6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

THE BLAST By Stuart Cloete

I AM WRITING this because today I saw two girls. It was very odd after twenty years. I do not know if anyone—the word anyone looks funny—will ever find this, or be able to read it, or even if it will last, because it is written in pencil. Naturally there is no ink. It all dried up long ago, but there are plenty of pencils, thousands of them, pencils by the hundred thousand gross—all the best kinds, just for the picking up.

It’s difficult to know where to begin. It all happened so long ago that some of the details are fogged and I’m even doubtful of the chronology. The big thing, of course, the real beginning, was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the atomic bomb and the bungling that followed it after the war: fear of Russia, fear of free enterprise, fear of communism, of Fascism—fear, in fact. I remember one thing in ‘46, and that was a senator from Florida saying that we should destroy every facility we possessed capable of producing only destructive forms of atomic energy. This made a great impression on me, just as Roosevelt’s saying, “All we have to fear is fear itself,” had done. But, of course, we did not pay any more attention to this senator than we had to the late President. We entered into a kind of armament race. Strength was the thing, power politics; and atoms were power. The common man didn’t really believe in it, but what could he do? When had he ever been able to prevent wars? All he did was fight them. Anyway, there was no war. There was only a state of fear. There were only rumors—stories that Russia and Spain were only a year behind us in the atomic race.

These two countries were, of course, at opposite ideological poles and were a constant threat not only to each other, but to the world. Then there was the rumor that no one believed, but which nevertheless had the psychological effect of adding to the general fear and uncertainty of mankind. It was that a group of Germans in South America had discovered new fissionable material and that the process of refining it was so simple that bombs could be made in any garage—or if not quite in a garage, in almost any small machine shop. This, if it were true, naturally would render the inspection measures discussed by the United Nations completely ineffective because, quite obviously, all small plants all over the world could not be kept under supervision.

Then came a new rumor—only it was a little more than a rumor because the same story came from several accredited sources—that the new bombs were minuscule, no bigger than a fountain pen, and could be taken anywhere and planted with impunity. This probably was untrue, but certainly the underlying principle was true. Bombs were being made that were both smaller and more powerful. We had been making them ourselves, ever since the very first ones we’d used in the New Mexico test and in Japan. We knew that there were many Germans in South America. We knew that many war criminals had escaped there, by various subterfuges and in various disguises. We knew that young Norwegian Nazis had been invited over as colonists. We knew that Russia was courting the all but openly Fascist southern republics—and knowing all this we discounted it all.

What happened next is history. I never bothered writing about it till today, because, thinking myself the only survivor, I could see little point in recording the events of the last twenty years. It is, I think, the year 1972 now; and the month—I am less certain of the months—is probably May. I deduce this from the flowering shrubs, the state of the foliage, and the fact that most of the young birds have flown from their nests.

Perhaps, too, I have avoided writing, though writing comes easily to me (it used to be my profession; I was a novelist, because of the terror of those days, which I wish to forget if possible. Even now, though the pain has been softened slightly by the passage of time, it will be difficult for me to write of the death of my wife, who, having survived the first blasts and succeeded in living with me almost a year, finally died in my arms of the Red Death, as it came to be called.

None of this, of course, is the true reason for having either not written before or for writing now. The real reason is that previously there was no one to write for; but now there is, because I have seen people. People are an audience, and some old reflex in me has been activated.

I thought I was over it all. Just as I had thought I was over women—girls. But I see that I have deceived myself and that this manuscript, this record, may be of some historic value. That is the true reason for this work that I am writing in a mixture of hope and fear.

At the time of the blast—before it, that is—I was well known as the author of several South African novels. I am of South African descent and, at that time, still had a farm in the Transvaal. I suppose I have it still—even now. This is probably what saved my life, for in the beginning, though there were others who came through the plague, most people were apparently unable to stand the conditions of life when all meat had to be hunted and savage animals roamed through the piled canyons of what had been the greatest city in the world, New York, where I lived before the blast, and still live. Of course, there were great quantities of canned goods, but fresh meat, fuel and water were difficult to obtain for those who were unaccustomed to dealing with life in the raw.

I had better go back to the blast. It was what might be called the last real event in history. I seem to be in the interesting position of having survived history, of being history itself—a kind of lonely Adam in a jungle where terror stalked by day and night.

The Adam idea is now suddenly particularly apt because of the Eves that I have seen. I wonder what Adam would have done with two Eves. Anyway, I am glad I have hidden from them, because if they have survived, others must have. It has always seemed possible to me that in remote parts of the world some groups of those people we used to call savages might have survived, saved by their isolation from the diseases set up by radioactivity and immune or partially immune, because of their diet and the lives they led, to the Red Death which spread over the North. I have evidently been right, for the two girls—they are in their early twenties from the look of them—could not have raised themselves; which again brings up the question: are those with them friends or enemies, and what is my position? Do I wish to be a friend to these strangers after twenty years alone?

The thing to do now is to continue my narrative and to describe what was certainly the end of our civilization and might have been the end of mankind—though of course man might have reappeared again by a process of natural selection in a few million years; unless this time the new animals, such as the giant wolves that stand as high as a horse, and the immense brown and white minks that attack cattle and suck their blood in a few minutes, and the many other strange beasts and birds should prove to be too much for such primitive types of man as might arise. This, at any rate, had been my opinion until I saw the two girls. It is now subject to modification.

That I have succeeded in my fight against such wild beasts as I have described is due to my possession of modern weapons. These animals, however, are quite natural-phenomena that science once predicted might arise through the effect of atomic fission on the genes and chromosomes of the embryos extant at the time of the explosion. Or at least that is the way I remember it, though at the time—that is, before it happened—I did not pay much attention to the details about the atom in the magazines and papers, because I had no inclinations toward nuclear physics.

The center of the blast was said to have been Gramercy Park, probably the Players Club. It was estimated that three hundred thousand people were killed. Another half-million people were wounded by flying debris or burned in varying degrees. A tiny blister, however, proved as bad as a serious burn: There was no case of recovery from a burn of any size. The patient simply appeared to dissolve slowly from the nucleus of the wound. The deaths were extremely painful, and since there were neither sufficient hospital facilities nor enough drugs of any kind to stifle pain, thousands committed suicide, while others were killed by their friends in mercy killings.

All public services broke down, including fire and police, key men having been killed, water mains destroyed, telephone and telegraph communication ruined beyond repair. Our technological back was broken; our civilization writhed like a wounded snake, unable to advance and incapable of retreat. We were too complex to return to simplicity; and only then, when it was too late, did it become apparent to the man in the street on what a fragile base his life had rested and how tenuous had been his hold upon existence. “One world or no world,” our greatest men had said, but no one had believed them. Having refused one world, we now had no world, and each man reacted according to his nature. Some, as I say, committed suicide, not merely because they were wounded or burned but because they were terrified. They bolted like animals, leaping from the housetops of the vast circle of buildings that surrounded the empty center of devastation. Some prayed, some cursed, some raped and murdered, their lusts liberated in final orgy. The police tried in certain parts to keep order, and shot looters and assassins till their ammunition gave out, when they were lynched by police-hating mobs. All the jewelry stores were broken into, and rings and ornaments were scattered everywhere. But now, of course, diamonds and gold were useless.

For forty-eight hours, there was madness and murder, screams, shots and shouts; the parading of loose women in stolen ermine cloaks, mink coats, stone marten stoles, with diamond tiaras on their bleached blond hair. For forty-eight hours, cars roared through the streets and tommy guns spat from the cars. Then the gasoline began to give out in the filling stations, and the ammunition began to give out for the tommy guns as it had earlier for the police, and there was no one to hold up. Gangsters could go into any store and take anything. Their women dripped with jewels, their cars were stacked with valuable furs and piled with cases of Scotch and gin and rye. They had eaten their fill of steak cooked by trembling chefs at the point of a gun. But now there were neither steaks nor chefs left, and there was no water to wash the grime from their faces and the blood from their hands. And then, as suddenly as their reign of terror had begun, it ended in terror on their part. Here was a new world that they could not understand, where all that they had ever wanted was theirs and they were carrying it off. But to where, and for what? In this world they were the suckers, and, like wild animals betrayed by this new environment, they turned upon one another in a kind of gang war of extinction.

This, of course, is all somewhat academically stated, the drama having lost its sharp cutting edge with the passing years. But there are incidents, vignettes that still stand out, separated from the general mass of somewhat amorphous memory and theory and rationalization, like the red-capped figure to be found in almost every Corot landscape. There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that. I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.

In a book published a few years before it happened, a number of scientists had predicted what might occur, and one of them had explained what would take place if an atomic bomb were dropped in Gramercy Park. The fact that the explosion actually did take place in Gramercy Park could have been a matter of coincidence, or luck, or it might have been suggested by the chapter in question. The depositor of the bomb may have said, “Well, if they want it there, let them have it there.” He may even have had a kind of perverted sense of humor, like the guards at Buchenwald who gave towels to those of their victims who were about to be gassed, telling them the Murder House was for baths; or again, with that tidy Nazi mind, he may have wished to make fact conform to fiction. The point, however, is that the explosion did not operate quite as was expected, because, for some unknown reason, the blast did not fade out and get weaker and weaker as the distance from its center increased. Instead, it ended as if it were cut off by an invisible wall.

