Earth Abides

He did not want to force an entrance by breaking a window, thus giving access to animals and also to the rain. In the end, however, he could find no other way. He tapped gently with his hammer, and managed to break only a part of a pane, reaching through, he unlocked the window and raised it. After all, he told himself, he could bring some boards and patch the window again, so that it would still be rat-proof and weatherproof.

He had been in the Library hundreds of times before, as a matter of course, during his years at the University. But now under the changed conditions, he felt a strange new sense of awe. Here rested in storage the wisdom by which civilization had been built, and could be rebuilt. Now that he knew himself soon to be a father, he had suddenly a new attitude, a feeling for the future. The child should not grow up to be a parasite, scavenging forever. And it would not need to. Everything was here. All the knowledge!

He had come to hunt up some books on obstetrics, but after looking into the main reading-room and then wandering through two levels of the stacks, he became so excited that he left the building in a frenzy of imagination. He did not need to worry about the obstetrics today. There was plenty of time still for that.

He drove home in a kind of trance. Books! Most of the knowledge was in books, and yet he soon saw that they were not all. First of all, there must be people who could read, who knew how to use the books. He must also save other things. Seeds, for instance. He must see to it that the more important domestic plants did not vanish from the earth.

Suddenly he felt that all civilization depended not only upon men but also upon these other things which had marched with him like kinsmen and friends and companions. If Saint Francis had hailed the sun as brother, might not we also say, “Oh, Brother Wheat! Oh, Sister Barley!” He smiled to himself. Yes, one could go on: “Oh, Grandfather Wheel! Oh, Cousin Compass! Oh, Friend Binomial Theorem!” All the discoveries of science and philosophy also might be imagined as standing shoulder to shoulder with man, even though the putting of the matter into words made it all sound a little ridiculous.

He hurried, still hot with boyish enthusiasm, to tell it all to Em. He found her trying, not at all successfully, to teach Princess to retrieve. Em. was not as enthusiastic as he had expected. “Civilization!” she said. “Oh, you -mean airplanes going higher and higher, and faster and faster. That kind of thing!”

“Oh, yes. But art, too, you know. Music, literature, culture.”

“Yes, mystery-stories and those funny Negro jazz bands that always made my ears hurt.”

He was crestfallen, even though he knew she was having a little fun with him.

“Another thing, though, about civilization,” she said. “There’s this matter of time. We don’t really know what month it is. We’ll want to be sure when his birthday comes, so that we can celebrate it, something less than two years from now.”

Perhaps, he felt in his mind, that was the difference! That was the difference between woman and man. She felt only in terms of the immediate, and was more interested in being able to spot her child’s birthday than in all the future of civilization. Again, he felt superior to her. “One thing I didn’t do, though,” he said, “was to read any of those obstetrics books today. I’m sorry—but there’s no hurry, is there?”

“Oh, no. Maybe not even any use of it at all. Don’t you remember that even in the Old Times babies were always being born in taxis and hospital lobbies? Once they’re started, nobody can stop them.”

Later, when he had thought things over, he could not but admit that she had made a suggestion of something important. The more he thought about it, the more fundamental he considered her idea of keeping track of time. After all, time was history, and history was tradition, and tradition was civilization. If you lost the continuity of time, you lost something that might never be recovered. Probably it had already been lost unless some of the other survivors had been more careful about the matter than he had been. Take the seven-day week, for instance. Even though you were not religious, you had to admit that the seven-day week with its one day of rest was a fine old tradition of mankind. It had been going on for at least five thousand years, clear from Babylonian times, and no one knew how much further. Would he ever be able to figure out again just which day was Sunday?

As for getting the proper day of the year, that should not be too difficult. He knew enough about the fundamentals of astronomy to do that, and if he got the time of the solstice correct, he could figure back on last year’s calendar and perhaps re-establish the day of the week.