The Coming of the Ice - Green Peyton Wertenbaker

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker. It's
strange to be alone and so cold, to be the
last man on earth. The snow drives silently about me,

(00:23):
ceaselessly and drearily, and I am isolated in this tiny, white,
indistinguishable corner of a blurred world. Surely the loneliest creature
in the universe. How many thousands of years is it
since I last knew the true companionship? For a long
time I've been lonely. But there were people, creatures of

(00:47):
flesh and blood. Now they are gone. Now I have
not even the stars to keep me company, for they
are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight
here below. If only I could know how long it
has been since first I was imprisoned upon the earth.
It cannot matter now. And yet some strange dissatisfaction, some

(01:12):
faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing ears,
what year, What year? It was in the year nineteen
thirty that the great thing began in my life? There
was then a very great man who performed operations on
his fellows to compose their vitals. We called such men surgeons.

(01:36):
John Grandon wore the title Sir before his name in
indication of nobility by birth, according to the prevailing standards
in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir John's,
if I must be precise. For while he had achieved
an enormous reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that
his real work lay in the experimental end of his profession.

(02:00):
He was, in a way a dreamer, but a dreamer
who could make his dreams come true. I was a
very close friend of Sir John's. In fact, we shared
the same apartments in London. I've never forgotten that day
when he first mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I
had just come in from a long sleigh ride in

(02:20):
the country with Alice. I was seated drowsily in the
window seat, writing idly in my mind a description of
the wind and the snow and the gray twilight of
the evening. It's strange, is it not that my tale
should begin and end with the snow and the twilight.

(02:40):
Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of
the room, and came hurrying across to another door. He
looked at me, grinning rather like a triumphant maniac. It's coming,
he cried, without pausing, I've almost got it. I smiled
at him. He looked very ludicrous at that moment. What

(03:01):
have you got, I asked, good lord man. The secret,
the secret? And then he was gone again, the door
closing upon his victorious cry the secret. I was, of
course amused, but I was also very much interested. I
knew Sir John Well enough to realize that, however amazing

(03:21):
his appearance might be, there would be nothing absurd about
his secret, whatever it was. But it was useless to speculate.
I could only hope for enlightenment at dinner, so I
immersed myself in one of the Surgeon's volumes from his
fine library of imagination, and waited. I think the book

(03:42):
was one of mister H. G. Wells, probably The Sleeper Awakes,
or some other of his brilliant phantasies and predictions, for
I was in a mood conducive to belief in almost anything.
When later we sat down together across the table, I
only wish I could give some idea of the atmosphere
that permeated our apartments, the reality it lent to. Whatever

(04:03):
was vast and amazing and strange. You could, then, whoever
you are understand a little the ease with which I
accepted Sir John's new discovery. He began to explain it
to me at once, as though he could keep it
to himself no longer. Did you think I gone mad, Danel,
he asked, I quite wonder that I haven't why. I've
been studying for many years, for most of my life,

(04:25):
on this problem, and suddenly I've solved it. Or rather,
I'm afraid I've solved another one much greater. Tell me
about it, but for God's sake, don't be technical, right
he said? Then he paused, Danel, it's magnificent. It will
change everything that's in the world. His eyes held mine suddenly,

(04:47):
with a fatality of hypnotists, Denel, it's the secret of
eternal life, he said, Good Lord, Sir John, I cried,
half inclined to laugh. I mean it, he said. You know,
I have spent most of my life studying the processes
of birth, trying to find out precisely what went on
in the whole history of conception. You have found out. No,

(05:11):
that's just what amuses me. I've discovered something else without
knowing yet what causes either process. I don't want to
be technical and I know very little of what actually
takes place myself, but I can try to give you
some idea of it. It's thousands, perhaps millions of years
since Sir John explained to me what little I understood

(05:32):
at the time. I may have forgotten, yet I try
to reproduce what I can of his theory. In my
study of the processes of birth, he began, I discovered
the rudiments of an action which takes place in the
bodies of both men and women. There are certain properties
in the foods we eat that remain in the body
for the reproduction of life, two distinct essences, so to speak,

(05:54):
of which one is retained by the woman, another by
the man. It is the union of these two properties that,
of course creates the child. Now, I made a slight
mistake one day in experimenting with a guinea pig, and
I re arranged certain organs which I need not describe,
so that I thought I had completely messed up the
poor creature's abdomen. It lived, however, and I laid it aside.

