（外文电子版资料）Knight, Damon - Not With A Bang.pdf

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Damon%20Knight%20-%20Not%20With%20A%20Bang.txt Damon Knight: Not with a Bang Ten months after the last plane passed over, Rolf Smith knew beyond doubt that only one other human being had survived. Her name was Louise Oliver, and he was sitting opposite her in a department-store cafe in Salt Lake City. They were eating canned Vienna sausages and drinking coffee. Sunlight struck through a broken pane like a judgment. Inside and outside, there was no sound; only a stifling rumor of absence. The clatter of dishware in the kitchen, the heavy rumble of streetcars: never again. There was sunlight; and silence; and the watery, astonished eyes of Louise Oliver. He leaned forward, trying to capture the attention of those fishlike eyes for a second. Darling, he said, I respect your views, naturally. But Ive got to make you see that theyre impractical. She looked at him with faint surprise, then away again. Her head shook slightly. No. No, Rolf, I will not live with you in sin. Smith thought of the women of France, of Russia, of Mex- ico, of the South Seas. He had spent three months in the ruined studios of a radio station in Rochester, listening to the voices until they stopped. There had been a large colony in Sweden, including an English cabinet minister. They re- ported that Europe was gone. Simply gone; there was not an acre that had not been swept clean by radioactive dust. They had two planes and enough fuel to take them any- where on the Continent; but there was nowhere to go. Three of them had the plague; then eleven; then all. There was a bomber pilot who had fallen near a govern- ment radio station in Palestine. He did not last long, because he had broken some bones in the crash; but he had seen the vacant waters where the Pacific Islands should have been. It was his guess that the Arctic ice fields had been bombed. There were no reports from Washington, from New York, from London, Paris