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+Project Gutenberg's The Coming of the Ice, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Coming of the Ice
+
+Author: G. Peyton Wertenbaker
+
+Illustrator: Frank Rudolph Paul
+
+Release Date: October 19, 2008 [EBook #26967]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMING OF THE ICE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+_The COMING of the ICE_
+
+_By G. Peyton Wertenbaker_
+
+
+[Illustration: Strange men these creatures of the hundredth century ...]
+
+_Copyright, 1926, by E. P. Co., Inc._
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories_ July 1961 and was
+    first published in _Amazing Stories_ June 1926. Extensive research
+    did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
+    publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors
+    have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, June, 1926
+
+Introduction by Sam Moskowitz
+
+
+_One of the gravest editorial problems faced by the editors of AMAZING
+STORIES when they launched its first issue, dated April, 1926, was the
+problem of finding or developing authors who could write the type of
+story they needed. As a stop-gap, the first two issues of AMAZING
+STORIES were devoted entirely to reprints. But reprints were to
+constitute a declining portion of the publication's contents for the
+following four years. The first new story the magazine bought was
+_Coming of the Ice_, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, which appeared in its
+third issue. Wertenbaker was not technically a newcomer to science
+fiction, since he had sold his first story to Gernsback's SCIENCE AND
+INVENTION, _The Man From the Atom_, in 1923 when he was only 16! Now, at
+the ripe old age of 19, he was appearing in the world's first truly
+complete science fiction magazine._
+
+_The scope of his imagination was truly impressive and, despite the
+author's youth, _Coming of the Ice_ builds to a climax of considerable
+power._
+
+_Wertenbaker, under the name of Green Peyton, went on to sell his first
+novel, _Black Cabin_, in 1933. He eventually became an authority on the
+Southwest with many regional volumes to his credit: _For God and Texas_,
+_America's Heartland_, _The Southwest_, and _San Antonio, City of the
+Sun_. But he never lost his interest in space travel, assisting Hubertus
+Strughold on the writing of _The Green and Red Planet_, a scientific
+appraisal of the possibilities of life on the planet Mars published in
+1953. He also served for a time as London correspondent for FORTUNE
+MAGAZINE._
+
+
+
+
+It is strange to be alone, and so cold. To be the last man on earth....
+
+The snow drives silently about me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I am
+isolated in this tiny white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred
+world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands
+of years is it since I last knew the true companionship? For a long time
+I have been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood.
+Now they are gone. Now I have not even the stars to keep me company, for
+they are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight here below.
+
+If only I could know how long it has been since first I was imprisoned
+upon the earth. It cannot matter now. And yet some vague
+dissatisfaction, some faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing
+ears: What year? What year?
+
+It was in the year 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was
+then a very great man who performed operations on his fellows to compose
+their vitals--we called such men surgeons. John Granden wore the title
+"Sir" before his name, in indication of nobility by birth according to
+the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir
+John's, if I must be precise, for, while he had achieved an enormous
+reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that his real work lay in the
+experimental end of his profession. He was, in a way, a dreamer, but a
+dreamer who could make his dreams come true.
+
+I was a very close friend of Sir John's. In fact, we shared the same
+apartments in London. I have never forgotten that day when he first
+mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I had just come in from a long
+sleigh-ride in the country with Alice, and I was seated drowsily in the
+window-seat, writing idly in my mind a description of the wind and the
+snow and the grey twilight of the evening. It is strange, is it not,
+that my tale should begin and end with the snow and the twilight.
+
+Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of the room and came hurrying
+across to another door. He looked at me, grinning rather like a
+triumphant maniac.
+
+"It's coming!" he cried, without pausing, "I've almost got it!" I smiled
+at him: he looked very ludicrous at that moment.
+
+"What have you got?" I asked.
+
+"Good Lord, man, the Secret--the Secret!" And then he was gone again,
+the door closing upon his victorious cry, "The Secret!"
+
+I was, of course, amused. But I was also very much interested. I knew
+Sir John well enough to realize that, however amazing his appearance
+might be, there would be nothing absurd about his "Secret"--whatever it
+was. But it was useless to speculate. I could only hope for
+enlightenment at dinner. So I immersed myself in one of the surgeon's
+volumes from his fine Library of Imagination, and waited.
