Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

  He got to the car, opened the door for Princess to jump in, and stilling a last-moment panicky impulse to scramble, he himself stepped in behind her with dignity. As the door clicked shut, he had an immediate feeling of safety. He let his hand close comfortably around the solid handle of the hammer which lay at his feet. He felt sick with the reaction.

  Looking out from the car, he saw only the handsome Dalmatian, sitting at the side of the road. Now being safe, Ish felt his attitude quickly changing. Actually the dogs had done him no harm, and indeed had not really even threatened him. During a few minutes he had thought of them as wild creatures thirsting for his blood. Now, they seemed a little pitiful, as if they might merely have been seeking the companionship of a man because of what they remembered long ago—of food laid out in dishes, of crackling logs in the fireplace, of a patting hand and a soothing voice. As he drove away, he wished them no bad luck, but rather hoped that they would manage occasionally to snap up a rabbit or pull down a calf.

  The next morning the whole matter had even a more comic aspect when he became aware of Princess's changed condition. Not wanting any puppies, he shut her in the basement.

  Yet he could not be sure, and he decided if there was one way rather than another by which he did not care to die, it was to be torn to pieces by the teeth of dogs. After that he made it a rule always to walk in the hills with a pistol strapped at his belt, or else with his rifle or shot-gun....

  Two days later the problem of dogs had come to seem a petty one compared with the problem of ants. They had already troubled him, but now they seemed to arrive from all directions at once and to cover everything. Even in the old days, he could remember that constant battle—his mother's cry of dismay at finding a line of them in the kitchen, his father's irritation, and the constant debate about whether they should summon the ant-man or try to handle the situation themselves. But now the ants were a hundred times worse than ever before. No longer did ardent householders combat them in the houses, and even wage offensive war against them in their own strongholds. Now after a few months their powers of rapid breeding had brought their numbers to climactic proportions. Probably, also, they had found great supplies of food somewhere.

  They streamed everywhere. Ish was sorry not to be a good enough entomologist to ascertain what really was happening and to work out the history of this overpowering increase. But in spite of some investigations, he never even discovered for certain whether the ants were spreading outward from some great center of development or whether they were breeding equally all over the city.

  Their scouts ranged everywhere. Suddenly he had to become a furiously meticulous housekeeper, for the slightest scrap of food or even a dead fly brought an immediate stream of ants an inch wide, overwhelming the insignificant prey which had attracted them. He found them wandering upon Princess's coat like fleas, although apparently they did not bite. He found them in his own clothes. Once in the early morning he awoke with a horrible dream because a stream of ants was pouring across his own cheek, bent to some goal which he never discovered.

  Actually the house was only alien ground into which they made raids. Their real strength lay outside. Their hills seemed now to be everywhere. He could not overturn a clod without having ants swarm out by thousands from burrows that pierced the earth. They must be annihilating all the other insects, he thought, destroying their means of subsistence even if not killing them. He got bottles of ant-poison and DDT spray from the drug store, and tried to make the house into a hostile island, but the pressure of numbers was so great from the outside that they streamed across his spray. Doubtless all the trespassers inevitably died, but the death of even millions of individuals would not affect such numbers appreciably. He tried to estimate how many ants must be living on this one city lot, but he came out with an unbelievable answer in billions. Had they no natural enemies? Had they broken all limits of control? With the removal of man were they now destined to inherit the earth?

  Yet, after all, they were only the little hustling ants which had irritated and plagued California housewives. Making some investigations, he found that actually the range of the plague did not extend appreciably beyond the limits of the city. In some way, like dogs and cats and rats, these ants had come to be domestic animals dependent upon the activities of man. This gave him a certain hope. If he had only been seeking his ease, he would have left the city, but he preferred, even at the cost of some discomfort, to watch what was happening.

  Then one morning he realized suddenly that he had not noticed any ants. He looked around carefully, but he could not see any of their scouts. He dropped a bit of food on the floor, then went away about some other business for a few minutes. When he returned to the scene of his experiment, the food lay there without an ant upon it. Curious, realizing that something had happened, he went outside. He turned over a clod of dirt, and no ants swarmed from their holes. He hunted carefully. Here and there he discovered a few stragglers wandering about aimlessly, but they were so few that he could have counted them individually. He hunted still further. He could find no dead bodies of ants. They had simply vanished. Perhaps, if he had had the skill in their ways to dig down and find their nests; he would have discovered that they were lying dead in their billions. But again he could only wish that he knew more of their manner of life and could carry on an investigation.

  He never solved the mystery, but he had little doubt as to what had happened. When any creature reached such climactic numbers and attained such high concentration, a nemesis was likely to fall upon it. Possibly the ants had exhausted the supplies of food which had led to this tremendous increase of numbers. More likely, some disease had fallen upon them, and wiped them out. In the next few days he smelled, or thought he smelled, a faint all-pervading putrescence, as if from the decaying bodies of billions of ants....

