She shrugged. There wasn't much question. She had Thurston's Disease. It
was the beginning stages, the harsh cough, the slight temperature, the
leukopenia. Pretty soon her white cell count would begin to rise, but
it would rise too late. In fact, it was already too late. It's funny,
she thought. I'm going to die, but it doesn't frighten me. In fact, the
only thing that bothers me is that poor Walter is going to have a
terrible time finding things. But I can't put this place the way it was.
I couldn't hope to.

She shook her head, slid gingerly off the lab stool and went to the hall
door. She'd better check in at the clinic, she thought. There was bed
space in the hospital now. Plenty of it. That hadn't been true a few
months ago but the only ones who were dying now were the newborn and an
occasional adult like herself. The epidemic had died out not because of
lack of virulence but because of lack of victims. The city outside, one
of the first affected, now had less than forty per cent of its people
left alive. It was a hollow shell of its former self. People walked its
streets and went through the motions of life. But they were not really
alive. The vital criteria were as necessary for a race as for an
individual. Growth, reproduction, irritability, metabolism--Mary smiled
wryly. Whoever had authored that hackneyed mnemonic that life was a
"grim" proposition never knew how right he was, particularly when one of
the criteria was missing.

The race couldn't reproduce. That was the true horror of Thurston's
Disease--not how it killed, but who it killed. No children played in the
parks and playgrounds. The schools were empty. No babies were pushed in
carriages or taken on tours through the supermarkets in shopping
carts. No advertisements of motherhood, or children, or children's
things were in the newspapers or magazines. They were forbidden
subjects--too dangerously emotional to touch. Laughter and shrill young
voices had vanished from the earth to be replaced by the drab grayness
of silence and waiting. Death had laid cold hands upon the hearts of
mankind and the survivors were frozen to numbness.

* * * * *

It was odd, she thought, how wrong the prophets were. When Thurston's
Disease broke into the news there were frightened predictions of the end
of civilization. But they had not materialized. There were no mass
insurrections, no rioting, no organized violence. Individual excesses,