bacteriological warfare. The last was apparently the popular idea. The disease was assumed to be airborne, possibly upon particles of dust. A curious feature was that the isolation of the individual seemed to be of no avail.
In an interview conducted by trans-Atlantic telephone, a crusty old British sage had commented, “Man has been growing more stupid for several thousand years; I myself shall waste no tears at his demise.” On the other hand an equally crusty American critic had got religion: “Only faith can save us now; I am praying hourly.”
A certain amount of looting, particularly of liquor stores was reported. On the whole, however, order had been well preserved, possibly through fear. Louisville and Spokane reported conflagrations, out of control because of decimated fire-departments.
Even in what they must have suspected to be their last issue, the gentlemen of the press, however, had not neglected to include a few of their beloved items of curiosity. In Omaha a religious fanatic had run naked through the streets, calling out the end of the world and the opening of the Seventh Seal. In Sacramento a crazed woman had opened the cages of a circus menagerie for fear that the animals might starve to death, and had been mauled by a lioness. Of more scientific interest, the Director of the San Diego zoo reported his apes and monkeys to be dying off rapidly, the other animals unaffected.
As he read, Ish felt himself growing weak with the cumulative piling up of horror and an overwhelming sense of solitude. Yet he still read on, fascinated.
Civilization, the human race—at least, it seemed to have gone down gallantly. Many people were reported as escaping from the cities, but those remaining had suffered, as far as he could make out from the newspaper a week old, no disgraceful panic. Civilization had retreated, but it had carried its wounded along, and had faced the foe. Doctors and nurses had stayed at their posts, and thousands more had enlisted as helpers. Whole areas of cities had been designated as hospital zones and points of concentration. All ordinary business had ceased, but food was still handled on an emergency basis. Even with a third of the population dead, telephone service along with water, light, and power still remained in most cities. In order to avoid intolerable conditions which might lead to a total breakdown of morale, the authorities were enforcing strict regulations for immediate mass burials.
He read the paper, and then read it through again more carefully. There was obviously nothing else he needed to do. When he had finished it a second time, he went out and sat in his car. There was no particular reason, he realized, why he should sit in his own car rather than in some other. There was no more question of property right, and yet he felt more comfortable being where he had been before. (The fat dog walked along the street again, but he did not call to the dog.) He sat there a long time, thinking; rather, he scarcely thought, but his mind seemed merely turning over without getting anywhere.
The sun was nearly down when he roused himself. He started the engine, and drove the car down the street, stopping now and then to blow a blast upon the horn. He turned off into a side street, and made the rounds of the town, blowing the horn methodically. The town was small, and in a quarter of an hour he was back where he had started. He had seen no one, and heard no answer. He had observed four dogs, several cats, a considerable number of scattered hens, one cow grazing in a vacant lot with a bit of broken rope dangling from her neck. Nosing along the doorway of a very decent-looking house, there had been a large rat.
He did not stop in the business district again, but drove on and came to what he now knew to be the best house in town. He got out of the car, carrying the hammer with him. This time he did not hesitate before the locked door; he struck it hard, three times, and it crashed inwards. As he had supposed, there was a large radio in the living-room.
He made a quick round of inspection, downstairs and up. “There’s nobody!” he decided. Then the grim suggestion of the word itself struck him:
Feeling the two meanings already coalescing in his mind, he returned to the living-room. He snapped the radio on, and saw that the electricity was still working. He let the tubes warm up, and then searched carefully. Only faint crackles of static impinged on his alerted ear-drums; there was no program. He shifted to the short-wave, but it too was silent. Methodically he searched both bands again. Of course, he thought, some stations might still be operating; they would probably not be on a twenty-four-hour schedule.
He left the radio tuned to a wave-length which was—or had been—that of a powerful station. If it came on at any time, he would hear it. He went and lay on the davenport.
In spite of the horror of the situation he felt a curious spectator’s sense about it all, as if he were watching the last act of a great drama. This, he realized, was characteristic of his personality. He was—had been—was (well, no matter)—a student, an incipient scholar, and such a one was necessarily oriented to observe, rather than to participate.
Thus observing, he even gained a momentary ironic satisfaction by contemplating the catastrophe as a demonstration of a dictum which he had heard an economics professor once propound—“The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way.” Mankind had been trembling about destruction through war, and had been having bad dreams of cities blown to pieces along with their inhabitants, of animals killed too, and of the very vegetation blighted off the face of the earth. But actually mankind seemed merely to have been removed rather neatly, with a minimum of disturbance. This, he thought vaguely, would offer interesting conditions of life to the survivors, if eventually there were any.
He lay comfortably on the davenport; the evening was warm. Physically he was exhausted from his illness, and he was equally spent emotionally. Soon he was sleeping.
He awoke in the full light. Flexing his hand, he found that the pain of the snake-bite had shrunk back to local soreness. His head felt clear too, and he realized that the other illness, if it had been another illness and not an effect of the snake-bite, had also grown better. Then suddenly he started, and was aware of something which he had not considered before. The obvious explanation was that he had actually had this new disease, and that it had combated with the snake-venom in his blood, the one neutralizing the other. That at least offered the simplest explanation of why he was still alive.
As he lay there quietly on the davenport, he was very calm. The isolated bits of the puzzle were now beginning to fit into their places. The men who fled in panic at seeing someone lying sick in the cabin—they had merely been some poor fugitives, afraid that the pestilence had already preceded them. The car that had gone up the road in the darkness had carried other fugitives, possibly even the Johnsons. The excited collie had been trying to tell him that strange things had happened at the power-house.
But as he lay there, he was not greatly perturbed even at the thought that he might be the only person left in the world. Possibly that was because he had not seen many people for some time, so that the shock of the new realization could not come to him as strongly as to one who had seen his fellow-creatures dying on all sides. At the same time he could not really believe, and he had no reason to believe, that he alone was left upon the earth. The last report in the paper indicated that the population had merely shrunk by perhaps a third. The evacuation of a small town like Hutsonville showed merely that the population had scattered or withdrawn to some other center. Before he shed any tears over the destruction of civilization and the death of man, he should discover whether civilization was destroyed and whether man was dead. Obviously the first call was for him to return to the house where his parents had lived—or, he hoped, might still be living. Having thus laid out for himself a definite plan for the day, he felt the quiet satisfaction which always came to him when confusion of mind yielded even to temporary certainty.
Getting up, he searched both radio bands again, and again without result.
He went into the kitchen; throwing open the door of the refrigerator, he found that it was still working. On the shelves was a fair assortment of food, though not as much as might have been expected. Apparently supplies
