XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.tv
On 4/10/2024 3:23 PM, BTR1701 wrote:
In article <uv5ugd$topp$9@dont-email.me>,
Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:
George R. Stewart's classic sci-fi novel EARTH ABIDES has been officially
greenlit as a limited series for streaming channel MGM+.
The story follows the aftermath of a global plague and is being adapted by >> creator and showrunner Todd Komarnicki (Sully), and has signed Alexander
Ludwig (Vikings, The Covenant) to star. Previously announced as in
development, MGM+ plans six episodes to tell the 1949 book's tale.
From the official description: "Leading character Ish (Ludwig) is a brilliant
but solitary young geologist living a semi-isolated life who awakens from a >> coma
If he's living an isolated life, who was feeding him and caring for him
while he was in a coma?
only to find that there is no one left alive but him.
Again, how was he eating while comatose if he's the only one left alive?
ust as he pulled himself up to the rock ledge, he heard a sudden rattle,
and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand;
turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing. It was not a
large one, he noted, even at the moment when he raised his hand to his
lips and sucked hard at the base of the index finger, where a little
drop of blood was oozing out.
“Don’t waste time by killing the snake!” he remembered.
He slid down from the ledge, still sucking. At the bottom he saw the
hammer lying where he had left it. For a moment he thought he would go
on and leave it there. That seemed like panic; so he stooped and picked
it up with his left hand, and went on down the rough trail.
He did not hurry. He knew better than that. Hurry only speeded up a
man’s heart, and made the venom circulate faster. Yet his heart was
pounding so rapidly from excitement or fear that hurrying or not
hurrying, it seemed, should make no difference. After he had come to
some trees, he took his handkerchief and bound it around his right
wrist. With the aid of a twig he twisted the handkerchief into a crude tourniquet.
Walking on, he felt himself recovering from his panic. His heart was
slowing down. As he considered the situation, he was not greatly afraid.
He was a young man, vigorous and healthy. Such a bite would hardly be
fatal, even though he was by himself and without good means of treatment.
Now he saw the cabin ahead of him. His hand felt stiff. Just before he
got to the cabin, he stopped and loosened the tourniquet, as he had read
should be done, and let the blood circulate in the hand. Then he
tightened it again.
He pushed open the door, dropping the hammer on the floor as he did so.
It fell, handle up, on its heavy head, rocked back and forth for a
moment, and then stood still, handle in the air.
He looked into the drawer of the table, and found his snake-bite outfit,
which he should have been carrying with him on this day of all days.
Quickly he followed the directions, slicing with the razor-blade a neat
little crisscross over the mark of the fangs, applying the rubber
suction-pump. Then he lay on his bunk watching the rubber bulb slowly
expand, as it sucked the blood out.
He felt no premonitions of death. Rather, the whole matter still seemed
to him just a nuisance. People had kept telling him that he should not
go into the mountains by himself—“Without even a dog!” they used to add. He had always laughed at them. A dog was constant trouble, getting mixed
up with porcupines or skunks, and he was not fond of dogs anyway. Now
all those people would say, “Well, we warned you!”
Tossing about half-feverishly, he now seemed to himself to be composing
a defense. “Perhaps,” he would say, “the very danger in it appealed to me!” (That had a touch of the heroic in it.) More truthfully he might
say, “I like to be alone at times, really need to escape from all the problems of dealing with people.” His best defense, however, would
merely be that, at least during the last year, he had gone into the
mountains alone as a matter of business. As a graduate student, he was
working on a thesis: The Ecology of the Black Creek Area. He had to
investigate the relationships, past and present, of men and plants and
animals in this region. Obviously he could not wait until just the right companion came along. In any case, he could never see that there was any
great danger. Although nobody lived within five miles of his cabin,
during the summer hardly a day passed without some fisherman coming by,
driving his car up the rocky road or merely following the stream.
Yet, come to think of it, when had he last seen a fisherman? Not in the
past week certainly. He could not actually remember whether he had seen
one in the two weeks that he had been living by himself in the cabin.
There was that car he had heard go by after dark one night. He thought
it strange that any car would be going up that road in the darkness, and
could hardly see the necessity, for ordinarily people camped down below
for the night and went up in the morning. But perhaps, he thought, they
wanted to get up to their favorite stream, to go out for some early fishing.
No, actually, he had not exchanged a word with anyone in the last two
weeks, and he could not even remember that he had seen anyone.
A throb of pain brought him back to what was happening at the moment.
The hand was beginning to swell. He loosened the tourniquet to let the
blood circulate again.
Yes, as he returned to his thoughts, he realized that he was out of
touch with things entirely. He had no radio. Therefore, as far as he was concerned, there might have been a crash of the stock market or another
Pearl Harbor; something like that would account for so few fishermen
going by. At any rate, there was very little chance apparently that
anyone would come to help him. He would have to work his own way out.
Yet even that prospect did not alarm him. At worst, he considered, he
would lie up in his cabin, with plenty of food and water for two or
three days, until the swelling in his hand subsided and he could drive
his car down to Johnson’s, the first ranch.
The afternoon wore on. He did not feel like eating anything when it came
toward suppertime, but he made himself a pot of coffee on the gasoline
stove, and drank several cups. He was in much pain, but in spite of the
pain and in spite of the coffee he became sleepy. . . .
