each other and being too polite to
yawn.

They are polite, so polite I almost feel they are afraid of me, and I
want to reassure them.

But I talk as if I were angry. I can't help it, because if things had
only been a little different ... "Why couldn't you have come sooner? Why
couldn't you have tried to stop it before it happened, or at least come
sooner, afterward...?"

If they had come sooner to where the workers of the Nevada power pile
starved slowly behind their protecting walls of lead--if they had looked
sooner for survivors of the dust with which the nations of the world had
slain each other--George Craig would be alive. He died before they came.
He was my co-worker, and I loved him.

We had gone down together, passing door by door the automatic safeguards
of the plant, which were supposed to protect the people on the outside
from the radioactive danger from the inside--but the danger of a failure
of politics was far more real than the danger of failure in the science
of the power pile, and that had not been calculated by the builders. We
were far underground when the first radioactivity in the air outside had
shut all the heavy, lead-shielded automatic doors between us and the
outside.

We were safe. And we starved there.

"Why didn't you come sooner?" I wonder if they know or guess how I feel.
My questions are not questions, but I have to ask them. He is dead. I
don't mean to reproach them--they look well meaning and kindly--but I
feel as if, somehow, knowing why it happened could make it stop, could
let me turn the clock back and make it happen differently. If I could
have signaled them, so they would have come just a little sooner.

They look at one another, turning their funny-face heads uneasily,
moving back and forth, but no one will answer.

The world is dead.... George is dead, that thin, pathetic creature with
the bones showing through his skin that he was when we sat still at the
last with our hands touching, thinking there were people outside who had
forgotten us, hoping they would remember. We didn't guess that the world
was dead, blanketed in radiating dust outside. Politics had killed it.

These beings around me, they had been watching, seeing what was going to
happen to our world, listening to our radios from their small
settlements on the other planets of the Solar System. They had seen the
doom of war coming. They represented stellar civilizations of great
power and technology, and