she could understand. Once he had scraped his knee on a rock, and
she had been extremely sympathetic. But pain from disease seemed unknown
to her. Of course, Jason Wall knew, any disease was compounded of two
things: a disease agent, bacteria or virus, and a susceptibility.
Apparently First Man and First Woman had utterly no susceptibility. They
were disease-free.

Some time later in the course of human development--how much later he
did not yet know--susceptibility to disease had evolved.

The woman's belly grew round and Jason Wall knew she was going to have a
baby. His baby.

He sighed. His time was short. The baby would never be born, because he
would kill its mother first.

Then it struck him like a blow. A baby. His baby. And First Man and
First Woman--free of disease. He had introduced disease into the human
makeup, by planting his seed in this woman!

_Including his own...._

He could break the pattern by killing her. Then, as he had planned
originally, there would be no childbirth, and no mankind.

He lifted the pistol. The look on his face must have given him away.
Probably, she thought it was a club. He was pain-wracked and very much
weakened by his disease now. She took the pistol away from him easily,
and shrugged, and cried a little, and went away.

He ran after her.

"Wait!" he screamed. "Wait, you don't understand! You've got to die.
You've got to--"

He fell. His legs drummed feebly. She was gone. The pistol was gone.
Humanity would live--the life of torment and pain and disease that it
had always known.

And he would die, alone, wracked by the ailment he had introduced into
the human line.

He lay there.

It took him a long time to die.

End of Project Gutenberg's Disaster Revisited, by Darius John Granger

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISASTER REVISITED ***

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