Science Fiction - Daily Short Stories
The Coming of the Ice - Green Peyton Wertenbaker
Listen Ad Free https://www.solgood.org - Listen to hundreds of audiobooks, thousands of short stories, and meditative sounds.
- Duration:
- 41m
- Broadcast on:
- 27 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
The Takono Music and Spirits Festival returns to Centennial Park, Saturday, August 3rd from 2 to 10 p.m. And it's free! Live music from The Warren Treaty! ♪ Live music ♪ Chris Daniels and the Kings is Callie and More. Enjoy a Spirits Competition, Kids Zone and Fireworks presented by Oxy and the City of Dacono. Admission and parking are free! The Takono Music and Spirits Festival brought to you by Breckenridge Brewery and City of Dacono. Go to thecityofdacono.com for more information. 5280 Exteriors James Hardy Siding is a low-maintenance siding made primarily of cement that resists flame spread and repels woodborne insects and woodpeckers. Through the month of July, you'll receive free, rigid foam installation with the purchase of whole house siding. That's installing additional insulation behind your siding for free. But only for the month of July. Call today for more details or visit 5280exteriors.com. 5280exteriors.com, a James Hardy Preferred Contractor, 5280 Exteriors, The Altitude of Quality. The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker. It's strange to be alone and so cold to be the last man on earth. The snow drives silently about me ceaselessly, drearily. And I am isolated in this tiny, white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands of years is it since I last knew the true companionship? For a long time I've been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood. Now they are gone. Now I have not even the stars to keep me company. For they are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight here below. If only I could know how long it has been since first I was imprisoned upon the earth. It cannot matter now. And yet some strange dissatisfaction, some faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing ears. What year? What year? It was in the year 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was then a very great man who performed operations on his fellows to compose their vitals. We called such men surgeons. John Grandin wore the title Sir before his name, an indication of nobility by birth, according to the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir John's, if I must be precise, for while he had achieved an enormous reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that his real work lay in the experimental end of his profession. He was in a way a dreamer, but a dreamer who could make his dreams come true. I was a very close friend of Sir John's, in fact we shared the same apartments in London. I've never forgotten that day when he first mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I had just come in from a long sleigh-ride in the country with Alice. I was seated drowsily in the window-seat, writing idly in my mind a description of the wind and the snow and the grey twilight of the evening. That strange is it not that my tale should begin, and end with the snow and the twilight. Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of the room and came hurrying across to another door. He looked at me, grinning, rather like a triumphant maniac. "It's coming," he cried without pausing. "I've almost got it," I smiled at him. He looked very ludicrous at that moment. "What have you got?" I asked. "Good Lord man, the secret, the secret." And then he was gone again, the door closing upon his victorious cry, "The Secret." I was, of course, amused, but I was also very much interested. I knew Sir John well enough to realize that however amazing his appearance might be, there would be nothing absurd about his "secret" whatever it was. But it was useless to speculate. I could only hope for enlightenment at dinner. So I immersed myself in one of the surgeon's volumes from his fine library of imagination, and waited. I think the book was one of Mr. H. G. Wells, probably the sleeper awakes or some other of his brilliant fantasies and predictions, for I was in a mood conducive to belief in almost anything when, later, we sat down together across the table. I only wish I could give some idea of the atmosphere that permeated our apartments. The reality it lent to whatever was vast and amazing and strange. You could then, whoever you are, understand a little, the ease with which I accepted Sir John's new discovery. He began to explain it to me at once, as though he could keep it to himself no longer. "Did you think I'd gone mad, Denil?" he asked. "I quite wonder that I haven't. Why, I have been studying for many years for most of my life on this problem. And suddenly, I've solved it. Or rather, I'm afraid, I've solved another one much greater. Tell me about it, but for God's sake, don't be technical." "Right," he said. Then he paused. Denil, it's magnificent. It will change everything that's in the world. His eyes held mine suddenly, with a fatality of hypnotists. "Denil, it's the secret of eternal life," he said. "Good Lord," said John, I cried, half inclined to laugh. "I mean it," he said. "You know I've spent most of my life studying the processes of birth, trying to find out precisely what went on in the whole history of conception." "You have found out?" "No. That's just what amuses me. I've discovered something else without knowing yet what causes either process." "I don't want to be technical, and I know very little of what actually takes place myself, but