Knight, Damon - Not With A Bang

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 14.85KB 4 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Damon%20Knight%20-%20Not%20With%20A%20Bang.txt

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

look came into her eyes and her shattered expression

seemed to slip a little more. Smith did not press her for an

explanation.

Like himself, she had found a radio station which still

functioned, and when Smith discovered that she had not

contracted the plague, he agreed to meet her. She was, ap-

parently, naturally immune. There must have been others,

a few at least; but the bombs and the dust had not spared

them.

It seemed very awkward to Louise that not one Protestant

minister was left alive.

The trouble was, she really meant it. It had taken Smith

a long time to believe it, but it was true. She would not sleep

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Damon%20Knight%20-%20Not%20With%20A%20Bang.txt (1 of 4) [11/1/2004 12:05:11 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Knight, Damon - Not With A Bang.pdf

共4页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Knight, Damon - Not With A Bang

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: