For it was quite literally true. There was nothing more to write.
The situation was not novel in literature. He had read many treatments, and even written a rather successful satire on the theme himself. But here was the truth itself.
He was that most imagination-stirring of all figures, The Last Man on Earth. And he was bored.
Kirth-Labbery, had he lived, would have devoted his energies in the laboratory to an effort, even conceivably a successful one, to destroy the invaders; Vyrko knew his own limitations too well to attempt that.
Vrist, his gay wild twin who had been in Lunn on yet another of his fantastic ventures when the agnoton struck—Vrist would have dreamed up some gallant feat of physical prowess to make the invaders pay dearly for his life; Vyrko found it difficult to cast himself in so swashbuckling a role.
He had never envied Vrist till now. Be jealous of the dead; only the living are alone. Vyrko smiled as he recalled the line from one of his early poems; it had been only the expression of a pose when he wrote it, a mood for a song that Tyrsa would sing well . . .
It was in this mood that he found (the ancient word had no modern counterpart) the pulps.
He knew their history: how some eccentric of two thousand years ago (the name was variously rendered as Trees or Tiller) had buried them in a hermetic capsule to check against the future; how Tarabal had dug them up some fifty years ago; how Kirth-Labbery had spent almost the entire Hard Prize for them because, as he used to assert, their incredible mixture of exact prophecy and arrant nonsense offered the perfect proof of the greatness and helplessness of human ingenuity.
But he had never read them before. They would at least be a novelty to assuage the ennui of his classically dramatic situation. And they helped. He passed a more than pleasant hour with Galaxy and Surprising and the rest, needing the dictionary but rarely. He was particularly impressed by one story detailing with the most precise minutiae the politics of the American Religious Wars—a subject on which he himself had based a not unsuccessful novel. By one Norbert Holt, he observed. Extraordinary how exact a forecast—and yet extraordinary too how many of the stories dealt with spaceand time-travel which the race had never yet attained and now never would . . .
And inevitably there was a story, a neat and witty one by an author named Knight, about The Last Man on Earth. He read it and smiled, first at the story and then at his own stupidity.
He found Lavra in the laboratory, of all unexpected places.
She was staring fixedly at one corner, where the light did not strike clearly.
“What’s so fascinating?” Vyrko asked.
Lavra turned suddenly. Her hair and her flesh rippled with the perfect grace of the movement. “I was thinking . . .”
Vyrko’s half-formed intent permitted no comment on that improbable statement.
“The day before Father . . . died, I was in here with him and I asked if there was any hope of our escaping ever. Only this time he answered me. He said yes there was a way out but he was afraid of it. It was an idea he’d worked on but never tried. And we’d be wiser not to try it, he said.”
“I don’t believe in arguing with your father—even post mortem.”
“But I can’t help wondering . . . And when he said it he looked over at that corner.”
Vyrko went to that corner and drew back a curtain. There was a chair of metal rods, and there was a crude panel, though it was hard to see what it was intended to control. He shrugged and restored the curtain.
For a moment he stood watching Lavra. She was a fool, and she was exceedingly lovely. And the child of Kirth-Labbery could hardly carry nothing but a fool’s genes.
Several generations could grow up in this retreat before the inevitable failure of the most permanent mechanical installations made it uninhabitable. By that time the earth would be free of agnoton and yellow bands, or they would be so firmly established that there was no hope. The third generation would go forth into the world, to perish or . . .
He walked over to Lavra and laid a gentle hand on her golden hair.
Vyrko never understood whether Lavra had been bored before that time. A life of undemanding inaction with plenty of food may well have sufficed her. Certainly she was not bored now.
At first she was merely passive; Vyrko had always suspected that she had meant the gambit to be declined. Then as her interest mounted and Vyrko began to compliment himself on his ability as an instructor, they became certain of their success; and from that point on she was rapt with the fascination of the changes in herself.
But even this new development did not totally alleviate Vyrko’s own ennui. If there were only something he could do, some positive, Vristian, Kirth-Labberian step that he could take! He damned himself for an incompetent esthetic fool who had taken so for granted the scientific wonders of his age that he had never learned what made them tick or how greater wonders might be attained.
He slept too much, he ate too much, for a brief period he drank too much—until he found boredom even less attractive with a hangover.
He tried to write, but the terrible uncertainty of any future audience disheartened him.
Sometimes a week would pass without his consciously thinking of agnoton or the yellow bands. Then he would spend a day flogging himself into a state of nervous tension worthy of his uniquely dramatic situation, and thereafter relapse.
Now even the consolation of Lavra’s beauty was vanishing, and she began demanding odd items of food which the hydroponic garden could not supply.
“If you loved me, you’d find a way to make cheese . . .” or “.
