He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.”
Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.
“No!” she said.
He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can—”
He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.
He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.”
The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but is no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.
He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really.
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…