Troublemakers (Harlan Ellison) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

THE VOICE IN THE GARDEN

Trying to inject a subtextual “moral” into a story as brief as this one puts me in mind of a great quotation by the author of Moby Dick, Mr. Herman Melville. He once said: “No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” (And even though the wonderful Don Marquis did a whole book about a cockroach named archy, and his swinging friend, the slut cat Mehitabel, a cockroach is certainly higher on the evolutionary scale than a flea, so what that tells us, hey, I don’t have all the answers.) But though I’m writing this “troublemaker lesson” where it ain’t necessary, because this short-short story is essentially the product of a smartass who never grew up, it does, in fact, suggest a lesson you deadbeats ought to heed. Which is this: if all you’ve got to back up your wisecracks and stupid jokes-the kind you make in the movie audience that gets everyone cheesed-off at you-is more smartmouth, you are very quickly going to look to everyone around you, everyone you want to be impressed by you, as what you truly are: a horse’s patoot.

After the bomb, the last man on Earth wandered through the rubble of Cleveland, Ohio. It had never been a particularly jaunty town, nor even remotely appealing to aesthetes. But now, like Detroit and Rangoon and Minsk and Yokohama, it had been reduced to a petulantly shattered Tinkertoy of lath and brickwork, twisted steel girders and melted glass.

As he picked his way around the dust heap that had been the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in what had been Public Square, his eyes red-rimmed from crying at the loss of humanity, he saw something he had not seen in Beirut or Venice or London. He saw the movement of another human being.

Celestial choruses sang in his head as he broke into a run across the pitted and blasted remains of Euclid Avenue. It was a woman!

She saw him, and in the very posture of her body, he knew she was filled with the same glory he felt. She knew! She began running toward him, her arms outstretched. They seemed to swim toward each other in a ballet of slow motion. He stumbled once, but got to his feet quickly and went on. They detoured around the crumpled tin of tortured metal that had once been automobiles, and met in front of the shattered carcass that was, in a time seemingly eons before, The May Co.

“I’m the last man!” he blurted. He could not keep the words inside, they fought to fill the air. “I’m the last, the very last. They’re all dead, everyone but us. I’m the last man, and you’re the last woman, and we’ll have to mate and start the race again, and this time we’ll do it right. No war, no hate, no bigotry, nothing but goodness...we’ll do it, you’ll see, it’ll be fine, a bright new shining world from all this death and terror.”

Her face was lit with an ethereal beauty, even beneath the soot and deprivation. “Yes, yes,” she said. “It’ll be just like that. I love you, because we’re all there is left to love, each other.”

He touched her hand. “I love you. What is your name?”

She flushed slightly. “Eve,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Bernie,” he said.