To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH! Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through the thick pane of window glass. A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening, attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary meanings. He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His stomach clenched up like an angry fist. "But I don't want to be the last man alive!" he shouted. "I don't know what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know--" A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the window for several minutes. "_Maybe I'm not the last!_" The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with swelling comfort to fill his emptiness. Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them. He had to know--he had to find out. * * * * * As he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now. The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing Rachmaninoff's _Isle of the Dead_ on full automatic. The music haunted him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself. The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced. "That was it," he said to himself. "Pride. We called this the 'Proud Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual, ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles. "We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until...."