Kirth-Labbery managed to laugh at himself. "Damn your secretarial hide,
Vyrko. I love you like a son, but if I had one man who knew a meson
from a metazoon to help me in the laboratory...."
"You'll find something, Father," Lavra said vaguely.
Her father regarded her with an odd seriousness. "Lavra," he said,
"your beauty is the greatest thing that I have wrought--with a certain
assistance, I'll grant, from the genes so obviously carried by your
mother. That beauty alone still has meaning. The sight of you would
bring a momentary happiness even to a man choking in his last spasms,
while our great web of civilization...."
He absently left the sentence unfinished and switched on the video
screen. He had to try a dozen channels before he found one that was
still casting. When every erg of a man's energy goes to drawing his
next breath, he cannot tend his machine.
At last Kirth-Labbery picked up a Nyork newscast. The announcer was
sneezing badly ("The older literature," Vyrko observed, "found sneezing
comic...."), but still contriving to speak, and somewhere a group of
technicians must have had partial control of themselves.
"Four hundred and seventy-two planes have crashed," the announcer
said, "in the past forty-eight hours. Civil authorities have forbidden
further plane travel indefinitely because of the danger of spasms at
the controls, and it is rumored that all vehicular transport whatsoever
is to come under the same ban. No Rocklipper has arrived from Lunn for
over a week, and it is thirty-six hours since we have made contact with
the Lunn telestation. Yurp has been silent for over two days, and Asia
a week.
"'The most serious threat of this epidemic,' the head of the Academy
has said in an authorized statement, 'is the complete disruption of the
systems of communication upon which world civilization is based. When
man becomes physically incapable of governing his machines....'"
* * * * *
It was then that they saw the first of the yellow bands.
It was just that: a band of bright yellow some thirty centimeters
wide, about five meters long, and so thin as to seem insubstantial,
a mere stripe of color. It came underneath the backdrop behind the
announcer. It streaked about the casting room with questing sinuosity.
No features, no appendages relieved its yellow blankness.
Then with a deft whipping motion it wrapped itself around the
announcer. It held him only an instant. His hideously shriveled body
plunged toward the camera as the screen went dead.
That was the start of the horror.
Vyrko, naturally, had no idea of the origin of the yellow bands. Even
Kirth-Labbery could offer no more than conjectures. From another
planet, another system, another galaxy, another universe....
It did not matter. Precise knowledge had now lost its importance.
Kirth-Labbery was almost as indifferent to the problem as was Lavra; he
speculated on it out of sheer habit. What signified was that the yellow
bands were alien, and that they were rapidly and precisely completing
the destruction of mankind begun by the agnoton.
"Their arrival immediately after the epidemic," Kirth-Labbery
concluded, "cannot be coincidence. You will observe that they function
freely in an agnoton-laden atmosphere."
"It would be interesting," Vyrko commented, "to visualize a band
sneezing...."
"It's possible," the scientist corrected, "that the agnoton was a
poison-gas barrage laid down to soften Earth for their coming; but is
it likely that they could _know_ that a gas harmless to them would
be lethal to other life? It's more probable that they learned from
spectroscopic analysis that the atmosphere of Earth lacked an element
essential to them, which they supplied before invading."
Vyrko considered the problem while Lavra sliced a peach with delicate
grace. She was unable to resist licking the juice from her fingers.
"Then if the agnoton," he ventured, "is something that they imported,
is it possible that their supply might run short?"
Kirth-Labbery fiddled with the dials under the screen. It was still
possible to pick up occasional glimpses from remote sectors, though by
now the heart sickened in advance at the knowledge of the inevitable
end of the cast.
"It is possible, Vyrko. It is the only hope. The three of us here,
where the agnoton and the yellow bands are alike helpless to enter,
may continue our self-sufficient existence long enough to outlast the
invaders. Perhaps somewhere on Earth there are other such nuclei, but I
doubt it. We are the whole of the future ... and I am old."
* * * * *
Vyrko frowned. He resented the terrible weight of a burden that he did
not want but could not reject. He felt himself at once, oppressed and
ennobled. Lavra went on eating her peach.
The video screen sprang into light. A young man with the tense, lined
face of premature age spoke hastily, urgently. "To all of you, if there
are any of you.... I have heard no answer for two days now.... It is
chance that I am here. But _watch_, all of you! I have found how the
yellow bands came here. I am going to turn the camera on it now ...
_watch_!"
The field of vision panned to something that was for a moment
totally incomprehensible. "This is their ship," the old young man
gasped. It was a set of bars of a metal almost exactly the color of
the bands themselves, and it appeared in the first instant like a
three-dimensional projection of a tesseract. Then as they looked at it,
their eyes seemed to follow strange new angles. Possibilities of vision
opened up beyond their capacities. For a moment they seemed to see what
the human eye was not framed to grasp.