(06:18):
It was some years later that I happened to notice
it again. It had not given birth to any young
but I was amazed to note that it had apparently grown
no older. It seemed precisely in the same state of
growth in which I had left it. From that I
built up. I re examined the guinea pig and observed
it carefully. I need not detail my studies, but in

(06:39):
the end I found that my mistake had in reality
been a momentous discovery. I found that I had only
to close certain organs, to rearrange certain ducts, and to
open certain dormant organs. And where I be lady too,
the whole process of reproduction was changed. You have heard,
of course, that our bodies are continual changing hour by hour,

(07:01):
minute by minute, so that every few years we have
been literally reborn. Some such principle as this seems to
operate in reproduction, except that instead of the old body
being replaced by the new and in its form, approximately
the new body is created apart from it. It is
the creation of children that causes us to die, it

(07:24):
would seem, because if this activity is so to speak,
damned up or turned aside into new channels, the reproduction
operates on the old body, renewing it continually. It's very
obscure and very absurd, is it not. But the most absurd.
Part of it is that it's true. Whatever the true
explanation may be, the fact remains that the operation can

(07:46):
be done, that it actually prolongs life indefinitely, and that
I alone know the secret. Sir John told me a
great deal more, But after all I think it amounted
to little more than this. It would be impossible for
me to express the great hold this discovery took upon
my mind the moment he recounted it. From the very first,

(08:08):
under the spell of his personality, I believed, and I
knew he was speaking the truth, and it opened up
before me new vistas. I began to see myself become
suddenly eternal, never again to know the fear of death.
I could see myself storing up, century after century an
amplitude of wisdom and experience that would make me truly

(08:31):
a god. Sir John, I cried, long before he was finished.
You must perform the operation on me. But Denel, you're
too hasty. You must not put yourself so rashly into
my hands. You have perfected the operation, haven't you. That's true?
He said, You must try it out on somebody, must

(08:51):
you not, Yes, course, And yet somehow, Danel, I'm afraid.
I can't help feeling that man is not yet prepared
for such a vast thing. There are sacrifices. One must
give up, all love and all sensual pleasure. This operation
not only takes away the mere fact of reproduction, but

(09:12):
it deprives one of all the things that go with sex,
all love, all sense of beauty, all feeling for poetry
and the arts. It leaves only the few emotions, selfish
emotions that are necessary to self preservation. Do you not see?
One becomes an intellect, nothing more, a cold apotheosis of reason.

(09:36):
And I, for one, cannot face such a thing calmly.
But Sir John, like many fears, it's largely horrible in
the foresight. After you've changed your nature, you cannot regret it.
What you are would be as horrible an idea to
you afterwards as the thought of what you will be
seems now true. True. I know, but it's hard to face. Nevertheless,

(10:00):
I am not afraid to face it. You don't understand, Dnnell.
I am afraid, and I wonder whether you or I,
or any of us on this earth are ready for
such a step. After all, to make a race deathless,
one should be sure it's a perfect race, Sir John,
I said, it's not you who have to face this,

(10:22):
nor any one else in the world till you're ready.
But I'm firmly resolved, and I demand it of you
as my friend. Well, we argued much further, but in
the end I won. Sir John promised to perform the
operation three days later. But do you perceive now what
I have forgotten during all that discussion. The one thing

(10:45):
I had thought I could never forget so long as
I lived, not even for an instant. It was my
love for Alice. I had forgotten that I cannot write
here all the infinity of emotions I experienced. Later, when
with Alice in my arms, it suddenly came upon me

(11:05):
what I had done ages ago. I have forgotten how
to feel. I could name now a thousand feelings I
used to have, but I can no longer even understand them,
for only the heart could understand the heart, and the intellect,
only the intellect. With Alice in my arms, I told

(11:28):
the whole story. It was she who, with her quick instinct,
grasped what I had never noticed. But Karl, she cried,
don't you see it will mean that we can never
be married, and for the first time I understood, if
only I could recapture some conception of that love I

(11:50):
have always known, since the last shred of comprehension slipped
from me, that I lost something very wonderful when I
lost love. But what does it matter. I lost Alice too,
and I could not have known love again without her.
We were very sad and very tragic that night. For

(12:12):
hours and hours we argued the question over. But I
felt somewhat that I was inextricably caught in my fate,
that I could not retreat now from my resolve. I
was perhaps very schoolboyish, but I felt it would be
cowardice to back out now. But it was Alice again
who perceived a final aspect of the matter. Carl. She

(12:37):
said to me, her lips very close to mine. It
need not come between our love. After all, ours would
be a poor sort of love if it were not
more of the mind than of the flesh. We shall
remain lovers, but we shall forget mere carnal desire. I
shall submit to that operation too, And I could not

(12:58):
shake her from her resolve. I would speak of danger
that I could not let her face. But after the
fashion of women She disarmed me with the accusation that
I didn't love her, that I did not want her love,
that I was trying to escape from love. What answer
had I for that, but that I loved her and
would do anything in the world not to lose her.