+
+I think the book was one of Mr. H. G. Wells', probably "The Sleeper
+Awakes," or some other of his brilliant fantasies and predictions, for I
+was in a mood conducive to belief in almost anything when, later, we sat
+down together across the table. I only wish I could give some idea of
+the atmosphere that permeated our apartments, the reality it lent to
+whatever was vast and amazing and strange. You could then, whoever you
+are, understand a little the ease with which I accepted Sir John's new
+discovery.
+
+He began to explain it to me at once, as though he could keep it to
+himself no longer.
+
+"Did you think I had gone mad, Dennell?" he asked. "I quite wonder that
+I haven't. Why, I have been studying for many years--for most of my
+life--on this problem. And, suddenly, I have solved it! Or, rather, I am
+afraid I have solved another one much greater."
+
+"Tell me about it, but for God's sake don't be technical."
+
+"Right," he said. Then he paused. "Dennell, it's _magnificent_! It will
+change everything that is in the world." His eyes held mine suddenly
+with the fatality of a hypnotist's. "Dennell, it is the Secret of
+Eternal Life," he said.
+
+"Good Lord, Sir John!" I cried, half inclined to laugh.
+
+"I mean it," he said. "You know I have spent most of my life studying
+the processes of birth, trying to find out precisely what went on in the
+whole history of conception."
+
+"You have found out?"
+
+"No, that is just what amuses me. I have discovered something else
+without knowing yet what causes either process.
+
+"I don't want to be technical, and I know very little of what actually
+takes place myself. But I can try to give you some idea of it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is thousands, perhaps millions of years since Sir John explained to
+me. What little I understood at the time I may have forgotten, yet I try
+to reproduce what I can of his theory.
+
+"In my study of the processes of birth," he began, "I discovered the
+rudiments of an action which takes place in the bodies of both men and
+women. There are certain properties in the foods we eat that remain in
+the body for the reproduction of life, two distinct Essences, so to
+speak, of which one is retained by the woman, another by the man. It is
+the union of these two properties that, of course, creates the child.
+
+"Now, I made a slight mistake one day in experimenting with a
+guinea-pig, and I re-arranged certain organs which I need not describe
+so that I thought I had completely messed up the poor creature's
+abdomen. It lived, however, and I laid it aside. It was some years later
+that I happened to notice it again. It had not given birth to any young,
+but I was amazed to note that it had apparently grown no older: it
+seemed precisely in the same state of growth in which I had left it.
+
+"From that I built up. I re-examined the guinea-pig, and observed it
+carefully. I need not detail my studies. But in the end I found that my
+'mistake' had in reality been a momentous discovery. I found that I had
+only to close certain organs, to re-arrange certain ducts, and to open
+certain dormant organs, and, _mirabile dictu_, the whole process of
+reproduction was changed.
+
+"You have heard, of course, that our bodies are continually changing,
+hour by hour, minute by minute, so that every few years we have been
+literally reborn. Some such principle as this seems to operate in
+reproduction, except that, instead of the old body being replaced by the
+new, and in its form, approximately, the new body is created apart from
+it. It is the creation of children that causes us to die, it would seem,
+because if this activity is, so to speak, dammed up or turned aside into
+new channels, the reproduction operates on the old body, renewing it
+continually. It is very obscure and very absurd, is it not? But the most
+absurd part of it is that it is true. Whatever the true explanation may
+be, the fact remains that the operation can be done, that it actually
+prolongs life indefinitely, and that I alone know the secret."
+
+Sir John told me a very great deal more, but, after all, I think it
+amounted to little more than this. It would be impossible for me to
+express the great hold his discovery took upon my mind the moment he
+recounted it. From the very first, under the spell of his personality, I
+believed, and I knew he was speaking the truth. And it opened up before
+me new vistas. I began to see myself become suddenly eternal, never
+again to know the fear of death. I could see myself storing up, century
+after century, an amplitude of wisdom and experience that would make me
+truly a god.
+
+"Sir John!" I cried, long before he was finished. "You must perform that
+operation on me!"
