Chapter 1
... and the government of the United States of America is herewith suspended, except in the District of Columbia, as of the emergency. Federal officers, including those of the Armed Forces, will put themselves under the orders of the governors of the various states or of any other functioning local authority. By order of the Acting President. God save the people of the United States....
Here is an announcement which has just come in from the Bay Area Emergency Council. The West Oakland Hospitalization Center has been abandoned. Its functions, including burials at sea, are now concentrated at the Berkeley Center. That is all....
Keep tuned to this Station, which is the only one now in operation in northern California. We shall inform you of developments, as long as it is possible.
Just as he pulled himself up to the rock-ledge, he heard a sudden rattle, and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand; turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing. It was not a large one, he noted, even at the moment when he raised his hand to his lips and sucked hard at the base of the index-finger, where a little drop of blood was oozing out.
"Don't waste time by killing the snake!" he remembered.
He slid down from the ledge, still sucking. At the bottom he saw the hammer lying where he had left it. For a moment he thought he would go on and leave it there. That seemed like panic; so he stooped and picked it up with his left hand, and went on down the rough trail.
He did not hurry. He knew better than that. Hurry only speeded up a man's heart, and made the venom circulate faster. Yet his heart was pounding so rapidly from excitement or fear that hurrying or not hurrying, it seemed, should make no difference. After he had come to some trees, he took his handkerchief and bound it around his right wrist. With the aid of a twig he twisted the handkerchief into a crude tourniquet.
Walking on, he felt himself recovering from his panic. His heart was slowing down. As he considered the situation, he was not greatly afraid. He was a young man, vigorous and healthy. Such a bite would hardly be fatal, even though he was by himself and without good means of treatment.
Now he saw the cabin ahead of him. His hand felt stiff. Just before he got to the cabin, he stopped and loosened the tourniquet, as he had read should be done, and let the blood circulate in the hand. Then he tightened it again.
He pushed open the door, dropping the hammer on the floor as he did so. It fell, handle up, on its heavy head, rocked back and forth for a moment, and then stood still, handle in the air.
He looked into the drawer of the table, and found his snake-bite outfit, which he should have been carrying with him on this day of a days. Quickly he followed the directions, slicing with the razor-blade a neat little criss-cross over the mark of the fangs, applying the rubber suction-pump. Then he lay on his bunk watching the rubber bulb slowly expand, as it sucked the blood out.
He felt no premonitions of death. Rather, the whole matter still seemed to him just a nuisance. People had kept telling him that he should not go into the mountains by himself—"Without even a dog!" they used to add. He had always laughed at them. A dog was constant trouble, getting mixed up with porcupines or skunks, and he was not fond of dogs anyway. Now all those people would say, "Well, we warned you!"
Tossing about half-feverishly, he now seemed to himself to be composing a defense. "Perhaps," he would say, "the very danger in it appealed to me!" (That had a touch of the heroic in it.) More truthfully he might say, "I like to be alone at times, really need to escape from all the problems of dealing with people." His best defense, however, would merely be that, at least during the last year, he had gone into the mountains alone as a matter of business. As a graduate student, he was working on a thesis: The Ecology of the Black Creek Area. He had to investigate the relationships, past and present, of men and plants and animals in this region. Obviously he could not wait until just the right companion came along. In any case, he could never see that there was any great danger. Although nobody lived within five miles of his cabin, during the summer hardly a day passed without some fisherman coming by, driving his car up the rocky road or merely following the stream.
Yet, come to think of it, when had he last seen a fisherman? Not in the past week certainly. He could not actually remember whether he had seen one in the two weeks that he had been living by himself in the cabin. There was that car he had heard go by after dark one night. He thought it strange that any car would be going up that road in the darkness, and could hardly see the necessity, for ordinarily people camped down below for the night and went up in the morning. But perhaps, he thought, they wanted to get up to their favorite stream, to go out for some early fishing.
No, actually, he had not exchanged a word with anyone in the last two weeks, and he could not even remember that he had seen anyone.
A throb of pain brought him back to what was happening at the moment. The hand was beginning to swell. He loosened the tourniquet to let the blood circulate again.