(13:22):
I've wondered some time since whether we might have known
the love of the mind. Is love something entirely of
the flesh, something created by an ironic God merely to
propagate his race? Or can there be love without emotion,
love without passion, love between two cold intellects. I don't know.

(13:47):
I did not ask, then I accepted anything that would
make our way more easy. There's no need to draw
out the tale. Already my hand wavers, and my time
grows short. Soon there will be no more of me,
no more of my tail, no more of mankind. There

(14:07):
will be only the snow and the ice and the cold.
Three days later I entered John's hospital with Alice on
my arm. All my affairs, and they were few enough,
were in order. I had insisted that Alice wait until
I had come safely through the operation before she submitted

(14:28):
to it. I had been carefully starved for two days,
and I was lost in an unreal world of white
walls and white clothes and white lights, drunk with my
dreams of the future. When I was wheeled into the
operating room on the long, hard table, for a moment,
it shone with brilliant distinctness, a neat methodical white chamber,

(14:51):
tall and more or less circular. Then I was beneath
the glare of soft white lights, and the room fail
into a misty vagueness, from which little steel rays flashed
and quivered from silvery cold instruments. For a moment, our hands,
Sir John's and mine, gripped, and we were saying good

(15:13):
bye for a little while, in the way men say
these things. Then I felt the warm touch of Alice's
lips upon mine, and I felt sudden, painful things I
can't describe that I could not have described. Then, for
a moment I felt that I must rise and cry out,

(15:33):
that I could not do it. But the feeling passed,
and I was passive. Something was pressed about my mouth
and nose, something with an ethereal smell. Staring eyes swam
about me from behind their white masks. I struggled instinctively,
but in vain. I was held securely infinitesimal points of

(15:57):
light began to wave back and forth on a pitch
black background. A great hollow buzzing echoed in my head.
My head seemed suddenly to have become all throat, a
great cavernous, empty throat, in which sounds and lights were
mingled together in a swift rhythm, approaching, receding eternally. Then

(16:19):
I think there were dreams, but I've forgotten them. I
began to emerge from the effects of the ether. Everything
was dim, but I could perceive Alice beside me and
Sir John bravely done. Sir John was saying, and Alice
too was saying something, but I cannot remember what. For

(16:42):
a long while we talked, I speaking the nonsense of
those who were coming out from under the ether. They
teasing me a little solemnly. But after a while I
became aware of the fact that they were about to leave. Suddenly,
God knows why I knew that they must not leave.
Something cried in the back of my head that they

(17:03):
must stay. One cannot explain these things except by after events.
I began to press them to remain, but they smiled
and said they must get their dinner. I commanded them
not to go, but they spoke kindly and said they
would be back before long. I think I even wept
a little, like a child. But Sir John said something

(17:24):
to the nurse, who began to reason with me firmly.
And then they were gone, and somehow I was asleep.
When I awoke again, my head was fairly clear, but
there was an abominable reek of ether all about me.
The moment I opened my eyes, I felt that something
had happened. I asked for Sir John and for Alice.

(17:47):
I saw a swift, curious look as I could not interpret,
come over the face of the nurse, and she was
calm again, her countenance impassive. She reassured me in quick,
meaningless phrases and told me to sleep. But I could
not sleep. I was absolutely sure that something had happened
to them, to my friend, and to the woman I loved.