+
+"But, Dennell, you are too hasty. You must not put yourself so rashly
+into my hands."
+
+"You have perfected the operation, haven't you?"
+
+"That is true," he said.
+
+"You must try it out on somebody, must you not?"
+
+"Yes, of course. And yet--somehow, Dennell, I am afraid. I cannot help
+feeling that man is not yet prepared for such a vast thing. There are
+sacrifices. One must give up love and all sensual pleasure. This
+operation not only takes away the mere fact of reproduction, but it
+deprives one of all the things that go with sex, all love, all sense of
+beauty, all feeling for poetry and the arts. It leaves only the few
+emotions, selfish emotions, that are necessary to self-preservation. Do
+you not see? One becomes an intellect, nothing more--a cold apotheosis
+of reason. And I, for one, cannot face such a thing calmly."
+
+"But, Sir John, like many fears, it is largely horrible in the
+foresight. After you have changed your nature you cannot regret it. What
+you are would be as horrible an idea to you afterwards as the thought of
+what you will be seems now."
+
+"True, true. I know it. But it is hard to face, nevertheless."
+
+"I am not afraid to face it."
+
+"You do not understand it, Dennell, I am afraid. And I wonder whether
+you or I or any of us on this earth are ready for such a step. After
+all, to make a race deathless, one should be sure it is a perfect race."
+
+"Sir John," I said, "it is not you who have to face this, nor any one
+else in the world till you are ready. But I am firmly resolved, and I
+demand it of you as my friend."
+
+Well, we argued much further, but in the end I won. Sir John promised to
+perform the operation three days later.
+
+... But do you perceive now what I had forgotten during all that
+discussion, the one thing I had thought I could never forget so long as
+I lived, not even for an instant? It was my love for Alice--I had
+forgotten that!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I cannot write here all the infinity of emotions I experienced later,
+when, with Alice in my arms, it suddenly came upon me what I had done.
+Ages ago--I have forgotten how to feel. I could name now a thousand
+feelings I used to have, but I can no longer even understand them. For
+only the heart can understand the heart, and the intellect only the
+intellect.
+
+With Alice in my arms, I told the whole story. It was she who, with her
+quick instinct, grasped what I had never noticed.
+
+"But Carl!" she cried, "Don't you see?--It will mean that we can never
+be married!" And, for the first time, I understood. If only I could
+re-capture some conception of that love! I have always known, since the
+last shred of comprehension slipped from me, that I lost something very
+wonderful when I lost love. But what does it matter? I lost Alice too,
+and I could not have known love again without her.
+
+We were very sad and very tragic that night. For hours and hours we
+argued the question over. But I felt somewhat that I was inextricably
+caught in my fate, that I could not retreat now from my resolve. I was
+perhaps, very school-boyish, but I felt that it would be cowardice to
+back out now. But it was Alice again who perceived a final aspect of the
+matter.
+
+"Carl," she said to me, her lips very close to mine, "it need not come
+between our love. After all, ours would be a poor sort of love if it
+were not more of the mind than of the flesh. We shall remain lovers, but
+we shall forget mere carnal desire. I shall submit to that operation
+too!"
+
+And I could not shake her from her resolve. I would speak of danger that
+I could not let her face. But, after the fashion of women, she disarmed
+me with the accusation that I did not love her, that I did not want her
+love, that I was trying to escape from love. What answer had I for that,
+but that I loved her and would do anything in the world not to lose her?
+
+I have wondered sometimes since whether we might have known the love of
+the mind. Is love something entirely of the flesh, something created by
+an ironic God merely to propagate His race? Or can there be love without
+emotion, love without passion--love between two cold intellects? I do
+not know. I did not ask then. I accepted anything that would make our
+way more easy.