Yes, as, he returned to his thoughts, he realized that he was out of touch with things entirely. He had no radio. Therefore, as far as he was concerned, there might have been a crash of the stockmarket or another Pearl Harbor; something like that would account for so few fishermen going by. At any rate, there was very little chance apparently that anyone would come to help him. He would have to work his own way out.
Yet even that prospect did not alarm him. At worst, he considered, he would lie up in his cabin, with plenty of food and water for two or three days, until the swelling in his hand subsided and he could drive his car down to Johnson's, the first ranch.
The afternoon wore on. He did not feel like eating anything when it came toward supper-time, but he made himself a pot of coffee on the gasoline stove, and drank several cups. He was in much pain, but in spite of the pain and in spite of the coffee he became sleepy...
He woke suddenly in half-light, and realized that someone had pushed open the cabin door. He felt a sudden relief to know that he had help. Two men in city clothes were standing there, very decent-looking men, although staring around strangely, as if in fright. "I'm sick!" he said from his bunk, and suddenly he saw the fright on their faces change to sheer panic. They turned suddenly without even shutting the door, and ran. A moment later came the sound of a starting motor. It faded out as the car went up the road.
Appalled now for the first time, he raised himself from the bank, and looked through the window. The car had already vanished around the curve. He could not understand. Why had they suddenly disappeared in panic, without even offering to help?
He got up. The light was in the east; so he had slept until dawn the next morning. His right hand was swollen and acutely painful. Otherwise he did not feel very ill. He warmed up the pot of coffee, made himself some oatmeal, and lay down in his bunk again, in the hope that after a while he would feel well enough to risk driving down to Johnson's—that is, of course, if no one came along in the meantime who would stop and help him and not like those others, who must be crazy, run away at the sight of a sick man.
Soon, however, he felt much worse, and realized that he must be suffering some kind of relapse. By the middle of the afternoon he was really frightened. Lying in his bunk, he composed a note, thinking that he should leave a record of what had happened. It, would not be very long of course before someone would find him; his parents would certainly telephone Johnson's in a few days now, if they did not hear anything. Scrawling with his left hand, he managed to get the words onto paper. He signed merely Ish. It was too much work to write out his full name of Isherwood Williams, and everybody knew him by his nickname.
At noon, feeling himself like the ship-wrecked mariner who from his raft sees the steamer cross along the horizon, he heard the sound of cars, two of them, coming up the steep road. They approached, and then went on, without stopping. He called to them, but by now he was weak, and his voice, he was sure, did not carry the hundred yards to the turn-off where the cars were passing.
Even so, before dusk he struggled to his feet, and lighted the kerosene lamp. He did not want to be left in the dark.
Apprehensively, he bent his lanky body down to peer into the little mirror, set too low for him because of the sloping roof of the cabin. His long face was thin always, and scarcely seemed thinner now, but a reddish flush showed through the sun-tan of his cheeks. His big blue eyes were blood-shot, and stared back at him wildly with the glare of fever. His light brown hair, unruly always, now stuck out in all directions, completing the mirror-portrait of a very sick young man.
He got back into his bunk, feeling no great sense of fear although now he more than half expected that he was dying. Soon a violent chill struck him; from that he passed into a fever. The lamp burned steadily on the table, and he could see around the cabin. The hammer which he had dropped on the floor still stood there, handle pointed stiffly upwards, precariously balanced. Being right before his eyes, the hammer occupied an unduly large part of his consciousness—he thought about it a little disorderedly, as if he were making his will, an old-fashioned will in which he described the chattels he was leaving. "One hammer, called a single-jack, weight of head four pounds, handle one foot long, slightly cracked, injured by exposure to weather, head of hammer somewhat rusted, still serviceable." He had been extraordinarily pleased when he had found the hammer, appreciating that actual link with the past. It had been used by some miner in the old days when rock-drills were driven home in a low tunnel with a man swinging a hammer in one hand; four pounds was about the weight a man could handle in that way, and it was called a single-jack because it was managed one-handedly. He thought, feverishly, that he might even include a picture of the hammer as an illustration in his thesis.