(18:08):
Yet all my insistence profited me nothing, for the nurses
were a silent lot. Finally, I think they must have
given me a sleeping potion of some sort, for I
fell asleep again. For two endless, chaotic days, I saw
nothing of either of them, Alice or Sir John. I
became more and more agitated the nurse more and more taciturn,

(18:31):
she would only say that they had gone away for
a day or two. And then on the third day
I found out they thought I was asleep. The night
nurse had just come in to relieve the other. Has
he been asking about them again? She asked, yes, poor fellow,
I have hardly managed to keep him quiet. We will

(18:51):
have to keep it from him until he's recovered fully.
There was a long pause, and I could hardly control
my labored breathing. Sudden, was it one of them said
to be killed? Like that? I heard no more, for
I leapt suddenly up in bed, crying out quick, for
God's sake, tell me what has happened. I jumped to

(19:12):
the floor and seized one of them by the collar.
She was horrified. I shook her with superhuman strength. Tell me,
I shouted, Tell me, or I'll She told me what
else could she do. They were killed in an accident,
she gasped in her taxi, a collision the strand, and
at that moment a crowd of nurses and attendants arrived,

(19:32):
called by the other frantic woman, and they put me
to bed again. I have no memory of the next
few days I was in delirium, and I was never
told what I said during my ravings, nor can I
express the feelings I was saturated with when at last
I regained my mind again. Between my old emotions and
any attempt to put them into words or even to

(19:54):
remember them, lies always that insurmountable wall of my change.
I can't understand what I must have felt. I cannot
express it. I only know that for weeks I was
sunk in a misery beyond any misery I had ever
imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth
were gone to me. I was left alone, and for

(20:17):
the first time I began to see before me all
these endless years that would be the same, dull, lonely.
Yet I recovered I could feel each day the growth
of a strange new vigor in my limbs, a vast
force that was something tangibly expressive to eternal life. Slowly

(20:41):
my anguish began to die. After a week more I
began to understand how my emotions were leaving me, how
love and beauty and everything of which poetry was made,
how all this was going. I couldn't bear the thought.
At first, I would look at the golden sunlight and
the blue shadow of the wind, and I would say, God,

(21:03):
how beautiful, and the words would echo meaninglessly in my ears.
Or I would remember Alice's face, that face I had
once loved so inextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch
my forehead and clench my fists, crying, Oh God, how
can I live without her? Yet there would be a

(21:25):
little strange fancy in my head at the same moment, saying,
who is this Alice? You'd know no such person, and
truly I would wonder whether she had ever existed. So
slowly the old emotions were shed away from me, and
I began to joy. In a corresponding growth of my

(21:46):
mental perceptions, I began to toy idly with mathematical formulae
I had forgotten years ago, in the same fashion that
a poet toys were the word and its shades of meaning.
I would look at everything with new seeing eyes, new perception,
and I would understand things I had never understood before,
because formerly my emotions had always occupied me more than

(22:08):
my thoughts. And so the weeks went by until one
day I was well, what, after all, is the use
of this chronicle? Surely there will never be men to
read it. I have heard them say that the snow
will never go. I will be buried. It will be

(22:30):
buried with me, and it will be the end of
us both. Yet somehow it eases my weary soul a
little to write. Need I say that I lived thereafter
many thousands of thousands of years until this day. I
cannot detail our life. It's a long round of new,

(22:51):
fantastic impressions coming dream like, one after another, melting into
each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon dreams,
I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly,
And it seems that my imagination must have filled in
the swift movement between episodes. I think now of necessity

(23:12):
in terms of centuries and millenniums rather than days and months.
The snow blows terribly about my little fire, and I
know it will soon gather courage to quench us. Both
years passed at first with a sort of clear wonder.
I watched things that took place everywhere in the world

(23:35):
I studied. The other students were much amazed to see me,
a man of thirty odd, coming back to college. But
Judas Dennel, you've already got your pH D. What more
do you want? So they would all ask me, and
I would reply, I want an M D and an
F R C S. I didn't tell them that I
wanted degrees in law too, and in biology and chemistry,

(23:59):
in architecture and engineering, in psychology and philosophy. Even so,
I believe they thought me mad. But poor fools, I
would think, they can hardly realize that I have all
of eternity before me to study. I went to school
for many decades. I would pass from university to university, leisurely,

(24:19):
gathering all the fruits of every subject. I took up
reveling in study as no student reveled ever before. There
was no need of hurry in my life, no fear
of death too soon. There was a magnificence of vigor
in my body, and a magnificence of vision and clarity
in my brain. I felt myself a superman. I had

(24:40):
only to go on storing up wisdom until the day
should come when all knowledge of the world was mine,
and then I could command the world. I had no
need for hurry. Oh, vast life, How I gloried in
my eternity, and how little good it has ever done
me By the irony of God. For several centuries, changing

(25:02):
my name and passing from place to place, I continued
my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony, for to
the intellect, monotony cannot exist. It was one of those
emotions I had left behind. One day, however, in the
year twenty one thirty two, a great discovery was made
by a man called Zorentsov. It had to do with

(25:24):
the curvature of space, quite changing the conceptions that we
had all followed since Einstein. I had long ago mastered
the last detail of Einstein's theory, as had in time
the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into
the study of this new epoch, making conception. To my amazement,
it all seemed to me curiously dim and elusive. I

(25:47):
could not quite grasp what Zorentsov was trying to formulate. Why,
I cried, the thing is a monstrous fraud. I went
to the professor of physics in the university I then attended,
and I told him it was a fraud, a huge
book of mere nonsense. He looked at me rather pityingly.

