The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction by Mike Ashley (Editor)

Author:Mike Ashley (Editor)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781849015356
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2010-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

Alice lay face down among the bricks, gasping and moaning. The blood hammered in Eastwood’s brain, and the strangest mirages flickered before his eyes.

Alternately he lapsed into heavy stupors, and awoke to the agony of the day. In his lucid moments he reflected that this could not last long, and tried to remember what degree of heat would cause death.

Within an hour after the drenching rains he was feverishly thirsty, and the skin felt as if peeling from his whole body.

This fever and horror lasted until he forgot that he had ever known another state; but at last the west reddened, and the flaming sun went down. It left the familiar planet high in the heavens, and there was no darkness until the usual hour, though there was a slight lowering of the temperature.

But when night did come it brought life-giving coolness, and though the heat was still intense it seemed temperate by comparison. More than all, the kindly darkness seemed to set a limit to the cataclysmic disorders of the day.

“Ouf! This is heavenly!” said Eastwood, drawing long breaths and feeling mind and body revived in the gloom.

“It won’t last long,” replied Alice, and her voice sounded extraordinarily calm through the darkness. “The heat will come again when the new sun rises in a few hours.”

“We might find some better place in the meanwhile – a deep cellar – or we might get into the Subway,” Eastwood suggested.

“It would be no use. Don’t you understand? I have been thinking it all out. After this, the new sun will always shine, and we could not endure it even another day. The wave of heat is passing round the world as it revolves, and in a few hours the whole Earth will be a burnt-up ball. Very likely we are the only people left alive in New York, or perhaps America.”

She seemed to have taken the intellectual initiative, and spoke with an assumption of authority that amazed him.

“But there must be others,” said Eastwood, after thinking for a moment. “Other people have found sheltered places, or miners, or men underground.”

“They would have been drowned by the rain. At any rate, there will be none left alive by tomorrow night.

“Think of it,” she went on dreamily. “For a thousand years this wave of fire has been rushing toward us, while life has been going on so happily in the world, so unconscious, that the world was doomed all the time. And now this is the end of life.”

“I don’t know,” Eastwood said slowly. “It may be the end of human life, but there must be some forms that will survive – some micro-organisms perhaps capable of resisting high temperatures, if nothing higher. The seed of life will be left at any rate, and that is everything. Evolution will begin over again, producing new types to suit the changed conditions. I only wish I could see what creatures will be here in a few thousand years.

“But I can’t realize it at all – this thing!” he cried passionately, after a pause.

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