Shards of Space

by Robert Sheckley

  He felt the demons of hope and desire stir within him. Surely it wouldn’t be too unwise now to consider the possibility of meeting people? Yes, too unwise. The unleashed demons, once frustrated, turned against you, as they had turned against the man at the base of the sandstone cliff. Hope and desire were his most dangerous enemies. He didn’t dare release the genies from the corked bottle deep in his mind.

  He walked quickly along the trail, certain, from the increasing freshness of the prints, that he was moving faster than the presumed group of people. His geiger clucked contentedly to itself, satisfied with the low radiation level. The people ahead of him—if they were still alive—must be picking their way through with a geiger.

  Survival had been so simple, really; but so few had managed it.

  Miller had known the end was in sight when the Chinese communists launched their large-scale amphibious assault against Formosa. At the beginning it had looked like a local war, as local as the angry little war being fought in Kuwait, and the U.N. police action on the Turkish-Bulgarian border.

  But it was one war too many. Treaties, like chains, dragged country after country into the conflict. No nuclear weapons had been employed as yet, but their use was imminent.

  Nugent Miller, associate professor of ancient history at Laurelville College in Tennessee, read the handwriting on the wall and began to set up caches of food in the Laurelville Caverns. He was thirty-eight at the time, and an ardent, life-long pacifist. When the DEW line radar sent back word of unidentified missiles from the north, Miller was already packed and ready. He went at once to the Laurelville Caverns, one of whose mouths was less than a mile from the college. He was surprised when only fifty or so students and faculty joined him. Surely the warning was clear enough.

  The bombs fell, and drove the group deeper into the labyrinth of caves and tunnels. After a week, the bombs stopped. The survivors started to the surface.

  Miller checked the radiation at the cave mouth and found it lethal. They couldn’t leave. Food had already run out, and radioactive debris was filtering down, forcing them deeper into the caverns.

  By the fourth week, thirty-eight people had starved to death. The radiation at the entrances was still too high to permit leaving. Miller decided to go into the lower levels and try to locate a still-untouched food cache. Three others accompanied them. The rest decided to risk the radiation and break out.

  Miller and his friends climbed deep into the darkness of the caverns. They were very weak, and not one of them was a trained speleologist. Two were killed in a rock fall. Miller and one man clung stubbornly to life. They couldn’t locate the food cache; but they did find a stream of black water, and saw the luminous dots of fish in the water, blind fish who lived all their lives in the caves. They fished, and caught nothing. It was several days before Miller was able to block up a branch of the stream, trap several fish and land them. By then, his friend was dead.

  Miller lived by the stream and worked out ways of catching fish. He kept time as best he could, and climbed painfully to the surface once a week to check the radiation. It took twelve weeks for it to drop enough to allow him to leave.

  He never saw any of the others from the cave, although he did find a few of their bodies.

  Outside, he tried to locate people, anywhere. But hard radiation had caught most of the survivors of the hydrogen bombings.

  Very few had been equipped with food stores or geiger counters. All, or nearly all, had gone out in search of food before the radiation had dropped to a tolerable level. Doubtless there were some survivors; but where, where?

  For several months he had looked. Then he stopped looking. He assumed there were some people left in parts of Africa and Asia, in South America. He would never see them. Perhaps he would find a few on the North American continent some day. Perhaps not. In the meantime, he would go on living.

  He lived, trekking south in the fall and returning north in the spring, a quiet man who had never wanted war, who hated killing with a passion that many had simulated but few had felt. He was a man who clung to many of his former habits as though the bombs had never fallen. He read books when he could find them, and apologetically collected paintings and sculptures, stealing them from the ghostly caretakers of the empty art galleries.

  He was a man who, long before the Second World War, had promised himself never to kill a fellow human; and who now, after the Third World War, saw no reason to change that resolve. He was an amiable, boyish college type who had survived the death of the fittest and who, after the agonized destruction of a world, was still filled with high resolves and impeccable ideals. He was a man whom circumstance had forced to repress desire and abandon hope.

