It was while he was listening to a wire of Tyrsa’s (the last she ever made, in the curious tonalities of that newly-rediscovered Mozart opera) and visualizing her homely face made even less lovely by the effort of those effortless-sounding notes that he became conscious of the operative phrase. “If you loved me . . .”
“Have I ever said I did?” he snapped.
He saw a new and not readily understood expression mar the beauty of Lavra’s face. “No,” she said in sudden surprise. “No,” and her voice fell to flatness, “you haven’t . . .”
And as her sobs—the first he had ever heard from her—traveled away toward the hydroponic room, he felt a new and not readily understood emotion. He switched off the wire midway through the pyrotechnic rage of the eight teenth-century queen of darkness.
Vyrko found a curious refuge in the pulps. There was a perverse satisfaction in reading the thrilling exploits of other Last Men on Earth. He could feel through them the emotions that he should be feeling directly. And the other stories were fun too, in varying ways. For instance that astonishingly accurate account of the hairsbreadth maneuvering which averted what threatened to be the first and final Atomic War . . .
He noticed one oddity: Every absolutely correct story of the “future” bore the same by-line. Occasionally other writers made good guesses, predicted logical trends, foresaw inevitable extrapolations; but only Norbert Holt named names and dated dates with perfect historical accuracy.
It wasn’t possible. It was too precise to be plausible. It was far more spectacular than the erratic Nostradamus so often discussed in certain of the pulps.
But there it was. He had read the Holt stories solidly through in order a halfdozen times without finding a single flaw when he discovered the copy of Surprising Stories that had slipped behind a shelf and was therefore new to him. He looked at the contents page; yes, there was a Holt and—he felt a twinge of irrational but poignant sadness—one labeled as posthumous. He turned to the page indicated and read:
This story, we regret to tell you, is incomplete, and not only because of Norbert Holt’s tragic death last month. This is the last in chronological order of Holt’s stories of a consistently plotted future; but this fragment was written before his masterpiece, The Siege of Lunn. Holt himself used to tell me that he could never finish it, that he could not find an ending; and he died still not knowing how The Last Boredom came out. But here, even though in fragment form, is the last published work of the greatest writer of the future, Norbert Holt.
The note was signed with the initials M. S. Vyrko had long sensed a more than professional intimacy between Holt and his editor Manning Stern; this obituary introduction must have been a bitter task. But his eyes were hurrying on, almost fearfully, to the first words of The Last Boredom-.
There were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the yellow bands. The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed . . .
Vyrko blinked and started again. It still read the same. He took firm hold of the magazine, as though the miracle might slip between his fingers, and dashed off with more energy than he had felt in months.
He found Lavra in the hydroponic room. “I have just found,” he shouted, “the damnedest unbelievable—”
“Darling,” said Lavra, “I want some meat.”
“Don’t be silly. We haven’t any meat. Nobody’s eaten meat except at ritual dinners for generations.”
“Then I want a ritual dinner.”
“You can go on wanting. But look at this! Just read those first lines!”
“Vyrko,” she pleaded, “I want it. Really.”
“Don’t be an idiot!”
Her lips pouted and her eyes moistened. “Vyrko dear . . . What you said when you were listening to that funny music . . . Don’t you love me?”
“No,” he barked.
Her eyes overflowed. “You don’t love me? Not after . . . ?”
All Vyrko’s pent-up boredom and irritation erupted. “You’re beautiful, Lavra, or you were a few months ago, but you’re an idiot. I am not given to loving idiots.”
“But you—”
“I tried to assure the perpetuation of the race—questionable though the desirability of such a project seems at the moment. It was not an unpleasant task, but I’m damned if it gives you the right in perpetuity to pester me.”
She moaned a little as he slammed out of the room. He felt oddly better. Adrenalin is a fine thing for the system. He settled into a chair and resolutely read, his eyes bugging like a cover-monster’s with amazed disbelief. When he reached the verbatim account of the quarrel he had just enjoyed, he dropped the magazine.
It sounded so petty in print. Such stupid inane bickering in the face of— He left the magazine lying there and went back to the hydroponic room.
Lavra was crying—noiselessly this time, which somehow made it worse. One hand had automatically plucked a ripe grape, but she was not eating it. He went up behind her and slipped his hand under her long hair and began rubbing the nape of her neck. The soundless sobs diminished gradually. When his fingers probed tenderly behind her ears she turned to him with parted lips. The grape fell from her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he heard himself saying. “It’s me that’s the idiot. Which, I repeat, I am not given to loving. And you’re the mother of my son and I do love you . . .” And he realized that the statement was quite possibly, if absurdly, true.
“I don’t want anything now,” Lavra said when words were again in order. She stretched contentedly, and she was still beautiful even in the ungainly distortion which might preserve a race. “And what were you trying to tell me?”
He explained. “And this Holt is always right,” he ended. “And now he’s writing
