Earth Abides

tongue, and disappeared on a trail. Irritated, he waited for her, and when she did not return, he changed his plans, and spent most of the day lolling, half naked, in the shade of some trees. In the late afternoon, he started.

At twilight he came to the crest of the hill, and looked out again over the broad expanse of all—the Bay cities. With a sudden start of pleasure he saw that most of the street-lights were still burning. There had been no electric lights for such a long time that he could really not remember where he had last seen them. All the steam- driven power-plants must have failed almost immediately, and even the smaller hydro-electric systems had not lasted long. He felt a curious local pride mingling with his pleasure; perhaps these were the last electric lights left burning in the whole world.

At the moment he could almost think that it had all been some wild vagary of the imagination, and that he had now returned to a normally functioning city.

The long empty highway ahead of him gave the lie to such thoughts. He looked more carefully. A few sections, he decided, had blacked out through local failure of power since he had been away. The lights on the Golden Gate Bridge were either extinguished, or else he could not see them because of the smoke drift upon the Bay.

He turned into San Lupo Drive. As far as he could see from the street-lights and the headlight glare, everything looked just the same as when he had last left it. “There’ll always be a San Lupo Drive!” he thought, and then he realized that at least he was enough like all the other survivors to pick out some particular familiar spot, and though he went away, to return to it again like the homing pigeon.

He opened the front door, snapped the lights on and looked. Nothing was changed. He had known that it in be so, and yet there had always been hope. He felt no active sorrow, but only dullness.

“The sere and yellow leaf,” he thought, saying a line he had heard on the stage, but not knowing what play. “There would have been a time….”

Princess made a sudden dash into the kitchen, slipped on the linoleum, skidded, yelped comically, and recovered. Thankful to her again for breaking the tension, he followed her. She was sniffing along the baseboard, but he failed to discover what had excited her.

“Well,” he thought, walking back to the living-room, “if I have no feelings left, that is perhaps strange, but at least there is no one now to whom I can pretend. It is probably all part of what I am passing through.”

The note which he had left posted on the desk was still there, undisturbed, looking remarkably fresh. He took it, crumpled it, threw it into the fireplace, scratched a match. He hesitated a moment. Then he touched the match to the paper, and watched the flame blaze up. That was finished!

In that generation there will be neither father nor mother, nor wife, nor child, nor friend. But it will be as in the ancient tales when the gods reared up a new people from stones or dragons’ teeth, and they were all strangers with strange faces, and no man knew his fellow’s face.

The next morning he settled down to establish his life. Food, he knew already, was no problem at all. In the nearest business district he began looking into store-windows. Rats and mice were making a mess of everything, and the floors were littered with gnawed cartons and spilled food. Through one window, however, he was startled to see the gaily colored piles of fruit and vegetables as fresh and lovely as ever. He stared incredulously, peering through the dust-coated glass. Then, first with irritation and then with amusement, he realized that the bright colors were merely from the papier mache oranges, apples, tomatoes, and avocados which the store in the old days had used for a permanent front-window display.

After a while he saw through the windows a grocery which was unlittered. Apparently it must be rodent- proof. Carefully jimmying a window, he got into the store.

The bread was inedible, and weevils were at work even in some of the carefully sealed boxes of crackers. But the dried fruit and everything inside of tin and glass was as good as ever. As he was picking out some cans of olives, he heard an electric motor start. Curiously, he opened the refrigerator, and found that the butter was still perfectly preserved. Next he investigated the deep-freeze units, and found fresh meat, frozen vegetables, ice- cream, and even materials for a green salad. When he left with his loot, he closed the window carefully behind him, to keep at least that one store free of rats.

After he had returned to the house, he reflected upon his position again, and decided that as yet the mere maintenance of life would be easy, indefinitely. Food, clothing—the shops were full, and he had only to help himself! Water still gushed from the faucets at full pressure. Gas had failed, and if it had been a country of bitterly cold winters, he might have had to consider laying in some kind of fuel supply. But his gasoline stove served excellently for cooking; if the fireplace was not sufficient in the winter, he could round up a battery of such stoves and supply himself with all the heat he needed. In fact, he soon began to feel so pleasantly self-sufficient that he feared he was turning into a hermit like the old man he had once seen.

In those days when there had been death even in the air and civilization tottered toward its end—in those days, the men who controlled the flow of the water looked at one another and said, “Even though we fall sick and die, still, the people must have water.” And they thought of plans that they had laid carefully in those times when men feared that bombs would fall. Then they set the valves and opened the channels, so that the water flowed freely all the way from the great dams in the mountains and through the long siphons and into the tunnels and finally to the reservoirs from which it would flow, all at the pull of the earth, through all the faucets. “Now,” they said, “when we are gone, the water will flow on—yes, until the pipes rust out, and that will be the time of a generation!” Then they died. But they died as men who have finished their work and lie down quietly, secure in their honor.

So at the end, there was still the blessing of water, and no one thirsted. And even when only a few wanderers walked through the city streets, the water still flowed.

Ish had feared at first that he would suffer from mere boredom, but he soon found himself as busy as he wished to be. The desire for activity which had expressed itself in his eastern trip had now faded out. He slept a great deal. He also found himself sitting for long periods, conscious but in sheer apathy. Such lapses, however, frightened him, and he always tried to force himself into some kind of activity.

Fortunately, though the mechanics of living were not complicated, they took up an appreciable part of his time.

He had to prepare his food, and he soon found that unless he washed the dishes promptly, a stream of ants appeared, to make everything twice as difficult. He was forced, for the same reason, to wrap up the garbage and carry it somewhere away from the house. He had to feed Princess; since she was getting smelly, he even bathed her, over her loud protests.

One day, wanting to shake himself out of his apathy, he went to the Public Library, smashed a lock with his hammer, and after some browsing found himself (a little to his own amusement) walking out with Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson.

These books, however, did not interest him greatly. Crusoe’s religious preoccupations seemed boring and rather silly. As for the Robinsons, he felt (as he had felt when a boy) that the ship remained for the family a kind of infinite grab-bag from which at any time they might take exactly what they wanted.

Although the radio was dead, he still had the family’s record-player and collection of records. After a while he located in a music store a better record-player. It was heavy, but he was just able to get it home on the station-wagon tailgate, and set it up in the living-room. He also took all the records he wanted. Feeling the need of something more too, he helped himself to a fine accordion. With the aid of an instruction book, he managed to make some very soul-satisfying noises on it, although Princess objected at times with loud howls. He also supplied himself with drawing-materials, but never got round to using them.

His chief interest remained the careful observation of what was happening to the world after the removal of man’s controls. He drove around through all parts of the city, and into the near-by country. At other times, carrying his field-glasses, he took long walks through the hills, with Princess trailing now behind him and now dashing off in wild pursuit of that perpetual unseen rabbit.

Once he searched for the old man whom he had found storing up all those supplies of miscellaneous goods. After some trouble he located the house, and found the rat’s nest of materials which had been piled in it. But the old man was not in the house, and there was no evidence as to where he had gone or whether he was still alive.