  The footprints led through sparse underbrush, around a moss-covered granite boulder. He heard sounds.

  “A gust of wind,” he told himself.

  He came around the boulder and stopped. In front of him, only a few yards away, were five people. To his starved eyes they looked like a crowd, an army, a multitude. They were camped around a small fire. It took him several seconds to assimilate this much information.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” one of them said.

  He adjusted. He took in the scene again. Five people, all of them women. Five women, dressed in ragged jeans and denim jackets, with rucksacks on the ground beside them, with crude spears propped up against the rucksacks.

  “Who are you?” one of the women asked. She was the oldest, perhaps fifty years old. She was a short, stocky, strongly built woman with a square face and iron-gray hair, with strongly muscled arms and a brown, sinewy neck, with pince-nez—one lens cracked—perched incongruously on her large nose.

  “Can’t you talk?” the woman asked sharply.

  “Yes, I can talk,” Miller said. “Sorry. I was just surprised. You’re the first women I’ve seen since the bombing.”

  “The first women?” she asked sharply. “Have you seen men?”

  “Only dead ones,” Miller said. He turned from her and looked at the other four. They were young, somewhere in their twenties, and Miller thought them inexpressibly beautiful. Undoubtedly they were different and distinct from each other-, but to Miller, coming upon them as he would encounter an unknown race, they were alike in their alienness. Four comely animals, golden-skinned and long-limbed, with the great calm eyes of panthers.

  “So you’re the only man around,” the older woman said. “Well, that won’t constitute any problem.”

  The girls didn’t speak. They were staring at him. Miller began to feel uncomfortable and self-conscious. He was considering the responsibilities of the situation, and the thoughts excited yet disturbed him.

  “We might as well get introductions over with,” the older woman said in her firm, matter-of-fact voice. “My name is Miss Denis.”

  Miller waited, but Miss Denis didn’t introduce the girls. He said, “My name is Nugent Miller.”

  “Well, Mr. Miller, you’re the first person we’ve encountered. Our story is really very simple. When I heard the alarms, I took the girls to the sub-basement of our school, The Charleton-Vaness School for Young Ladies, that is. I am—I was—an instructor in etiquette.”

  A colleague, Miller thought wryly.

  “Naturally,” Miss Denis went on, “I had equipped the shelter with supplies, as any prudent person should have done. But as few did. I had several geiger counters, in whose use I had familiarized myself. Some foolish people insisted upon leaving the shelter immediately after the bombs had stopped falling. I succeeded in impressing on these girls the dangers of radiation. It seeped down. We were forced to abandon the sub-basement and take refuge in the sewer system further down.”

  “We ate rats,” one the of girls said.

  “That’s right, Suzie,” Miss Denis said. “We ate rats and were very happy to get them. When the radiation subsided to a safe level, we came out. We have been doing nicely ever since.”

  The girls nodded in agreement. They were still watching Miller with their panthe
r eyes. And Miller was watching them. He had fallen in love with all of them simultaneously and quite genuinely, particularly with Suzie because she had a name. But he hadn’t fallen in love with the squat, strong-armed, matter-of-fact Miss Denis.

  “My own experiences were quite similar,” Miller said. “I went into the Laurelville Caverns. I didn’t find any rats to eat, but I did consume some very odd-looking fish. I suppose the next thing is, what do we do?”

  “Is it?” Miss Denis asked.

  “I should think so. We survivors should stick together for mutual support and assistance. Shall we go to your camp or mine? I don’t know how much foraging you’ve done. I’ve done quite a bit. Assembled a library and a few paintings, and a good stock of food.”

  “No,” Miss Denis said.

  “Well, if you insist upon your camp—”

  “I do indeed. Our camp. And alone. That means without you, Mr. Miller.”