I can try to give you some idea of it." "It's thousands, perhaps millions of years since Sir John explained to me. What little I understood at the time I may have forgotten, yet I try to reproduce what I can of his theory." In my study of the processes of birth, he began, "I discovered the rudiments of an action which takes place in the bodies of both men and women. There are certain properties in the foods we eat that remain in the body for the reproduction of life, two distinct essences, so to speak, of which one is retained by the woman, another by the man. It is the union of these two properties that, of course, creates the child." "Now, I made a slight mistake one day in experimenting with a guinea pig, and I rearranged certain organs which I need not describe, so that I thought I had completely messed up the poor creature's abdomen. It lived, however, and I laid it aside. It was some years later that I happened to notice it again. It had not given birth to any young, but I was amazed to note that it had apparently grown no older. It seemed precisely in the same state of growth in which I had left it. From that I built up. I reexamined the guinea pig and observed it carefully. I need not detail my studies, but in the end I found that my mistake had in reality been a momentous discovery, I found that I had only to close certain organs, to rearrange certain ducts, and to open certain dormant organs, and, my ability to, the whole process of reproduction was changed. You have heard, of course, that our bodies are continually changing, hour by hour, minute by minute, so that every few years we have been literally reborn. Some such principle as this seems to operate in reproduction, except that instead of the old body being replaced by the new, and in its form, approximately, the new body is created apart from it. It is the creation of children that causes us to die, it would seem, because if this activity is, so to speak, damned up, or turn the side into new channels, the reproduction operates on the old body, renewing it continually. It's very obscure and very absurd, is it not? But the most absurd part of it is that it's true. Whatever the true explanation may be, the fact remains that the operation can be done, that it actually prolongs life indefinitely, and that I alone know the secret. So John told me a great deal more, but, after all, I think it amounted to little more than this. It would be impossible for me to express the great hold this discovery took upon my mind, the moment he recounted it. From the very first, under the spell of his personality, I believed, and I knew he was speaking the truth, and he'd opened up before me, new vistas, I began to see myself become suddenly eternal, never again to know the fear of death. I could see myself storing up, century after century, an amplitude of wisdom and experience that would make me truly a god. So John, I cried long before he was finished, you must perform the operation on me. But Denil, you're too hasty, you must not put yourself so rashly into my hands. You have perfected the operation, haven't you? That's true, he said, you must try it out on somebody, must you not. Yes, of course, and yet, somehow, Denil, I'm afraid, I can't help feeling that man is not yet prepared for such a vast thing, there are sacrifices. One must give up all love and all sensual pleasure. This operation not only takes away the mere fact of reproduction, but it deprives one of all the things that go with sex, all love, all sense of beauty, all feeling for poetry and the arts. It leaves only the few emotions, selfish emotions, that are necessary to self-preservation. Do you not see? One becomes an intellect, nothing more, a cold pathiosis of reason, and I, for one, cannot face such a thing calmly. But Sir John, like many fears, it's largely horrible in the foresight. After you've changed your nature, you cannot regret it. Not you are, would it be as horrible an idea to you afterwards as the thought of what you will be seems now? True, true, I know, but it's hard to face, nevertheless. I'm not afraid to face it. You don't understand, Denil, I am afraid, and I wonder whether you or I or any of us on this earth are ready for such a step, after all, to make a race deathless. One should be sure it's a perfect race. Sir John, I said, it's not you who have to face this, nor anyone else in the world till you're ready. But I'm firmly resolved, and I demand it of you as my friend. Well, we argued much further, but in the end I won. Sir John promised to perform the operation three days later, but do you perceive now what I had forgotten during all that discussion? The one thing I had thought I could never forget so long as I lived, not even for an instant. It was my love for Alice. I had forgotten that. I cannot write here all the infinity of emotions I experienced later when, with Alice in my arms, it suddenly came upon me what I had done. Ages ago I have forgotten how to feel. I could name now a thousand feelings I used to have, but I can no longer even understand them, for only the heart could understand the heart, and the intellect, only the intellect. With Alice in my arms I told the whole story, it was she who, with her quick instinct, grasped what I had never noticed. "With Karl," she cried, "don't you see? It will mean that we can never be married, and for the first time I understood. If only I could recapture some conception of that love. I have always known, since the last shred of comprehension slipped from me, that I lost something very wonderful when I lost love. But what does it matter? I lost