The best way to describe it would be to imagine the force of the blast as something tied to a string that was being swung round and round. Everything within the area covered by the string was destroyed, and everything only a few yards beyond it was left—with the exception of such minor damage as some broken windows—intact. The blast at that point appeared to take an upward direction, so that in the area beyond the destroyed center there was no further destruction except that due to fires caused by the falling debris. This destruction was somewhat haphazard; certain buildings escaped all damage while whole areas were completely gutted.

After the original reign of disorder and mayhem, the city started to reorganize itself. Emergency repairs were effected to water supplies, and local authorities were linked by provisional army field telephones. Citizens formed themselves into troops of vigilantes, and though there was some street fighting between different groups which took each other for bandit bands, order was in some degree restored. But there was no sense of security or continuity, for if there is no reason to expect tomorrow to dawn, today loses its validity. Were more bombs going to go off? What was going to happen about food, or work, or money?

People began to evacuate the city in cars, on foot, on bicycles. They left the island of Manhattan, endless black caterpillars of humanity creeping over every bridge, appearing from under the ground in every tunnel. They were migrating like lemmings. Driven by fear, they were going into the unknown where they would inevitably die.

They swarmed over the land like locusts, devastating it, marching till they were halfway to Canada. Some even reached the Canadian border, where they met Canadians marching down from Montreal and Toronto. What had taken place in New York was not an isolated phenomenon. Every big city in North America had suffered the same experience. No city except Washington was completely destroyed, but the population of all had been panicked, and the cumulative effect of these multiple bombings was much more serious than the total destruction of any single city, because all the urban populations fled to the country—which they destroyed; to the small towns and villages where, when once what was happening was understood, the villagers defended themselves with guns and even pitchforks, ex-soldiers fighting from tractors as if they were tanks. It was civil war, mass suicide. North America as a power, as a civilization, ceased to exist.

But as if even this were not enough, disaster was piled upon disaster, and the sickness hit us. First came diseases that were caused, it was said, by radioactivity. Then came the Red Death. The Red Death appears to have been general all over the civilized world.

The news of the period, naturally, was garbled; but there was some news. A few radio hams were able to receive messages. Ships at sea relayed frantic and conflicting reports. Naturally, within hours of the disaster, our air fleets set out for Europe and in a series of retaliatory raids blotted out many centers of military and industrial strength. Every big town in England had been blown up at the same time that ours were: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, all had ceased to exist. But fortunately the United States, anticipating the possibility of such an attack, had the foresight to be ready for it and had several fleets of immense bombers, complete with atomic bombs and personnel hidden in secret underground hangers. Anticipating the destruction of central authority, the commanding officers of these areas had sealed instructions to be opened if communication broke down.

When the attack came, the wings of retaliation were soon in the air and within hours of the first blast our world was gone. There was never in anyone’s mind, apparently, the idea that any country other than Russia could have been responsible for the attack upon us.

What was forgotten was that Germany was our enemy— the enemy of Russia and America and England—and that nothing would please Germany better than the mutual destruction of the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. The Germans hoped this would happen and, in my opinion, engineered it—perhaps even by setting off the explosions in America, knowing that we, in our fear and bewilderment, would attack Russia in a retaliatory reflex. What the Germans did not foresee (or perhaps they did not care) was that such a war would extinguish them with the rest of mechanized mankind. Or again they—the Germans—may have had such confidence in their Spenglerian myth that they assumed they could survive.

And so, perhaps, they could have—until the Red Death came along. Then they died along with all the others.

I had thought till today that it had killed every living human being in the Western Hemisphere with the exception of myself and perhaps some Indians in the forests of the upper Amazon or Orinoco. Some of the last news that we got through was that the same disease had broken out in both Buenos Aires and Rio. This makes me think now, looking back on it, that the bacteriological war the attackers planned for us got completely out of control.

What happened in the Far East, in Australia and Asia, I have no idea. We never heard anything from there, and perhaps they, too, survived. Perhaps a new empire of Orientals arose. I doubt it, though, because I feel that they would surely have established some kind of communication with the East coast of the United States. I think it is safe to assume that sickness and death overtook everyone in the Far East as well, except for isolated tribesmen and perhaps the inhabitants of such a remote place as Lhasa, the sacred city of Tibet.

The two girls I saw were standing on a small hill on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23d Street. I saw them clearly silhouetted against the skyline. They had long spears in their hands and were leading horses. One horse was a bay and the other a chestnut. The girls were staring north, shading their eyes with their hands, while the horses cropped the grass beside them. Both girls were blond. Their hair was knotted on their necks and they wore what looked like buckskin shirts and trousers. I had trouble with the dogs, Vixen and Bodo; the girls were upwind and the dogs had never smelled a woman before—or any other human being but me, for that matter—and they probably thought of me as one of themselves, since I had bred them and their parents before them and they were never separated from me, even sleeping on the same heap of skins in the cave I had built in the ruined Chelsea Hotel.

Having described the girls, I suppose I had better describe myself.

I was born in Paris, just in time to serve in the first World War. I was severely wounded and went to live in South Africa, where I farmed cattle for ten years. I then took to writing, returned to England and came from there to the United States, where I remained, apart from a few trips to England, France and the Bahamas, till the second World War, when I married a charming American girl, an artist, and continued writing while I waited for the war to end. My age and disabilities prevented my doing anything more active. Among others, I wrote and talked of the dangers of our Anglo-American retention of the bomb secret, maintaining that manufacture should cease and control be given to the United Nations. I also said that our civilization, as we knew it, was finished; and that as others were saying and writing at the same time the future presented only two alternatives: the liberation of man through atomic power or the destruction of our civilization, either by great nations in an undeclared war, which was what we feared, or by atomic bandits or nihilists.

My wife and I lived in a small studio penthouse on the eleventh floor of the Whitby Apartments on West 45th Street, opposite the Martin Beck Theater. I was over there yesterday and it is still almost intact, having been extremely well constructed sometime in the twenties. As a matter of fact, I shot a mountain lion that my dogs had driven into a basement apartment which had, when we lived there, been occupied by a drummer. Hunting big game in old apartment houses is the most dangerous form of shooting there is and makes any African safari look like child’s play, because the animals are likely to attack from the immediate flank—that is, from any apartment—as you move down a passage. Hunting under such conditions would be quite impossible without dogs that first investigate the building and bay up the den of any animal that is lurking there. The losses in dogs are heavy; but I am continually breeding new ones—huge animals of mixed Saint Bernard, Newfoundland, great Dane, Irish wolf hound, bloodhound, mastiff, police dog and Husky blood —which generation by generation become larger, fiercer, and better hunters. The feral dogs—the wild stock that has survived and bred itself by mongrelization—are not much bigger than jackals or coyotes.

When I am out for a stroll, as I was today, I usually take only a couple of well-trained dogs as guards to inform me of any danger that I do not see myself, which was lucky for the girls and their horses. For had I been hunting with my pack, as I do every second day or so, the girls would undoubtedly have been torn to pieces, since this is my way of feeding my dogs. They are trained to pull down any living thing and, having done so, to break it up as English hounds did a fox. Of course, when hunting the mutations such as the giant wolf and mink and a kind of wild ox that resembles the extinct European aurochs, I use a rifle—a 450 express that I selected at Abercrombie and Fitch—which has immense striking power. The dogs, instead of attacking game that is too big for them, merely bring it to bay and hold it till I come.

From my point of view, there is a certain interest in the change in my own character because, when I first went to Africa as a young man, I was an ardent hunter. Then, at the age of thirty-five, I gave up shooting altogether. Now I, like my dogs, have reverted atavistically, and hunting is my only pleasure. My mind is less disciplined than it was when I used to write for the magazines. It drifts along strange paths, as I dig among my memories seeking for incidents and examples that will elucidate or explain what has happened. This is not a story. It has no plot. It is a testament, a form of history, a literary curiosity written for myself as a form of justification, as a debt that I, the last man of the past, must owe to an unborn future.

My narrative must drift back and forth to catch memories that are like butterflies as they flick through my mind, for I am an old man. How can I write about the death of my wife? I can’t. But the description of her death will be there, threaded like every twentieth bead on the string of my life. I cannot coldly discuss killing and eating Annie, my pet dog. Nevertheless, I did kill and eat her.

We also ate Edward, the kinkajou we had had for four years, in a stew. There was no food for pet animals, and it was necessary to dispose of them all. I have never had a nicer pet than a kinkajou, a South American animal resembling, though not connected with, a lemur. It has a long prehensile tail, a soft fur, and charming snuggly habits. It is about the size of a cat and is more or less nocturnal. We never took to cannibalism, though both cannibalism and infanticide were widely practiced and probably, under such conditions, to be condoned. Morality can exist only in a social framework. A man alone cannot be good or bad. He cannot steal, fight, lie, or murder.

Now I return to animals because it is among animals that the last twenty years of my life have been lived. In addition to the giant mutations, there was an immense increase in the wild animals indigenous to New York State, such as the timber wolf, beaver, black bear, lynx, mountain lion, deer, moose and bobcat. There were even some bison and caribou. There were also many game birds: pheasant, ptarmigan, grouse, and a new kind of American jungle fowl which evolved from ordinary poultry. The inmates of the Central Park zoo now roamed wild, too. Some lunatic, very shortly after the explosion, had thrown open every cage in the zoo, and since no one had time to deal with the liberated animals, a number of them survived and became acclimated. Now there are tigers in New York, which, in their long winter coats, resemble the great tigers of Manchuria. There are also leopards, Jaguars and a wide variety of buck and antelope which, despite the severity of the winters, have managed to survive. As happened elsewhere where their ranges overlapped, the lions were soon exterminated by the tigers. There is at least one herd of zebra and another of donkeys. Occasionally they hybridize. There are no horses, and the two that I saw today are the first I have seen for twenty years. Grizzly bears have spread from the West and are very large-even bigger, I should say, than the Kodiak bears. I have seen marks where they sharpened their claws against a tree in Central Park more than twenty feet from the ground. There are several families of polar bears living along both the Hudson and East rivers. There is a great colony of seals at Ellis Island.

