6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Read online

  The Washington Bridge is intact and so is the Brooklyn Bridge, these two being the main migration routes for those animals which leave or come to the island of Manhattan. The polar bears, moose and caribou seem to prefer swimming, as do the tigers in the summer months.

  As there have been animal mutations, so there have also been mutations among the plants. There are some great ferns as big as trees, and there is a new elm which creeps along the ground, one tree covering as much as an acre. Everything grows with great rapidity.

  The scene from a hilltop or a ruin is of strange and almost incredible beauty. The game is so thick that it is reminiscent of the Sabi game reserve in the Transvaal. Standing out above the rolling greensward that covers the fallen buildings, great towers of masonry rise like ancient forts.

  Everywhere there are small woods, clumps of trees, and little streams and rivers. There are large numbers of flowers, many of them completely new, at least new as wild flowers. Varieties of roses which usually had to be budded now glow wild, as do gladioli, dahlias, tulips and every other kind of bulb. Hyacinths, daffodils and crocuses cover large patches in solid mats of color; they lie like scatter rugs on the green floor of the city; and nothing more beautiful could be imagined than coming across a great striped Bengal tiger asleep on a carpet of purple crocuses in the first warm afternoon of early spring, or seeing a red and white wild ox standing belly-deep in orange gladioli. There are ferns and mosses to be found wherever water drips or runs among the rocky gullies. And in no place are they more beautiful than in the natural grotto in front of the Chelsea Hotel, where a clear spring bubbles up and falls with a delightful splash into the small lake made by the subsidence of the ground in 23d Street. It is in this lake that I keep the black bass, rainbow trout and carp that I catch when I need a change of diet. They have become adapted to this way of life and are very little different from their ancestors.

  I must say that after the hardships we underwent in the beginning while we were learning to adjust ourselves, I now live very well. I have fresh meat and fish, wine and whisky when I want it, and plenty of canned food of all kinds. I only miss bread and potatoes.

  ~ * ~

  I have often thought about the question of luck—of my good luck in being left alive, for instance. But are we really sure about what is good luck and what is bad? Why was I chosen to be spared out of so many millions?

  Or, on the other hand, why was I so damned as to be made to survive, to live alone in a world of death and putrescence—made to revert atavistically to a subhuman existence? What had I done to deserve a lonely hell like this, when all other men—as I had supposed until today—were killed quickly and mercifully, or at least relatively quickly and mercifully? Now that it is all over; and my adjustments are made—now that I have gotten over my loneliness and overcompensated to the point where, having seen two fellow human beings, I hide like an animal— I go over it all again in my mind.

  It was naturally a great shock for a modern man to be thrust back into prehistory, and to see how, having misused our means, we had lost our ends, which should have been, not the search for a life of more and more comfort and the possession of more and more things, but the integration of the personality—man becoming man at last. I had visualized in the last years of our era a new type of co-operative, non-predatory man living at peace with his fellows in a world of plenty made possible by modern technology. But man instead had weighted himself down with this very technology in a system that corresponded to the armor of the prehistoric reptiles and, like them, unable to change, had been forced by the very extent of its development into self-destruction.

  Looking back, I realize I have not thought seriously about anything for ten years. Obviously, in the first rush of events and difficulties of adjustment there was little time for thought; it was hard enough just to stay alive. But about five years after the disaster, for a period of several years, I thought and read a great deal. I still have a very fine library that I collected at that time, and sometimes on a sunny day I sit and read in the grotto with my gun and dogs beside me. But I read mainly poetry now, stuff with a ringing meter, that I learned as a child: Tennyson, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, Kipling, Swinburne, and Hood. It is what critics used to call the best bad poetry. I think that unconsciously I have gone back to it so as to keep the song of words and the power of simile functioning in a mind that was becoming atrophied from disuse. For I had stopped thinking in words and was only feeling things, like an animal. I had even stopped speaking to my dogs, and controlled them by gestures and sounds: sah to attack, ah to check them, hi-lorst to hunt, er to warn, hup to jump. So, to regain the use of my tongue and vocal chords, I went back to the poems of my school days, taking an almost childish pleasure in watching the development of my own defense mechanisms, laughing wryly at the devices of a so-called cultured mind as it strove to fight madness alone in lovely wilderness.

  Perhaps in a way these neoclinical symptoms, tricks, alibis, and fantasies are the most important part of this narrative. The real fight was not, as might be imagined, with wild beast. Indeed, as must by now have become apparent, this war with the wild game was both my way of living and my pleasure. No, the real fight was with loneliness and boredom. Alcoholism was a way out, and for a while I tried it, reeling drunk and singing through the ruined, empty streets, through the reek of putrescence. I tried it till I fell and came to with a pack of starving mongrels sniffing and growling round me as I lay in the gutter. Another few minutes—if I had taken one more drink and had been just that much drunker—and the boldest of the dogs would have been at my throat.

