Finally he realized that he must be immune; hence a lifetime waited ahead of him. So he turned to learning, for the vast libraries of tapes and books remained changeless amid the disaster. He read and he learned a great deal, and if he could not derive pleasure from this, at least there was a deep intellectual appreciation that almost took its place.
The doctors on Ndrikull, the most advanced of the other planets, at last managed to find a serum that would kill the plague—that is, they maintained it was their serum that had killed it. Some suggested that the virus had died because Earth's environment had eventually proved hostile to it. But Earth did not die, even though most of its people had, because the great machines that took care of it—the Dyall machines—had kept functioning.
Gradually, most of the people who had fled to the other planets came back, and those who had survived in the country returned to the cities. Earth was restored to its former splendor as the social and political capital of the Galaxy, though Ndrikull now was the financial center and rivaled Earth for artistic honors. But still Emrys stuck to his books. Once in a while, he would sink himself for a week or a month in what would be, for other men, physical pleasure, just to see if his reactions had changed, but they had grown even more impersonal.
When Emrys Shortmire had been ten years on Earth, he eventually ran into Nicholas Dyall, at the opening of a scientific exposition. As soon as he saw Dyall in the crowd, he turned to go, but Dyall had seen him at the same time, and hurriedly limped across the room.
"You must be Emrys Shortmire," he declared, in a voice of surprising resonance for so old a man. "You look so much like Jan, I couldn't be mistaken." Grasping his stick with one hand for support, he extended the other to Emrys, who could not refuse it. "But you are so young...."
"I'm older than I look," Emrys said uncomfortably; then remembered to add, "You were a friend of my father's, sir?"
"A hundred years ago, yes. My name is Nicholas Dyall."
"I've heard of you; you're the man who—who invented all those machines," Emrys said, trying not to sound too ingenuous. "I've heard people say you revolutionized our technology as much as—"
"As much as your father revolutionized our civilization? Yes, both of us are responsible for a great deal. Luckily, your father is dead."