(26:07):
I am afraid Modevski, he said, addressing me by the name.
I was at the time using I am afraid you
do not understand it. That is all. When your mind
has broadened, you will you should apply yourself more carefully
to your physics. But that angered me, for I had
mastered my physics before he was ever born. I challenged

(26:29):
him to explain the theory, and he did. He put
it obviously, in the clearest language he could. Yet I
understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook
his head impatiently, saying that it was useless and if
I could not grasp it, I would simply have to
keep on studying. I was stunned. I wandered away in

(26:51):
a daze. For do you see what happened? During all
those years I had studied ceaselessly, and my mind had
been clear and quick as a day first had left
the hospital. But all the time I had been able
to only remain what I was, an extraordinary intelligent man
of the twentieth century. And the rest of the race

(27:12):
had been progressing. It had been swiftly gathering knowledge and
power and ability all that time, faster and faster, while
I had been only remaining still. And now here was
Zorentzov and the teachers of the universities, and probably a
hundred intelligent men who had all outstripped me. I was
being left behind, and that is what happened. I need

(27:36):
not dilate further upon it. By the end of that
century I had been left behind by all the students
of the world, and I never did understand Zorentsov. Other
men came with other theories, and these theories were accepted
by the world, but I could not understand them. My
intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing more

(27:57):
to understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing,
and thenceforth I could only play wearily with the old ideas.
Many things happened in the world. A time came when
the East and West, two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up
in arms, the civil war of a planet. I recall

(28:18):
only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It
was all incomprehensible to me, like a bizarre dream. Things happened,
people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing.
I lurked during all that time in a tiny shuddering
hole in the city of Yokohama, and by miracle I survived,

(28:40):
and the East one. But it seems to have mattered
little who did win. For all the world had become,
in all except its few remaining prejudices, a single race,
and nothing was changed when it was all rebuilt again
under a single government. I saw the first of the
strange creatures who appeared aung Us in the year sixty

(29:01):
three seventy one, men who were later known to be
from the planet Venus. But they were repulsed, for they
were savages compared with the earthmen, although they were about
equal to the people of my own century nineteen hundred.
Those of them who did not perish of the cold
after the intense warmth of their world, and those who
were not killed by our hands, those few returned silently

(29:25):
home again, and I have always regretted that I had
not the courage to go with them. I watched a
time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, when men
could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men,
these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains
and tiny shriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements

(29:50):
on their little conveyances. It was I, with my ancient compunctions,
who shuddered when at last they put to death all
the perverts, criminals, and the insane, ridding the world of
the scum for which they had no more need. It
was then that I was forced to produce my tattered
old papers proving my identity and my story. They knew

(30:13):
it was true in some strange fashion of theirs, and
thereafter I was kept on exhibition as an archaic survival.
I saw the world made immortal through the new invention
of a man called Cathol, who used somewhat the same
method legend decreed had been used upon me. I observed
the end of speech, of all perceptions except one, when

(30:37):
men learned to communicate directly by thought and to receive
directly into the brain. All the myriad vibrations of the universe.
All these things I saw and more, until that time,
when there was no more discovery, but a perfect world
in which there was no need for anything but memory.
Men ceased to count time at last, several hundred years

(31:00):
after the one hundred and fifty fourth dynasty from the
Last War, or as we would have counted in my time,
about two hundred thousand a d. Official records of time
were no longer kept carefully, they fell into disuse. Men
began to forget years, to forget time at all. Of
what significance was time when one was immortal. After long, long,

(31:26):
uncounted centuries, a time came when the days grew noticeably colder, slowly,
the winters became longer, and the summers diminished to but
a month or two. Fierce storms raged endlessly in winter,
and in summer. Sometimes there was severe frost. Sometimes there
was only frost. In the high places, and in the

(31:50):
north and in the sub equatorial south, the snow came
and would not go. Men died by the thousands in
the higher latticudes. New York became, after a while the
furthest habitable city north, an arctic city where warmth seldom penetrated,
and great fields of ice began to make their way southward,

