Earth Abides

surfaces it could not work rapidly. Unused, the coils and the timers, the carburetors and the spark-plugs, all remained as good as ever.

In the batteries the slow processes of chemistry worked day and night, breaking down, neutralizing. A few months, and the unused batteries were dead. But as long as the battery and acid were kept separate, neither deteriorated, and it would always be a small matter to add the acid and start out again with a new battery; the batteries were not the weakest link.

More likely it was the tires. In the rubber the processes of decay worked slowly. The tires would last a year, five years. But nevertheless, the weakness worked in them. The air leaked from the tires, and after the car had stood on the flat tires for a while, they were no longer of any use. Even in the warehouses, decay worked in the rubber. The stored tires would have ten years, and still some life. Twenty years they would last, perhaps even more. Quite likely the roads, themselves, would be broken and men forget how to drive cars and lose the desire for driving them before the cars themselves were rendered undrivable.

Her head rested in the crook of his arm, and he looked down upon the black liquid eyes. They lay on the davenport in the living-room. Her face looked darker than ever now in the twilight.

There was one question, he knew, that they had not yet faced, and now she brought it forward.

“That would be fine!” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You mean you don’t like it about me?”

“Yes. It’s dangerous. There’d be no one else but me, and I wouldn’t be any use.”

“But you can read—all the books.”

“Books!” he laughed a little as he spoke. “The Practical Midwife? The Pathology of Parturition? I don’t think I’d like to face it, even if you would.”

“But, yet, you really could find some books and read them. That would be a lot of use. And I wouldn’t really need so much help.” She paused a moment: “I’ve been through it twice before, you know. It wasn’t bad.”

“Maybe not. But it might be different this time without hospitals and doctors and all that. And just why, why do you think so much about it?”

“Biology, don’t they call it, or something like that? I guess it’s natural.”

“Do you think life must go on, we have a duty to the future, all that?”

She paused a minute. He could tell that she was thinking, and thinking was not the best thing that she did; she reacted at deeper levels than those of mere thought.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know whether life needs to go on. Why should it? Just as likely I’m selfish. I want a baby for myself. I mean, oh, I don’t talk this sort of thing well. I’d like to be kissed, though.” He did it.

“I wish I could talk,” she said. “I wish I could tell what it is I think about it.”

Then she stretched her arm out, and took a match from the box on the table. She smoked, more than he did, and he expected her to take a cigarette also. But she did not. It was a big kitchen-match, the kind she liked. She turned it between thumb and finger, saying nothing. Then she scratched it against the box.

The matchhead spurted into a flare. Then the fierceness faded out, and the wood of the match-shank burned quietly in yellow flame. Suddenly she blew it out.

Vaguely he knew that she, who did not find words easily, had tried—perhaps half unconsciously—to act out something that she could not say. Slowly he thought that he understood. The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.

He thought then of his old fear during the first days and of the time when he had overthrown it, when he had unlashed the motorcycle from the tail-gate of the station-wagon in the desert and tossed it to one side. He remembered the wild feeling of exaltation which had come when he had offered defiance to death and all the powers of darkness. He felt her body stir gently in his arms. Yes, he thought humbly, that strong courage was his only at great moments—with her it was part of daily life.

“All right,” he said, “I suppose you’re right. I’ll read the books.”

“You know,” she said, “I might need a little more help than that!”

Her body was close and warm against him. Still he held back, feeling all the loneliness and the emptiness and the terror. Who was he to set mankind again on the long and uncertain road to the future? But it was only for a moment. Then her courage and the confidence of her courage flowed out from her to him. “Yes,” he thought, “she will be the mother of nations! Without courage there is nothing!”

And then suddenly he was conscious again of her body, and his strength came upon him.

To thee be the glory, because the love of life was brighter before thy face than the fear of death was dark. Thou art Demeter and Hertha and Isis; Cybele of the Lions, and the Mountain-Mother. From thy daughters shall spring tribes; and from thy grandsons, nations! Thy name is The Mother, and they shall call thee blessed.

There will be laughter and song again. Maidens will walk in the meadows; young men, leap by the brooks. Their children’s children shall be again as the pine trees of the mountainside. They shall call thee blessed, because in a dark time thy look was toward the light.

While they were still uncertain, Em looked out one morning and said, “See, some rats!”

He looked. Sure enough, two rats were nosing their way along the base of the hedge, foraging about or merely investigating. Em pointed out the rats to Princess through the window, and then opened the door. But being a dog who gave tongue to tell the hunter where the chase was leading, she leaped out baying, and the rats vanished before she was anywhere near them.

That afternoon they saw more rats at several times, one place and another, near the house, in the street, or running in the gardens.

Next morning the wave had engulfed them. Rats were everywhere. These were merely ordinary-looking rats, no larger or smaller than rats were expected to be, not particularly fat or particularly lean—just rats. Ish thought of the way the ants had been some time ago, and felt a cold shiver run through him.

The only thing to do was to make an investigation, and thus render the rats less horrible, because when you knew something about the situation, you saw the interest that lay in it.

In the station-wagon they drove about here and there, often crushing some rat which decided to dash across the street, just ahead of their tires. At first they shuddered a little at the soft squash, and looked at each other, but before long it had become so common that they thought nothing about it. The area which the rats were occupying was roughly the city, although they spread outward from the built-up area, covering somewhat larger an area than the ants had done.

What had happened, in general, was clear enough. Ish remembered some kind of statistics which declared that the number of rats in a city was generally about equal to the number of people.

“Well,” he explained to Em, “you start then with, say, a million rats, half of them being does or bitches or whatever you call lady rats. Some of the stores and warehouses are rat-proof, but still there has been for all this tune what you can call an unlimited supply of food.”

“Then how many rats should there be now?”

“I can’t do that problem in my head. I’ll try later.”

That evening at home he sat down to it as a mathematical problem. With the aid of his father’s encyclopedia he determined that rats had approximately one litter a month, with an average of about ten young. That is, one month of uninterrupted breeding might have produced about a population of ten million rats in this given area. These young females, in turn, would begin to breed before they reached the age of two months. There must be some casualties, of course, and he had no way of determining just how many of the rats would live to maturity. But, certainly the increase must be prodigious under the circumstances. His mathematics broke down.

But even if the rats should only be increasing at the rate of doubling their numbers every month, an estimate which seemed ridiculously conservative, there should by this time be already somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty