George Stewart - Earth Abides

San Lupo Drive was high enough on the slope of the hills to be proud of its view. As he sat there looking out, everything seemed just about the same. Apparently the processes behind the production of electricity must be almost completely automatic. In the hydro-electric plants the flow of water was still keeping the generators in motion. Moreover, when things had started to go to pieces, someone must have ordered that the street-lights be left turned on. Now he saw beneath him all the intricate pattern of the lights in the East Bay cities, and beyond that the yellow chains of lights on the Bay Bridge, and still farther through the faint evening mist, the glow of the San Francisco lights and the fainter chains on the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the traffic lights were still working, changing from green to red. High upon the bridge-towers the flashes silently sent their warnings to airplanes which would no longer ever be flying. (Far to the south, however, somewhere in Oakland, there was one wholly black section. There, some switch must have failed, or some fuse have burned out.) Even the advertising signs, some of them at least, had been left burning. Pathetically, they flashed out their call to buy, though no longer were there any customers left or any salesmen. One great sign in particular, its lower part hidden behind a near-by building, still sent out its message Drink although he could not see what he was thus commanded to drink.

He watched it, half-fascinated. Drink —blackness. Drink —blackness. Drink. “Well, why not?” he thought, and going in, he came out again with a bottle of his father’s brandy.

Yet the brandy had little bite, and brought no satisfaction.

“In probably not the type,” he thought, “to drink myself to death.” He found himself really more interested in watching the sign that still flashed there. Drink —blackness. Drink —blackness. Drink . How long would the lights burn? What would make them go out in the end? What else would continue? What was going to happen to all that man had built up through the centuries and now had left behind him?

“I suppose,” he thought again, “I ought to be considering suicide. No, too soon. I am alive, and so others probably are alive. We are just like gas molecules in a near-vacuum, circulating around, one unable to make contact with the other.”

Again a kind of dullness verging on despair slowly came settling upon him. What if he did live on, eating as a scavenger at all those great supplies of food which were piled up in every storeroom? What if he could live well and even if he could draw together a few other survivors? What would it all amount to? It would be different if one could pick half a dozen friends for fellow-survivors, but this way they would probably be dull and stupid people, or even vicious ones. He looked out and saw still the great sign flashing far off. Drink —blackness. Drink —blackness. Drink. And again he wondered how long it would keep flashing while there were no more vending-machines or salesmen offering whatever it was one was to drink, and from that he thought back to some of the other things he had seen that day, wondering what would happen to the coyote that he had seen loping along the highway, and what would happen to the cattle and horses standing by the watering-trough beneath the slowly revolving spokes of the windmill. How long indeed would the windmill still revolve and pump its water from the depths of the earth?

Then suddenly he gave a quick start, and he realized that he had again a will to live! At least, if he could be no more a participant, he would be a spectator, and a spectator trained to observe what was happening. Even though the curtain had been rung down on man, here was the opening of the greatest of all dramas for a student such as he. During thousands of years man had impressed himself upon the world. Now man was gone, certainly for a while, perhaps forever. Even if some survivors were left, they would be a long time in again obtaining supremacy. What would happen to the world and its creatures without man? That he was left to see!

Yet, after he was in bed, no sleep came to him. As the chilly arms of the summer fog lapped around the house in the darkness, he felt first loneliness, and then fear, and finally panic. He rose from his bed. Wrapping himself in a bathrobe, he sat before the radio, frantically searching the bands. But he heard only, far-off, the rasp and crackle of static, and there was no one.

With a sudden thought he tried the telephone. As he lifted the receiver, he heard the low hum of the clear wire. He dialed desperately a number-any number! On some distant house he heard the telephone ring, ring again. He waited, thinking of the sound echoing through empty rooms. After it had rung ten times, he hung up. He tried a second number, and a third and then no others.

Working with a new thought, he rigged up a light with a reflector, and standing on the front porch, high above the city, he sent the flashes into the night— short-short-short, long-long-long, short-short-short —the old call of the SOS, which had gone out so often from despairing men. But there was no reply from all the expanse of the city. After a while he realized that with all the street-lights still burning there was too much illumination; his own petty flashing would hardly be noticeable.

So he went into the house again. The foggy night sent a chill into him. He turned on the thermostat, and in a moment he heard the whir of the oil-burner. With electricity still working and a full tank of fuel-oil there was no trouble. He sat, and after a while turned out the lights in the house, feeling in some strange way that they were too conspicuous. He let the fog and the darkness wrap him round and conceal him. Still he felt the fear of loneliness, and as he sat there, he laid the hammer close at hand, ready for grasping if there should be need.

A horrible cry broke the darkness! He trembled violently, and then realized that it was only the call of a mating cat, the sort of sound which in any night one might have heard now and then, even on decorous San Lupo Drive. The caterwauling rose to a climax, and then the growl of a charging dog cut across it, and the night was silent again.

For them the world of twenty thousand years was overthrown. In the kennels, swollen-tongued, they lay dead of thirst—pointers, collies, poodles, toy pekinese, tall hounds. The luckier ones, not confined, wandered loose through city and countryside; drinking at the streams, at the fountains, at the gold-fish ponds; hunting here and there for what they might find for eating—scurrying after a hen, picking up a squirrel in the park. And gradually, the pangs of hunger breaking down the long centuries of civilization, they drew closer to where the unburied corpses lay.

Now no longer would Best-of-Breed go for stance, and shape of head, and markings. Now Champion Golden Lad of Piedmont IV no longer outranked the worst mongrel of the alley. The prize, which was life itself, would go to the one of keenest brain, staunchest limb, and strongest jaw, who could best shape himself to meet the new ways and who in the old competition of the wilderness could win the means of life.

Peaches, the honey-colored spaniel, sat disconsolate, growing weaker with hunger, too stupid to live by craft, too short-legged to live by pursuit of prey… Spot, the children’s mongrel pet, had the luck to find a liner of kittens and kill them, not for fun but for food…. Ned, the wire-haired terrier, who had always enjoyed being on his own and was by nature a tramp, managed to get along fairly well…. Bridget, the red setter, shivered and trembled, and now and then howled faintly with a howl that was scarcely more than a moan; her gentle spirit found no will to live in a world without master or mistress to love.