Most of those hours of darkness he passed in little better than a nightmare, racked by coughing, choking frequently, shaking with the chill and then burning with the fever. A pink measles-like rash broke out on him.
At daybreak he felt himself again sinking into a deep sleep.
"It has never happened!" cannot be construed to mean, "It can never happen!"—as well say, "Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable," or "Because I've never died, I am immortal." One thinks first of some great plague of insects—locusts or grasshoppers—when the species suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals also fluctuate. The lemmings work upon their cycle. The snowshoe-rabbits build up through a period of years until they reach a climax when they seem to be everywhere; then with dramatic suddenness their pestilence falls upon them. Some zoologists have even suggested a biological law: that the number of individuals in a species never remains constant, but always rises and falls—the higher the animal and the slower its breeding-rate, the longer its period of fluctuation.
During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies, and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved to be increasing steadily. Then toward the century's end it reached its climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterwards the buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In the last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers.
As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.
When he awoke in the middle of the morning, he felt a sudden sense of pleasure. He had feared he would be sicker than ever, but he felt much better. He was not choking any more, and also his hand felt cooler. The swelling had gone down. On the preceding day he had felt so bad, from whatever other trouble had struck him, that he had had no time to think about the hand. Now both the hand and the illness seemed better, as if the one had stopped the other and they had both receded. By noon he was feeling clear-headed and not even particularly weak.
He ate some lunch, and decided that he could make it down to Johnson's. He did not bother to pack up everything. He took his precious notebooks and his camera. At the last moment also, as if by some kind of compulsion, he picked up the hammer, carried it to the car, and threw it in on the floor by his feet. He drove off slowly, using his right hand as little as possible.
At Johnson's everything was quiet. He let the car roll to a stop at the gasoline-pump. Nobody came out to fill his tank, but that was not peculiar, because the Johnson pump, like so many in the mountains, was tended on a haphazard basis. He blew the horn, and waited again. After another minute he got out, and went up the rickety steps which led to the room serving as an informal store where campers could pick up cigarettes and canned goods. He went in, but there was nobody there.
He had a certain sense of surprise. As often, when he had been by himself for a while, he was not exactly sure what day it might be. Wednesday, he thought. But it might be Tuesday or Thursday. Yet he was certain that it was somewhere in the middle of the week, not a Sunday. On a Sunday, or even for a whole weekend, the Johnsons might possibly shut up the store and go somewhere on a trip of their own. They were easygoing and did not believe too strongly in letting business interfere with pleasure. Yet they were really dependent to a large extent upon the sales which the store made during the fishing season; they could hardly afford to go away very long. And if they had gone on a vacation, they would have locked the door. Still you never could tell about these mountain people. The incident might even be worth a paragraph in his thesis. In any case, his tank was nearly empty. The pump was unlocked, and so he helped himself to ten gallons of gas and with difficulty scrawled a check which he left on the counter along with a note: "Found you all away. Took 10 gal. Ish."
As he drove down the road, he had suddenly a slight sense of uneasiness—the Johnsons gone on a weekday, the door unlocked, no fishermen, a car going by in the night, and (most of all) those men who had run away when they had seen another man lying sick in his bunk in a lonely mountain cabin. Yet the day was bright, and his hand was not paining him much; moreover, he seemed to be cured of that other strange infection, if it was something else and not the snake-bite. He felt almost back to normal again. Now the road wound down restfully between open groves of pine trees along a little rushing stream. By the time he came to Black Creek Power-house, he felt normal in his mind again also.
At the power-house everything looked as usual. He heard the whir of the big generators, and saw the streams of foaming water still bursting out from beneath. A light was burning on the bridge. He thought to himself, "I suppose nobody bothers ever to turn that out. They have so much electricity that they don't need to economize."
He considered going across the bridge to the power-house, just to see somebody and allay the strange fears which he had begun to feel. But the sight and sound of everything running normally were reassuring, signs that after all the power-house was working as usual, even though he saw no people. There was nothing remarkable about not seeing people. The process was so nearly automatic that only a few men were employed there, and they kept indoors mostly.
Just as he was leaving the power-house behind, a large collie ran out from behind one of the buildings. From the other side of the creek, it barked loudly and violently at Ish. It ran back and forth excitedly.
