Not a Creature Was Stirring
By DEAN EVANS
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction December 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
This could be a Christmas story. If it is, it
shows one way peace on Earth can be attained!
He was a tall, hard man with skin the color of very old iodine. When heclimbed up out of the vertical shaft of his small gold mine, The LousyDisappointment, he could have been taken for an Indian, he was thatdark. Except, of course, that Indians didn't exist any more in 1982.His name was Tom Gannett and he was about forty years old and he didn'trealize his own uniqueness.
When he made it to his feet, the first thing he did was to squint upat the sun. The second was to sneeze, and the third to blow his nose.
"Hey, you old sun!" he growled. "You old crummy sun, you look sicker'na dog."
Which was literally true, for the sun seemed to be pretty queer. Thewhole sky seemed to be pretty queer, for that matter. Skies shouldbe blue and the sun should be a bloated golden bauble driftingserenely across them. But the skies were not blue; they were a dirtypurplish-gray. And the sun wasn't a bloated golden bauble; somebodyhad it by the scruff of the neck and was dragging it.
Gannett planted his big feet wide apart and frowned sourly around andsniffed the air like a dog at a gopher hole. "The damn world smellssick," he grunted.
Which was also true. The world did smell sick. The world smelledsomething like that peculiar odor that comes from an old graveyardcarefully tended by an old man with dank moss sticking to the soles ofhis old shoes. That kind of smell.
Gannett didn't know why the sun looked sick, and he didn't know why theworld smelled sick. Indeed, there were many things Gannett didn't know,among which would be these in particular:
(a) He did not know (since, for the last six months, he had beenliving and working all alone at his little mine, which was in theremotest of the most remote desert regions of Nevada) that a littleless than three weeks earlier, mankind had finally achieved theinevitable: man's own annihilation.
(b) He did not know that he was going to be the loneliest man onEarth—he who was used to, and perfectly content with, the hermitlikeexistence of a desert rat.
(c) He furthermore did not know that there were four of the TenCommandments which he wasn't going to be able to break any more—noteven if he stayed up nights trying and lived for centuries.
Gannett snorted the smell from his nostrils and shrugged. Hell with it.He thought about Reno and how he hadn't been there for nearly a year.He thought of the dimly lighted, soft-carpeted cocktail lounges in Renowhere drinks come in long stemmed glasses and blondes in long-stemmedlegs. Reno at Christmastime, he thought. There was a town, Reno!
He grinned, showing big gold teeth that blazed out of his mouth likethe glittering grille on a Buick. He dug his feet into the hard groundand walked the hundred feet or so to his cabin where he sometimesslept when he didn't happen to sleep in the mine. He stripped off hisgrime-sodden clothes. He stepped out of them, in fact, and stretchedluxuriously as though he hadn't felt the good joy of being unclothedfor a long time.
He got up and went to a corner of the cabin, rummaged out a pair ofdusty clogs and