The great bald eagle now nests in the abandoned cliffs of every skyscraper. There are pigeons by the millions; and ducks, wild geese and swans in all the ponds and rivers. Buzzards and kites circle everywhere.

Many of the larger carnivora live in the drains, which is probably how those from more tropical countries survived their first winter. It is of course for the same reason that I live in a cave, where the temperature is more or less stable, rather than in an apartment, of which there is certainly no shortage. It occurred to me when I moved in here that, after all, a cave was man’s natural habitat, and that a house was only an artificial cave.

At least one more thing is necessary to supply a picture of this area as it is now. New York was always famous for its skyline. This skyline is now vastly changed. There are a number of large buildings—blocks of flats, hospitals and hotels—more or less intact. Rockefeller Center stands; so does the pinnacle of the Empire State Building, an eagles’ aerie now. The Chrysler Building stands, but its pinnacle hangs from it at any angle. The bomb blast area is completely bare and almost as flat as a polo field. A curious thing, however, has occurred. The debris that landed on the housetops, combined with the guano from the countless birds that took to roosting on them, has formed a soil so fertile that trees and shrubs cover the flat tops of higher buildings. This fertility accounts for the amount of game found here.

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.

Apart from the curious cold pink glow in the room, there was a smell of hot iron. Mixed with this smell was a faint odor of ozone, a sort of seashore smell. There was also a feeling of warmth—not heat, just warmth, like that felt from the shortwave diathermy treatment that doctors used to give sometimes for a strained back. I had the feeling of being enveloped in a blanket of powerful, almost palpitating warmth. I remember thinking: Are these the fatal radioactive waves that we read about? A writer whose name I cannot recall had written a magnificent description of the bombing of Hiroshima in a magazine called The New Yorker, which, though it was a magazine of sophisticated humor, devoted a whole issue to his report. His description gave us a standard of comparison.

We now dared to look out of the window. The McGraw-Hill Building was still standing, and so was the Holland Hotel, but beyond them there was only an incandescent orange redness against which they were blackly silhouetted. This redness was the center of what can only be described as a frightful, cream-colored, cauliflower-shaped cloud. Branches of white and butter-yellow broccoli seemed to grow writhing out from this center in mushroom layers. The whole thing was vegetablelike, a vivid, livid, mushroom-cauliflower-broccoli that formed great branches which grew, changing into white trees growing out of the scarlet central heart, against a background of thick brown smoke. Everything writhed and churned, the branches becoming intricate tendrils of marblelike delicacy—orange-pink, scarlet, amber-yellow, citron; and then the veins thickened into arms so that the vegetable simile failed and one thought of the writhing arms of an octopus.

Having watched this tree of death grow, having seen it mount into the firmament, break into two parts and drift in majesty toward the west, we turned our attention to our home, which we knew already to be shattered, cracked like a mended cup which seems, as it is dropped for the last time, to retain its shape for an instant so that a memory of it can be fixed before it breaks into tiny shards.

Meanwhile, other things had happened, as we found out when we looked around more carefully. The kinkajou had stopped screaming and had gone to sleep. This was her answer to all problems and corresponded to our method of anesthesia by means of drink, drugs, or women. But some of the tropical fish were dead, floating with their white bellies in the air; and the plants which filled the big studio window had their leaves browned on the edges. Why only the edges? Why had only some of the fish died? I forget which now, but all of two or three varieties were dead while the others swam at ease, seeking food in the corners of the tank. We picked out the dead fish to feed to Edward when she woke, as was our habit. We scattered some food in the feed ring and watched the multicolored fish cluster near the surface to eat. I said, “Put on the kettle and we’ll have some tea”; a cup of tea being my answer to any crisis—tea and aspirin.

Then suddenly I felt weak. I saw how we were going through the motions of life: feeding the animals, making tea. Mildred must have felt the same, because she said from the kitchen, “The gas is all right.”

I said, “And the water?” though I had heard her fill the kettle and knew that the water was still running.

“The water’s all right, too,” she said.

It won’t be for long, I thought; and got up and put the plug into the bath and filled it. That would give us fifty gallons or so—enough for a few days anyway. I was trying to bridge the gap between a technological past of half an hour ago and the future, trying to think what would work and what wouldn’t, and making decisions that seemed very wise at the time—conditioned reflexes to disaster brought out of the past from African droughts, from memories of the last war, from stories and letters I had had about London in the blitz. The next minute I was being violently sick. Lucky I’m in here, I thought. If one had to be sick it was a good thing to be in the place where it was easiest to be sick. It all comes back to me very clearly as I relive that day. Again I hear my wife’s voice saying, “Are you all right?” And my answer: “Yes, I’m all right.”

And now I became aware of the smoke and the smell. Smoke was coming in through the shattered window of the bedroom. Fires must have broken out everywhere, I thought. Probably the destruction of the explosion, though it must have caused the fires, had banked them, as it were, with falling buildings, and only now were they breaking out with real severity. I heard a great crash as something fell on the flat roof and, looking out, saw it was a big wooden beam; more things fell, half bricks, tiles, dust, something that looked as if it had once been a man. I must get that away—overboard—before Mildred saw it.

I did later, when things had stopped falling, and wondered as I handled the broken body if it was radioactive. I wondered how things had stayed in the air so long. Or was it not long; had it all happened so fast, in minutes— and what did it matter, anyway? I thought of what we had done, of filling the bath and the kettle, and decided that the debris falling on the roof was the result of a later explosion. There would no doubt be many of them. The kettle began to whistle.

I said, “Let’s make the tea. We’ll feel better when we’ve had tea.”

Mildred said, “Yes,” and we went into the kitchen together with the dog between us, right on our heels so that when we stopped, she bumped into us. The very act of making tea was calming.

Things still kept falling, and the air was filled with papers that rose sailing like kites on the currents between the high buildings. It was very dark and there was no light when I tried to turn on the table lamp. Neither of us said anything. The wind continued to rise, assuming almost whirlwind proportions. I began to be aware of the noise of sirens. Fire engines and ambulances and police cars were evidently out on the streets. We both said, “Listen to the fire engines.” Then there was a shot and Mildred said, “Is that a shot?” and I said, “Yes.” There were to be plenty more later. Then we heard a scream. The paralysis of fear was now changing to hysteria. Terrified people were rushing out to escape from themselves, to find out. We’d have to go out ourselves sometime—but not yet.

We had a second cup of tea. I was surprised how very calm I seemed; my hand hardly trembled. That amused me, not because it showed my lack of fear but because it showed my ability to control most of it. Probably the only people who were not frightened at that moment were lunatics, to whom this must all have seemed very logical and predestined. Perhaps that is why I was not more frightened, having been classified, because I had expected something of this kind to happen, as a lunatic. I was, in a way, psychologically prepared for the end of the world, but there was little satisfaction in being able to say, “I told you so,” and, at the moment, no one to whom I could say it except my wife, who always believed everything I said and thought me an altogether remarkable man, thus tempering her criticism with her charm.

I went into the bedroom to try the telephone. The room was very smoky but not so bad as it might have been, for the wind had changed again. I did not know whom I was going to call. It was just that I wanted to see if the telephone worked. I had always hated the telephone—the network of copper threads that tied all civilized mankind together in a web of misunderstanding. If there had been no telephones and no airplanes and no electricity, there would have been no atomic bomb. I held the receiver to my ear. It was dead. No phone. That, after all, was not surprising after the failure of the electric light. But as the discovery of the telephone had been hailed as a great advance of our civilization, its end—for there was no doubt in my mind that it had ended—was a definite sign that our civilization was disintegrating.

I went to look in the kitchen to see what we had to eat. There was quite a lot of stuff: cans of baked beans, boned chicken, soups, glass jars of tongue.

There were other factors that were to the good. Once the first shock had worn off, I began to consider the possibilities of life as well as I was able—began to look and see if there was anything to reconstruct with. As I say, there was a fair amount of canned food in the kitchen and there were, in addition, about ten large parcels of food that we had wrapped and were going to send to friends in England and France. It was remarkable how distant England and France seemed and how little our dearest friends now mattered. I was grateful to them for my own good impulse that had made me buy the food, and delighted with the habit of procrastination which had prevented my sending it to them.

Another good thing, though I did not realize it fully at the time, was that I had a thousand rounds of .22 ammunition for the Mauser, because we had been intending to go on a holiday and I had meant to do some target shooting. I must have thought of this, though subconsciously, because my next move was to go and see the manager of the hotel, a great deer hunter who lived in the adjoining penthouse, and ask him if he would let me have one ol his heavier rifles and some ammunition. I was already aware that there would be a necessity for weapons, that civilization in terms of protection had broken down and that it must be every man for himself.