  Miller could hardly believe it. He looked at the girls. They looked back at him warily, their faces unreadable.

  “Now listen,” Miller said, “we need mutual support and assistance—”

  “By which you mean the lasciviousness of the male,” Miss Denis said.

  “I didn’t mean anything of the sort,” Miller said. “If you insist upon talking about that now, I suppose we can just let nature take its course.”

  “Nature has taken its course,” Miss Denis said. “Its only true course. We are five women. We have done very well together over the last months. Haven’t we, girls?”

  The girls nodded, but their eyes were still fixed upon Miller.

  “We have no need,” Miss Denis said, “of you or any other man. No need and no desire.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Miller said, although he was beginning to.

  “Men are responsible for all this,” Miss Denis said. She waved her thick hand in an all-encompassing gesture. “Men ran the government, men were the soldiers and the nuclear scientists, men started the war that has wiped out most of the human race. Even before the bombings I always warned my girls to beware of men. A lot of drivel was talked about equality of the sexes-, in practice, woman was still man’s chattel and his plaything. But when times were normal I couldn’t explain my theories fully. The school would not have allowed it.”

  “I can understand that,” Miller said.

  “Now times are no longer normal. You men have messed things up once and for all, and you’re not going to get another chance. Not if I have anything I can do about it.”

  “Maybe the girls don’t feel that way,” Miller said.

  “I am educating the girls,” Miss Denis said. “It’s a slow process, but we have plenty of time. And I believe my lessons have begun to take hold. We’ve had a good time together, haven’t we, girls?”

  “Yes, Miss Denis,” the girls chorused.

  “And we don’t need this man around the premises, do we?”

  “No, Miss Denis.”

  “You see?”

  “Now just a minute,” Miller said. “I think you’re laboring under a misapprehension. Some men have been responsible for wars. Not all men. I for example, was an ardent pacifist at a time when it was distinctly uncomfortable to be one. In the Second World War, I served in an ambulance unit. I have never taken a human life, and I never intend to.”

  “So you’re a coward as well as a man,” Miss Denis said.

  “I do not consider myself a coward,” Miller said. “I have been a conscientious objector out of conviction, not cowardice. My ambulance unit operated on the front lines, like soldiers, except that we were not armed. I have been under fire. I have been wounded, though not badly.”

  “How utterly heroic,” Miss Denis said, and the girls laughed.

  “I’m not trying to parade my accomplishments before you,” Miller said. “I’m simply trying to make you see what sort of a man I am. Men differ, you know.”

  “They’re all the same,” Miss Denis said. “All of them. Dirty, hairy, smelly, promiscuous beasts who start wars and kill women and children. Don’t try to tell me about men.”

  “I must,” Miller said. “You don’t know much about them. Tell me, what did you do to stop the wars you hate so much?”

  “What can any woman do?” Miss Denis asked. “The captives must follow the conquerors.”

  “Nonsense,” Miller said. “There was plenty women could have done if they’d really wanted to stop wars. Have you ever read Lysistrata? Aristophanes tells how the women of Greece refused to cohabit with their husbands until they stopped fighting. It makes the point—”

  “I have read the play,” Miss Denis said. “It was hardly a practical solution.”

  “Why not’ Wasn’t it because too many of you women loved war and worshipped soldiers? You could have stopped it if you’d wanted to. But you didn’t! Nietzche said—”

  “Don’t stand there quoting your damned men authors at me,” Miss Denis said. “Your logic is specious. The fact is, you men had the power and you abused it. You treated women as playthings, and you used the Earth as one big battleground until you warred yourself right out of existence. You’re finished now, washed up, over. You’re an extinct species. You stand there with your funny hairy face and you look as strange as a dinosaur or an auk. Go off and die somewhere, Miller. We women are going to have our chance now.”

  “You may find breeding difficult,” Miller said.

  “But not impossible. I kept in very close touch with the latest work being done in parthenogenetic research. Reproduction without the male is distinctly possible.”