"Fool dog!" he thought. "What's it so excited about? Is it trying to tell me not to steal the power-house?" People certainly tended to overestimate the intelligence of dogs!
Rounding the curve, he left the sound of barking behind. But the sight of the dog had been another evidence of normality. Ish began to whistle contentedly. It was ten miles now until he came to the first town, a little place called Hutsonville.
Consider the case of Captain Maclear's rat. This interesting rodent inhabited Christmas Island, a small bit of tropical verdure some two hundred miles south of Java. The species was first described for science in 1887, the skull being noted as large and strongly built, with beaded supra-orbital edges and the anterior edge of the zygomatic plate projecting forward conspicuously.
A naturalist observed the rats as populating the island "in swarms, " feeding upon fruit and young shoots. To the rats the island was as a whole world, an earthly paradise. The observer noted: "They seem to breed all the year round." Yet such was the luxuriance of the tropical growth that the rats had not attained such numbers as to provide competition among members of the species. The individual rats were extremely well nourished, and even unduly fat.
In 1903 some new disease sprang up. Because of their crowding and also probably because of the softened condition of the individuals, the rats proved universally susceptible, and soon were dying by thousands. In spite of great numbers, in spite of an abundant supply of food, in spite of a very rapid breeding rate, the species is extinct.
He came over the rise, and saw Hutsonville a mile away. Just as he started to slide down the grade, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something which turned him inwardly cold. Automatically he tramped hard on the brake. He walked back, scarcely believing that he had really seen it. Just there at the side of the road, in full view, lay the body of a fully clothed man; ants were crawling over the face. The body must have lain there a day or two at least. Why had it not been seen? He did not look closely or long, obviously the thing to do was to get into Hutsonville, and tell the Coroner as soon as possible. He hurried back to the car.
Yet as he started again, he had a deep feeling inside him somewhere, strangely, that this was not a case for the Coroner, and that possibly there would even be no Coroner. He had seen no one at the Johnson's or at the power-house, and he had not met a single car on the road. The only things that seemed real from all the old life had been the light burning at the power-house and the quiet hum of the great generators at their work.
Then, as he came to the first houses, he suddenly breathed more easily, for there on a vacant lot a hen was quietly scratching in the dust, a half-dozen chicks beside her, and a little farther on, a black-and-white cat wandered across the sidewalk as unconcernedly as it would have done upon any other June day.
The heat of the afternoon lay heavy on the street, and he saw no one. "Bad as a Mexican town," he thought, "everyone taking a siesta." Then suddenly he realized that he had said it as a man whistles to keep up his courage. He came to the business center, stopped the car by the curb, and got out. There was nobody.
He tried the door of a little restaurant. It was open. He went in.
"Hi!" he yelled.
Nobody came. Not even an echo spoke back to reassure him.
The door of the bank was locked, although the hour was well before closing time, and he was sure (the more he thought of it) that the day must be Tuesday or Wednesday or possibly Thursday. "What am I anyway?" he thought. "Rip van Winkle?" Even so, Rip van Winkle, though he had slept twenty years, had come back to a village that was still full of people.
The door of the hardware store beyond the bank was open.
He went in, and again he called, and again there was not even an echo coming back for answer. He looked in at the bakery; this time there was only a tiny noise such as a scuttling mouse could make.
Had the people all gone to a baseball game? Even so, they would have closed the stores. He went back to his car, got into the seat, and looked around. Was he himself delirious, still lying on his bunk, really? He was half inclined merely to drive on; panic was rising up inside him. Now he noticed that several cars were parked along the street, just as they might be on any not too busy afternoon. He could not merely drive on, he decided, because he must report the dead man. So he pushed upon the horn-rig, and the great blatant squawk resounded obscenely along the deserted street through the quiet of the afternoon. He blew twice, waited, and blew twice again. Again and again, in rising panic, he pressed down. As he pressed, he looked around, hoping to see somebody come popping out from a door or at least a head at a window. He paused, and again there was only silence, except that somewhere far off he heard the strident cackling of a hen. "Must have scared an egg out of her!" he thought.
