We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...."

But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on
Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half
believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything.
Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare.
But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned
was no coward--death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could
have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness,
were hideous like being stranded alone on another world!

His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across
this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading
upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless
lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded
out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp.

* * * * *

He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting
passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the
occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But
he emerged at last at the surface.

He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The
Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were
unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow,
crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags
loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of
erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the
ground glistened with dry salt.

"Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone.

Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit.
Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes,
he might as well be an exile on another planet--so changed had the Earth
become.

A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the
distances of time that had passed--those inconceivable eons, separating
himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was
familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He
sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he
have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged
and studied....

Prison or a madhouse would be far bette