Earth Abides

More deeply, they changed little. The rust ate here and there, but on the grease-smeared surfaces it could not work rapidly. Unused, the coils and the timers, the carburetors and the spark-plugs, all remained as good as ever.

In the batteries the slow processes of chemistry worked day and night, breaking down, neutralizing. A few months, and the unused batteries were dead. But as long as the battery and acid were kept separate, neither deteriorated, and it would always be a small matter to add the acid and start out again with a new battery; the batteries were not the weakest link.

More likely it was the tires. In the rubber the processes of decay worked slowly. The tires would last a year, five years. But nevertheless, the weakness worked in them. The air leaked from the tires, and after the car had stood on the flat tires for a while, they were no longer of any use. Even in the warehouses, decay worked in the rubber. The stored tires would have ten years, and still some life. Twenty years they would last, perhaps even more. Quite likely the roads, themselves, would be broken and men forget how to drive cars and lose the desire for driving them before the cars themselves were rendered undrivable.

Her head rested in the crook of his arm, and he looked down upon the black liquid eyes. They lay on the davenport in the living-room. Her face looked darker than ever now in the twilight.

There was one question, he knew, that they had not yet faced, and now she brought it forward.

“That would be fine!” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You mean you don’t like it about me?”.

“Yes. It’s dangerous. There’d be no one else but me, and I wouldn’t be any use.”

“But you can read—all the books.”

“Books!” he laughed a little as he spoke. “The Practical Midwife? The Pathology of Parturition? I don’t think I’d like to face it, even if you would.”

“But, yet, you really could find some books and read them. That would be a lot of use. And I wouldn’t really need so much help.” She paused a moment: “I’ve been through it twice before, you know. It wasn’t bad.”

“Maybe not. But it might be different this time without hospitals and doctors and all that. And just why, why do you think so much about it?”

“Biology, don’t they call it, or something like that? I guess it’s natural.”

“Do you think life must go on, we have a duty to the future, all that?”

She paused a minute. He could tell that she was thinking, and thinking was not the best thing that she did; she reacted at deeper levels than those of mere thought.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know whether life needs to go on. Why should it? Just as likely I’m selfish. I want a baby for myself. I mean, oh, I don’t talk this sort of thing well. I’d like to be kissed, though.” He did it.

“I wish I could talk,” she said. “I wish I could tell what it is I think about it.”

Then she stretched her arm out, and took a match from the box on the table. She smoked, more than he did, and he expected her to take a cigarette also. But she did not. It was a big kitchen-match, the kind she liked. She turned it between thumb and finger, saying nothing. Then she scratched it against the box.

The matchhead spurted into a flare. Then the fierceness faded out, and the wood of the match-shank burned quietly in yellow flame. Suddenly she blew it out.

Vaguely he knew that she, who did not find words easily, had tried—perhaps half unconsciously—to act out something that she could not say. Slowly he thought that he understood. The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.