He smiled. What he had written was good. Not literary enough, perhaps,
but a fitting tribute to the human race, written by the last man. He
glanced at the tools at his feet. Having no further use for them, he
dissolved them, and, hungry from his long work, squatted in the rubble
of the cave and created a dinner. He stared at the food for a moment,
wondering what was lacking; then, sheepishly, created a table and
chair, utensils and plates. He was embarrassed. He had forgotten them
again.
Although there was no need to rush, he ate hurriedly, noting the odd
fact that when he didn't think of anything specific, he always created
hamburger, mashed potatoes, peas, bread and ice cream. Habit, he
decided. Finished, he made the remnants of the meal disappear, and with
them the plates, utensils and table. The chair he retained. Sitting on
it, he stared thoughtfully at the inscription. _It's fine_, he thought,
_but no human other than myself will ever read it._
It was fairly certain that he was the last man alive on the Earth. The
war had been thorough. Thorough as only man, a meticulous animal, could
make it. There had been no neutrals in this war, no middle-of-the-road
policy. You were on one side or the other. Bacteria, gas and radiations
had covered the Earth like a vast cloud. In the first days of that
war, invincible secret weapon had succeeded secret weapon with almost
monotonous regularity. And after the last hand had pushed the last
button, the bombs, automatically guided and impelled, had continued
to rain down. The unhappy Earth was a huge junkyard, without a living
thing, plant or animal, from pole to pole.
He had watched a good part of it. He had waited until he was fairly
sure the last bomb had been dropped; then he had come down.
_Very clever of you_, he thought bitterly, looking out the mouth of the
cave at the lava plain his ship rested on, and at the twisted mountains
behind it.
_You're a traitor--but who cares?_
He had been a captain in the Western Hemisphere Defense. Within two
days of warfare, he had known what the end would be. Filling a cruiser
with canned air, food and water, he had fled. In the confusion and
destruction, he knew that he would never be missed; after a few days
there was no one left to miss him. He had raced the big ship to the
dark side of the Moon, and waited. It was a twelve-day war--he had
guessed it would last fourteen--but he had to wait nearly six months
before the automatic missiles stopped falling. Then he had come down.
To find himself the only survivor....
* * * * *
He had expected others to recognize the futility of it, load ships
and flock to the dark side of the Moon also. Evidently there had been
no time, even if there had been the desire. He had thought that there
would be scattered groups of survivors, but he hadn't found any. The
war had been too thorough.
Landing on the Earth should have killed him, for the air itself was
poisoned. He hadn't cared--and he had lived. He seemed to be immune to
the various kinds of germs and radiations, or perhaps that was part of
his new power. He certainly had encountered enough of both, skipping
around the world in his ship, from the ruins of one city to another,
across blasted valleys and plains, scorched mountains. He had found no
life, but he did discover something.
He could create. He realized the power on his third day on Earth.
Wistfully, he had wished for a tree in the midst of the melted rock
and metal; a tree had appeared. The rest of the day he experimented,
and found that he could create anything that he had ever seen or heard
about.
Things he knew best, he could create best. Things he knew just from
books or conversation--palaces, for example--tended to be lopsided
and uncertain, although he could make them nearly perfect by laboring
mentally over the details. Everything he created was three-dimensional.
Even food tasted like food and seemed to nourish him. He could forget
all about one of his creations, go to sleep, and it would still be
there when he awakened. He could also uncreate. A single concentrated
thought and the thing he had made would vanish. The larger the thing,
the longer it took to uncreate.
Things he _hadn't_ made--valleys and mountains--he could uncreate, too,
but it took longer. It seemed as though matter was easier to handle
once he had shaped it. He could make birds and small animals, or things
that looked like birds and small animals.
He had never tried to make a human being.
He wasn't a scientist; he had been a space-pilot. He had a vague
concept of atomic theory and practically no idea of genetics. He
thought that some change must have taken place in his germ-plasm, or
in his brain, or perhaps in the Earth. The "why" of it all didn't
especially bother him. It was a fact and he accepted it.
He stared at the monument again. Something about it bothered him.
Of course, he could have created it, but he didn't know if the things
he made would endure after his death. They seemed stable enough, but
they might dissolve with his own dissolution. Therefore he compromised.
He created a chisel and mallet, but selected a granite wall that he
hadn't made. He cut the letters into the inside of the wall of the
cave so they would be safe from the elements, working many hours at a
stretch, sleeping and eating beside the wall.
From the mouth of the cave, he could see his ship, perched on a level
plain of scorched ground. He was in no rush to get back to it. In six
days the inscription was done, cut deeply and eternally into the rock.
The thought that had been bothering him as he stared at the gray
granite finally came to the surface. The only people who would come
to read it would be visitors from the stars. How would they decipher
it? He stared at the inscription angrily. He should have written it in
symbols. But what kind of symbols? Mathematics? Of course, but what
would that tell them about Man? And what made him think _they_ would
discover the cave anyway? There was no use for an inscription when
Man's entire history was written over the face of the planet, scorched
into the crust for anyone to see. He cursed his stupidity for wasting
six days working at the useless inscription. He was about to uncreate
it when he turned his head, hearing footsteps at the mouth of the cave.
He almost fell off the chair getting to his feet.
* * * * *
A girl was standing there. He blinked rapidly, and she was still there,
a tall, dark-haired girl dressed in a torn, dirty one-piece coverall.
"Hi," she said, and walked into the cave. "I heard your hammer from the
valley."
Automatically, he offered her his chair and created another for
himself. She tested it gingerly before she sat down.
"I saw you do it," she said, "but I still don't believe it. Mirrors?"
"No," he muttered uncertainly. "I create. That is, I have the power
to--wait a minute! How did you get here?" While he was demanding to
know, he was considering and rejecting possibilities. Hidden in a cave?
On a mountain top? No, there would be only one possible way....
"I was in your ship, pal." She leaned back in the chair and clasped her
hands around one knee. "When you loaded up that cruiser, I figured you
were going to beat it. I was getting tired of setting fuses eighteen
hours a day, so I stowed away. Anybody else alive?"
"No. Why didn't I see you, then?" He stared at the ragged, beautiful
girl, and a vague thought crossed his mind. He reached out and touched
her arm. She didn't draw back, but her pretty face grew annoyed.
"I'm real," she said bluntly. "You must have seen me at the base.
Remember?"
He tried to think back to the time when there had been a
base--centuries ago, it seemed. There _had_ been a dark-haired girl
there, one who had never given him a tumble.
"I think I froze to death," she was saying. "Or into coma, anyhow, a
few hours after your ship took off. Lousy heating system you have in
that crate!" She shivered reminiscently.
"Would have used up too much oxygen," he explained. "Just kept the
pilot's compartment heated and aired. Used a suit to drag supplies
forward when I needed them."
"I'm glad you didn't see me," she laughed. "I must have looked like the
devil, all covered with frost and killed, I bet. Some sleeping beauty I
probably made! Well, I froze. When you opened all the compartments, I
revived. That's the whole story. Guess it took a few days. How come you
didn't see me?"
"I suppose I never looked back there," he admitted. "Quick enough,
I found I didn't need supplies. Funny, I thought I opened all the
compartments, but I don't really remember--"