Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

In its symptoms the disease was like a kind of super-measles. No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine.

As for its origin, he offered three possibilities. It might have emerged from some animal reservoir of disease; it might be caused by some new micro-organism, most likely a virus, produced by mutation; it might be an escape, possibly even a vindictive release, from some laboratory of bacteriological warfare.

Of more scientific interest, the Director of the San Diego zoo reported his apes and monkeys to be dying off rapidly, the other animals unaffected.

The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way.” Mankind had been trembling about destruction through war, and had been having bad dreams of cities blown to pieces along with their inhabitants, of animals killed too, and of the very vegetation blighted off the face of the earth.

The Great Disaster—so he had begun to call it to himself—had not been complete.

Secondary Kill. Of those that the Great Disaster had spared, many would fall victim to some trouble from which civilization had previously protected them.

After a while he took pencil and paper, deciding to write down what qualifications he had, why he might be going to live, even with some degree of happiness, while the others were not.

1) Have will to live. Want to see what will happen in world without man, and how. Geographer.

2) Always was solitary. Don’t have to talk to other people.

3) Have appendix out.

4) Moderately practical, though not mecha...

5) Did not suffer devastating experience of living through it all, seeing family, other people, die....

At least he could hope that i...

Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity.

“Whatever happens, at least I shall never believe that I am a god. No, I shall never be a god!”

“I understand. I went through it too—having to have something around to make you feel comfortable. Like a pocket-piece or a rabbit-foot, you remember. We’re still about the same as we used to be, all of us.”

The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.