Anthony's voice, he could hold his slipping grip on
reason. He felt that the cloth of his robe was metal, fine spun and
woven. That was strangely reassuring.

"How long do you think you have slept?"

"How long?" Dane murmured. Something told him that he had been
unconscious for a long time. "A week?"

Anthony sighed. "No. Longer than that, much longer." There was
reluctance in his tone. "You have lain here for twenty years."

Allan's eyes flew open, and he stared up into the speaker's face.
Twenty years! Somehow it did not occur to him to disbelieve this
astounding statement. He struggled hard to realize its implication.
Two decades had passed since last he remembered. He had been a youth
then. Now he was forty-four.

Anthony continued. "That may be a shock to you, but this will be a
greater. Unless I am greatly mistaken, we seven, we four men and three
women, are the only living humans left on Earth."

The words dripped into Allan's consciousness. Beyond them, he could
hear movements, exclamations. But they meant nothing to him. Only the
one thought tolled, knell-like, within him. "We seven are the only
living humans left on Earth."

* * * * *

Dimly he knew that Anthony was talking. "There is a possibility, a
bare possibility, that somewhere near here there are two others. That
chance is faint indeed. Otherwise humanity is dead, killed by its own
hand."

Through a dizzy vertigo that blurred sight and sound Allan heard the
rounded voice go on and on, telling the story of the doom that Man's
own folly had brought. And intermingled with that tale of a world gone
mad there came back to the listener the clear-cut vision of the day of
horror that to him seemed but yesterday. He remembered the sudden
ultimatum of the Easterner's, the Western Coalition's stanch defiance.
Again he saw a supposedly invincible fleet utterly destroyed, saw
comrades whiffed out of existence in infinitesimal seconds. Again he
watched a city of twenty millions inundated by a muddy yellow gas in
which no human being, no animal, might live. He waked once more to
find himself helpless with weakness, among living corpses, in a place
that seemed a tomb.

"All this we saw in our long-distance televisoscope." Anthony gestured
to a blank screen above the apparatus ranged along the opposite wall.
"Then, just as that last weird battle ended, something happened to the
eye-mast outside, and we were isolated." He fell