Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

  But even if the rats should only be increasing at the rate of doubling their numbers every month, an estimate which seemed ridiculously conservative, there should by this time be already somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million. If they were increasing threefold each month, an estimate which still seemed conservative, there would now be in the area approximately one billion rats.

  As he considered the problem, he saw no reason at all why the rats, with unlimited food, might not possibly quadruple their numbers every month. In the Old Times man had been the only important natural enemy of the city rats, and even man had had to maintain constant war against them to keep their numbers under control. With man gone, their only enemies would have been the small number of dogs whose instinct led them to catch rats, and somewhat larger number of cats. But here a secondary result must have influenced the situation in favor of the rats. As he had noticed, the rat-catching dogs seemed to hold the ground alone without the help of any cats. Probably the dogs had killed the cats as much as they had the rats, and so had eliminated the chief control. And in the end, the dogs themselves had probably been overwhelmed in the mere increase of numbers. Now he no longer saw any dogs. It seemed unlikely that they had actually been killed by the rats, although the rats may very well have cleaned out many litters of puppies. Probably, the dogs had merely retreated before the swarms of rats, and were still hanging around on the outskirts, now having been driven from the city into the suburbs.

  Whether there were a billion rats or only fifty million made very little difference. There certainly were too many rats, and Ish and Em felt themselves in a state of siege. They watched all the doors carefully. Nevertheless, one rat appeared in the kitchen from some unknown quarter, and they had a mad scurry as Ish pursued it with a broom. Cornered, it leaped viciously at the broom-handle, and left teeth marks in the hard wood before he was able to crush it against the floor.

  After a few days, moreover, they began to see a kind of difference, both in the appearance and in the behavior of the rats. Apparently, the supplies of food, vast though they were, had at last begun to yield before the attack of an ever-pyramiding number of rats. The rats now appeared thinner, and they ran around even more feverishly in search of food. They began to burrow in the ground. They dug up the tulip bulbs, first of all, seeming particularly fond of them. Then they attacked the less palatable bulbs and roots. They ran along the branches of the trees, apparently eating any insects they could find or any remains of seeds or fruit. They even, at last, began to gnaw the bark of young trees, like rabbits.

  Ish parked the car as close to the house as he could now, and made a dash for it, wearing high boots. But actually the rats never made any attempt at an attack. Ish kept Princess in the house mostly, although the rats had offered her no violence either.

  Still driving about to investigate, Ish became more and more accustomed to the soft squash beneath his tires. He began to feel as if he were plastering the streets with a continuous line of crushed rats. In the angle of two walls, as he drove slowly by, a small white object caught his attention. Stopping the car and looking carefully, he saw that it was the skull of some small dog. The long teeth, still shining white, indicated that it had probably been a terrier. Apparently, the rats had cornered the dog in the angle of the walls; or else, the dog, fighting for its life, had retreated there. Whether the rats had dared attack a strong and healthy dog, Ish could not know. Perhaps it had suffered an accident or had been chewed up in a fight with another dog. Perhaps it was old or sick. But apparently, for once, the swarm of rats had been too much even for the ratter. Ish saw only a few of the larger bones; the rest had apparently either been gnawed to pieces or dragged away. In the vicinity, he saw also the skulls of several rats, indicating that the terrier had gone down fighting. He tried to imagine the scene. The swarrning gray bodies clambering all over the struggling dog, the dog unable to attack those which hung to its back. Others must have slashed at the hamstrings like wolves attacking an old bison-bull. Though the dog might kill a dozen or fifty, in the end the mad, hunger-frenzied rodents must have gnawed through the skin and tendons until the dog collapsed. Ish drove away from the spot feeling definitely sober, and deciding that they must keep an even more careful watch on Princess.

  He remembered, hopefully, that the ants had vanished almost overnight, and he kept expecting that something like that also might happen to the rats. But there was no indication of it.

  "Are the rats going to take over the world?" Em asked. "Now that men are gone, are the rats going to be next?"

  "Of course I don't know for sure," said Ish, "but I hardly think so. They've got a head-start because they know how to use the food-supplies in the city and because they breed fast. But once they get away from the city they'll have to forage on their own, and the foxes and snakes and owls are going to build up too because man is gone and because they'll have lots of rats to feed on."

  "I never thought of that!" she said. "You mean rats are kind of domestic animals because people supply them food and kill off their enemies."

