The End of the World

by Donald A. Wollheim

  Followed the usual short interval of silence; then came the voice, fairly brittle with freezing terror.

  “Why,” it screamed, “do you keep me here; the last living man upon a dying planet ? The world is festering with dead things. Let me be dead with them.” “Mortimer,” I interrupted, “this is awful! Hasn’t your experiment gone far enough?”

  He pushed back his chair and rose. “Yes,” he said, a bit shakily, I thought. “For the present, at least. Come; I will awaken Williams.”

  I followed him down the hall, and was close upon his heels, when he flung open the door of the lead-lined room, and stepped inside. Our cries of surprised alarm were simultaneous.

  In the chair where we had left him sat Williams; but physically he was a different man. He had shrunken several inches in stature, while his head appeared to have grown larger, with the forehead almost bulbous in aspect. His fingers were extremely long and sensitive, but suggestive of great strength. His frame was thin to emaciation.

  “Good Heavens!” I gasped. “What has happened?” “It is an extreme case of mental influence upon matter,” answered Mortimer, bending over the hypnotized man. “You remember how young Bennet’s features took on the characteristics of a Hun? A similar thing, but in a much intenser degree, has happened to Williams. He has become a man of the future physically as well as mentally.”

  “Good Lord!” I cried. “Waken him at once! This is horrible.”

  “To be frank with you,” said Mortimer gravely, “I am afraid to. He has been in this state much longer than I realized. To waken him too suddenly would be dangerous. It might even prove fatal.”

  For a moment he seemed lost in thought. Then he removed the ear phones from Williams’ head, and addressed him. “Sleep,” he commanded. “Sleep soundly and naturally. When you have rested sufficiently, you will awaken and be your normal self.”

  Shortly after this, I left Mortimer, and, although it was my day off duty, went to my hospital. How good my commonplace tonsil cases seemed after the unholy things I had just experienced! I surprised the resident physician almost into a state of coma by putting in the remainder of the day in the hardest work possible in the free clinic; and finally went home, tired in mind and body.

  I turned in early for what I deemed a well-earned rest, and fell asleep instantly. The next thing of which I was conscious was the insistent ringing of the telephone bell beside my bed.

  “Hello,” I cried sleepily, taking down the receiver. “Dr. Claybridge speaking.”

  “Claybridge, this is Mortimer,” came the almost hysterical response. “For God’s sake, come over to the laboratory at once!”

  “What has happened?” I demanded, instantly wide awake. It would take something unusual to wring such excitement from the unemotional Mortimer.

  “It's Williams,” he answered. “I can’t bring him back. He got awake about an hour ago, and still believes that he is living in the future. Physically, he is the same as he was when last you saw him this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be over at once,” I fairly shouted, and slammed the receiver down upon its hook. As I scrambled into my clothes, I glanced at the clock. Two fifteen. In half an hour I could reach the laboratory. What would I find waiting for me?

  Mortimer was in the lead room with Williams when I arrived.

  “Claybridge,” he said, “I need someone else’s opinion in this case. Look at him, and tell me what you think.”

  Williams still occupied the chair in the middle of the room. His eyes were wide open, but it was plain that he saw neither Mortimer nor me. Even when I bent over him and touched him, he gave no sign of being conscious of my presence.

  “He looks as if he were suffering from some sort of catalepsy,” I said, “yet his temperature and pulse are almost normal. I should say that he is still partially in a state of hypnosis.”

  “Then it is self-hypnosis,” said Mortimer, “for I have entirely withdrawn my influence.”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested lightly, “you have transported him irretrievably into the future.”

  “That,” Mortimer replied, “is precisely what I fear has happened.”

  I stared at him dumbly.

  “The only way out,” he went on, “is to rehypnotize him, and finish the experiment. At its conclusion, he may return to his natural state.”

