craft or fish-shaped strato-ships hurtled purposely above her Himalayan skyline, no birds or insects sang or buzzed in her wondrous hanging gardens. Grass and weeds grew in crevices in her disintegrating pedestrian walks, and fat angle worms crawled unafraid through their lush and fecund tangle.
Dry and chalk-white skeletons littered the streets—the skeletons of men and women and children and birds and domestic beasts. They strewed the dust-carpeted corridors of great buildings; they were even to be found—had any sentient creature been there to search for them—in the huge and hermetically sealed gas shelters beneath the city. The gas had lingered longer than the men who had designed and built those tremendous caverns had believed possible; thirst and oxygen starvation had snuffed out lives the gas had not been able to touch.
It was not only that way in Nu Yok and in the Americas; it was the same all over Earth. Even the yellow men, big and little, who had first perfected the gas and immediately deluged the Americas with it in that last decade of the Twenty-first Century, had also perished. For the gas had been easy to analyze, and easier to manufacture. Dying, the Americas had struck back at the yellow men with their own weapon, and gasping doom had encircled the globe. All races of mankind, all air-breathing creatures, save only the deep-sea fishes and the worms that chanced to be far underground—and, perhaps, a few toads and frogs, encapsulated and dormant in dry lake or river beds—had perished.
The last human creature had been dead for over three years, and the last bird or beast or insect for perhaps an additional six months, when, at approximately eleven o'clock in the morning on June eighth, in the year—according to occidental reckoning—two thousand and ninety-seven, Thvall the Seeker brought his fourteen-million ton neutronium-hulled space-ship into Earth's atmosphere and, having already observed Nu Yok's towers and minarets from half-way around the globe, set her down as lightly as a drifting feather in a cradle of granite rocks near the southern boundary of that rectangular stretch of greenery men knew as Central Park. And, as he set his ship down gently, careful to avoid crushing the green vegetation, in Thvall the Seeker's curious soul there was a great gladness. For Thvall knew that his quest was ended.
IT had been a long and a lonely search, spanning reaches of space that light will not cross in twenty thousand years. It had begun beyond the hub of our stellar galaxy, and the years of Thvall's journeying were to the life of a man as the age of the Pyramids is to a single day.
Spawn of the innermost planet of a blue-white dwarf sun deep hidden in the globular cluster in Messier II, Thvall resembled in no way save one any of the diversified forms of life which have evolved upon Earth down the millenniums since the red heat died from her surface rocks and permitted her seas to form. Because of that single resemblance Thvall had begun his search; only because of it had he finally arrived upon Earth.
Water! Thvall, like a man, required water. The mechanical processes of his existence, and of the existence of his kind, depended upon an unfailing supply of water. And upon Thvall's home world the water was almost gone. . . .
Thvall well knew, when he began his