Alice, too, and I could not have known love again without her. We were very sad and very tragic that night, for hours and hours we argued the question over, but I felt somewhat that I was inextricably caught in my fate, that I could not retreat now from my resolve. I was perhaps very school-boyish, but I felt it would be cowardice to back out now. Because it was Alice again who perceived a final aspect of the matter. "Karl," she said to me, her lips very close to mine, "it need not come between our love. After all, ours would be a poor sort of love if it were not more of the mind than of the flesh. We shall remain lovers, but we shall forget mere carnal desire. I shall submit to that operation, too." And I could not shake her from her resolve. I would speak of danger that I could not let her face, but after the fashion of women she disarmed me with the accusation that I didn't love her, that I did not want her love, that I was trying to escape from love. What answer had I for that, but that I loved her and would do anything in the world not to lose her? I've wondered sometimes since whether we might have known the love of the mind. Does love something entirely of the flesh, something created by an ironic god merely to propagate his race? Or can there be love without emotion, love without passion, love between two cold intellects? I don't know. I did not ask then. I accepted anything that would make our way more easy. There's no need to draw out the tale, already my hand wavers, and my time grows short. Soon there will be no more of me, no more of my tale, no more of mankind. There will be only the snow and the ice and the cold. Three days later I entered John's hospital with Alice on my arm. From my affairs, and they were, few enough, were in order. I had insisted that Alice wait until I had come safely through the operation before she submitted to it. I had been carefully starved for two days, and I was lost in an unreal world of white walls and white clothes and white lights, drunk with my dreams of the future. When I was wheeled into the operating room on the long, hard table, for a moment it shone with brilliant distinctness, a neat, methodical white chamber, tall, and more or less circular. Then I was beneath the glare of soft white lights, and the room faded into a misty vagueness, from which little steel rays flashed and quivered from silvery cold instruments. For a moment our hands, Sir John's and mine, gripped, and we were saying goodbye, for a little while. In the way men say these things. Then I felt the warm touch of Alice's lips upon mine, and I felt sudden, painful things I can't describe, that I could not have described then. For a moment I felt that I must rise and cry out that I could not do it, but the feeling passed, and I was passive. Everything was pressed about my mouth and nose, something with an ethereal smell, staring eyes swam about me from behind their white masks. I struggled instinctively, but in vain, I was held, securely. Infinitesimal points of light began to wave back and forth on a pitch-black background, a great hollow buzzing echoed in my head. My head seemed suddenly to have become all throat, a great cavernous, empty throat in which sounds and lights were mingled together in a swift rhythm approaching, receding eternally. Then I think there were dreams, but I forgotten them. I began to emerge from the effects of the ether. Everything was dim, but I could perceive Alice beside me, and Sir John. "We've literally done," Sir John was saying, and Alice, too, was saying something, but I cannot remember what. For a long while we talked, I, speaking the nonsense of those who were coming out from under the ether, they, teasing me a little solemnly. But after a while I became aware of the fact that they were about to leave. Suddenly, God knows why, I knew that they must not leave. One cried in the back of my head that they must stay. One cannot explain these things except my after-events. I began to press them to remain, but they smiled and said they must get their dinner. I commanded them not to go, but they spoke kindly and said they would be back before long. I think I even wept a little like a child, but Sir John said something to the nurse who began to reason with me firmly, and then they were gone, and somehow I was asleep. When I awoke again my head was fairly clear, but there was an abominable reek of ether all about me. The moment I opened my eyes I felt that something had happened. I asked for Sir John and for Alice. I saw a swift, curious look as I could not interpret come over the face of the nurse, and she was calm again, her countenance impassive. She reassured me in quick, meaningless phrases and told me to sleep. But I could not sleep. I was absolutely sure that something had happened to them, to my friend and to the woman I loved. Yet all my insistence profited me nothing, for the nurses were a silent lot. Finally I think they must have given me a sleeping potion of some sort, for I fell asleep again. Over two endless, chaotic days I saw nothing of either of them, Alice or Sir John. I became more and more agitated. The nurse, more and more taciturn, she would only say that they had gone away for a day or two. And then, on the third day, I found out. They thought I was asleep, the night nurse had just come in to relieve the other. "Has he been asking about them again?" she asked. "Yes, poor fellow, I had hardly managed to keep him quiet. We will have to keep it from him until he is recovered fully." There was a long pause, and I could hardly control my laboured breathing. "How sudden was it?" One of them