  I could not help thinking that there were certain things which it was forbidden man to know; and that Mortimer, having wantonly blundered into them, was now being made to pay the penalty. I watched him as he worked over poor Williams, straining all his energies to induce a state of hypnotic sleep. At last the glassy eyes before him closed, and his subject slept. With hands that trembled visibly, he adjusted the earphones, and we went back to the laboratory.

  “Williams,” Mortimer called into his transmitter, “do you hear me ?”

  “I hear you,” replied the odiously familiar voice. “You are now living in the fourth day. What do you see?”

  “I see reptiles; great lizards that walk upon their hind legs, and birds with tiny heads and bats’ wings, that build nests in the ruins of the deserted cities.”

  “Dinosaurs and pterodactyles!” I gasped involuntarily. “A second age of reptiles!”

  “The Polar caps have retreated until there is but a small area of ice about each of the poles,” continued the voice. “There are no longer any seasons; only a continuous reign of heat. The torrid zone has become uninhabitable even by the reptiles. The sea there boils. Great monsters writhe in their death agonies upon its surface. Even the northern waters are becoming heated.

  “All the land is covered with rank vegetation upon which the reptiles feed. The air is fetid with it.” Mortimer interrupted: “Describe the fifth day.”

  After the customary interval, the voice replied. There was a sticky quality about it that reminded me of the sucking of mud at some object struggling in it.

  “The reptiles are gone,” it said. “I alone live upon this expiring world. Even the plant life has turned yellow and withered. The volcanoes are in terrific action. The mountains are becoming level, and soon all will be one vast plain. A thick, green slime is gathering upon the face of the waters; so that it is difficult to tell where the land with its rotting vegetation ends and the sea begins. The sky is saffron in color, like a plate of hot brass. At night a blood red moon swims drunkenly in a black sky.

  “Something is happening to gravitation. For a long time I had suspected it. Today I tested it by throwing a stone into the air. I was carried several feet above the ground by the force of my action. It took the stone nearly twenty minutes to return to earth. It fell slowly, and at an angle!”

  “An angle!” cried Mortimer.

  “Yes. It was barely perceptible, but it was there. The earth’s movement is slowing. Days and nights have more than doubled in length.”

  “What is the condition of the atmosphere?”

  “A trifle rarefied, but not sufficiently so to make breathing difficult. This seems strange to me.”

  “That,” said Mortimer to me, “is because his body is here in the twentieth century, where there is plenty of air. The air at the stage of the earth’s career where his mind is would be too rare to support organic life. Even now the mental influence is so strong that he believes the density of the atmosphere to be decreasing.” “Recently,” Williams’ voice went on, “the star Vega has taken Polaris’ place as centre of the universe. Many of the old stars have disappeared, while new ones have taken their places. I have a suspicion that our solar system is either fallingor traveling in a new direction through space.” “Listen to me, Williams.” Mortimer’s voice sounded dry and cracked, and his forehead was besprinkled with great gouts of sweat. “It is the sixth, the last day. What do you see?”

  “I see a barren plain of grey rock. The world is in perpetual twilight because the mists that rise from the sea obscure the sun. Heaps of brown bones dot the plain near the mounds that once were cities. The dykes around Manhattan long ago crumbled
away; but there is no longer any need for them even were men here, for the sea is rapidly drying up. The atmosphere is becoming exceedingly rarefied. I can hardly breathe. . . .

  “Gravitation is giving out more rapidly. When I stand erect. I sway as though drunk. Last night the curtains of mist parted for a time, and I saw the moon fly off into space.

  “Great lightnings play about the earth, but there is no thunder. The silence all around is plummetless. I keep speaking aloud and striking one object against another to relieve the strain on my eardrums. . . .

  “Great cracks are beginning to appear in the ground, from which smoke and molten lava issue. I have fled to Manhattan in order that the skeletons of the tall buildings may hide them from my sight.

  “Small objects have begun to move of their own volition. I am afraid to walk, as each step hurls me off my balance. The heat is awful. I cannot breathe.”

  There was a short interval, that came as a relief to our tightly screwed nerves. The tension to which the experiment had pitched us was terrific; yet I, for one, could no more have torn myself away than I could have passed into the fourth dimension.

