radioactive. “There isn’t any danger of using up the sun?” I asked. He took it soberly—it was a stupid question, but after all not so long ago people thought there wasn’t any danger of using up the Earth—and said no, because we wouldn’t be pulling out energy, as we did when we mined and lumbered and split atoms, but just using the energy that comes to us anyhow: as the plants, the trees and grass and rosebushes, always have done. “You could call it Flower Power,” he said. He was high, high up on the mountain, ski-jumping in the sunlight.

“The State owns us,” he said, “because the corporative State has a monopoly on power sources, and there’s not enough power to go around. But now, anybody could build a generator on their roof that would furnish enough power to light a city.”

I looked out the window at the dark city.

“We could completely decentralize industry and agriculture. Technology could serve life instead of serving capital. We could each run our own life. Power is power! . . . The State is a machine. We could unplug the machine, now. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. But that’s true only when there’s a price on power. When groups can keep the power to themselves; when they can use physical power-to in order to exert spiritual power-over; when might makes right. But if power is free? If everybody is equally mighty? Then everybody’s got to find a better way of showing that he’s right . . . .”

“That’s what Mr. Nobel thought when he invented dynamite,” I said. “Peace on earth.”

He slid down the sunlit slope a couple of thousand feet and stopped beside me in a spray of snow, smiling. “Skull at the banquet,” he said, “finger writing on the wall. Be still! Look, don’t you see the sun shining on the Pentagon, all the roofs are off, the sun shines at last into the corridors of power . . . . And they shrivel up, they wither away. The green grass grows through the carpets of the Oval Room, the Hot Line is disconnected for nonpayment of the bill. The first thing we’ll do is build an electrified fence outside the electrified fence around the White House. The inner one prevents unauthorized persons from getting in. The outer one will prevent authorized persons from getting out . . . .”

Of course he was bitter. Not many people come out of prison sweet.

But it was cruel, to be shown this great hope, and to know that there was no hope for it. He did know that. He knew it right along. He knew that there was no mountain, that he was skiing on the wind.

THE TINY LIGHTS OF THE lantern-creatures died out one by one, sank away. The distant lonely voices were silent. The cold, slow currents flowed, vacant, only shaken from time to time by a shifting in the abyss.

It was dark again, and no voice spoke. All dark, dumb, cold.

Then the sun rose.

It was not like the dawns we had begun to remember: the change, manifold and subtle, in the smell and touch of the air; the hush that, instead of sleeping, wakes, holds still, and waits; the appearance of objects, looking gray, vague, and new, as if just created—distant mountains against the eastern sky, one’s own hands, the hoary grass full of dew and shadow, the fold in the edge of a curtain hanging by the window—and then, before one is quite sure that one is indeed seeing again, that the light has returned, that day is breaking, the first, abrupt, sweet stammer of a waking bird. And after that the chorus, voice by voice: This is my nest, this is my tree, this is my egg, this is my day, this is my life, here I am, here I am, hurray for me! I’m here!—No, it wasn’t like that at all, this dawn. It was completely silent, and it was blue.

In the dawns that we had begun to remember, one did not become aware of the light itself, but of the separate objects touched by the light, the things, the world. They were there, visible again, as if visibility were their own property, not a gift from the rising sun.

In this dawn, there was nothing but the light itself. Indeed there was not even light, we would have said, but only color: blue.

There was no compass bearing to it. It was not brighter in the east. There was no east or west. There was only up and down, below and above. Below was dark. The blue light came from above. Brightness fell. Beneath, where the shaking thunder had stilled, the brightness died away through violet into blindness.

We, arising, watched light fall.

In a way, it was more like an ethereal snowfall than like a sunrise. The light seemed to be in discrete particles, infinitesimal flecks, slowly descending, faint, fainter than flecks of fine snow on a dark night, and tinier, but blue. A soft, penetrating blue tending to the violet, the color of the shadows in an iceberg, the color of a streak of sky between gray clouds on a winter afternoon before snow: faint in intensity but vivid in hue: the color of the remote, the color of the cold, the color farthest from the sun.

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, THEY HELD a scientific congress in our room. Clara and Max came, of course, and the engineer Phil Drum and three others who had worked on the sun tap. Phil Drum was very pleased with himself because he had actually built one of the things, a solar cell, and brought it along. I don’t think it had occurred to either Max or Simon to build one. Once they knew it could be done, they were satisfied and wanted to get on with something else. But Phil unwrapped his baby with a lot of flourish, and people made remarks like, “Mr. Watson, will you come here a minute,” and “Hey, Wilbur, you’re off the ground!” and “I say, nasty mould you’ve got there, Alec, why don’t you throw it out?” and “Ugh, ugh, burns, burns, wow, ow,” the latter from Max, who does look a little pre-Mousterian. Phil explained that he had exposed the cell for one minute at four in the afternoon up in Washington Park during a light rain. The lights were back on on the West Side since Thursday, so we could test it without being conspicuous.

We turned off the lights, after Phil had wired the table-lamp cord to the cell. He turned on the lamp switch. The bulb came on, about twice as bright as before, at its full forty watts—city power of course was never full strength. We all looked at it. It was a dime-store table lamp with a metallized gold base and a white plasticloth shade.

“Brighter than a thousand suns,” Simon murmured from the bed.

“Could it be,” said Clara Edmonds, “that we physicists have known sin—and have come out the other side?”

“It really wouldn’t be any good at all for making bombs with,” Max said dreamily.

“Bombs,” Phil Drum said with scorn. “Bombs are obsolete. Don’t you realize that we could move a mountain with this kind of power? I mean pick up Mount Hood, move it, and set it down. We could thaw Antarctica, we could freeze the Congo. We could sink a continent. Give me a fulcrum and I’ll move the world. Well, Archimedes, you’ve got your fulcrum. The sun.”

“Christ,” Simon said, “the radio, Belle!”

The bathroom door was shut and I had put cotton over the bug, but he was right; if they were going to go ahead at this rate there had better be some added static. And though I liked watching their faces in the clear light of the lamp—they all had good, interesting faces, well worn, like the handles of wooden tools or the rocks in a running stream—I did not much want to listen to them talk tonight. Not because I wasn’t a scientist, that made no difference. And not because I disagreed or disapproved or disbelieved anything they said. Only because it grieved me terribly, their talking. Because they couldn’t rejoice aloud over a job done and a discovery made, but had to hide there and whisper about it. Because they couldn’t go out into the sun.

I went into the bathroom with my viola and sat on the toilet lid and did a long set of sautille exercises. Then I tried to work at the Forrest trio, but it was too assertive. I played the solo part from Harold in Italy, which is beautiful, but it wasn’t quite the right mood either. They were still going strong in the other room. I began to improvise.

After a few minutes in E-minor, the light over the shaving mirror began to flicker and dim; then it died. Another outage. The table lamp in the other room did not go out, being connected with the sun, not with the twenty-three atomic fission plants that power the Greater Portland Area. Within two seconds somebody had switched it off, too, so that we shouldn’t be the only window in the West Hills left alight; and I could hear them rooting for candles and rattling matches. I went on improvising in the dark. Without light, when you couldn’t see all the hard shiny surfaces of things, the sound seemed softer and less muddled. I went on, and it began to shape up. All the laws of harmonics sang together when the bow came down. The strings of the viola were the cords of my own voice, tightened by sorrow, tuned to the pitch of joy. The melody created itself out of air and energy, it raised up the valleys, and the mountains and hills were made low, and the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. And the music went out to the dark sea and sang in the darkness, over the abyss.

When I came out, they were all sitting there and none of them was talking. Max had been crying. I could see little candle flames in the tears around his eyes. Simon lay flat on the bed in the shadows, his eyes closed. Phil Drum sat hunched over, holding the solar cell in his hands.

I loosened the pegs, put the bow and the viola in the case, and cleared my throat. It was embarrassing. I finally said, “I’m sorry.”

One of the women spoke: Rose Abramski, a private student of Simon’s, a big shy woman who could hardly speak at all unless it was in mathematical symbols. “I saw it,” she said. “I saw it. I saw the white towers, and the water streaming down their sides, and running back down to the sea. And the sunlight shining in the streets, after ten thousand years of darkness.”

“I heard them,” Simon said, very low, from the shadow. “I heard their voices.”

“Oh, Christ! Stop it!” Max cried out, and got up and went blundering out into the unlit hall, without his coat. We heard him running down the stairs.

“Phil,” said Simon, lying there, “could we raise up the white towers, with our lever and our fulcrum?”

After a long silence Phil Drum answered, “We have the power to do it.”

“What else do we need?” Simon said. “What else do we need, besides power?”

Nobody answered him.

THE BLUE CHANGED. IT BECAME brighter, lighter, and at the same time thicker: impure. The ethereal luminosity of blue-violet turned to turquoise, intense and opaque. Still we could not have said that everything was now turquoise-colored, for there were still no things. There was nothing, except the color of turquoise.

The change continued. The opacity became veined and thinned. The dense, solid color began to appear translucent, transparent. Then it seemed as if we were in the heart of a sacred jade, or the brilliant crystal of a sapphire or an emerald.

As at the inner structure of a crystal, there was no motion. But there was something else, now, to see. It was as if we saw the motionless, elegant inward structure of the molecules of a precious stone. Planes and angles appeared about us, shadowless and clear in that even, glowing, blue-green light.

These were the walls and towers of the city, the streets, the windows, the gates.

We knew them, but we did not recognize them. We did not dare to recognize them. It had been so long. And it was so strange. We had used to dream, when we lived in this city. We had lain down, nights, in the rooms behind the windows, and slept, and dreamed. We had all dreamed of the ocean, of the deep sea. Were we not dreaming now?

Sometimes the thunder and tremor deep below us rolled again, but it was faint now, far away; as far away as our memory of the thunder and the tremor and the fire and the towers falling, long ago. Neither the sound nor the memory frightened us. We knew them.

The sapphire light brightened overhead to green, almost green-gold. We looked up. The tops of the highest towers were hard to see, glowing in the radiance of light. The streets and doorways were darker, more clearly defined.

In one of those long, jewel-dark streets, something was moving—something not composed of planes and angles, but of curves and arcs. We all turned to look at it, slowly, wondering as we did so at the slow ease of our own motion, our freedom. Sinuous, with a beautiful flowing, gathering, rolling movement, now rapid and now tentative, the thing drifted across the street from a blank garden wall to the recess of a door. There, in the dark blue shadow, it was hard to see for a while. We watched. A pale blue curve appeared at the top of the doorway. A second followed, and a third. The moving thing clung or hovered there, above the door, like a swaying knot of silvery cords or a boneless hand, one arched finger pointing carelessly to something above the lintel of the door, something like itself, but motionless—a carving. A carving in jade light. A carving in stone.

Delicately and easily, the long curving tentacle followed the curves of the carved figure, the eight petal-limbs, the round eyes. Did it recognize its image?

The living one swung suddenly, gathered its curves in a loose knot, and darted away down the street, swift and sinuous. Behind it a faint cloud of darker blue hung for a minute and dispersed, revealing again the carved figure above the door: the sea-flower, the cuttlefish, quick, great-eyed, graceful, evasive, the cherished sign, carved on a thousand walls, worked into the design of cornices, pavements, handles, lids of jewel boxes, canopies, tapestries, tabletops, gateways.

Down another street, about the level of the first-floor windows, came a flickering drift of hundreds of motes of silver. With a single motion, all turned toward the cross street, and glittered off into the dark blue shadows.

There were shadows, now.

We looked up, up from the flight of silverfish, up from the streets where the jade-green currents flowed and the blue shadows fell. We moved and looked up, yearning, to the high towers of our city. They stood, the fallen towers. They glowed in the ever-brightening radiance, not blue or blue-green, up there, but gold. Far above them lay a vast, circular, trembling brightness: the sun’s light on the surface of the sea.

We are here. When we break through the bright circle into life, the water will break and stream white down the white sides of the towers, and run down the steep streets back into the sea. The water will glitter in dark hair, on the eyelids of dark eyes, and dry to a thin white film of salt.

We are here.

Whose voice? Who called to us?

HE WAS WITH ME FOR twelve days. On January 28th the ’crats came from the Bureau of Health, Education, and Welfare and said that since he was receiving Unemployment Compensation while suffering from an untreated illness, the government must look after him and restore him to health, because health is the inalienable right of the citizens of a democracy. He refused to sign the consent forms, so the chief health officer signed them. He refused to get up, so two of the policemen pulled him up off the bed. He started to try to fight them. The chief health officer pulled his gun and said that if he continued to struggle he would shoot him for resisting welfare, and arrest me for conspiracy to defraud the government. The man who was holding my arms behind my back said they could always arrest me for unreported pregnancy with intent to form a nuclear family. At that, Simon stopped trying to get free. It was really all he was trying to do, not to fight them, just to get his arms free. He looked at me, and they took him out.

He is in the federal hospital in Salem. I have not been able to find out whether he is in the regular hospital or the mental wards.

It was on the radio again yesterday, about the rising land masses in the South Atlantic and the Western Pacific. At Max’s the other night I saw a TV special explaining about geophysical stresses and subsidence and faults. The U.S. Geodetic Service is doing a lot of advertising around town, the most common one is a big billboard that says IT’S NOT OUR FAULT! with a picture of a beaver pointing to a schematic map that shows how even if Oregon has a major earthquake and subsidence as California did last month, it will not affect Portland, or only the western suburbs perhaps. The news also said that they plan to halt the tidal waves in Florida by dropping nuclear bombs where Miami was. Then they will reattach Florida to the mainland with landfill. They are already advertising real estate for housing developments on the landfill. The president is staying at the Mile High White House in Aspen, Colorado. I don’t think it will do him much good. Houseboats down on the Willamette are selling for $500,000. There are no trains or buses running south from Portland, because all the highways were badly damaged by the tremors and landslides last week, so I will have to see if I can get to Salem on foot. I still have the rucksack I bought for the Mount Hood Wilderness Week. I got some dry lima beans and raisins with my Federal Fair Share Super Value Green Stamp minimal ration book for February—it took the whole book—and Phil Drum made me a tiny camp stove powered with the solar cell. I didn’t want to take the Primus, it’s too bulky, and I did want to be able to carry the viola. Max gave me a half pint of brandy. When the brandy is gone I expect I will stuff this notebook into the bottle and put the cap on tight and leave it on a hillside somewhere between here and Salem. I like to think of it being lifted up little by little by the water, and rocking, and going out to the dark sea.

WHERE ARE YOU?

We are here. Where have you gone?

When We Went to See The End of The World

— ROBERT SILVERBERG —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

IT’S NOT SURPRISING THAT IN a long career in science fiction—my first story was published more than sixty years ago—I would have taken more than a few stabs at the end-of-the-world concept myself. In my 1964 novel Time of the Great Freeze I subjected the world to a new ice age; in Conquerors from the Darkness (1965) I afflicted it with an invasion by extraterrestrial beings who drowned the planet beneath a worldwide sea; in At Winter’s End (1988) and its 1990 sequel, The Queen of Springtime, I told of an Earth recovering from an asteroid bombardment that had plunged it into yet another ice age, this one lasting hundreds of thousands of years.

I’ve dealt with the theme in the shorter lengths, too. Perhaps the most familiar of them is the darkly ironic short story “When We Went to See the End of the World,” which I wrote in 1972 for my friend Terry Carr’s series of anthologies of previously unpublished science fiction, Universe. Carr published my “Good News from the Vatican,” a playful item about the first robot Pope that went on to win a Nebula, in the initial issue of Universe, and a year later, in Universe 2, I was equally playful in this one, although Carr found it necessary to note, in his editorial introduction, “This is a story about the end of the world, but it isn’t funny. If you find traces of an irresponsible grin forming as you read, suppress them. That’s what I did.”

No, it wasn’t meant to be funny, and it isn’t. And, reading it again some forty-five years after I first wrote it, it seems even farther from being comic than it was in its own day.

—R. S.

WHEN WE WENT TO SEE THE END OF THE WORLD

NICK AND JANE WERE GLAD that they had gone to see the end of the world, because it gave them something special to talk about at Mike and Ruby’s party. One always likes to come to a party armed with a little conversation. Mike and Ruby give marvelous parties.

Their home is superb, one of the finest in the neighborhood. It is truly a home for all seasons, all moods. Their very special corner of the world. With more space indoors and out . . . more wide-open freedom. The living room with its exposed ceiling beams is a natural focal point for entertaining. Custom-finished, with a conversation pit and fireplace. There’s also a family room with beamed ceiling and wood paneling . . . plus a study. And a magnificent master suite with twelve-foot dressing room and private bath. Solidly impressive exterior design. Sheltered courtyard. Beautifully wooded one-third acre grounds. Their parties are highlights of any month. Nick and Jane waited until they thought enough people had arrived. Then Jane nudged Nick and Nick said gaily, “You know what we did last week? Hey, we went to see the end of the world!”

“The end of the world?” Henry asked.

“You went to see it?” said Henry’s wife Cynthia.

“How did you manage that?” Paula wanted to know.

“It’s been available since March,” Stan told her. “I think a division of American Express runs it.”

Nick was put out to discover that Stan already knew. Quickly, before Stan could say anything more, Nick said, “Yes, it’s just started. Our travel agent found out for us. What they do is they put you in this machine, it looks like a tiny teeny submarine, you know, with dials and levers up front behind a plastic wall to keep you from touching anything, and they send you into the future. You can charge it with any of the regular credit cards.”

“It must be very expensive,” Marcia said.

“They’re bringing the costs down rapidly,” Jane said.

“Last year only millionaires could afford it. Really, haven’t you heard about it before?”

“What did you see?” Henry asked.

“For a while, just greyness outside the porthole,” said Nick. “And a kind of flickering effect.” Everybody was looking at him. He enjoyed the attention. Jane wore a rapt, loving expression. “Then the haze cleared and a voice said over a loudspeaker that we had now reached the very end of time, when life had become impossible on Earth. Of course, we were sealed into the submarine thing. Only looking out. On this beach, this empty beach. The water a funny grey color with a pink sheen. And then the sun came up. It was red like it sometimes is at sunrise, only it stayed red as it got to the middle of the sky, and it looked lumpy and saggy at the edges. Like a few of us, hah hah. Lumpy and sagging at the edges. A cold wind blowing across the beach.”

“If you were sealed in the submarine, how did you know there was a cold wind?” Cynthia asked.

Jane glared at her. Nick said, “We could see the sand blowing around. And it looked cold. The grey ocean. Like winter.”

“Tell them about the crab,” said Jane.

“Yes, the crab. The last life-form on Earth. It wasn’t really a crab, of course, it was something about two feet wide and a foot high, with thick shiny green armor and maybe a dozen legs and some curving horns coming up, and it moved slowly from right to left in front of us. It took all day to cross the beach. And toward nightfall it died. Its horns went limp and it stopped moving. The tide came in and carried it away. The sun went down. There wasn’t any moon. The stars didn’t seem to be in the right places. The loudspeaker told us we had just seen the death of Earth’s last living thing.”

“How eerie!” cried Paula.

“Were you gone very long?” Ruby asked.

“Three hours,” Jane said. “You can spend weeks or days at the end of the world, if you want to pay extra, but they always bring you back to a point three hours after you went. To hold down the babysitter expenses.”

Mike offered Nick some pot. “That’s really something,” he said. “To have gone to the end of the world. Hey, Ruby, maybe we’ll talk to the travel agent about it.”

Nick took a deep drag and passed the joint to Jane. He felt pleased with himself about the way he had told the story. They had all been very impressed. That swollen red sun, that scuttling crab. The trip had cost more than a month in Japan, but it had been a good investment. He and Jane were the first in the neighborhood who had gone. That was important. Paula was staring at him in awe. Nick knew that she regarded him in a completely different light now. Possibly she would meet him at a motel on Tuesday at lunchtime. Last month she had turned him down but now he had an extra attractiveness for her. Nick winked at her. Cynthia was holding hands with Stan. Henry and Mike both were crouched at Jane’s feet. Mike and Ruby’s twelve-year-old son came into the room and stood at the edge of the conversation pit. He said, “There just was a bulletin on the news. Mutated amoebas escaped from a government research station and got into Lake Michigan. They’re carrying a tissue-dissolving virus and everybody in seven states is supposed to boil their water until further notice.” Mike scowled at the boy and said, “It’s after your bedtime, Timmy.” The boy went out. The doorbell rang. Ruby answered it and returned with Eddie and Fran.

Paula said, “Nick and Jane went to see the end of the world. They’ve just been telling us about it.”

“Gee,” said Eddie, “We did that too, on Wednesday night.”

Nick was crestfallen. Jane bit her lip and asked Cynthia quietly why Fran always wore such flashy dresses. Ruby said, “You saw the whole works, eh? The crab and everything?”

“The crab?” Eddie said. “What crab? We didn’t see the crab.”

“It must have died the time before,” Paula said. “When Nick and Jane were there.”

Mike said, “A fresh shipment of Cuernavaca Lightning is in. Here, have a toke.”

“How long ago did you do it?” Eddie said to Nick.

“Sunday afternoon. I guess we were about the first.”

“Great trip, isn’t it?” Eddie said. “A little somber, though. When the last hill crumbles into the sea.”

“That’s not what we saw,” said Jane. “And you didn’t see the crab? Maybe we were on different trips.”

Mike said, “What was it like for you, Eddie?”

Eddie put his arms around Cynthia from behind. He said, “They put us into this little capsule, with a porthole, you know, and a lot of instruments and—”

“We heard that part,” said Paula. “What did you see?”

“The end of the world,” Eddie said. “When water covers everything. The sun and the moon were in the sky at the same time—”

“We didn’t see the moon at all,” Jane remarked. “It just wasn’t there.”

“It was on one side and the sun was on the other,” Eddie went on. “The moon was closer than it should have been. And a funny color, almost like bronze. And the ocean creeping up. We went halfway around the world and all we saw was ocean. Except in one place, there was this chunk of land sticking up, this hill, and the guide told us it was the top of Mount Everest.” He waved to Fran. “That was groovy, huh, floating in our tin boat next to the top of Mount Everest. Maybe ten feet of it sticking up. And the water rising all the time. Up, up, up. Up and over the top. Glub. No land left. I have to admit it was a little disappointing, except of course the idea of the thing. That human ingenuity can design a machine that can send people billions of years forward in time and bring them back, wow! But there was just this ocean.”

“How strange,” said Jane. “We saw the ocean too, but there was a beach, a kind of nasty beach, and the crab-thing walking along it, and the sun—it was all red, was the sun red when you saw it?”

“A kind of pale green,” Fran said.

“Are you people talking about the end of the world?” Tom asked. He and Harriet were standing by the door taking off their coats. Mike’s son must have let them in. Tom gave his coat to Ruby and said, “Man, what a spectacle!”

“So you did it, too?” Jane asked, a little hollowly.

“Two weeks ago,” said Tom. “The travel agent called and said, Guess what we’re offering now, the end of the goddamned world! With all the extras it didn’t really cost so much. So we went right down there to the office, Saturday, I think—was it a Friday?—the day of the big riot, anyway, when they burned St. Louis—”

“That was a Saturday,” Cynthia said. “I remember I was coming back from the shopping center when the radio said they were using nuclears—”

“Saturday, yes,” Tom said. “And we told them we were ready to go, and off they sent us.”

“Did you see a beach with crabs,” Stan demanded, “or was it a world full of water?”

“Neither one. It was like a big ice age. Glaciers covered everything. No oceans showing, no mountains. We flew clear around the world and it was all a huge snowball. They had floodlights on the vehicle because the sun had gone out.”

“I was sure I could see the sun still hanging up there,” Harriet put in. “Like a ball of cinders in the sky. But the guide said no, nobody could see it.”

“How come everybody gets to visit a different kind of end of the world?” Henry asked. “You’d think there’d be only one kind of end of the world. I mean, it ends, and this is how it ends, and there can’t be more than one way.”

“Could it be fake?” Stan asked. Everybody turned around and looked at him. Nick’s face got very red. Fran looked so mean that Eddie let go of Cynthia and started to rub Fran’s shoulders. Stan shrugged. “I’m not suggesting it is,” he said defensively. “I was just wondering.”

“Seemed pretty real to me,” said Tom. “The sun burned out. A big ball of ice. The atmosphere, you know, frozen. The end of the goddamned world.”

The telephone rang. Ruby went to answer it. Nick asked Paula about lunch on Tuesday. She said yes. “Let’s meet at the motel,” he said, and she grinned. Eddie was making out with Cynthia again. Henry looked very stoned and was having trouble staying awake. Phil and Isabel arrived. They heard Tom and Fran talking about their trips to the end of the world and Isabel said she and Phil had gone only the day before yesterday. “Goddamn,” Tom said, “everybody’s doing it! What was your trip like?”

Ruby came back into the room. “That was my sister calling from Fresno to say she’s safe. Fresno wasn’t hit by the earthquake at all.”

“Earthquake?” Paula asked.

“In California,” Mike told her. “This afternoon. You didn’t know? Wiped out most of Los Angeles and ran right up the coast practically to Monterey. They think it was on account of the underground bomb test in the Mohave Desert.”

“California’s always having such awful disasters,” Marcia said.

“Good thing those amoebas got loose back east,” said Nick. “Imagine how complicated it would be if they had them in LA now too.”

“They will,” Tom said. “Two to one they reproduce by airborne spores.”

“Like the typhoid germs last November,” Jane said.

“That was typhus,” Nick corrected.

“Anyway,” Phil said, “I was telling Tom and Fran about what we saw at the end of the world. It was the sun going nova. They showed it very cleverly, too. I mean, you can’t actually sit around and experience it, on account of the heat and the hard radiation and all. But they give it to you in a peripheral way, very elegant in the McLuhanesque sense of the word. First they take you to a point about two hours before the blowup, right? It’s I don’t know how many jillion years from now, but a long way, anyhow, because the trees are all different, they’ve got blue scales and ropy branches, and the animals are like things with one leg that jump on pogo sticks—”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Cynthia drawled.

Phil ignored her gracefully. “And we didn’t see any sign of human beings, not a house, not a telephone pole, nothing, so I suppose we must have been extinct a long time before. Anyway, they let us look at that for a while. Not getting out of our time machine, naturally, because they said the atmosphere was wrong. Gradually the sun started to puff up. We were nervous—weren’t we, Iz?—I mean, suppose they miscalculated things? This whole trip is a very new concept and things might go wrong. The sun was getting bigger and bigger, and then this thing like an arm seemed to pop out of its left side, a big fiery arm reaching out across space, getting closer and closer. We saw it through smoked glass, like you do an eclipse. They gave us about two minutes of the explosion, and we could feel it getting hot already. Then we jumped a couple of years forward in time. The sun was back to its regular shape, only it was smaller, sort of like a little white sun instead of a big yellow one. And on Earth everything was ashes.”

“Ashes,” Isabel said, with emphasis.

“It looked like Detroit after the union nuked Ford,” Phil said. “Only much, much worse. Whole mountains were melted. The oceans were dried up. Everything was ashes.” He shuddered and took a joint from Mike. “Isabel was crying.”

“The things with one leg,” Isabel said. “I mean, they must have all been wiped out.” She began to sob. Stan comforted her. “I wonder why it’s a different way for everyone who goes,” he said. “Freezing. Or the oceans. Or the sun blowing up. Or the thing Nick and Jane saw.”

“I’m convinced that each of us had a genuine experience in the far future,” said Nick. He felt he had to regain control of the group somehow. It had been so good when he was telling his story, before those others had come. “That is to say, the world suffers a variety of natural calamities, it doesn’t just have one end of the world, and they keep mixing things up and sending people to different catastrophes. But never for a moment did I doubt that I was seeing an authentic event.”

“We have to do it,” Ruby said to Mike. “It’s only three hours. What about calling them first thing Monday and making an appointment for Thursday night?”

“Monday’s the President’s funeral,” Tom pointed out. “The travel agency will be closed.”

“Have they caught the assassin yet?” Fran asked.

“They didn’t mention it on the four o’clock news,” said Stan. “I guess he’ll get away like the last one.”

“Beats me why anybody wants to be President,” Phil said.

Mike put on some music. Nick danced with Paula. Eddie danced with Cynthia. Henry was asleep. Dave, Paula’s husband, was on crutches because of his mugging, and he asked Isabel to sit and talk with him. Tom danced with Harriet even though he was married to her. She hadn’t been out of the hospital more than a few months since the transplant and he treated her extremely tenderly. Mike danced with Fran. Phil danced with Jane. Stan danced with Marcia. Ruby cut in on Eddie and Cynthia. Afterward Tom danced with Jane and Phil danced with Paula. Mike and Ruby’s little girl woke up and came out to say hello. Mike sent her back to bed. Far away there was the sound of an explosion. Nick danced with Paula again, but he didn’t want her to get bored with him before Tuesday, so he excused himself and went to talk with Dave. Dave handled most of Nick’s investments. Ruby said to Mike, “The day after the funeral, will you call the travel agent?” Mike said he would, but Tom said somebody would probably shoot the new President too and there’d be another funeral. These funerals were demolishing the gross national product, Stan observed, on account of how everything had to close all the time. Nick saw Cynthia wake Henry up and ask him sharply if he would take her on the end-of-the-world trip. Henry looked embarrassed. His factory had been blown up at Christmas in a peace demonstration and everybody knew he was in bad shape financially. “You can charge it,” Cynthia said, her fierce voice carrying above the chitchat. “And it’s so beautiful, Henry. The ice. Or the sun exploding. I want to go.”

“Lou and Janet were going to be here tonight, too,” Ruby said to Paula. “But their younger boy came back from Texas with that new kind of cholera and they had to cancel.”

Phil said, “I understand that one couple saw the moon come apart. It got too close to the Earth and split into chunks and the chunks fell like meteors. Smashing everything up, you know. One big piece nearly hit their time machine.”

“I wouldn’t have liked that at all,” Marcia said.

“Our trip was very lovely,” said Jane. “No violent things at all. Just the big red sun and the tide and that crab creeping along the beach. We were both deeply moved.”

“It’s amazing what science can accomplish nowadays,” Fran said.

Mike and Ruby agreed they would try to arrange a trip to the end of the world as soon as the funeral was over. Cynthia drank too much and got sick. Phil, Tom, and Dave discussed the stock market. Harriet told Nick about her operation. Isabel flirted with Mike, tugging her neckline lower. At midnight someone turned on the news. They had some shots of the earthquake and a warning about boiling your water if you lived in the affected states. The President’s widow was shown visiting the last President’s widow to get some pointers for the funeral. Then there was an interview with an executive of the timetrip company. “Business is phenomenal,” he said. “Time-tripping will be the nation’s number one growth industry next year.” The reporter asked him if his company would soon be offering something besides the end-of-the-world trip. “Later on, we hope to,” the executive said. “We plan to apply for Congressional approval soon. But meanwhile the demand for our present offering is running very high. You can’t imagine. Of course, you have to expect apocalyptic stuff to attain immense popularity in times like these.” The reporter said, “What do you mean, times like these?” but as the time-trip man started to reply, he was interrupted by the commercial. Mike shut off the set. Nick discovered that he was extremely depressed. He decided that it was because so many of his friends had made the journey, and he had thought he and Jane were the only ones who had. He found himself standing next to Marcia and tried to describe the way the crab had moved, but Marcia only shrugged. No one was talking about time-trips now. The party had moved beyond that point. Nick and Jane left quite early and went right to sleep, without making love. The next morning the Sunday paper wasn’t delivered because of the Bridge Authority strike, and the radio said that the mutant amoebas were proving harder to eradicate than originally anticipated. They were spreading into Lake Superior and everyone in the region would have to boil all their drinking water. Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.

The Wind And The Rain

— ROBERT SILVERBERG —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

SHARP-EYED READERS WILL HAVE NOTICED that Brian Aldiss is not the only writer who has two stories in this collection. As I noted in the introduction to the second Aldiss story, there’s plenty of precedent for using two and even three stories by the same writer in a single science-fiction anthology—especially if the stories fit the theme of that anthology. Certainly the two Aldiss stories do; and, after puzzling over which of the two most appropriate Silverberg stories on the theme of the apocalypse I should choose for this book, I invoked the imperial editorial privilege and put both of them in, and so be it.

I must have been in an apocalyptic mood indeed in the early years of the troubled decade of the seventies, because I wrote “The Wind and the Rain” just a few months after the story that precedes it here, “When We Went to See the End of the World.” It was published in 1973 in an anthology called Saving Worlds, edited by Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd, and looks back on our unhappy era from the point of view of visitors from the distant future who have come to reclaim our ravaged planet from our contemporary environmental excesses. It is a grim tale, but, like so many of these apocalyptic fictions, it does manage to sound a note, however faint, of hope.

—R. S.

THE WIND AND THE RAIN

THE PLANET CLEANSES ITSELF. THAT is the important thing to remember, at moments when we become too pleased with ourselves. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. The action of the wind and the rain, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, the vigorous rivers flushing out the choked and stinking lakes—these are all natural rhythms, all healthy manifestations of universal harmony. Of course, we are here too. We do our best to hurry the process along. But we are only auxiliaries, and we know it. We must not exaggerate the value of our work. False pride is worse than a sin: it is a foolishness. We do not deceive ourselves into thinking we are important. If we were not here at all, the planet would repair itself anyway within twenty to fifty million years. It is estimated that our presence cuts that time down by somewhat more than half.

THE UNCONTROLLED RELEASE OF METHANE into the atmosphere was one of the most serious problems. Methane is a colorless, odorless gas, sometimes known as “swamp gas.” Its components are carbon and hydrogen. Much of the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn consists of methane. (Jupiter and Saturn have never been habitable by human beings.) A small amount of methane was always normally present in the atmosphere of Earth. However, the growth of human population produced a consequent increase in the supply of methane. Much of the methane released into the atmosphere came from swamps and coal mines. A great deal of it came from Asian rice fields fertilized with human or animal waste; methane is a by-product of the digestive process.

The surplus methane escaped into the lower stratosphere, from ten to thirty miles above the surface of the planet, where a layer of ozone molecules once existed. Ozone, formed of three oxygen atoms, absorbs the harmful ultraviolet radiation that the sun emits. By reacting with free oxygen atoms in the stratosphere, the intrusive methane reduced the quantity available for ozone formation. Moreover, methane reactions in the stratosphere yielded water vapor that further depleted the ozone. This methane-induced exhaustion of the ozone content of the stratosphere permitted the unchecked ultraviolet bombardment of the Earth, with a consequent rise in the incidence of skin cancer.

A major contributor to the methane increase was the flatulence of domesticated cattle. According to the US Department of Agriculture, domesticated ruminants in the late twentieth century were generating more than eighty-five million tons of methane a year. Yet nothing was done to check the activities of these dangerous creatures. Are you amused by the idea of a world destroyed by herds of farting cows? It must not have been amusing to the people of the late twentieth century. However, the extinction of domesticated ruminants shortly helped to reduce the impact of this process.

