"Damon Knight - Not With A Bang (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

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Damon Knight: Not with a Bang

Ten months after the last plane passed over, Rolf Smith
knew beyond doubt that only one other human being had
survived. Her name was Louise Oliver, and he was sitting
opposite her in a department-store cafe in Salt Lake City.
They were eating canned Vienna sausages and drinking
coffee.
Sunlight struck through a broken pane like a judgment.
Inside and outside, there was no sound; only a stifling rumor
of absence. The clatter of dishware in the kitchen, the heavy
rumble of streetcars: never again. There was sunlight; and
silence; and the watery, astonished eyes of Louise Oliver.
He leaned forward, trying to capture the attention of
those fishlike eyes for a second. "Darling," he said, "I respect
your views, naturally. But I've got to make you see that
they're impractical."
She looked at him with faint surprise, then away again.
Her head shook slightly. No. No, Rolf, I will not live with
you in sin.
Smith thought of the women of France, of Russia, of Mex-
ico, of the South Seas. He had spent three months in the
ruined studios of a radio station in Rochester, listening to
the voices until they stopped. There had been a large colony
in Sweden, including an English cabinet minister. They re-
ported that Europe was gone. Simply gone; there was not an
acre that had not been swept clean by radioactive dust.
They had two planes and enough fuel to take them any-
where on the Continent; but there was nowhere to go. Three
of them had the plague; then eleven; then all.
There was a bomber pilot who had fallen near a govern-
ment radio station in Palestine. He did not last long, because
he had broken some bones in the crash; but he had seen the
vacant waters where the Pacific Islands should have been.
It was his guess that the Arctic ice fields had been bombed.
There were no reports from Washington, from New York,
from London, Paris, Moscow, Chungking, Sydney. You
could not tell who had been destroyed by disease, who by
the dust, who by bombs.
Smith himself had been a laboratory assistant in a team
that was trying to find an antibiotic for the plague. His
superiors had found one that worked sometimes, but it was a
little too late. When he left, Smith took along with him all
there was of itforty ampoules, enough to last him for years.
Louise had been a nurse in a genteel hospital near Den-
ver. According to her, something rather odd had happened
to the hospital as she was approaching it the morning of the
attack. She was quite calm when she said this, but a vague