+
+There is no need to draw out the tale. Already my hand wavers, and my
+time grows short. Soon there will be no more of me, no more of my
+tale--no more of Mankind. There will be only the snow, and the ice, and
+the cold ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days later I entered John's Hospital with Alice on my arm. All my
+affairs--and they were few enough--were in order. I had insisted that
+Alice wait until I had come safely through the operation, before she
+submitted to it. I had been carefully starved for two days, and I was
+lost in an unreal world of white walls and white clothes and white
+lights, drunk with my dreams of the future. When I was wheeled into the
+operating room on the long, hard table, for a moment it shone with
+brilliant distinctness, a neat, methodical white chamber, tall and more
+or less circular. Then I was beneath the glare of soft white lights, and
+the room faded into a misty vagueness from which little steel rays
+flashed and quivered from silvery cold instruments. For a moment our
+hands, Sir John's and mine, gripped, and we were saying good-bye--for a
+little while--in the way men say these things. Then I felt the warm
+touch of Alice's lips upon mine, and I felt sudden painful things I
+cannot describe, that I could not have described then. For a moment I
+felt that I must rise and cry out that I could not do it. But the
+feeling passed, and I was passive.
+
+Something was pressed about my mouth and nose, something with an
+ethereal smell. Staring eyes swam about me from behind their white
+masks. I struggled instinctively, but in vain--I was held securely.
+Infinitesimal points of light began to wave back and forth on a
+pitch-black background; a great hollow buzzing echoed in my head. My
+head seemed suddenly to have become all throat, a great, cavernous,
+empty throat in which sounds and lights were mingled together, in a
+swift rhythm, approaching, receding eternally. Then, I think, there were
+dreams. But I have forgotten them....
+
+I began to emerge from the effect of the ether. Everything was dim, but
+I could perceive Alice beside me, and Sir John.
+
+"Bravely done!" Sir John was saying, and Alice, too, was saying
+something, but I cannot remember what. For a long while we talked, I
+speaking the nonsense of those who are coming out from under ether, they
+teasing me a little solemnly. But after a little while I became aware of
+the fact that they were about to leave. Suddenly, God knows why, I knew
+that they must not leave. Something cried in the back of my head that
+they _must_ stay--one cannot explain these things, except by after
+events. I began to press them to remain, but they smiled and said they
+must get their dinner. I commanded them not to go; but they spoke kindly
+and said they would be back before long. I think I even wept a little,
+like a child, but Sir John said something to the nurse, who began to
+reason with me firmly, and then they were gone, and somehow I was
+asleep....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I awoke again, my head was fairly clear, but there was an
+abominable reek of ether all about me. The moment I opened my eyes, I
+felt that something had happened. I asked for Sir John and for Alice. I
+saw a swift, curious look that I could not interpret come over the face
+of the nurse, then she was calm again, her countenance impassive. She
+reassured me in quick meaningless phrases, and told me to sleep. But I
+could not sleep: I was absolutely sure that something had happened to
+them, to my friend and to the woman I loved. Yet all my insistence
+profited me nothing, for the nurses were a silent lot. Finally, I think,
+they must have given me a sleeping potion of some sort, for I fell
+asleep again.
+
+For two endless, chaotic days, I saw nothing of either of them, Alice or
+Sir John. I became more and more agitated, the nurse more and more
+taciturn. She would only say that they had gone away for a day or two.
+
+And then, on the third day, I found out. They thought I was asleep. The
+night nurse had just come in to relieve the other.
+
+"Has he been asking about them again?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, poor fellow. I have hardly managed to keep him quiet."
+
+"We will have to keep it from him until he is recovered fully." There
+was a long pause, and I could hardly control my labored breathing.
+
+"How sudden it was!" one of them said. "To be killed like that--" I
+heard no more, for I leapt suddenly up in bed, crying out.
+
+"Quick! For God's sake, tell me what has happened!" I jumped to the
+floor and seized one of them by the collar. She was horrified. I shook
+her with a superhuman strength.
+
+"Tell me!" I shouted, "Tell me--Or I'll--!" She told me--what else could
+she do.
+
+"They were killed in an accident," she gasped, "in a taxi--a
+collision--the Strand--!" And at that moment a crowd of nurses and
+attendants arrived, called by the other frantic woman, and they put me
+to bed again.
+
+I have no memory of the next few days. I was in delirium, and I was
+never told what I said during my ravings. Nor can I express the feelings
+I was saturated with when at last I regained my mind again. Between my
+old emotions and any attempt to put them into words, or even to remember
+them, lies always that insurmountable wall of my Change. I cannot
+understand what I must have felt, I cannot express it.