TODAY WE MUST INJECT COLORED fluids into a major river. Edith, Bruce, Paul, Elaine, Oliver, Ronald, and I have been assigned to this task. Most members of the team believe the river is the Mississippi, although there is some evidence that it may be the Nile. Oliver, Bruce, and Edith believe it is more likely to be the Nile than the Mississippi, but they defer to the opinion of the majority. The river is wide and deep and its color is black in some places and dark green in others. The fluids are computer mixed on the east bank of the river in a large factory erected by a previous reclamation team. We supervise their passage into the river. First we inject the red fluid, then the blue, then the yellow; they have different densities and form parallel stripes running for many hundreds of kilometers in the water. We are not certain whether these fluids are active healing agents—that is, substances which dissolve the solid pollutants lining the riverbed—or merely serve as markers permitting further chemical analysis of the river by the orbiting satellite system. It is not necessary for us to understand what we are doing, so long as we follow instructions explicitly. Elaine jokes about going swimming. Bruce says, “How absurd. This river is famous for deadly fish that will strip the flesh from your bones.” We all laugh at that. Fish? Here? What fish could be as deadly as the river itself? This water would consume our flesh if we entered it, and probably dissolve our bones as well. I scribbled a poem yesterday and dropped it in, and the paper vanished instantly.

IN THE EVENINGS WE WALK along the beach and have philosophical discussions. The sunsets on this coast are embellished by rich tones of purple, green, crimson, and yellow. Sometimes we cheer when a particularly beautiful combination of atmospheric gases transforms the sunlight. Our mood is always optimistic and gay. We are never depressed by the things we find on this planet. Even devastation can be an art form, can it not? Perhaps it is one of the greatest of all art forms, since an art of destruction consumes its medium, it devours its own epistemological foundations, and in this sublimely nullifying doubling-back upon its origins it far exceeds in moral complexity those forms which are merely productive. That is, I place a higher value on transformative art than on generative art. Is my meaning clear? In any event, since art ennobles and exalts the spirits of those who perceive it, we are exalted and ennobled by the conditions on Earth. We envy those who collaborate to create those extraordinary conditions. We know ourselves to be small-souled folk of a minor latter-day epoch; we lack the dynamic grandeur of energy that enabled our ancestors to commit such depredations. This world is a symphony. Naturally you might argue that to restore a planet takes more energy than to destroy it, but you would be wrong. Nevertheless, though our daily tasks leave us weary and drained, we also feel stimulated and excited, because by restoring this world, the mother-world of mankind, we are in a sense participating in the original splendid process of its destruction. I mean in the sense that the resolution of a dissonant chord participates in the dissonance of that chord.

Now we have come to Tokyo, the capital of the island empire of Japan. See how small the skeletons of the citizens are? That is one way we have of identifying this place as Japan. The Japanese are known to have been people of small stature. Edward’s ancestors were Japanese. He is of small stature. (Edith says his skin should be yellow as well. His skin is just like ours. Why is his skin not yellow?) “See?” Edward cries. “There is Mount Fuji!” It is an extraordinarily beautiful mountain, mantled in white snow. On its slopes one of our archaeological teams is at work, tunneling under the snow to collect samples from the twentieth century strata of chemical residues, dust, and ashes. “Once there were over 75,000 industrial smokestacks around Tokyo,” says Edward proudly, “from which were released hundreds of tons of sulfur, nitrous oxides, ammonia, and carbon gases every day. We should not forget that this city had more than 1,500,000 automobiles as well.” Many of the automobiles are still visible, but they are very fragile, worn to threads by the action of the atmosphere. When we touch them they collapse in puffs of gray smoke. Edward, who has studied his heritage well, tells us, “It was not uncommon for the density of carbon monoxide in the air here to exceed the permissible levels by factors of 250 per cent on mild summer days. Owing to atmospheric conditions, Mount Fuji was visible only one day of every nine. Yet no one showed dismay.” He conjures up for us a picture of his small, industrious yellow ancestors toiling cheerfully and unremittingly in their poisonous environment. The Japanese, he insists, were able to maintain and even increase their gross national product at a time when other nationalities had already begun to lose ground in the global economic struggle because of diminished population owing to unfavorable ecological factors. And so on and so on. After a time we grow bored with Edward’s incessant boasting. “Stop boasting,” Oliver tells him, “or we will expose you to the atmosphere.” We have much dreary work to do here. Paul and I guide the huge trenching machines; Oliver and Ronald follow, planting seeds. Almost immediately, strange angular shrubs spring up. They have shiny bluish leaves and long crooked branches. One of them seized Elaine by the throat yesterday and might have hurt her seriously had Bruce not uprooted it. We were not upset. This is merely one phase in the long, slow process of repair. There will be many such incidents. Some day cherry trees will blossom in this place.

THIS IS THE POEM THAT the river ate:

DESTRUCTION

I. NOUNS. DESTRUCTION, DESOLATION, WRECK, wreckage, ruin, ruination, rack and ruin, smash, smashup, demolition, demolishment, ravagement, havoc, ravage, dilapidation, decimation, blight, breakdown, consumption, dissolution, obliteration, overthrow, spoilage; mutilation, disintegration, undoing, pulverization; sabotage, vandalism; annulment, damnation, extinguishment, extinction; invalidation, nullification, shatterment, shipwreck; annihilation, disannulment, discreation, extermination, extirpation, obliteration, perdition, subversion.

II. VERBS. DESTROY, WRECK, RUIN, ruinate, smash, demolish, raze, ravage, gut, dilapidate, decimate, blast, blight, break down, consume, dissolve, overthrow; mutilate, disintegrate, unmake, pulverize; sabotage, vandalize, annul, blast, blight, damn, dash, extinguish, invalidate, nullify, quell, quench, scuttle, shatter, shipwreck, torpedo, smash, spoil, undo, void; annihilate, devour, disannul, discreate, exterminate, obliterate, extirpate, subvert; corrode, erode, sap, undermine, waste, waste away, whittle away (or down); eat away, canker, gnaw; wear away, abrade, batter, excoriate, rust.

III. ADJECTIVES. DESTRUCTIVE, RUINOUS, VANDALISTIC, baneful, cutthroat, fell, lethiferous, pernicious, slaughterous, predatory, sinistrous, nihilistic; corrosive, erosive, cankerous, caustic, abrasive.

“I validate,” says Ethel.

“I unravage,” says Oliver.

“I integrate,” says Paul.

“I devandalize,” says Elaine.

“I unshatter,” says Bruce.

“‘I unscuttle,” says Edward.

“I discorrode,” says Ronald.

“I undesolate,” says Edith.

“I create,” say I.

WE RECONSTITUTE. WE RENEW. WE repair. We reclaim. We refurbish. We restore. We renovate. We rebuild. We reproduce. We redeem. We reintegrate. We replace. We reconstruct. We retrieve. We revivify. We resurrect. We fix, overhaul, mend, put in repair, retouch, tinker, cobble, patch, darn, staunch, caulk, splice. We celebrate our successes by energetic and lusty singing. Some of us copulate.

HERE IS AN OUTSTANDING EXAMPLE of the dark humor of the ancients. At a place called Richland, Washington, there was an installation that manufactured plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. This was done in the name of “national security,” that is, to enhance and strengthen the safety of the United States of America and render its inhabitants carefree and hopeful. In a relatively short span of time these activities produced approximately fifty-five million gallons of concentrated radioactive waste. This material was so intensely hot that it would boil spontaneously for decades, and would retain a virulently toxic character for many thousands of years. The presence of so much dangerous waste posed a severe environmental threat to a large area of the United States. How, then, to dispose of this waste? An appropriately comic solution was devised. The plutonium installation was situated in a seismically unstable area located along the earthquake belt that rings the Pacific Ocean. A storage site was chosen nearby, directly above a fault line that had produced a violent earthquake half a century earlier. Here 140 steel and concrete tanks were constructed just below the surface of the ground and some 240 feet above the water table of the Columbia River, from which a densely populated region derived its water supply. Into these tanks the boiling radioactive wastes were poured: a magnificent gift to future generations. Within a few years the true subtlety of the jest became apparent when the first small leaks were detected in the tanks. Some observers predicted that no more than ten to twenty years would pass before the great heat caused the seams of the tanks to burst, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere or permitting radioactive fluids to escape into the river. The designers of the tanks maintained, though, that they were sturdy enough to last at least a century. It will be noted that this was something less than one percent of the known half-life of the materials placed in the tanks. Because of discontinuities in the records, we are unable to determine which estimate was more nearly correct. It should be possible for our decontamination squads to enter the affected regions in 800 to 1300 years. This episode arouses tremendous admiration in me. How much gusto, how much robust wit, those old ones must have had!

WE ARE GRANTED A HOLIDAY so we may go to the mountains of Uruguay to visit the site of one of the last human settlements, perhaps the very last. It was discovered by a reclamation team several hundred years ago and has been set aside, in its original state, as a museum for the tourists who one day will wish to view the mother-world. One enters through a lengthy tunnel of glossy pink brick. A series of airlocks prevents the outside air from penetrating. The village itself, nestling between two craggy spires, is shielded by a clear shining dome. Automatic controls maintain its temperature at a constant mild level. There were a thousand inhabitants. We can view them in the spacious plazas, in the taverns, and in places of recreation. Family groups remain together, often with their pets. A few carry umbrellas. Everyone is in an unusually fine state of preservation. Many of them are smiling. It is not yet known why these people perished. Some died in the act of speaking, and scholars have devoted much effort, so far without success, to the task of determining and translating the last words still frozen on their lips. We are not allowed to touch anyone, but we may enter their homes and inspect their possessions and toilet furnishings. I am moved almost to tears, as are several of the others. “Perhaps these are our very ancestors,” Ronald exclaims. But Bruce declares scornfully, “You say ridiculous things. Our ancestors must have escaped from here long before the time these people lived.” Just outside the settlement I find a tiny glistening bone, possibly the shinbone of a child, possibly part of a dog’s tail. “May I keep it?” I ask our leader. But he compels me to donate it to the museum.

THE ARCHIVES YIELD MUCH THAT is fascinating. For example, this fine example of ironic distance in ecological management. In the ocean off a place named California were tremendous forests of a giant seaweed called kelp, housing a vast and intricate community of maritime creatures. Sea urchins lived on the ocean floor, 100 feet down, amid the holdfasts that anchored the kelp. Furry aquatic mammals known as sea otters fed on the urchins. The Earth people removed the otters because they had some use for their fur. Later, the kelp began to die. Forests many square miles in diameter vanished. This had serious commercial consequences, for the kelp was valuable and so were many of the animal forms that lived in it. Investigation of the ocean floor showed a great increase in sea urchins. Not only had their natural enemies, the otters, been removed, but the urchins were taking nourishment from the immense quantities of organic matter in the sewage discharges dumped into the ocean by the Earth people. Millions of urchins were nibbling at the holdfasts of the kelp, uprooting the huge plants and killing them. When an oil tanker accidentally released its cargo into the sea, many urchins were killed and the kelp began to reestablish itself. But this proved to be an impractical means of controlling the urchins. Encouraging the otters to return was suggested, but there was not a sufficient supply of living otters. The kelp foresters of California solved their problem by dumping quicklime into the sea from barges. This was fatal to the urchins; once they were dead, healthy kelp plants were brought from other parts of the sea and embedded to become the nucleus of a new forest. After a while the urchins returned and began to eat the kelp again. More quicklime was dumped. The urchins died and new kelp was planted. Later, it was discovered that the quicklime was having harmful effects on the ocean floor itself, and other chemicals were dumped to counteract those effects. All of this required great ingenuity and a considerable outlay of energy and resources. Edward thinks there was something very Japanese about these maneuvers. Ethel points out that the kelp trouble would never have happened if the Earth people had not originally removed the otters. How naïve Ethel is! She has no understanding of the principles of irony. Poetry bewilders her also. Edward refuses to sleep with Ethel now.

IN THE FINAL CENTURIES OF their era the people of Earth succeeded in paving the surface of their planet almost entirely with a skin of concrete and metal. We must pry much of this up so that the planet may start to breathe again. It would be easy and efficient to use explosives or acids, but we are not overly concerned with ease and efficiency; besides, there is great concern that explosives or acids may do further ecological harm here. Therefore we employ large machines that insert prongs in the great cracks that have developed in the concrete. Once we have lifted the paved slabs they usually crumble quickly. Clouds of concrete dust blow freely through the streets of these cities, covering the stumps of the buildings with a fine, pure coating of grayish-white powder. The effect is delicate and refreshing. Paul suggested yesterday that we may be doing ecological harm by setting free this dust. I became frightened at the idea and reported him to the leader of our team. Paul will be transferred to another group.

TOWARD THE END HERE THEY all wore breathing suits, similar to ours but even more comprehensive. We find these suits lying around everywhere like the discarded shells of giant insects. The most advanced models were complete individual housing units. Apparently it was not necessary to leave one’s suit except to perform such vital functions as sexual intercourse and childbirth. We understand that the reluctance of the Earth people to leave their suits even for those functions, near the close, immensely hastened the decrease in population.

OUR PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSIONS. GOD CREATED this planet. We all agree on that, in a manner of speaking, ignoring for the moment definitions of such concepts as “God” and “created.” Why did He go to so much trouble to bring Earth into being, if it was His intention merely to have it rendered uninhabitable? Did He create mankind especially for this purpose, or did they exercise free will in doing what they did here? Was mankind God’s way of taking vengeance against His own creation? Why would He want to take vengeance against His own creation? Perhaps it is a mistake to approach the destruction of Earth from the moral or ethical standpoint. I think we must see it in purely aesthetic terms, i.e., a self-contained artistic achievement, like a fouetté en tournant or an entrechat-dix, performed for its own sake and requiring no explanations. Only in this way can we understand how the Earth people were able to collaborate so joyfully in their own asphyxiation.

MY TOUR OF DUTY IS almost over. It has been an overwhelming experience; I will never be the same. I must express my gratitude for this opportunity to have seen Earth almost as its people knew it. Its rusted streams, its corroded meadows, its purpled skies, its bluish puddles. The debris, the barren hillsides, the blazing rivers. Soon, thanks to the dedicated work of reclamation teams such as ours, these superficial but beautiful emblems of death will have disappeared. This will be just another world for tourists, of sentimental curiosity but no unique value to the sensibility. How dull that will be: a green and pleasant Earth once more, why, why? The universe has enough habitable planets; at present it has only one Earth. Has all our labor here been an error, then? I sometimes do think it was misguided of us to have undertaken this project. But on the other hand I remind myself of our fundamental irrelevance. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. With us or without us, the planet cleanses itself. The wind, the rain, the tides. We merely help things along.

A RUMOR REACHES US THAT a colony of live Earthmen has been found on the Tibetan plateau. We travel there to see if this is true. Hovering above a vast red empty plain, we see large figures moving slowly about. Are these Earthmen, inside breathing suits of a strange design? We descend. Members of other reclamation teams are already on hand. They have surrounded one of the large creatures. It travels in a wobbly circle, uttering indistinct cries and grunts. Then it comes to a halt, confronting us blankly as if defying us to embrace it. We tip it over; it moves its massive limbs dumbly but is unable to arise. After a brief conference we decide to dissect it. The outer plates lift easily. Inside we find nothing but gears and coils of gleaming wire. The limbs no longer move, although things click and hum within it for quite some time. We are favorably impressed by the durability and resilience of these machines. Perhaps in the distant future such entities will wholly replace the softer and more fragile life forms on all worlds, as they seem to have done on Earth.

THE WIND. THE RAIN. THE TIDES. All sadnesses flow to the sea.

The Screwfly Solution

— JAMES TIPTREE JR. —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

THE WRITER WHOSE SCIENCE-FICTION STORIES were published under the name of “James Tiptree Jr.” was born in Chicago in 1915 as Alice Bradley; and there began one of the most unusual lives of the twentieth century. Her mother was the novelist and travel writer Mary Hastings Bradley, and her father was Herbert Bradley, a lawyer and naturalist. They traveled widely, taking young Alice with her: a photograph taken when she was about six shows her in East Africa, posing as a young white goddess before a group of Kikuyu tribesmen.

After a brief early marriage and activities as a painter and an art critic for a Chicago newspaper, she enlisted in the US Army Air Force in 1942, working in the photo-intelligence group, and eventually attained the rank of major. After the war she and her second husband, Huntington Sheldon, briefly operated a poultry farm, which proved not to be a good idea. In 1952 they both accepted invitations to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, though she left it after a few years to complete her unfinished work for an undergraduate degree and then enrolled in the psychology department of George Washington University for doctoral studies that led to her obtaining a PhD in 1967, with a dissertation involving perception in rats. Along the way she had turned to writing fiction as a sideline, her first story appearing in the New Yorker in 1946 under the name of “Alice Bradley.” But science fiction had always interested her, and in 1968 she commenced the publication of a series of brilliant s-f pieces, beginning with “Birth of a Salesman” in Analog Science Fiction.

That story, and those that quickly followed it, appeared under the Tiptree byline, the name having been taken from that of a brand of marmalade. As for the “James,” she said many years later, “A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” She stayed away from the world of science-fiction writers except via correspondence, and, since no one in the science-fiction world had ever met “him” or knew anything else about “him,” the rumor spread that “Tiptree” was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency—a male agent, of course—because “he” was known to live in Virginia, close by CIA headquarters. She made no attempt to deny this. A very few discerning readers, seeing a feminist subtext in much of “Tiptree’s” work, offered the hypothesis that the stories had actually been written by a woman, but that theory was generally deemed improbable. Her stories, dealing knowingly, as they did, with machinery and weaponry and other “masculine” things, and told in a brisk, virile tone, provided little reason for anyone to think they were reading the work of a woman. Among those who shook the idea off was Robert Silverberg, who in 1975, in an introduction to a collection of Tiptree stories, raised and brusquely dismissed it, saying, “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” He bolstered his argument with the observation that there are distinct differences between the writing of men and women, noting that nobody could ever think the novels of Jane Austen had been written by a man or those of Ernest Hemingway by a woman. Tiptree, who had seen my introduction before publication, said nothing to contradict me.

Silverberg may have been right about Austen and Hemingway, but he was most egregiously wrong about Tiptree, as was revealed almost immediately when Mary Hastings Bradley died and an ingenious Tiptree scholar, picking up clues from her obituary, was able to demonstrate that Alice Bradley, her only daughter, was in fact the person who had written the science-fiction tales of James Tiptree Jr. Alice Sheldon, as she was then, quickly confirmed the story. (And sent me a gracious letter of apology for having led me into such a public embarrassment. She accompanied it with a box of Tiptree marmalade.)

From then until her death in 1987, Alice Sheldon continued to write prolifically under the Tiptree name, gathering praise and awards in great abundance. So prolific was she, in fact, that she found it necessary to adopt a second pseudonym, “Raccoona Sheldon,” which was the name under which “The Screwfly Solution” appeared in the June 1977 issue of Analog. With the permission of her estate I have chosen to reprint it as a Tiptree story, which it most definitely is, presenting a diabolically clever method for the obliteration of the human race that I suspect had never occurred to anyone before.

—R. S.

THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION

THE YOUNG MAN SITTING AT 2°N, 75°W, sent a casually venomous glance up at the nonfunctional shoofly ventilador and went on reading his letter. He was sweating heavily, stripped to his shorts in the hotbox of what passed for a hotel room in Cuyápan.

HOW DO OTHER WIVES DO IT? I stay busy-busy with the Ann Arbor grant review-programs and the seminar, saying brightly “Oh yes, Alan is in Colombia setting up a biological pest-control program, isn’t it wonderful?” But inside I imagine you surrounded by nineteen-year-old raven-haired cooing beauties, every one panting with social dedication and filthy rich. And forty inches of bosom busting out of her delicate lingerie. I even figured it in centimeters, that’s 101.6 centimeters of busting. Oh, darling, darling, do what you want only come home safe.

Alan grinned fondly, briefly imagining the only body he longed for. His girl, his magic Anne. Then he got up to open the window another cautious notch. A long pale mournful face looked in—a goat. The room opened on the goat pen, the stench was vile. Air, anyway. He picked up the letter.

Everything is just about as you left it, except that the Peedsville horror seems to be getting worse. They’re calling it the Sons of Adam cult now. Why can’t they do something, even if it is a religion? The Red Cross has set up a refugee camp in Ashton, Georgia. Imagine, refugees in the U.S.A. I heard two little girls were carried out all slashed up. Oh, Alan.

Which reminds me, Barney came over with a wad of clippings he wants me to send you. I’m putting them in a separate envelope; I know what happens to very fat letters in foreign POs. He says, in case you don’t get them, what do the following have in common? Peedsville, São Paulo, Phoenix, San Diego, Shanghai, New Delhi, Tripoli, Brisbane, Johannesburg, and Lubbock, Texas. He says the hint is, remember where the Intertropical Convergence Zone is now. That makes no sense to me, maybe it will to your superior ecological brain. All I could see about the clippings was that they were fairly horrible accounts of murders or massacres of women. The worst was the New Delhi one, about “rafts of female corpses” in the river. The funniest (!) was the Texas Army officer who shot his wife, three daughters, and his aunt, because God told him to clean the place up.

Barney’s such an old dear, he’s coming over Sunday to help me take off the downspout and see what’s blocking it. He’s dancing on air right now; since you left, his spruce budworm-moth antipheromone program finally paid off. You know he tested over 2,000 compounds? Well, it seems that good old 2,097 really works. When I asked him what it does he just giggles, you know how shy he is with women. Anyway, it seems that a one-shot spray program will save the forests, without harming a single other thing. Birds and people can eat it all day, he says.

Well, sweetheart, that’s all the news except Amy goes back to Chicago to school Sunday. The place will be a tomb, I’ll miss her frightfully in spite of her being at the stage where I’m her worst enemy. The sullen sexy subteens, Angie says. Amy sends love to her daddy. I send you my whole heart, all that words can’t say.

—Your Anne

Alan put the letter safely in his note file and glanced over the rest of the thin packet of mail, refusing to let himself dream of home and Anne. Barney’s “fat envelope” wasn’t there. He threw himself on the rumpled bed, yanking off the light cord a minute before the town generator went off for the night. In the darkness the list of places Barney had mentioned spread themselves around a misty globe that turned, troublingly, in his mind. Something . . .

But then the memory of the hideously parasitized children he had worked with at the clinic that day took possession of his thoughts. He set himself to considering the data he must collect.

Look for the vulnerable link in the behavioral chain—how often Barney—Dr. Barnhard Braithwaite—had pounded it into his skull. Where was it, where? In the morning he would start work on bigger canefly cages. . . .

At that moment, five thousand miles north, Anne was writing.

OH, DARLING, DARLING, YOUR FIRST three letters are here, they all came together. I knew you were writing. Forget what I said about swarthy heiresses, that was all a joke. My darling, I know, I know . . . us. Those dreadful canefly larvae, those poor little kids. If you weren’t my husband I’d think you were a saint or something. (I do anyway.)

I have your letters pinned up all over the house, makes it a lot less lonely. No real news here except things feel kind of quiet and spooky. Barney and I got the downspout out, it was full of a big rotted hoard of squirrel nuts. They must have been dropping them down the top, I’ll put a wire over it. (Don’t worry, I’ll use a ladder this time.)

Barney’s in an odd, grim mood. He’s taking this Sons of Adam thing very seriously, it seems he’s going to be on the investigation committee if that ever gets off the ground. The weird part is that nobody seems to be doing anything, as if it’s just too big. Selina Peters has been printing some acid comments, like: When one man kills his wife you call it murder, but when enough do it we call it a life-style. I think it’s spreading, but nobody knows because the media have been asked to downplay it. Barney says it’s being viewed as a form of contagious hysteria. He insisted I send you this ghastly interview, printed on thin paper. It’s not going to be published, of course. The quietness is worse, though, it’s like something terrible was going on just out of sight. After reading Barney’s thing I called up Pauline in San Diego to make sure she was all right. She sounded funny, as if she wasn’t saying everything . . . my own sister. Just after she said things were great she suddenly asked if she could come and stay here awhile next month. I said come right away, but she wants to sell her house first. I wish she’d hurry.

The diesel car is okay now, it just needed its filter changed. I had to go out to Springfield to get one, but Eddie installed it for only $2.50. He’s going to bankrupt his garage.

In case you didn’t guess, those places of Barney’s are all about latitude 30° N or S—the horse latitudes. When I said not exactly, he said remember the Equatorial Convergence Zone shifts in winter, and to add in Libya, Osaka, and a place I forget—wait, Alice Springs, Australia. What has this to do with anything, I asked. He said, “Nothing—I hope.” I leave it to you, great brains like Barney can be weird.

Oh my dearest, here’s all of me to all of you. Your letters make life possible. But don’t feel you have to, I can tell how tired you must be. Just know we’re together, always everywhere.

—Your Anne

Oh PS I had to open this to put Barney’s thing in, it wasn’t the secret police. Here it is. All love again. A.

In the goat-infested room where Alan read this, rain was drumming on the roof. He put the letter to his nose to catch the faint perfume once more, and folded it away. Then he pulled out the yellow flimsy Barney had sent and began to read, frowning.

PEEDSVILLE CULT/SONS OF ADAM SPECIAL. Statement by driver Sgt. Willard Mews, Globe Fork, Ark. We hit the roadblock about 80 miles west of Jacksonville. Major John Heinz of Ashton was expecting us, he gave us an escort of two riot vehicles headed by Capt. T. Parr. Major Heinz appeared shocked to see that the N.I.H. medical team included two women doctors. He warned us in the strongest terms of the danger. So Dr. Patsy Putnam (Urbana, Ill.), the psychologist, decided to stay behind at the Army cordon. But Dr. Elaine Fay (Clinton, N.J.) insisted on going with us, saying she was the epi-something (?epidemiologist).

We drove behind one of the riot cars at 30 m.p.h. for about an hour without seeing anything unusual. There were two big signs saying SONS OF ADAM—LIBERATED ZONE. We passed some small pecan-packing plants and a citrus-processing plant. The men there looked at us but did not do anything unusual. I didn’t see any children or women, of course. Just outside Peedsville we stopped at a big barrier made of oil drums in front of a large citrus warehouse. This area is old, sort of a shantytown and trailer park. The new part of town with the shopping center and developments is about a mile farther on. A warehouse worker with a shotgun came out and told us to wait for the mayor. I don’t think he saw Dr. Elaine Fay then, she was sitting sort of bent down in back.

Mayor Blount drove up in a police cruiser, and our chief, Dr. Premack, explained our mission from the Surgeon General. Dr. Premack was very careful not to make any remarks insulting to the mayor’s religion. Mayor Blount agreed to let the party go on into Peedsville to take samples of the soil and water and so on and talk to the doctor who lives there. The mayor was about 6’2”, weight maybe 230 or 240, tanned, with grayish hair. He was smiling and chuckling in a friendly manner.

Then he looked inside the car and saw Dr. Elaine Fay and he blew up. He started yelling we had to all get the hell back. But Dr. Premack talked to him and cooled him down, and finally the mayor said Dr. Fay should go into the warehouse office and stay there with the door closed. I had to stay there too and see she didn’t come out, and one of the mayor’s men would drive the party.

So the medical people and the mayor and one of the riot vehicles went on into Peedsville, and I took Dr. Fay back into the warehouse office and sat down. It was real hot and stuffy. Dr. Fay opened a window, but then I heard her trying to talk to an old man outside and I told her she couldn’t do that and closed the window. The old man went away. Then she wanted to talk to me, but I told her I did not feel like conversing. I felt it was real wrong, her being there.

So then she started looking through the office files and reading papers there. I told her that was a bad idea, she shouldn’t do that. She said the government expected her to investigate. She showed me a booklet or magazine they had there, it was called Man Listens to God by Reverend McIllhenny. They had a carton full in the office. I started reading it, and Dr. Fay said she wanted to wash her hands. So I took her back along a kind of enclosed hallway beside the conveyor to where the toilet was. There were no doors or windows, so I went back. After a while she called out that there was a cot back there, she was going to lie down. I figured that was all right because of the no windows; also, I was glad to be rid of her company.

When I got to reading the book it was very intriguing. It was very deep thinking about how man is now on trial with God and if we fulfill our duty God will bless us with a real new life on Earth. The signs and portents show it. It wasn’t like, you know, Sunday-school stuff. It was deep.

After a while I heard some music and saw the soldiers from the other riot car were across the street by the gas tanks, sitting in the shade of some trees and kidding with the workers from the plant. One of them was playing a guitar, not electric, just plain. It looked so peaceful.

Then Mayor Blount drove up alone in the cruiser and came in. When he saw I was reading the book he smiled at me sort of fatherly, but he looked tense. He asked me where Dr. Fay was, and I told him she was lying down in back. He said that was okay. Then he kind of sighed and went back down the hall, closing the door behind him. I sat and listened to the guitar man, trying to hear what he was singing. I felt really hungry, my lunch was in Dr. Premack’s car.

After a while the door opened and Mayor Blount came back in. He looked terrible, his clothes were messed up, and he had bloody scrape marks on his face. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at me hard and fierce, like he might have been disoriented. I saw his zipper was open and there was blood on his clothing and also on his (private parts).

I didn’t feel frightened, I felt something important had happened. I tried to get him to sit down. But he motioned me to follow him back down the hall, to where Dr. Fay was. “You must see,” he said. He went into the toilet and I went into a kind of little room there, where the cot was. The light was fairly good, reflected off the tin roof from where the walls stopped. I saw Dr. Fay lying on the cot in a peaceful appearance. She was lying straight, her clothing was to some extent different but her legs were together, I was glad to see that. Her blouse was pulled up, and I saw there was a cut or incision on her abdomen. The blood was coming out there, or it had been coming out there, like a mouth. It wasn’t moving at this time. Also her throat was cut open.

I returned to the office. Mayor Blount was sitting down, looking very tired. He had cleaned himself off. He said, “I did it for you. Do you understand?”

He seemed like my father. I can’t say it better than that. I realized he was under a terrible strain, he had taken a lot on himself for me. He went on to explain how Dr. Fay was very dangerous, she was what they call a cripto-female (crypto?), the most dangerous kind. He had exposed her and purified the situation. He was very straightforward, I didn’t feel confused at all, I knew he had done what was right.

We discussed the book, how man must purify himself and show God a clean world. He said some people raise the question of how can man reproduce without women, but such people miss the point. The point is that as long as man depends on the old filthy animal way, God won’t help him. When man gets rid of his animal part which is woman, this is the signal God is awaiting. Then God will reveal the new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey. He said some men here had seen an Angel of the Lord. This was very deep, it seemed like it echoed inside me, I felt it was an inspiration.

Then the medical party drove up and I told Dr. Premack that Dr. Fay had been taken care of and sent away, and I got in the car to drive them out of the Liberated Zone. However, four of the six soldiers from the roadblock refused to leave. Capt. Parr tried to argue them out of it but finally agreed they could stay to guard the oil-drum barrier.

I would have liked to stay too, the place was so peaceful, but they needed me to drive the car. If I had known there would be all this hassle I never would have done them the favor. I am not crazy and I have not done anything wrong and my lawyer will get me out. That is all I have to say.

In Cuyapán the hot afternoon rain had temporarily ceased. As Alan’s fingers let go of Sgt. Willard Mews’s wretched document, he caught sight of pencil-scrawled words in the margin in Barney’s spider hand. He squinted.

“Man’s religion and metaphysics are the voices of his glands. Schönweiser, 1878.”

Who the devil Schönweiser was Alan didn’t know, but he knew what Barney was conveying. This murderous crackpot religion of McWhosis was a symptom, not a cause. Barney believed something was physically affecting the Peedsville men, generating psychosis, and a local religious demagogue had sprung up to “explain” it.

Well, maybe. But cause or effect, Alan thought only of one thing: eight hundred miles from Peedsville to Ann Arbor. Anne should be safe. She had to be.

He threw himself on the lumpy cot, his mind going back exultantly to his work. At the cost of a million bites and cane cuts he was pretty sure he’d found the weak link in the canefly cycle. The male mass-mating behavior, the comparative scarcity of ovulant females. It would be the screwfly solution all over again with the sexes reversed. Concentrate the pheromone, release sterilized females. Luckily the breeding populations were comparatively isolated. In a couple of seasons they ought to have it. Have to let them go on spraying poison meanwhile, of course; damn pity, it was slaughtering everything and getting in the water, and the caneflies had evolved to immunity anyway. But in a couple of seasons, maybe three, they could drop the canefly populations below reproductive viability. No more tormented human bodies with those stinking larvae in the nasal passages and brain. . . . He drifted off for a nap, grinning.

Up north, Anne was biting her lip in shame and pain.

SWEETHEART, I SHOULDN’T ADMIT IT but your wife is s/c/a/r/e/d/ a bit jittery. Just female nerves or something, nothing to worry about. Everything is normal up here. It’s so eerily normal, nothing in the papers, nothing anywhere except what I hear through Barney and Lillian. But Pauline’s phone won’t answer out in San Diego; the fifth day some strange man yelled at me and banged the phone down. Maybe she’s sold her house—but why wouldn’t she call?

Lillian’s on some kind of Save-the-Women committee, like we were an endangered species, ha-ha—you know Lillian. It seems the Red Cross has started setting up camps. But she says, after the first rush, only a trickle are coming out of what they call “the affected areas.” Not many children, either, even little boys. And they have some air photos around Lubbock showing what look like mass graves. Oh, Alan . . . so far it seems to be mostly spreading west, but something’s happening in St. Louis, they’re cut off. So many places seem to have just vanished from the news, I had a nightmare that there isn’t a woman left alive down there. And nobody’s doing anything. They talked about spraying with tranquilizers for a while and then that died out. What could it do? Somebody at the UN has proposed a convention on—you won’t believe this—femicide. It sounds like a deodorant spray.

Excuse me, honey, I seem to be a little hysterical. George Searles came back from Georgia talking about God’s Will—Searles the lifelong atheist. Alan, something crazy is happening.

But there aren’t any facts. Nothing. The Surgeon General issued a report on the bodies of the Rahway Rip-Breast Team—I guess I didn’t tell you about that. Anyway, they could find no pathology. Milton Baines wrote a letter saying in the present state of the art we can’t distinguish the brain of a saint from a psychopathic killer, so how could they expect to find what they don’t know how to look for?

Well, enough of these jitters. It’ll be all over by the time you get back, just history. Everything’s fine here, I fixed the car’s muffler again. And Amy’s coming home for the vacations, that’ll get my mind off faraway problems.

Oh, something amusing to end with—Angie told me what Barney’s enzyme does to the spruce budworm. It seems it blocks the male from turning around after he connects with the female, so he mates with her head instead. Like clockwork with a cog missing. There’re going to be some pretty puzzled female spruceworms. Now why couldn’t Barney tell me that? He really is such a sweet shy old dear. He’s given me some stuff to put in, as usual. I didn’t read it.

