Not a Creature Was Stirring By DEAN EVANS Illustrated by DAVID STONE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] This could be a Christmas story. If it is, it shows one way peace on Earth can be attained! He was a tall, hard man with skin the color of very old iodine. When he climbed up out of the vertical shaft of his small gold mine, _The Lousy Disappointment_, he could have been taken for an Indian, he was that dark. Except, of course, that Indians didn't exist any more in 1982. His name was Tom Gannett and he was about forty years old and he didn't realize his own uniqueness. When he made it to his feet, the first thing he did was to squint up at the sun. The second was to sneeze, and the third to blow his nose. "Hey, you old sun!" he growled. "You old crummy sun, you look sicker'n a dog." Which was literally true, for the sun seemed to be pretty queer. The whole sky seemed to be pretty queer, for that matter. Skies should be blue and the sun should be a bloated golden bauble drifting serenely across them. But the skies were not blue; they were a dirty purplish-gray. And the sun wasn't a bloated golden bauble; somebody had it by the scruff of the neck and was dragging it. Gannett planted his big feet wide apart and frowned sourly around and sniffed the air like a dog at a gopher hole. "The damn world smells sick," he grunted. Which was also true. The world did smell sick. The world smelled something like that peculiar odor that comes from an old graveyard carefully tended by an old man with dank moss sticking to the soles of his old shoes. That kind of smell. Gannett didn't know why the sun looked sick, and he didn't know why the world smelled sick. Indeed, there were many things Gannett didn't know, among which would be these in particular: (a) He did not know (since, for the last six months, he had been living and working all alone at his little mine, which was in the remotest of the most remote desert regions of Nevada) that a little less than three weeks earlier, mankind had finally achieved the inevitable: man's own annihilation. (b) He did not know that he was going to be the loneliest man on Earth--he who was used to, and perfectly content with, the hermitlike existence of a desert rat. (c) He furthermore did not know that there were four of the Ten Commandments which he wasn't going to be able to break any more--not even if he stayed up nights trying and lived for centuries. * * * * *