by Jerry eBooks
“Splendid. Did the pellet work?”
“Well enough. Here we go.”
They walked on up the hill.
“Alice, come out and see who we have here,” Hathaway called into the hut. The men of the rocket stood waiting and smiling. Hathaway frowned slightly and bent into the doorway once more. “Alice, did you hear, come out now.”
His wife appeared in the doorway. A moment later the two daughters, tall and gracious, came out, followed by an even taller son.
“Captain Parsons, my wife. Alice, this is Captain Parsons.”
“Mrs. Hathaway, I remember you from a long time ago.”
“Captain Parsons.” She shook his hand and turned, still holding his hand. “My daughters, Marguerite and Susan. My son, John. Captain Parsons.”
Hathaway stood smiling as hands were shaken all around.
“It’s like coming home,” said Parsons, simply.
“It’s like home having you,” said the wife.
Parson sniffed the air. “Is that gingerbread?”
“Will you have a piece?”
Everybody laughed. And while folding tables were carried down and set up by the wide canal and hot foods were brought out and set down and plates were placed about with fine silverware and damask napkins, Captain Parsons looked first at Mrs. Hathaway and then at her son and then at her two tall, gracious daughters. He sat upon a folding chair which the son brought him and said, “How old are you, son?”
The son replied, “Twenty-three.” Parsons said nothing else. He looked down at his silverware but his face grew pale and sickly. Hathaway was helping his wife bring out more tureens of food. The man next to Parsons said, “Sir, that can’t be right.”
“What’s that, Williamson? . . . asked Parsons.
“I’m thirty-eight myself, sir. I was in school the same time as young John Hathaway there, twenty years ago. And he says he’s only twenty-three. And, by God, he only looks twenty-three. But that can’t be right. He should be thirty-eight.”
“Yes, I know,” said Parsons, quietly. “What does it mean, sir?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t look well, sir.”
“I’m not feeling very well. Will you do me a favor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to run a little errand for me. I’ll tell you where to go and what to check. Late in the breakfast, slip away. It should take you only five minutes. The place is not far from here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here, what are you two talking so seriously about ?” Mrs. Hathaway ladled quick ladles of soup into their bowls. “Smile now, we’re all together, the trip’s over, and it’s like home!”
“Yes, ma’m,” said Captain Parsons. “You look very young, Mrs. Hathaway, I hope you don’t mind my saying.”
“Isn’t that like a man?” And she gave him an extra ladle of soup.
Parsons watched her move away.
Her face was filled with warmth, it was smooth and unwrinkled. She moved around the tables and placed things neatly and laughed at every joke. She stopped never once to sit and take her breath. And the son and daughters were brilliant and witty as their father, telling of the long years and their quiet life.
The breakfast went through its courses. Midway, Williamson slipped quietly off and walked down the hill. “Where is he going so suddenly?” inquired Hathaway. “He’ll be right back. There’s some stuff he’s to check in the rocket,” explained Parsons. “But, as I was saying, sir, there wasn’t much left of America. The grass country towns, was about all. New York was a wreck. It took twenty years to get things back on an even keel, what with the radio-activity and all. Europe wasn’t any better off. But we finally have a World Government.”
Parsons talked automatically, reading it off from memory, not listening to himself, thinking only of Williamson going down the hill and coming back to tell what he had found. “Ours is the only rocket now available,” said Parsons. “There’ll be more in about four years. We’re here on a preliminary survey to see what’s left of our colonies. Not much here. Perhaps more over at New Chicago. We’ll check there this afternoon.
“Thanks,” he said, as Marguerite Hathaway filled his water glass. He touched her hand, suddenly. She did not even mind it. Her hand was warm. “Incredible,” thought Parsons.
Hathaway, at the head of the table, paused long enough to press his hand to his chest. Then he went on, listening to the talk, looking now and then, with concern, at Parsons, who did not seem to be enjoying his meal.
Williamson returned up the hill, in a great hurry.
Williamson sat down beside Parsons. He was agitated and his cheeks were white. He could not keep his mind on his food, he kept picking at it until the captain whispered aside to him, “Well?”
“I found it, sir, what you sent me to find, sir.”
“And?”
“I went down the hill and up that other hill until I came to the graveyard, as you directed.” Williamson kept his eyes on the party. People were laughing. The daughters were smiling gravely and blinking and the son was telling a joke. Hathaway was smoking a cigarette, his first really fresh one in years. “And,” said Williamson, “I went into the graveyard.”
