At last it was too dark to continue the repairs. He straightened his aching back and tossed his wrench aside, wiping a gob of grease from his face with a bit of waste. He stepped into the darkness of the battery-room, a darkness relieved only by the spasmodic, cold, blue flickering spark of the charger. The door closed behind him.
Camp pried one eye open a terrific trifle and yawned. Halfway through the yawn he sat bolt-upright, his heart pounding against his ribs like a frightened steam hammer, and stared about the small, bare room.
"Well?" a jeering voice demanded, and Camp jumped. Memory returned to him with a rush.
Unwilling, in his unfamiliarity, to leave the batteries charging all night, he had turned off the charger; finding this couch in an adjoining room, the gas station had seemed as good a place as any to bed down for the night. And the voice? Marvin, of course.
He had but to connect a starter-wire or so and clean up the resultant mess in the motor-well of the cruiser, and carry a few cases of canned food aboard. A map he had found indicated that this was Lake Nipigon, in Ontario. Nipigon, he knew, connected with Lake Superior; once in the Great Lake he could head for Isle Royale and the town of Johns. Why he decided on his old summer home he didn't know, but familiar surroundings would be better than the terrifying stillness of this deserted, unknown village. He carefully steered through the maze of moored and awash craft before him, and once out in the lake, set the course for the mouth of the Nipigon River and left it up to the automatic steering gear....
The Nipigon River opened up into Lake Superior, and a large island—Isle Royale, by his map—loomed ahead, its bays offering comfortable harbor for his small craft. Camp paralleled its shore, searching for recognizable landmarks. At last he spotted the old, familiar buoy, and on the island, just over a clump of trees, the red roof of the hotel he had patronized in the old days. He put in to shore and tied up at the dock.
Quite suddenly Camp realized that he'd only a very sketchy breakfast and no lunch, and that he was hungry. He slung Marvin into a pocket again and said, "Come on, Marvin. We're off to see the wizard."
Marvin snuggled into a comfortable ball and sleepily corrected. "Lizard ... petrosaurus parlante veneris ."
Camp soon found Broadway, the central avenue of the town, and wandered disconsolately past dusty alleys and snug little homes, all silent and dead. There was a cafeteria ahead, the only one the town boasted, and he listlessly entered, wondering vaguely if he should take one of the checks protruding from the dispenser.
He stepped behind the long counter, feeling singularly guilty, and saw plastic containers of milk stacked up by the score. He took one, broke the seal, and drained it. It was warm, of course, but pure, though the cream had formed a solid chunk at the top of the container; the sterile milk would not sour under any conditions or range of temperature once it had been imprisoned behind its translucent shell. A vacuum-trap container yielded a slice of cake, marbled with pink and green streaks, to his questing fingers. He bit into it and found it sound and firm, but powder-dry in his mouth. He set the slice down unfinished and coughed.
Repressing his resurgent panic with a distinct effort he walked slowly from the grave-quiet cafeteria—it was too spooky, that place which should have resounded with the clatter of knife and fork and plate quiet with the stillness of a deserted tomb, too spooky even for a ghost—and headed down the street to the public library. He had thought to find some hint, some clue to the disappearance of every living thing, but the library's doors were locked, and he walked on.
Far down the street something flickered ... and again. Camp stared stupidly, waiting for a recurrence of the flash of motion. "Red," he said vaguely. "Red fabric." Had it been a banner of some sort, writhing under the caress of the afternoon breeze? No, he thought not. He quickened his pace. The flash had seemed to come from the door of a bookshop ...
Cautiously Camp trotted to the other side of Broadway. The windows of the shop were smudged and dirty; he strained his eyes to peer past the streaky glass into the dark interior.
"Must have imagined it," he mumbled.
And then the door of the shop opened, and a girl stepped out to the bright sidewalk.
III. Girl Alone
Camp's eyes bulged dangerously. He knew her! "Lois—Lois Temple!" he exclaimed, and ran across the street.
He grabbed her shoulders, shouting incoherent, near-hysterical questions at her, almost unsettled by his joy and relief at finding another human being. But she stared blankly at him, and yet—no! There was such a concentration of intense life in her eyes that for a moment he felt almost as though he had received a physical blow. Her eyes, for all that, were uniquely vacuous, and yet they seemed as penetrating as a powerful fog-light. Her lips worked slightly, as though she were reading an extraordinarily difficult passage in some obscurely written book, and Camp felt, as he later phrased it, as though someone were stirring his brains with a stick. Then her taut, white face relaxed, and she murmured, "August Camp!"
"Yeah," he babbled. "I just got back from Venus; came down on the other side of the border, by Lake Nipigon. But there was nobody there. There's nobody at all! Lois, what's happened?"
"August Camp," she said once more, as though to reassure herself. "One morning, two years ago, I woke up and found that everybody was gone. I've been alone ever since."
"Isn't anybody left?"
She shook her head, sending amber-colored ringlets tumbling about her pale face. "I've tried to work the telephones and a transmitting set I found," she said, "and there is never any answer."
He stared at her, suddenly noticing that she was dripping wet. "What the devil happened to you?" he demanded, indicating her soaked clothing.
"Fell in the lake."
Camp was puzzled by her costume. It was somewhat the same as the gown she had worn when last he'd seen her—but there was a subtle difference. It had been at a party then, the party for the Expedition members, and her dress had been fashionably modest. The lines of her present frock were the same, he saw, but the intent was somehow different. The dress was backless, and moreover, dipped sharply in front, baring more of her neck and slim, shapely shoulders than was strictly proper for the afternoon. The skirt apparently reached her ankles, but as she turned a trifle he saw that it was slit from hem to thigh.
"I landed in Canada," he repeated, "near Meshuggeh Junction. I was—scared—by the silence, and promoted myself a boat and buzzed over here to Johns. It's awfully odd that I should find the one person left on my first attempt."
The girl's attractive lips twitched in a smile.
"I don't understand it myself. Did you say that you came over by boat? There's not a single piece of machinery turning on the Earth today; all the generators have stopped. They've run out of fuel or broken down, or something."
Camp fished a flat case from the breastpocket of his coverall and popped a cigarette between his thin, crooked lips. "Odd,' he commented. "My boat started easily enough after a minor overhaul, considering that the oil was all of two years old. Wonder the stuff didn't thicken or gum up."
"Your boat's a Diesel?" she asked irrelevantly.
Camp cast a covert glance at her. Her eyes were wide and staring; she looked far from well. There was a strange note to her low voice, a note of—effort, he thought. That, her odd, lonely survival, her inexplicable, though quite agreeable clothing—he decided to ask her....
"Lois ... I want you to tell me whatever you can about this."
"Yes?" she said, with white, even teeth flashing in a smile that he had remembered through all his three years of voluntary exile.