The first batch of ape-people were just a big drag as far as I was concerned. I was pleased to see them, in a way, but mostly they were just a hassle. All that evolution—and for this? It was a coon’s age before they ever amounted to anything, and even then they were still shockingly grasping and paranoid. With my little house, my fur suits, my cleanshaven look, and my barbecues, I stood out. Occasionally I became the object of hatred, or worship. But even the friendly ones were no use to me. Ugh. Ich. Akk. What kind of conversation do you call that? And when at last they improved, and I made a few pals and started having relationships with the women, along came a horrible discovery. I thought they would be different, but they weren’t. They all got old and died, like my pets.
As they are dying now. They are dying all about me.
At first, around here, we were pleased when the world started getting warmer. We were pleased when things started brightening up again. Winter is always depressing —but nuclear winter is somehow especially grim. Even I had wearied of a night that lasted thirteen years (and New Zealand, I find, is pretty dead at the best of times). For a while, sunbathing was all the rage. But then it went too far in the other direction. It just kept on getting hotter—or rather there was a change in the nature of the heat. It didn’t feel like sunlight. It felt more like gas or liquid: it felt like rain, very thin, very hot. And buildings don’t seem to hold it off properly, even buildings with roofs. People stopped being sun-worshipers and started being moon-worshipers. Life became nightlife. They’re fairly cheerful, considering —sorrier for others than they are for themselves. I suppose it’s lucky they can’t tell what’s really coming down.
The poor mortals, I grieve for them. There’s just nothing they can do about that molten fiend up there in the middle of the sky. They faced the anger, then they faced the cold; and now they’re being nuked all over again. Now they’re being renuked, doublenuked—by the slow reactor of the sun.
Apocalypse happened in the year a.d. 2045. When I was sure it was coming I headed straight for the action: Tokyo. I’ll come right out and say that I was pretty much ready to quit. Not that I was particularly depressed or anything. I certainly wasn’t as depressed as I am now. In fact I had recently emerged from a five-year hangover and, for me, the future looked bright. But the planet was in desperate shape by then and I wanted no part of it anymore. I wanted out. Nothing else had ever managed to kill me, and I reckoned that a direct hit from a nuke was my only chance. I’m cosmic —in time—but so are nukes: in power. If a nuke hasn’t the heft to blow me away (I said to myself), well, nothing else will. I had one serious misgiving. The deployment fashion at that time was for carpet detonations in the hundred-kiloton range. Personally I would have liked something a little bigger, say a megaton at least. I missed the boat. I should have grabbed my chance in the days of atmospheric tests. I always used to kick myself about that sixty-meg sonofabitch the Soviets tried out in Siberia. Sixty million tons of TNT: surely not even I would have walked away from that. . . .
I leased a top-floor room at the Century Inn near Tokyo Tower, bang in the middle of town. I wanted to take this one right on the nose. At the hotel they seemed to be glad of my custom. Business was far from brisk. Everybody knew it would start ending here: it started ending here a century ago. And by this time cities everywhere were all dying anyway. … I had my money on an airburst, at night. I bribed the floor guard and he gave me access to the roof: the final sleepout. The city writhed in mortal fear. Me, I writhed in mortal hope. If that sounds selfish, well, then I apologize. But who to? When I heard the sirens and the air-whine I sprang to my feet and stood there, nude, on tiptoe, with my arms outstretched. And then it came, like the universe being unzipped.