I obtained a rifle and fifty rounds of 303 ammunition without much difficulty—the manager had more guns than he could use—in exchange for a case of whisky that I had just bought. We talked around the subject of the bomb and our predicament, more or less ignoring it, which was fantastic, since the air was filled with smoke. Like me, he must have had the feeling that this was the end of everything. Actually, of course, there was nothing to say. And to talk would probably only have torn the last shreds of self-control from our naked fear. We got no further than saying it was terrible, that neither of us had been out, that we had better be careful, and that it would probably be all right.

My wife fixed some food. We had meat in the icebox, which by this time had stopped working; we had potatoes and soup. Surprisingly, the gas was still on; our supply had evidently been unaffected. And we had water; it was still running, probably from the reserve tank on the roof above us, and we did not have to use the reserve in the bath. We gave the kinkajou the dead fish from the tank and a banana, the last, and a bit of bread, and Annie had our leavings. The day passed somehow. I forget how. Night came —a night like those of the blackouts of the war but without air-raid wardens or police. The streets were dark and lighted only by the light reflected down from the low ceiling of cloud and smoke which was illuminated by those parts of the city that were still burning. It was a night filled with strange happenings—screams, cries, shouts, shots, the noise of doors being forced; a night of black horror edged by the glare of the buildings that still burned to the south of us. The McGraw-Hill Building still stood out like a great black pinnacle against the glow of the sky. There was still the sound of sirens as fire engines and police tried to keep some semblance of order, but it was all sporadic. There was no sleep for us, but we lay down with the dog between us and tried to rest. I had the deer rifle loaded beside me, and I had a Gurkha kukri in its sheath under my pillow; I had sharpened it till it was like a razor. I have it still, having carried it since that day. I say we did not sleep, but we must have dozed off, for at dawn we were wakened by a sound truck.

An impersonal voice was giving out the news. It made me think of the town crier who had in the old days brought the news of war, of victory or disaster. It appeared that Washington was completely obliterated and that, since the federal government no longer existed, New York and all the other states were on their own. The Governor advised calm and patience. He said he would undertake to keep order and restore vital utilities. People were advised to stay where they were and wait and not rush off to the country. This news, of course, succeeded in achieving the purpose opposite to that desired and stampeded everyone, so that later in the day there was a veritable exodus of such cars as had gas in their tanks. The rest of the news was that, bad as things were, there was no cause for panic or alarm and, though the casualties in New York City were estimated to be more than seven hundred thousand, the fires were under control and we should remain calm.

The voice went on and on. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and every other major city had been severely damaged. But everything would be all right; this foolish catch phrase was reiterated and we were again advised to remain calm, stay at home if possible, until normalcy was restored. How this was to be done with seven hundred thousand casualties and a quarter of Manhattan destroyed was not revealed.

There were a great number of suicides. Within an hour of the blast, we saw one woman throw her child out of a high window in the Lincoln Hotel, stand naked for an instant on the parapet and then follow her child in a headfirst dive. Most suicides, however, were on the fashionable upper East Side—the working poor being more able to stand disaster; having so little, they had little to lose.

Forced by curiosity and the knowledge that the longer we waited, the harder it would be to go out, we made our way down the stairs from our eleventh-floor apartment to the street. I had often called dwellers in apartment houses “troglodytes,” and I remember thinking how right I had been as we climbed down the concrete stairs and crossed the paved passages that divided one flight from the next, pausing to rest and to listen to the strange sounds we heard. There was some drunken singing, the sound of quarrels, a hysterical woman blaming her husband for what had happened and asking him why he did not do something about it. He did. He struck her; she fell down and got up screaming she’d “have the law on him for that”; at which he laughed and she burst out crying loudly because now there was no law. On another floor, people were having a prayer meeting and singing hymns. There was no one in the office, and the lobby was deserted.

We went into the street and found it empty. It was rather like a Sunday afternoon with everyone away, or a Saturday—a week-end—because a car was being loaded with things from a house almost opposite the hotel entrance. I had with me a heavy blackthorn stick that I always carry on account of the lameness caused by an old wound, and since we had money with us, we thought we might as well go up to the corner and see if we could buy more food. Obviously, money was no good any more, but here was the possibility the grocer would not have come to that conclusion yet; he might not have had the sense to load up his stock and take it home with him. This guess proved to be right, and we were able to buy fifty dollars’ worth of canned goods: sardines, herring, salmon, tuna fish, and potted meat. We obtained a gunny sack and staggered back with our wealth.

On the way home there was the body of a man—his head had been bashed in—lying in the gutter on the corner of 45th Street, opposite a liquor store which had been raided and was completely empty. And, as we were getting our stuff in the grocery store, a girl ran screaming past us pursued by a gang of young hooligans. I judged from the noise that followed that they must have pulled her down in the next block. It was this incident which decided me to cut off Mildred’s hair (she wore it long, more than shoulder length) and make her dress in dungarees. With short hair, dungarees, and a dirty face, she would pass for a youngish, rather queer-looking boy, but everyone looked queer now and she would certainly be safer.

We lay low for a few days. This was the time that the sediment of the underworld rose to the surface and took over. The streets were the scene of unrestricted pillage, murder and fights between rival gangs. From our roof we saw some amazing sights. But by degrees, in a matter of four or five days, things improved. My friend the manager told me that he had heard that the city was full of wounded and crazed people. He asked if I had seen any and I said no. He said they were flooding up Lexington and Park avenues. He told me more of the exodus, of how the routes out of the city were packed with refugees in cars and on foot. The police were making no effort to control them, since control was impossible. But what could they have done, anyway? Given tickets? Made arrests? Broken cars were jamming the roads. People were being run down and robbed, girls abducted; other people were jumping off bridges and out of windows. But still they were moving outward like the spokes running from the shattered hub of a wheel. He asked me what I was going to do. I said I was going to stay.

Though my memory of the sequence of events that followed is somewhat confused, certain incidents stand out very clearly, the first among them being the destruction of our pets. The fish went first, since they could not live without the light in the tank. But then they did not count as pets; they were merely a decoration and an interest—no more than that. The kinkajou was different. She was very affectionate and never bit hard enough to draw blood. Looking back on it, it seems funny now; but I had been away from farming for fifteen years or so and had gotten out of the habit of killing things. It was only with the greatest difficulty that, holding her in the crook of my left arm, I made myself hit her on the back of the head with a two-pound ball hammer. She stretched out the way animals do when struck, her legs quivered, and then she went limp. I skinned her while she was still warm, as it’s much easier then, and then I cut her up for a stew. Mildred cried. The dog looked on, not at all sorry to see the kink go. She had never understood our interest in it. It was difficult to think of Annie going the same way, which she did two days later.

Dogs have been associated with man for so long, a million years perhaps, that they no longer, in the full sense, count as animals; they are extensions of man, inventions of many like the spinning jenny, the Queen Mary and the atomic bomb. Breeding livestock has always interested me, and I have learned a great deal about it since I have lived alone in the world with animals. Domestic dogs, as we knew them, were bred by continually discarding dogs that were not tractable, but my dogs now are bred two ways: the dogs of my hunting pack, which have been bred for strength and courage alone, would be capable of pulling me down if they were really starving, while my personal dogs are almost human, having been bred for both brains and courage.

In taming any animal, you must replace the mother of the young animal so that it fixes its affection on you instead of on its dam; or, in the case of animals that hunt in packs, you must become the leader of the pack.

This is what I do when I hunt with my hounds. Though I carry a rifle, a knife, and a pistol, I would not try to handle my pack without a bull whip and a short club. Every now and then a young dog, never a bitch, challenges me. Weighing as much as or more than I do, he might pull me down if I were not ready for him. On one occasion I killed—with my bare hands—a dog that weighed two hundred and five pounds (I had the curiosity to weigh him.) His name was Racketeer, and his breeding was Great Dane, police dog, Saint Bernard and Afghan.

Racketeer was a lovely beast, but suddenly he challenged me. I had put the pack onto a bear spoor. It was spring, and the spoor was very clear in the moist ground, but Racketeer wanted to follow a lynx. When I began to whip him off—this was before I carried a club—he turned on me, while the pack waited to see which would be master. I saw him crouch for the jump, and as he leaped for my throat I struck him straight in the nose with my fist. As he fell I jumped on him; leaping into the air, I brought both feet down on him, smashing his ribs. Then I raised him in my arms and threw him back to the waiting pack.

But all this discourse has been an evasion of the description of the death of Annie, my pinscher. The past is still too near to make it easy to discuss. But the way it went was this: I held her on my knee, with my left hand over her shoulder, and brought the hammer down on her skull, cracking it with a single blow. I then cleaned and skinned her and we ate her, for though we had canned food we were trying to conserve it for the days that were to come. When it became known that I had killed my pets and eaten them, a woman burst into the apartment and called me a cannibal and a brute. She said it was like eating a human being, and I said, “We may be doing that yet.” There had been cannibalism in the German concentration camps at Dachau and elsewhere, but this good woman had forgotten or had never believed it. On the other side of the same penny were the people who wanted me to kill their dogs for them because they could not bring themselves to do it. I killed a number of dogs that I had known quite well, many of them having lived in the hotel as long as I had. I charged half the dog for killing and dressing it, and became accustomed to dog soup and stew.

During this period the destroyed part of the city was walled off, the rubble of the fallen buildings being used to close off the streets. It made me think of the walled-off ghettos of the German occupation in Poland, and of the way situations tended to repeat themselves, death being enclosed by walls in both cases. It was a defense mechanism on our part against the knowledge that death had us hemmed, walled in, and was one of our final tributes to complacency, to the idea that if we could not see a thing we stopped its existing. But you could not help smelling it. All over the city there was a stench of death in the air.

