Earth Abides

Since that idea had first come to Ish on New Years Day, he had been pressing the lessons, and Joey had been absorbing them eagerly. There was even danger that he might turn out to be a learned pedant. He showed little ability at leadership among the other children, and sometimes Ish had begun to doubt.

This small incident just now, for instance! It might show intelligence and thought for the future, and it might show a tendency to escape from contacts with those of his own age, who were better at games than he, and to seek security in the presence of his father, by whom he felt himself appreciated. Ish hoped that the other children did not feel how strongly Joey had become his favorite. It was not right for a father to play favorites, but this situation had arisen suddenly and involuntarily, that New Years Day.

“Oh,” he thought, “don’t worry about it!” And suddenly he felt as if he were explaining it all to Em. “There on New Years Day, I was suddenly sure that Joey was the Chosen One. Now of course it’s all blurred. Maybe this is only the feeling a father gets for a small son. Later we may squabble, just the way I do with Walt now. Yet, I hope! The other boys were never like this—bright, I mean, lightning-quick at lessons. I don’t know. I wish I knew. I’ll keep on trying.”

Then, as he lit another cigarette, he was suddenly angry. He himself had not been so very bright! He had missed the opportunity. During the years he had been saying, “Something is going to happen!” It had not happened, and they had smiled at him for a gloomy and not-to-be-regarded prophet. Now this morning it had happened! It had been a shock! He could remember the scared faces when he and Ezra and George had first come back with the news. Then was the time to have made his I-told-you-so speech. He should have rubbed it in. He should have painted the future with disaster. That might have got something done.

As it was—perhaps he himself had been a little scared at the moment—everyone had made as light as possible of the matter, searched for the easiest makeshifts, and thus dulled the edge of what might have been made to seem a disaster. The Tribe had really taken the matter in its stride. Or—the identity of the word popped an old comparison into his mind—it had rolled off, “like water off a duck’s back!” Four or five hours later, and everybody had apparently settled again into the old happy-go-lucky life!

“Apparently,” yes! But after all, some sense of shock and uncertainty must still be lingering. Some had gone fishing and some had gone quail-shooting, and already he had heard two reports of a shot-gun. But all of these must certainly feel a slight sense of irresponsibility, even of guilt, at having left the more important work. They would come in tired at evening, and then the reaction might go the other way. He would get everybody together for a meeting then. If the iron would not still be red-hot, it might at least have rewarmed a little.

Then he himself incongruously crunched out his second after-lunch cigarette, and settled back to rest, comfortable and unharassed by worry, in the big chair. “This is comfortable,” he thought, “This is…”

In those days they will look toward the sea, and cry out suddenly, “A ship, a ship!… Yes, a ship certainly!… Do you not see the plume of the drifting smoke?… Yes, it is making for our harbor!” Then they will be merry with one another and say gaily: “Why were we despondent?…. It stood to reason that civilization could not be destroyed everywhere!… Of course, I always said…. In Australia, or South Africa, one of those isolated places-or one of the islands.” But there will be no ship, and only a wisp of cloud on the horizon.

Or one will wake from his nap in the afternoon, and took upward quickly. “Surely!… I knew it must come!… That was the motor of a plane…. I could not be mistaken.” But it will be only the locust in the bush, and there will be no plane.