  One evening shortly afterward, he sat reading, and after a while began to feel hungry. He went to the kitchen, and rummaged in the refrigerator for some cheese. Happening to glance at the electric clock, he was surprised to see that the time was only nine-thirty-seven. He had thought it was later. On his way back to the living-room he took a bite of the cheese, and glanced at his wrist-watch. The watch-hands stood at ten-nine, and he knew that he had set the watch by the clock within twenty-four hours.

  "The old clock's going to pieces at last," he thought. "Not surprising!" He remembered how the motion of its hands had startled him when he had first returned to the house.

  He sat down to read again. A high wind from the north with the heavy smell of smoke in it blew so hard that it rattled the windows occasionally. By now he was used to the smell of smoke, and did not think about it. At many times he could not even get a good view because of the smoke of the burning forests. After a while he blinked his eyes a little, and stared more intently at the page where the letters seemed to have grown strangely indistinct. "This smoke must be making my eyes water," he thought. "I don't seem to see so well." But as he looked closer, it seemed that not only the page before him but the whole room had grown dimmer. With a sudden start he looked at the electric-light bulb in the bridge lamp beside him.

  Then quickly, with a jumping heart, he was out of his chair and standing on the front porch looking out over the broad stretches of the city below him. The lights were still burning along the streets. The chains of yellow beads still showed on the great bridge, and at the tops of the towers the red lights were flashing. He looked more carefully. The lights seemed a little dimmer than they should be, but he could be imagining that, or they might be obscured by all the drifting smoke. He went back and sat in his chair again and tried to read, forgetting about it—forgetting what he feared.

  But he blinked—and again! Looking at the light beside him, he was puzzled. Then suddenly he remembered the clock! "Well," he thought, "it had to come!"

  His watch now showed ten-fifty-two. He went out to the kitchen, and saw that the clock was at ten-fourteen. He calculated apprehensively. The result was bad. As clo
sely as he could remember, the clock had lost six minutes in about three-quarters of an hour.

  The clock was run, he knew, by electrical impulses which were ordinarily timed at sixty to the minute. Now they must be coming less often. An electrical engineer would doubtless have found it an elementary matter to calculate just how much less often. Ish could even have made an attempt at the calculation himself, but he saw no use in it, and he felt suddenly downcast. In any case, once the Power-and-Light system had started to go to pieces, the rate of decline would undoubtedly be progressively faster.

  Back in the living-room, he could scarcely doubt now that the light had faded still more. Deep shadows seemed to have moved out from behind the chairs in the corners of the room.

  "The lights are going out. The lights of the world!" he thought, and he felt like a child going alone into the dark. Princess lay dozing on the floor. The fading of the lights could mean nothing to her, but she sensed his nervousness and came up restlessly sniffing, whining a little.

  He stood on the porch again. Minute by minute the long chains of street-lights grew less and less luminous, more and more yellow. The high wind, he thought, must be helping, blowing down a power-line here, weakening a switch connection there. The fire too was sweeping across the forested ridges unchecked by men, burning power-lines, perhaps, even power-houses.

  After a while the lights seemed to fade no further, but to remain at a constant dimness. He went in again, and pulling another bridge-lamp to the side of his chair, he was able to read comfortably with two lights instead of one. Princess lay down again to doze. By now it was late, but he did not want to go to sleep. He felt as if he were sitting up by the deathbed of his most treasured and oldest friend. He remembered those great words "Let there be light, and there was light!" This seemed the other end of that story.

  After a while he went to look at the clock again, and saw that it had stopped with the hands symmetrically upward—at eleven-five.

  His watch showed him that by now it was well after midnight. The lights might still continue many hours, or even might burn dimly for days. Yet he did not want to go to bed.

  He tried to read again, but finally slipped off to sleep in the easy-chair where he was sitting.

  With Power-and-Light it was all so carefully contrived that even in the disaster there was no need for adjustment. The men fell sick, but the generators still sent out along the wires their finely timed pulsations. So, when the brief agony of mankind was ended, the lights still burned.

  So it continued through the weeks. If a wire broke and cut out a whole town from the flow of power, the system adjusted before that wire had had time to fall to the ground. If a power-house failed, just as quickly the other power-houses in the system stretching across hundreds of miles took up the stack, and sent out more power to fulfill the need.

  Yet in any system, as in a chain or a road, there is always a weakest link. (That is the fatal flaw of all systems.) The water would continue to flow; the great generators could spin upon their oil-bathed bearings for years. But the flaw lay in the governors which controlled the generators. No one had ever bothered to make them wholly automatic. Once every ten days they were inspected for oil; once a month, perhaps, there was need to add oil to them. After two months without care the oil supplies grew low, and one by one, as the weeks passed, the governors began to go out of action. When one failed, automatically the great water-nozzle changed angle and the water flowed through without touching the wheel. Then the generator ceased revolving, and sent out no more power. As generator after generator was thus cut out of the system, the strain upon the few remaining ones became greater and greater and the decline of the system became cumulative.

  When he awoke, he noticed that the lights had faded still more. The filaments in the electric lamps were only an orange-red now. He could look at them without hurting his eyes. Now, although he had not turned off any of the lamps, the room was in half-darkness.