  At one time I contemplated suicide, and here, oddly enough, I discovered a great truth: a man alone, unless he is in great pain, does not commit suicide if he still has the means of living. Suicide is an act, when it is not done in a panic of fear which is a more or less unconscious running away, that is committed in order to impress, astonish, and dismay those who cause it. It is committed as a final act of annoyance, a kind of blackmail by which the dead hope to make the living pay. Either this, or it is a way for someone who has never been important in life to become important in death. Thus it was impossible for me, once I had made these discoveries, to kill myself.

  It was about this time, and probably a part of the same mechanism—the opposite side of the same psychological penny—that I decided to collect and breed a pack of dogs as a distraction and as a means of hunting. There were a number of large dogs roaming about, some of which showed a tendency to follow me. I shot game for them, and even shot other dogs for them to eat. Some dogs had gone completely savage and, having lived on cadavers, were much more dangerous than any wild animal, for it is the half-wild animal which has lost its fear of man that is the most likely to attack him. There were some terrific fights between my dogs and these wild dogs, but by degrees the larger of the wild dogs died off and were replaced by the smaller coyotelike animal which skulks in the scrub and ruins today.

  ~ * ~

  But I must go back to the disaster, and to the events, as far as I can remember them, that preceded it.

  The funny thing to me, as I look back at it, is that the atom, the smallest thing in the world, should turn out to be the biggest thing in the world. In the summer of 1946 we thought we had control of the atom and we ran some bomb tests on Bikini, a coral atoll in the Pacific. Everything went wrong about that time. It was, if one had been cle.ver enough to see it, the beginning of the end. There was fear on every face—fear and anger. There was no kindness anywhere, because fear and kindness cannot live together. All over the world people were angry, and their anger, born of fear, became fury. I saw it only in New York, and there I withdrew myself, seeing fewer and fewer people and losing myself in the ivory tower of my storytelling, a trick that I had taught myself when I first found it necessary to escape from life—a trick at which, as life became progressively worse, I became progressively better, able to live more and more within my dreams, to love women I created in my mind, to ride
horses that I bred in my brain. I needed a thousand subtleties as a defense against a future that came nearer every day, a giant who carried death in his hand.

  But to get back to the experiment: There were stories about it, the best one being that some goats on the battleships had survived the blast. There are goats in New York City today. I can see goats any time I go out, and I hardly ever shoot one because their taste is too rank even for the dogs. But where are the people?

  In those days, there was a world famine. Men had increased tremendously in numbers despite wars and disasters and the safety margin of nutrition was gone. This margin had never been very wide, and a world drought, combined with the effects of war, had closed the gap. And those who talked of a continually rising standard in American terms of eating were, whether they knew it or not, talking also in terms of reduced population, for the billions who were on earth then had to live on grain rather than meat except such meat as could be grass-fed. Here is another odd paradox, for now in this savage world of animals it is grain that is the luxury—grain and fat, because most animals do not carry fat, except a little around the kidneys, and I get most of mine from bears and porcupines. I melt it down and save it in airtight jars.

  But I was trying to describe those times—the hate and fear and the little love. There was not even much love between men and women. There was marriage, of course, but only three marriages in five lasted.

  It is easy now, so long after the event, to be wise and see that probably we should never have employed the bomb at all—not even on Japan. Instead, we should have brought Japanese observers under safe conduct from Ireland or other neutral countries to witness the first trials in the New Mexican desert and then said, “Give up or we will do this to you.”

  Now I must tell something of my own personal life. This brings me to my home, and my wife, and the life we led together before it ended, and its end—a difficult and painful thing to do, but one which must be done as a duty, for this phase, too, is coming to an end. I feel it in my bones and heart. Even the dogs feel it: at this moment Bodo, who was sitting with his head on my knee, has gone toward the door and stands there growling, with his hackles erect and his tail stiff. Vixen, more dangerous but more restrained than he, is backing him silently; her eyes are on him and on the door. My hand is on the rifle at my side. I lay it across my knees and watch the dogs.

  The dogs that have been growling by the door have quieted down and come back to me. Whatever had been outside has gone and I have relaxed. I can now go on with my narrative again, continuing where I had left off.

  My wife, Mildred, was an American, a very small and beautiful woman who hailed from the swamps of New Jersey that are now inhabited by every kind of savage creature. She was an artist, and our small and unpretentious apartment in the Whitby Apartments was decorated with her work. She painted and I wrote, and we amused ourselves with our pets: a miniature pinscher called Annie; a kinkajou called Edward, which was a female but did not know it; a South American bugle bird or troupial called Sam; a golden hamster by the name of Stompie; and some sixty-odd tropical fish of various species whose names still come to me without difficulty: zebras, platties, angels, neons, moons, sword tails, clowns, guppies, gouramis, Siamese fighting fish, miniature catfish, and many others. The fish lived amid water plants in a large tank which, when lighted by a fluorescent light, looked like fairyland. My wife, who was filled with imaginations and fantasies, always said how wonderful it would be if we could only be very small (and able to breathe under water) and therefore able to walk about in so lovely a garden, sitting on the rocks and strolling over the silver sand.

