Earth Abides

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 volcanoes 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.