+
+I only know that for weeks I was sunk in a misery beyond any misery I
+had ever imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth were gone
+to me. I was left alone. And, for the first time, I began to see before
+me all these endless years that would be the same, dull, lonely.
+
+Yet I recovered. I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigor
+in my limbs, a vast force that was something tangibly expressive to
+eternal life. Slowly my anguish began to die. After a week more, I began
+to understand how my emotions were leaving me, how love and beauty and
+everything of which poetry was made--how all this was going. I could not
+bear the thought at first. I would look at the golden sunlight and the
+blue shadow of the wind, and I would say,
+
+"God! How beautiful!" And the words would echo meaninglessly in my ears.
+Or I would remember Alice's face, that face I had once loved so
+inextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch my forehead, and clench my
+fists, crying,
+
+"O God, how can I live without her!" Yet there would be a little strange
+fancy in my head at the same moment, saying,
+
+"Who is this Alice? You know no such person." And truly I would wonder
+whether she had ever existed.
+
+So, slowly, the old emotions were shed away from me, and I began to joy
+in a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idly
+with mathematical formulae I had forgotten years ago, in the same
+fashion that a poet toys with a word and its shades of meaning. I would
+look at everything with new, seeing eyes, new perception, and I would
+understand things I had never understood before, because formerly my
+emotions had always occupied me more than my thoughts.
+
+And so the weeks went by, until, one day, I was well.
+
+... What, after all, is the use of this chronicle? Surely there will
+never be men to read it. I have heard them say that the snow will never
+go. I will be buried, it will be buried with me; and it will be the end
+of us both. Yet, somehow, it eases my weary soul a little to write....
+
+Need I say that I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands of
+years, until this day? I cannot detail that life. It is a long round of
+new, fantastic impressions, coming dream-like, one after another,
+melting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon
+dreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly; and it
+seems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement between
+episodes. I think now, of necessity, in terms of centuries and
+millenniums, rather than days and months.... The snow blows terribly
+about my little fire, and I know it will soon gather courage to quench
+us both ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Years passed, at first with a sort of clear wonder. I watched things
+that took place everywhere in the world. I studied. The other students
+were much amazed to see me, a man of thirty odd, coming back to college.
+
+"But Judas, Dennell, you've already got your Ph.D! What more do you
+want?" So they would all ask me. And I would reply;
+
+"I want an M.D. and an F.R.C.S." I didn't tell them that I wanted
+degrees in Law, too, and in Biology and Chemistry, in Architecture and
+Engineering, in Psychology and Philosophy. Even so, I believe they
+thought me mad. But poor fools! I would think. They can hardly realize
+that I have all of eternity before me to study.
+
+I went to school for many decades. I would pass from University to
+University, leisurely gathering all the fruits of every subject I took
+up, revelling in study as no student revelled ever before. There was no
+need of hurry in my life, no fear of death too soon. There was a
+magnificence of vigor in my body, and a magnificence of vision and
+clarity in my brain. I felt myself a super-man. I had only to go on
+storing up wisdom until the day should come when all knowledge of the
+world was mine, and then I could command the world. I had no need for
+hurry. O vast life! How I gloried in my eternity! And how little good it
+has ever done me, by the irony of God.
+
+For several centuries, changing my name and passing from place to place,
+I continued my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony, for, to the
+intellect, monotony cannot exist: it was one of those emotions I had
+left behind. One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery was
+made by a man called Zarentzov. It had to do with the curvature of
+space, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed since
+Einstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein's theory,
+as had, in time, the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into
+the study of this new, epoch-making conception.
+
+To my amazement, it all seemed to me curiously dim and elusive. I could
+not quite grasp what Zarentzov was trying to formulate.
+
+"Why," I cried, "the thing is a monstrous fraud!" I went to the
+professor of Physics in the University I then attended, and I told him
+it was a fraud, a huge book of mere nonsense. He looked at me rather
+pityingly.