A fat dog came waddling around the corner and down the sidewalk, the kind of dog you see along Main Street in any small town. Ish got out of the car, and confronted the dog. "You haven't been missing any meals, anyway," he said. (Then he had a sudden feeling of tightness in the throat when he thought of things the dog might be eating.) The dog was not friendly; it skirted him, keeping distance; then it went on down the street. He made no effort to call it closer or to follow it; after all, the dog could not tell him.
"I could play detective by going into some of these stores and looking around," he thought. Then he had a better idea.
Across the street was a little pool-room where he had often stopped to buy a newspaper. He went over to it. The door was locked. He looked through the window, and saw newspapers in the rack. He stared hard against the reflection of the light in the window, and suddenly he saw that there were headlines as large as for Pearl Harbor. He read:
CRISIS ACUTE
What crisis? With sudden determination he strode back to the car, and picked up the hammer. A moment later he stood with the heavy head poised in front of the door.
Then suddenly all the restraints of habit stopped him. Civilization moved in, and held his arm, almost physically. You couldn't do this! You didn't break into a store this way—you, a law-abiding citizen! He glanced up and down the street, as if a policeman or a posse might be bearing down upon him.
But the empty street brought him back again, and panic overbore the restraints. "Hell," he thought, I can pay for the door if I have to!"
With a wild feeling of burning his bridges, of leaving civilization behind, he swung the heavy hammer-head with all his force against the door-lock. The wood splintered, the door flew open, he stepped in.
His first shock came when he picked up the newspaper. The Chronicle, the one he remembered, was thick—twenty or thirty pages at least. The newspaper he picked up was like a little country weekly, a single folded sheet. It was dated Wednesday of the preceding week.
The headlines told him what was most essential. The United States from coast to coast was overwhelmed by the attack of some new and unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity of spread, and fatality. Estimates for various cities, admittedly little more than guesses, indicated that between 25 percent and 35 percent of the population had already died. No reports, he read, were available for Boston, Atlanta, and New Orleans, indicating that the news-services in those cities had already broken down. Rapidly scanning the rest of the paper, he gained a variety of impressions—a hodge-podge which he could scarcely put together in any logical order. In its symptoms the disease was like a kind of super-measles. No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine.
In an interview a notable bacteriologist indicated that the emergence of some new disease had always been a possibility which had worried the more far-thinking epidemiologists. He mentioned in the past such curious though minor outbreaks as the English sweat and Q-fever. As for its origin, he offered three possibilities. It might have emerged from some animal reservoir of disease; it might be caused by some new microorganism, most likely a virus, produced by mutation; it might be an escape, possibly even a vindictive release, from some laboratory of 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: Nobody—no body!
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.
High overhead, moon and planets and stars swung in their long smooth curves. They had no eyes, and they saw not; yet from the time when man's fancy first formed within him, he has imagined that they looked down upon the earth.
And if so we may still imagine, and if they looked down upon the earth that night, what did they see?
Then we must say that they saw no change. Though smoke from stacks and chimneys and campfires no longer rose to dim the atmosphere, yet still smoke rose from volcanos and from forest-fires. Seen even from the moon, the planet that night must have shown only with its accustomed splendor—no brighter, no dimmer.
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 combatted 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 had failed a little before the house had been abandoned, and the larder was comparatively scant. Nevertheless there were half a dozen eggs, most of a pound of butter, and some bacon, along with several heads of lettuce, a little celery, and a few odds and ends. Looking into a cupboard, he found a can of grapefruit-juice; in a bread-drawer there was a loaf of bread, dry but not impossible. He estimated that it might have been there for five days, and so he had a better idea than before of the time at which the town might have been abandon With such materials at hand he was enough of a camper to have built a fire outdoors and contrived an excellent meal, but he snapped the switches of the electric stove and felt the heat begin to radiate. He cooked himself a hearty breakfast, managing even to make the bread into acceptable toast. As always when he came out of the mountains, he was hungry for fresh green stuff, and so to his conventional breakfast of bacon, eggs and coffee, he added a generous head-lettuce salad.