  "More like parasites on man, I suppose really." And then, just, to be saying something to keep her interest, he ran on: "And speaking of parasites, of course rats have them too. Just like the ants! When anything gets too numerous it's likely to get hit by some plague—I mean—" (Something had suddenly exploded in his mind at the word.) He coughed to cover up his hesitation, and then went on, without making a point of it. "Yes, some plague is likely to hit them."

  Em, to his relief, did not seem to have noticed.

  "All we can do then," she said, "I guess, is to sit around and cheer for the rat's parasites."

  Ish did not tell her what had disturbed him. It was the realization that not just plague in the general sense, but bubonic plague was a common epidemic among rats. It was spread, he knew, by fleas, and those infected fleas readily hopped from dead rats to living people. The thought of being among the new people left in an area inhabited by millions of rats being killed off by bubonic plague was a horrible situation to contemplate.

  He began to deluge the house with DDT and spray it upon his clothing and Em's. Naturally then she became suspicious, and he had to tell her.

  She was not disturbed. Her natural courage rose superior to even the thought of plague, and perhaps there was a vein of fatalism in her too. The simplest and safest thing would have been to hurry out of the city, and get to some place—the desert, perhaps—where few rats could live.

  But each of them had already decided independently that life was not to be lived on the basis of fear. Her courage indeed was stronger than his, and the horror of the rats pressed in more closely upon him. Occasionally he even felt panic and was ready to force her into the car for flight. But always in such times her courage seemed to flow out from her and sustain him.

  As the days passed, he watched individual rats carefully to see if they seemed sickly. On the contrary, they seemed more active than ever.

  Then Em called to him one morning from the window.

  "Look, they're fighting!" He went to look, quickly, but without too much interest. Probably, he thought, it was merely whatever kind of sex-play rats indulged in. But it was not.

  He saw a large rat definitely attacking a smaller one. The small one fought back, and dodged desperately, and seemed just about to make its escape through a hole which might be too small for the larger one. Then suddenly a third and still larger rat appeared, and sprang also upon the small one. The little pool of blood spread out from the torn throat, and then the largest rat dragged the body away, the one who had made the original attack scurrying close after.

  In high boots, well gloved, carrying a stout stick in his hand, Ish made an expedition to the nearest business-center and foraged for some more food. Curiously, to him, he found very few rats in the stores, and when he investigated, he found that everything which a rat could get and eat had been completely wiped out. The stores were a great disgusting litter of torn papers, and chewed cartons and ra
t-droppings. They had even chewed the labels on the cans and bottles, so that sometimes it was difficult even to tell what was contained in them. Certainly, as yet, starvation and not disease was closing in upon the hordes. He took the news back to Em.

  Next morning they let Princess out for her daily run. (They had been allowing her out only once a day as a matter of precaution.) After a few minutes they heard her wild howling, and she came tearing back to the door with rats skirmishing all around her, and two or three actually clinging to her back. Opening the door they let her in, and necessarily admitted three or four rats along with her. Princess refired under the davenport in a flurry of howling. Deserted by the cause of the disaster, Ish and Em spent a lively quarter hour routing out the rats and killing them. They hunted the house most carefully, aided by a now partially recovered Princess, to find whether any rat was still lurking in a closet or behind the books of the bookcase. But they decided that they had killed them all. They kept Princess shut up, after that, out of necessary precaution, and they also muzzled her for fear of hydrophobia.

  By now they were quite sure that the rats were preying one upon another. Sometimes they saw a large rat pursuing a smaller rat, and sometimes it seemed as if several banded together in a pack to attack a single one. They seemed less numerous now, but that might be because they were keeping out of sight under the new conditions.

  To Ish the whole affair, in spite of a certain horror that he still held of it, came to be a most interesting study in ecology, almost a laboratory problem. The rats had first lived upon the stores of food which men had laid up for them, and these had gradually been transformed into a great reservoir of rat-flesh. Then, when the cereals and dried fruit and packaged beans were depleted, there was left—for certain individual rats at least—this other supply of food. Under such circumstances, it seemed a question whether any single rat would die of starvation, even though the rats as a species might be dying of starvation.

  "The old and sickly and weak and immature will go first," he said, "and then those that are not quite so old or sickly or weak or immature—and so on."

  "And eventually," said Em, who sometimes showed disconcerting logic, "there'll just be two great strong rats left to fight it out—like (what was it?) the Kilkenny cats?"

  Ish explained that before such a fate ensued the rats would have become so scarce that they would again have begun to forage upon other sources of food.

