The End - Visions of Apocalypse

What separated mankind from animals was not our opposable thumbs, or use of tools, but the prefrontal cortex that allowed humans to imagine — to envision within the limitless boundaries of the mind everything from mechanical flight, to new worlds, to gods. Building a pyramid was nothing compared to the construction of a whole universe. It took the Egyptians thousands of men, but Frank Herbert worked alone. This ability to see into the future, to imagine and anticipate — to dream the unreal — is what allowed a patchwork of apes to step into the sun and throw a femur into the air that would spin into a space station. Imagination lay at the basis of every great leap forward. Food, medicine, communication, power and transportation were all the results of mankind’s ability to conceive something from nothing. These annals of science fiction alone needed to be saved as the mystic books of the past, present, and future. Submarines, space travel, the atomic bomb had all been prophesized more accurately than any religious rumor. And if those were not enough, how many had predicted the end of the world? How many had foreseen Irwin’s very situation? Looking out upon the June snow from his little porthole, Irwin felt Revelations did not so aptly describe what he saw as Adam And No Eve, The Postman, Final Blackout, A Boy and His Dog, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Joseph E. Kelleam’s Rust, just to name a few — although that last one was about robots, rather than a man in a buried bunker of books. Still no purer form of man’s best talent existed than fantasy and science fiction literature.

No less than this did Irwin have before him. A treasure greater than any horde of gold. He had a wealth of knowledge, thousands of tiny doors to other worlds. If he could survive the new ice age, he would emerge as the man of Atlantis, a wizard in a land of forgotten words. But to survive he would need to burn some of them.

Even as he dumped the last of Jimmy’s gift into the pot, he could not get by on waste alone. Yet how could he chose? With the fire well stoked, Irwin moved down the length of his trench peering at the tiny titled spines in the bright flickering light. Should Heinlein perish because he didn’t care nearly as much for Stranger in a Strange Land as he did for The Door into Summer, or did that latter title merely embody the hope he needed at that moment? Should Ender’s Game be sent to the furnace in favor of The Forever War? What about the Wheel of Time? That series alone could keep him alive for a week, but at what cost? Would Tolkien and Martin be enough? Solomon would not be up to such a task as this.

Could the value of Flowers for Algernon and the lessons taught by Mary Shelley be callously erased in favor of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, or the rabbit world of Watership Down? Might he have to resort to a practical pound-for-pound measure? Along with Jordan would Erickson need to die? Discworld? Song of Ice and Fire? And how ironic and painful would it be to burn that title?

What if the winter failed to end? Would he burn them all to live? He never thought himself capable of even dog-earing a page, but now he had already burned a whole book, and he could tell that like any gateway drug, it made the idea of burning the next easier. After having cremated David Copperfield, how hard would it really be to burn Frankenstein?

Irwin laid his hand on the spines and let his fingertips slide gently down across the titles. He could almost feel their fear, hear them all begging for life. Smell…

Smoke.

Irwin had grown oblivious, his olfactory receptors as blanketed with the scent as his home was with snow. This and the darkness accounted for why he took so long to realize more was burning than what was in his pot.

Not so much burning as smoldering.

The pot!

Irwin realized with fear that he’d forgotten more than just ventilation. Metal conducted heat. The stainless steel of the pot was cooking the books it rested on. Like an iron left plugged in on a newspaper, the heat singed the glossy cover of Chicken Soup for the Soul, causing the laminate to melt and bubble like boiled brown sugar. Maybe that was it, the new industrial stench not as wholesome as crackling pulp and ink had finally caught his attention.

The smoke issued from under the pot, a thick white cloud like the chugging tufts that oozed out of factory stacks. It crawled up the shiny sides where both of Mickey’s ears were drooping like a guilty dog.

Outside the wind whispered its plot.

“Shit!”