  We had three rooms in the apartment: a studio sitting room, a bedroom, and a small study. There were, in addition, a kitchen, a bathroom, several large closets, and a terrace garden with plants and trees in pots and boxes, chairs, swings, and a striped awning which could be lowered or pulled up by means of ropes. The apartment was, in fact, an ordinary small New York penthouse in the theatrical district, chosen for a combination of privacy, economy and delight in the situation—this being in what was known as Times Square and corresponding in this city to the grand boulevards of my native Paris. Around us each time we took the air to buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer, were the cream of the world’s artists, actors, playwriters, musicians, dancers, singers, prize fighters, cowboys. There were also pimps, gamblers and prostitutes— and their prey: the curious and the rich who sought on the West Side those diversions which the West Side sought on the East.

  ~ * ~

  I was shaving. I had been ill, and to interest myself had grown a beard which each day I marked out like a tennis court, shaving up to the soap mark. The immense white beard which now sweeps my belt buckle was thus simply born. My wife was in the kitchen washing up the things which would be needed for breakfast, and which in a more meticulous household would have been washed the previous night (when we had made tea on coming in from the theater). It was fortunate that she had left the dishes until morning; if she had not, she would have been in the bedroom and exposed to the direct rays of the blinding flash of the explosion. It is hard to recall with exactness what I felt or heard, or to differentiate between what I have reconstructed and my actual memory. My first conscious act was to run from the bathroom to meet Mildred running toward me from the kitchen. She was followed by the dog, which jumped into my arms. With one arm around my wife, and carrying the dog, I went toward the bedroom. I do not think we spoke. I do not think we even said: “What was that?” It was obvious that something had taken place that was beyond both question or explanation. I cannot even remember if the sound—an incredible, dull, slow explosion, if such a thing is possible to imagine, like the bursting of a shell which takes minutes instead of seconds to explode—or the unearthly light came first, or if they came together as lightning and thunder come when they strike near by.

  It seems almost certain to me now that we both knew what it was. That it was it—the atomic bomb, the “new god” that we had talked about for so long and whose name, like that of older gods, we feared to mention, calling it it. It can’t happen here; it can’t happen to us.

  I do not know what I felt when it happened. Fear certainly, then perhaps an odd kind of relief. It had happened, and we were still alive. This was the worst that could happen—that was what we thought, then. In a way, it was like walking through a barrage. A thing that seemed impossible had taken place; we had passed through a wall of death and fire. We had survived. In us then, consciously or not, was the terrible selfish joy of the survivor. Only the dog had more sense. She trembled so much that when I put her down she could not stand but fell on her side. And the kinkajou in the kitchen was uttering loud screams.

  The glass from the bedroom windows was on the floor and window sill. Since some of it still stuck to the frames, it was obvious that it had not been smashed the way glass is usually broken by an explosion, but that it had been bent, like a plastic, by inward pressure and then had fallen, instead of being blown into the room. Thus all laws of physics were shattered; everything that I had learned of what, at school, we had called “heat, light, and sound” was now reversed. We and all mankind were dwelling in a vacuum universe where even Einstein must find himself a child spending his first day in a cosmic kindergarten. But this thought did not come then, as I stood with my wife in my arms, as she clung like a small bird to the only safety that she knew. We stared, not out—for we dared not —but at the familiarity of our bedroom which was bathed in an unearthly light. Only a true artist would know what I mean when I say it was a cold rose. Only he would know that this is not an impossibility—for by the rules all reds and pinks are warm, and it is the blues that are cold. Only he would know—and it makes me laugh as I write, for there is not an artist left alive today, not a damned soul who can understand this message from the damned.

  My wife’s dressing table was intact, its mirror unshattered, her comb, brushes and other accessories as they had always been in that woman’s disorder,
that asymmetry which always appalls a man. There was a lipstick lying open. There was a scattering of powder. A cut-glass perfume bottle was unstoppered. It occurred to me to ask her how she expected the perfume to retain its strength if she did not put the stopper back—a thing I had done a hundred times, to no effect. And I smiled inside my mind at the thought and turned my eyes to the bed. There we had lain. There were the marks of our lying. The sheets crumpled, the bed no doubt still warm; and this had happened. This had taken place.

  Still looking, my eyes moved to the bird cage. At night we brought Sam into the bedroom so that his chuckling and calling would wake us slowly in the morning. (That was one advantage of my profession; I was no servant to time or to the shattering effect of an alarm clock. As it is to every man, my belly was my master, but I could choose my time to make the wherewithal to fill it, and use, if I so desired, a bird to wake me.) At the bottom of the cage my bird lay dead, a crumpled ball of black and yellow.