Outside, the street was clamorous with the taped importunities of the empty vehicles—so many machines, because there were so few people left. But he chose to walk.
The air was sweet and clean, because the Dyall machines came and took away the bodies of those who fell in the street, and then cleaned those streets as carefully and tenderly as they had done when the walks and gutters had abounded with the vibrant slovenliness of the living. Emrys could, of course, have thrown the woman's body out into the gutter, and the machines would have carried her in their steel maws to the crematorium. But some remembered emotion had kept him from doing such a thing, and had made him give her to the flames with what small ceremony he could muster.
She had been the last mistress remaining to him, and probably, he thought, to any man in the city. Perhaps, out in the country, there might be women with life and lust in them still, but such women as were left here could no longer be considered women. This last one had not been even human for the past week; yet he had tended her—why, he could not say, except that he had nothing better to do. For one thing, she had been quieter when he was near her, and he could not bear her cries.
He was glad when she did die, because playing the good Samaritan had grown tedious as, in their turn, all other roles had palled. Even though he knew there would be no more women for him, he was glad. During the first few weeks of the plague, when everyone who had been alive had known that soon they would be dead, all the people on Earth had rushed to squander the life which suddenly seemed to fill them to bursting. Then a man could have had all the women he wanted, all of anything he wanted, for the asking, except the one thing he really wanted—the assurance of life.
Not everyone had plunged into an orgy of joyless pleasure. There were some who took refuge in prayer—addressed either to the traditional Deity or to the recent importations from the other planets. But, in the end, it was the same for all, prayerful and profligate alike. The only exceptions were the lucky few who seemed to be immune, like Emrys Shortmire, and those who escaped from the cities—to the country or, if they were rich, the other planets. So, even if Emrys had craved women before, he would have had enough of them by now.
As he passed through the streets, he heard a man who walked alone and talked to himself curse the name of Jan Shortmire. They would tear me to pieces if they knew I was his flesh and blood, Emrys thought, and smiled to think how once he had feared to be engulfed by Jan Shortmire's reputation, and now he feared to be destroyed by it.
For it had been a starship equipped, like all starships, with the Shortmire engines that had brought back the plague—a starship probing the distant corners of the Galaxy which were all that Man's insatiable curiosity had left undiscovered.
Far out, even beyond Morethis—outermost of the discovered planets—in the middle of the dead and dying stars that were all there was in this chill, cold sector of space, the ship had come upon three dead planets, dark and lifeless. But when it returned to Earth to report the end of Man's ambitions for further conquest, it turned out that one planet had not been quite as lifeless as they had fancied. And the ship had brought back its life—a virus against which terrestrial medicine was powerless.
Emrys could have fled the city; he could have fled the planet. But somehow, after three years on Earth, he had not wanted to. He had spent those years fulfilling the dreams that all young men dream in the murky part of their souls but seldom have the chance to gratify.