"They come," the voice panted on, "from...."
The voice and the screen went dead. Vyrko covered his eyes with his
hands. Darkness was infinite relief. A minute passed before he felt
that he could endure once more even the normal exercise of the optic
nerve. He opened his eyes sharply at a little scream from Lavra.
He opened them to see how still Kirth-Labbery sat. The human heart,
too, is framed to endure only so much; and, as the scientist had said,
he was old.
* * * * *
It was three days after Kirth-Labbery's death before Vyrko had brought
his prose-and-verse record up to date. Nothing more had appeared on
the video, even after the most patient hours of knob-twirling. Now
Vyrko leaned back from the keyboard and contemplated his completed
record--and then sat forward with abrupt shock at the thought of that
word _completed_.
There was nothing more to write.
The situation was not novel in literature. He had read many treatments,
and even written a rather successful satire on the theme himself. But
here was the truth itself.
He was that most imagination-stirring of all figures, The Last Man on
Earth. And he found it a boring situation.
Kirth-Labbery, had he lived, would have devoted his energies in the
laboratory to an effort, even conceivably a successful one, to destroy
the invaders. Vyrko knew his own limitations too well to attempt that.
Vrist, his gay wild twin, who had been in Lunn on yet another of his
fantastic ventures when the agnoton struck--Vrist would have dreamed
up some gallant feat of physical prowess to make the invaders pay
dearly for his life. Vyrko found it difficult to cast himself in so
swash-buckling a role.
He had never envied Vrist till now. _Be jealous of the dead; only the
living are alone._ Vyrko smiled as he recalled the line from one of his
early poems. It had been only the expression of a pose when he wrote
it, a mood for a song that Tyrsa would sing well....
It was in this mood that he found (the ancient word had no modern
counterpart) the _pulps_.
* * * * *
He knew their history: how some eccentric of two thousand years ago
(the name was variously rendered as Trees or Tiller) had buried them
in a hermetic capsule to check against the future; how Tarabal had
dug them up some fifty years ago; how Kirth-Labbery had spent almost
the entire Hartl Prize for them because, as he used to assert, their
incredible mixture of exact prophecy and arrant nonsense offered the
perfect proof of the greatness and helplessness of human ingenuity.
But Vyrko had never read them before. They would at least be a novelty
to deaden the boredom of his classically dramatic situation. He passed
a more than pleasant hour with _Galaxy_ and _Surprising_ and the rest,
needing the dictionary but rarely. He was particularly impressed by one
story detailing, with the most precise minutiae, the politics of the
American Religious Wars--a subject on which he himself had based a not
unsuccessful novel. By one Norbert Holt, he observed. Extraordinary
how exact a forecast ... and yet extraordinary too how many of the
stories dealt with space- and time-travel, which the race had never yet
attained and now never would....
And inevitably there was a story, a neat and witty one by an author
named Knight, about the Last Man on Earth. He read it and smiled, first
at the story and then at his own stupidity.
He found Lavra in the laboratory, of all unexpected places.
She was staring fixedly at one corner, where the light did not strike
clearly.
"What's so fascinating?" Vyrko asked.
Lavra turned suddenly. Her hair and her flesh rippled with the perfect
grace of the movement. "I was thinking...."
Vyrko's half-formed intent toward her permitted no comment on that
improbable statement.
"The day before Father ... died, I was in here with him and I asked if
there was any hope of our escaping ever. Only this time he answered me.
He said yes, there was a way out, but he was afraid of it. It was an
idea he'd worked on but never tried. And we'd be wiser not to try it,
he said."
"I don't believe in arguing with your father--even post mortem."
"But I can't help wondering.... And when he said it, he looked over at
that corner."
* * * * *
Vyrko went to that corner and drew back a curtain. There was a chair of
metal rods, and a crude control panel, though it was hard to see what
it was intended to control. He dropped the curtain.
For a moment he stood watching Lavra. She was a fool, but she was
exceedingly lovely. And the child of Kirth-Labbery could hardly carry
only a fool's genes.
Several generations could grow up in this retreat before the inevitable
failure of the most permanent mechanical installations made it
uninhabitable. By that time Earth would be free of agnoton and yellow
bands, or they would be so firmly established that there was no hope.
The third generation would go forth into the world, to perish or....
He walked over to Lavra and laid a gentle hand on her golden hair.
* * * * *
Vyrko never understood whether Lavra had been bored before that time. A
life of undemanding inaction with plenty of food may well have sufficed
her. Certainly she was not bored now.
