I smiled. The man said slowly, “Peace would have poisoned him. He would have shrivelled up like a dried apple.” It was the truth, or near enough, and I did not contradict him. The floor lurched again.
“You’re waiting to watch us suffer,” the woman said. “Aren’t you?”
I smiled.
“But that may take a long time. Even if we fall into the ocean, this globe will keep us alive. We might be in here for months before our food gives out.”
“I can wait,” I said pleasantly.
She turned to her husband. “Then we must be the last,” she said. “Don’t you see? If we weren’t, would he be here?”
“That’s right,” said the man, with a note in his voice that I did not like. He bent over the control board. “There’s nothing more to keep us here. Ava, will you …” He stepped back, indicating a large red-handled switch.
The woman stepped over and put her hand on it. “One moment,” I said uneasily. “What are you doing? What is that thing?”
She smiled at me. “This isn’t just a machine to generate a force field,” she said.
“No?” I asked. “What else?”
“It’s a time machine,” the man said.
“We’re going back,” the woman whispered, “to the beginning.”
Back, to the beginning, to start all over.
Without me.
The woman said, “You’ve won Armageddon, but you’ve lost Earth.”
I knew the answer to that, of course, but she was a woman and had the last word.
I gestured toward the purple darkness outside. “Lost Earth? What do you call this?”
She poised her hand on the switch.
“Hell,” she said.
And I have remembered her voice, through ten thousand lonely years.