all the talk shows and newspapers were full of reports that the terrorists were planning to poison the nation's drinking water. The corporation hired some ten thousand good-looking men and women to dine in the restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, and a handful of other large cities and say to anyone they spotted ordering a glass of water, 'Wouldn't you feel safer drinking a Coke?' By the third week of the operation, domestic sales had increased by forty percent, and by the fifth week they had increased another twenty. The campaign was Joyce's idea, and its success had landed him the promotion that would eventually send him to Antarctica – and, Laura speculated, to the bottom of a crevasse somewhere. Puckett had been chosen because of his knowledge of the polar landscape (though in truth he was no more than a hobbyist) and Laura because, of the dozen or so environmental impact specialists in her department, she was the only one who had seniority enough to be eligible for the trip but too little seniority to decline. This was how such things were usually decided.
Four days after the electricity began to falter, it snapped off with a conspicuousness that she knew was final. A scent of cordite spread through the shelter – though it couldn't possibly have been cordite – and the Bertelsmann player stopped dead in the middle of an Etta James song. If she had understood anything at all about how the generator worked, she might have been able to repair it, but she knew next to nothing about electro-mechanics, only the few scraps of theory she remembered from her freshman year of college. She turned on the flashlight she had placed in the pocket of the tent. The air around her still had the same slightly pink quality to it, but now that the light was reflected back in on itself, rather than filtered through from outside, it was twice as sharp as it had been before. Everything inside the tent seemed to shine with a finely edged clarity. There was a box of granola bars in the recess by the tent's entrance. She unwrapped and ate one. She was astonished by the distinctness of the individual grains, which were cemented together with such cohesion that they resembled tiny puzzle pieces. This was the kind of food she would be eating from now on, she knew: hunks of pemmican, dehydrated biscuits, beef jerky, and granola bars – food that was meant to last through an apocalypse. She could always hook up the Primus stove or try to construct a fire, of course, but even then she expected the provisions to run out in less than a month. The expedition was supposed to have ended weeks ago, and their reserve of supplies had always been meager.
So this was her situation: no heat, no electricity, and soon there would be no food.
She knew what she had to do – knew, in fact, so immediately that she realized she must have been pondering the question for weeks.
Her only chance was to outfit the second sledge, abandon the shelter, and set off after Puckett and Joyce. If she made it to the western rim of the Ross Sea, she would find food, shelter, and companionship; if not, she would be no worse off than she already was. She didn't want to leave. The thought of venturing out across the ice, into all that cold and emptiness, terrified her. But there was no other choice.
She spent the next half-day gathering the supplies she needed: boxes of condensed and dehydrated food, a jar of multivitamins, a few cans of coffee, a dozen rolls of toilet paper, one change of clothing, her tent and sleeping bag and thermal lining, her first-aid kit, a bottle of sunblock, a coil of Alpine rope, several waterproof boxes of matches, the Primus stove and a few cans of heating oil, a bundle of candles, the spare tent, a small magnetic compass (the sledge was equipped with a GPS monitor, but she didn't want to take any chances), her flashlight and a box of extra batteries, the tool box, a cooking pot, a second cooking pot for melting ice into water, a few pieces of plywood, an ice ax, a pick, a sledging shovel, her pocket knife, and, finally, a harness and a pair of skis and ski poles, in case the sledge broke down and she had to haul the supplies across the ice herself. She used up more than an hour looking for an extra fuel cell for the sledge, but she wasn't able to find one. Which meant that either the corporation hadn't thought to provide them with one or that Puckett and Joyce had taken it with them. In either case, she would have to make do without it.
She was concentrating so hard on culling and sorting the equipment that she didn't even notice that the wind had stopped blowing until she swung the door of the hut open to a paling sky and a motionless field of snow. She stepped outside, tucking her hands in her armpits. The air was absolutely still. No matter where she looked she couldn't see a single cloud, though from somewhere a sparse, floury snow was falling.
It was one of the sunset days – that was how she had come to think of them – when the sky fills for hours at a time with trailers of pink and gold. A bare freckling of stars was just beginning to show through the atmosphere, and she began to count them. The longer she stared, though, the more she was able to see, and soon she gave up.
She squatted down to examine the condition of the ice. Thousands of parallel ridges – sastrugi, they were called – stretched from the door of the hut all the way to the horizon, combed into the snow by the southern wind. But the ice was not too soft, nor was it too hard and dry, and she thought that it would make for good traveling.
She began to chip away at the mass of ice covering the sledge, setting the sharp end of the pick against it and hammering down with her palm. It was like breaking the stone from around a sculpture, and as the shards rained down around her feet by the thousands, she contemplated the distance that lay ahead of her, and the industry, and the luck, it would take to cross it.
THREE. THE ENCOUNTER
It was hot in the office, a terrible, parching heat that lifted the smell of ink from the mimeograph machine and filled the air with it. For a long time Luka sat at his desk fanning the fumes away from his face. Then he opened the window and pulled the vines out of the way, waiting for the breeze to come blowing through. The quiet outside was nearly transcendent. There were no cars idling at the stoplight, no children running past with balloons. There was nobody down there at all. The air tasted like granite and river grass. He took a few deep breaths and returned to his stencil.
He was working on the latest edition of the Sims Sheet. The headline read ALONE IN THE CITY, and the subheading, in a slightly smaller type, EDITOR WONDERS, IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE? That was as far as he had gotten.
He had spent the better part of the morning stationed outside the River Road Coffee Shop with a full stack of the early edition in his hands. From seven to eleven-thirty he had stood there, completely alone, reading the headline to himself: THE GREAT LEAVE-TAKING CONTINUES. Four and a half hours of waiting by the plate-glass window where dozens of bodies used to sit shifting about on rickety wooden stools, inching their coffees to the left as the sun came slowly into view. Four and a half hours of counting the birds on the ledges and the bits of trash blowing by on the street. Four and a half hours, and he saw not a single human soul, not even the people he considered his regulars, like the woman who wore the white beret, or the thin man in the wrinkled business suit, or the dessert chef who always poked his head outside just as Luka was packing up to leave.
In all his years in the city, this was the first time such a thing had happened. Who or what had taken everybody he didn't know. But that wasn't the question that was bothering him. The question that was bothering him was, Why hadn't it taken him as well? He allowed himself a few extra minutes to wait out any stragglers before he finally gave up and walked home. On his way, he dumped the entire run of newspapers in a garbage basket, then thought better of it and fished them back out, then thought better of it again and threw them away, but he kept a single copy, a memento, which he pinned to the wall behind his desk. It would serve as a memorial for something – the day his hope died out, maybe.
Why was he still working on the newspaper at all? He wasn't sure. Habit, he supposed – something to keep his hands busy, something to keep his mind occupied. He could already sense where the whole thing was heading, though: down, down, down, into the deepest, most embarrassing form of solipsism.
He wasn't looking forward to it. He had always been the paper's only writer, and now he was its only reader, too. Soon, if he wasn't careful, he would be issuing reports on his own bowel movements.
The L. Sims News & Speculation Sheet: All the Sims That's Fit to Print.
Or, better yet: All the Sims That's Sims to Sims.
A tiny licking breeze came into the office and stirred the air. He heard the vines that had fallen back over the window rustling against the brick. He bent over his desk to tinker with his lead: 'At approximately 11:30 this morning, the editor of this newspaper concluded that he was the last human being in the city. And perhaps, aside from the birds, the last creature of any kind.' Or should he use a comma before the 'and'? Or a dash? Or a