  Suddenly the voice cut the air like a knife!

  “The buildings!” it shrieked. “They are swaying! They are leaning toward each other! They are crumbling, disintegrating; and the crumbs are flying outward instead of falling! Tiny particles are being thrown off by everything around me. Oh, the heat! There is no air!”

  Followed a hideous gurgling; then:

  “The earth is dissolving beneath my feet! It is the end. Creation is returning to its original atoms! Oh, my God!” There was a sickening scream that rapidly grew fainter with the effect of fading on radio.

  “Williams!” shouted Mortimer. “What happened?”

  There was no answer.

  “Williams! Williams!” Mortimer was on his feet, fairly shrieking into the instrument. “Do you hear me ?”

  The only response was utter silence.

  Mortimer clutched me by the arm, and dragged me with him from the laboratory and down the hall.

  “Is—is he dead?” I choked as we ran.

  Mortimer did not answer. His breath was coming in quick, short gasps that would have made speech impossible even had he heard me.

  At the door of the lead room he stopped and fumbled with his keys. From beyond we could hear no sound. Twice Mortimer, in his nervousness and hurry, dropped the key and had to grope for it; but at last he got it turned in the lock, and flung the door open.

  In our haste, we collided with each other as we hurtled into the room. Then as one man we stopped dead in our tracks. The room was empty!

  “Where—” I began incredulously. “He couldn’t have gotten out! Could he?”

  “No,” Mortimer answered hoarsely.

  We advanced farther into the room, peering into every crack and corner. From the back of the chair, suspended by their cord, hung the earphones; while dangling from the chair’s seat to the floor were the tattered and partially charred remains of what seemed to have been at one time a suit of men’s clothing. At sight of these, Mortimer’s face went white. In his eyes was a look of dawning comprehension and horror.

  “What does it mean?” I demanded.

  For answer, he pointed a palsied finger.

  As I looked, the first beam of morning sunlight slipped through the skylight above us, and fell obliquely to the floor. In its golden shaft, directly above the chair where Williams had sat, a myriad of infinitesimal atoms were dancing.

  In the World's Dusk

  Edmond Hamilton

  A gripping tale of the last survivor of the human race and

  his attempts to repopulate the world

  The city Zor reared its somber towers and minarets of black marble into the ruddy sunset, a great mass of climbing spires circumvallated by a high black wall. Twelve gates of massive brass opened in that wall, and outside it there lay the white salt desert that now covered the whole of Earth. A cruel, glaring plain that stretched eye-achingly to the horizons, its monotony was broken by no hill or valley or sea. Long ago the last seas had dried up and disappeared, and long ago the ages of geological gradation had smoothed mountain and hill and valley into a featureless blank.

  As the sun sank lower, it struck a shaft of red light across the city Zor into a great hall in the topmost spire. The crimson rays cut through the shadowy gloom of the dim, huge room and bathed the sitting figure of Galos Gann.

  Brooding in the ruddy glow, Galos Gann looked out across the desert to the sinking sun, and said, “It is another day. The end comes soon.”

  Chin in hand he brooded, and the sun sank, and the shadows in the great hall deepened and darkened about him. Out in the dusking sky blossomed the stars, and they peered down through the portico like taunting white eyes at him. And it seemed to him that he heard their thin, silvery star-voices cry mockingly across the sky to each other, “The end comes soon to the race of Galos Gann.”

  For Galos Gann was the last man of all men. Sitting alone in his darksome hall high in somber Zor, he knew that nowhere around the desert globe did there move another human shape nor echo another human voice. He was that one about whom during anticipatory ages a fearful, foreboding fascination had clung—the final survivor. He tasted a loneliness no other man had ever known, for it was his to brood upon all the marching millions of men who had gone before him and who were now no more. He could look back across the millioned millions of years to the tumultuous youth of Earth in whose warm seas had spawned the first protoplasmic life which, under the potent influences of cosmic radiation, had evolved through more and more complex animal forms into the culminating form of man. He could mark how man had risen through primeval savagery to world civilization that had finally given men mighty powers and had lengthened their life-span to centuries. And he could mark too how the grim, grinding mechanism of natural forces had in the end brought doom to the fair cities of that golden age.

