“Do you believe that we’re the only ones left?” she asked, as if demanding that he lie to her. Jonathan looked back at her, struggling with his primitive, protective feelings that he had never wanted to have pulled out of him, and decided that he would not lie to her, because like Thaw Tint he had no mercy in him. Heaven’s gentle rain had simply never blessed him with any, so he could not bless anyone else with it, however much he strained. Besides, what respect he had for Hollis told him that she wanted the truth, and that he would only earn her additional contempt by lying.

He nodded. “Probably. We failed to raise anyone, so either there was no one left or they weren’t answering. Somehow I don’t believe Thaw Tint lies. Do you agree?”

She nodded, trembling in her chair but making no move toward him.

“What would he gain by lying to us?” Jonathan continued. “He just about said so himself: he’d lie only if there were mercy in him.”

“But elsewhere in the solar system…” she started to say. “Escape was not impossible. Some life will always escape, of whatever you try to kill. Thaw Tint’s knowledge can’t be perfect!”

“Who knows? We can hope, but we’ll never know. I’m afraid we can count on this Race of Nonebeing very thorough about it. Maybe they got us all.”

“Maybe,” she started to say, “maybe Thaw Tint won’t ever find out if there are other survivors.”

“I’d be very quiet if I were they,” Jonathan said, suddenly taken aback by the possibility that Hollis might be thinking of playing Adam and Eve with him. It would not take much, he guessed, for her to put a spin on the Catholic myths that her Jesuit’s mind took such great pride in rationalizing (“Human life resembled nothing so much as the Way of the Cross,” he had once heard her say). In no time at all he would be cast in the role of the new Adam, and Cain would be killing Abel as the aliens watched from outside the cage—assuming, of course, that their captors permitted such a union to take place. A fruitless union was as far as he would go, given enough time, he told himself. For mercy’s sake.

“If their curiosity about us is ever completely satisfied,” he continued, “or if they do find other survivors, I doubt that they’ll need us anymore,” and the words caught in his throat as self-pity overcame him. He clenched his teeth and was silent. Though he had never gotten along particularly well with people, he realized, as he looked at Hollis, that he had needed the mass of humanity around him.

He decided that when Thaw Tint returned, he would ask him for the pad on which he had constructed his TITANIC ILLUSTRATED program. Wasn’t every life a Titanic disaster writ small? It hits the iceberg and is ripped open when it first understands its own mortality. And faced with this intolerable fact, it seeks to launch lifeboats, in the hope that something of itself will survive; for it knows that it will not survive, even if there are enough lifeboats, because it is the ship itself. Art, literature, music, may survive; children will pass the torch before they also pass away. But the sinkings could only be overcome when there was a humankind around the individual to receive his lifeboats, to fish artifacts out of the ocean, to remember. With humanity gone, the old quip, “nobody gets out of life alive” had taken on a deeper, even more horrific meaning. He would sink away completely … except, perhaps, in the minds of the aliens….