said, "To be killed like that." I heard no more, for I leapt, suddenly up in bed crying out. Quick, for God's sake, tell me what has happened. I jumped to the floor and seized one of them by the collar. She was horrified, I shook her with superhuman strength. "Tell me, I shouted, tell me, or I'll-" she told me. What else could she do? "They were killed in an accident," she gasped, "in her taxi, a collision, the strand." And at that moment a crowd of nurses and attendants arrived, called by the other frantic woman, and they put me to bed again. I have no memory of the next few days. I was in delirium, and I was never told what I said during my ravings. Nor can I express the feelings I was saturated with when at last I regained my mind again. Between my old emotions and any attempt to put them into words, or even to remember them, lies always that insurmountable wall of my change. I can't understand what I must have felt, I cannot express it. I only know that for weeks I was sunk in a misery beyond any misery I had ever imagined before. The only two friends I had on earth were gone to me. I was left alone, and for the first time I began to see before me all these endless years that would be the same dull lonely. Late I recovered, I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigour in my limbs, a vast force that was something tangibly expressive to eternal life. Slowly my anguish began to die. After a week more I began to understand how my emotions were leaving me, how love and beauty and everything of which poetry was made, how all this was going. I couldn't bear the thought at first, I would look at the golden sunlight and the blue shadow of the wind, and I would say, "God, how beautiful!" and the words would echo meaninglessly in my ears, or I would remember Alice's face. That face I had once loved so inextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch my forehead and clench my fists, crying, "Oh God, how can I live without her?" Yet there would be a little strange fancy in my head, at the same moment, saying, "Who is this Alice? You know no such person!" And truly I would wonder whether she had ever existed. So slowly the old emotions were shared away from me, and I began to joy in a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idly with mathematical formula, I had forgotten years ago, in the same fashion that a poet toys with a word, and its shades of meaning. I would look at everything with new, seeing eyes, new perception, and I would understand things I had never understood before, because formally my emotions had always occupied me more than my thoughts. And so the weeks went by, until one day I was well. What, after all, is the use of this chronicle? Surely, there will never be men to read it. I have heard them say that the snow will never go, I will be buried, it will be buried with me, and it will be the end of us both, yet somehow it eases my weary soul a little to write. Did I say that I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands of years until this day? I cannot detail that life, its a long round of new, fantastic impressions, coming dream like one after another, melting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon dreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly, and it seems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement between episodes. I think now, of necessity, in terms of centuries and milleniums rather than days and months. The snow blows terribly about my little fire, and I know it will soon gather courage to quench us both. Years passed, at first with a sort of clear wonder, I watched things that took place everywhere in the world I studied. The other students were much amazed to see me, a man of thirty odd coming back to college. But Judas Dennell, you've already got your PhD, what more do you want? So they would all ask me, and I would reply, I want an MD, and an FRCS. I didn't tell them that I wanted degrees in law, too, and in biology, and chemistry, in architecture, and engineering, in psychology and philosophy. And so, I believe they thought me mad. But poor fools, I would think, they can hardly realize that I have all of eternity before me to study. I went to school for many decades. I would pass from university to university, leisurely gathering all the fruits of every subject I took up, reveling in study as no student reveled ever before. There was no need of hurry in my life, no fear of death too soon. There was a magnificence, a vigour in my body, and a magnificence of vision and clarity in my brain. I felt myself a superman. I had only to go on storing up wisdom until the day should come, when all knowledge of the world was mine, and then I could command the world, I had no need for hurry. Oh vast life, how I gloried in my eternity, and how little good it has ever done me by the irony of God. In several centuries, changing my name and passing from place to place, I continued my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony, thought of the intellect, monotony cannot exist. It was one of those emotions I had left behind. One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery was made by a man called Zerensov. It had to do with the curvature of space, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed since Einstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein's theory, as had in time the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into the study of this new epoch-making conception. To my amazement, it all seemed to me curiously dim and elusive. I could not quite grasp what Zerensov was trying to formulate. Why, I