  Steadily, silently, inexorably, through the ages the hydrosphere or water envelope of Earth had slowly dwindled, due to the loss of its particles into space from molecular dispersion. The seas had dried up as the millions of years had passed, and salt deserts had crept across the world. And men had seen the end close at hand for their race, and because they saw it they ceased to bring forth children.

  They were weary of the endless, hopeless struggle, and they would not listen to the pleadings of Galos Gann, their greatest scientist, who alone among them yearned to keep the dying race alive. And so in their weariness the last generation of them had passed away, and in the world was left no living man but the unyielding Galos Gann.

  In his dark hall high in Zor, Galos Gann sat huddled in his robes brooding upon these things, his withered face and black, living eyes unchanging. Then at last he stood erect. He strode with his robes swirling about him onto the balcony outside, and in the darkness he looked up at the mocking white eyes of the stars.

  He said, “You think that you look down on the last of men, that all the glories of my race are a story that is told and ended, but you are wrong. I am Galos Gann, the greatest man of all the men that have lived on Earth. And it is my unconquerable will that my race shall not die but shall live on to greater glories.”

  The white stars were silent, wheeling with cynical imperturbability over the deserts beyond night-shrouded Zor.

  And Galos Gann raised his hand toward Rigel and Canopus and Achernar in a gesture pregnant with defiance and menace.

  “Somewhere and somehow I will find means to keep the race of man living on!” he cried to them. “Yes, and the day will come when our seed will yoke you and all your worlds in submissive harness to man!”

  Then Galos Gann, filled with that determination, came to a great resolve and went to his laboratories and procured certain instruments and cryptic mechanisms. Holding them inside his robes, he went down from the tower and walked through the dark streets of the city Zor.

  Very small and alone he seemed as he wended throu
gh the dim starlight and glooming shadows of the mighty city’s ways, yet proudly he stalked; for unconquerable defiance to fate flamed in his heart and vitalized his brain with unshakable resolve.

  He came to the low, squat structure that he sought, and its door opened with a sighing sound as he approached. He entered, and there in a small dark room was a stair down which he went. The coils of that spiral stair dropped into a great subterranean hall of black marble illuminated by a feeble blue light that had no visible source.

  When Galos Gann stepped at last on its tessellated tile floor, he stood looking along the oblong hall. Upon its far-stretching walls were a hundred high square panels that bore in painted pictures the story of mankind. The first of those panels showed the primal protoplasmic life from which man had descended, and the last of the panels displayed this very subterranean chamber. For in crypts set into the floor of this hall there lay the dead people of the city Zor who had been the last generation of mankind. There was one last empty crypt that waited for Galos Gann when he should lie down in it to die, and since this was the last chapter of mankind’s story, it had been pictured in the last panel.

  But Galos Gann disregarded the painted walls and strode along the hall, opening the crypts in the floor one after another. He worked on until at last before him lay the scores of dead men and women, their bodies perfectly preserved so that they seemed sleeping.

  Galos Gann said to them, “It is my thought that even you who are not now living can mayhap be used to keep mankind from perishing. It seems an ill thing to disturb you in the peace of death. But nowhere else save in death can I find those I must have to perpetuate mankind.”

  Then Galos Gann began to work upon the bodies of the dead, summoning up from his mighty resolution superhuman scientific powers which even he had hitherto never possessed.

  By supreme chemical achievement he synthesized new blood with which he filled the wasted veins of the bodies. And by powerful electric stimulants and glandular injections he set their hearts to beating convulsively, and then regularly. And as their hearts pumped the new blood through their bodies to their perfectly preserved brains, the dead regained slow consciousness and staggered upright and looked dazedly at one another and at the watching Galos Gann.