  When he thought more deeply, he saw that the rats were not actually destroying the species for their own individual preservation; they were really saving the species. If the rats had been sentimental and had decided that they would all starve together without indulging in cannibalism, then indeed there might have been some danger. But rats were realists, and so their racial future seemed secure from this emergency.

  Day by day, the numbers of rats became fewer, and then one morning they seemed to be gone entirely. Ish knew that there still must be many rats in the city, but what had happened was merely what would happen in the decline of any species. Under natural circumstances, the rats kept out of sight, like narrow passageways and holes and brush-filled gullies. Only when their numbers became so great that they could not all find such refuges did they spill over and inhabit the open places where they could be seen.

  Doubtless, at the end, disease may have helped, but he was never sure of this. One great advantage of the disappearance through cannibalism was that there were no bodies of rats left around. They had gone on to preserve the species into the next generation. Also, he knew, although he did not investigate, that the rats must have done a great deal toward removing the bodies of the human beings who had died in the original disaster.

  As he collected his thoughts upon the subject, he was surprised that there had been no plague of mice. The ants had come first, and then had come the rats. Between the two there should have been a rapid increase of mice, because the mice should have had almost as good an opportunity as the rats and because their breeding rate was even faster. He never learned the answer, but merely had to suppose that some control of which he knew nothing had acted to prevent the rapid increase of mice.

  Both Ish and Em took a little while to recover from the horror with which the rats had filled them. But after a while they decided that Princess had not contracted hydrophobia. They loosed her, and life became more normal, and they forgot about the constant crawling of the gray bodies.

  The fables were wrong. Not the Lion, but Man, was the King of Beasts. Throughout his reign the rule was heavy, often harsh.

  But though the cry rise up, "The Kind is dead!" it shall not go on: "Long live the King!"

  As in the old days when some conqueror died, leaving no tall son, and the captains strove together for the scepter and none proved strong enough and the realm fell apart, so it shall be again, for neither the ant nor the rat nor the dog nor the ape is wise enough above his fellows. For a little while there will be jostlings, quick rises and sudden falls; then, a quiet and a peace such as the earth has not known in twenty thousand years.

  Again her head lay in the crook of his arm, and he looked down into the dark eyes. She spoke. "Well, you'd better get busy at that book-work now. I guess it's happened."

  And then suddenly before he could say anything, he felt her tremble and she was crying. He had not thought this of her—this fear! He felt the sudden weakness of his own terror. What if she collapsed?

  "Oh, darling," he cried out. "Maybe we can still do something! There are ways. You mustn't try to go through with it!"

  "Oh, it's not that! It's not that!" she cried out, still trembling. "I lied. Not what I said, what I didn't say! But it's all the same. You're just a nice boy. You looked at my hands, and said they were nice. You never even noticed the blue in the half-moons."

  He felt the shock, and he knew that she felt the shock in him. Now everything came together in his mind—brunette complexion, dark liquid eyes, full lips, white teeth, rich voice, accepting temperament.

  Then she spoke again, scarcely in more than a whisper, "It didn't matter at first, of course. No man cares then about that. But my mother's people never had much luck in the world. Maybe when things are starting out again, it shouldn't be with them. But mostly, I guess, I think it wasn't right with you."

  Then suddenly he heard nothing more, for the whole vast farce of everything broke in upon him, and he laughed, and all he could do was to laugh and laugh more, and then he found that she, too, had relaxed and was laughing with him and holding him all the closer.

  "Oh, darling," he said, "everything is smashed and New York lies empty from Spuyten Duyvil to the Battery, and there's no government in Washington. The senators and the judges and the governors are all dead and rotten, and the Jew-baiters and the Negro-baiters along with them. We're just two poor people, picking at the leavings of civilization for our lives, not knowing whether it's to be the ants or the rats or something else will get us. Maybe a thousand years from now people can afford the luxury of wondering and worrying about that kind of thing again. But I doubt it. And now there are just the two of us here, or maybe three, now."

  He kissed her while she still was weeping quietly. And he knew that for once he had seen more clearly and more deeply and been stronger than she.

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  On the day after she had told him, he drove to the University campus, and parked in front of the Library. He had never entered it since the Great Disaster, although he had often gone to the city library for books. The great building stood undisturbed. Its surrounding bushes and trees had not, in the few months, grown appreciably taller. The drain pipes all seemed to be functioning perfectly, and no stain of water showed on the white granite walls. There was only a general impression of dirt and litter and disuse.

  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.