(32:13):
grinding before them the brittle remains of civilizations, covering over
relentlessly all of man's proud work. Snow appeared in Florida
and Italy one summer. In the end, snow was there always.
Men left New York, Chicago, Paris, Lukohama, and everywhere. They

(32:35):
traveled by the millions southward, perishing as they went, pursued
by the snow and the cold, and that inevitable field
of ice. They were feeble creatures when the cold first
came upon them, But I speak in terms of thousands
of years, and they turned every weapon of science to

(32:55):
the recovery of their physical power, for they foresaw that
the only chance for survival lay in a hard, strong body.
As for me, at last, I had found a use
for my few powers, for my physique was the finest
in that world. It was but little comfort, however, for
we were all united in our awful fear of that

(33:18):
cold and that grinding field of ice. All the great
cities were deserted. We would catch silent, fearful glimpses of
them as we sped on in our mechanics over the snow,
great hungry, haggard skeletons of cities shrouded in banks of snow,
snow that the wind rustled through desolate streets where the

(33:40):
cream of human life had once passed in calm security.
Yet still the ice pursued, for men had forgotten about
that last ice age, when they ceased to reckon time,
when they lost sight of the future and steeped themselves
in memories. They had not remembered that a time must

(34:02):
come when ice would lie white and smooth over all
the earth, when the sun would shine bleakly between unending
intervals of dim twilight, snow and sleet. Slowly the ice
pursued us down the earth, until all the feeble remains

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of civilization were gathered in Egypt and India and South America.
The deserts flowered again, but the frost would come, always
to bite the tiny crops. For still the ice came.
All the world now, but for a narrow strip around
the equator was one great, silent, desolate vista of stark

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ice plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of
cities that had endured for hundreds of thousands of years.
It was terrible to imagine the awful solitude and the
endless twilight that lay on these places, and the grim
snow sailing in silence over all. It surrounded us on

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all sides, until life remained only in a few scattered
clearings all about that equator of the globe, with an
eternal fire going to hold away the hungry ice. Perpetual
winter reigned now, and we were becoming terror stricken beasts.
That preyed on each other for a life already doomed. Ah,

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but I the archaic survival. I had my revenge then,
with my great physique and strong jaws. God, let me
think of something else. Those men who lived upon each other.
It was horrible, and I was one. So inevitably the

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ice closed in one day. The men of our tiny
clearing were but a scar or. We huddled about our
dying fire of bones and stray logs. We said nothing.
We just sat in deep, wordless, thoughtless silence. We were
the last outpost of mankind. I think suddenly, something very

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noble must have transformed these creatures to a semblance of
what they had been of old. And I saw in
their eyes the question they sent from one another, and
in every eye I saw the answer was yes. With
one accord, they rose before my eyes, and, ignoring me
as a baser creature, they stripped away their load of

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tattered rags, and one by one they stalked with their
tiny shriveled limbs into the shrivering gale of swirling, dusting snow,
and disappeared. And I was alone. So am I alone?
Now I have written this last fantastic hittory of myself

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and of mankind, upon a substance that will, I know,
outlast even the snow and the ice, as it has
outlasted mankind that made it. It's the only thing with
which I have never parted. For It's not irony that
I should be the historian of this race. I a savage,

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an archaic survival. Why do I write? God knows, But
some instinct prompts me although there will be never men
to read. I have been sitting here waiting, and I
have thought often of Sir John and Alice, whom I loved.

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Can it be that I'm feeling again, after all these ages,
some tiny portion of that emotion, that great passion I
once knew. I see her face before me, the face
I've lost from my thoughts for eons, and something is
in it that stirs my blood again. Her eyes are

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half closed and deep, her lips are parted, as though
I could crush them with an infinity of wonder and discovery.
Oh God, is it love again? Love that I thought
was lost. They have often smiled upon me when I
spoke of God and muttered about my foolish, primitive superstitions.

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But they are gone, and I am left who believe
in God, and surely there's purpose in it. I am cold,
I written, I am frozen. My breath freezes as it
mingles with the air, and I can hardly move my

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numbed fingers. The ice is closing over me, and I
cannot break it any longer. The storm cries weirdly all
about me in the twilight, and I know this is
the end, the end of the world, and I I

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the last man, the last man. I am cold, cold?
But is it you, Alice? Is it you? End of

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the Coming of the Ice? By G. Peyton Wertenbaker