Order, as I say, had been for a while somewhat restored and a few minimum services functioned, but everything worked on a kind of reflex. Policemen remained policemen because it was their habit and they did not know what else to do; for a few days garbage collectors still collected garbage for the same reason. But there was neither credit nor currency, central authority having disappeared. Public servants were paid in food from the stock that was available in the city warehouses, a system that obviously could not continue for long.

There were amazing tales of the fights put up by farmers against the influx of city dwellers who had run out of the metropolis and had flung themselves upon anything edible in the country—a swarm of human locusts that the country people resisted in every manner possible. There was a pitched battle on the Canadian border in the vicinity of Niagara Falls. The Canadians appeared to be a little better off than we were, having retained their central government, and they used troops to turn back the unwelcome thousands, many of whom had known the Falls only as a honeymoon resort. We got the story from one of the survivors and his wife. She was a lovely blond night-club singer who now looked like an old and shrunken woman; he had played a hot trumpet and was at one time internationally famous through his recordings. I recall the incident because, despite everything, he had held onto the silver trumpet that had made him famous— a remarkable young man who no doubt died tooting on his instrument.

All this took place in the first few months. I was proved to have been wise in my decision to stay in New York: there was more food here than in the country. There were still some pigeons, and there were plenty of cats, for with the departure of mankind and the failure of all city services, the rodents had increased in a phenomenal manner and naturally the city cats had increased with them. I had eaten cat as a child (our gardener in France, who trapped them, had once given me some), and both Mildred and I found them excellent. There were still some dogs in the street, which lived, literally, by dog eating dog, and these I shot with my .22. Our system of hunting was to go out together; I went a pace in front with the .22 and Mildred followed with the heavier rifle, the 303, which she, like a gunbearer in Africa, put into my hand if I asked for it. Some of the big dogs could not be stopped by a small-bore rifle; and there were human wolves, too, who had to be destroyed. Mildred was in no danger now as a woman, having like all other surviving women, lost any visible sexual charm which she had ever had, near starvation having reduced the sexual curves that characterize women; and the sex fiends, who had run riot in the early days, raping and murdering, had either been eliminated or had been reduced by the food shortages to seeking nourishment rather than other satisfactions.

For a change, we used to fish in Central Park. Mildred, being better at it than I, would watch her float bob in the water while I stood guard with the rifle. We cooked out on the roof where, when first we had taken the apartment, I had had built a little barbecue. Water was now obtained with difficulty. Some we brought from Central Park, some we collected by damming up a section of our roof.

At this time there were very few people left in the city—only a few thousand—because everything had broken down with the breakdown of credit. People simply would not work without money. They were not even ready to save their lives by co-operative effort. So deeply had our competitive system bitten into us that they preferred to sit around and starve, or else they ran away and starved— except the few who, like ourselves, lived on what they could find or loot from the stores. The word “loot” persists, though obviously it was no longer looting. It remained, however, an operation of some danger because of the darkness of the stores and the maniacs who had taken up their abode in many of them—savages who resented any intrusion into their territory. I remember one man that I shot at Gimbel’s while Mildred held the flashlight on him. He was an immense man who ran at us roaring with rage as he brandished a meat cleaver. We had gone to Gimbel’s for caviar and pâté de foie gras. They had a lot of it, for apparently the other looters, having less sophisticated tastes than ours, left it alone.

For anyone who liked adventure I suppose this would have been very interesting, but to us who had become almost sedentary and were quite unaccustomed to swift movement, hard living, or even loud noises, the adjustment was most difficult. Yet in this twilight world, we succeeded in living and forming a pattern of life, even remembering the days with some semblance of accuracy. I, who had always hated a schedule of any kind, now invented one. Monday: Central Park, fishing; Wednesday and Friday: food-looting expeditions. Inevitably, though, the human instinct being what it is, more was collected than food. We found some beautiful fur coats—stone marten, blue mink, Russian sable, and ermine. The ermine came in very handy for winter hunting in the snow. We picked up some wonderful diamond rings of fifteen or twenty carats, ruby clips, necklaces and bracelets. We both looked like pirates. We were far from clean but we were dressed in suede, silk and satin; we wore rare fur coats from which I had cut the arms to give greater freedom. We had silk sashes around our waists, carried an arsenal of daggers and pistols, and over our shoulders were slung the best guns New York could provide.

We had begun by this time to collect our big dogs. We needed them for protection and hunting. In the beginning we had a boxer and a police dog. We hunted other dogs to feed on. The transition of my wife from a charming, rather fastidious young American girl to a primeval savage was most interesting. She soon learned to use a knife and to skin an animal as well as I did. She was never a good shot, having difficulty in closing her left eye, so I got her a shotgun and a .32-caliber Colt. I told her that if anyone attacked, she was to wait till he was right on her, then push the muzzle of the pistol into his stomach—she would feel it go in—and then continue pulling the trigger till she passed out. No girl could have had better instructions. Fortunately, she never had to follow them. The only near disaster occurred once when I was some distance away, but her assailant was pulled down by the dogs, and when I arrived, the man who had approached her was dead. This reassured me because I had not been, until that moment, quite certain how the dogs would act, as they were young and unused to dangerous work.

This was about the time that we heard the first stories of the Red Death, the strange dancing disease that was, according to the information we had, sweeping not only the country, but the world. We soon saw evidences of it. In fact, one of these dancers was the second man our dogs killed. The disease was contagious. The first symptom was the appearance of great health and gaiety, which was followed by a mad happiness; we would see rosy-faced couples dancing and singing in the streets as the disease began to spread. In the later phase, the victim either fell into a coma or attacked anyone in the vicinity without warning. This is what happened one evening as we were about to cross Sixth Avenue: a man and a woman suddenly appeared and began pirouetting and jitterbugging. I hoped they would pay no attention to us, but the man saw us. I knew that we were in for trouble, for he suddenly got beyond the happy stage and became murderous. He reached me with incredible speed and had me down before I could do anything to defend myself. But as he gripped me, my wife fired three shots into him from her .32 and the dogs attacked him, the boxer grasping his thigh and the police dog his shoulder. They knocked him onto his back and quickly finished him off.

I picked up the sack I had been carrying and felt very shaken, for I was certain I had been contaminated, and now had to work out plans for a method of restraint that my wife could use which would prevent my hurting her when I reached the paroxysms of fury that were the final symptoms of the disease. I had my own theory and was certain that if she did not touch me she would be all right. Naturally, no one knew much about the disease, but I had the idea that with restraint there was the possibility of survival, death occurring through the berserk rage, which had the effect of burning up the victim. I therefore conceived the plan of going to the local police station— we had dumped our sack of loot—and getting a pair of handcuffs and some chains. The incubation period was said to be a week, but to take no chances I found a ring bolt, fastened it in the floor of the apartment and attached the chain and handcuffs to it at once. All I had to do now, the minute I got the first symptoms, the feeling of joy and the flush that went with it, was to handcuff myself and then hope for the best. I told Mildred of this plan and gave her her instructions. She was to keep out of my reach, give me no food but plenty of water. This she was to put in a tin measuring cup and push into my reach.

The precautions I had taken frightened my wife, and I had to spend the next few days reassuring her, telling her that there was nothing to fear and that it was all done “just in case.” For my own part, I, was certain that I could not have failed to contract the disease, and so we spent our time hunting furiously for more canned provisions and collecting a reserve of wood and water. I also obtained more ammunition for the shotgun, because this was the best weapon for Mildred: a scattergun to point in the general direction of anything that frightened her was more likely to be of use than any other kind.

What follows is all that I can remember of the days that ensued. I do not actually remember them at all and have reconstructed the story from what I remember of what Mildred told me when it was over.

It seems, according to what she said, that on the seventh day—our guess about the incubation period had apparently been right—I woke in great form in the morning and began to sing opera. The remarkable thing was that I sang in tune, which was extraordinary, for I have no ear for music. This proved that I was ill. With expanded chest and wide-open mouth I stood on the roof singing to the silent city. Then I dressed, putting on a brown suit with a white pin stripe. I also put on my gaudiest tie, one that I had bought when we were working in Hollywood. It was a red-white-and-green affair made of silk, hand blocked, and about a foot wide at the wide end. I had never dared to wear it before. I then danced all by myself, tripping lightly up and down to unheard music, and then undressed and broke into a series of Zulu war dances. At this moment some glimmering of sanity must have returned to me, because Mildred said I covered my face with my hands and burst into tears; when the paroxysm was over I picked up the handcuffs, clipped them over my wrists, and lay down like a chained dog to sleep.

What came next must have been completely terrifying for my wife. I am a big man, six feet two, and I weighed two hundred pounds. Having slept for some hours, I woke in the fury that is the secondary symptom of the disease. Having circled the room to test the length of my chain, I crouched on my haunches like an animal and leaped at her. Fortunately, the right bolt held and I was dragged back, being pulled onto my shoulders and falling on my back with my handcuffed hands between my legs. This seemed to have knocked me out for a moment, but I was only playing possum. Forgetting what I had told her, and with a wife’s instinct of solicitude, she came to see if I were hurt. In a second I was up, and raising my manacled hands, I swung them down at her head in an attempt to stun her. She jumped back just in time and then decided to obey the instructions I had given her. Fetching a tin cup full of water, she pushed it into my reach with the tip of a jointed fishing rod. I seized it and tried to draw her to me, but the tip came off in my hand.