  "The lights are going out! The lights are going out!" How often, in how many centuries had those words been said—sometimes in matter-of-fact tones, sometimes in panic—now literally, now as symbol? How much light had meant in all the story of Man! Light of the world! Light of life! Light of knowledge!

  A deep shiver shook him, but he stilled his panic. After all, he thought, the great system of Power-and-Light had held up for an amazingly long time, all its automatic processes functioning though the men were gone. He thought clear back to that first day when he had come down out of the mountains not yet even knowing what had happened. Then he had passed the power-house, and felt the reassurance that everything must be normal because he saw the water pouring out from the tailraces and heard the dim continuous hum of the generators. He felt again a curious touch of local pride in thinking of it. Perhaps no system had lasted so long. These might well be the last electric lights to be left burning in the world, and when they faded, the lights would be out for a long, long time.

  No longer sleepy, he sat there, feeling that he should not go to sleep, wishing at least that the end would come quickly and with dignity and not be dragged out too long. Again, he felt the light fading, and he thought, "This is the end!" But still it lingered, the filaments now only a cherry-red.

  And then again they faded. As a sled on a hillside, slowly first, then gaining momentum. Just for a moment, he thought (or imagined), they flared more brightly—and then they were gone.

  Princess stirred in her sleep, then suddenly barked the half-bark of a dream. Was it a death knell?

  He went outside. "Perhaps," he thought, "that was just the failure of some local line." But he was really sure that it had not been. He peered through the darkness, all the thicker for the smoke that was heavy in the air, changing the moon into an orange ball. He could see no light—not along the streets, nor anywhere on the bridge. This, then, was the end. "Let there be no light, and there was no light!"

  "No use being melodramatic" he thought. Going inside, he stumbled around until he had found the drawer where his mother kept candles. Putting one into a candlestick, he sat again by its feeble but steady and continuing light. Nevertheless he continued to feel a little shaken.

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  The fading out of the lights had a strangely severe effect upon Ish. Even in the full daylight, he seemed to feel those shadows creeping in from the edges toward him. The Dark Ages were closing in.

  He found himself hoarding matches and flashlights and candles, piling them up in spite of himself, as a psychological protection.

  Yet actually, in a little while, he discovered that the absence of electric light was not really as important to him as the absence of electric power, particularly of refrigeration. The ice-box was dead now, and his food spoiled. In the deep-freeze units the fresh meat, and butter, and heads of lettuce soon relapsed into mere smelling masses of corruption.

  Now came the change of the season. He was completely lost as to the passage of the weeks and months, but with the geographer's eye he could still tell something about the time of year from the look of things. Now he guessed it must be October, and the first rain came to confirm him; from the way it settled down, it seemed likely to last longer than one expected of the first storm.

  He stayed at home, managing to amuse himself fairly well. He played his accordion. He browsed through several books—ones he had always meant to read and now was undoubtedly going to have time to do so. Now and then he looked out at the fine drifting rain and the clouds low over the tops of the houses.

  The next day he went out to see what was happening, still thinking of the drama he was prepared to watch. Not so much had occurred, it seemed at first. But after a while he began to notice things. On San Lupo Drive a drain-pipe had plugged with the washing in of all the unswept leaves that lay in the gutter. After the drain-pipe had plugged, the water had swirled across the street to the downhill side and flooded over the curb. The stream of water had worked its way across the tangle of tall grass which had bee
n the Harts' lawn, and seeped under the door. Their floors and rugs must be soaked, and slimy with mud. Below the house the water had broken out, and run through the rose-garden, leaving a small gully behind it, at last disappearing into the drainage of a storm-sewer on the street below. It was just a little matter, and yet it showed what must be happening all over the country.

  Men had built roads and drains and walls and thousands of other obstructions to the natural flow of water. These could survive and function only because men were constantly at hand to repair and clean the thousands of little breaks and blockages which showed up at every change of the weather. Ish himself could have cleaned out that clogged drain in two minutes by merely scraping the leaves back from the grating where they had plugged it. But he saw no point to stretching out his hand. There were thousands, millions, of spots where the same thing must be happening. The roads and the drains and the walls had been constructed only for man's convenience, and now that man was gone there was no need of them. The water might just as well follow its natural courses, and cut back through the rose-garden. Soaked and muddy, the Harts' rugs would begin to rot where they lay. No matter! To think of that as something bad was merely to think in terms of what had once been and no longer existed.

  As he walked back home, he suddenly came upon a large black billy-goat calmly eating the hedge which Mr. Osmer used to clip so carefully. Ish looked at the billy-goat in amusement and in some curiosity, wondering where he could have come from. (No one kept goats anywhere near such a respectable street as San Lupo.) The goat desisted from eating the hedge, and looked at Ish. Perhaps, thought Ish, the animal was looking also at the man in amusement and some curiosity. Men now had rarity-value. Having looked for a few seconds, as if it might be equal to equal, the goat again returned to the more profitable business of eating the long shoots which had grown out from the hedge. Doubtless they were very succulent.