The Stilled Patter By JAMES E. GUNN Illustrated by STALLMAN _The age-old battle of the sexes may yet be the deadliest of all!_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity Science Fiction, June 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] George Washington was the father of his country. I am not George Washington. My name is Andrew Jones, and it is because of me there will be no more Joneses in the world. There will be, in fact, no more anybody. This is the end of the world. It did not come through fire or ice, with a bang or a whimper, from solar catastrophe or man's suicidal mis-use of atomic power or any of the other fearful possibilities with which the Sunday-supplement writers once terrified us. It came through the exposure of an age-old conspiracy. I did it. My excuse is the eternal excuse of the scientist: I sought the truth. How it was used was not my concern. But that it should have led to the depopulation of the Earth concerns me, as it must concern every man, and I have an unshakable feeling of guilt. Perhaps I write this now in the hope that I may somehow purge myself. I know that it will never be read. The linen wick gutters in the saucer of melted tallow. It casts strange shadows on the cellar wall. Sometimes I think that they are the ghosts of children come to haunt me, the ghosts of all the little children who will never be born. But this is not what I sat down to write while I waited for Lindsay to return. What is keeping Lindsay? He should be back by now. I will begin again. My name is Andrew Jones, and today, by my figures, is October 3, 1969. The weather is turning cold here, and soon we must go looking for another hiding place. My joints are getting old; the damp has seeped into them. I long for the year-long warmth of California or Florida, but those areas are still crowded and deadly. Someone would recognize me. I think we will try a powerhouse again this winter. Often they have supplies of coal large enough to last us through the cold weather without extra foraging. * * * * * Cataclysm began in 1954, June 13 to be exact. That was the day my second child was born, a boy we named Kevin. It is surprising that a man who was the father of two children should accuse himself of depopulating the Earth. And yet it is because I was the father of two children that it happened. Pre-natal care of mothers and post-natal care of infants were subjects of compelling interest in those days, arriving monthly in the burgeoning women's magazines and annually in the proliferous child-care manuals. Pediatricians and mothers besieged parents with advice, and we consumed everything with catholic appetite: logical, illogical, sensible, insensible, nonsensical, self-contradictory.