Now don’t worry, my darling, everything’s fine.

I love you, I love you so.

—Always, all ways your Anne

Two weeks later in Cuyápan when Barney’s enclosures slid out of the envelope, Alan didn’t read them, either. He stuffed them into the pocket of his bush jacket with a shaking hand and started bundling his notes together on the rickety table, with a scrawled note to Sister Dominique on top. The hell with the canefly, the hell with everything except that tremor in his fearless Anne’s firm handwriting. The hell with being five thousand miles away from his woman, his child, while some deadly madness raged. He crammed his meager belongings into his duffel. If he hurried he could catch the bus through to Bogota and maybe make the Miami flight.

He made it to Miami, but the planes north were jammed. He failed a quick standby; six hours to wait. Time to call Anne. When the call got through some difficulty, he was unprepared for the rush of joy and relief that burst along the wires.

“Thank god—I can’t believe it—Oh, Alan, my darling, are you really—I can’t believe—”

He found he was repeating too, and all mixed up with the canefly data. They were both laughing hysterically when he finally hung up.

Six hours. He settled in a frayed plastic chair opposite Aerolineas Argentinas, his mind half back at the clinic, half on the throngs moving by him. Something was oddly different here, he perceived presently. Where was the decorative fauna he usually enjoyed in Miami, the parade of young girls in crotch-tight pastel jeans? The flounces, boots, wild hats and hairdos, and startling expanses of newly tanned skin, the brilliant fabrics barely confining the bob of breasts and buttocks? Not here—but wait; looking closely, he glimpsed two young faces hidden under unbecoming parkas, their bodies draped in bulky nondescript skirts. In fact, all down the long vista he could see the same thing: hooded ponchos, heaped-on clothes and baggy pants, dull colors. A new style? No, he thought not. It seemed to him their movements suggested furtiveness, timidity. And they moved in groups. He watched a lone girl struggle to catch up with the others ahead of her, apparently strangers. They accepted her wordlessly.

They’re frightened, he thought. Afraid of attracting notice. Even that gray-haired matron in a pantsuit resolutely leading a flock of kids was glancing around nervously.

And at the Argentine desk opposite he saw another odd thing; two lines had a big sign over them: Mujeres. Women. They were crowded with the shapeless forms and very quiet.

The men seemed to be behaving normally; hurrying, lounging, griping, and joking in the lines as they kicked their luggage along. But Alan felt an undercurrent of tension, like an irritant in the air. Outside the line of storefronts behind him a few isolated men seemed to be handing out tracts. An airport attendant spoke to the nearest man; he merely shrugged and moved a few doors down.

To distract himself Alan picked up a Miami Herald from the next seat. It was surprisingly thin. The international news occupied him for a while; he had seen none for weeks. It too had a strange empty quality, even the bad news seemed to have dried up. The African war which had been going on seemed to be over, or went unreported. A trade summit meeting was haggling over grain and steel prices. He found himself at the obituary pages, columns of close-set type dominated by the photo of an unknown defunct ex-senator. Then his eye fell on two announcements at the bottom of the page. One was too flowery for quick comprehension, but the other stated in bold plain type:

THE FORSETTE FUNERAL HOME REGRETFULLY ANNOUNCES IT WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT FEMALE CADAVERS

Slowly he folded the paper, staring at it numbly. On the back was an item headed Navigational Hazard Warning, in the shipping news. Without really taking it in, he read:

AP/NASSAU: THE EXCURSION LINER CARIB Swallow reached port under tow today after striking an obstruction in the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras. The obstruction was identified as part of a commercial trawler’s seine floated by female corpses. This confirms reports from Florida and the Gulf of the use of such seines, some of them over a mile in length. Similar reports coming from the Pacific coast and as far away as Japan indicate a growing hazard to coastwise shipping.

Alan flung the thing into the trash receptacle and sat rubbing his forehead and eyes. Thank god he had followed his impulse to come home. He felt totally disoriented, as though he had landed by error on another planet. Five hours more to wait . . . At length he recalled the stuff from Barney he had thrust in his pocket, and pulled it out and smoothed it.

The top item seemed to be from the Ann Arbor News. Dr. Lillian Dash, together with several hundred other members of her organization, had been arrested for demonstrating without a permit in front of the White House. They had started a fire in a garbage can, which was considered particularly heinous. A number of women’s groups had participated; the total struck Alan as more like thousands than hundreds. Extraordinary security precautions were being taken, despite the fact that the President was out of town at the time.

The next item had to be Barney’s acerbic humor.

UP/VATICAN CITY 19 JUNE. POPE John IV today intimated that he does not plan to comment officially on the so-called Pauline Purification cults advocating the elimination of women as a means of justifying man to God. A spokesman emphasized that the Church takes no position on these cults but repudiates any doctrine involving a “challenge” to or from God to reveal His further plans for man.

Cardinal Fazzoli, spokesman for the European Pauline movement, reaffirmed his view that the Scriptures define woman as merely a temporary companion and instrument of man. Women, he states, are nowhere defined as human, but merely as a transitional expedient or state. “The time of transition to full humanity is at hand,” he concluded.

The next item appeared to be a thin-paper Xerox from a recent issue of Science:

SUMMARY REPORT OF THE AD HOC

EMERGENCY COMMITTEE ON FEMICIDE

THE RECENT WORLDWIDE THOUGH LOCALIZED outbreaks of femicide appear to represent a recurrence of similar outbreaks by groups or sects which are not uncommon in world history in times of psychic stress. In this case the root cause is undoubtedly the speed of social and technological change, augmented by population pressure, and the spread and scope are aggravated by instantaneous world communications, thus exposing more susceptible persons. It is not viewed as a medical or epidemiological problem; no physical pathology has been found. Rather it is more akin to the various manias which swept Europe in the seventeenth century, e.g., the Dancing Manias, and like them, should run its course and disappear. The chiliastic cults which have sprung up around the affected areas appear to be unrelated, having in common only the idea that a new means of human reproduction will be revealed as a result of the “purifying” elimination of women.

We recommend that (1) inflammatory and sensational reporting be suspended; (2) refugee centers be set up and maintained for women escapees from the focal areas; (3) containment of affected areas by military cordon be continued and enforced; and (4) after a cooling-down period and the subsidence of the mania, qualified mental-health teams and appropriate professional personnel go in to undertake rehabilitation.

SUMMARY OF THE MINORITY

REPORT OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE

THE NINE MEMBERS SIGNING THIS report agree that there is no evidence for epidemiological contagion of femicide in the strict sense. However, the geographical relation of the focal areas of outbreak strongly suggests that they cannot be dismissed as purely psychosocial phenomena. The initial outbreaks have occurred around the globe near the 30th parallel, the area of principal atmospheric downflow of upper winds coming from the Intertropical Convergence Zone. An agent or condition in the upper equatorial atmosphere would thus be expected to reach ground level along the 30th parallel, with certain seasonal variations. One principal variation is that the downflow moves north over the East Asian continent during the late winter months, and those areas south of it (Arabia, Western India, parts of North Africa) have in fact been free of outbreaks until recently, when the downflow zone moved south. A similar downflow occurs in the Southern Hemisphere, and outbreaks have been reported along the 30th parallel running through Pretoria and Alice Springs, Australia. (Information from Argentina is currently unavailable.)

This geographical correlation cannot be dismissed, and it is therefore urged that an intensified search for a physical cause be instituted. It is also urgently recommended that the rate of spread from known focal points be correlated with wind conditions. A watch for similar outbreaks along the secondary down-welling zones at 60° north and south should be kept.

(signed for the minority)

—Barnhard Braithwaite

Alan grinned reminiscently at his old friend’s name, which seemed to restore normalcy and stability to the world. It looked as if Barney was on to something, too, despite the prevalence of horses’ asses. He frowned, puzzling it out.

Then his face slowly changed as he thought how it would be, going home to Anne. In a few short hours his arms would be around her, the tall, secretly beautiful body that had come to obsess him. Theirs had been a late-blooming love. They’d married, he supposed now, out of friendship, even out of friends’ pressure. Everyone said they were made for each other, he big and chunky and blond, she willowy brunette; both shy, highly controlled, cerebral types. For the first few years the friendship had held, but sex hadn’t been all that much. Conventional necessity. Politely reassuring each other, privately—he could say it now—disappointing.

But then, when Amy was a toddler, something had happened. A miraculous inner portal of sensuality had slowly opened to them, a liberation into their own secret unsuspected heaven of fully physical bliss. . . . Jesus, but it had been a wrench when the Colombia thing had come up. Only their absolute sureness of each other had made him take it. And now, to be about to have her again, trebly desirable from the spice of separation—feeling-seeing-hearing-smelling-grasping. He shifted in his seat to conceal his body’s excitement, half mesmerized by fantasy.

And Amy would be there, too; he grinned at the memory of that prepubescent little body plastered against him. She was going to be a handful, all right. His manhood understood Amy a lot better than her mother did; no cerebral phase for Amy. . . . But Anne, his exquisite shy one, with whom he’d found the way into the almost unendurable transports of the flesh. . . . First the conventional greeting, he thought; the news, the unspoken, savored, mounting excitement behind their eyes; the light touches; then the seeking of their own room, the falling clothes, the caresses, gentle at first—the flesh, the nakedness—the delicate teasing, the grasp, the first thrust—

A terrible alarm bell went off in his head. Exploded from his dream, he stared around, then finally down at his hands. What was he doing with his open clasp knife in his fist?

Stunned, he felt for the last shreds of his fantasy, and realized that the tactile images had not been of caresses, but of a frail neck strangling in his fist, the thrust had been the plunge of a blade seeking vitals. In his arms, legs, phantasms of striking and trampling bones cracking. And Amy—

Oh, god. Oh, god—

Not sex, blood lust.

That was what he had been dreaming. The sex was there, but it was driving some engine of death.

Numbly he put the knife away, thinking only over and over, it’s got me. It’s got me. Whatever it is, it’s got me. I can’t go home.

After an unknown time he got up and made his way to the United counter to turn in his ticket. The line was long. As he waited, his mind cleared a little. What could he do, here in Miami? Wouldn’t it be better to get back to Ann Arbor and turn himself in to Barney? Barney could help him, if anyone could. Yes, that was best. But first he had to warn Anne.

The connection took even longer this time. When Anne finally answered he found himself blurting unintelligibly, it took a while to make her understand he wasn’t talking about a plane delay.

“I tell you, I’ve caught it. Listen, Anne, for god’s sake. If I should come to the house don’t let me come near you. I mean it. I mean it. I’m going to the lab, but I might lose control and try to get to you. Is Barney there?”

“Yes, but darling—”

“Listen. Maybe he can fix me, maybe this’ll wear off. But I’m not safe. Anne, Anne, I’d kill you, can you understand? Get a—get a weapon. I’ll try not to come to the house. But if I do, don’t let me get near you. Or Amy. It’s a sickness, it’s real. Treat me—treat me like a f*cking wild animal. Anne, say you understand, say you’ll do it.”

They were both crying when he hung up.

He went shaking back to sit and wait. After a time his head seemed to clear a little more. Doctor, try to think. The first thing he thought of was to take the loathsome knife and throw it down a trash slot. As he did so he realized there was one more piece of Barney’s material in his pocket. He uncrumpled it; it seemed to be a clipping from Nature.

At the top was Barney’s scrawl: “Only guy making sense. U.K. infected now, Oslo, Copenhagen out of communication. Damfools still won’t listen. Stay put.”

COMMUNICATION FROM PROFESSOR IAN MACLNTYRE, GLASGOW UNIV.

A POTENTIAL DIFFICULTY FOR OUR species has always been implicit in the close linkage between the behavioral expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male. This close linkage is shown by (a) many of the same neuro-muscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and sexual pursuit, grasping, mounting, etc., and (b) similar states of adrenergic arousal which are activated in both. The same linkage is seen in the males of many other species; in some, the expression of aggression and copulation alternate or even coexist, an all-too-familiar example being the common house cat. Males of many species bite, claw, bruise, tread, or otherwise assault receptive females during the act of intercourse; indeed, in some species the male attack is necessary for female ovulation to occur.

In many if not all species it is the aggressive behavior which appears first, and then changes to copulatory behavior when the appropriate signal is presented (e.g., the three-tined stickleback and the European robin). Lacking the inhibiting signal, the male’s fighting response continues and the female is attacked or driven off.

It seems therefore appropriate to speculate that the present crisis might be caused by some substance, perhaps at the viral or enzymatic level, which effects a failure of the switching or triggering function in the higher primates. (Note: Zoo gorillas and chimpanzees have recently been observed to attack or destroy their mates; rhesus not.) Such a dysfunction could be expressed by the failure of mating behavior to modify or supervene over the aggressive/predatory response; i.e., sexual stimulation would produce attack only, the stimulation discharging itself through the destruction of the stimulating object.

In this connection it might be noted that exactly this condition is a commonplace of male functional pathology, in those cases where murder occurs as a response to, and apparent completion of, sexual desire.

It should be emphasized that the aggression/copulation linkage discussed here is specific to the male; the female response (e.g., lordotic reflex) being of a different nature.

Alan sat holding the crumpled sheet a long time; the dry, stilted Scottish phrases seemed to help clear his head, despite the sense of brooding tension all around him. Well, if pollution or whatever had produced some substance, it could presumably be countered, filtered, neutralized. Very very carefully, he let himself consider his life with Anne, his sexuality. Yes; much of their loveplay could be viewed as genitalized, sexually gentled savagery. Play-predation . . . . He turned his mind quickly away. Some writer’s phrase occurred to him: “The panic element in all sex.” Who? Fritz Leiber? The violation of social distance, maybe; another threatening element.

Whatever, it’s our weak link, he thought. Our vulnerability . . . . The dreadful feeling of rightness he had experienced when he found himself knife in hand, fantasizing violence, came back to him. As though it was the right, the only, way. Was that what Barney’s budworms felt when they mated with their females wrong-end-to?

At long length, he became aware of body need and sought a toilet. The place was empty, except for what he took to be a heap of clothes blocking the door of the far stall. Then he saw the redbrown pool in which it lay, and the bluish mounds of bare, thin buttocks. He backed out, not breathing, and fled into the nearest crowd, knowing he was not the first to have done so.

Of course. Any sexual drive. Boys, men, too.

At the next washroom he watched to see men enter and leave normally before he ventured in.

Afterward he returned to sit, waiting, repeating over and over to himself: Go to the lab. Don’t go home. Go straight to the lab. Three more hours; he sat numbly at 26°N, 81°W, breathing, breathing. . . .

DEAR DIARY. BIG SCENE TONITE, Daddy came home!!! Only he acted so funny, he had the taxi wait and just held on to the doorway, he wouldn’t touch me or let us come near him. (I mean funny weird, not funny ha-ha.) He said, I have something to tell you, this is getting worse not better. I’m going to sleep in the lab but I want you to get out, Anne, Anne, I can’t trust myself anymore. First thing in the morning you both get on the plane for Martha’s and stay there. So I thought he had to be joking, I mean with the dance next week and Aunt Martha lives in Whitehorse where there’s nothing nothing nothing. So I was yelling and Mother was yelling and Daddy was groaning, Go now! And then he started crying. Crying!!! So I realized, wow, this is serious, and I started to go over to him but Mother yanked me back and then I saw she had this big knife!!! And she shoved me in back of her and started crying too: Oh Alan, Oh Alan, like she was insane. So I said, Daddy, I’ll never leave you, it felt like the perfect thing to say. And it was thrilling, he looked at me real sad and deep like I was a grown-up while Mother was treating me like I was a mere infant as usual. But Mother ruined it raving, Alan the child is mad, darling go. So he ran out of the door yelling, Be gone. Take the car. Get out before I come back.

Oh I forgot to say I was wearing what but my gooby green with my curl-tites still on, wouldn’t you know of all the sh*tty luck, how could I have known such a beautiful scene was ahead we never know life’s cruel whimsy. And Mother is dragging out suitcases yelling, Pack your things hurry! So she’s going I guess but I am not repeat not going to spend the fall sitting in Aunt Martha’s grain silo and lose the dance and all my summer credits. And Daddy was trying to communicate with us, right? I think their relationship is obsolete. So when she goes upstairs I am splitting. I am going to go over to the lab and see Daddy.

Oh PS Diane tore my yellow jeans she promised me I could use her pink ones ha-ha that’ll be the day.

I RIPPED THAT PAGE OUT of Amy’s diary when I heard the squad car coming. I never opened her diary before, but when I found she’d gone I looked. . . . Oh, my darling little girl. She went to him, my little girl, my poor little fool child. Maybe if I’d taken time to explain, maybe—

Excuse me, Barney. The stuff is wearing off, the shots they gave me. I didn’t feel anything. I mean, I knew somebody’s daughter went to see her father and he killed her. And cut his throat. But it didn’t mean anything.

Alan’s note, they gave me that but then they took it away. Why did they have to do that? His last handwriting, the last words he wrote before his hand picked up the, before he

I remember it. “Sudden and light as that, the bonds gave. And we learned of finalities besides the grave. The bonds of our humanity have broken, we are finished. I love—”

I’m all right, Barney, really. Who wrote that, Robert Frost? The bonds gave. . . . Oh, he said, tell Barney: The terrible rightness. What does that mean?

You can’t answer that, Barney dear. I’m just writing this to stay sane, I’ll put it in your hidey-hole. Thank you, thank you, Barney dear. Even as blurry as I was, I knew it was you. All the time you were cutting off my hair and rubbing dirt on my face, I knew it was right because it was you. Barney, I never thought of you as those horrible words you said. You were always Dear Barney.

By the time the stuff wore off I had done everything you said, the gas, the groceries. Now I’m here in your cabin. With those clothes you made me put on—I guess I do look like a boy, the gas man called me “Mister.”

I still can’t really realize, I have to stop myself from rushing back. But you saved my life, I know that. The first trip in I got a paper, I saw where they bombed the Apostle Islands refuge. And it had about those three women stealing the Air Force plane and bombing Dallas, too. Of course they shot them down, over the Gulf. Isn’t it strange how we do nothing? Just get killed by ones and twos. Or more, now they’ve started on the refuges. . . . Like hypnotized rabbits. We’re a toothless race.

Do you know I never said “we” meaning women before? “We” was always me and Alan, and Amy of course. Being killed selectively encourages group identification. . . . You see how saneheaded I am.

But I still can’t really realize.

My first trip in was for salt and kerosene. I went to that little Red Deer store and got my stuff from the old man in the back, as you told me—you see, I remembered! He called me “Boy,” but I think maybe he suspects. He knows I’m staying at your cabin.

Anyway, some men and boys came in the front. They were all so normal, laughing and kidding. I just couldn’t believe, Barney. In fact I started to go out past them when I heard one of them say, “Heinz saw an angel.” An angel. So I stopped and listened. They said it was big and sparkly. Coming to see if man is carrying out God’s Will, one of them said. And he said, Moosenee is now a liberated zone, and all up by Hudson Bay. I turned and got out the back, fast. The old man had heard them, too. He said to me quietly, “I’ll miss the kids.”

Hudson Bay, Barney, that means it’s coming from the north too, doesn’t it? That must be about 60°.

But I have to go back once again, to get some fishhooks. I can’t live on bread. Last week I found a deer some poacher had killed, just the head and legs. I made a stew. It was a doe. Her eyes; I wonder if mine look like that now.

I WENT TO GET THE fishhooks today. It was bad, I can’t ever go back. There were some men in front again, but they were different. Mean and tense. No boys. And there was a new sign out in front, I couldn’t see it; maybe it says Liberated Zone, too.

The old man gave me the hooks quick and whispered to me, “Boy, them woods’ll be full of hunters next week.” I almost ran out.

About a mile down the road a blue pickup started to chase me. I guess he wasn’t from around there, I ran the VW into a logging draw and he roared on by. After a long while I drove out and came on back, but I left the car about a mile from here and hiked in. It’s surprising how hard it is to pile enough brush to hide a yellow VW.

Barney, I can’t stay here. I’m eating perch raw so nobody will see my smoke, but those hunters will be coming through. I’m going to move my sleeping bag out to the swamp by that big rock, I don’t think many people go there.

Since my last lines I moved out. It feels safer. Oh, Barney, how did this happen?

Fast, that’s how. Six months ago I was Dr. Anne Alstein. Now I’m a widow and bereaved mother, dirty and hungry, squatting in a swamp in mortal fear. Funny if I’m the last woman left alive on Earth. I guess the last one around here, anyway. Maybe some are holed up in the Himalayas, or sneaking through the wreck of New York City. How can we last?

We can’t.

And I can’t survive the winter here, Barney. It gets to 40° below. I’d have to have a fire, they’d see the smoke. Even if I worked my way south, the woods end in a couple hundred miles. I’d be potted like a duck. No. No use. Maybe somebody is trying something somewhere, but it won’t reach here in time . . . and what do I have to live for?

No. I’ll just make a good end, say up on that rock where I can see the stars. After I go back and leave this for you. I’ll wait a few days to see the beautiful color in the trees one last time.

Good-bye, dearest dearest Barney.

I know what I’ll scratch for an epitaph.

HERE LIES THE SECOND MEANEST PRIMATE ON EARTH

I GUESS NOBODY WILL EVER read this, unless I get the nerve and energy to take it back to Barney’s. Probably I won’t. Leave it in a Baggie, I have one here; maybe Barney will come and look. I’m up on the big rock now. The moon is going to rise soon, I’ll do it then. Mosquitoes, be patient. You’ll have all you want.

The thing I have to write down is that I saw an angel, too. This morning. It was big and sparkly, like the man said; like a Christmas tree without the tree. But I knew it was real because the frogs stopped croaking and two blue jays gave alarm calls. That’s important; it was really there.

I watched it, sitting under my rock. It didn’t move much. It sort of bent over and picked up something, leaves or twigs, I couldn’t see. Then it did something with them around its middle, like putting them into an invisible sample pocket.

Let me repeat—it was there. Barney, if you’re reading this, there are things here. And I think they’ve done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off.

Why?

Well, it’s a nice place, if it wasn’t for the people. How do you get rid of people? Bombs, death rays—all very primitive. Leave a big mess. Destroy everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place.

This way there’s no muss, no fuss. just like what we did to the screwfly. Pinpoint the weak link, wait a bit while we do it for them. Then only a few bones around; make good fertilizer.

Barney dear, good-bye. I saw it. It was there.

But it wasn’t an angel.

I think I saw a real estate agent.

After-Images

— MALCOLM EDWARDS —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

MALCOLM EDWARDS HAS BEEN A central figure in the British science-fiction world for some forty years, although it is not for fiction that he is known but for his work as an editor and critic. In 1976, after taking a degree in anthropology at Cambridge, he joined the London-based publishing house of Gollancz as a copy editor, but swiftly rose through the ranks to attain the title of Publishing Director. In that capacity he built a distinguished list, overseeing the publication of works by most of the major science fiction writers of the day. After thirteen years at Gollancz he moved over to Grafton, another important British science-fiction publisher, again with the title of Publishing Director, and when Grafton was absorbed into the HarperCollins publishing empire he remained one of its key executives, now designated Deputy Managing Director. In 1998 Edwards changed companies yet again, becoming Managing Director of Orion Books and then Group Publisher, and when Orion purchased Gollancz a few years later he found himself in charge of the company where he had begun his publishing career. He is now semi-retired, but still plays an active role in the Orion and Gollancz science-fiction programs.

He has published critical essays in such major critical journals of science fiction as Vector, Foundation, and Science Fiction Commentary, was one of the early contributors to the indispensable Science Fiction Encyclopedia, and is the author or co-author of a number of useful reference books, among them Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction (1979) and The Complete Book of Science Fiction Lists (1988).

It is his career as a science-fiction writer, however, that would have earned him a place in his own Book of Lists, had there been a category for Least Prolific Science-Fiction Writers. His oeuvre consists of precisely one story, the powerful apocalyptic tale “After-Images”, which was published in the Spring 1983 issue of the British science-fiction magazine Interzone. It attracted immediate attention, was given the British Science Fiction Association’s award as the best short story of the year, and was reprinted in several anthologies—and, apparently content to rest on his laurels at that point, Edwards has offered us no new stories ever since. Its blazing vision of a world at the edge of destruction makes us wonder what the rest of his career as a storyteller would have been like, but apparently the other stories and novels of Malcolm Edwards will remain forever in some alternative universe.

—R. S.

AFTER-IMAGES

AFTER THE EVENTS OF THE previous day Norton slept only fitfully, his dreams filled with grotesque images of Richard Carver, and he was grateful when his bedside clock showed him that it was nominally morning again. He always experienced difficulty sleeping in anything less than total darkness, so the unvarying sunlight, cutting through chinks in the curtains and striking across the floor, marking it with lines that might have been drawn by an incandescent knife, added to his restlessness. He had tried to draw the curtains as closely as possible, but they were cheap and of skimpy manufacture—a legacy from the previous owner of the flat, who for obvious reasons could not be bothered to take them with her when she moved—and even when, after much manoeuvring, they could be persuaded to meet along much of their length, narrow gaps would always appear at the top, near the pleating.

Norton felt gripped by a lassitude born of futility, but as on the eight other mornings of this unexpected coda to his existence, fought off the feeling and slid wearily out of bed. After dressing quickly and without much thought, he pulled back the curtains to admit the brightness of the early-afternoon summer sun.

The sun was exactly where it had been for the last eight days, poised a few degrees above the peaked roof of the terraced house across the road. It had been a stormy day, and a few minutes before everything had stopped a heavy shower had been sweeping across London; but the squall had passed and the sun had appeared—momentarily, one would have supposed—through a break in the cloud. The visible sky was still largely occupied by lowering, soot-colored clouds, which enfolded the light and gave it the peculiar penetrating luminosity which presages a storm; but the sun sat in its patch of blue sky like an unblinking eye in the face of the heavens, and Norton and the others spent their last days and nights in a malign parody of the mythical, eternally sunlit English summer.

Outside the heat was stale and oppressive and seemed to settle heavily in his temples. Drifts of rubbish, untended now for several weeks, gave off a ripe odor of decay and attracted buzzing platoons of flies. Marlborough Street, where Norton lived, was one of a patchwork of late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces filling an unfashionable lacuna in the map of north London. At one end of the road was a slightly wider avenue which called itself a High Road on account of a bus route and a scattering of down-at-heel shops. Norton walked towards it, past houses which gave evidence of their owners’ hasty departure, doors and windows left open. The house across the road, which for three days had been the scene of an increasingly wild party held by most of the few teenagers remaining in the area, was now silent again. They had probably collapsed from exhaustion, or drugs, or both, Norton thought.

At the corner Norton paused. To the north—his left—the street curved away sharply, lined on both sides by shabby three-storey houses with mock-Georgian facades. To the south it was straight, but about a hundred yards away was blocked off by the great baleful flickering wall of the interface, rising into the sky and curving back on itself like a surreal bubble. As always he was drawn to look at it, though his eyes resisted as if under autonomous control and tried to focus themselves elsewhere.

It was impossible to say precisely what it looked like, for its surface seemed to be an absence of color. When he closed his eyes it left swimming variegated after-images: protoplasmic shapes which crossed and intermingled and blended. When Norton forced himself to stare at it, his optic nerves attempted to deny its presence, warping together the flanking images of shopfronts so that the road seemed to narrow to a point.

Norton suffered occasional migraine headaches and often experienced an analogous phenomenon as the prelude to an attack: he would find that parts of his field of vision had been excised, but that the edges of the blanks were somehow pulled together, so it was difficult to be sure something was missing. Just as then it was necessary sometimes to turn sideways and look obliquely to see an object sitting directly in front of him, so now, as he turned away, he could see the interface as a curving wall the color of a bruise from which pinpricks of intense light occasionally escaped as if through faults in its fabric. Then, too, he could glimpse more clearly the three human images printed, as though by some sophisticated holographic process, upon the interface. In the centre of the road were the backs of Carver and himself as they disappeared beyond the interface, the images already starting to become fuzzy as the wavefront slowly advanced; to one side, slightly sharper, was the record of his lone re-emergence, his expression clearly pale and strained despite the heavy polarized goggles which covered half his face.

Norton had been sitting the previous morning at a table outside the Cafe Hellenika, slowly drinking a tiny cup of Greek coffee. He had little enthusiasm for the sweet, muddy drink, but was unwilling as yet to move on to beer or wine.

The café’s Greek Cypriot proprietor had reacted to the changed conditions in a manner which under other circ*mstances would have seemed quite enterprising. He had shifted all his tables and chairs out on to the pavement, leaving the cooler interior free for the perennial pool players and creating outside a passable imitation of a street café remembered from happier days in Athens or Nicosia. Many of the remaining local residents were of Greek origin, and the men gathered here, playing cards and chess, drinking cheap Demestica, and talking in sharp bursts which sounded dramatic however banal and ordinary the conversation. There was a timelessness to the scene which Norton found oddly apposite.

He was staring into his coffee, thinking studiously about nothing, when a shadow fell across him and he simultaneously heard the chair next to his being scraped across the pavement. He looked up to see Carver easing himself into the seat. He was dressed bizarrely in a thickly padded white suit which looked as though it should belong to an astronaut or a polar explorer. He was carrying a pair of thick goggles which he placed on the formica surface of the table. He signalled the café owner to bring him a coffee.

Norton didn’t want company, but he was intrigued despite himself. “What on Earth is that outfit?” he asked.

“Explorer’s gear . . . bloody hot, too,” said Carver, dragging the sleeve cumbersomely across his perspiring forehead.

“What’s to explore, for God’s sake?”

“The . . . whatever you call it. The bubble. The interface. I’ve been into it.”

Norton felt irritated. Carver seemed incapable of taking their situation seriously. He had attached himself to Norton four days ago as he sat getting drunk and had sought him out every day since, full of jokes of dubious merit and colorful stories of his life in some unspecified, but probably menial, branch of the diplomatic service. He was the sort of person Norton hated finding himself next to in a bar. Now he was obviously fantasizing.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’d be dead.”

“Do I look dead?” Carver gestured at himself. His face, tanned and plump with eyes of a disconcertingly pure aquamarine, looked as healthy as ever.

“It’s impossible,” Norton repeated.

“Don’t you want to know what I found?”

Losing patience, Norton shouted: “I know what you’d have found. You’d have found a f*cking nuclear explosion. Don’t tell me you went for a stroll through that!”

The café owner came up and slapped a cup on to the table in front of Carver, slopping the coffee into the saucer. Carver took a long slow sip of the dark liquid, looking at Norton expressionlessly over the rim of the cup as he did so. Norton subsided, feeling foolish.

“But I did, Norton,” Carver finally said calmly. “I did.”

Norton remained silent, stubbornly refusing to play his part in the choreography of the conversation, knowing that Carver would carry on without further prompting.

“I didn’t just walk in,” Carver said, after a few seconds. “I’m not suicidal. I tried probing first, with a stick. I waggled it about a bit, pulled it out. It wasn’t damaged. That set me thinking. So I tried with a pet mouse of mine. No damage—except that its eyes were burned out, poor little sod. So I thought, all right, it’s very bright, but nothing more. What does that suggest?”

Norton shrugged.

“It suggested to me that the whole process is slowed down in there, that there’s a whole series of wavefronts—the light flash, the fireball, the blastwave—all expanding slowly, but all separate.”

“It seems incredible.”

“Well, the whole situation isn’t precisely normal, you know—” They were interrupted by a commotion at another table.

There seemed to be some disagreement between two men over a hand of cards. One of them, a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a greying string vest through which his bodily hair sprouted abundantly, was standing and waving a handful of cards. The other, an older man, remained seated, banging his fist repeatedly on the table. Their voices rose in a fast, threatening gabble. Then the man in the vest threw the cards across the table with a furious jerk of his arm and stamped into the café.

The other continued to talk loudly and aggrievedly to the onlookers, his words augmented by a complex mime of gesture. Norton was glad of the distraction. He couldn’t understand what Carver was getting at, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. “It’s amazing the way they carry on,” he said. “It’s as though nothing had happened, as though everything was normal.”

“Very sensible of them. At least they’re consistent.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I am. The whole thing has been inevitable for years. We all knew that, but we tried to pretend otherwise even while we carried on preparing for it. We said that it wouldn’t happen, because so far it hadn’t happened—some logic! We buried our heads like ostriches and pretended as hard as we could. Now it’s here—it’s just down the road and we can see it coming and we know there’s no escape. But we knew that all along. If you tie yourself to a railway line you don’t have to wait until you can see the train coming before you start to think you’re in danger. So why not just carry on as usual?”

“I didn’t know you felt like that.”

“Of course you didn’t. As far as you’re concerned I’m just the old fool in the saloon bar. End of story.”

Carver had a point, Norton supposed. If anyone had asked him whether there was going to be a nuclear war in his lifetime he would probably have said yes. If anyone had asked what he was doing about it he would have shrugged and said, well, what could you do? He had friends active in the various protest movements, but couldn’t help viewing their efforts as futile. Some of them would virtually admit as much sometimes, if pressed. The difference was that they couldn’t bear to sit still while some hope—however remote—remained, whereas he couldn’t be bothered with gestures which seemed extremely unlikely to produce results. He would rather watch TV or spend the evening in the pub.

The other difficulty was that he couldn’t really picture it in his mind’s eye, couldn’t visualize London consumed by blast and fire, couldn’t imagine the millions of deaths, the survivors of the blast explosion dying in fallout shelters, the ensuing chaos and anarchy. And because he found it unimaginable, on some level he told himself it could never happen, not here, not to him.

Being apathetic about politics—especially Middle-Eastern politics—he hadn’t even been properly aware of the crisis developing until it reached flashpoint, with Russian and American troops clashing outside Riyadh. Then there had been government announcements, states of emergency, panic. Despite advice to stay at home the great mass of the population had headed out of the cities; unconfirmed rumors filtered back of clashes with troops on roads commandeered for military use. A few had stayed behind: some dutifully obeying government instructions, some doubtless oblivious to the whole thing, some, like Norton, unable to imagine an aftermath they would want to live in.

And then the sirens had sounded and he had sat waiting for the end; and they had stopped, and there was a silence which went on and on and on until Norton, like others, had gone into the streets and found himself in the middle of a situation far stranger than anything he could have imagined. The small urban island in which they stood—an irregular triangle no more than half a mile on a side—was bracketed by three virtually simultaneous groundburst explosions which had caused . . . what? A local fracture in space-time? That was as good an explanation as any. Whatever the cause, the effect was to slow down subjective time in the locality by a factor of millions, reducing the spread of the detonations to a matter of a few yards every day, hemming them into their strange and fragile-seeming shells.