cried, the thing is a monstrous fraud. I went to the professor of physics in the university I then attended, and I told him it was a fraud, a huge book of mere nonsense. He looked at me, rather pityingly. "I'm afraid, Madevsky," he said, addressing me by the name I was at the time using. "I'm afraid you do not understand it, that is all. When your mind has broadened, you will. You should apply yourself more carefully to your physics." But that angered me, for I had mastered my physics before he was ever born. I challenged him to explain the theory, and he did. He put it, obviously, in the clearest language he could. Yet I understood nothing. I stared at him dumbly, until he shook his head impatiently, saying that it was useless, and if I could not grasp it, I would simply have to keep on studying. I was stunned, I wandered away in a daze. For do you see what happened? During all those years I had studied ceaselessly, and my mind had been clear and quick as a day I first had left the hospital. But all the time, I had been able to only remain what I was, an extraordinary, intelligent man of the twentieth century, and the rest of the race had been progressing. It had been swiftly gathering knowledge and power and ability all that time faster and faster, while I had been only remaining still. And now, here was Zerentzof from the teachers of the universities, and probably a hundred intelligent men who had all outstripped me. I was being left behind. And that is what happened. I need not dilate further upon it. By the end of that century, I had been left behind by all the students of the world, and ever did understand Zerentzof. Other men came with other theories, and these theories were accepted by the world, but I could not understand them. My intellectual life was at an end. I had nothing more to understand. I knew everything I was capable of knowing, and thenceforth I could only play wearily with the old ideas. Many things happened in the world, a time came when the east and west, two mighty unified hemispheres rose up in arms, the civil war of a planet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It was all incomprehensible to me, like a bizarre dream. Things happened. People rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurked during all that time in a tiny, shuddering hole in the city of Yokohama, and by miracle I survived. And the east, one. But it seems to have mattered little, who did win, for all the world had become, in all except its few remaining prejudices, a single race, and nothing was changed when it was all rebuilt again under a single government. I saw the first of the strange creatures who appeared among us in the 63-71, men who were later known to be from the planet Venus. But they were repulsed, for they were savages compared with the earthmen, although they were about equal to the people of my own century, 1900. Those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth of their world, and those who were not killed by arhans, those few returned silently home again. And I have always regretted that I had not the courage to go with them. I watched a time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, when men could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men, these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tiny, shriveled bodies, atrophy limbs and slow, ponderous movements on their little conveyances. It was I, with my ancient compunctions who shuddered, when at last they put to death all the perverts, the criminals and the insane, reading the world of the scum for which they had no more need. It was then that I was forced to produce my tattered old papers proving my identity and my story. They knew it was true in some strange fashion of theirs, and thereafter I was kept on exhibition as an archaic survival. I saw the world made immortal through the new invention of a man called Kathol, who used somewhat the same method legend decreed had been used upon me. I observed the end of speech, of all perceptions except one, when men learned to communicate directly my thought, and to receive directly into the brain all the myriad vibrations of the universe, all these things I saw, and more, until that time when there was no more discovery, but a perfect world in which there was no need for anything but memory. Men ceased to count time at last. Several hundred years after the one hundred and fifty-fourth dynasty from the last war, or as we would have counted in my time about two hundred thousand A.D., official records of time were no longer kept carefully. They fell into disuse. Men began to forget years, to forget time at all, of what significance was time when one was immortal. After long, long, uncounted centuries a time came when the days grew noticeably colder. Slowly, the winters became longer, and the summers diminished to but a month or two. Here storms raged endlessly in winter, and in summer sometimes there was severe frost. Sometimes there was only frost. In the high places and in the north, and in the sub-equatorial south, the snow came and would not go. Men died by the thousands in the higher latitudes. New York became, after a while, the furthest habitable city north, an arctic city where warmth seldom penetrated. And great fields of ice began to make their way southward, grinding before them the brittle remains of civilizations covering over relentlessly all of man's proud work. Snow appeared in Florida and Italy one summer. In the end, snow was there always. Men left New York, Chicago, Paris, Yokohama, and everywhere they travelled by the millions southward, perishing