+
+"I am afraid, Modevski," he said, addressing me by the name I was at the
+time using, "I am afraid you do not understand it, that is all. When
+your mind has broadened, you will. You should apply yourself more
+carefully to your Physics." But that angered me, for I had mastered my
+Physics before he was ever born. I challenged him to explain the theory.
+And he did! He put it, obviously, in the clearest language he could. Yet
+I understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook his head
+impatiently, saying that it was useless, that if I could not grasp it I
+would simply have to keep on studying. I was stunned. I wandered away in
+a daze.
+
+For do you see what happened? During all those years I had studied
+ceaselessly, and my mind had been clear and quick as the day I first had
+left the hospital. But all that time I had been able only to remain what
+I was--an extraordinarily intelligent man of the twentieth century. And
+the rest of the race had been progressing! It had been swiftly gathering
+knowledge and power and ability all that time, faster and faster, while
+I had been only remaining still. And now here was Zarentzov and the
+teachers of the Universities, and, probably, a hundred intelligent men,
+who had all outstripped me! I was being left behind.
+
+And that is what happened. I need not dilate further upon it. By the end
+of that century I had been left behind by all the students of the world,
+and I never did understand Zarentzov. Other men came with other
+theories, and these theories were accepted by the world. But I could not
+understand them. My intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing more
+to understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing, and,
+thenceforth, I could only play wearily with the old ideas.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many things happened in the world. A time came when the East and West,
+two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up in arms: the civil war of a
+planet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It
+was all incomprehensible to me: like a bizarre dream, things happened,
+people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurked
+during all that time in a tiny shuddering hole under the city of
+Yokohama, and by a miracle I survived. And the East won. But it seems to
+have mattered little who did win, for all the world had become, in all
+except its few remaining prejudices, a single race, and nothing was
+changed when it was all rebuilt again, under a single government.
+
+I saw the first of the strange creatures who appeared among us in the
+year 6371, men who were later known to be from the planet Venus. But
+they were repulsed, for they were savages compared with the Earthmen,
+although they were about equal to the people of my own century, 1900.
+Those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth of
+their world, and those who were not killed by our hands, those few
+returned silently home again. And I have always regretted that I had not
+the courage to go with them.
+
+I watched a time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, when
+men could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men,
+these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tiny
+shriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements on
+their little conveyances. It was I, with my ancient compunctions, who
+shuddered when at last they put to death all the perverts, the
+criminals, and the insane, ridding the world of the scum for which they
+had no more need. It was then that I was forced to produce my tattered
+old papers, proving my identity and my story. They knew it was true, in
+some strange fashion of theirs, and, thereafter, I was kept on
+exhibition as an archaic survival.
+
+I saw the world made immortal through the new invention of a man called
+Kathol, who used somewhat the same method "legend" decreed had been used
+upon me. I observed the end of speech, of all perceptions except one,
+when men learned to communicate directly by thought, and to receive
+directly into the brain all the myriad vibrations of the universe.
+
+All these things I saw, and more, until that time when there was no more
+discovery, but a Perfect World in which there was no need for anything
+but memory. Men ceased to count time at last. Several hundred years
+after the 154th Dynasty from the Last War, or, as we would have counted
+in my time, about 200,000 A.D., official records of time were no longer
+kept carefully. They fell into disuse. Men began to forget years, to
+forget time at all. Of what significance was time when one was immortal?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After long, long uncounted centuries, a time came when the days grew
+noticeably colder. Slowly the winters became longer, and the summers
+diminished to but a month or two. Fierce storms raged endlessly in
+winter, and in summer sometimes there was severe frost, sometimes there
+was only frost. In the high places and in the north and the
+sub-equatorial south, the snow came and would not go.
+
+Men died by the thousands in the higher latitudes. New York became,
+after awhile, the furthest habitable city north, an arctic city, where
+warmth seldom penetrated. And great fields of ice began to make their
+way southward, grinding before them the brittle remains of
+civilizations, covering over relentlessly all of man's proud work.
