Earth Abides

Ish realized that his feet and even his lower legs were cold, or perhaps they had really lost all feeling in a kind of cold that might be called deathly. He knew then, his mind again becoming clearer, that he had not been merely passing through one of his lapses of old age but that he must actually have suffered some kind of seizure—a stroke or a heart attack—and that the others were frightened.

He saw Jack moving his lips as if he were talking, and yet making no noise. A strange thing to do! The lips moved more and more vigorously, as if Jack were shouting. Then Ish realized that he himself was not hearing. This thought did not pain him, but rather pleased him, because he knew that he would now not have the world press in upon him, as it must always upon a man who can hear.

The others began talking, that is, moving their lips in the same way, and Ish saw that they were trying definitely, even desperately, to tell him something. He shook his head, puzzled. Then he tried to tell them that he could not hear, but he realized that he did not have control over his speech. This disturbed him, for he realized that it would be a nuisance to live in the world when he could not communicate by talking and when nobody could understand what he wrote.

The young men had been very respectful and friendly all day. But now they became irritated. They gesticulated, and Ish could see they were insistent that he should do something, and were even frightened that he might not be able to do it. They made gestures toward the hammer, but Ish did not feel it worthwhile to try very hard to understand.

Soon, however, the young men were even more insistent, and then they began to pinch him. Ish felt the pain because his body was still sensitive, and he cried out, and tears even came to his eyes, though he was ashamed of that, and felt that it was not fitting for the last American.

“It is a strange thing,” he thought, “to be an old god. They worship you, and yet they mistreat you. If you do not want to do what they wish, they make you. It is not fair.”

Then, by thinking hard and by watching their gestures, he thought that they wanted him to indicate one of them to whom the hammer should be given. The hammer had been Ish’s own for a long time, and no one had ever suggested that he should give it to anyone else, but he did not care, besides he wished them to stop pinching him. He could still move his arms, and so with a gesture he indicated that the young man called Jack should have the hammer.

Jack picked up the hammer, and stood with it dangling from his right hand. The other three then drew off a little, and Ish felt within himself a strange pang of sorrow for the young man to whom the hammer had descended.

But at least they all seemed to be relieved, now that the inheritance of the hammer was settled, and they did not bother Ish any more.

He rested there quietly then, as if he had done all in this world that he needed to do, and had made his peace. He was dying on the bridge, and he knew it now. Many others, he remembered, had died on that bridge. He might have died there many years before in some mere crash of automobiles. Now he had lived clear out of his own world, and still he was dying there. One way or another, he now was contented. He half-remembered a line which he had read in some book at some time during all those years when he had read so many books. “Men go and come…” But that was trite and meaningless without its other half.

He looked now at the others, although there was a little mist before his eyes and he could not see very well. Yet he noticed the two dogs lying quietly, and the four young men—three of them apart from the other one now—who squatted on the bridge in a half circle around him, watching. They were very young in age, at least by comparison with him, and in the cycle of mankind they were many thousands of years younger than he. He was the last of the old; they were the first of the new. But whether the new would follow the course which the old had followed, that he did not know, and now at last he was almost certain that he did not even desire that the cycle should be repeated. He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization—of slavery and conquest and war and oppression.

But now he looked beyond the young men, toward the bridge itself. Now that he would soon be dead, he felt himself more a companion of the bridge than of the men. It too had been part of civilization.