He woke suddenly in half-light, and realized that someone had pushed
open the cabin door. He felt a sudden relief to know that he had help.
Two men in city clothes were standing there, very decent-looking men,
although staring around strangely, as if in fright. “I’m sick!” he said from his bunk, and suddenly he saw the fright on their faces change to
sheer panic. They turned suddenly without even shutting the door, and
ran. A moment later came the sound of a starting motor. It faded out as
the car went up the road.
Appalled now for the first time, he raised himself from the bunk, and
looked through the window. The car had already vanished around the
curve. He could not understand. Why had they suddenly disappeared in
panic, without even offering to help?
He got up. The light was in the east; so he had slept until dawn the
next morning. His right hand was swollen and acutely painful. Otherwise
he did not feel very ill. He warmed up the pot of coffee, made himself
some oatmeal, and lay down in his bunk again, in the hope that after a
while he would feel well enough to risk driving down to Johnson’s—that
is, of course, if no one came along in the meantime who would stop and
help him and not like those others, who must be crazy, run away at the
sight of a sick man.
Soon, however, he felt much worse, and realized that he must be
suffering some kind of relapse. By the middle of the afternoon he was
really frightened. Lying in his bunk, he composed a note, thinking that
he should leave a record of what had happened. It would not be very long
of course before someone would find him; his parents would certainly
telephone Johnson’s in a few days now, if they did not hear anything. Scrawling with his left hand, he managed to get the words onto paper. He
signed merely Ish. It was too much work to write out his full name of
Isherwood Williams, and everybody knew him by his nickname.
At noon, feeling himself like the shipwrecked mariner who from his raft
sees the steamer cross along the horizon, he heard the sound of cars,
two of them, coming up the steep road. They approached, and then went
on, without stopping. He called to them, but by now he was weak, and his
voice, he was sure, did not carry the hundred yards to the turnoff where
the cars were passing.
Even so, before dusk he struggled to his feet, and lighted the kerosene
lamp. He did not want to be left in the dark.
Apprehensively, he bent his lanky body down to peer into the little
mirror, set too low for him because of the sloping roof of the cabin.
His long face was thin always, and scarcely seemed thinner now, but a
reddish flush showed through the suntan of his cheeks. His big blue eyes
were bloodshot, and stared back at him wildly with the glare of fever.
His light brown hair, unruly always, now stuck out in all directions, completing the mirror-portrait of a very sick young man.
He got back into his bunk, feeling no great sense of fear, although now
he more than half expected that he was dying. Soon a violent chill
struck him; from that he passed into a fever. The lamp burned steadily
on the table, and he could see around the cabin. The hammer which he had dropped on the floor still stood there, handle pointed stiffly upwards, precariously balanced. Being right before his eyes, the hammer occupied
an unduly large part of his consciousness—he thought about it a little disorderedly, as if he were making his will, an old-fashioned will in
which he described the chattels he was leaving. “One hammer, called a single-jack, weight of head four pounds, handle one foot long, slightly cracked, injured by exposure to weather, head of hammer somewhat rusted,
still serviceable.” He had been extraordinarily pleased when he had
found the hammer, appreciating that actual link with the past. It had
been used by some miner in the old days when rock-drills were driven
home in a low tunnel with a man swinging a hammer in one hand; four
pounds was about the weight a man could handle in that way, and it was
called a single-jack because it was managed one-handedly. He thought, feverishly, that he might even include a picture of the hammer as an illustration in his thesis.
Most of those hours of darkness he passed in little better than a
nightmare, racked by coughing, choking frequently, shaking with the
chill, and then burning with the fever. A pink measles-like rash broke
out on him.
At daybreak he felt himself again sinking into a deep sleep.
“It has never happened!” cannot be construed to mean, “It can never happen!”—as well say, “Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,” or “Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.” One thinks first of some great plague of insects—locusts or grasshoppers—when the species suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as
dramatically sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The
higher animals also fluctuate. The lemmings work upon their cycle. The snowshoe-rabbits build up through a period of years until they reach a
climax when they seem to be everywhere; then with dramatic suddenness
their pestilence falls upon them. Some zoologists have even suggested a biological law: that the number of individuals in a species never
remains constant, but always rises and falls—the higher the animal and
the slower its breeding-rate, the longer its period of fluctuation.
During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common
creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies,
and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved
to be increasing steadily. Then toward the century’s end it reached its climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterward the buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In
the last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers.
As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run
escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of
flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more
and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling
an uninterrupted run of sevens.
When he awoke in the middle of the morning, he felt a sudden sense of
pleasure. He had feared he would be sicker than ever, but he felt much
better. He was not choking any more, and also his hand felt cooler. The swelling had gone down. On the preceding day he had felt so bad, from
whatever other trouble had struck him, that he had had no time to think
about the hand. Now both the hand and the illness seemed better, as if
the one had stopped the other and they had both receded. By noon he was
feeling clearheaded and not even particularly weak.
He ate some lunch, and decided that he could make it down to Johnson’s.
He did not bother to pack up everything. He took his precious notebooks
and his camera. At the last moment also, as if by some kind of
compulsion, he picked up the hammer, carried it to the car, and threw it
in on the floor by his feet. He drove off slowly, using his right hand
as little as possible.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)