+
+Snow appeared in Florida and Italy one summer. In the end, snow was
+there always. Men left New York, Chicago, Paris, Yokohama, and
+everywhere they traveled by the millions southward, perishing as they
+went, pursued by the snow and the cold, and that inevitable field of
+ice. They were feeble creatures when the Cold first came upon them, but
+I speak in terms of thousands of years; and they turned every weapon of
+science to the recovery of their physical power, for they foresaw that
+the only chance for survival lay in a hard, strong body. As for me, at
+last I had found a use for my few powers, for my physique was the finest
+in that world. It was but little comfort, however, for we were all
+united in our awful fear of that Cold and that grinding field of Ice.
+All the great cities were deserted. We would catch silent, fearful
+glimpses of them as we sped on in our machines over the snow--great
+hungry, haggard skeletons of cities, shrouded in banks of snow, snow
+that the wind rustled through desolate streets where the cream of human
+life once had passed in calm security. Yet still the Ice pursued. For
+men had forgotten about that Last Ice Age when they ceased to reckon
+time, when they lost sight of the future and steeped themselves in
+memories. They had not remembered that a time must come when Ice would
+lie white and smooth over all the earth, when the sun would shine
+bleakly between unending intervals of dim, twilight snow and sleet.
+
+Slowly the Ice pursued us down the earth, until all the feeble remains
+of civilization were gathered in Egypt and India and South America. The
+deserts flowered again, but the frost would come always to bite the tiny
+crops. For still the Ice came. All the world now, but for a narrow strip
+about the equator, was one great silent desolate vista of stark
+ice-plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of cities that had
+endured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was terrible to imagine
+the awful solitude and the endless twilight that lay on these places,
+and the grim snow, sailing in silence over all....
+
+It surrounded us on all sides, until life remained only in a few
+scattered clearings all about that equator of the globe, with an eternal
+fire going to hold away the hungry Ice. Perpetual winter reigned now;
+and we were becoming terror-stricken beasts that preyed on each other
+for a life already doomed. Ah, but I, I the archaic survival, I had my
+revenge then, with my great physique and strong jaws--God! Let me think
+of something else. Those men who lived upon each other--it was horrible.
+And I was one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So inevitably the Ice closed in.... One day the men of our tiny clearing
+were but a score. We huddled about our dying fire of bones and stray
+logs. We said nothing. We just sat, in deep, wordless, thoughtless
+silence. We were the last outpost of Mankind.
+
+I think suddenly something very noble must have transformed these
+creatures to a semblance of what they had been of old. I saw, in their
+eyes, the question they sent from one to another, and in every eye I saw
+that the answer was, Yes. With one accord they rose before my eyes and,
+ignoring me as a baser creature, they stripped away their load of
+tattered rags and, one by one, they stalked with their tiny shrivelled
+limbs into the shivering gale of swirling, gusting snow, and
+disappeared. And I was alone....
+
+So am I alone now. I have written this last fantastic history of myself
+and of Mankind upon a substance that will, I know, outlast even the snow
+and the Ice--as it has outlasted Mankind that made it. It is the only
+thing with which I have never parted. For is it not irony that I should
+be the historian of this race--I, a savage, an "archaic survival?" Why
+do I write? God knows, but some instinct prompts me, although there will
+never be men to read.
+
+I have been sitting here, waiting, and I have thought often of Sir John
+and Alice, whom I loved. Can it be that I am feeling again, after all
+these ages, some tiny portion of that emotion, that great passion I once
+knew? I see her face before me, the face I have lost from my thoughts
+for eons, and something is in it that stirs my blood again. Her eyes are
+half-closed and deep, her lips are parted as though I could crush them
+with an infinity of wonder and discovery. O God! It is love again, love
+that I thought was lost! They have often smiled upon me when I spoke of
+God, and muttered about my foolish, primitive superstitions. But they
+are gone, and I am left who believe in God, and surely there is purpose
+in it.
+
+I am cold, I have written. Ah, I am frozen. My breath freezes as it
+mingles with the air, and I can hardly move my numbed fingers. The Ice
+is closing over me, and I cannot break it any longer. The storm cries
+weirdly all about me in the twilight, and I know this is the end. The
+end of the world. And I--I, the last man....
+
+The last man....
+
+... I am cold--cold....
+
+But is it you, Alice? Is it you?
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Coming of the Ice, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker
+
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