“What’s on your mind?” Walter asked.
“An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel.”
Walter shrugged.
“It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him.”
“And worse. A Zan has died. This morning.”
“Is that worse?” Walter looked at him blandly. “Well, George, you’ll have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay around here.”
The Zan said nothing. It stood there.
Finally Walter said, “Well?”
“A-bout wea-sel. You ad-vise same?”
Walter shrugged again. “Probably won’t do any good. But sure, why not?”
The Zan left.
Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. “It might work, Martha,” he said.
“Mar—My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?”
“My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” said Grace “But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?”
“We’ll know tomorrow,” Walter said. And she couldn’t get another word out of him.
That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.
The next was the last.
It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren’t words.
He said, “We go. Our coun-cil met and de-cid-ed,”
“Another of you died?”
“Last night. This is pla-net of death ”
Walter nodded. “You did your share. You’re leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don’t hurry back.”
“Is there an-y-thing we can do?”
“Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We’ll take care of the others.”
Something clicked on the door; the Zan left.
Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.
She asked, “What—? How—?”
“Wait,” cautioned Walter. “Let’s hear them blast off. It’s a sound I want to remember.”
The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he’d been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.
“There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble,” he said musingly. “But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake.”
“You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But—”
Walter nodded, “They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who ‘were asleep and wouldn’t wake up,’ and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn’t know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right.”
“How did you get the snake to—”
Walter Phelan grinned. He said, “I told them what affection was. They didn’t know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting—constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it—and the rattlesnake.”
He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.
“Well, we’ve got a world to plan,” he said. “We’ll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we’ll do better to keep and take charge of; we’ll need them. But the carnovora—Well, we’ll have to decide. But I’m afraid it’s got to be thumbs down.”
He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.”
Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.
“No!” she said.
He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can—”
He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.
He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.”
The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but is no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.
He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really.
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…