For ten days I remained in alternating states of animal fury and animal sleep. The sitting room resembled the den of a beast. Filthy, naked except for a blanket that I used not for modesty but for warmth, I growled and sulked, wringing my fingers and licking my wrists where the steel had bitten into the flesh and worn away the skin so that it was a ring of festering sores. I drank quantities of water, cup after cup, and each time I had done so I threw the cup at Mildred’s head with a clumsy two-handed throw. My ribs stood out in arcs about my chest, my stomach was sunken, my eyes stared wildly; my whole skin was pink shading into red, almost scarlet; while my face and neck, in contrast to the rest of my body, were swollen, apparently suffused with blood to the point where I was unrecognizable. For some reason, the sebaceous glands were stimulated by the fever, and hair grew in great profusion all over my body.

This, then, is the story of my illness as reported by my wife and as I remember it. On the eleventh day it ended as suddenly as it had begun. My face was now white with illness; my eyes, no longer dilated, were sunken; and, instead of having the strength of ten, I could hardly lift my hands to my head. The fever had burned itself out, and I was alive. That was my first conscious thought. I was rational. I said, “I think it’s over.” Mildred said, “Yes,” and burst into tears. I said, “You can let me go now,” and for a while it seemed doubtful that she would be able to, because she had put the handcuff key away so safely that she could not remember where it was. She found it at last in an empty flower vase.

A period of convalescence and reflection followed. It is easy to reflect when one is ill; there is nothing else to do. Our reserves of food being ample, we just sat around and talked. The ten days of my illness had been notable for the final evacuation of the hotel. As far as we knew, we were now the only people in it.

I was now the most intelligent man in the world. I knew answers that should have been obvious by implication to everyone when the first bomb burst in the New Mexican desert. I had survived the Red Death by a miracle and was therefore even more special, because a lot of people had survived the blast, but so far as I knew, I was the only man to recover from the plague. All that came out of this period of reflection, during which I regained some measure of my strength, was the certainty that what had been wrong with us was nothing but stupidity. We had been too stupid to be afraid, or too afraid to acknowledge our fear.

What I’d feared now happened. Mildred came down with the fever. Her symptoms followed the accepted pattern of dancing and singing, but considering our differences in size (she was under five feet tall and weighed only ninety-three pounds) I could not bring myself to tie her up, with the result that when she turned on me, suddenly leaping like a tiger cat onto my shoulder and sinking her teeth into my neck, I had great difficulty in escaping her. As soon as I got my hands free I threw her down and put the handcuffs on her. Her hands were so small that she wriggled out of them till I succeeded in padding them with a handkerchief. She bit, scratched, and kicked fiercely all the time I was restraining her. Having recovered from the disease, I was “salted,” as we used to say in Africa of horses that had had horse sickness, and so I was able to take better care of her than she had of me. Nor was she hard to handle because she would seize any lure, like a bath towel, that I offered to her, and worry it, which kept her occupied till I could get right up to her— for a woman, like a horse or any other animal, is less dangerous when she is quite close to you. A kick or a blow has to travel to gain strength. Nevertheless, despite all my efforts—my keeping her covered and hand-feeding her— she weakened and died the day that the fever ended, curling up in my arms so that I thought she was just sleeping and did not know she was dead till I put her down.

This description seems somewhat cold and unfeeling, but there is no way of describing such an incident except by understatement. The point was that she had been and now was not. I was almost mad with sadness and loneliness. My brave little companion was gone and her body had to be disposed of. Burial was unthinkable, for no matter how deep I might have buried her, the hunger-crazed dogs would have dug her up. So, collecting furniture from the houses in the neighborhood, I made a great pyre, rested her body on the top of it, and set it ablaze, standing watch over it with a rifle in my hands. Like a Hindu widow, she was burned—utterly destroyed with the household goods of those who had died before her.

It was then that I thought of suicide and, deciding against it, began to take to the bottle. Oddly enough, the dogs were of no help, the wet noses of their sympathy doing nothing to alleviate my sorrow. Some days of this, or weeks—time, which had been getting vaguer, now ceased to exist entirely, because if you are alone there is no time —and then I made my decision to leave a home which no longer held anything but memories. Seeking a place to live, I moved first to the Hotel Pierre because of its proximity to Central Park; and then ten years or so later I moved to this cave in the Chelsea because of the sylvan beauties of its surroundings—its grottoes, pool and springs attracting me profoundly.

Leaving home was a strange sensation. Each thing I looked at had a history. Given by friends, bought, inherited, each thing represented something other than what it was. They were objects certainly, some of them objects of art, but they were also memories. This man and that woman came to the surface of memory; this place and that place; this year and that year. We were in New Orleans then, I thought. We bought those little brass cannons on our honeymoon. We bought this picture in New York, that ivory Buddha in Paris. What was it they said about Buddhas? That you should never use them for anything—not as paperweights or doorstops; you should just have them to look at. This was home, a collection of objects—chairs, tables, beds, chests of drawers, china, silver, pictures, books—that had been integrated into a personality by their possessors—by us. This was home in its final phase; built up slowly, it was now suddenly disintegrated.

Several times I went back to look at the apartment, to walk about in it as I had walked before, to feel the things I had handled in the past. I even collected a few things as souvenirs and took them over to the Pierre. It may have been these minor objects of art, or it may have been the location of my new abode, its convenience to 57th Street, that prompted me to make a collection of the smaller pictures in the art galleries there.

The galleries were intact, no one having bothered to loot them—jewels and gold being the things that attracted the robbers. I got some very lovely things: a Poussin, a Utrillo; I got pictures by Renoir, Ingres, Vermeer, Manet, Monet, Dali, and Winslow Homer. Later on, this picture collecting became a kind of obsession and no doubt helped me to retain my sanity, for I would hunt the more expensive apartments and houses of the city in search of works of art—pictures, bibelots, and books. I took things from museums and libraries, and so created a museum of my own in one of the large reception rooms of the hotel. The catholicity of my taste would no doubt have amazed the late curators of the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art, but I have a very interesting collection to which, even now, I occasionally add an exceptional piece if I run across one. And it is very restful after a day’s hunting in Central Park to drop in and look at the masterpieces of our vanished civilization and reflect upon the marvelous capacity of man for variability.

It is interesting to look back now and see the devices I unknowingly employed to keep going. Had I not been alone, had Mildred lived, there might have been a great excitement in this life once we had got used to it. Even as it was, I grew to enjoy it. I see that today, when the even tenor of my life has been shattered by the sudden appearance of the strangers. Had they been men, I should unquestionably have killed them, but since they were young women I could not. That I could not was not a matter of chivalry, for chivalry needs a social context in which to function. The force that stayed my finger—which was on the trigger—was one much older than chivalry, being the force that had given birth to it. These were young females of my own species. No factor can be more disturbing to any man or animal.

It is hard to imagine the sport of hunting in North America at this time unless the game is described. The mutations mentioned earlier did not all appear suddenly —first one turned up and then another. I found the first sign of anything odd about six years after the blast. I was out looking for a deer in Central Park, and I came upon what looked like a dog spoor eight inches across. My dogs, however, became very excited and went off in full cry.

As I trotted after my pack (at that time it consisted of about fifteen couples of grown dogs, and ten half-and three-quarter-grown pups who were learning their business) I felt that they had bitten off more than they could chew. The spoor puzzled me. This was an immense beast —the stride was well over a yard—with imprints so deep that it must weigh at least half a ton. I had gone about a mile when I heard the baying of the dogs. I also heard some of them screaming the way a hurt dog does. I hurried and then, prompted by some instinct, decided to climb a tree to get a better view. It was a good thing I did because the dogs had surrounded a huge black wolf that stood as high at the withers as a horse. Three dogs were dead and, as I looked, the wolf caught another—a handsome red-colored dog called Fox—and tossed him in the air the way a good terrier does a rat. The dog fell howling with his back broken. As the wolf seized their companion, the other dogs darted in from all around to bite him, seizing his hind legs and tail, one bitch leaping at his throat. I had only the 303 with me, a rifle quite unsuited to this kind of beast had I been on the ground where he could get me, but a good enough weapon from my point of vantage in a tree. Resting the barrel along a branch, I emptied the magazine into him, and before he could decide what to do he was down and the dogs had swarmed all over him. He killed three more before he died, and hurt six. This experience taught me a very important lesson, and I never went out again without two guns, one of them a 450 express.

After seeing this animal, I was no longer surprised at the other strange beasts I saw. The atomic bomb and the radioactivity that had accompanied it were explanation enough when I thought it all out. These beasts were monsters caused by the effect of radioactivity on the genes and chromosomes of animals pregnant at the time of the blast, while other abnormal mutations were the result of some nutritional change that had taken place in the herbage. It interested me to note that I, too, felt very well and even seemed to have grown a little through eating the meat of these animals. And this diet certainly had had an effect on my hounds, the young dogs increasing in size, going up to forty inches and weighing over three hundred pounds—the size of a small lion or leopard. The aurochs, which had roamed Europe before the Romans, reappeared through some kind of throwback; and the cattle of the country—Jerseys, Guernseys, Herefords, Holsteins, and Shorthorns—bred together, increased in size, and reverted to a breed that looked like the Texas longhorn. These cattle became the chief prey of the giant parti-coloured mink.