Returning to the davenport, he helped himself from a red lacquer box on the near-by table, and smoked an after-breakfast cigarette. As yet, he reflected, the maintenance of life offered no problem.
The cigarette was not even yet badly dried out. With a good breakfast and a good cigarette, he did not feel himself worrying. Actually he had put worry in abeyance, and had decided that he would not indulge in it until he had really found out just how much need there was.
When he had finished the cigarette, he reflected that there was really no need even to wash the dishes, but since he was naturally careful, he went to the kitchen and made sure that he had left the refrigerator closed and had turned off the burners on the stove. Then he picked up the hammer, which had already proved so useful, and went out by the shattered front door. He got into his car, and started for home.
A half mile beyond the town, he caught sight of the cemetery. He realized that he had not thought of it on the preceding day. Without getting out of the car, he noticed a long row of new individual graves, and also a bull-dozer near a large heap of earth. Probably, he decided, there had not really been many people left to abandon Hutsonville at the end.
Beyond the cemetery the road sloped down through flattening terrain. At all the emptiness, depression settled down on him again; he longed even for a single clattering truck suddenly to come across the rise ahead, but there was no truck.
Some steers stood in a field and some horses with them. They switched their tails at the flies, as they might on any hot summer morning. Above them the spokes of the windmill revolved slowly in the breeze, and below the watering-trough there was a little patch of green and trampled muddy ground, as there always was—and that was all.
Yet this road below Hutsonville never carried much traffic, and on any morning he might have driven several miles without seeing anyone. It was different when he came to the highway. The lights were still burning at the junction, and automatically he pulled to a stop because they were red.
But where trucks and buses and cars should have been streaming by, crowding the four lanes, there was only emptiness. After he had paused just a moment at the red lights, he drove on through them, even though feeling a slight sense of wrongdoing as he did so.
Beyond that, on the highway with all the four lanes to himself, everything was more ghost-like than before. He seemed to drive half in a daze, and only now and then some special scene brought him out, and fixed itself in his consciousness....
Something was loping along the inner lane ahead of him. He drew up on it fast from behind. A dog? No, he saw the sharp ears and the light lean legs, gray shading into yellow. That was no farm dog. It was a coyote, calmly loping along the highway in broad daylight. Strange how soon it had known that the world had changed, and that it could take new freedoms! He drew up close and honked his horn, and the beast quickened its pace a little and swung over into the other lane and off across the fields, seemingly not much alarmed....
The two cars lay sprawled at crazy angles blocking both lanes. It had been a bad accident. He pulled out onto the shoulder and stopped. A man's body lay crushed beneath one car. He got out to look. There was no other body although the pavement was spotted with blood. Even if he had seen any particular reason to try, he could not have raised the car from the man's body to give it burial. He drove on....
His mind did not even bother to register the name of the town where he stopped for gasoline, though it was a large one. The electricity was still working; he took down the nozzle from the gas-pump at a large station and filled the tank. Since his car had been so long in the mountains, he checked the radiator and battery, and put in a quart of oil. He saw that one tire needed more air and as he pressed the air-hose against the valve, he heard the motor suddenly start to build up the pressure again in the tank. Yes, man had gone, but so recently that all his well-contrived automatic processes were still carrying on without his care....
At the main street of some other town he stopped, and blew a long blast on the horn. He had no real expectation that he would have any reply, but there was something about the look of this street which seemed more normal than those of other towns. Many cars were parked at the meters where each one showed the red flag of a violation. It might have been some Sunday morning with many cars parked overnight and the stores not yet open or people beginning to circulate. But it was not early morning, for now the sun was almost overhead. Then he saw what had made him pause, and what gave the place an illusion of animation. In front of a restaurant called The Derby a neon sign was still in full activity—a little horse galloping hard, its legs still going as actively as ever. In the full sunlight the faint pink glow was scarcely visible except for its motion. He looked, and as he looked, he caught the rhythm—one, two, three. (And at three the feet of the little horse were close tucked up under its body as if it were clear in the air.) Four—they came back to the half position, and the legs stretched out as if the body were low along the ground. One, two, three, four, it went. One, two, three, four. It galloped in a frenzy of activity still, and yet in all its galloping it arrived nowhere, and now even for most of its time it galloped with no eye to observe. As he looked, it seemed to him a gallant little horse, though a futile and a foolish one. The horse, suddenly he thought, was like that civilization of which man had been so proud, galloping so hard and yet never arriving anywhere; and sometime destined, when once the power failed, to grow still forever...