At first people hoped that the miracle—for so it seemed—allowed some possibility of rescue, but they soon learned better. Between two of the wavefronts was a narrow corridor which coincided with a side road and led apparently to safety. One family, who had miscalculated their evacuation plans, piled into a car and drove off down the corridor, but halfway their car seemed suddenly to halt, as if frozen. Norton still looked at it occasionally. Through the rear window could be seen two young children, faces caught in smiles, hands arrested in mid-wave. It was clear that the phenomenon was only local, and crossing some invisible threshold they had emerged into the real-time world. At least, he thought, they would never have time to realize that their escape attempt had failed; it was left to those still trapped to experience anguish on their behalf.

Norton wondered what one of the many spy satellites which he supposed crossed overhead would make of the scene, if any of their equipment was sensitive enough to register anything. Perhaps some future historian, analysing the destruction of London, would slow down the film and wonder at an apparent burst of high-speed motion in the area on which the explosions converged. The historian would probably rub his or her eyes in puzzlement and dismiss it as an optical trick, like the after-images which played behind one’s eyelids after staring into a bright light.

“So will you come?” Carver was saying. Norton dragged his attention back to the conversation, aware that Carver had been talking and that he had not been taking in what he was saying.

“Come? Where?”

“Through the interface. I want somebody else to see this. It’s amazing, Norton. The experience of a lifetime. The last experience of a lifetime. Why miss it?”

Norton’s first instinct was to protest that he wasn’t interested, that there seemed little point in seeking out new experiences when extinction was, at best, days away, but then he realized that in fact some purposeful action—even a pretence at purposeful action would be welcome. Terminal patients given the bad news by their doctors didn’t just lie down and wait to die, if they had any spirit; they got up and got on with their lives for as long as they could. In the last analysis that was all anyone could do, and here everybody—the Greek card players, the partygoers, Carver—seemed to be doing it except him.

“Sure,” he said. “But what about protective clothing? You’ve got all that . . .” He gestured at Carver’s bulky and absurd-looking outfit.

“It’s unnecessary. In fact it’s hotter out here than it is there. I don’t know what I was thinking about—if I had run into the heat a thousand of these would have been no protection. All you need is goggles, and I’ve got a spare pair at home.”

Carver got up, tossed a £5 note on the table and walked away, gesturing Norton to follow. He lived just off the High Road, in a large, double-fronted redbrick Victorian house, most of whose neighbors had been turned into bedsits. His house was still intact, though the front garden was a tangle of hollyhocks choking amid brambles, and the wood in the window sashes was visibly rotten. Little attention was evidently paid to its upkeep.

Inside was a dim hallway floored with cracked brown linoleum and cluttered with coatstands and hatracks. There was a heavy odor of dust, old leather and indefinable decay.

Carver went through into one of the rear rooms. Norton followed, then paused in the open doorway. It was a large room, with French windows opening on to the garden. It was impossible to tell what the decorations might have once been like, because the whole room was choked with a profusion of different objects. All the walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books, old and expensive bindings jammed alongside garish paperbacks seemingly at random. More books were heaped on the floor, in chairs and on tables. The rest of the room was a wild assortment of clocks, globes, stuffed animals, model ships and engines, old scientific and medical equipment, porcelain, musical instruments and countless other items. Carver made his way—almost wading through the detritus—to a desk, where some of the clutter had been pushed aside and a second pair of goggles lay amid knives, glues and offcuts of polarized plastic.

“Don’t mind the mess,” he said jovially, seeing Norton still hovering uncertainly by the door. “The whole house is like this, I’m afraid. Never could stop accumulating stuff. Never could throw anything out. My wife used to say I’d been a jackdaw in my previous lives. That’s why I didn’t leave, you know. I couldn’t start off again somewhere else without all this. Sometimes I think there’s more of me here—” his gesture took in the room, and the other rooms beyond it—“than here.” He tapped the side of his skull.

Norton suddenly warmed to the man, seeing him properly for the first time as another human being, not just an irritating presence. Carver seemed to sense this and turned to fiddle with the goggles for long seconds while embarrassment dispersed from the atmosphere. “I made these up myself,” he said. “Ordinary dark glasses are no good. You need extra thicknesses, lots of them. Trouble is, if you put the things on anywhere else you can’t see a damn thing.”

Carver insisted on showing Norton the place where he had gone exploring earlier, though he was equally adamant that this time they would cross over somewhere else. He had stripped off the cumbersome protective suit and now cut an unlikely figure as a pioneer in a Hawaiian-style shirt and corduroy slacks. He had uprooted two stout wooden poles, giving one to Norton and keeping the other himself. They walked away from the High Road, took the second turning on the left, and came face to face with another wall of shimmering, eye-wrenching colorlessness. On its surface, as if holographic images had been pasted to it, were images of Carver’s back as he crossed the interface and his front view as he returned.

“You see,” Carver said, “light can’t escape, so the image is trapped there like a fly in amber until the thing moves forward far enough for it to break up. It’s already starting to happen.”

Looking closely Norton could see that indeed the images were taking on a slightly unfocused aspect, as though viewed through a wavering heat haze.

They walked back to the High Road, passed the café—where a group of men were standing round a table watching five more play out an obviously tense card game; side bets were apparently being exchanged—and approached the interface which blocked the street.

“Right,” Carver said. “Keep close by me. If in doubt wave the stick in front of you. If not in doubt still wave the stick in front of you.” He laughed, and Norton smiled in return. They pulled on their goggles and then, like blind men, tapping their way with their sticks, they walked through the interface, leaving their departing images stuck to its surface so that to anyone casually watching from the café it would have looked as if they had both suddenly and improbably halted in mid-stride.

Norton found himself enveloped in a soundless blizzard of brilliant light. Even through the thick laminations of polarized plastic the luminosity was almost painful; it was like looking too near to the sun, except that there was nowhere to turn away. The light seemed to bounce and swirl around him, to cascade on his head and fountain up from the ground. There was a singing in his ears, and he felt as though he was walking into a wind, a zephyr of pure incandescence, its photon pressure sufficient to resist his progress.

He felt exhilarated, almost ecstatic, as if he was coming face to face with God. The light was cleansing, purifying. He found that he was moving with an involuntary swimming motion of his arms, propelling himself into the cool heart of this artificial sun with a clumsy breaststroke.

“Norton! Be careful!” Carver’s voice came as if from under water, far away; it splashed faintly against his ears but was washed away in the radiant tide.

Carver was at his side, tugging at his shirt. He turned and looked at the other man. Carver seemed to glow, to fluoresce. The intense effulgence overpowered ordinary color, making him a surreal sculpture in degrees of brilliant white. His skin seemed luminous and translucent, and when Norton lifted his own hand he found it was the same; he fancied he could see dim outlines of bone through the flesh. When Carver moved he cut swathes through the light; a sudden motion of his stick sent splintered refractions in all directions.

“Carver—” Norton said, and his words seemed to be snatched away as if he was talking into a silent hurricane. “This is extraordinary . . . incredible . . .” The sentence trailed away; he had no words to describe the experience.

Carver laughed. “Who’d have thought that this lay in the heart of a nuclear explosion, eh? I don’t know, though—those slow-motion films always were beautiful if you could forget what they were.”

“How far can we go?” Norton shouted, turning away and moving towards the heart of the radiance, using his cane like a mine-detector.

“Only a few yards. You’ll see.”

Norton moved on a dozen paces, then the tip of his stick abruptly exploded into brilliant fire, like a sparkler on Guy Fawkes’ Night. He withdrew it, stamped on the burning end. Several inches had vanished from its tip in an instant.

“It’s here,” he called in warning. “Just ahead.”

Peering forwards he fancied he could see the further interface, the fireball advancing at its own slow, inexorable pace behind the light flash. Even through the radiance he thought he could detect flickering patterns of orange flame dancing across its surface. Norton was suddenly reminded of what lay beyond there . . . but for now it was enough to be drifting, clad in a nimbus of cool white fire.

Carver, a pale haloed ghost of a figure, was at his side. He swished his stick playfully through the fireball’s surface, coming away each time with a couple of inches less on the tip. He was like a lion-tamer, holding inconceivable energy at bay with just the stick and the force of his personality.

“Don’t get too close,” Norton warned, as the other man edged forward. Carver took no notice, so Norton tapped him on the shoulder with his own stick. Carver began to turn, but as he did so his foot caught on the kerbstone. He teetered, began to fall backwards, mouth widening in surprise: fell faster than Norton could lunge forwards, into the fireball.

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, as though Carver had fallen into still another time anomaly. He appeared to hang suspended as his hair burst into flame and his skin began to char. Puffs of steam rose from his body. His shirt was consumed so quickly that it simply seemed to vanish. His lips drew back as if he was about to say something, but they were only shrivelling with the heat. Behind them the gums burned away, exposing bone that blackened swiftly, though the teeth remained anomalously white until the enamel cracked and burst. The goggles melted, exposing steaming sockets in a face that was turning into a skull even as he fell. His body cooked, as if Norton was watching an accelerated film of meat being roasted. The skin crisped, then peeled away; the flesh followed, crumbling and flaking away from bones that snapped and popped from their sockets and themselves began to burn. By the time Carver hit the ground all that was left of him was a charred heap of smouldering detritus which blew away in clouds of ash even as it settled. It had taken only seconds; the only sound which reached Norton was a soft, almost plaintive sigh.

Norton watched, transfixed with horror. Then as nausea rose in him he stumbled away, dropping his stick. He burst out of the interface into total darkness—then ripped off the goggles and squatted by the pavement, retching until all he could wring from his stomach was a thin trickle of sour yellow bile.

Now, as Norton looked sidelong at the images recording the beginning and end of yesterday’s tragic adventure, he saw that the interface was undergoing a change. Patterns played more vigorously across its surface; fans of light sprayed outwards briefly; it seemed to vibrate, as if to a deep bass tone. It’s breaking down, he thought. It won’t be long now.

To his surprise his major feeling was not fear but relief. He understood now why condemned prisoners sometimes sacked their lawyers and actively sought their execution rather than trying to delay it.

He felt he would prefer to be at home when it happened, so he turned back into Marlborough Street. As he passed number 6 a voice called out his name. It was Mr. McDonald, a friendly and gregarious pensioner who lived there with his equally good-natured wife. Norton had always got on well with them on a pleasant superficial level. Lacking transport, the McDonalds had been unable to evacuate even if they had wanted to.

Mr. McDonald was busily giving the sitting room windows a second coat of whitewash. “Just putting the final touches,” he said cheerily. The McDonalds had spent the last eight days as they had spent the week before, turning part of their house into a fallout shelter, following an official instruction leaflet. To them the last week seemed to be a God-given opportunity to finish the job properly. Their house did not have a cellar, so they had fitted out the large cupboard under the stairs, protecting it with countless black dustbin bags filled with earth. Inside were carefully arranged supplies of food, water and medicine; bedding and primitive cooking equipment; and even a portable chemical toilet. Before retirement made such recreations impossible to afford the McDonalds had been keen campers, and regarded their expertise and lovingly stored equipment as particular good fortune. A few days ago Mr. McDonald had insisted on showing off their impressively well-organised shelter to Norton; had even offered to squeeze up and make room for three if he hadn’t the materials to build his own defences. What was more, although the offer was made only out of politeness, Norton was sure the McDonalds would have gone through with it if he had pressed them. But he had declined politely, assuring them of the adequacy of his own preparations.

Now, with the image of Carver vivid in his mind, he felt like shouting at Mr. McDonald, shocking him into a realisation of how futile his efforts were in the face of the kind of forces held delicately in check all around him. But it would only hurt and confuse the old man, who was simply following the instructions which he had been told would keep him safe.

Norton waved goodbye to Mr. McDonald and started to walk away. But even as his foot lifted, the air seemed to shudder and split around him, and before his senses were able properly to register the phenomenon the world was filled with an instantaneous, consuming brilliance, a white fire that was neither cool nor pure.

Daisy, In The Sun

— CONNIE WILLIS —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

COLORADO-BORN CONNIE WILLIS IS ONE of the pivotal figures of modern science fiction, who in 2011 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America and has an astonishing eleven Hugo and seven Nebula awards to her credit. Her novels Doomsday Book (1993) and Blackout/All Clear (2011) won both of those awards, making her one of a very small group of writers who have collected the Hugo and Nebula awards for the same book.

Her career began quietly, in 1970, with a short story called “The Secret of Santa Teresa,” and it was not for another decade that her work attracted significant attention. But when “Daisy, in the Sun” appeared in 1979, it was quickly singled out by knowledgeable science-fiction readers—even though it had been published in Galileo, a magazine of very limited distribution. The subtlety of its storytelling and the elegance of its portrait of a world on the eve of destruction marked her as a writer to watch. “Daisy, in the Sun” was chosen for one of the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies the following year, and was nominated for a Hugo in 1980, the first of her innumerable nominations.

Connie Willis lives in Colorado with her husband, Courtney, a retired professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado, and she plays a conspicuous role each year in the World Science Fiction Convention, where her gift for light onstage comedy at the annual awards banquet makes a fascinating contrast to the depth and poignancy of much of her fiction.

—R. S.

DAISY, IN THE SUN

NONE OF THE OTHERS WERE any help. Daisy’s brother, when she knelt beside him on the kitchen floor and said, “Do you remember when we lived at Grandma’s house, just the three of us, nobody else?” looked at her blankly over the pages of his book, his face closed and uninterested. “What is your book about?” she asked kindly. “Is it about the sun? You always used to read your books out loud to me at Grandma’s. All about the sun.”

He stood up and went to the windows of the kitchen and looked out at the snow, tracing patterns on the dry window. The book, when Daisy looked at it, was about something else altogether.

“It didn’t always snow like this at home, did it?” Daisy would ask her grandmother. “It couldn’t have snowed all the time, not even in Canada, could it?”

It was the train this time, not the kitchen, but her grandmother went on measuring for the curtains as if she didn’t notice. “How can the trains run if it snows all the time?” Her grandmother didn’t answer her. She went on measuring the wide curved train windows with her long yellow tape measure. She wrote the measurements on little slips of paper, and they drifted from her pockets like the snow outside, without sound.

Daisy waited until it was the kitchen again. The red café curtains hung streaked and limp across the bottom half of the square windows. “The sun faded the curtains, didn’t it?” she asked slyly, but her grandmother would not be tricked. She measured and wrote and dropped the measurements like ash around her.

Daisy looked from her grandmother to the rest of them, shambling up and down the length of her grandmother’s kitchen. She would not ask them. Talking to them would be like admitting they belonged here, muddling clumsily around the room, bumping into each other.

Daisy stood up. “It was the sun that faded them,” she said. “I remember,” and went into her room and shut the door.

The room was always her own room, no matter what happened outside. It stayed the same, yellow ruffled muslin on the bed, yellow priscillas at the window. She had refused to let her mother put blinds up in her room. She remembered that quite clearly.

She had stayed in her room the whole day with her door barricaded. But she could not remember why her mother had wanted to put them up or what had happened afterward.

Daisy sat down cross-legged in the middle of the bed, hugging the yellow ruffled pillow from her bed against her chest. Her mother constantly reminded her that a young lady sat with her legs together. “You’re fifteen, Daisy. You’re a young lady whether you like it or not.”

Why could she remember things like that and not how they had gotten here and where her mother was and why it snowed all the time yet was never cold? She hugged the pillow tightly against her and tried, tried to remember.

It was like pushing against something, something both yielding and unyielding. It was herself, trying to push her breasts flat against her chest after her mother had told her she was growing up, that she would need to wear a bra. She had tried to push through to the little girl she had been before, but even though she pressed them into herself with the flats of her hands, they were still there. A barrier, impossible to get through.

Daisy clutched at the yielding pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. “Grandma came in,” she said out loud, reaching for the one memory she could get to, “Grandma came in and said . . .”

She was looking at one of her brother’s books. She had been holding it, looking at it, one of her brother’s books about the sun, and as the door opened he reached out and took it away from her. He was angry—about the book? Her grandmother came in, looking hot and excited, and he took the book away from her. Her grandmother said, “They got the material in. I bought enough for all the windows.” She had a sack full of folded cloth, red-andwhite gingham. “I bought almost the whole bolt,” her grandmother said. She was flushed. “Isn’t it pretty?” Daisy reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth. And . . . Daisy clutched at the pillow, wrinkling the ruffled edge. She had reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth and then . . .

It was no use. She could not get any further. She had never been able to get any further. Sometimes she sat on her bed for days. Sometimes she started at the end and worked back through the memory and it was still the same. She could not remember any more on either side. Only the book and her grandmother coming in and reaching out her hand.

Daisy opened her eyes. She put the pillow back on the bed and uncrossed her legs and took a deep breath. She was going to have to ask the others. There was nothing else to do.

She stood a minute by the door before she opened it, wondering which of the places it would be. It was her mother’s living room, the walls a cool blue and the windows covered with venetian blinds. Her brother sat on the gray-blue carpet reading. Her grandmother had taken down one of the blinds. She was measuring the tall window. Outside the snow fell.

The strangers moved up and down on the blue carpet. Sometimes Daisy thought she recognized them, that they were friends of her parents or people she had seen at school, but she could not be sure. They did not speak to each other in their endless, patient wanderings. They did not even seem to see each other. Sometimes passing down the long aisle of the train or circling her grandmother’s kitchen or pacing the blue living room, they bumped into each other. They did not stop and say excuse me. They bumped into each other as if they did not know they did it, and moved on. They collided without sound or feeling, and each time they did, they seemed less and less like people Daisy knew and more and more like strangers. She looked at them anxiously, trying to recognize them so she could ask them.

The young man had come in from outside. Daisy was sure of it, though there was no draft of cold air to convince her, no snow for the young man to shrug from his hair and shoulders. He moved with easy direction through the others, and they looked up at him as he passed. He sat down on the blue couch and smiled at Daisy’s brother. Her brother looked up from his book and smiled back. He has come in from outside, Daisy thought. He will know.

She sat down near him, on the end of the couch, her arms crossed in front of her. “Has something happened to the sun?” she asked him in a whisper.

He looked up. His face was as young as hers, tanned and smiling. Daisy felt, far down, a little quiver of fear, a faint alien feeling like that which had signaled the coming of her first period. She stood up and backed away from him, only a step, and nearly collided with one of the strangers.

“Well, hello,” the boy said. “If it isn’t little Daisy!”

Her hands knotted into fists. She did not see how she could not have recognized him before—the easy confidence, the casual smile. He would not help her. He knew, of course he knew, he had always known everything, but he wouldn’t tell her. He would laugh at her. She must not let him laugh at her.

“Hi, Ron,” she was going to say, but the last consonant drifted away into uncertainty. She had never been sure what his name was.

He laughed. “What makes you think something’s happened to the sun, Daisy-Daisy?” He had his arm over the back of the couch. “Sit down and tell me all about it.” If she sat down next to him he could easily put his arm around her.

“Has something happened to the sun?” she repeated more loudly from where she stood. “It never shines anymore.”

“Are you sure?” he said, and laughed again. He was looking at her breasts. She crossed her arms in front of her.

“Has it?” she said stubbornly, like a child.

“What do you think?”

“I think maybe everybody was wrong about the sun.” She stopped, surprised at what she had said, at what she was remembering now. Then she went on, forgetting to keep her arms in front of her, listening to what she said next. “They all thought it was going to blow up. They said it would swallow the whole earth up. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just burned out, like a match or something, and it doesn’t shine anymore and that’s why it snows all the time and—”

“Cold,” Ron said. “What?”

“Cold,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be cold if that had happened?”

“What?” she said stupidly.

“Daisy,” he said, and smiled at her. She reeled a little. The tugging fear was further down and more definite.

“Oh,” she said, and ran, veering around the others milling up and down, up and down, into her own room. She slammed the door behind her and lay down on the bed, holding her stomach and remembering.

HER FATHER HAD CALLED THEM all together in the living room. Her mother perched on the edge of the blue couch, already looking frightened. Her brother had brought a book in with him, but he stared blindly at the page.

It was cold in the living room. Daisy moved into the one patch of sunlight, and waited. She had already been frightened for a year. And in a minute, she thought, I’m going to hear something that will make me more afraid.

She felt a sudden stunning hatred of her parents, able to pull her in out of the sun and into darkness, able to make her frightened just by talking to her. She had been sitting on the porch today. That other day she had been lying in the sun in her old yellow bathing suit when her mother called her in.

“You’re a big girl now,” her mother had said once they were in her room. She was looking at the outgrown yellow suit that was tight across the chest and pulled up on the legs. “There are things you need to know.”

Daisy’s heart had begun to pound. “I wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t hear a lot of rumors.” She had had a booklet with her, pink and white and terrifying. “I want you to read this, Daisy. You’re changing, even though you may not notice it. Your breasts are developing and soon you’ll be starting your period. That means—”

Daisy knew what it meant. The girls at school had told her. Darkness and blood. Boys wanting to touch her breasts, wanting to penetrate her darkness. And then more blood.

“No,” Daisy said. “No. I don’t want to.”

“I know it seems frightening to you now, but someday soon you’ll meet a nice boy and then you’ll understand . . .”

No, I won’t. Never. I know what boys do to you.

“Five years from now you won’t feel this way, Daisy. You’ll see . . .”

Not in five years. Not in a hundred. No.

“I won’t have breasts,” Daisy shouted, and threw the pillow off her bed at her mother. “I won’t have a period. I won’t let it happen. No!”

Her mother had looked at her pityingly. “Why, Daisy, it’s already started.” She had put her arms around her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, honey.”

Daisy had been afraid ever since. And now she would be more afraid, as soon as her father spoke.

“I wanted to tell you all together,” her father said, “so you would not hear some other way. I wanted you to know what is really happening and not just rumors.” He paused and took a ragged breath. They even started their speeches alike.

“I think you should hear it from me,” her father said. “The sun is going to go nova.”

Her mother gasped, a long, easy intake of breath like a sigh, the last easy breath her mother would take. Her brother closed his book. Is that all? Daisy thought, surprised.

“The sun has used up all the hydrogen in its core. It’s starting to burn itself up, and when it does, it will expand and—” he stumbled over the word.

“It’s going to swallow us up,” her brother said. “I read it in a book. The sun will just explode, all the way out to Mars. It’ll swallow up Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars and we’ll all be dead.”

Her father nodded. “Yes,” he said, as if he was relieved that the worst was out.

“No,” her mother said. And Daisy thought, This is nothing. Nothing. Her mother’s talks were worse than this. Blood and darkness.

“There have been changes in the sun,” her father said. “There have been more solar storms, too many. And the sun is releasing unusual bursts of neutrinos. Those are signs that it will—”

“How long?” her mother asked.

“A year. Five years at the most. They don’t know.”

“We have to stop it!” Daisy’s mother shrieked, and Daisy looked up from her place in the sun, amazed at her mother’s fear.

“There’s nothing we can do,” her father said. “It’s already started.”

“I won’t let it,” her mother said. “Not to my children. I won’t let it happen. Not to my Daisy. She’s always loved the sun.”

At her mother’s words, Daisy remembered something. An old photograph her mother had written on, scrawling across the bottom of the picture in white ink. The picture was herself as a toddler in a yellow sunsuit, concave little girl’s chest and pooching toddler’s stomach. Bucket and shovel and toes dug into the hot sand, squinting up into the sunlight. And her mother’s writing across the bottom: “Daisy, in the sun.”

Her father had taken her mother’s hand and was holding it. He had put his arm around her brother’s shoulders. Their heads were ducked, prepared for a blow, as if they thought a bomb was going to fall on them.

Daisy thought, All of us, in a year or maybe five, surely five at the most, all of us children again, warm and happy, in the sun. She could not make herself be afraid.

IT WAS THE TRAIN AGAIN. The strangers moved up and down the long aisle of the dining car, knocking against each other randomly. Her grandmother measured the little window in the door at the end of the car. She did not look out the window at the ashen snow. Daisy could not see her brother.

Ron was sitting at one of the tables that were covered with the heavy worn white damask of dining cars. The vase and dull silver on the table were heavy so they would not fall off with the movement of the train. Ron leaned back in his chair and looked out the window at the snow.

Daisy sat down across the table from him. Her heart was beating painfully in her chest. “Hi,” she said. She was afraid to add his name for fear the word would trail away as it had before and he would know how frightened she was.

He turned and smiled at her. “Hello, Daisy-Daisy,” he said.

She hated him with the same sudden intensity she had felt for her parents, hated him for his ability to make her afraid.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

He turned slightly in the seat and grinned at her.

“You don’t belong here,” she said belligerently. “I went to Canada to live with my grandmother.” Her eyes widened. She had not known that before she said it. “I didn’t even know you. You worked in the grocery store when we lived in California.” She was suddenly overwhelmed by what she was saying. “You don’t belong here,” she murmured.

“Maybe it’s all a dream, Daisy.”

She looked at him, still angry, her chest heaving with the shock of remembering. “What?”

“I said, maybe you’re just dreaming all this.” He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “You always had the most incredible dreams, Daisy-Daisy.”

She shook her head. “Not like this. They weren’t like this. I always had good dreams.” The memory was coming now, faster this time, a throbbing in her side where the pink and white book said her ovaries were. She was not sure she could make it to her room. She stood up, clutching at the white tablecloth. “They weren’t like this.” She stumbled through the milling people toward her room.

“Oh, and Daisy,” Ron said. She stopped, her hand on the door of her room, the memory almost there. “You’re still cold.”

“What?” she said blankly.

“Still cold. You’re getting warmer, though.”

She wanted to ask him what he meant, but the memory was upon her. She shut the door behind her, breathing heavily, and groped for the bed.

ALL HER FAMILY HAD HAD nightmares. The three of them sat at breakfast with drawn, tired faces, their eyes looking bruised. The lead-backed curtains for the kitchen hadn’t come yet, so they had to eat breakfast in the living room where they could close the venetian blinds. Her mother and father sat on the blue couch with their knees against the crowded coffee table. Daisy and her brother sat on the floor.

Her mother said, staring at the closed blinds, “I dreamed I was full of holes, tiny little holes, like dotted swiss.”

“Now, Evelyn,” her father said.

Her brother said, “I dreamed the house was on fire and the fire trucks came and put it out, but then the fire trucks caught on fire and the fire men and the trees and—”

“That’s enough,” her father said. “Eat your breakfast.” To his wife he said gently, “Neutrinos pass through all of us all the time. They pass right through the earth. They’re completely harmless. They don’t make holes at all. It’s nothing, Evelyn. Don’t worry about the neutrinos. They can’t hurt you.”

“Daisy, you had a dotted swiss dress once, didn’t you?” her mother said, still looking at the blinds. “It was yellow. All those little dots, like holes.”

“May I be excused?” her brother asked, holding a book with a photo of the sun on the cover.

Her father nodded and her brother went outside, already reading. “Wear your hat!” Daisy’s mother said, her voice rising perilously on the last word. She watched him until he was out of the room, then she turned and looked at Daisy with her bruised eyes. “You had a nightmare too, didn’t you, Daisy?”

Daisy shook her head, looking down at her bowl of cereal. She had been looking out between the venetian blinds before breakfast, looking out at the forbidden sun. The stiff plastic blinds had caught open, and now there was a little triangle of sunlight on Daisy’s bowl of cereal. She and her mother were both looking at it. Daisy put her hand over the light.

“Did you have a nice dream, then, Daisy, or don’t you remember?” She sounded accusing.

“I remember,” Daisy said, watching the sunlight on her hand. She had dreamed of a bear. A massive golden bear with shining fur. Daisy was playing ball with the bear. She had in her two hands a little blue-green ball. The bear reached out lazily with his wide golden arm and swatted the blue ball out of Daisy’s hands and away. The wide, gentle sweep of his great paw was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Daisy smiled to herself at the memory of it.

“Tell me your dream, Daisy,” her mother said.

“All right,” Daisy said angrily. “It was about a big yellow bear and a little blue ball that he swatted.” She swung her arm toward her mother.

Her mother winced.

“Swatted us all to kingdom come, Mother!” she shouted and flung herself out of the dark living room into the bright morning sun.

“Wear your hat,” her mother called after her, and this time the last word rose almost to a scream.

DAISY STOOD AGAINST THE DOOR for a long time, watching him. He was talking to her grandmother. She had put down her yellow tape measure with the black coal numbers and was nodding and smiling at what he said. After a very long time he reached out his hand and covered hers, patting it kindly.

Her grandmother stood up slowly and went to the window, where the faded red curtains did not shut out the snow, but she did not look at the curtains. She stood and looked out at the snow, smiling faintly and without anxiety.

Daisy edged her way through the crowd in the kitchen, frowning, and sat down across from Ron. His hands still rested flat on the red linoleum-topped table. Daisy put her hands on the table, too, almost touching his. She turned them palm up, in a gesture of helplessness.

“It isn’t a dream, is it?” she asked him.

His fingers were almost touching hers. “What makes you think I’d know? I don’t belong here, remember? I work in a grocery store, remember?”

“You know everything,” she said simply.

“Not everything.”

The cramp hit her. Her hands, still palm up, shook a little and then groped for the metal edge of the red table as she tried to straighten up.

“Warmer all the time, Daisy-Daisy,” he said.

She did not make it to her room. She leaned helplessly against the door and watched her grandmother, measuring and writing and dropping the little slips of paper around her. And remembered.

Her mother did not even know him. She had seen him at the grocery store. Her mother, who never went out, who wore sunglasses and long-sleeved shirts and a sun hat, even inside the darkened blue living room—her mother had met him at the grocery store and brought him home. She had taken off her hat and her ridiculous gardening gloves and gone to the grocery store to find him. It must have taken incredible courage.

“He said he’d seen you at school and wanted to ask you out himself, but he was afraid I’d say you were too young, isn’t that right, Ron?” Her mother spoke in a rapid, nervous voice. Daisy was not sure whether she had said Ron or Rob or Rod. “So I said why don’t you just come on home with me right now and meet her? There’s no time like the present, I say. Isn’t that right, Ron?”

He was not embarrassed by her at all. “Would you like to go get a co*ke, Daisy? I’ve got my car here.”

“Of course she wants to go. Don’t you, Daisy?”

No. She wished the sun would reach out lazily, the great golden bear, and swat them all away. Right now.

“Daisy,” her mother said, hastily brushing at her hair with her fingers. “There’s so little time left. I wanted you to have . . .”

Darkness and blood. You wanted me to be as frightened as you are. Well, I’m not, Mother. It’s too late. We’re almost there now.

But when she went outside with him, she saw his convertible parked at the curb, and she felt the first faint flutter of fear. It had the top down. She looked up at his tanned, smiling face, and thought, He isn’t afraid.

“Where do you want to go, Daisy?” he asked. He had his bare arm across the back of the seat. He could easily move it from there to around her shoulders. Daisy sat against the door, her arms wrapped around her chest.

“I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down. I love the sun,” she said to frighten him, to see the same expression she could see on her mother’s face when Daisy told her lies about the dreams.

“Me, too,” he said. “It sounds like you don’t believe all that garbage they feed us about the sun, either. It’s a lot of scare talk, that’s all. You don’t see me getting skin cancer, do you?” He moved his golden-tanned arm lazily around her shoulder to show her. “A lot of people getting hysterical for nothing. My physics teacher says the sun could emit neutrinos at the present rate for five thousand years before the sun would collapse. All this stuff about the aurora borealis. Geez, you’d think these people had never seen a solar flare before. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Daisy-Daisy.”

He moved his arm dangerously close to her breast.

“Do you have nightmares?” she asked him, desperate to frighten him.

“No. All my dreams are about you.” His fingers traced a pattern, casually, easily on her blouse. “What do you dream about?”

She thought she would frighten him like she frightened her mother. Her dreams always seemed so beautiful, but when she began to tell them to her mother, her mother’s eyes became wide and dark with fear. And then Daisy would change the dream, make it sound worse than it was, ruin its beauty to make it frighten her mother.

“I dreamed I was rolling a golden hoop. It was hot. It burned my hand whenever I touched it. I was wearing earrings, little golden hoops in my ears that spun like the hoop when I ran. And a golden bracelet.” She watched his face as she told him, to see the fear. He traced the pattern aimlessly with his finger, closer and closer to the nipple of her breast.

“I rolled the hoop down a hill and it started rolling faster and faster. I couldn’t keep up with it. It rolled on by itself, like a wheel, a golden wheel, rolling over everything.”

She had forgotten her purpose. She had told the dream as she remembered it, with the little secret smile at the memory. His hand had closed over her breast and rested there, warm as the sun on her face.

He looked as if he didn’t know it was there. “Boy, my psych teacher would have a ball with that one! Who would think a kid like you could have a sexy dream like that? Wow! Talk about Freudian! My psych teacher says—”

“You think you know everything, don’t you?” Daisy said.

His fingers traced the nipple through her thin blouse, tracing a burning circle, a tiny burning hoop.

“Not quite,” he said, and bent close to her face. Darkness and blood. “I don’t know quite how to take you.”

She wrenched free of his face, free of his arm. “You won’t take me at all. Not ever. You’ll be dead. We’ll all be dead in the sun,” she said, and flung herself out of the convertible and back into the darkened house.

Daisy lay doubled up on the bed for a long time after the memory was gone. She would not talk to him anymore. She could not remember anything without him, but she did not care. It was all a dream anyway. What did it matter? She hugged her arms to her.

It was not a dream. It was worse than a dream. She sat very straight on the edge of the bed, her head up and her arms at her side, her feet together on the floor, the way a young lady was supposed to sit. When she stood up, there was no hesitation in her manner. She walked straight to the door and opened it. She did not stop to see what room it was. She did not even glance at the strangers milling up and down. She went straight to Ron and put her hand on his shoulder.

“This is hell, isn’t it?”

He turned, and there was something like hope on his face. “Why, Daisy!” he said, and took her hands and pulled her down to sit beside him. It was the train. Their folded hands rested on the white damask tablecloth. She looked at the hands. There was no use trying to pull away.

Her voice did not shake. “I was very unkind to my mother. I used to tell her my dreams just to make her frightened. I used to go out without a hat, just because it scared her so much.” She couldn’t help it. She was so afraid the sun would explode. She stopped and stared at her hands. “I think it did explode and everybody died, like my father said. I think . . . I should have lied to her about the dreams. I should have told her I dreamed about boys, about growing up, about things that didn’t frighten her. I could have made up nightmares like my brother did.”

“Daisy,” he said. “I’m afraid confessions aren’t quite in my line. I don’t—”

“She killed herself,” Daisy said. “She sent us to my grandmother’s in Canada and then she killed herself. And so I think that if we are all dead, then I went to hell. That’s what hell is, isn’t it? Coming face to face with what you’re most afraid of.”

“Or what you love. Oh, Daisy,” he said, holding her fingers tightly, “whatever made you think that this was hell?”

In her surprise, she looked straight into his eyes. “Because there isn’t any sun,” she said.