“The four crosses were there?” asked Parsons.
“The four crosses were there, sir. The names were still on them. I wrote them down to be sure.” He produced a white paper and read from it. “Alice Hathaway, Marguerite, Susan and John Hathaway. All four died of the plague in July, 1997.”
“Thank you, Williamson,” said Parsons. He closed his eyes.
“Twenty years ago, sir,” said Williamson, his hands trembling. He was afraid to look up at the people at the table. “Yes, twenty years ago,” said Parsons. “Then, who are these?” And Williamson wide-eyed, nodded at the two daughters and the son and the wife of Hathaway, the last man on Mars.
“I don’t know, Williamson.”
“What are you going to do, sir?”
“I don’t know that either,” he said, slowly.
“Will we tell the other men?”
“No, not yet. Later. Go on with your food as if nothing had happened.”
“I’m not very hungry now, sir.”
They both began on their dessert.
The meal ended with wine brought from the rocket. Hathaway rose to his feet, holding his glass. “A toast to all of you, it is good to be with friends again.” He moved his wine glass ever so little in the air. “And to my wife, and my children, without whom I could not have survived alone. It is only through their kindness in caring for me, that I have lived on, waiting for your arrival. Else, years ago, I would have put a bullet in my head.” He moved his glass now to his wife, now to his children, who looked back self-consciously, lowering their eyes at last as everyone drank.
Parsons’ eyelids were flickering nervously. His hands were moving uneasily on his lap.
Hathaway drank down his wine and fell forward onto the table and then slipped toward the ground. He did not cry out. Several of the men caught and eased him to the ground where the doctor felt of his chest, listened, and remained there, listening, until Parsons arrived with Williamson.
The doctor looked up and shook his head. Parsons knelt and took the old man’s hand. “Parsons, is that you ?”
Hathaway’s voice was barely audible.
Parsons nodded.
“I’m sorry,” said Hathaway, gently grieved. “I had to spoil the breakfast.”
“Never you mind,” said Parsons.
“Say goodbye to Alice and the children for me,” said the old man.
“They’re right here,” said Parsons. “Just a moment, I’ll call them.”
“No, no, don’t; they wouldn’t understand, I wouldn’t want them to understand, no, don’t,” whispered Hathaway. Parsons did not move.
A moment later old Dr. Hathaway was dead.
Parsons waited for a long time. Then he arose and walked away from the small stunned group around Ha
thaway. He went to Alice Hathaway and looked into her face and said, “Do you know what has just happened?”
“It’s something about my husband,” she said.
“He’s just passed away; his heart,” said Parsons, watching her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“He didn’t want us to feel badly, he told us it would happen one day, and he didn’t want us to cry. He didn’t teach us how, you know. He didn’t want us to know, he said it was the worst thing that could happen to a man to know how to be lonely and to know how to be sad and then cry.
So we’re not to know what death is or what crying is or being sad.”
Parsons looked off at the mountains. “Perhaps it’s just as well.” He glanced at her hands, the soft warm hands and the fine manicured nails and the tapered wrists. And he looked at the slender smooth white neck and the intelligent eyes. “I know all about you,” he said, finally.
“But the others don’t.” She was confident of that.
“No, you’re so perfect they haven’t guessed. Mr. Hathaway did a fine job on you and your children.”
“He would have liked to hear you say that. He was so very proud of us. After a while he even forgot that he had made us. At the end he loved and took us as his real wife and children. And, in a way, we are.”
“You gave him a great deal of comfort,” said Parsons.
“Yes, over the years we sat and talked and talked. He so much loved to talk. He liked the stone hut and the open fire. We could have lived in a regular, house in the town, but he liked it up here, where he could be primitive if he liked, or modem if he liked. He told me all about his laboratory and the things he did in it. Once he wired the entire dead American town below with sound speakers and when he pressed a button the town lit up and made noises as if ten thousand people lived in it. There were airplane noises and car noises and the sounds of people talking. He would sit and light a cigar and talk to us and the sounds would come up from the town and once in awhile the phone would ring and a recorded voice, Mr. Hathaway himself, would ask Mr. Hathaway scientific and surgical questions and he would answer them, and then I’d make strawberry biscuits. Mr. Hathaway took a transcription of his voice down into town each day, put it in a automatic telephone that called us every night. And with the phone ringing and us here and the sounds of the town and the cigar, I’m sure Mr. Hathaway was quite happy.”