He saw smoke rising against the sky. His heart leaped up, and he turned quickly off on a side road, and drove toward the smoke. But even before he reached it, he knew that he would find no one there, and his spirit fell again. He drove up to the smoke, and saw then that it was a small farmhouse quietly beginning to burn up. There were many reasons, he decided, why a fire might start thus without people. A pile of greasy rags might ignite spontaneously, or some electric apparatus might have been left on, or a motor in a refrigerator might jam and begin to burn. The little house was obviously doomed. There was nothing he could do, and no special reason why he should do it if he could. He turned around, and headed back to the highway ...
He did not drive fast, and he stopped often to investigate, rather half-heartedly. Here and there he saw bodies, but in general he found only emptiness. Apparently the onset of the disease had been slow enough so that people were not usually struck down in the streets. Once he passed through a town where the smell of corpses was thick in the air. He remembered what he had read in the newspaper; apparently there had been concentrations at the last upon certain areas, and in these the corpses were now to be found most thickly. There was all too much evidence of death in that town and none of life. He saw no reason to stop to investigate. Surely no one would linger there longer than necessary.
In the late afternoon he came across the crest of the hills, and saw the Bay lie bright beneath the westering sun. Smokes rose here and there from the vast expanse of city, but they did not look like smokes rising from chimneys. He drove on toward the house where he had lived with his parents. He had no hope. Miracle enough it was that he himself had survived—miracle upon miracle if the plague had also spared the others of his own family!
From the boulevard he turned into San Lupo Drive. Every thing looked much the same, although the sidewalks were not as well swept as the standard of San Lupo Drive required. It had always been a street, of eminent respectability, and even yet, he reflected, it preserved decorum. No corpse lay on the street; that would b e unthinkable in San Lupo Drive. He saw the Hatfields' old gray cat sleeping on their porch-step in the sun, as he had seen her a hundred times before. Aroused by the sound of the car as he drove by, she rose up and stretched luxuriously.
He let the car roll to a stop in front of the house where he had lived so long. He blew two blasts on the horn, and waited. Nothing! He got out of the car, and walked up the steps into the house. Only after he had entered did he think it a little strange that the door was not even locked.
Inside, things were in good-enough order. He glanced about, apprehensively, but there was nothing at which a man would hesitate to look. He searched around the living-room for some note left behind to tell him where they had gone. There was no note.
Upstairs also everything looked much as usual, but in his parents' bedroom both the beds were unmade. Perhaps it was that which made him begin to feel giddy and sick. He walked out of the room, feeling himself unsteady.
Holding by the rail, he made it downstairs again. "The kitchen!" he thought, and his mind cleared a trifle at the thought of something definite to do.
As he opened the swinging door, the fact of motion within the room struck his senses. Then he saw that it was only the second hand of the electric clock above the sink, steadily moving on past the vertical, beginning its long swoop toward six again. At that moment also he started wildly at a sudden noise, only to realize that the motor of the electric refrigerator, as if disturbed by his coming, had begun to whir. In quick reaction he was deathly ill, and found himself vomiting into the sink.
Recovered, he went out again, and sat in the car. He was no longer ill, but he felt weak and utterly despondent. If he made a detective-like investigation, searching in cupboards and drawers, he could probably discover something. But of what use thus to torture himself?. The main part of the story was clear. There were no bodies in the house; of that at least he could be thankful. Neither, he believed, would there be any ghosts-although the faithful clock and refrigerator were rather too ghost-like.
Should he go back into the house, or go somewhere else? At first he thought that he could not enter again. Then he realized that just as he had come here, so his father and mother, if by any chance they still lived, would also return here looking for him. After half an hour, overcoming repugnance, he went back into the house.