His eyes burned her, burned her. She felt blindly for the white-covered table, but the room had changed. She could not find it. He pulled her down beside him on the blue couch. With him still clinging to her hands, still holding onto her, she remembered.

They were being sent away, to protect them from the sun. Daisy was just as glad to go. Her mother was angry with her all the time. She forced Daisy to tell her her dreams every morning at breakfast in the dark living room. Her mother had put blackout curtains up over the blinds so that no light got in at all, and in the blue twilight not even the little summer slants of light from the blinds fell on her mother’s frightened face.

There was nobody on the beaches. Her mother would not let her go out, even to the grocery store, without a hat and sunglasses. She would not let them fly to Canada. She was afraid of magnetic storms. They sometimes interrupted the radio signals from the towers. Her mother was afraid the plane would crash.

She sent them on the train, kissing them goodbye at the train station, for the moment oblivious to the long dusty streaks of light from the vaulted train-station windows. Her brother went ahead of them out to the platform, and her mother pulled Daisy suddenly into a dark shadowed corner. “What I told you before, about your period, that won’t happen now. The radiation—I called the doctor and he said not to worry. It’s happening to everyone.”

Again Daisy felt the faint pull of fear. Her period had started months ago, dark and bloody as she had imagined. She had not told anyone. “I won’t worry,” she said.

“Oh, my Daisy,” her mother said suddenly. “My Daisy in the sun,” and seemed to shrink back into the darkness. But as they pulled out of the station, she came out into the direct sun and waved goodbye to them.

It was wonderful on the train. The few passengers stayed in their cabins with the shades drawn. There were no shades in the dining car, no people to tell Daisy to get out of the sunlight. She sat in the deserted dining car and looked out the wide windows. The train flew through forests, thin branchy forests of spindly pines and aspens. The sun flickered in on Daisy—sun and then shadows and then sun, running across her face. She and her brother ordered an orgy of milkshakes and desserts and nobody said anything to them.

Her brother read his books about the sun out loud to her. “Do you know what it’s like in the middle of the sun?” he asked her. Yes. You stand with a bucket and a shovel and your bare toes digging into the sand, a child again, not afraid, squinting up into the yellow light.

“No,” she said.

“Atoms can’t even hold together in the middle of the sun. It’s so crowded they bump into each other all the time, bump bump bump, like that, and their electrons fly off and run around free. Sometimes when there’s a collision, it lets off an X-ray that goes whoosh, all the way out at the speed of light, like a ball in a pinball machine. Bing-bang-bing, all the way to the surface.”

“Why do you read those books anyway? To scare yourself?”

“No. To scare Mom.” That was a daring piece of honesty, suitable not even for the freedom of Grandma’s, suitable only for the train. She smiled at him.

“You’re not even scared, are you?”

She felt obliged to answer him with equal honesty. “No,” she said, “not at all.”

“Why not?”

Because it won’t hurt. Because I won’t remember afterwards. Because I’ll stand in the sun with my bucket and shovel and look up and not be frightened. “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “I’m just not.”

“I am. I dream about burning all the time. I think about how much it hurts when I burn my finger and then I dream about it hurting like that all over forever.” He had been lying to their mother about his dreams, too.

“It won’t be like that,” Daisy said. “We won’t even know it’s happened. We won’t remember a thing.”

“When the sun goes nova, it’ll start using itself up. The core will start filling up with atomic ash, and that’ll make the sun start using up all its own fuel. Do you know it’s pitch-dark in the middle of the sun? See, the radiations are X-rays, and they’re too short to see. They’re invisible. Pitch-dark and ashes falling around you. Can you imagine that?”

“It doesn’t matter.” They were passing a meadow and Daisy’s face was full in the sun. “We won’t be there. We’ll be dead. We won’t remember anything.”

Daisy had not realized how relieved she would be to see her grandmother, narrow face sunburned, arms bare. She was not even wearing a hat. “Daisy, dear, you’re growing up,” she said. She did not make it sound like a death sentence. “And David, you still have your nose in a book, I see.”

It was nearly dark when they got to her little house. “What’s that?” David asked, standing on the porch.

Her grandmother’s voice did not rise dangerously at all. “The aurora borealis. I tell you, we’ve had some shows up here lately. It’s like the Fourth of July.”

Daisy had not realized how hungry she had been to hear someone who was not afraid. She looked up. Great red curtains of light billowed almost to the zenith, fluttering in some solar wind. “It’s beautiful,” Daisy whispered, but her grandmother was holding the door open for her to go in, and so happy was she to see the clear light in her grandmother’s eyes, she followed her into the little kitchen with its red linoleum table and the red curtains hanging at the windows.

“It is so nice to have company,” her grandmother said, climbing onto a chair. “Daisy, hold this end, will you?” She dangled the long end of a yellow plastic ribbon down to Daisy. Daisy took it, looking anxiously at her grandmother. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Measuring for new curtains, dear,” she said, reaching into her pocket for a slip of paper and a pencil. “What’s the length, Daisy?”

“Why do you need new curtains?” Daisy asked. “These look fine to me.”

“They don’t keep the sun out,” her grandmother said. Her eyes had gone coal-black with fear. Her voice was rising with every word. “We have to have new curtains, Daisy, and there’s no cloth. Not in the whole town, Daisy. Can you imagine that? We had to send to Ottawa. They bought up all the cloth in town. Can you imagine that, Daisy?”

“Yes,” Daisy said, and wished she could be afraid.

RON STILL HELD HER HANDS tightly. She looked steadily at him. “Warmer, Daisy,” he said. “Almost here.”

“Yes,” she said.

He untwined their fingers and rose from the couch. He walked through the crowd in the blue living room and went out the door into the snow. She did not try to go to her room. She watched them all, the strangers in their endless, random movement, her brother walking while he read, her grandmother standing on a chair, and the memory came quite easily and without pain.

“YOU WANTA SEE SOMETHING?” HER brother asked.

Daisy was looking out the window. All day long the lights had been flickering, even though it was calm and silent outside. Their grandmother had gone to town to see if the fabric for the curtains had come in. Daisy did not answer him.

He shoved the book in front of her face. “That’s a prominence,” he said. The pictures were in black and white, like old-fashioned snapshots, only under them instead of her mother’s scrawled white ink, it said, “High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, Colorado.”

“That’s an eruption of hot gas hundreds of thousands of feet high.”

“No,” Daisy said, taking the book into her own lap. “That’s my golden hoop. I saw it in my dream.”

She turned the page.

David leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That was the big eruption in 1946 when it first started to go wrong only they didn’t know it yet. It weighed a billion tons. The gas went out a million miles.”

Daisy held the book like a snapshot of a loved one.

“It just went bash, and knocked all this gas out into space. There were all kinds of—”

“It’s my golden bear,” she said. The great paw of flame reached lazily out from the sun’s black surface in the picture, the wild silky paw of flaming gas.

“This is the stuff you’ve been dreaming?” her brother asked.

“This is the stuff you’ve been telling me about?” His voice went higher and higher. “I thought you said the dreams were nice.”

“They were,” Daisy said.

He pulled the book away from her and flipped angrily through the pages to a colored diagram on a black ground. It showed a glowing red ball with concentric circles drawn inside it. “There,” he said, shoving it at Daisy. “That’s what’s going to happen to us.” He jabbed angrily at one of the circles inside the red ball. “That’s us. That’s us! Inside the sun! Dream about that, why don’t you?”

He slammed the book shut.

“But we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter,” Daisy said. “It won’t hurt. We won’t remember anything.”

“That’s what you think! You think you know everything. Well, you don’t know what anything is. I read a book about it, and you know what it said? They don’t even know what memory is. They think maybe it isn’t even in the brain cells. That it’s in the atoms somewhere, and even if we’re blown apart, that memory stays. What if we do get burned by the sun and we still remember? What if we go on burning and burning and remembering and remembering forever?”

Daisy said quietly, “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t hurt us.” There had been no fear as she stood digging her toes into the sand and looking up at him, only wonder. “He—”

“You’re crazy!” her brother shouted. “You know that? You’re crazy. You talk about him like he’s your boyfriend or something! It’s the sun, the wonderful sun that’s going to kill us all!” He yanked the book away from her. He was crying.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy was about to say, but their grandmother came in just then, hatless, with her hair blowing around her thin, sunburned face.

“They got the material in,” she said jubilantly. “I bought enough for all the windows.” She spilled out two sacks of red gingham. It billowed out across the table like the northern lights, red over red. “I thought it would never get here.”

Daisy reached out to touch it.

SHE WAITED FOR HIM, SITTING at the white-damask table of the dining car. He hesitated at the door, standing framed by the snow of ash behind him, and then came gaily in, singing.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your theory do,” he sang. He carried in his arms a bolt of red cloth. It billowed out from the bolt as he handed it to her grandmother—she standing on the chair, transfixed by joy, the pieces of paper, the yellow tape measure fallen from her forever.

Daisy came and stood in front of him.

“Daisy, Daisy,” he said gaily. “Tell me—”

She put her hand on his chest. “No theory,” she said. “I know.”

“Everything, Daisy?” He smiled the easy, lopsided smile, and she thought sadly that even knowing, she would not be able to see him as he was, but only as the boy who had worked at the grocery store, the boy who had known everything.

“No, but I think I know.” She held her hand firmly against his chest, over the flaming hoop of his breast. “I don’t think we are people anymore. I don’t know what we are—atoms stripped of our electrons maybe, colliding endlessly against each other in the center of the sun while it burns itself to ash in the endless snowstorm at its heart.”

He gave her no clue. His smile was still confident, easy. “What about me, Daisy?” he asked.

“I think you are my golden bear, my flaming hoop, I think you are Ra, with no end to your name at all, Ra who knows everything.”

“And who are you?”

“I am Daisy, who loved the sun.”

He did not smile, did not change his mocking expression. But his tanned hand closed over hers, still pushing against his chest.

“What will I be now, an X-ray zigzagging all the way to the surface till I turn into light? Where will you take me after you have taken me? To Saturn, where the sun shines on the cold rings till they melt into happiness? Is that where you shine now, on Saturn? Will you take me there? Or will we stand forever like this, me with my bucket and shovel, squinting up at you?”

Slowly he gave her hand back to her. “Where do you want to go, Daisy?”

Her grandmother still stood on the chair, holding the cloth as if it were a benediction. Daisy reached out and touched the cloth, as she had in the moment when the sun went nova. She smiled up at her grandmother. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s come.”

She bent suddenly to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside as if she thought because she knew she might be granted some sort of vision, might see for some small moment the little girl that was herself, with her little girl’s chest and toddler’s stomach . . . might see herself as she really was: Daisy, in the sun. But all she could see was the endless snow.

Her brother was reading on the blue couch in her mother’s living room. She stood over him, watching him read. “I’m afraid now,” Daisy said, but it wasn’t her brother’s face that looked back at her.

All right, then, Daisy thought. None of them are any help. It doesn’t matter. I have come face to face with what I fear and what I love and they are the same thing.

“All right, then,” Daisy said, and turned back to Ron. “I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down.” She stopped and squinted up at him. “I love the sun,” she said.

When he put his arm around her shoulder, she did not move away. His hand closed on her breast and he bent down to kiss her.

Three Days After

— KAREN HABER —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

AFTER WORKING AS A NEWSPAPER reporter and as an editor for an art magazine, and spending some time in Brazil and Paraguay, Karen Haber turned to writing science fiction with the stories Samba Sentado and Madre de Dios in 1988, both of them outgrowths of her South American sojourns. Since then, she has published some fifty other short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well as nine novels. She has also edited numerous anthologies, reviews science-fiction and fantasy art books and does profiles of artists for Locus, and has produced several books of nonfiction, including the Hugo-nominated Meditations on Middle Earth (2001), Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber Present (2003), and Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art (2011), based on her interviews with leading science-fiction and fantasy artists. The chilling post-apocalyptic vignette reprinted here, “Three Days After,” was published for the first time in The Sweet Taste of Regret (ReAnimus Press, 2014), a collection of thirteen of her short stories.

She lives in the San Francisco area and in her real-world life is the wife of science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg.

—R. S.

THREE DAYS AFTER

PHELIA AWAKENS IN THE VIOLET gloom, hands locked around the balled blue sheet, palms sweating. The clock says 6:05 A.M., April 12. Twenty minutes before the alarm.

The noise pushes aside the fading echoes of her dreams, pushes in, pushes hard. Eagles, falling, wings locked shut, screaming. A small child alone and wet in a dark tunnel, keening.

Whatwhatwhatinhell and where is it?

The window and its thin blinds bending at the touch of a fingertip—pop—and a horizontal sliver of half-night slides into the room.

No mongrel pack or rogue scavenger lingers in the shadows. Nothing, there is nothing out there at all save the purple mist swirling slowly above the pavement, haloing the yellow streetlamp, and a strange green light in the east, pearly as the inside of an abalone’s shell, soft and luminescent. Generations of artists struggled and died trying to capture that light.

Bed calls, better dreams. She turns toward her pillow.

But someone or thing is blocking the way, there in the room with her, stiff-legged and staggering. A Frankenstein in dress whites, limbs sheathed in long pale tents, fishbowl for a head, silver gloves on hands and feet, and a flat matte screen for a face.

Phelia points. “What?” she says. “What, what?”

A robot? Rewrapped mummy? Drunken friend’s joke?

She waits for something to jump out and go boo but nothing does. “What do you want?” she says.

Deaf, the fishbowl head, and dumb. He runs his hands over the pale blue roses growing on the walls. Golden numbers click at his fingertips. Touch. Touch again. Eyes in his hands? Mouth in his head?

Work, brain, she thought. “I’ll call the police,” she said.

Pulling away from the roses, he turns to the bed. Takes a step. No, she thinks.

No, no, please, God, be home and listening. No.

He turns back, back to the powerful wall flowers and makes long undersea movements along the wallboards.

“Are you deaf? Get out of here!”

Now he is a prairie dog testing the air for enemy scent. Up on the hind legs and sniff, sniff, sniff.

She dials 911.

“Hola? Quien?”

Redial.

“Police dispatcher,” says the robot voice. “All operators are busy. Please hold.”

The man with numbers on his fingers touches the wall and looks at his hands. Touches the window, looks again.

“All operators are still busy but your call is important to us. Please hold.”

Phelia stares after her visitor. She can’t see him.

Gone. Gone?

Ignoring ghostly pleas she puts the phone back in its cradle and checks the closet, the bathroom, but finds nothing, nowhere.

In-out, in-out, she breathes deeply, counts her breaths, her silver, her chakras for good measure, and touches the front door. Locked. Locked. Locked.

She double-locks herself in with her fear.

The phone rings. “You’re too late,” she says.

A voice whispers in a long-distance hiss. Her brother, a scientist, calling from the South Pole. He has been scrambling through the labyrinth of the underground lab, searching for the switch, the food, the light above the exit door.

“Run,” he says. “Run, run, run . . .”

His words break into sharp pieces in her ears but Phelia can feel his meaning transmitted in pulses over the shining wires and pillowed cables, all the longing and sadness bounced off of satellites and into her brain, once around the auditory canal and home. She’s been infected with the twentieth century—love is the vector but the cure is years distant.

“Take care,” she says. “I miss you,” and many other words without deeds, safe because he can’t hear her, because the line is dead. She hangs up tenderly and the tv is there, waiting to comfort and understand.

A blue face onscreen says “Seminary student enters nursery school, machine-guns teacher.”

Flip!

“Woman throws freezer from bridge. Eight homeless killed by falling food.”

Flip! Flip!

“The sovereign nation of Dakota has entered trade talks with Montana.”

Flip!

“Bulletproof buntings for baby—”

Phelia sleeps, lulled by familiar syllables.

A TIGERISH NOISE IN THE sky. A fervid light brighter than the sun at midday, too bright to see except through black glass, flashing neon against the red silk lining of eyelids. Outside a corona of particles sleets softly down upon the sleeping city.

PHELIA SHUTS OFF THE TELEVISION and peers through the window slats. Sun’s up. The clock says April 12, 6:05 A.M.

First the shower, then the green dress and an apple. The bus, when it comes, is late. She steps over drifts of snow, oddly warm, to climb in. The ride is slow, the engine stalls often, and the tires slip and spin against the slick road.

When she gets to work, someone has painted the building blue. But it was bronze yesterday, wasn’t it? When? she wonders. Why?

Upstairs heads are bent in brown cubicles, bodies hunched over keyboards, good punctual boys and girls.

All day Phelia types numbers into glowing orange columns. She only goes outside to buy and eat fried rice, salty and brown with soy sauce. And after, she types words into glowing orange paragraphs and moves them here, there. Then she goes home.

The apartment is yellow. But that morning it had been white. They must be painting them all, she thinks.

Disembodied television voices say, “. . . joint chiefs of staff.”

A face, suddenly, onscreen. Bland, female, and green.

“World leaders meet,” it says, and other hard words that begin with consonants.

Flip.

Flip.

Flip.

The same everywhere. The same stark words coming out of the same green faces.

“Famine.”

“Radiation”

“Plague.”

“Kidnap.”

“Murder.”

“Stay tuned.”

Phelia wants to watch but she wants sleep even more. With the last of her energy she reaches out and turns off the set. Curled around herself, she dreams of words that begin with vowels, doors with windows, claws that snatch.

THE NOISE, ROARING, WAKES HER again. The clock says April 12, 6:05 A.M.

She sits up, stretching, yawning.

The television is on, the screen dissected by snaking scales, a coiling pattern of lateral bands midway between purple and green, nearly gold and decaying to black.

The set hisses and whispers but she can’t speak the language.

“Sorry,” she says. “Je ne parle pas.” Should she have studied Spanish? Taken vocational courses?

The snakes moult, skinned into gray and white slivers, a blizzard of scales: Jackson Pollock channeling Seurat.

She shuts it off, gets up, puts on her blue dress (no, red), eats a pear, waits for the bus until her feet fall asleep. Limping, she walks around the piles of dirty snow and gets to work an hour late, but nobody seems to notice.

The new paint is peeling off the building in long winding ribbons. Inside, upstairs, several brown cubicles are empty and the room is dark. People sit quietly, hands folded in their laps. Some of them are crying. No one wants to talk.

Phelia calls her parents but odd jangling sounds fall out of the phones and crack like thin glass all over the floor.

“There’s nothing to do here,” she says. “I’m going home.”

The streets are filled with drifts of pale ash. Figures move like lost shadows in the murk. By the time she gets home her shoes are ruined and her legs rimed. The electricity is off but she manages a bath by flickering candlelight, ignoring the strange shapes cast upon the wall behind her. Later, she sleeps.

ALL NIGHT LONG IMPLACABLE ARMIES march across her bed. Faceless soldiers throw her to the floor, rape and imprison her. Rape. Then prison.

“But it’s really not my erotic fantasy,” she insists. Beside her, the doctor is silent, thoughtful. “Perhaps it’s a synapse lapse,” she says. “A stray countertransferrence. See?” She opens the drawer in her bedside table and pulls out a small purring man with amber eyes, a long forked tongue, and almost enough time.

WHEN THE SOUND BEGINS SHE is already up, munching a piece of stale bread, and waiting for the morning news to come on. The clock still says 6:05 A.M., April 12. White, all she can hear is white noise. The electricity is still off and the phone is out. She hopes the repair crews will get there soon.

Cracking two slats, she peers outside. The street below has flooded, is a river, flat, brown, and muddy. Bits of debris swirl past, looking now like a tree limb and now like something else, something dead. Two men in a rowboat sweep by and never look up.

At least the batteries in the television still work. Onscreen the abstract expressionists have been busy. Phelia thinks that she can make out shapes. People dressed in white boxes with fishbowl heads, waltzing.

She shivers, oddly hot, and peels down, pulling off every layer until she reaches ground zero, skin, and still cannot strip off enough, unwind herself, cool down her soul.

No, no, no, she is cold. The chill of real fever begins, rattling her bones, and she grabs at the bedclothes with shaking hands, skin prickling, all gooseflesh. She is a skeleton loose in her own flesh, a plaything for a young fiery virus. Shake, shake, shake, teeth clicking like seeds stored in a dried gourd.

When it stops she gets up, reaches for her red dress (no, green), and a soft brown banana. But she can’t go to work. The river is wide, the buses aren’t running, and she is tired, much too tired to swim. She sits on the bed.

THE SOUND. THE PAIN. THE sweet purple dark. Again the clock says April 12, 6:05 A.M. Waking slowly, to silence and the buzz of the television, Phelia sees that all channels are gone. Out. Flip, flip.

“We regret to inform you,” she says, giggling. The laughter becames a cough, an angry dog which takes her between its teeth and worries her, worries her, then leaves her silent and breathless in the unmade bed, her dress a red pool around her.

Finally she sleeps.

PHELIA SAT UP IN BED.

The man in the white box knocked twice at the door and came in. His visor was flat and grey, without reflection, floating in a round fishbowl. His hands and legs were encased in protective silver. The Geiger counter in his gloves clicked like castanets as he ran his hands over the walls with the blue roses. Then he turned and faced the bed.

Phelia didn’t look at the intruder, didn’t even blink. In silence she stared at the silent screen until the man in white leaned over and gently closed her eyes.

“Another deader,” he said into a small box. “We can seal this sector as well.”

“Affirmative,” the box replied.

The clock had stopped at 6:05 A.M., April 12.

THE SOUND. PHELIA AWAKENS IN the dark.

Bullets whizz overhead, breaking glass with sharp, musical notes. The whine of the carbine, the click of the submachine cartridge. The ping and ricochet of the night.

She peers at the clock and sees that it’s no particular time at all. There’s no one and no place she must be. With a deep relieved sigh she pulls the blanket over her head and goes back to sleep.

The Rain at The End of The World

— DALE BAILEY —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

DALE BAILEY, WHO GREW UP in Princeton, West Virginia, is a professor of English at Lenoir–Rhyne University, North Carolina, and has been writing science fiction since the last years of the previous century. He has had three novels published—The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen—and a collection of his short stories under the title, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. “One of the abiding disappointments of my life,” he says, “is that I’ve never had any of the interesting jobs that writers are supposed to have. I was never a gandy dancer or a stevedore. I never drove an ambulance on the Italian Front. I just went to school to study literature and started writing stories.”

“The Rain at the End of the World,” which first appeared in the July 1999 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, attacks the age-old theme of a worldwide deluge with very modern economy and force.

—R. S.

THE RAIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

THEY DROVE NORTH, INTO EVER-FALLING rain. Rain slanted out of the evening sky and spattered against the windshield where the humming wipers slapped it away. Rain streamed from the highway to carve twisted runnels in the gravelled berm. Raindrops beaded up along the windows and rolled swiftly away as the slipstream caught them up. All about them, only the rain, and to fill the voiceless silence, the sounds of tires against wet pavement and rain drumming with insistent fingers all about the car. And in these sounds, Melissa heard another sound, a child’s voice, repeating a scrap of some old nursery rhyme: rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People’s Republic of China. It was raining all around the world. Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields.

Weathermen were apologetic. “Rain,” they said during the five day forecast. “Just rain.” Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion. Religious fanatics built arks. And Melissa—who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain—Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain. They drove north, to the mountain cabin—three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband. And all about them the unceasing rain.

Melissa sighed and studied the book she had tried to read as they drove east out of Knoxville that afternoon. A failed effort, that, defeated by the swaying car. She glanced at Stuart and almost spoke, but what could she say? The silence was a wall between them; they’d lost the rhythm of conversation. They hadn’t exchanged a word since they had changed highways at Wytheville, when Stuart snapped at her for smoking.

Staring at him now, Melissa thought he was changing, a subtle transformation that had begun—when? days ago? weeks? who could say?—sometime during the endless period after the clouds rolled in and rain began to descend like doom from the heavy sky. In the dash lights, his once ruddy features were ghastly and pale, like the features of a corpse. Pasty flesh stretched taut across the angular planes of his skull; his mouth compressed into a white line. Shadow rippled across his tense features, across his hairline, retreating from a sharp widow’s peak though he was only thirty-five.

“Do you have to stare at me?” he said. “Why don’t you read your book?”

“It’s getting dark.”

“Turn on the light then.”

“I don’t want to read. It was making me sick.”

Stuart shrugged and hunched closer over the wheel.

Melissa looked away.

At first, it had been refreshing, the rain, lancing out of the afternoon sky as she drove home from her art history class. She parked the car and stood in the yard, staring up at the gray sky, at lightning incandescent in swollen cloud bellies. Rain poured down, spattering her cheeks and eyelids, running fresh into her open mouth, plastering her garments close against her flesh.

By the thirteenth day—she had gone back by then and added them up, the endless days of unrelenting rain—the haunted look began to show in Stuart’s eyes. His voice grew harsh and strained as discordant music, as it did when she tested his patience with minutiae. That was his word for it: minutiae, pronounced in that gently mocking way he had perfected in the two years since the baby. Not mean, for Stuart was anything but mean; just teasing. “Just teasing,” he always said, and then his lips would shape that word again: minutiae, meaning all the silly trivia that were her life—her gardening, her reading, her occasional class.

By this time the pressure had begun to tell on them all. You could see it in the faces of the newscasters on CNN, in the haunted vacancies behind the weary eyes of the scientists on the Sunday talk shows—vacancies of ignorance and despair. How could they account for this rain that fell simultaneously over every square inch of the planet? How could anyone? By this time—the thirteenth day—you could detect the frayed edges of hysteria and fear. Evangelists intoned portentously that the Rapture was at hand. Certain government experiments had gone awry, a neighbor, who had a friend whose brother-in-law worked at Oak Ridge national labs, confided ominously; flying saucers had been sighted over an airbase in Arizona.

On the twenty-seventh day—a Saturday, and by this time everyone was keeping count—Stuart walked about the house with the stiff-kneed gait of an automaton, jerkily pacing from window to window, shading his eyes as he peered out into the gloom and falling rain.

“Why don’t you call Jim?” Melissa had said. “See if he wants to do something. Get out of here before you go crazy.” Or drive me crazy, she thought, but didn’t say it. She was reading Harper’s and smoking a Marlboro Light—a habit she had picked up two years ago, after the miscarriage. She had always planned to quit, but she somehow never did. It was too easy to smoke, at home alone. Stuart had discouraged her from going back to teaching. Take some time for yourself, he had said. And why not? They didn’t need the money now that Stuart had made partner. And it would have been too hard to be around kids.

“I don’t want to call Jim,” Stuart had said. He peered out into the rain. “I wish you’d quit smoking. It stinks up the whole house.”

“I know,” she said. And she had tried. But as soon as she quit, she started putting on weight, and Stuart didn’t like that either, so what was she to do? Smoke.

Now, driving through rain across the ridges separating Virginia and West Virginia, she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. The flame of the lighter threw Stuart’s angular face into relief, highlighting a ghostly network of lines and shadows that brooded in the hollows around his eyes and beneath his cheeks. For a moment, before the flame blinked out and darkness rushed back into the car, she knew what he would look like when he was old. But he was handsome still, she thought, distinguished even, with the first hint of gray in his dark hair.

Still handsome after twelve years, still the same Stuart. He had noticed her at a time when few men did, had made her feel beautiful and alive, as if she shared his color and energy, his arrogant charm. And just then, leaning over beside her in freshman composition, he had been boyishly vulnerable. “Look,” he’d said, “I’m not very good at this kind of stuff. Do you think you can help me?”

That was a long time ago, but the old Stuart was still there; sometimes she could see vulnerability peeking through the cool and distant resolve he had woven about himself after the baby. She had talked about adoption for a while and she had seen it then—the ghost of that insecurity in the hard curve of his jaw, in the brazen tone of his voice. As if the miscarriage had been his fault.

She cracked her window and blew smoke into the downpour. Stuart coughed theatrically.

“Leave it alone, Stuart,” she said.

Stuart grimaced. He flipped on the radio and searched for a station with one hand. Most of the stations had gone off the air by now, same as the television networks. Why, no one could be certain.

Hysteria, Melissa suspected. The government had shut them down to prevent hysteria. In the last week or two news reports had become increasingly disturbing, often bizarre: floods of epic proportions in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and just about everywhere else, roving gangs in the sodden streets, doom cults who practiced human sacrifice to appease angry weather gods, videotapes of the giant toadstool forest that had erupted over miles and miles of empty western territory. In many places, money was no longer good. People had taken to bartering for canned food, gasoline, cigarettes.

By day thirty-six, Stuart had himself begun to stock up on gasoline and the non-perishable food crammed into the back of the Jeep. He had wanted to buy a gun, but Melissa had drawn the line there; the world might retreat into savagery, but she would have no part of it. At night, the two of them sat without speaking in the living room while the rain beat against the roof. They watched the news on television, and then—on the forty-second day of rain, when the airwaves rang with commentary about surpassing Noah—the cable went dead. Every channel blank, empty, gray. The cable company didn’t answer; radio news reported that television had gone out simultaneously across the country; and then, one by one over the next few days, the radio stations themselves started to go. Without warning or explanation they simply disappeared, static on the empty dial.

Stuart refused to give up; every hour he turned on the radio and spun through the frequencies. Static, more static, an occasional lunatic babbling (but who was a lunatic now, Melissa wondered, now that the whole world had gone insane?), more static. But the static had a message, too: Roads are washing away, the static said, bridges are being obliterated. The world as we know it is being re-made.

Now, driving, Stuart spun through the channels again, FM and then AM. Static and static and then a voice: calm, rational, a woman’s cultured voice in an echoing studio that sounded far, far away.

They paused, listening:

“It’s over,” the woman was saying.

And the interviewer, a man, his voice flat: “What’s over? What do you mean?”

“The entire world, the civilization that men have built over the last two thousand years, since Homer and the Greeks, since earlier—”

“For Christ’s sake,” Stuart said, stabbing at the radio; Melissa reached out to stop him, thinking that anything, even lunacy, was better than this silence that had grown up between them in the last years and which seemed now, in the silent car, more oppressive than it ever had.

“Please,” she said, and sighing, Stuart relented.

“—apocalypse,” the man was saying. “The world is to be utterly destroyed, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not at all. Not destroyed. Recreated, refashioned, renewed—whatever.”

“Like the Noah story? God is displeased with what we’ve made of ourselves.”

“Not with what we’ve made,” the woman said. “With what you’ve made.”

A lengthy pause followed, so lengthy that Melissa for a moment thought they had lost the station, and then the man spoke again. She realized that he had been trying to puzzle out the woman’s odd distinction, and having failed, had chosen to ignore it. He said: “What you’re saying, though, is that God is out there. And He is angry.”

“No, no,” the woman said. “She is.”

“Christ,” Stuart said, and this time he did punch the search button. The radio cycled through a station or two of static and hit on yet another active channel. The strains of Credence Clearwater Revival filled the car—“Who’ll Stop the Rain?” and that joke had been old three weeks ago. He shut off the radio.

All along, he had been this way, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their situation. All along, he had continued to work, shuffling files and depositions though the courts had all but ground to a halt. It was as if he believed he could make the world over as it had been, simply by ignoring the rain. But by yesterday—day forty-eight—the pressure had truly begun to tell on him. Melissa could see it in his panicked eyes.

That day, in the silent house with Stuart gone to work, Melissa stood by the window and looked out across the yard at toadstools, like bowing acolytes to the rain. Pasty fungoid stalks, cold and rubbery as dead flesh, had everywhere nosed their way out of the earth and spread their caps beneath the poisoned sky.

Melissa went about the house on soft feet; she shut curtains in the living room, closed blinds in the office, lowered shades in the bedroom. All about the house she went, shuttering and lowering and closing, walling away the rain.

When Stuart came home that afternoon, his hair was plastered flat against his skull and his eyes glowered from dark hollows.

“How was your day?” she said. She stood at the top of the stairs, in the door to the kitchen, holding a pot.

He stood below, on the landing, one hand in the pocket of his rain-slick jacket, the other grasping the leather briefcase she had given him for Christmas last year. “Fine,” he said.

That was what he always said. The conversation was as ritualized as some ancient religious ceremony. And so she said, “What did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

That was fine, too, that was formula. She turned away. She didn’t care what he’d done all day any more than he cared what she’d done. She didn’t care about flow charts and tax law and office politics any more than he cared about her garden or her classes or any of the hundred things she did to fill the empty days. That was how it was—even though the rain had begun to erase the world they had known, to sweep away without discrimination the tax laws and the flow charts, and the gardens and art classes, too.

But that night—the forty-eighth night of a rain that would never end—that night was different. In the kitchen, as she placed the pot on the stove, she heard his footsteps squeak across the linoleum. He was behind her. She smelled his cologne, weak beneath the moist earthwormy stench of the rain. She turned and he was standing there, a droplet of rain poised at the end of his nose. Rain dripped off his slicker and pooled on the linoleum floor. Rain flattened his hair against his skull.

“Stuart?” she said.

The briefcase slipped from his fingers. Rain glistened on his cheeks and in his eyes. The other hand came out of his pocket, extending towards her.

Toadstools, pale and spongy against his pale and spongy flesh, as colorless as the pasty skin of some cave-dwelling amphibian, extruded from his fist. Toadstools, spotted and poisonous, dangled from between his fingers.

“Toadstools are growing in the yard,” he said.

“I know.”

“We have to get to higher ground.”

“It won’t be any different there,” she said. She had a vision of the mountain cabin, three rooms, and all about them the entombing rain.

“It’s raining all around the world,” she said.

He turned away. The toadstools dropped from his fingers as he left the room. Melissa stared at the fungoid stalks, cold and colorless as dead flesh against the linoleum. She shuddered when she picked them up.

And so this morning, on the forty-ninth morning, they had fled at last. The highways were virtually abandoned; occasionally four-wheel drives zipped past, flying harried in either direction, driven by panicked, pasty-looking men. In fields to either side of the road, lakes, ponds, seas swelled and grew. Mushrooms sprouted at the horizon, overshadowing the trees; on hilly slopes they saw houses and barns decaying beneath masses of putrid mold. Three times the pavement had disappeared before them, submerged; three times Stuart had dropped the Jeep into four-wheel drive and edged forward, fearing sinkholes and washouts; three times their luck had held and they had emerged to wet pavement once again.

They fled east, up 81 to 77, north into West Virginia and the Appalachians. They had a cabin there, near a ski resort in Raleigh County. Melissa remembered when they had bought it a year ago. When Stuart had bought it; he hadn’t consulted her. He had come home late one day, clutching the papers, his eyes wild and feverish. “I used the money,” he had announced, “I made a down-payment on a cabin and two acres of woodland.” Something cold and hateful pierced her then. Stuart had spent the money, the baby’s money, and the spending came like the icy needle-probe of reality:

There was no baby. There would not ever be one.

Now, on the forty-ninth day, they fled northward into night, seeking higher ground, but the rain stayed with them, omnipresent and eternal. It fell out of the sky in solid sheets, flowing over the black pavement and soaking Stuart when he pulled over to refill the tank from the gas cans strapped in the back of the Jeep. Cursing, he would climb back inside and crank the heat to its highest setting, and each time Melissa would remember her long-ago fantasy of making love in the rain. She took a last drag from the cigarette and let the wind have it, watching in the mirror as it tumbled away, extinguished by the rain.