At first she was merely passive; Vyrko had always suspected that she
had meant the gambit to be declined. Then as her interest mounted and
Vyrko began to compliment himself on his ability as an instructor, they
became certain of their success; and from that point on she was rapt
with the fascination of the changes in herself.
But even this new development did not totally rid Vyrko of his own
ennui. If there were only something he could _do_, some positive,
Vristian, Kirth-Labberian step that he could take! He damned himself
for having been an incompetent aesthetic fool, who had taken so for
granted the scientific wonders of his age that he had never learned
what made them tick, or how greater wonders might be attained.
He slept too much, he ate too much, for a brief period he drank too
much--until he found boredom even less attractive with a hangover.
He tried to write, but the terrible uncertainty of any future audience
disheartened him.
Sometimes a week would pass without his consciously thinking of
agnoton or the yellow bands. Then he would spend a day flogging himself
into a state of nervous tension worthy of his uniquely dramatic
situation, but he would always relapse. There just wasn't anything to
do.
Now even the consolation of Lavra's beauty was vanishing, and she began
demanding odd items of food which the hydroponic garden could not
supply.
"If you loved me, you'd find a way to make cheese ..." or "... grow a
new kind of peach ... a little like a grape, only different...."
It was while he was listening to a film wire of Tyrsa's (the last she
ever made, in the curious tonalities of that newly rediscovered Mozart
opera) and seeing her homely face, made even less lovely by the effort
of those effortless-sounding notes, that he became conscious of the
operative phrase.
"If you loved me...."
"Have I ever said I did?" he snapped.
He saw a new and not readily understood expression mar the beauty of
Lavra's face. "No," she said in sudden surprise. "No," and her voice
fell to flatness, "you haven't...."
And as her sobs--the first he had ever heard from her--traveled away
toward the hydroponic room, he felt a new and not readily understood
emotion. He switched off the film wire midway through the pyrotechnic
rage of the eighteenth-century queen of darkness.
* * * * *
Vyrko found a curious refuge in the _pulps_. There was a perverse
satisfaction in reading the thrilling exploits of other Last Men on
Earth. He could feel through them the emotions that he should be
feeling directly. And the other stories were fun, too, in varying ways.
For instance, that astonishingly accurate account of the delicate
maneuvering which averted what threatened to be the first and final
Atomic War....
He noticed one oddity: Every absolutely correct story of the "future"
bore the same by-line. Occasionally other writers made good guesses,
predicted logical trends, foresaw inevitable extrapolations. But only
Norbert Holt named names and dated dates with perfect historical
accuracy.
It wasn't possible. It was too precise to be plausible. It was far more
spectacular than the erratic Nostradamus often discussed in the _pulps_.
But there it was. He had read the Holt stories solidly through in order
a half-dozen times, without finding a single flaw, when he discovered
the copy of _Surprising Stories_ that had slipped behind a shelf and
was therefore new to him.
He looked at once at the contents page. Yes, there was a Holt and--he
felt a twinge of irrational but poignant sadness--one labeled as
posthumous.
This story, we regret to tell you, is incomplete, and not only
because of Norbert Holt's tragic death last month. This is the last
in chronological order of Holt's stories of a consistently plotted
future; but this fragment was written before his masterpiece, The
_Siege of Lunn_. Holt himself used to tell me that he could never
finish it, that he could not find an ending; and he died still not
knowing how _The Last Boredom_ came out. But here, even though in
fragment form, is the last published work of the greatest writer
about the future, Norbert Holt.
The note was signed with the initials M. S. Vyrko had long sensed a
more than professional intimacy between Holt and his editor, Manning
Stern; this obituary introduction must have been a bitter task. But his
eyes were hurrying on, almost fearfully, to the first words of _The
Lost Boredom_:
There were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind
safe from the deadly yellow bands. The great Kirth-Labbery himself
had constructed....
Vyrko blinked and started again. It still read the same. He took firm
hold of the magazine, as though the miracle might slip between his
fingers, and dashed off with more energy than he had felt in months.
* * * * *
He found Lavra in the hydroponic room. "I have just found," he shouted,
"the damnedest unbelievable--"
"Darling," said Lavra, "I want some meat."
"Don't be silly. We haven't any meat. Nobody's eaten meat except at
ritual dinners for generations."
"Then I want a ritual dinner."
"You can go on wanting. But look at this! Just read those first lines!"
"Vyrko," she pleaded, "I _want_ it."
"Don't be an idiot!"
Her lips pouted and her eyes moistened. "Vyrko dear.... What you said
when you were listening to that funny music.... Don't you love me?"
"No," he barked.