as they went, pursued by the snow and the cold, and that inevitable field of ice. They were feeble creatures when the cold first came upon them, but I speak in terms of thousands of years, and they turned every weapon of science to the recovery of their physical power, for they foresaw that the only chance for survival lay in a hard, strong body. As for me, at last I had found a use for my few powers, for my physique was the finest in that world. It was but little comfort, however, for we were all united in our awful fear of that cold and that grinding field of ice. All the great cities were deserted. We would catch silent, fearful glimpses of them as we sped on in our mechanics over the snow. Great, hungry, haggard skeletons of cities, shrouded in banks of snow, snowed at the wind rustled through desolate streets where the cream of human life had once passed in calm security. Yet still the ice pursued. For men had forgotten about that last ice age, when they ceased to reckon time, when they lost sight of the future and steeped themselves in memories. They had not remembered that a time must come when ice would lie white and smooth over all the earth, when the sun would shine bleakly between unending intervals of dim, twilight snow and sleet. Slowly, the ice pursued us down the earth, until all the feeble remains of civilization were gathered in Egypt and India and South America. The deserts flowered again, but the frost would come always to bite the tiny crops. For still the ice came. All the world now, but for a narrow strip around the equator, was one great, silent, desolate vista of stark ice-plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of cities that had endured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was terrible to imagine the awful solitude and the endless twilight that lay on these places and the grim snow, sailing in silence over all. It surrounded us on all sides, until life remained only in a few scattered clearings, all about that equator of the globe, with an eternal fire going to hold away the hungry ice. Perpetual winter rained now, and we will be coming pterastric and beasts that preyed on each other for a life already doomed. Ah, but I, the archaic survival, I had my revenge then, with my great physique and strong jaws. God, let me think of something else. Those men who lived upon each other. It was horrible, and I was one. So inevitably, the ice closed in. One day, the men of our tiny clearing were but a score. We huddled about our dying fire of bones and stray logs. We said nothing. We just sat in deep, wordless, thoughtless, silence. We were the last outpost of mankind. I think, suddenly, something very noble must have transformed these creatures to a semblance of what they had been of old, and I saw in their eyes the question they sent from one another, and in every eye I saw the answer was yes. With one accord, they rose before my eyes, and, ignoring me as a basic creature, they stripped away their load of tattered rags, and one by one, they stalked with their tiny, crippled limbs into this rivering gale of swirling, dusting snow, and disappeared. And I was alone. So am I alone now. I have written this last fantastic history of myself and of mankind upon a substance that will, I know, outlast even the snow and the ice, as it has outlasted mankind that made it. It's the only thing with which I have never parted, for it's not irony that I should be the historian of this race. I, a savage, an archaic survival. Why do I write? God knows, but some instinct prompts me, although there were never men to read. I have been sitting here, waiting, and I have thought often of Sir John and Alice, whom I loved. Can it be that I am feeling again? After all these ages, some tiny portion of that emotion, that great passion I once knew. I see her face before me, the face I have lost from my thoughts for eons, and something is in it that stirs my blood again, her eyes are half closed and deep, her lips are parted as though I could crush them with an infinity of wonder and discovery. Oh, God, is it love again? Love, that I thought was lost. They have often smiled upon me when I spoke of God, and muttered about my foolish primitive superstitions. But they are gone, and I am left who believe in God, and surely there's purpose in it. I am cold, I have written, I am frozen, my breath freezes as it mingles with the air, and I can hardly move my numbed fingers. The ice is closing over me, and I cannot break it any longer. The storm cries weirdly all about me in the twilight, and I know this is the end. The end of the world, and I, I, the last man, the last man, I am cold, cold. But is it you, Alice? Is it you? End of The Coming of the Ice by G. Payton Wertenbaker. The Dakono Music and Spirits Festival returns to Centennial Park Saturday, August 3rd from 2 to 10 p.m., and it's free live music from the Warren Treaty. Staniels and the Kings is Cally and More! The Dakono Music and Spirits Festival brought to you by Breckenridge Brewery and City of Dakono. Go to thecityofdakono.com for more information. 5280 exteriors James Hardy-Siting is a low-maintenance sighting made primarily of cement that resist flame spread and repels wood-borne insects and woodpeckers. Through the month of July, you'll receive free rigid foam installation with the purchase of whole-house sighting. That's installing additional insulation behind your sighting for free, but only for the month of July. Call today for more details or visit 5280 exteriors.com, 5280 exteriors.com, a James Hardy preferred contractor, 5280 exteriors, the altitude of quality.