Sodium lights appeared, lining the highway. Ahead, a mountain loomed dark against the gray sky. The road rose to meet it, rose, and rose, and plunged down toward a granite wall. A tunnel—the second one since Wytheville—opened up before them at the last moment, and Melissa clenched her fists, fearing washouts, fearing cave-ins. Then they were inside, the sound of the rain disappearing as they crossed under the mountain and into West Virginia. Bars of shadow and light flashed across Stuart’s face and the hum of tires against dry pavement filled the car. The wipers scraped against the dry windshield, back and forth, back and forth, and then they emerged from the tunnel into a shifting wall of rain.

“Christ,” Stuart said. “Do you think it’ll ever stop? Do you think it’ll rain forever?”

She looked away, out the window, into the falling rain, and that rag of nursery rhyme returned to her. “Rain, rain go away,” she said. “Come again some other day.”

Night closed in around them. Mountains rose above the road like the shoulders of giants, black against the black sky. Melissa smoked her last cigarette. Far ahead, huddled high against an arm of the ridge, Melissa saw a sprinkle of lights, all that remained of a once-bustling town. The cabin lay farther north, isolated still higher in the mountains. Three rooms, Stuart, and all about them the besieging rain.

At last, the lights came up around them.

“Would you look at that?” Stuart said, pointing.

She saw it then, as well, a blazing Texaco sign towering above the highway. Beyond it stretched a strip of hotels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants—most of them dark, abandoned.

“It could be a trap,” Stuart said, “to lure in the unwary.”

She sighed.

“We should have bought that gun.”

“No guns,” she said.

“We’ll have to risk it. If they have gas, we could top off the tank, refill our cans. Maybe they’ll have kerosene.”

Without another word, he exited to the strip, passed the boarded-up ruins of fast-food restaurants and hotels, and stopped the Jeep beneath the canopy by the Texaco’s islands. She watched as he studied the parking lot suspiciously; he put her in mind of some frightened forest creature, and she had the disquieting thought that men weren’t so far removed from the jungle. Satisfied at last, he killed the engine; the noise of the rain grew louder, almost deafening, drowning out her thoughts. She opened the door and stood, stretching.

“I’m going to the restroom,” she said, without turning; she heard the pump come on, gasoline gush into the tank.

“You want anything from inside?” he asked.

“Get me a co*ke and a pack of cigarettes.”

The bathrooms were across the parking lot, through the downpour. Melissa shrugged on her rain coat, slipped the hood over her head, and darted across the pavement, one arm co*cked ineffectually above her, warding off the rain. The interior of the restroom stank of urine and bleach; mold had begun to blossom here, sodden, cancerous roses along the base of the dry-wall. A trash can overflowed in one corner. Melissa’s nose wrinkled in disgust as she covered the toilet seat with toilet paper.

When she returned, Stuart was waiting in the Jeep.

“Can you believe it,” he said. “He took money, good old-fashioned American money. Fool.”

“You get my stuff?”

He gestured at the dash. A can of Diet co*ke waited there, sweating condensation.

“What about my cigarettes?”

“I didn’t get them. We have to be careful now. Who knows when we’ll be able to see a doctor again?”

“Jesus, Stuart.” Melissa got out and slammed the door. She walked to the tiny shop. The attendant sat behind the register, his feet propped against the counter, reading a novel which he placed face-down when the door chimed behind her.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Pack of Marlboro Lights, please.”

He shook his head as he pulled the cigarettes from an overhead rack. “Shouldn’t smoke, lady. Bad for you.”

“I’ve given up sun-bathing to compensate.”

The attendant laughed.

She looked up at him, a young man, not handsome, with flesh the color and texture of the toadstools she had scraped off the kitchen floor. Flesh like Stuart’s flesh, in the midst of that subtle change of his.

But nice eyes, she decided. Clear eyes, blue, the color of water. Eyes like the baby might have had. And this thought moved her to say something—anything, just to make contact. “Think it’ll ever stop raining?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s a good thing. Cleansing.”

“You think?”

“Who knows? Wash the whole world away, we’ll start again. Rain’s okay by me.”

“Me, too,” she said, and now she thought again of the fragment of radio program. Is God out there? the host had wanted to know. And is He angry?

She is, the woman had replied. She is.

Melissa’s hand stole over her belly, where the baby, her baby, had grown and died. Abruptly, the crazed logic of the idea, its simple clarity and beauty, seized her up: This was the world they had made, she thought, men like Stuart, this world of machines and noise, this world of simple tasteless things. This is the world that is being washed away. Their world.

Outside, Stuart began to blow the horn. The sound came to her, discordant, importunate. Melissa glanced out at the Jeep, at Stuart, impatient behind the steering wheel, anxious to be off, anxious to get to higher ground. Three rooms in the mountains, just three. She and Stuart and all about them the imprisoning rain. It fell still, beyond the roof over the fuel islands, blowing out of the sky in sheets, dancing against the pavement, chasing neon reflections of the Texaco sign across black puddles.

“Lady? You okay? Miss?”

“Missus,” she said, out of habit. She turned to face him.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, just distracted that’s all.”

The horn blew again.

“Nice guy.”

“Not really. He tries to be, sometimes.”

The horn again. Impatiently.

“You better go.”

“Yeah.” She dug in her purse for money.

“Forget it. Like it means anything now, right?”

She hesitated. “Thanks, then.”

“You’re welcome. Be careful. Who knows what the roads are like in the mountains.”

She nodded and stepped out into moist air. Stuart had gotten out of the Jeep. He stood by the open door, his flesh orange and spongy beneath the street lights, his arms crossed against his chest. He stared at her impatiently, beyond him only darkness, only rain. Water fell from the night sky, against the gleaming pavement, the buildings, the shining neon Texaco sign. Against everything, washing it all away.

“Hurry up,” Stuart said.

And she said, without even realizing she was going to say it, “I’m not coming. You go ahead.” When she said it, she was suffused suddenly with warmth and excitement and life, a sensation of release, as if a hard knot of emotion, drawn tight in her chest through long years, had suddenly loosened.

“What?” Stuart said. “What are you talking about?”

Melissa didn’t answer. She walked past Stuart and the Jeep, stopping at the edge of the canopy that sheltered the fuel islands. She shrugged out of the rain coat, let it drop to the pavement behind her. Ignoring Stuart, she lined up the tips of her toes against the hard clear edge of the pavement where it was wet, where the roof left off and the rain began.

Stuart said, “Melissa? Melissa?”

But Melissa didn’t answer. She stepped out into a world that was ending, into a gently falling rain. It poured down over her, cool and refreshing against her cheeks and lips and hair, caressing her with the hands of a lover.

The End of The World As We Know It

— DALE BAILEY —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

BY NOW THE ATTENTIVE READER will be aware that I have no compunction about including more than one story by the same writer in this collection. There are two Aldisses, there are two Silverbergs, and here, for good and proper reasons, is a second story by Dale Bailey.

When I began my search for stories for this book, one of the first I came upon was Bailey’s “The Rain at the End of the World.” When I mentioned to a friend that I had chosen a story by one Dale Bailey, a writer whose work was previously unknown to me, he said at once, “Of course you’ve picked ‘The End of the World as We Know It.’” Well, no, I replied; I have a different one. But I immediately tracked down this one also, and discovered that it was another apocalyptic vision quite different in tone from my other Bailey story, but just as good. There seemed no way to choose between them, and, since I had ample precedent for multiple selection, I notified the somewhat startled Bailey that I was going to take this one as well. And so I have. The special virtue of this one is that it exemplifies a special sub-class of the apocalyptic-fiction genre, the tale of the last man left alive, which is not otherwise heavily represented here. (Comparing it with the other one, G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Coming of the Ice,” provides an interesting demonstration of the changes in narrative technique in science fiction over the eight decades that separate the two stories.) “The End of the World as We Know It” was first published in the October–November 2004 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

—R. S.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

BETWEEN 1347 AND 1450 ad, bubonic plague overran Europe, killing some 75 million people. The plague, dubbed the Black Death because of the black pustules that erupted on the skin of the afflicted, was caused by a bacterium now known as Yersinia pestis. The Europeans of the day, lacking access to microscopes or knowledge of disease vectors, attributed their misfortune to an angry God. Flagellants roamed the land, hoping to appease His wrath. “They died by the hundreds, both day and night,” Agnolo di Tura tells us. “I buried my five children with my own hands . . . so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

Today, the population of Europe is about 729 million.

EVENINGS, WYNDHAM LIKES TO SIT on the porch, drinking. He likes gin, but he’ll drink anything. He’s not particular. Lately, he’s been watching it get dark—really watching it, I mean, not just sitting there—and so far he’s concluded that the cliché is wrong. Night doesn’t fall. It’s more complex than that.

Not that he’s entirely confident in the accuracy of his observations.

It’s high summer just now, and Wyndham often begins drinking at two or three, so by the time the sun sets, around nine, he’s usually pretty drunk. Still, it seems to him that, if anything, night rises, gathering first in inky pools under the trees, as if it has leached up from underground reservoirs, and then spreading, out toward the borders of the yard and up toward the yet-lighted sky. It’s only toward the end that anything falls—the blackness of deep space, he supposes, unscrolling from high above the earth. The two planes of darkness meet somewhere in the middle, and that’s night for you.

That’s his current theory, anyway.

It isn’t his porch, incidentally, but then it isn’t his gin either—except in the sense that, in so far as Wyndham can tell anyway, everything now belongs to him.

END-OF-THE-WORLD STORIES USUALLY COME IN one of two varieties.

In the first, the world ends with a natural disaster, either unprecedented or on an unprecedented scale. Floods lead all other contenders—God himself, we’re told, is fond of that one—though plagues have their advocates. A renewed ice age is also popular. Ditto drought.

In the second variety, irresponsible human beings bring it on themselves. Mad scientists and corrupt bureaucrats, usually. An exchange of ICBMs is the typical route, although the scenario has dated in the present geo-political environment.

Feel free to mix and match:

Genetically engineered flu virus, anyone? Melting polar ice caps?

ON THE DAY THE WORLD ended, Wyndham didn’t even realize it was the end of the world—not right away, anyway. For him, at that point in his life, pretty much every day seemed like the end of the world. This was not a consequence of a chemical imbalance, either. It was a consequence of working for UPS, where, on the day the world ended Wyndham had been employed for sixteen years, first as a loader, then in sorting, and finally in the coveted position of driver, the brown uniform and everything. By this time the company had gone public and he also owned some shares. The money was good—very good, in fact. Not only that, he liked his job.

Still, the beginning of every goddamn day started off feeling like a cataclysm. You try getting up at 4:00 AM every morning and see how you feel.

This was his routine:

At 4:00 AM, the alarm went off—an old-fashioned alarm, he wound it up every night. (He couldn’t tolerate the radio before he drank his coffee.) He always turned it off right away, not wanting to wake his wife. He showered in the spare bathroom (again, not wanting to wake his wife; her name was Ann), poured coffee into his thermos, and ate something he probably shouldn’t—a bagel, a Pop-Tart—while he stood over the sink. By then, it would be 4:20, 4:25 if he was running late.

Then he would do something paradoxical: He would go back to his bedroom and wake up the wife he’d spent the last twenty minutes trying not to disturb.

“Have a good day,” Wyndham always said.

His wife always did the same thing, too. She would screw her face into her pillow and smile. “Ummm,” she would say, and it was usually such a cozy, loving, early-morning cuddling kind of “ummm” that it almost made getting up at 4 in the goddamn morning worth it.

WYNDHAM HEARD ABOUT THE WORLD Trade Center—not the end of the world, though to Wyndham it sure as hell felt that way—from one of his customers.

The customer—her name was Monica—was one of Wyndham’s regulars: a Home Shopping Network fiend, this woman. She was big, too. The kind of woman of whom people say “She has a nice personality” or “She has such a pretty face.” She did have a nice personality, too—at least Wyndham thought she did. So he was concerned when she opened the door in tears.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Monica shook her head, at a loss for words. She waved him inside. Wyndham, in violation of about fifty UPS regulations, stepped in after her. The house smelled of sausage and floral air freshener. There was Home Shopping Network sh*t everywhere. I mean, everywhere.

Wyndham hardly noticed.

His gaze was fixed on the television. It was showing an airliner flying into the World Trade Center. He stood there and watched it from three or four different angles before he noticed the Home Shopping Network logo in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

That was when he concluded that it must be the end of the world. He couldn’t imagine the Home Shopping Network preempting regularly scheduled programming for anything less.

THE MUSLIM EXTREMISTS WHO FLEW airplanes into the World Trade Center, into the Pentagon, and into the unyielding earth of an otherwise unremarkable field in Pennsylvania, were secure, we are told, in the knowledge of their imminent translation into paradise.

There were nineteen of them.

Every one of them had a name.

WYNDHAM’S WIFE WAS SOMETHING OF a reader. She liked to read in bed. Before she went to sleep she always marked her spot using a bookmark Wyndham had given her for her birthday one year: It was a cardboard bookmark with a yarn ribbon at the top, and a picture of a rainbow arching high over white-capped mountains. Smile, the bookmark said. God loves you.

Wyndham wasn’t much of a reader, but if he’d picked up his wife’s book the day the world ended he would have found the first few pages interesting. In the opening chapter, God raptures all true Christians to Heaven. This includes true Christians who are driving cars and trains and airplanes, resulting in uncounted lost lives as well as significant damages to personal property. If Wyndham had read the book, he’d have thought of a bumper sticker he sometimes saw from high in his UPS truck. Warning, the bumper sticker read, In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned. Whenever he saw that bumper sticker, Wyndham imagined cars crashing, planes falling from the sky, patients abandoned on the operating table—pretty much the scenario of his wife’s book, in fact.

Wyndham went to church every Sunday, but he couldn’t help wondering what would happen to the untold millions of people who weren’t true Christians—whether by choice or by the geographical fluke of having been born in some place like Indonesia. What if they were crossing the street in front of one of those cars, he wondered, or watering lawns those planes would soon plow into?

BUT I WAS SAYING:

On the day the world ended Wyndham didn’t understand right away what had happened. His alarm clock went off the way it always did and he went through his normal routine. Shower in the spare bath, coffee in the thermos, breakfast over the sink (a chocolate donut, this time, and gone a little stale). Then he went back to the bedroom to say good-bye to his wife.

“Have a good day,” he said, as he always said, and, leaning over, he shook her a little: not enough to really wake her, just enough to get her stirring. In sixteen years of performing this ritual, minus federal holidays and two weeks of paid vacation in the summer, Wyndham had pretty much mastered it. He could cause her to stir without quite waking her up just about every time.

So to say he was surprised when his wife didn’t screw her face into her pillow and smile is something of an understatement. He was shocked, actually. And there was an additional consideration: She hadn’t said, “Ummm,” either. Not the usual luxurious, warm-morning-bed kind of “ummm,” and not the infrequent but still familiar stuffy, I-have-a-cold-and-my-head-aches kind of “ummm,” either.

No “ummm” at all.

The air-conditioning cycled off. For the first time Wyndham noticed a strange smell—a faint, organic funk, like spoiled milk, or unwashed feet.

Standing there in the dark, Wyndham began to have a very bad feeling. It was a different kind of bad feeling than the one he’d had in Monica’s living room watching airliners plunge again and again into the World Trade Center. That had been a powerful but largely impersonal bad feeling—I say “largely impersonal” because Wyndham had a third cousin who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. (The cousin’s name was Chris; Wyndham had to look it up in his address book every year when he sent out cards celebrating the birth of his personal savior.) The bad feeling he began to have when his wife failed to say “ummm,” on the other hand, was powerful and personal.

Concerned, Wyndham reached down and touched his wife’s face. It was like touching a woman made of wax, lifeless and cool, and it was at that moment—that moment precisely—that Wyndham realized the world had come to an end.

Everything after that was just details.

BEYOND THE MAD SCIENTISTS AND corrupt bureaucrats, characters in end-of-the-world stories typically come in one of three varieties.

The first is the rugged individualist. You know the type: self-reliant, iconoclastic loners who know how to use firearms and deliver babies. By story’s end, they’re well on their way to Re-Establishing Western Civilization—though they’re usually smart enough not to return to the Bad Old Ways.

The second variety is the post-apocalyptic bandit. These characters often come in gangs, and they face off against the rugged survivor types. If you happen to prefer cinematic incarnations of the end-of-the-world tale, you can usually recognize them by their penchant for bondage gear, punked-out haircuts, and customized vehicles. Unlike the rugged survivors, the post-apocalyptic bandits embrace the Bad Old Ways—though they’re not displeased by the expanded opportunities to rape and pillage.

The third type of character—also pretty common, though a good deal less so than the other two—is the world-weary sophisticate. Like Wyndham, such characters drink too much; unlike Wyndham, they suffer badly from ennui. Wyndham suffers too, of course, but whatever he suffers from, you can bet it’s not ennui.

WE WERE DISCUSSING DETAILS, THOUGH:

Wyndham did the things people do when they discover a loved one dead. He picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1. There seemed to be something wrong with the line, however; no one picked up on the other end. Wyndham took a deep breath, went into the kitchen, and tried the extension. Once again he had no success.

The reason, of course, was that, this being the end of the world, all the people who were supposed to answer the phones were dead. Imagine them being swept away by a tidal wave if that helps—which is exactly what happened to more than 3000 people during a storm in Pakistan in 1960. (Not that this is literally what happened to the operators who would have taken Wyndham’s 9-1-1 call, you understand; but more about what really happened to them later—the important thing is that one moment they had been alive; the next they were dead. Like Wyndham’s wife.)

Wyndham gave up on the phone.

He went back into the bedroom. He performed a fumbling version of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his wife for fifteen minutes or so, and then he gave that up, too. He walked into his daughter’s bedroom (she was twelve and her name was Ellen). He found her lying on her back, her mouth slightly agape. He reached down to shake her—he was going to tell her that something terrible had happened; that her mother had died—but he found that something terrible had happened to her as well. The same terrible thing, in fact.

Wyndham panicked.

He raced outside, where the first hint of red had begun to bleed up over the horizon. His neighbor’s automatic irrigation system was on, the heads whickering in the silence, and as he sprinted across the lawn, Wyndham felt the spray, like a cool hand against his face. Then, chilled, he was standing on his neighbor’s stoop. Hammering the door with both fists. Screaming.

After a time—he didn’t know how long—a dreadful calm settled over him. There was no sound but the sound of the sprinklers, throwing glittering arcs of spray into the halo of the street light on the corner.

He had a vision, then. It was as close as he had ever come to a moment of genuine prescience. In the vision, he saw the suburban houses stretching away in silence before him. He saw the silent bedrooms. In them, curled beneath the sheets, he saw a legion of sleepers, also silent, who would never again wake up.

Wyndham swallowed.

Then he did something he could not have imagined doing even twenty minutes ago. He bent over, fished the key from its hiding place between the bricks, and let himself inside his neighbor’s house.

The neighbor’s cat slipped past him, mewing querulously. Wyndham had already reached down to retrieve it when he noticed the smell—that unpleasant, faintly organic funk. Not spoiled milk, either. And not feet. Something worse: soiled diapers, or a clogged toilet.

Wyndham straightened, the cat forgotten.

“Herm?” he called. “Robin?”

No answer.

Inside, Wyndham picked up the phone, and dialed 9-1-1. He listened to it ring for a long time; then, without bothering to turn it off, Wyndham dropped the phone to the floor. He made his way through the silent house, snapping on lights. At the door to the master bedroom, he hesitated. The odor—it was unmistakable now, a mingled stench of urine and feces, of all the body’s muscles relaxing at once—was stronger here. When he spoke again, whispering really—

“Herm? Robin?”

—he no longer expected an answer.

Wyndham turned on the light. Robin and Herm were shapes in the bed, unmoving. Stepping closer, Wyndham stared down at them. A fleeting series of images cascaded through his mind, images of Herm and Robin working the grill at the neighborhood block party or puttering in their vegetable garden. They’d had a knack for tomatoes, Robin and Herm. Wyndham’s wife had always loved their tomatoes.

Something caught in Wyndham’s throat.

He went away for a while then.

The world just grayed out on him.

When he came back, Wyndham found himself in the living room, standing in front of Robin and Herm’s television. He turned it on and cycled through the channels, but there was nothing on. Literally nothing. Snow, that’s all. Seventy-five channels of snow. The end of the world had always been televised in Wyndham’s experience. The fact that it wasn’t being televised now suggested that it really was the end of the world.

THIS IS NOT TO SUGGEST that television validates human experience—of the end of the world or indeed of anything else, for that matter.

You could ask the people of Pompeii, if most of them hadn’t died in a volcano eruption in 79 AD, nearly two millennia before television. When Vesuvius erupted, sending lava thundering down the mountainside at four miles a minute, some 16,000 people perished. By some freakish geological quirk, some of them—their shells, anyway—were preserved, frozen inside casts of volcanic ash. Their arms are outstretched in pleas for mercy, their faces frozen in horror.

For a fee, you can visit them today.

HERE’S ONE OF MY FAVORITE end-of-the-world scenarios by the way: Carnivorous plants.

WYNDHAM GOT IN HIS CAR and went looking for assistance—a functioning telephone or television, a helpful passerby. He found instead more non-functioning telephones and televisions. And, of course, more non-functioning people: lots of those, though he had to look harder for them than you might have expected. They weren’t scattered in the streets, or dead at the wheels of their cars in a massive traffic jam—though Wyndham supposed that might have been the case somewhere in Europe, where the catastrophe—whatever it was—had fallen square in the middle of the morning rush.

Here, however, it seemed to have caught most folks at home in bed; as a result, the roads were more than usually passable.

At a loss—numb, really—Wyndham drove to work. He might have been in shock by then. He’d gotten accustomed to the smell, anyway, and the corpses of the night shift—men and women he’d known for sixteen years, in some cases—didn’t shake him as much. What did shake him was the sight of all the packages in the sorting area: He was struck suddenly by the fact that none of them would ever be delivered. So Wyndham loaded his truck and went out on his route. He wasn’t sure why he did it—maybe because he’d rented a movie once in which a post-apocalyptic drifter scavenges a US Postal uniform and manages to Re-Establish Western Civilization (but not the Bad Old Ways) by assuming the postman’s appointed rounds. The futility of Wyndham’s own efforts quickly became evident, however.

He gave it up when he found that even Monica—or, as he more often thought of her, the Home Shopping Network Lady—was no longer in the business of receiving packages. Wyndham found her face down on the kitchen floor, clutching a shattered coffee mug in one hand. In death she had neither a pretty face nor a nice personality. She did have that same ripe unpleasant odor, however. In spite of it, Wyndham stood looking down at her for the longest time. He couldn’t seem to look away.

When he finally did look away, Wyndham went back to the living room where he had once watched nearly 3000 people die, and opened her package himself. When it came to UPS rules, the Home Shopping Network Lady’s living room was turning out to be something of a post-apocalyptic zone in its own right.

Wyndham tore the mailing tape off and dropped it on the floor. He opened the box. Inside, wrapped safely in three layers of bubble wrap, he found a porcelain statue of Elvis Presley.

ELVIS PRESLEY, THE KING OF Rock ’n’ Roll, died August 16, 1977, while sitting on the toilet. An autopsy revealed that he had ingested an impressive co*cktail of prescription drugs—including codeine, ethinimate, methaqualone, and various barbiturates. Doctors also found trace elements of Valium, Demerol, and other pharmaceuticals in his veins.

FOR A TIME, WYNDHAM COMFORTED himself with the illusion that the end of the world had been a local phenomenon. He sat in his truck outside the Home Shopping Network Lady’s house and awaited rescue—the sound of sirens or approaching choppers, whatever. He fell asleep cradling the porcelain statue of Elvis. He woke up at dawn, stiff from sleeping in the truck, to find a stray dog nosing around outside.

Clearly rescue would not be forthcoming.

Wyndham chased off the dog and placed Elvis gently on the sidewalk. Then he drove off, heading out of the city. Periodically, he stopped, each time confirming what he had already known the minute he touched his dead wife’s face: The end of the world was upon him. He found nothing but non-functioning telephones, non-functioning televisions, and non-functioning people. Along the way he listened to a lot of non-functioning radio stations.

YOU, LIKE WYNDHAM, MAY BE curious about the catastrophe that has befallen everyone in the world around him. You may even be wondering why Wyndham has survived.

End-of-the-world tales typically make a big deal about such things, but Wyndham’s curiosity will never be satisfied. Unfortunately, neither will yours.

sh*t happens.

It’s the end of the world after all.

THE DINOSAURS NEVER DISCOVERED WHAT caused their extinction, either.

At this writing, however, most scientists agree that the dinosaurs met their fate when an asteroid nine miles wide plowed into the Earth just south of the Yucatan Peninsula, triggering gigantic tsunamis, hurricane-force winds, worldwide forest fires, and a flurry of volcanic activity. The crater is still there—it’s 120 miles wide and more than a mile deep—but the dinosaurs, along with 75% of the other species then alive, are gone. Many of them died in the impact, vaporized in the explosion. Those that survived the initial cataclysm would have perished soon after as acid rain poisoned the world’s water and dust obscured the sun, plunging the planet into a years-long winter.

For what it’s worth, this impact was merely the most dramatic in a long series of mass extinctions; they occur in the fossil record at roughly 30 million-year intervals. Some scientists have linked these intervals to the solar system’s periodic journey through the galactic plane, which dislodges millions of comets from the Oort cloud beyond Pluto, raining them down on Earth. This theory, still contested, is called the Shiva Hypothesis in honor of the Hindu god of destruction.

THE INHABITANTS OF LISBON WOULD have appreciated the allusion on November 1, 1755, when the city was struck by an earthquake measuring 8.5 on the Richter Scale. The tremor leveled more than 12,000 homes and ignited a fire that burned for six days.

More than 60,000 people perished.

This event inspired Voltaire to write Candide, in which Dr. Pangloss advises us that this is the best of all possible worlds.

WYNDHAM COULD HAVE FILLED THE gas tank in his truck. There were gas stations at just about every exit along the highway, and they seemed to be functioning well enough. He didn’t bother, though.

When the truck ran out of gas, he just pulled to the side of the road, hopped down, and struck off across the fields. When it started getting dark—this was before he had launched himself on the study of just how it is night falls—he took shelter in the nearest house.

It was a nice place, a two-story brick house set well back from the country road he was by then walking on. It had some big trees in the front yard. In the back, a shaded lawn sloped down to the kind of woods you see in movies, but not often in real life: enormous, old trees with generous, leaf-carpeted avenues. It was the kind of place his wife would have loved, and he regretted having to break a window to get inside. But there it was: It was the end of the world and he had to have a place to sleep. What else could he do?

WYNDHAM HADN’T PLANNED TO STAY there, but when he woke up the next morning he couldn’t think of anywhere to go. He found two non-functional old people in one upstairs bedroom and he tried to do for them what he had not been able to do for his wife and daughter: Using a spade from the garage, he started digging a grave in the front yard. After an hour or so, his hands began to blister and crack. His muscles—soft from sitting behind the wheel of a UPS truck for all those years—rebelled.

He rested for a while, and then he loaded the old people into the car he found parked in the garage—a slate-blue Volvo station wagon with 37,312 miles on the odometer. He drove them a mile or two down the road, pulled over, and laid them out, side-by-side in a grove of beech trees. He tried to say some words over them before he left—his wife would have wanted him to—but he couldn’t think of anything appropriate so he finally gave it up and went back to the house.

It wouldn’t have made much difference: Though Wyndham didn’t know it, the old people were lapsed Jews. According to the faith Wyndham shared with his wife, they were doomed to burn in hell for all eternity anyway. Both of them were first-generation immigrants; most of their families had already been burned up in ovens at Dachau and Buchenwald.

Burning wouldn’t have been anything new for them.

SPEAKING OF FIRES, THE TRIANGLE Shirt Waist Factory in New York City burned on March 25, 1911. One-hundred and forty-six people died. Many of them might have survived, but the factory’s owners had locked the exits to prevent theft.

Rome burned, too. It is said that Nero fiddled.

BACK AT THE HOUSE, WYNDHAM washed up and made himself a drink from the liquor cabinet he found in the kitchen. He’d never been much of a drinker before the world ended, but he didn’t see any reason not to give it a try now. His experiment proved such a success that he began sitting out on the porch nights, drinking gin and watching the sky. One night he thought he saw a plane, lights blinking as it arced high overhead. Later, sober, he concluded that it must have been a satellite, still whipping around the planet, beaming down telemetry to empty listening stations and abandoned command posts.

A day or two later the power went out. And a few days after that, Wyndham ran out of liquor. Using the Volvo, he set off in search of a town. Characters in end-of-the-world stories commonly drive vehicles of two types: The jaded sophisticates tend to drive souped-up sports cars, often racing them along the Australian coast line because what else do they have to live for; everyone else drives rugged SUVs. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War—in which some 23,000 people died, most of them Iraqi conscripts killed by American smart bombs—military-style Humvees have been especially coveted. Wyndham, however, found the Volvo entirely adequate to his needs.

No one shot at him.

He was not assaulted by a roving pack of feral dogs.

He found a town after only fifteen minutes on the road. He didn’t see any evidence of looting. Everybody was too dead to loot; that’s the way it is at the end of the world.

On the way, Wyndham passed a sporting goods store where he did not stop to stock up on weapons or survival equipment. He passed numerous abandoned vehicles, but he did not stop to siphon off some gas. He did stop at the liquor store, where he smashed a window with a rock and helped himself to several cases of gin, whiskey, and vodka. He also stopped at the grocery store, where he found the reeking bodies of the night crew sprawled out beside carts of supplies that would never make it onto the shelves. Holding a handkerchief over his nose, Wyndham loaded up on tonic water and a variety of other mixers. He also got some canned goods, though he didn’t feel any imperative to stock up beyond his immediate needs. He ignored the bottled water.

In the book section, he did pick up a bartender’s guide.

SOME END-OF-THE-WORLD STORIES PRESENT US with two post-apocalypse survivors, one male and one female. These two survivors take it upon themselves to Re-Populate the Earth, part of their larger effort to Re-Establish Western Civilization without the Bad Old Ways. Their names are always artfully withheld until the end of the story, at which point they are invariably revealed to be Adam and Eve.

The truth is, almost all end-of-the-world stories are at some level Adam-and-Eve stories. That may be why they enjoy such popularity. In the interests of total disclosure, I will admit that in fallow periods of my own sexual life—and, alas, these periods have been more frequent than I’d care to admit—I’ve often found Adam-and-Eve post-holocaust fantasies strangely comforting. Being the only man alive significantly reduces the potential for rejection in my view. And it cuts performance anxiety practically to nothing.

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THIS story, too.

Don’t get your hopes up.

BY THIS TIME, WYNDHAM HAS been living in the brick house for almost two weeks. He sleeps in the old couple’s bedroom, and he sleeps pretty well, but maybe that’s the gin. Some mornings he wakes up disoriented, wondering where his wife is and how he came to be in a strange place. Other mornings he wakes up feeling like he dreamed everything else and this has always been his bedroom.

One day, though, he wakes up early, to gray pre-dawn light. Someone is moving around downstairs. Wyndham’s curious, but he’s not afraid. He doesn’t wish he’d stopped at the sporting goods store and gotten a gun. Wyndham has never shot a gun in his life. If he did shoot someone—even a post-apocalyptic punk with cannibalism on his mind—he’d probably have a breakdown.

Wyndham doesn’t try to disguise his presence as he goes downstairs. There’s a woman in the living room. She’s not bad looking, this woman—blonde in a washed-out kind of way, trim, and young, twenty-five, thirty at the most. She doesn’t look extremely clean, and she doesn’t smell much better, but hygiene hasn’t been uppermost on Wyndham’s mind lately, either. Who is he to judge?

“I was looking for a place to sleep,” the woman says.

“There’s a spare bedroom upstairs,” Wyndham tells her.

THE NEXT MORNING—IT’S REALLY ALMOST noon, but Wyndham has gotten into the habit of sleeping late—they eat breakfast together: a Pop-Tart for the woman, a bowl of dry Cheerios for Wyndham.

They compare notes, but we don’t need to get into that. It’s the end of the world and the woman doesn’t know how it happened any more than Wyndham does or you do or anybody ever does. She does most of the talking, though. Wyndham’s never been much of a talker, even at the best of times.

He doesn’t ask her to stay. He doesn’t ask her to leave.

He doesn’t ask her much of anything.

That’s how it goes all day.

SOMETIMES THE WHOLE SEX THING causes the end of the world.

In fact, if you’ll permit me to reference Adam and Eve just one more time, sex and death have been connected to the end of the world ever since—well, the beginning of the world. Eve, despite warnings to the contrary, eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and realizes she’s naked—that is, a sexual being. Then she introduces Adam to the idea by giving him a bite of the fruit.

God punishes Adam and Eve for their transgression by kicking them out of Paradise and introducing death into the world. And there you have it: the first apocalypse, eros and thanatos all tied up in one neat little bundle, and it’s all Eve’s fault.

No wonder feminists don’t like that story. It’s a pretty corrosive view of female sexuality when you think about it.

Coincidentally, perhaps, one of my favorite end-of-the-world stories involves some astronauts who fall into a time warp; when they get out they learn that all the men are dead. The women have done pretty well for themselves in the meantime. They no longer need men to reproduce and they’ve set up a society that seems to work okay without men—better in fact than our messy two-sex societies ever have.

But do the men stay out of it?

They do not. They’re men, after all, and they’re driven by their need for sexual dominance. It’s genetically encoded so to speak, and it’s not long before they’re trying to turn this Eden into another fallen world. It’s sex that does it, violent male sex—rape, actually. In other words, sex that’s more about the violence than the sex.

And certainly nothing to do with love.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty corrosive view of male sexuality.

The more things change the more they stay the same, I guess.

WYNDHAM, THOUGH.

Wyndham heads out on the porch around three. He’s got some tonic. He’s got some gin. It’s what he does now. He doesn’t know where the woman is, doesn’t have strong feelings on the issue either way.

He’s been sitting there for hours when she joins him. Wyndham doesn’t know what time it is, but the air has that hazy underwater quality that comes around twilight. Darkness is starting to pool under the trees, the crickets are tuning up, and it’s so peaceful that for a moment Wyndham can almost forget that it’s the end of the world.

Then the screen door claps shut behind the woman. Wyndham can tell right away that she’s done something to herself, though he couldn’t tell you for sure what it is: that magic women do, he guesses. His wife used to do it, too. She always looked good to him, but sometimes she looked just flat-out amazing. Some powder, a little blush. Lipstick. You know.