Fortunately the mink were rare. I feared them greatly because of their savagery. They stood about five feet high at the shoulder and were some eighteen feet long, including the tail. But despite their size they could flatten themselves and creep along almost invisibly, the white marks helping them by breaking up the silhouette. They would creep closer and closer to their prey and then charge at it from close distance at incredible speed—the speed being fast enough to roll over an ox that was taken by surprise. Then, cutting the jugular with their immense needle teeth, they swiftly emptied the carcass of blood.

As far as possible, I avoided hunting such dangerous animals and confined myself to deer, wild cattle, antelopes, bison and zebras for meat for the pack and myself; and tigers, leopards, mountain lions and bears for sport and to keep my dogs in fighting trim. There is nothing more exciting than hunting some great carnivore that has taken up its abode in a house in the vicinity. Such an animal has to be killed, because nothing is so inconvenient as a tiger or leopard making a den near one’s dwelling.

One of my most interesting hunts was that of a pair of tigers in the Hotel Pierre. They were a mated couple, and I was continually getting glimpses of them in the vestibule or in the passages.

The tigers had made their den in a small pantry behind the cocktail bar; and it was the knowledge that I would lose a lot of hounds, and that any dogs would be good enough for the job provided they had courage enough to enter, which had prompted me to use my culls. I sent them into the bar. The two leaders were killed before they were through the door, the male tiger smashing them against the wall with what can only be described as a right and a left; but as he struck, I shot him, the bullet smashing his lower jaw and entering his chest. The remaining dogs went in over his body, and came out faster than they had gone in, followed by the tigress. She charged out but did not see me—I had hidden behind the bar. As she passed me I fired at her, but I missed. The dogs were now in full cry after her. As she bounded up the steps into the dining-room, followed by the dogs, I got another shot in and hit her in the loins with a high shot that broke her back. I checked the dogs as well as I could—there was no point in their attacking now—but one refused to obey and was killed. Another bullet finished the tigress.

This incident was a contributory factor in my decision to move to the Chelsea. The Park was no longer important, since the whole city was now covered with grass, and the beauty of the cave I had discovered had long tempted me. There was no place near the Chelsea where large, dangerous animals could lurk, and there were excellent facilities for my dogs.

This new home where I am now sitting deserves some notice. The cave has two chambers and is lighted by windows that I have pierced through the debris. There is a third room, on a lower level, which has no window. The temperature of this room rarely varies more than a few degrees, and this is where I sleep in the coldest and the hottest weather. I also keep my wine here, and the room has a pleasant rich, earthy smell of wine and dog and man that is very homelike. The second room is a combined sitting room and study; I have my best pictures and books here, and some wonderful small pieces of furniture. The outside room is my kitchen and workshop. I have built myself a chimney and have a bench and carpenters’ tools.

But all these conveniences could have been found in most districts in the city. It was the exterior which made the situation unique. The hotel itself had collapsed and was a voluptuous green hill covered with short, cropped grass. In fine weather I have seen a herd of zebra mixed with American bison grazing over it within a few yards of me. By some combination of accidents—the explosion that destroyed New York, the civic engineering that existed before the explosion, and certain geological factors —a lovely long, finger-shaped lake appeared in 23d Street. It is fed from the spring which bubbles through mv grotto, the water being first forced upward by natural pressure through a small crevice in the fallen masonry some fifteen feet above ground level. After I had done a little minor engineering with plumbing fixtures picked up here and there and with plants and ferns collected wherever I could find them, I had created a little paradise for myself. I should add that I did no hunting within a mile of my home, thus making a reserve because I like the game for company and I find nothing more beautiful. I also had two practical reasons, one being that if any big carnivores came along they would have no difficulty in finding a meal, and the second being that, in the event of illness, I could easily kill something to eat from my own doorstep...

Something very awkward has just occurred. My house dogs again expressed uneasiness, and, waiting till they quieted down, I went out to see what had disturbed them. What I found justified my worst fears. The girls have found my retreat. Their spoor is all around the grotto. They even rested on the grass and dipped their toes in the pool below the trickling waterfall. This infuriates me. The impertinence of these abandoned creatures—hunting out the cave of an old and respectable man and then disporting themselves at his private spring! I have been away from people too long to feel any Robinson Crusoe-like joy at discovering the footprints of these girls; besides, Friday was not a girl, much less two girls.

Bodo and Vixen worked over the grotto, quartering it, noses to the ground, stopping occasionally with backward looks at me. I followed them and found the trail to lead east and then, climbing one of the larger hillocks to get a better view, saw the smoke of a fire about half a mile away. It gave me a very strange feeling to see the smoke of another’s cooking fire. I sat down and, with my dogs beside me, spent some time watching the blue smoke curl upward like a ribbon into the sky. Once a little breeze caught it, and it made a question mark. Nothing, I thought, could be more apt unless it were a period. I was overcome by a sense of finality, of foreboding. If I am not careful, my pleasant way of life may end, my habit of years be interrupted. With a certain irony I reflected on the repetition of the human pattern. As we once feared and resented the coming of atomic power, or, for that matter, universal suffrage, the liberation of the slaves or anything else that was different, I am now upset because I am no longer alone in the world. With these thoughts in my mind, I came home and cooked my supper. I had the saddle and kidneys of a yearling moose calf cooked in bear fat, a can of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and a can of green peas. I opened a bottle of port, one of the few wines which has not begun to go off after more than twenty years. I topped it off with three brandies. I have given the dogs a good meal and now sit here, pencil in hand, to record further impressions. I am now right up to date.

The brandy has done me good. I can feel my heart beating strangely.

Six months have passed since I have written a line. Although, as a novelist, I have always objected to the diary or near-diary form, I find on reading this over that it has a certain interest. Oddly enough, whether or not anyone is ever to read it appears to depend on me, because the young women are with me now. I would call them nice-looking—though it is quite hard for me to remember exactly what a pretty girl should look like.

I will describe them in greater detail later. At the moment my problem is one of biology and morals.

I am seventy-three years of age, and, though I am healthy and remarkably strong, I am without any desire for these young creatures of my own species. My lack of interest does not appear to be reciprocated, for in them is the warmth and burgeoning of youth. This is very embarrassing to a man of my solitary habits and advanced years. Who am I to repopulate the world with white men? And would not the world perhaps be a better place without us? On the other hand, my vanity comes in—my vanity as an author and the historian of these events: the final chapter of history as we knew it, and the opening chapter of a new kind of history. If there are to be people again, if there, are to be readers again—who might someday read this diary—it appears that I must father them. The problem perturbs me; it is an issue that I find it hard to clarify. The moral question is not whether I should live with two girls, but whether our species is worth perpetuating.

And for the life of me I cannot see what is the matter with the young Indian braves. Why can’t the girls marry them, and live happily ever after without bothering me? Of course, the Indians may not think them attractive, but this seems hardly likely. In my opinion, the girls’ interest in me is simply curiosity: I seem unique, and women love the rare and strange. It is also evident that I have prestige value among the Indians.

It is now spring again, and as I look back over the last few months I feel them worthy of some notice because of their personal interest to me. We are now in some open country in what I take to be Florida, since our war party went south and we are among palms. I have seen brown pelicans and frigate birds and so I cannot be very far wrong. I was riding Prince, my big bay, and beside me on her chestnut was Helen, the smaller of the two blondes. We galloped side by side, my long white hair and beard blowing in the wind, her yellow hair flowing like a palomino’s tail. Throwing my leg across a horse again after all these years has been a strange and wonderful sensation that has really reconciled me to this new way of life.

As I rode, my thoughts went back to the day the Indians broke into my home and captured me far north in New York City.

I had finished eating and was working on my manuscript when the dogs leaped up and went almost mad with fury. They barked and snuffled under the door. As I grabbed my rifle, the door burst open and a number of young braves, accompanied by the two girls, broke in. They were all yelling and carrying weapons. The leader killed Bodo, who jumped at him as he crossed the threshold. As I raised my rifle, one of the girls tripped me. She flung herself onto me, wrapping her arms about my legs. I fired two shots but missed with both. Looking back at the incident, I am inclined to think the three brandies may have had something to do with the poor showing I made. The brandy was wonderful ‘65, the so-called Napoleon, and I drank from one of those large-bellied glasses that are warmed with the hands. My missing, however, must be considered providential, for had I wounded one of the braves I might easily have been killed.

Vixen fastened her teeth onto the leg of one of the young men, but another got hold of my left arm before I could get to my feet. The Indians seemed to have decided not to hurt me and to have had a mistaken idea that I would not strike the girls if they attacked me, because the second girl now knelt on my chest. Her hair had fallen down and was hanging in my face. I was able to raise the barrel of my rifle and clip her on the jaw with it as I lay on my back, at the same time striking the other girl on the top of the head with a downward stroke from the butt. The young men now became more active, and disarmed me and tied me. I called Vixen off and gave up the battle. To tell the truth, I was curious about these Indians. I was even more curious about the two girls, who definitely were white and who spoke a kind of English—in the struggle they both swore like cavalry officers. I only hoped they did not know the meaning of the words they used. (It subsequently appeared that they did not, but had learned them from an old prospector who, having joined the Indians and finding these two orphan girls among them—their parents had died of the Red Death—had decided to pay his debt to society by teaching them his version of their own language.) The Indians were Comanches and Kiowas and had set out from Oklahoma four years ago on a kind of scouting exploration mission. They had brought the girls with them as interpreters, in case they should find any white men left alive. Their medicine men had foretold the finding of one and had said the white man would give them news.

