Earth Abides

This was the time of the year to get busy on the problem. Although he did not know exactly, he could tell from the progress of the weather and from his general knowledge of how much time had elapsed since the catastrophe, that it must have come now pretty well toward the middle of December. If the solstice was to be in a week or so, he could easily tell by watching where the sun set.

Next day he found a surveyor’s transit, and although he did not. know much about the use of it, he set it up on the porch, facing the west. He blackened its lenses with soot, so that he could observe the sun without hurting his’eyes. His very first observation showed that the sun was going down behind the hills of San Francisco, to the south of the Golden Gate. From memory he knew that this was very near to its most southern point of setting. He left the transit in position, and recorded the angle of the sunset.

The next evening it set still a little farther south. And then, as systems do, his system went to pieces. A heavy storm blew in from the ocean, and during a whole week he could not observe where the sun set. Next time he saw it, it had already started north.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “we must be pretty close to it. If we add one day to the time when we last saw the sun, we ought to be very near to the solstice, and then if we add ten days to that, we would get to New Years.”

“Isn’t that rather silly?” she said.

“Why?”

“Well, I mean, that is, shouldn’t the year really start when the sun turns north again? Don’t you guess really that was what people tried to do once, and things got mixed up some way or other, and got about ten days out of kilter?”

“Yes, I imagine it was that way.”

“Well, why don’t we just start our New Year then with—what you call it?—the solstice? It seems simpler.”

“Yes, but you can’t just go fooling with the calendar. That’s been established for a long time. You can’t just shift it.”

“Well, didn’t someone named Julian do it, and weren’t there riots and things? But still, they did change it.”

“They did change it! Yes, you’re right—and I suppose we can change it now if we want to. It certainly gives a person a sense of power!”

Then in playfulness of imagination they decided that living where they did, they had a system all worked out before them, so that they would not even bother to have months and things like that unless they wanted to, because from the hill they could see the sun setting around its whole arc. They could merely date things by the time the sun set in the middle of the Gate, or the time it had reached the first big hump to the north, or the time it had begun to, reach the various points along the long slope of the mountain. What was the use of merely having months?

“Say!” she said, suddenly, “it must be pretty nearly Christmas, too. I hadn’t thought of that. You think I can get down before the stores close to pick you a tie?”

He looked back at her with a little smile. “I suppose we ought to feel pretty lugubrious this Christmas, and yet, some way, I can’t.”

“Next year,” she said, “this ought to be even more fun. We’ll have to get him his first tree.”

“Yes, and he can have a rattle, too, can’t he? What I’m looking forward to, though, is when he can get an electric train, and I can run it. No, poor guy, I guess there’ll never be an electric train for him. Maybe, though, when we have grandchildren, in twenty-five years, maybe, we’ll be able to get the electricity working again!”

“Twenty-five years! I’ll be a pretty old woman by that time. It’s strange, thinking forwards now, as well as backwards. For a while, I only thought backwards. But that thinking ahead brings up something else to my mind, also—the years! We’ll have to keep track of the years. Don’t people on desert islands cut notches in trees or something like that? You see, he’ll want to know what year it is; so he can vote or get a passport, or report to his draft board, maybe. Only perhaps, you aren’t going to restore things like that for us in this new civilization. What is this year, anyway, now?”

Again he thought that was like a woman, to put even such an all-important thing as the very date in terms of her unborn child. But yet, as so often, her instinct was right—a great pity if the historical record should be broken at some point! Doubtless in the long run, archaeologists could restore the continuity by means of varves or dendrochronology, but it would save a lot of work if someone merely kept the tradition.

“You’re right,” he said. “And it’s simple, too, of course. We know what year it is now, and when we decide we’ve come to New Years, we’ll just chisel a new date on some good rock, and then every year chisel the next one. The chiseling will be quite a job, and so we’ll always remember whether we are up-to-date or not.”