CHAPTER 5

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....