And he appreciates the effort. He does. He’s flattered even. She’s an attractive woman. Intelligent, too.

The truth is, though, he’s just not interested.

She sits beside him, and all the time she’s talking. And though she doesn’t say it in so many words, what she’s talking about is Re-Populating the World and Re-Establishing Western Civilization. She’s talking about Duty. She’s talking about it because that’s what you’re supposed to talk about at times like this. But underneath that is sex. And underneath that, way down, is loneliness—and he has some sympathy for that, Wyndham does. After a while, she touches Wyndham, but he’s got nothing. He might as well be dead down there.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says.

Wyndham doesn’t know how to answer her. He doesn’t know how to tell her that the end of the world isn’t about any of that stuff. The end of the world is about something else, he doesn’t have a word for it.

SO, ANYWAY, WYNDHAM’S WIFE.

She has another book on her night stand, too. She doesn’t read it every night, only on Sundays. But the week before the end of the world the story she was reading was the story of Job.

You know the story, right?

It goes like this: God and Satan—the Adversary, anyway; that’s probably the better translation—make a wager. They want to see just how much sh*t God’s most faithful servant will eat before he renounces his faith. The servant’s name is Job. So they make the wager, and God starts feeding Job sh*t. Takes his riches, takes his cattle, takes his health. Deprives him of his friends. On and on. Finally—and this is the part that always got to Wyndham—God takes Job’s children.

Let me clarify: In this context “takes” should be read as “kills.”

You with me on this? Like Krakatoa, a volcanic island that used to exist between Java and Sumatra. On August 27, 1883, Krakatoa exploded, spewing ash 50 miles into the sky and vomiting up five cubic miles of rock. The concussion was heard 3,000 miles away. It created tsunamis towering 120 feet in the air. Imagine all that water crashing down on the flimsy villages that lined the shores of Java and Sumatra.

Thirty thousand people died.

Every single one of them had a name.

Job’s kids. Dead. Just like 30,000 nameless Javanese.

As for Job? He keeps shoveling down the sh*t. He will not renounce God. He keeps the faith. And he’s rewarded: God gives him back his riches, his cattle. God restores his health, and sends him friends. God replaces his kids. Pay attention: Word choice is important in an end-of-the-world story.

I said “replaces,” not “restores.”

The other kids? They stay dead, gone, non-functioning, erased forever from the Earth, just like the dinosaurs and the 12 million undesirables incinerated by the Nazis and the 500,000 slaughtered in Rwanda and the 1.7 million murdered in Cambodia and the 60 million immolated in the Middle Passage.

That merry prankster God.

That jokester.

THAT’S WHAT THE END OF the world is about, Wyndham wants to say. The rest is just details.

B

Y THIS POINT THE WOMAN (You want her to have a name? She deserves one, don’t you think?) has started to weep softly. Wyndham gets to his feet and goes into the dark kitchen for another glass. Then he comes back out to the porch and makes a gin and tonic. He sits beside her and presses the cool glass upon her. It’s all he knows to do.

“Here,” he says. “Drink this. It’ll help.”

Final Exam

— MEGAN ARKENBERG —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

MEGAN ARKENBERG, A NATIVE OF Milwaukee, lives in Davis, California, these days, is studying for her PhD at the University of California, Davis, and teaches composition there. Since 2008 she has published a great many science-fiction stories. The wry and ingeniously told one reprinted here first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction for June 2012.

She says of it, “When this story was first published, I received a lot of e-mails from readers either wondering or guessing at how autobiographical it is. On the level of detail, it definitely is—the main character’s job at a grocery store is based on the one I worked during college, and I seem to remember doing seventy dollars’ worth of damage to a cutlery drawer at some point. So far, though, I’ve been fortunate enough not to experience the breakdown of a marriage or a monster apocalypse firsthand. Final Exam is about the end of a marriage, the end of the world, and the ways people try to make sense of those things. It’s also, as the title suggests, written in the format of a multiple-choice exam.”

—R. S.

FINAL EXAM

PART I—MULTIPLE CHOICE

1.THE FIRST TIME YOU visited the ocean, that Fourth-of-July weekend when purple storm clouds swallowed the horizon and the great cerulean expanse below them was freckled with parti-colored sails, you looked out over the water and felt . . .

(a)the smallness of humanity in the face of a universe that is older and vaster and more full of life than any of us can imagine, much less understand.

(b)a sudden urge to jump.

(c)the awful terror of living.

(d)nothing; there was only the sea-spray on your face, salty, cold, and needle-fine.

(e)all of the above.

2.AT WHAT POINT DID you know—and I mean really know, in your gut, in the tautness of your heartstrings—that things had gone horribly wrong?

(a)When you ran the faucet in the motel bathroom to wash the salty tear-tracks from your face, and the water came out cold and red, staining the sink.

(b)When the equipment at work started breaking down, first the conveyor belts on the registers, then the adding machine in the office, then the registers themselves. IT had the same advice over and over again: unplug it, turn it off, and plug it in again. Of course it never worked.

(c)When Donald looked up from the papers he was correcting at the kitchen counter and said Baby girl, what do you think about couples’ therapy? and you were so startled that you dropped the whole carton of orange juice.

(d)When the pink-suited reporter interrupted the inspirational drama on the television in the marriage counselor’s waiting room, her hair frizzled with electricity and her left eyebrow bloodied from a shallow cut to the forehead. Tell us what you’re seeing, somebody said, and she said, God . . .

(e)When you asked him to pass you a butter knife from the drawer, and he must have heard you, but he was marking something in the margin of his book and you had to ask a second time. He slammed the book shut and pulled the drawer so hard that it came off the slides. Here, he said, flinging the knife across the counter. It landed with its tongue-like blade pointed at your breast.

3.WHEN THE PINK-SUITED REPORTER’S station showed the first footage of the things shambling out of the water, you compared them to . . .

(a)your neighbor’s dog, a blond-gray whippet with a scratched bald patch high on his left shoulder. You thought of Sultan when you saw the first shambling thing bend, drawing back its black and rubbery lips, and sink its long yellow teeth into its own thigh, biting down to the bone.

(b)fish, especially the fat, foul-smelling, tasteless white fish Donald used to bring home by the bucket-load and smoke over a charcoal fire on the patio.

(c)skinny girls, like the neighbor three blocks over who took her early morning jogs in a white tank top that, by the time she reached your house, had turned transparent with sweat, displaying her prominent ribs.

(d)Godzilla, whose movie you had never seen, but whose general shape you vaguely remembered from a commercial for a Japanese automobile.

(e)the sea-witch from a picture book your favorite teacher read to the class one day, when it was raining too hard to go outside for recess. The artist had drawn the sea-witch with a water snake wound around her shoulders like a mink; the sea-witch was offering it a taste of a tiny red crab, which she held between her own sharp teeth.

4.AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS WATCHING them, first through the reporter’s camera and then, later, through the slats in the boards you had pounded over your windows, you came to the conclusion that the shambling things had originated . . .

(a)on Mars.

(b)in an alternate dimension, where the laws of physics and geometry and merging into freeway traffic are subtly different, and it is possible to have four-sided triangles.

(c)in the nightmares of mankind, where we let our guard down and unleash the latent psychic powers of creation which, when we are awake, limit themselves to such pieces of good fortune as the perfect seat in the movie theatre, or a bra that fits.

(d)on this planet, in the natural course of evolution, which has already produced such monsters as the platypus, the hyena, and your skinny neighbor.

(e)after Chernobyl, or Three-Mile Island, or a worse disaster that a national government, or the Illuminati, had been more successful at covering up.

5.NOW THAT IT HAS been months since the last sighting, many people have chosen to believe that the shambling monsters are gone for good. You, however, know that they are . . .

(a)still in the ocean, huddled at the bottom of chasms too deep for sonar, waiting to rise again and feel the cold moonlight on their bulbous faces.

(b)taking on the appearance of every-day people, the cashier at the newly re-opened liquor store, the gang of skinny gun-dragging teenagers who moved into the old marriage counselor’s office, the woman who walks up and down the sidewalk in the late afternoon, calling out names you can never quite understand.

(c)in our nightmares, slowly shaping us to our true forms.

(d)hiding under your bed.

(e)both c and d.

6.WHAT COULD YOU HAVE done to prevent all this from happening?

(a)Become a better cook, as Donald’s mother always hinted with her gifts of Julia Child and Betty Crocker collections, the elaborate kitchen gadgets whose names, much less their functions, remained shrouded in mystery. Though you never really learned to love food, you did learn to cook, to boil and bubble the bacteria out of a can of condensed soup. Incidentally, your mother-in-law would be proud.

(b)Become a better liar. It is true that the pink-and-emerald tie he wanted to buy at the church flea-market was the ugliest thing you had ever seen, uglier even than the monsters from the sea, uglier even than Sultan. But it would not have hurt you to bit your lip and nod your head and say Yes, for seventy-five cents it certainly is a steal.

(c)Prayed more, and harder, and to the right people. Saint Helena is the patron of dysfunctional marriage. Saint Neot is the patron of fish.

(d)All of the above.

(e)None of the above.

7.THE WORST PART WAS . . .

(a)when the first shambling thing ate the pink-suited reporter, and the camera man didn’t turn away, and you sat there petrified in the marriage counselor’s office, watching the flesh blossom and drip over the creature’s scaly lips. Jesus Christ, you said, reaching for Donald’s hand. He was gripping a magazine cover too tightly to notice.

(b)when he flung the little velvet box at you over the dinner table, and you looked at him and you asked What is this for? and he said I knew you’d forget.

(c)when you checked into the motel, and you couldn’t stop licking your bottom lip even though you knew your saliva was keeping the split open, and the man at the front desk was clearly worried for you but he just as clearly didn’t know what to say, so he handed you a pair of key-cards and told you, earnestly, to have a good night.

(d)later that night, when you opened the bottle of pinot grigio that the liquor clerk had recommended and drank it all in one long throat-tearing gulp. Your cell phone started to sing from its compartment in your purse, the sweet black-andwhite movie love song Donald had tried to serenade you with, once, in the back seat of your car. Even drunk, your thumb found the phone’s power button and turned it off.

(e)this moment, now, as you look back on all of it, and can’t think of anything that you would do the same.

8.WHEN YOU CAME HOME from the motel the next morning, a hangover ringing in your ears, you found his packed suitcase sitting on the coffee table in the living room. You stumbled into the bathroom to vomit, and when you came out again, the suitcase was gone. That was, in a way, the last you ever saw of Donald. What happened to him?

(a)Shortly after he left, he was eaten by one of the shambling creatures.

(b)He met another woman on a bus to Chicago. She was taller than you are, and skinnier, and she smelled like cinnamon and vanilla.

(c)He joined that cult down in Louisiana, the one with the blood sacrifices and the idol built of concrete blocks, and he was one of the men who walked into the ocean on June 21, and became a pillar of salt.

(d)He committed suicide with a shaving razor in the bathtub of the same motel room where you hid from him, that last night. He never forgave himself for hitting you, not even when he remembered that you’d hit him first.

(e)He slipped, somehow, into an alternate dimension, where the laws of physics and geometry are subtly different, and there is a house just like yours, but the woman inside is a better liar.

9.HIS LAST THOUGHTS WERE . . .

(a)incomprehensible with fear, the nauseating smell of his own blood.

(b)of you.

(c)revelations about the falseness of Euclidian geometry, the sheer wrongness of all human conceptions of time and history and causal relationships, that could never have been comprehended by another human being, even if Donald had lived, and admitted to himself what he had understood.

(d)of Christine Kaminski, the slender brunette who took him to junior prom, and who forged a deeper connection with him on that one night in the rented Marriott ballroom than you did in seven years of marriage. She wore pale blue, his favorite color, and only kissed him once, during the last dance of the night. If he had married her, he would have been happy.

(e)of his little brother, who died at birth, whom he never told you about. He intended to, but there was never a moment in that first year of marriage when you weren’t too busy with something else—arranging furniture, organizing closets and cupboards, filing for loans, writing thank-you cards. Afterward, it seemed too late to bring it up. The closest he ever came was during that Christmas dinner at your sister’s, when you teased him about being an only child.

10.LOOKING BACK ON ALL of it, you still don’t understand . . .

(a)why all the equipment at work broke down that day. You even stayed an extra fifteen minutes to play with the reset buttons and a bent paperclip; it made you late to the marriage counselor’s office, which in some ways didn’t matter, because her previous appointment was running over and you had to wait anyway, but in some ways it did matter, because Donald was expecting you to arrive on time. It didn’t help in any case. Everything was still broken the next day.

(b)why the water in the motel bathroom turned to blood. Afterward, you asked around town, and learned that no one else had discovered blood or any other bodily fluids running through their pipes. But there was a lot going on at the time; maybe they simply hadn’t noticed.

(c)why you told Donald about the Little Mermaid picture book as you collapsed drunken and giggling into your own back seat. Your throat was hoarse from swearing at your baseball team as they permitted run after humiliating run, and you had spilled beer on the sleeve of your sweatshirt. You tried to wiggle out of it and it got stuck around your hips, and you said, This reminds me of a story . . .

(d)what attracted you to Donald in the first place. Was it his eyes, his soft lips, the way he ran his fingers through his hair when he was nervous, the way all his undershirts smelled like chalkboards, the way he tightened his tie with both hands before saying something important?

(e)all of the above.

11.AFTER THAT INCIDENT IN Portland, when the shambling thing almost caught up to you by clinging to the bottom of your bus, your favorite shirt became stained with . . .

(a)seawater.

(b)blood (yours).

(c)ichor (its).

(d)sem*n.

(e)merlot.

12.YOUR SISTER, WHO KNOWS these things, told you that the best technique for fighting the shambling monsters is . . .

(a)frying them with a blow torch.

(b)dowsing them with holy water.

(c)dragging them behind a truck.

(d)flinging them into a nuclear reactor.

(e)running until they tire of chasing you.

13.YOU MOST REGRET . . .

(a)missing that shot at the fast food joint in Vancouver, when the little boy died. It was not your fault; no one had ever taught you to fire a revolver, much less where to aim on a bulbous heavy-lidded nightmare as it slivered over a drive-thru window. But it was your fault, because the creature had followed you, and if you hadn’t stopped to eat at that particular restaurant and that particular time, it would never have killed that child.

(b)not letting him buy that hideous watermelon tie at the church flea-market, when you knew it reminded him of his grandfather, and made him smile.

(c)wearing your favorite shirt on the bus in Portland.

(d)shaking Donald as you got into the car in the marriage counselor’s parking lot, then slapping him across the face. No matter how terrified you were, no matter how much you thought he’d earned it, you should have known better than to hit him. You did know better. You knew it reminded him of his father.

(e)turning into your pillow that last time he tried to kiss you goodnight, so that his lips caught you on the cheek.

14.IN YOUR DREAMS, THE shambling monsters appear at your bedside, and their voices sound like . . .

(a)radio static, interspersed with love songs from old black-and-white movies.

(b)the screaming of the pink-suited reporter as those yellow teeth crunched through her clavicle.

(c)the marriage counselor, with her gentle eastern accent, the sharp tick of her pen against her clipboard punctuating each clause.

(d)footsteps over broken glass.

(e)the whisper of a fish’s breath.

15.NOW, WHEN YOU LOOK out at the sea, you feel . . .

(a)the smallness of humanity in the face of a universe that is older and vaster and more full of life than any of us can imagine, much less understand.

(b)a sudden urge to jump.

(c)the awful terror of living.

(d)his absence; there is only the sea-spray on your face, salty, cold, and needle-fine.

(e)all of the above.

PART II—SHORT ANSWER

16.IS THIS REALLY THE end of the world? Defend your answer with evidence from the following texts: the Apocalypse of John, the Collected Works of H. P. Lovecraft, The Shepherd of Hermas, Ibn Al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the fortieth through fifty-eighth stanzas of Völuspá, and last week’s edition of The New York Times.

17.JUST WHAT IS IT about filling in bubbles on a multiple choice test that makes you believe that every terrible decision you’ve made might, with luck, with sheer cussedness, have turned out right in the end?

PART III—EXTRA CREDIT

What color were Donald’s eyes?

PART IV—ANSWER KEY

1.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) all of the above. You were nine years old, and had wanted to see the ocean ever since the day your third-grade teacher read you a picture book with the real story of the Little Mermaid—Anderson, not Disney. You wore a pink-and-yellow bathing suit that you had outgrown the previous summer and carried a purple plastic pail, not because you had any intention of building sandcastles but because the children in the picture book (who appeared in the seashore-margins on every page, though they had nothing to do with the mermaid or her prince or her beautiful raven-haired rival) had carried pails and shovels, made of tin, in which they collected seashells. At that moment, standing at the edge of the pier while your parents argued through a transaction at the overpriced snack-shack behind you, you registered nothing but the caress of the waves on your face. Only later, with reflection, did you feel the smallness, the terror, the urge to jump.

On your honeymoon, Donald tried to recreate this experience (which you had shared with him in the backseat of your car, after a drunken night at the worst baseball game your team had ever played). He took you to the same pier, bought you a paper cone of roasted peanuts at the same overpriced snack-shack, but the weather was different, clean and peaceful, and your red two-piece fit your body like a second skin.

2.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) when you asked him to pass you a butter knife, and he must have heard you, but he was marking something in the margin of his book and you had to ask a second time. It cost sixty-seven dollars to fix the drawer slides, sixty-seven dollars you didn’t have but managed to find somewhere, probably in the old plastic KFC cup you kept by the telephone to collect money for date nights, back when you went on dates. In days to come, that cup would hold many things: pinot grigio, as you drank yourself into a stupor; vomit; distilled water for an impromptu eye wash; strips of bloody gauze.

3.THE CORRECT ANSWER, I’M sorry to say, is (d) Godzilla. You had never done your best or most original thinking under stress. Donald would not have hesitated to point this out, but then again, when Donald saw the shambling things on the television his first thought was of the illustration of the sea-witch, which he had seen only days before as he wandered through the mall, looking for your anniversary present. He found the old picture book in a store that specialized in plush animals and greeting cards, and he thought of buying it for you, but he remembered that day on the pier by the ocean, and bought you a pearl bracelet instead.

There’s an old superstition that a bride shouldn’t wear pearls on her wedding day, because for each pearl she wears, her husband will give her a reason to cry.

4.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) in an alternate dimension. At least, that was your theory; the true answer is somewhat closer to (d) on this planet, in the natural course of evolution. You, however, are not expected to know this, or to retain your sanity if you had glimpsed some hint of it by mistake.

What happened between you and Donald was also by and large the result of a natural chain of events, an estrangement, a distancing of the sort that shambles into so many relationships. The truth—which you are also not expected to know—is that you never had very much in common to begin with. Your date nights stopped because you could no longer agree on a restaurant, or a movie, or a group of friends to visit. Breaking the cutlery drawer was the natural result of too many nights listening to you root for a baseball team he had never cared for in the first place.

5.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) taking on the appearance of every-day people. The marriage counselor, who spoke to you briefly on the office phone when you called her during your lunch break, said that Donald thought you had trust issues. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you, you said. Who is out to get you? asked the marriage counselor.

If your memory had a better sense of irony, it would have recalled that conversation two months later as you darted from shadow to shadow down your near-deserted block, clutching a gun you didn’t know how to use, listening for the gelatinous thump of the creature’s footsteps behind you. You’d learned by then that they could distinguish humans through scent, and that they gave off distinctive odors of their own; this particular creature, a female who smelled as chalky as a jar of antacid, had been trailing you for weeks. In the end, you only lost her when you packed the truck and moved up to Oregon for a few months, to stay with your sister, who’d compulsively saved canned goods and ammunition in her basem*nt. Even later, after you worked up the courage to return home, when you cracked open the front door and slipped into the foyer, your nostrils were assaulted by the stench of mold and chalk.

6.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) none of the above. Of course, you could have tried cooking, or lying, or praying; it would not have hurt to try. But you never did.

7.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (a) when the first shambling thing ate the pink-suited reporter, and the camera man didn’t turn away. You will see that scene in your nightmares for the rest of your life. You will never again look at that particular shade of pink without your stomach churning, your tongue fumbling compulsively past your lips, your ribs curling inward, your vision spotting like blood on bathroom tissue. In all of this, the reporter’s death is the only thing about which you have never spoken to anyone. Sometimes, you think it is the real reason you drink.

8.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) he met another woman on a bus to Chicago. Her name was Nora and she used to work in a bakery; she was not a very good baker, but her hand was perfectly steady as she drew looping cursive letters in pink gel across the smooth buttercream canvases. The last cake she decorated was for a little girl named Rebecca, who ate the frosting in huge gobs with her fingers, but had wanted the lettering to be blue. Nora didn’t care that Donald was married, and he didn’t care that her last relationship had been with a woman who died of suspiciously severe food poisoning. They settled for a while in an apartment over an abandoned antique store. Then, after a year and a half, Nora joined the Louisiana blood-cult, and Donald never heard from her again.

Though he did eventually commit suicide with a shaving razor, it is too much of a coincidence to think that he did it in that same motel room where you’d sobbed over the sink all those months before.

9.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) of you. For better or for worse, you were the love of his life. In the early whirlwind years, he imagined that some corner of his heart had always known and loved you, even at junior prom, when he was kissing Christine Kaminski and smelling the soapy-bubblegum scent of her shampoo. Later, when Nora disappeared, he began to write letters to you. He never sent them, which is just as well. You would never have opened them, and they would not have told you anything you didn’t already know.

(Here is what the last one said:

Baby girl, I’ve forgotten the color of your eyes.

Sorry for everything. Don.)

10.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) all of the above. It’s ironic, when you consider that an Apocalypse is meant to be a revelation, an unveiling, that at the end of everything so much remains veiled. No one knows why, in offices and stores around the country, computers and cash registers went down in droves that Tuesday afternoon. You were the only one to see the blood come out of the faucet, and you wouldn’t even swear that it was blood. It might have been zinfandel. You will never learn why you always need to be drunk before you can share really important information with the people you love. Even this answer key won’t give you all the answers.

(What first attracted you to Donald was the way he mispronounced your last name.)

11.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) blood (yours). You were sitting at the window above the left rear wheel, your head jolting with each pothole against the padded headrest, when you caught the stench of chalk coming through the air conditioning. You panicked and fought your way to the front door, and the driver misinterpreted your flailing and laid you low with a punch between the eyes. Everyone was jumpy, those first few months. You woke a half-hour later to learn that the bus had crossed six bridges while you were out, and the smell of chalk was gone, replaced by the sour-metallic taste in the back of your nostrils and gummed in your lace neckline.

12.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS, of course, (d) flinging them into a nuclear reactor, but you had to make do with (e) running until they tired of chasing you.

13.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) turning into your pillow that last time he tried to kiss you goodnight. In the days and months and years to come, you would miss the taste of his mouth, miss the cool scratch of his unshaved chin across your cheek. Of course the little boy’s death bothers you, and the pink-andgreen tie, and the hideous satisfaction of the hard granite sound your hand made when it collided with his jaw. But none of these produced in you the same yearning, the same hunger, the deep chilling pain of a hollowness you yourself created.

14.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (a) radio static, interspersed with love songs from old black-and-white movies. If Donald ever calls you, the ring tone will be the same: a sweet plucking of violin strings, a woman’s too-mellow voice. The worst thing about these nightmares is that you often think he is calling you, and it pulls you out of your dream of running into the cold and poorly-lit reality of the place you ran to. And once there, in the silence, in your narrow bed, you are all alone.

15.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (d).

16.ANSWERS WILL VARY.

17.ANSWERS WILL VARY.

Prayers to The Sun by A Dying Person

— ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO, ONE OF THE most promising of today’s newer science-fiction writers, was born in Spain to Spanish and American parents, studied theoretical physics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and lives now in Southern California. His fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in such publications as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, Nature, and Clarkesworld. The story that appears here, a visionary treatment of the old adage that “time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” has not been published before.

—R. S.

PRAYERS TO THE SUN BY A DYING PERSON

FROM ONE OF THE FIFTY-TWO ghats near Pushkar Lake, the old woman watched the mid-day sky. Bright, pearly clouds swelled and burst, raining the future down upon the world.

The throngs that had gathered in prayer around the lake fragmented. People ran and staggered. But Ashima remained still and chanted.

She wasn’t here for the same reason as them. They were hoping to attain moksha, liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Ashima’s purpose was a more humble one: simply to leave the world with a measure of grace. For the last two days the Gayatri mantra had served her well, and so she chose it again today. Stroking the beads of her Japa mala, she prepared to repeat the mantra one hundred and eight times. “Om bhūr bhuvah svah—”

Cries of terror drowned out Ashima’s frail voice. A man and woman within a stone’s throw of her were encased in a translucent sphere and carried by the sphere up to an orbital structure that hadn’t existed moments before. Ten feet away from Ashima, a huge cylindrical object materialized in the space occupied by a family, crushing them. Minutes later an old man’s skin grew into a golden shell and fell away to reveal him looking decades younger, an otherworldly green gleam in his rejuvenated eyes. Nearby, flames incinerated a father and his children.

The myriad transformations swept on, unpredictable, haphazard. The very air seemed to pulse with the changes. Talking heads on Ashima’s ocular implant called this collapse of the future into the present “causal accumulation,” but Ashima imagined Shiva, Kali, and Maya as Krishna’s sword, mace, and bow, cutting and bashing and piercing the present with all their might. And yet somehow, throughout it all, she had remained untouched. You are not special, she reminded herself. Your time will come any moment now. Be ready for it.

A pinprick of light high in the sky caught her attention. Goggle-eyed, she watched it explode into a trillion dots. A blanket of scintillating lights fell from above, covering everything and everyone. Ashima felt the energy first on her ghagra choli and then on her skin.

Within seconds her ocular implant overloaded and fizzled out, temporarily blinding her. Hot pain pressed against her temples and skull. This is the end, she thought, dizzy, heaving. Accept it. Let it all go. She imagined herself turning into gray ash and scattering in the wind like the petals of a lotus blossom.

Her legs buckled and she tumbled.

A young girl caught her, breaking her fall. Gently the girl helped Ashima back up.

Tears ran down Ashima’s cheeks. Despite all my preparations, a part of me was not ready, she thought, embarrassed at her relief. And this girl saved me. She stopped crying and studied the girl that had appeared out of thin air. The girl’s features were nothing like Ashima’s. Her mouth was hardly a sliver, her small ears tapered off in an eerie fashion, and her huge eyes burned with a cold fire. She might be nine or ten—or perhaps, if her inscrutable stare was anything to go by, much older. Ashima opened her mouth to speak, but the iridescence that had fallen from the sky and draped itself over the world spoke inside her mind, transmitting the girl’s words directly to her.

“It is time to break your fast,” the girl said, not moving her lips. “Your spirit is strong. But you must nourish your body. We have far to go.”

A stream of particulate matter rushed up from the ground, snaked up the girl’s thin arms and solidified into a wide, thin piece of millet bread. The girl handed it to Ashima. It was warm to the touch, as though freshly baked.

“Bajre ki roti,” Ashima murmured. “My favorite. How . . . ?”

The girl grinned.

Ashima cracked off a piece and took a bite. It tasted like the real Rajasthani deal, a little tangy but not bitter, as though the dough had been kneaded before cooking. The girl performs miracles, Ashima thought. Perhaps anything is possible during these end times.

“No miracle,” the girl said, apparently able to hear Ashima’s thoughts through the network of lights. “The bread’s constituent molecules were extracted from the local environment and nano-assembled into an emulation of roti.”

Ashima stared in blank bewilderment. “Nano-assembled molecules? An emulation of roti? It tastes real enough to me.” And then: “Who are you? And how did you get here?”

“I am Uki.”

All sounds except the girl’s wordless voice and Ashima’s breathing faded into the background.

“Are you doing that?” Ashima asked.

“The Disease has spared you,” Uki said. “But it could strike at any moment.”

Ashima frowned. “The Disease?”

“Ah—they haven’t named it yet.”

“Yet?”

Uki’s gaze became so intense that Ashima felt the girl was looking through her instead of at her. “In my time,” Uki said, “many have become paralyzed by the whole future falling in on us at once. The Disease is the name of this paralysis. Only some of the young ones who fled off-world, like me, seem to have escaped it.”

Ashima’s mind raced, trying to keep up. “You are not of this time?” She surveyed the rippling world outside their bubble. “Tell me, if the future and the present are different pages of the same book, how is it possible for them to speak to one another?”

“Think of time as the thickness of the pages rather than the pages themselves,” Uki said. “Your life is the writing on the pages. Two days ago relative to our present, some pages began to thin, and the print of future events began to bleed through. We’re not sure how or why. Some think that the Large Hadron Collider upset a fundamental balance of forces, a balance involving something called composite scalar baryonic dark matter. Others believe that a swarm of micro-singularities is to blame.”

“Baryonic . . . ? Micro-singularities?” Ashima shook her head. She listened to the gentle whisper of the lights inside her mind, which gave her the definitions of Uki’s difficult words, but the concepts remained beyond her grasp.

Uki smiled. “Never mind,” she said. “They’re just theories. There are plenty of others, even more bizarre. I was one of a group chosen to find out the truth.”

“Ah.” She considered the girl’s earnestness. “You were selected not only to discover the truth, but to try and reverse the effect, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Time-travel technology is available in my day,” Uki confirmed. “It fell to us from several centuries in the future.”

“So you can skip from one page to another, without having to read the words in between. Where did you go?”

“I was recruited and sent far into the future.” Uki’s face darkened. “To the very end of time.”

All books are finite, thought Ashima.

“Those who sent me there,” the girl continued, “believed that when the collapse was complete, all events would be simultaneous, and the cause of the temporal folding-in would become evident. If we could understand the cause, we could change the past and restore the timeline.” The ice in Uki’s eyes burned

bright. “I failed.”

Ashima retreated a little into herself, shaken by the girl’s words. “I am very sorry the plan did not work,” she said moments later. “But why tell me all this? I have nothing to do with such cosmic stories.”

“Perhaps not yet,” Uki said. “But I am hoping that you will—and soon. You see, I am going to try a second time. Fear got the better of me on my first journey, but this time will be different. Come with me. Help me make things right.”

Ashima pondered Uki’s words for a long time, while the world outside their bubble became almost unrecognizable. The unborn sprang to life; new cities and conurbations flourished by the moment; wondrous objects parted the heavens, and all things became connected by the life-like iridescence. These are end days, Ashima thought, and I would be wise not to forget that. “I am sorry,” she said, voice quivering. “But I cannot do as you ask.”

Uki’s gaze turned scalpel-sharp. “Have you no loved ones you wish to save?”

Ashima shook her head. “I am an only child and have no children of my own. My husband and I separated forty years ago. My parents have long passed on.”

Uki lowered her voice. “Do you not wish to save yourself?”

“I have no illusions about my longevity.”

“Then why turn me down?”

Ashima shivered. “You offer me hope, and I fear that hope will break my spirit.”

Uki’s eyes softened. “If you fear hope,” she said, “then you fear life, and in a way you’re already dead.” Her words carried no accusatory tone, merely a kind of clinical detachment. She co*cked her head sideways. “Allow me at least to share with you what I experienced on my journey,” the girl said. “You have nothing to lose.”

For the second time Ashima reflected deeply on her words. “Very well,” she said.

Uki stretched out her arms.

Ashima took a halting step forward.

They embraced.

Images and sensations flooded Ashima with electric force as she became Uki’s silent passenger in the reliving of her memories. Here was Uki, looking from outer space at an Earth millions of years in the future, watching the continents lock in. Then the scene shifted to Uki dancing among the rings of Saturn and contemplating the end of multi-cellular life on Earth. As the hours had passed Uki had become painfully aware of the sun ballooning into a red giant and engulfing Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. Using teleportation technology from thousands of years in the future, the girl had leaped to a place far beyond the Solar System, seeking solitude and respite. The jump had tired her, draining her in some subtle fashion.

How could you bear all the destruction? Ashima wondered.

I told myself it was not an ending, Uki replied, merely a transformation of energy and matter.

I would not have been so calm, Ashima said.

In truth, I wasn’t.

Ashima felt the doubts that had sprouted within Uki as though it were happening all over again now. The girl had slipped from shock to numbness and apathy; she had begun to question her mission.

I wondered whether I had contracted a mild form of the Disease, Uki said. To try and regain my sense of purpose, I practiced visualization; I pictured myself rescuing humanity from the brink of extinction.

But the exercise proved useless, Ashima surmised.

Indeed. I asked myself, “What if life isn’t worth saving?”

Surely, that was the Disease talking, Ashima said. The value of life is not for us to determine.

Ah, but it is, Uki said. Which is why I have asked for your help. If we do not decide to act, it will make little difference what others think about the subject.

In the end it was her instinct for self-preservation that had propelled Uki forward. Given the exponential nature of the collapse, she had only a few days left before everything went dark, cold, irreversibly dead. Uki’s energy matrix would fade into the great abyss of this heat death, floating in an endless morass of nothingness.

I had to confront this, Uki said. I had no choice but to jump forward in time, past the Dark Era of protonic decay, until I reached the very finality of things: over ten to the one hundred years in the future, which amounts to several real-time years from now.

As she shared her memory of the experience, Ashima truly understood the girl’s fear. There were costs to the temporal jumps. That same fatigue Uki had experienced before, during her teleportation exercises, would happen again, this time on a much larger scale. The terrible truth was revealed: Uki’s final jump might be too taxing, leaving her stranded in a gossamer realm of non-being.

Despite this, she had tried. Uki had jumped once, twice, ten times. And each time she had found she had not quite jumped far enough, and had become weaker then the time before. She had felt the very essence of her beginning to give way, to lose cohesion . . . .

Ashima was overwhelmed at the recollection. Her brain began to seize up. She couldn’t breathe. “Enough—”

She stumbled back and Uki severed the link.

A few minutes passed and Ashima at last regained her sense of self. Her breathing returned to normal and her head stopped spinning. “That was when you fled,” she said. “You turned around and came here, to the past.”

Uki lowered her head. “Yes. My courage failed me. A poet once said that time present and time past are both present in time future, and time future contained in time past; he was more right than he could have known. I drifted for a while, aimless. But then I felt your presence, like a beacon shining through the years. I was drawn here, to this time. To you.”

“You were incredibly brave,” Ashima said. Just thinking about the girl’s predicament chilled her. “What they asked of you was impossible.”

Uki’s orb-like eyes seemed to protrude, and her youthful face drew up into taut lines. “Impossible? No. I simply wasn’t ready.”

Ashima did not succeed in keeping incredulity out of her voice. “And now you are?”

“I am if you’ll come with me,” Uki said. “Together we can make all the difference in the world.”

“Or end up dissolved in that realm of non-existence,” Ashima said.

“The rewards outweigh the risks.”