Again he wandered through the empty rooms. They spoke with all the pathos of any dwelling-place left without people. Now and then some little thing cried out to him more poignantly—his father's new encyclopedia (purchased with qualms as to the expense), his mother's potted pelargoniums (now needing water), the barometer that his father used to tap each morning when he came down to breakfast. Yes, it was a simple house—what you would expect of a man who had taught history in high school and liked books, and of a woman who had made it into a home for him and served on the Y.W.C.A. board, and of their only child—"He always does so well in his studies!"—for whom they had cherished ambitions and for whose education they had made sacrifices.
After a while he sat down in the living-room. Looking at the familiar chairs and pictures and books, he gradually came to feel less despondent.
As twilight fell, he realized that he had not eaten since morning. He was not hungry, but his weakness might be partly the result of lack of food. He rummaged around a little, and opened a can of soup. He found only the stub of a loaf of bread, and it was mouldy. The refrigerator supplied butter and stale cheese. He located crackers in a cupboard. The gas-pressure at the kitchen stove was very low, but he managed to warm up the soup.
Afterwards he sat on the porch in the dark. In spite of his meal he felt unsteady, and he realized that he was suffering from shock.
San Lupo Drive was high enough on the slope of the hills to be proud of its view. As he sat there looking out, everything seemed just about the same. Apparently the processes behind the production of electricity must be almost completely automatic. In the hydro-electric plants the flow of water was still keeping the generators in motion. Moreover, when things had started to go to pieces, someone must have ordered that the street-lights be left turned on. Now he saw beneath him all the intricate pattern of the lights in the East Bay cities, and beyond that the yellow chains of lights on the Bay Bridge, and still farther through the faint evening mist, the glow of the San Francisco lights and the fainter chains on the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the traffic-lights were still working, changing from green to red. High upon the bridge-towers the flashes silently sent their warnings to airplanes which would no longer ever be flying. (Far to the south, however, somewhere in Oakland, there was one wholly black section. There, some switch must have failed, or some fuse have burned out.) Even the advertising signs, some of them at least, had been left burning. Pathetically, they flashed out their call to buy, though no longer were there any customers left or any salesmen. One great sign in particular, its lower part hidden behind a near-by building, still sent out its message Drink although he could not see what he was thus commanded to drink.
He watched it, half-fascinated. Drink—blackness. Drink—blackness. Drink. "Well, why not?" he thought, and going in, he came out again with a bottle of his father's brandy.
Yet the brandy had little bite, and brought no satisfaction.
"I'm probably not the type," he thought, "to drink myself to death." He found himself really more interested in watching the sign that still flashed there. Drink—blackness. Drink—blackness. Drink. How long would the lights burn? What would make them go out in the end? What else would continue? What was going to happen to all that man had built up through the centuries and now had left behind him?
"I suppose," he thought again, "I ought to be considering suicide. No, too soon. I am alive, and so others probably are alive. We are just like gas molecules in a near-vacuum, circulating around, one unable to make contact with the other."
Again a kind of dullness verging on despair slowly came settling upon him. What if he did live on, eating as a scavenger at all those great supplies of food which were piled up in every storeroom? What if he could live well and even if he could draw together a few other survivors? What would it all amount to? It would be different if one could pick half a dozen friends for fellow-survivors, but this way they would probably be dull and stupid people, or even vicious ones. He looked out and saw still the great sign flashing far off. Drink—blackness. Drink—blackness. Drink. And again he wondered how long it would keep flashing while there were no more vending-machines or salesmen offering whatever it was one was to drink, and from that he thought back to some of the other things he had seen that day, wondering what would happen to the coyote that he had seen loping along the highway, and what would happen to the cattle and horses standing by the watering-trough beneath the slowly revolving spokes of the windmill. How long indeed would the windmill still revolve and pump its water from the depths of the earth?
Then suddenly he gave a quick start, and he realized that he had again a will to live! At least, if he could be no more a participant, he would be a spectator, and a spectator trained to observe what was happening. Even though the curtain had been rung down on man, here was the opening of the greatest of all dramas for a student such as he. During thousands of years man had impressed himself upon the world. Now man was gone, certainly for a while, perhaps forever. Even if some survivors were left, they would be a long time in again obtaining supremacy. What would happen to the world and its creatures without man? That he was left to see!