“Twenty years, the five of you living here,” said Parsons.
“There’s only one thing he couldn’t make us do,” she said. “And that was grow old. He got older every day but we stayed the same. I guess he didn’t mind. I guess he wanted us that way.”
“We’ll bury him down in the yard where the other four crosses are. I think he would like that.”
She put her hand on his wrist, lightly. “I’m sure he would.”
Orders were given. The wife and the three children followed the little procession down the hill. Two men carried Hathaway on a covered stretcher. They passed the stone hut and the storage shed where Hathaway twenty years ago had begun his work. Parsons stepped from the procession a moment to stand within the doorway of the workshop.
How would it be to be alone on a planet with a wife and three children and then to have them die of the plague, leaving you alone in a world with nothing on it but wind and silence? What would you do? You would bury them with crosses in the graveyard and then come back up to your workshop and with all the power of mind and memory and accuracy of finger and genius, put together, bit by bit, all those things that were wife, son and daughter. With an entire American city below from which to draw needed supplies, a brilliant man might do anything.
Parsons returned to the procession. The sound of their footsteps was muffled in the sand. At the graveyard, as they turned in, two men were already spading out the earth.
The men came back to the rocket in the late afternoon. They stood in a circle around the captain.
Williamson nodded up at the stone hut. “What are you going to do about them?”
“I don’t know,” said the captain.
“Are you going to turn them off?”
“Off? The captain looked faintly surprised. “It never entered my mind.”
“You’re not going to take them back with us?”
“No, we haven’t space for them.”
“You mean you’re going to leave them here, like that, like they are? It’s sort of ghastly, the thought of them being here.”
The captain gave Smith a gun. “If you can do something about this, you’re a better man than I.”
Five minutes later, Williamson returned from the hut, sweating. He handed the gun back. “Here. Take it. I know what you mean, now. I went in with the gun. One of the daughters looked up at me. She smiled. So did the others. The wife said something about sitting down for a cup of tea. That did it. God, God, it would be murder.” He shook his head.
Parsons nodded. “After all the work he put in on them, it would be killing. There’ll never be anything as fine as them again, ever. They’re built to last; ten, fifty, two hundred years. Yes, they’ve as much right to live as you or I or any of us.” He knocked out his pipe. “Well, get aboard. We’re taking off. This city’s done for, we’ll not be using it.”
It was getting late in the day. The wind was rising. All the men were aboard. The captain hesitated. Williamson looked at him and said, “Don’t tell me you’re going back to say—good-bye—to them?”
The captain looked at Williamson coldly. “None of your damn business.” Parsons walked up toward the hut through the darkening wind. The men in the rocket saw his shadow lingering inside the stone hut door. They saw a woman’s shadow. They saw the captain put out his hand to shake her hand.
A minute later, he came running back to the rocket.
The rocket went up into the sky. It was only a red point, going away.
And now, on nights when the wind comes over the dead sea bottoms and through the hexagonal graveyard where there are four old crosses and one new fresh one, there is a light burning in the low stone hut on the edge of the burned New New York, and in that hut, as the wind roars by and the dust sifts down and the cold stars burn, are four figures, a woman, two daughters and a son, tending a low fire for no reason and talking and laughing, and this goes on night after night for every year and every year, and some nights, for no reason, the wife comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, knowing nothing, and then she goes back in and throws a stick on the fire and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead.
Knock
Fredric Brown
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room . . .
THERE is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door . . .”
Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.
But it wasn’t horrible, really.
The last man on Earth—or in the universe, for that matter—sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He’d just noticed how peculiar it was and he’d been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him.
Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrified easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn’t much to look at, and he knew it.
Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn’t much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour,
the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman—one woman. And that was a fact which didn’t concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He’d probably never see her and didn’t care too much if he didn’t.
Women just hadn’t been a factor in Walter’s life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn’t been a good wife—albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he’d loved Martha, in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he’d been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but—well—he just hadn’t thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn’t any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them.
True, company would be nice, but he’d get along without it. Maybe after a while, he’d get so he’d enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way.
An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn’t look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they’d done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills—and it had been done much more efficiently.
BUT they had given him plenty of books. They’d been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forever. Even a brilliant mind—and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds—has its idiosyncrasies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we digress.
There was a knock on the door.