Ashima thought about what Uki was proposing, and it filled her with weariness; she felt every one of her years, the slowness and clumsiness of her body. Her voice broke as she spoke. “I am an old woman. I am not the one you seek.” She tapped into the network of glittering lights, looking up Uki’s poetry reference. “Didn’t the same poet you quoted also say that what might have been, and what has been, point to one end, which is always present? My end is certainly present. Please return me to it.”

The softness of Uki’s voice belied the intensity of her pleading. “You can help me. You must.”

Ashima looked through the invisible curtain to the world beyond. If the girl insisted on keeping her captive here, she would surrender her body, but not her mind. She sat down and resumed her chant. “Tát savitúr váreṇ-i-yaṃ—”

“That’s it then?” Uki exclaimed.

Ashima did not reply, focusing on completing the prayer. And then she began it anew, a second time, a third, one hundred and eight times through the cycle. She recalled the twelve constellations and the nine arc segments, or namshas. She thought of the one hundred and eight energy lines that converge to form the heart chakra, and felt warmed by Sushumna on the path to self-realization. In time the cacophony of the disintegrating world returned, and a stifling wind brought hot gusts from several nearby fires, started as rites of purification or sacrifice. So, the girl has relented. Good, Ashima thought. She prayed on. “Bhárgo devásya dhīmahi—”

With the speed of a trumpet blast, the sky darkened and the air cooled, interrupting Ashima’s meditation. The moon deity Chandra was swallowing up the sun deity Surya.

“Is this your doing, Uki?”

“No.” The girl’s eyes shone defiantly. “Beginning now, each minute of our present is equivalent to nearly one future century. We’re witnessing the total solar eclipse of June 3, 2114. In two hours each passing minute will see four centuries of changes; in three hours, seven hundred and sixty five future years; and in nine hours and twenty-one minutes, the Earth will return to one of the current ice age’s glacial periods, fifty thousand years in the future. By the time—”

“I understand.” Ashima stood up. “No matter what the future holds, I must deal with this moment—that is all we can ever hope to do. Help me find some tulsi for the eclipse.”

Uki frowned. “Holy basil?”

“Yes.”

The girl sighed but proceeded to help. With her enhanced senses it didn’t take long. Basil in hand, Ashima purified a cup of drinking water and proffered it. “Drink with me.”

Uki took a sip and returned the cup. Ashima’s dry lips welcomed the water. She emptied the vessel. “Now we must dip ourselves into the holy waters of Pushkar Lakem,” Ashima said, “and cleanse ourselves from the stains of adharma, unrighteousness.”

The girl followed her lead. They waded in slowly, sharing the spot with several other people. Ashima kept her breathing calm and regular, centering herself on a single idea: Accept the present. Thoughts of the distant past threatened to rupture her serenity, so she pushed them away. The web of interconnected, glimmering lights babbled and droned within her mind, urging caution, warning of impending events. Was that Uki, trying to influence Ashima, or was it a greater future awareness, sharing its wisdom?

And what was this familiar song, playing on top of everything else?

“Dhíyo yó nah pracodáyāt,” Uki chanted, her face composed.

It’s her. Ashima smiled. The girl had adopted Ashima’s favorite mantra. “Well done,” she said. She paused and allowed herself to glimpse the unlikely beauty of the scene. Despite the crowds, she felt still, at peace.

Unbidden, words from the fifth and final chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad flowered in Ashima’s consciousness: The prayers to the sun by a dying person—and wasn’t that her in this moment?

The face of truth is covered with a golden vessel, and so I cannot see the truth behind. Yes, the face of truth. That face was close now. Ashima could feel its divine breath upon her soul. But she could not see it.

At that moment the deity Surya returned in full glory, a great eye ablaze in the sky. The world seemed to shift and sigh in relief. With all of existence in a state of permanent temporal eclipse, the end of this actual eclipse was even more reassuring than usual.

Without thinking about it, Ashima reached forward and caressed Uki’s hair, dank from the lake. It smelled rich, like jasmine oil. Minutes passed, or hours. “It is time,” one of them said, and they both stirred. They retreated from the lake, its waters shimmering with reflected afternoon light. Every instant brought impossible, yet inevitable, changes. The weather, the people, the very lake, all transmuted into nearly infinite versions of themselves, all of them existing at once. I can see only the glare of the vessel of gold that is covering the light of truth. Ashima imagined this truth deep within the lake’s waters, in a secret place untouched by the tides of transformation. She dared not look up to see what machines or catastrophes were creating the terrible thunders and darting shadows high above.

O glorious one! Lift this lid of gold. Withdraw your rays. Uncover this lid and enable me to behold you as you are in essence, so that I may commune myself with your being.

“Don’t be afraid,” Uki said, perhaps speaking for her own sake as much as for Ashima’s. They moved away from the central mass of people.

“Let us sing to Shiva of conquering death,” Ashima said. She pulled the girl towards her.

“The future devours the present,” the girl said. “The world is forever ending, and the sound of its death is a single word: Now. I can help you see the truth inside the golden vessel. Join me.”

Ashima considered her words. “‘In my beginning is my end.’ What greater truth is there?”

“In the water, you meditated on the nature of the present moment. But I could tell there were other thoughts inside you, deep within, which you did not allow to surface.”

“Yes,” Ashima admitted. “Distractions.”

“They were memories, Ashima. Memories of yourself as a young girl, about my age, being taught to perform charitable acts, no matter the circ*mstance.”

Was that so? Ashima had to concede the possibility. Uki’s words created a strange lifting of energies inside her, as though the eclipse had only now truly ended. This realignment of internal forces pushed against her exhaustion, budging it this way and that. Ashima closed her eyes. “Let us sing the Mahamrityunjaya mantra. Oṁ tryambakam yajāmahe sugandhim puṣṭi-vardhanam—”

The girl joined in, following her rhythms. Ashima pressed the girl against her chest. Their voices became as one and they sang and sang, and when the words ran out they merely hummed, and when the music ran out, their breathing created its own harmonious melody.

At last Ashima opened her eyes.

The golden vessel had lifted, and the face of truth was before her.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Uki’s eyes widened and her thin lips parted.

In the eternity of the instant that followed, the old woman and the girl ceased to be.

Last and First Men

— OLAF STAPLEDON —

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

OLAF STAPLEDON’S LAST AND FIRST MEN, first published in 1930, is surely the ultimate end-of-the-world novel. Not a novel, actually, for its form is not that of fiction but that of a chronicle of the next two billion years of human life; it has no real plot, no characters except as incidental figures as the long narrative of the human race’s future unfolds, no dialogue. In form it is a work of history, of sorts, a sober and solemn account of the passing eons to come, written in much the same tone as might be used for a chronicle of our ancestors’ way of life in the Pleistocene or of the development of constitutional theory in Great Britain. It’s a sign of Stapledon’s great artistry that he manages to make his history of the future such compelling reading. He does it by taking the entire unimaginably vast future as his subject—and then by imagining the unimaginable.

Though he is telling us of the colossal events to come, it is clear right away that Stapledon is not really a prophet, for the early chapters of this extraordinary book are an attempt to depict the very near future, the next few hundred years, and right from the start his picture of what is imminent in the world is awry. Writing in 1930, he fails to foresee the rise of Hitler, speaks of the Germany of the mid-twentieth century as the most enlightened nation of Europe, and envisions a horrendous war between England and France that leaves both countries devastated. He misses the development of atomic energy, too, giving us only the invention of an explosive weapon so terrible that everyone agrees to destroy the formula for it, and does. And he sees America and China as locked in a strange alliance as the two great powers of the world three or four hundred years hence.

Not prophecy, no. But a work of great poetic power. And the farther he gets from our own time, the more he astonishes us with his imaginative force. A series of catastrophes makes most of the world uninhabitable and brings the total collapse of our civilization; but then a mutation he calls the Second Men emerges, a species of big-brained geniuses who live for hundreds of years, only to be replaced, ultimately, by the Third Men, “slightly more than half the stature of their predecessors,” with immense silken ears and “great lean hands, on which were six versatile fingers, six antennae of living steel. . . .”

At this point the book is just past the halfway mark, and Stapledon has a long way to go. When he tells us in Chapter Five that we will now skip over the next ten million years, because it was a time of barbarism and stasis, we understand that we are entering a visionary dream. In the remaining pages he unfurls one human species after another, eighteen in all, some of them creatures that we would scarcely recognize as human (the pigeon-sized Seventh Men, for example, with leathery bat-like wings). Our world is destroyed; mankind moves along to Venus and then, in the time of the godlike Eighteenth Men two billion years hence, to Neptune. But now the end has come. A nearby star begins to send out lethal radiation; and, as a representative of the Eighteenth Men, traveling in time, explains to our twentieth-century narrator, all of space in the vicinity of our sun will become uninhabitable in 30,000 years, and there is no hope of escape. It is the ultimate apocalypse; and, in the lyrical epilogue to this extraordinary, even unique book, Stapledon speaks through the Eighteenth Men to provide the finest possible statement to mark the end of the human race. It is that epilogue, reprinted here, that makes what I think is the most fitting conclusion, as well, to this collection of dark but not always pessimistic visions of catastrophes to come.

CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST OF MAN

I. SENTENCE OF DEATH

OURS HAS BEEN ESSENTIALLY A philosophical age, in fact the supreme age of philosophy. But a great practical problem has also concerned us. We have had to prepare for the task of preserving humanity during a most difficult period which was calculated to begin about one hundred million years hence, but might, in certain circ*mstances, be sprung upon us at very short notice. Long ago the human inhabitants of Venus believed that already in their day the sun was about to enter the “white dwarf” phase, and that the time would therefore soon come when their world would be frost-bound. This calculation was unduly pessimistic; but we know now that, even allowing for the slight delay caused by the great collision, the solar collapse must begin at some date astronomically not very distant. We had planned that during the comparatively brief period of the actual shrinkage, we would move our planet steadily nearer to the sun, until finally it should settle in the narrowest possible orbit.

Man would then be comfortably placed for a very long period. But in the fullness of time there would come a far more serious crisis. The sun would continue to cool, and at last man would no longer be able to live by means of solar radiation. It would become necessary to annihilate matter to supply the deficiency. The other planets might be used for this purpose, and possibly the sun itself. Or, given the sustenance for so long a voyage, man might boldly project his planet into the neighborhood of some younger star. Thenceforth, perhaps, he might operate upon a far grander scale. He might explore and colonize all suitable worlds in every corner of the galaxy, and organize himself as a vast community of minded worlds. Even (so we dreamed) he might achieve intercourse with other galaxies. It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. We dared to think that in some far distant epoch the human spirit, clad in all wisdom, power, and delight, might look back upon our primitive age with a certain respect; no doubt with pity also and amusem*nt, but none the less with admiration for the spirit in us, still only half awake, and struggling against great disabilities. In such a mood, half pity, half admiration, we ourselves look back upon the primitive mankinds.

Our prospect has now suddenly and completely changed, for astronomers have made a startling discovery, which assigns to man a speedy end. His existence has ever been precarious. At any stage of his career he might easily have been exterminated by some slight alteration of his chemical environment, by a more than usually malignant microbe, by a radical change of climate, or by the manifold effects of his own folly. Twice already he has been almost destroyed by astronomical events. How easily might it happen that the solar system, now rushing through a somewhat more crowded region of the galaxy, should become entangled with, or actually strike, a major astronomical body, and be destroyed. But fate, as it turns out, has a more surprising end in store for man.

Not long ago an unexpected alteration was observed to be taking place in a near star. Through no discoverable cause, it began to change from white to violet, and increase in brightness. Already it has attained such extravagant brilliance that, though its actual disk remains a mere point in our sky, its dazzling purple radiance illuminates our nocturnal landscapes with hideous beauty. Our astronomers have ascertained that this is no ordinary “nova,” that it is not one of those stars addicted to paroxysms of brilliance. It is something unprecedented, a normal star suffering from a unique disease, a fantastic acceleration of its vital process, a riotous squandering of the energy which should have remained locked within its substance for aeons. At the present rate it will be reduced either to an inert cinder or to actual annihilation in a few thousand years. This extraordinary event may possibly have been produced by unwise tamperings on the part of intelligent beings in the star’s neighborhood. But, indeed, since all matter at very high temperature is in a state of unstable equilibrium, the cause may have been merely some conjunction of natural circ*mstances.

The event was first regarded simply as an intriguing spectacle. But further study roused a more serious interest. Our own planet, and therefore the sun also, was suffering a continuous and increasing bombardment of ethereal vibrations, most of which were of incredibly high frequency, and of unknown potentiality. What would be their effect upon the sun? After some centuries, certain astronomical bodies in the neighborhood of the deranged star were seen to be infected with its disorder. Their fever increased the splendor of our night sky, but it also confirmed our fears. We still hoped that the sun might prove too distant to be seriously influenced, but careful analysis now showed that this hope must be abandoned. The sun’s remoteness might cause a delay of some thousands of years before the cumulative effects of the bombardment could start the disintegration; but sooner or later the sun itself must be infected. Probably within thirty thousand years life will be impossible anywhere within a vast radius of the sun, so vast a radius that it is quite impossible to propel our planet away fast enough to escape before the storm can catch us.

2. BEHAVIOR OF THE CONDEMNED

THE DISCOVERY OF THIS DOOM kindled in us unfamiliar emotions. Hitherto humanity had seemed to be destined for a very long future, and the individual himself had been accustomed to look forward to very many thousands of years of personal life, ending in voluntary sleep. We had of course often conceived, and even savored in imagination, the sudden destruction of our world. But now we faced it as a fact. Outwardly every one behaved with perfect serenity, but inwardly every mind was in turmoil. Not that there was any question of our falling into panic or despair, for in this crisis our native detachment stood us in good stead. But inevitably some time passed before our minds became properly adjusted to the new prospect, before we could see our fate outlined clearly and beautifully against the cosmic background.

Presently, however, we learned to contemplate the whole great saga of man as a completed work of art, and to admire it no less for its sudden and tragic end than for the promise in it which was not to be fulfilled. Grief was now transfigured wholly into ecstasy. Defeat, which had oppressed us with a sense of man’s impotence and littleness among the stars, brought us into a new sympathy and reverence for all those myriads of beings in the past out of whose obscure strivings we had been born. We saw the most brilliant of our own race and the lowliest of our prehuman forerunners as essentially spirits of equal excellence, though cast in diverse circ*mstances. When we looked round on the heavens, and at the violet splendor which was to destroy us, we were filled with awe and pity, awe for the inconceivable potentiality of this bright host, pity for its self-thwarting effort to fulfil itself as the universal spirit.

At this stage it seemed that there was nothing left for us to do but to crowd as much excellence as possible into our remaining life, and meet our end in the noblest manner. But now there came upon us once more the rare experience of racial mentality. For a whole Neptunian year every individual lived in an enraptured trance, in which, as the racial mind, he or she resolved many ancient mysteries and saluted many unexpected beauties. This ineffable experience, lived through under the shadow of death, was the flower of man’s whole being. But I can tell nothing of it, save that when it was over we possessed, even as individuals, a new peace, in which, strangely but harmoniously, were blended grief, exaltation, and god-like laughter.

In consequence of this racial experience we found ourselves faced with two tasks which had not before been contemplated. The one referred to the future, the other to the past.

In respect of the future, we are now setting about the forlorn task of disseminating among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. For this purpose we shall make use of the pressure of radiation from the sun, and chiefly the extravagantly potent radiation that will later be available. We are hoping to devise extremely minute electro-magnetic “wave-systems,” akin to normal protons and electrons, which will be individually capable of sailing forward upon the hurricane of solar radiation at a speed not wholly incomparable with the speed of light itself. This is a difficult task. But, further, these units must be so cunningly inter-related that, in favorable conditions, they may tend to combine to form spores of life, and to develop, not indeed into human beings, but into lowly organisms with a definite evolutionary bias toward the essentials of human nature. These objects we shall project from beyond our atmosphere in immense quantities at certain points of our planet’s orbit, so that solar radiation may carry them toward the most promising regions of the galaxy. The chance that any of them will survive to reach their destination is small, and still smaller the chance that any of them will find a suitable environment. But if any of this human seed should fall upon good ground, it will embark, we hope, upon a somewhat rapid biological evolution, and produce in due season whatever complex organic forms are possible in its environment. It will have a very real physiological bias toward the evolution of intelligence. Indeed it will have a much greater bias in that direction than occurred on the Earth in those sub-vital atomic groupings from which terrestrial life eventually sprang.

It is just conceivable, then, that by extremely good fortune man may still influence the future of this galaxy, not directly but through his creature. But in the vast music of existence the actual theme of mankind now ceases for ever. Finished, the long reiterations of man’s history; defeated, the whole proud enterprise of his maturity. The stored experience of many mankinds must sink into oblivion, and today’s wisdom must vanish.

The other task which occupies us, that which relates to the past, is one which may very well seem to you nonsensical.

We have long been able to enter into past minds and participate in their experience. Hitherto we have been passive spectators merely, but recently we have acquired the power of influencing past minds. This seems an impossibility; for a past event is what it is, and how can it conceivably be altered at a subsequent date, even in the minutest respect?

Now it is true that past events are what they are, irrevocably; but in certain cases some feature of a past event may depend on an event in the far future. The past event would never have been as it actually was (and is, eternally), if there had not been going to be a certain future event, which, though not contemporaneous with the past event, influences it directly in the sphere of eternal being. The passage of events is real, and time is the successiveness of passing events; but though events have passage, they have also eternal being. And in certain rare cases mental events far separated in time determine one another directly by way of eternity.

Our own minds have often been profoundly influenced by direct inspection of past minds; and now we find that certain events of certain past minds are determined by present events in our own present minds. No doubt there are some past mental events which are what they are by virtue of mental processes which we shall perform but have not yet performed.

Our historians and psychologists, engaged on direct inspection of past minds, had often complained of certain “singular” points in past minds, where the ordinary laws of psychology fail to give a full explanation of the course of mental events; where, in fact, some wholly unknown influence seemed to be at work. Later it was found that, in some cases at least, this disturbance of the ordinary principles of psychology corresponded with certain thoughts or desires in the mind of the observer, living in our own age. Of course, only such matters as could have significance to the past mind could influence it at all. Thoughts and desires of ours which have no meaning to the particular past individual fail to enter into his experience. New ideas and new values are only to be introduced by arranging familiar matter so that it may gain a new significance. Nevertheless we now found ourselves in possession of an amazing power of communicating with the past, and contributing to its thought and action, though of course we could not alter it.

But, it may he asked, what if, in respect of a particular “singularity” in some past mind, we do not, after all, choose to provide the necessary influence to account for it? The question is meaningless. There is no possibility that we should not choose to influence those past minds which are, as a matter of fact, dependent on our influence. For it is in the sphere of eternity (wherein alone we meet past minds), that we really make this free choice. And in the sphere of time, though the choosing has relations with our modern age, and may be said to occur in that age, it also has relations with the past mind, and may be said to have occurred also long ago.

There are in some past minds singularities which are not the product of any influence that we have exerted today. Some of these singularities, no doubt, we shall ourselves produce on some occasion before our destruction. But it may be that some are due to an influence other than ours, perhaps to beings which, by good fortune, may spring long hence from our forlorn seminal enterprise; or they may be due perhaps to the cosmic mind, whose future occurrence and eternal existence we earnestly desire. However that may be, there are a few remarkable minds, scattered up and down past ages and even in the most primitive human races, which suggest an influence other than our own. They are so “singular” in one respect or another, that we cannot give a perfectly clear psychological account of them in terms of the past only; and yet we ourselves are not the instigators of their singularity. Your Jesus, your Socrates, your Gautama, show traces of this uniqueness. But the most original of all were too eccentric to have any influence on their contemporaries. It is possible that in ourselves also there are “singularities” which cannot be accounted for wholly in terms of ordinary biological and psychological laws. If we could prove that this is the case, we should have very definite evidence of the occurrence of a high order of mentality somewhere in the future, and therefore of its eternal existence. But hitherto this problem has proved too subtle for us, even in the racial mode. It may be that the mere fact that we have succeeded in attaining racial mentality involves some remote future influence. It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting co-operation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

We have two methods of influencing the past through past individuals; for we can operate either upon minds of great originality and power, or upon any average individual whose circ*mstances happen to suit our purpose. In original minds we can only suggest some very vague intuition, which is then “worked up” by the individual himself into some form very different from that which we intended, but very potent as a factor in the culture of his age. Average minds, on the other hand, we can use as passive instruments for the conveyance of detailed ideas. But in such cases the individual is incapable of working up the material into a great and potent form, suited to his age.

But what is it, you may ask, that we seek to contribute to the past? We seek to afford intuitions of truth and of value, which, though easy to us from our point of vantage, would be impossible to the unaided past. We seek to help the past to make the best of itself, just as one man may help another. We seek to direct the attention of past individuals and past races to truths and beauties which, though implicit in their experience, would otherwise be overlooked.

We seek to do this for two reasons. Entering into past minds, we become perfectly acquainted with them, and cannot but love them; and so we desire to help them. By influencing selected individuals, we seek to influence indirectly great multitudes. But our second motive is very different. We see the career of Man in his successive planetary homes as a process of very great beauty. It is far indeed from the perfect; but it is very beautiful, with the beauty of tragic art. Now it turns out that this beautiful thing entails our operation at various points in the past. Therefore we will to operate.

Unfortunately our first inexperienced efforts were disastrous. Many of the fatuities which primitive minds in all ages have been prone to attribute to the influence of disembodied spirits, whether deities, fiends, or the dead, are but the gibberish which resulted from our earliest experiments. And this book, so admirable in our conception, has issued from the brain of the writer, your contemporary, in such disorder as to be mostly rubbish.

We are concerned with the past not only in so far as we make very rare contributions to it, but chiefly in two other manners.

First, we are engaged upon the great enterprise of becoming lovingly acquainted with the past, the human past, in every detail. This is, so to speak, our supreme act of filial piety. When one being comes to know and love another, a new and beautiful thing is created, namely the love. The cosmos is thus far and at that date enhanced. We seek then to know and love every past mind that we can enter. In most cases we can know them with far more understanding than they can know themselves. Not the least of them, not the worst of them, shall be left out of this great work of understanding and admiration.

There is another manner in which we are concerned with the human past. We need its help. For we, who are triumphantly reconciled to our fate, are under obligation to devote our last energies not to ecstatic contemplation but to a forlorn and most uncongenial task, the dissemination. This task is almost intolerably repugnant to us. Gladly would we spend our last days in embellishing our community and our culture, and in pious exploration of the past. But it is incumbent on us, who are by nature artists and philosophers, to direct the whole attention of our world upon the arid labor of designing an artificial human seed, producing it in immense quantities, and projecting it among the stars. If there is to be any possibility of success, we must undertake a very lengthy program of physical research, and finally organize a world-wide system of manufacture. The work will not be completed until our physical constitution is already being undermined, and the disintegration of our community has already begun. Now we could never fulfil this policy without a zealous conviction of its importance. Here it is that the past can help us. We, who have now learnt so thoroughly the supreme art of ecstatic fatalism, go humbly to the past to learn over again that other supreme achievement of the spirit, loyalty to the forces of life embattled against the forces of death. Wandering among the heroic and often forlorn ventures of the past, we are fired once more with primitive zeal. Thus, when we return to our own world, we are able, even while we preserve in our hearts the peace that passeth understanding, to struggle as though we cared only for victory.

3. EPILOGUE

I AM SPEAKING TO YOU now from a period about twenty thousand terrestrial years after the date at which the whole preceding part of this book was communicated. It has become very difficult to reach you, and still more difficult to speak to you; for already the Last Men are not the men they were.

Our two great undertakings are still unfinished. Much of the human past remains imperfectly explored, and the projection of the seed is scarcely begun. That enterprise has proved far more difficult than was expected. Only within the last few years have we succeeded in designing an artificial human dust capable of being carried forward on the sun’s radiation, hardy enough to endure the conditions of a trans-galactic voyage of many millions of years, and yet intricate enough to bear the potentiality of life and of spiritual development. We are now preparing to manufacture this seminal matter in great quantities, and to cast it into space at suitable points on the planet’s orbit.

Some centuries have now passed since the sun began to show the first symptoms of disintegration, namely a slight change of colour toward the blue, followed by a definite increase of brightness and heat. Today, when he pierces the ever-thickening cloud, he smites us with an intolerable steely brilliance which destroys the sight of anyone foolish enough to face it. Even in the cloudy weather which is now normal, the eye is wounded by the fierce violet glare. Eye-troubles afflict us all, in spite of the special glasses which have been designed to protect us. The mere heat, too, is already destructive. We are forcing our planet outward from its old orbit in an ever-widening spiral; but, do what we will, we cannot prevent the climate from becoming more and more deadly, even at the poles. The intervening regions have already been deserted. Evaporation of the equatorial oceans has thrown the whole atmosphere into tumult, so that even at the poles we are tormented by hot wet hurricanes and incredible electric storms. These have already shattered most of our great buildings, sometimes burying a whole teeming province under an avalanche of tumbled vitreous crags.

Our two polar communities at first managed to maintain radio communication; but it is now some time since we of the south received news of the more distressed north. Even with us the situation is already desperate. We had recently established some hundreds of stations for the dissemination, but less than a score have been able to operate. This failure is due mainly to an increasing lack of personnel. The deluge of fantastic solar radiation has had disastrous effect on the human organism. Epidemics of a malignant tumour, which medical science has failed to conquer, have reduced the southern people to a mere remnant, and this in spite of the migration of the tropical races into the Antarctic. Each of us, moreover, is but the wreckage of his former self. The higher mental functions, attained only in the most developed human species, are already lost or disordered, through the breakdown of their special tissues. Not only has the racial mind vanished, but the sexual groups have lost their mental unity. Three of the sub-sexes have already been exterminated by derangement of their chemical nature. Glandular troubles, indeed, have unhinged many of us with anxieties and loathings which we cannot conquer, though we know them to be unreasonable. Even the normal power of “telepathic” communication has become so unreliable that we have been compelled to fall back upon the archaic practice of vocal symbolism. Exploration of the past is now confined to specialists, and is a dangerous profession, which may lead to disorders of temporal experience.

Degeneration of the higher neural centres has also brought about in us a far more serious and deep-seated trouble, namely a general spiritual degradation which would formerly have seemed impossible, so confident were we of our integrity. The perfectly dispassionate will had been for many millions of years universal among us, and the corner-stone of our whole society and culture. We had almost forgotten that it has a physiological basis, and that if that basis were undermined, we might no longer be capable of rational conduct. But, drenched for some thousands of years by the unique stellar radiation, we have gradually lost not only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for normal disinterested behaviour. Every one is now liable to an irrational bias in favour of himself as a private person, as against his fellows. Personal envy, uncharitableness, even murder and gratuitous cruelty, formerly unknown amongst us, are now becoming common. At first when men began to notice in themselves these archaic impulses, they crushed them with amused contempt. But as the highest nerve centres fell further into decay, the brute in us began to be ever more unruly, and the human more uncertain. Rational conduct was henceforth to be achieved only after an exhausting and degrading “moral struggle,” instead of spontaneously and fluently. Nay, worse, increasingly often the struggle ended not in victory but defeat. Imagine then, the terror and disgust that gripped us when we found ourselves one and all condemned to a desperate struggle against impulses which we had been accustomed to regard as insane. It is distressing enough to know that each one of us might at any moment, merely to help some dear individual or other, betray his supreme duty toward the dissemination; but it is harrowing to discover ourselves sometimes so far sunk as to be incapable even of common loving-kindness toward our neighbours. For a man to favour himself against his friend or beloved, even in the slightest respect, was formerly unknown. But today many of us are haunted by the look of amazed horror and pity in the eyes of an injured friend.

In the early stages of our trouble lunatic asylums were founded, but they soon became over-crowded and a burden on a stricken community. The insane were then killed. But it became clear that by former standards we were all insane. No man now can trust himself to behave reasonably.

And, of course, we cannot trust each other. Partly through the prevalent irrationality of desire, and partly through the misunderstandings which have come with the loss of “telepathic” communication, we have been plunged into all manner of discords. A political constitution and system of laws had to be devised, but they seem to have increased our troubles. Order of a kind is maintained by an over-worked police force. But this is in the hands of the professional organizers, who have now all the vices of bureaucracy. It was largely through their folly that two of the antarctic nations broke into social revolution, and are now preparing to meet the armament which an insane world-government is devising for their destruction. Meanwhile, through the break-down of the economic order, and the impossibility of reaching the food-factories on Jupiter, starvation is added to our troubles, and has afforded to certain ingenious lunatics the opportunity of trading at the expense of others.

All this folly in a doomed world, and in a community that was yesterday the very flower of a galaxy! Those of us who still care for the life of the spirit are tempted to regret that mankind did not choose decent suicide before ever the putrescence began. But indeed this could not be. The task that was undertaken had to be completed. For the Scattering of the Seed has come to be for every one of us the supreme religious duty. Even those who continually sin against it recognize this as the last office of man. It was for this that we outstayed our time, and must watch ourselves decline from spiritual estate into that brutishness from which man has so seldom freed himself.

Yet why do we persist in the forlorn effort? Even if by good luck the seed should take root somewhere and thrive, there will surely come an end to its adventure, if not swiftly in fire, then in the ultimate battle of life against encroaching frost. Our labour will at best sow for death an ampler harvest. There seems no rational defence of it, unless it be rational to carry out blindly a purpose conceived in a former and more enlightened state.

But we cannot feel sure that we really were more enlightened. We look back now at our former selves, with wonder, but also with incomprehension and misgiving. We try to recall the glory that seemed to be revealed to each of us in the racial mind, but we remember almost nothing of it. We cannot rise even to that more homely beatitude which was once within the reach of the unaided individual, that serenity which, it seemed, should be the spirit’s answer to every tragic event. It is gone from us. It is not only impossible but inconceivable. We now see our private distresses and the public calamity as merely hideous. That after so long a struggle into maturity man should be roasted alive like a trapped mouse, for the entertainment of a lunatic! How can any beauty lie in that?

But this is not our last word to you. For though we have fallen, there is still something in us left over from the time that is passed. We have become blind and weak; but the knowledge that we are so has forced us to a great effort. Those of us who have not already sunk too far have formed themselves into a brotherhood for mutual strengthening, so that the true human spirit may be maintained a little longer, until the seed has been well sown, and death be permissible. We call ourselves the Brotherhood of the Condemned. We seek to be faithful to one another, and to our common undertaking, and to the vision which is no longer revealed. We are vowed to the comforting of all distressed persons who are not yet permitted death. We are vowed also to the dissemination. And we are vowed to keep the spirit bright until the end.

Now and again we meet together in little groups or great companies to hearten ourselves with one another’s presence. Sometimes on these occasions we can but sit in silence, groping for consolation and for strength. Sometimes the spoken word flickers hither and thither amongst us, shedding a brief light but little warmth to the soul that lies freezing in a torrid world.

But there is among us one, moving from place to place and company to company, whose voice all long to hear. He is young, the last born of the Last Men; for he was the latest to be conceived before we learned man’s doom, and put an end to all conceiving. Being the latest, he is also the noblest. Not him alone, but all his generation, we salute, and look to for strength; but he, the youngest, is different from the rest. In him the spirit, which is but the flesh awakened into spirituality, has power to withstand the tempest of solar energy longer than the rest of us. It is as though the sun itself were eclipsed by this spirit’s brightness. It is as though in him at last, and for a day only, man’s promise were fulfilled. For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above his suffering. And though more than the rest of us he feels the suffering of others, he is above his pity. In his comforting there is a strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our dying world and the frustration of all man’s striving, he is not, like us, dismayed, but quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair wakens into peace. By his reasonable speech, almost by the mere sound of his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts mysteriously filled with exultation. Yet often his words are grave.

Let his words, not mine, close this story:

Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling’s knowledge. His admiration is a nestling’s admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.

But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.

About The Editor

ROBERT SILVERBERG IS ONE OF science fiction’s most beloved writers, and the author of such contemporary classics as Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, Lord Valentine’s Castle, and At Winter’s End. He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the winner of five Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards. In 2004, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America presented him with the Grand Master Award.

This Way to The End Times

EDITED BY Robert Silverberg

© 2016 by Three Rooms Press

Acknowledgments:

“Introduction” by Robert Silverberg, Copyright © 2016 by Agberg, Ltd.;

“The Eternal Adam” by Jules Verne, first published in 1910 in the collection Hier et Demain. English translation by Willis T. Bradley first published in 1957 in Saturn Science Fiction;

“The Last Generation,” by James Elroy Flecker, first published in 1908 by the New Age Press;

“Finis,” by Frank Lillie Pollock, first published in 1906 in Argosy;

“The Coming of the Ice” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, first published in 1926 in Amazing Stories;

“N Day,” by Philip Latham, Copyright © 1946 by the estate of R. S. Richardson. Reprinted by permission of Barry Malzberg, agent for the estate of R. S. Richardson;

“Guyal of Sfere,” by Jack Vance, Copyright © 1950, 1978 by Jack Vance. Reprinted by permission of John Vance, executor for the agent of Jack Vance;

“A Pail of Air,” by Fritz Leiber, Copyright © 1951, 1979 by Fritz Leiber. Reprinted by permission of Richard Curtis Associates, agents for the estate of Fritz Leiber;

“Who Can Replace a Man?,” by Brian W. Aldiss, Copyright © 1958, 1986 by Brian W. Aldiss. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Heresies of the Huge God,” by Brian W. Aldiss, Copyright © 1966 by Brian W. Aldiss. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“The New Atlantis,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, Copyright © 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Curtis Brown, Ltd.;

“When We Went to See the End of the World,” by Robert Silverberg, Copyright © 1972 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.;

“The Wind and the Rain,” by Robert Silverberg, Copyright © 1973 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author and Agberg, Ltd.;

“The Screwfly Solution,” by James Tiptree Jr., Copyright © 1977 by Alice B. Sheldon, copyright © 2005 by Jeffrey D. Smith. First published under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey D. Smith and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc., agents for the author’s estate;

“Daisy, in the Sun,” by Connie Willis, Copyright © 1979 by Connie Willis. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Lotts Agency, agents for the author;

“After-Images,” by Malcolm Edwards, Copyright © 1983 by Malcolm Edwards. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“The Rain at the End of the World,” by Dale Bailey, Copyright © 1999 by Dale Bailey. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“The End of the World as We Know It,” by Dale Bailey, Copyright © 2004 by Dale Bailey. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Final Exam,” by Megan Arkenberg, Copyright © 2012 by Megan Arkenberg. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Three Days After,” by Karen Haber, Copyright © 2014 by Karen Haber. Reprinted by permission of the author;

“Prayers to the Sun,” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Copyright © 2016 by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro;

Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, Copyright © 1930 by William Olaf Stapledon. Extract printed by permission of the author’s estate.

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ISBN 978-1-941110-47-8 (trade paperback); ISBN 978-1-941110-48-5 (ebook)

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