  “Perhaps it is,” Miller said. “But you aren’t a trained scientist. Even if you were, you don’t have the equipment.”

  “But I do know the places where the research was carried out,” Miss Denis said. “We may find one of the women scientists still alive. Our chance is even better of finding lab equipment intact. With that, plus my own knowledge of the subject, I think I can lick the problem.”

  “You’ll never do it,” Miller said.

  “I think I will. But even if I can’t, I’d rather see the race die out than let men take over again.”

  She was growing red-faced and angry. Miller said quietly, “I can well understand that you have grievances against men. Some men. But surely we can talk this through and reach some mutually satisfactory—”

  “No! We’ve done all the talking we’re going to do! Get out of here!”

  “I’m not going,” Miller said.

  Miss Denis moved quickly to the pile of weapons and picked up a spear.

  “Girls,” she said, “get ready.”

  The girls were still fascinated with Miller. They hesitated a moment. Then, obedient to Miss Denis’ strong personality, they took handfuls of rocks from their knapsacks. They were excited now. They watched Miss Denis expectantly.

  “Are you leaving?” she asked.

  “No!”

  “Stone him!”

  A hail of rocks flew through the air. Miller turned away to shield his geiger counter, and felt stones pelt him in the back and legs. He could hardly believe it was happening. These girls whom he loved—and especially Suzie—wouldn’t be stoning him. They would stop in a moment, they would be ashamed.

  But the rocks flew, and one caught him on the top of the head, half-stunning him. He shook his head, turned and ran forward, still holding the geiger counter. Miss Denis tried clumsily to impale him on her spear. He avoided the thrust and grabbed the spear with his left hand. They wrestled for it.

  One-handed, he almost pulled it away, but Miss Denis, strong and squat as a bull, was too much for him. She wrenched the spear free and hit him over the head with the knobbed end. And the girls cheered!

  Miller was on his knees now, and the rocks were still raining around him. A spear-point prodded him in the side. He rolled away from it and regained his footing.

  “Kill him!” Miss Denis screamed. “Kill that dirty man!”

  The girls, their faces flushed with excit
ement, advanced on him. Miller felt a spear graze his side. He turned and ran.

  He didn’t know how long he ran through the green twilight of the forest. At last he couldn’t run anymore. He drew his pocket knife and turned; but no one was following him.

  Miller lay down on the cool ground and tried to think. That woman, that Miss Denis, must be crazy. An old man-hater, a hard-bitten Lesbian gone stark raving mad. And the girls? He was sure they hadn’t wanted to hurt him. Perhaps they loved him. But they were under the influence of the old bitch.

  He checked and found that he hadn’t lost his geiger counter or his glasses in the flight. He was grateful. Without them, it would be difficult to find his own camp.

  He had always known that people were a little crazy. He should have realized that the survivors of an atomic holocaust would be even crazier than usual. That insane Miss Denis. Imagine man being an extinct species!

  With a shock, Miller found that he could imagine it. After all, how many men survived? How many women? What number of those survivors had geigers, what number would be able to overcome the hazards that lay ahead?

  Still, that didn’t affect him. The human race wasn’t his responsibility. He had been a fool to release the demons of hope and desire. Now he would have to conquer them all over again. But he could do it. He would live the rest of his life among his books and paintings. Perhaps he would be the last truly civilized man.

  Civilized...Miller shuddered and remembered the face of Suzie and the others, their panther eyes watching. Too bad he hadn’t been able to effect some sort of compromise with Miss Denis. But under the circumstances there was nothing he could do—

  Except abandon every principle he had ever lived by.

  Could he do it? He looked at the knife in his hand and shuddered under the weight of the demons on his shoulders. His hand tightened around the hilt.

  A moment later, the world’s last civilized man was dead. With him perished the world’s last pacifist and conscientious objector, the final art collector and ultimate bibliophile.