I was at first tongue-tied in the presence of the girls, who seemed, once I had got used to the idea, incredibly beautiful and desirable. I have to some extent got over this phase, which I consider one of the few signs of senility I have shown. I had next to learn the language they called English. Apart from its Rabelaisian flavor, it had many Comanche words which the girls used to fill in the gaps, where they had forgotten what their prospector friend had taught them. As he died when they were about ten years old, they had developed a kind of special language, as children do. However, by degrees I got their story. They were the daughters of an Indian agent and his wife who had been killed on the reservation when the blast hit us. The girls had been infants then, and so knew very little about the blast. An Indian squaw had adopted them. Some time later, a prospector by the name of Adam K. Bell had joined forces with the tribe (he had been in the mountains for two years) and had instructed the girls in their mother tongue and in his version of history, geography and mathematics. They knew the multiplication tables and could add, subtract, divide and multiply—arts which made them invaluable to the Indians, who called them in when such obscure calculations were necessary. He had also taught them some excellent geology, though they could never figure out his interest in gold, which they said was quite common in some of the mountains they had explored; and they thought it had caused the old prospector’s death through frustration, though of course they did not use that word. They said he went mad when he saw it—and to express his madness they clapped their hands, jumped up and down, and pulled at their hair.

The war party that captured me had had its camp on the site of the blast. The tepees stood about where the Players Club had been. They had chosen this site because, since everything was flattened around them, they need fear no ambush. When we reached the camp, a number of warriors were seated on the grass, grazing their horses, which they held by long riatas. These were the reserve braves, as it were, who had their arms with them—bows and arrows—and could be in action in a few minutes. Farther away, other horses were being grazed under an armed, mounted guard. These men had rifles that looked like Springfields. It appeared later that they had picked them up here and there as they crossed the country—deer rifles and the like, war souvenirs and other relatively light guns. In the United States, very heavy game rifles of the sort used in Africa have always been rare; and even if the Indians had found one, they would only have fired it once because of the kick. But even though they could have found enough ordinary rifles and enough ammunition, a great number of the braves were apparently against using them. The white man’s magic had, as it were, gone out of fashion with all but the boldest. As I took in the scene, I was struck by the oddness of the combination of primitive and modern weapons in the hands of the red men. Noble savages—but I wished they had been less rough with me.

More men were sitting about the cooking fires in front of the tepees. My girls—I called them that already in my mind—seemed to be the only women with the party.

I was taken before the leader, a subsidiary chief or headman called Tall Eagle. He was a powerful man of about forty, and some kind of communication with him was established with the help of the girls. I did not get to know the full story of these Indians until later, when I had mastered something of their tongue, which I speak well now though I continue to mix in words of Zulu, which disconcerts them. The war party’s mission was to proceed east till they came to the Great Water and then follow it south till they came to the land of the Seminoles, with whom they wished to establish contact and discuss the formation of a union of the Indian tribes that had survived, a repetition of the Six Nations alliance—if six nations were found still to exist.

They were, however, much perturbed by the great mutations that they had found in the East, and even to encounter such animals as Bengal tigers and polar bears worried them. Fortunately, the great mutations were not common. In my first week with the Indians I had the good fortune to kill a giant mink that had attacked a party of their braves, after it had killed three members of the party and sucked the blood from two of their horses. With the help of the Indians, I skinned the animal. It took ten men to drag it out so that we could peg it.

Perhaps I should describe this hunt in greater detail because it had certain interesting qualities. I was riding with one of the girls in the vicinity of my old home in 45th Street, perhaps unconsciously bidding it farewell, when from the direction of the Hudson River I heard shouts and yells which I knew must come from my new friends. I could also distinguish the scream of a giant mink. I was luckily carrying my 450. I had, in fact, fired a few shots from it just to get my horse used to the sound of a gun, something that he had not taken kindly to at first but seemed to be getting used to, as almost any horse will if he is swung sideways to the target so that a shot is not fired too close to his ears or face. At any rate, when I heard the noise I turned Prince’s head toward the river and galloped down the soft grass of the street, which at this point runs downhill till it crosses Ninth Avenue, where it rises in a short hill. I could feel Prince change his stride as the street rose; his great quarters came under him as he drove his hind hoofs into the turf. The girl stayed close behind me.

Breasting the hill, I checked the horse, pulling him up almost into a rear because, as I stopped him, I heard a terrible cry of agony from quite near by. Swinging Prince around, I pushed him up onto a ridge and saw, on the corner of what had been Tenth Avenue, the strangest sight I have ever seen.

A giant mink stood at bay with a dead Indian in his mouth. Two other Indians lay on the ground, and there was a dead horse near by. Some mounted Indians and one loose horse were circling round the mink, who bristled with so many arrows that he looked almost like a porcupine. There were probably enough arrows to kill him in the end, but he would take days to die. The Indians with rifles were not with this party. Even if they had been, their bullets would have been too light to have much effect. The most intelligent thing the Indians could have done would have been to leave the mink alone now, because he would have settled down to suck the blood of the men and horses he had killed; but they were in no mood to give in and, uttering wild yells, they closed in on him, circling around him and shooting more arrows into him. This made it impossible for me to get a shot at him till suddenly, dropping the man he held, he did what I hoped he would do—stood up on his hind legs. He had seen me on the ridge, outlined against the sky, and wondered what I was. The mink’s eyesight, fortunately, is not good. As he stood looking and sniffing, his pointed face dripping with blood, I charged down straight at him—a distance of a hundred yards or so—and, pulling up about twenty paces short of him, swung Prince broadside on and put a soft-nosed bullet into the mink’s chest, midway between his short, waving forelegs. The bullet must have smashed into his backbone because he threw up his paws, almost as a man might throw up his hands, and fell backward with the Indians closing in on him, forcing their reluctant ponies up to him so that they could drive their spears into him. Once satisfied that he was dead, they expressed their pleasure.

Nothing could have suited my purpose better than this happy event, for by it I proved my value to them as a warrior. For I had realized for some time that even if they had decided to leave me behind when they left New York (they had freed me almost as soon as they caught me), I would have followed because I needed company.

The bowl of my personal existence was shattered. Here were men again. I’d forgotten how I needed men. It was interesting how my nostrils, trained by years of hunting, now dilated at the scent of men. There were also the girls, who affected me profoundly, and the horses. Women might be a necessity in youth, but horses were a pleasure that I had never forgotten. No man was ever betrayed by a horse; no horse ever deserted him or bore false witness against him.

It took me some time to explain my ideas to the Indians, and to accustom my youngest dogs to their company. The older and more savage dogs I shot after having steeled myself by drinking half a bottle of French brandy. Actually, apart from the dogs that I could not take, I regretted most leaving my wine cellar. But I had some beautiful dogs left; I had the bay stallion Tall Eagle had given me; and I had the company of a hundred and fifty magnificent young Indians and two young white girls who were burned as brown as the Indians and distinguishable from them only by their corn-colored hair and blue eyes. All this made up for what I had lost.

I was, however, faced with an ethical problem. The Indians, who had discovered heavy rifles similar to mine in some of the stores they had entered, wished me to instruct them in their use. I could see nothing to be gained by such instruction, so I tried to explain to them that this was white man’s magic and so strong that it had destroyed all the white men in the world except me, turning its forces against them in retribution for their own misuse of its power. I also pointed out that all they need do to have this great power at their disposal was to keep me alive and treat me well. I let one man fire a shot lying down, and the recoil broke his collarbone. This seemed to confirm all that I had said.

Until I was with people again, it had not occurred to me to consider my own appearance, because when a man is alone he has no appearance. I found a mirror and examined myself with some attention and amazement. I was as straight as I had always been, but I was much wider than I had thought possible. My arms were as big as my thighs; my chest was immense. My hair was long, reaching halfway down my back, and my beard reached my belt. Both hair and beard were snow white. My body hair, with which I was covered, was white in front of my body and shaded through silver into black along my spine. For ornament, I wore a diamond necklace around my neck; my only clothing was a khaki kilt that I wore for warmth, a leather belt in which was stuck my kukri, and a pair of leather shoes. On my upper arms I had some gold armlets made from expanding wrist-watch chains and other jeweled bracelets that I had joined together and mounted on wide leather straps—a pastime I had indulged in as a hobby. I could not think what I looked like until I suddenly remembered the steel engravings of an old Bible I had had as a child. I looked like Moses when he received the tablets. But the astonishing thing was how well I felt and how immensely strong I was—now that I had others against whom to measure myself.

My appearance does not seem to bother the Indians and it is evident that the two girls—their names are Helen and Christine—want to marry me and are even prepared to share me if necessary, much to the amusement of the braves, who, now that we know each other well, nudge me in the ribs and give me monosyllabic advice amplified by gestures. This situation is still unresolved and becomes daily more precarious.

My personal affairs have, however, no historic interest; and, having completed my story of the end of the white man’s world, I can only say that I ride forward with optimism and can now laugh at the change of circumstance which hoisted my race with the petard of its own ingenuity and returned this great land to its original possessors. “America for the Americans,” I say to Tall Eagle, and laugh. He says nothing. He thinks I am mad. But the girls laugh, because young girls laugh at anything, and it is spring again.