131- Earth Abides Part 1

You, finding life rather dull, dreaming again of exotic places, wishing you were somewhere else, we offer you escape. Today, escape brings you one of the most unusual and terrifying stories of recent years.

It is a story of such scope that the producers of escape in order to dramatize its full impact will present it in two episodes. So now, with the performance of John Dana as Isherwood Williams, we bring you part one of George Stewart's powerful novel, Earth Abides.

If a killing type of virus strain should suddenly arise by mutation, it could, because of the rapid transportation in which we indulge nowadays, be carried to the far corners of the earth and cause the death of millions of people.

If you should awake some morning, tomorrow morning, let's say, if you should wake to a man dead world, where virtually all of human life had been dissolved from the face of the earth, leaving behind only buildings, bridges, machines, if you should awake to such a world tomorrow morning, what would you do?

Where would you go? My name is Isherwood Williams. I was a student of ecology. I was in the northern California wilderness gathering specimens of rock, plant, and animal life. I was alone and had been for a month.

Climbing up to a sharp ledge one day, I felt a sudden sharp pain in my extended right hand. I withdrew it under reflex and looked up and there. I put above my head I saw him, a rattler coiled, ready to strike again.

Slowly, carefully I lowered myself. I began to suck the poison from the bite. I wrapped a handkerchief about my wrist-turnic at style and headed for my cabin. There I broke open my snake-bite outfit, got a neat crisscross in my hand at the point of the wound and applied to the rubber suction pump.