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The last man on Earth sits alone in a room. There is a knock at the door. He looks up, startled. Just the wind, he tells himself. It has been terribly windy since . . . The man clenches his fist. Oh, the stupidity of the human race! He, alone, is left to learn the lesson. A house divided against itself cannot stand. They had to prove it, didn't they. Well, prove it they did. The universe was out there for the taking, an infinite universe, but still not enough space to settle the petty differences of mankind. Before the first settling expedition could be sent to found a new world, we first had to decide who would be on it. No easy task. And so had war commenced. Nuclear war. Whoever was not killed by the radiation was killed by the Silent Virus. The Silent Virus had evolved and mutated as a direct result of the radiation, and humans had no immunity to it. It spread rapidly, and there was no way to contain it, for a person may be infected for as long as a year before it gave any indication of itself. And then, when it was ready, it would announce itself in full glory. A seemingly perfectly healthy person would say he was tired, lay down, and die. Just like that. No pain, no suffering, except for the extreme shock of those who witnessed it. The man himself had seen it several times. The human brain was not made to accept such a sudden change of events. One did grow accustomed to it, though. Eventually all learned to accept that anyone could be alive and well one minute, and dead the next. And all learned to accept that they, too, would die suddenly, silently. Except the last man.

The knock comes again. What is it about the wind that makes it sound so . . . so human? The man stands up. It is not human, there's no question about that. It had been five years since that last woman died. As the population dwindled, the remaining humans banded together, and one by one died off. Except the last man. He walks over to the door and leans against it. He wouldn't die from the Silent Virus, but perhaps he might die from boredom, or perhaps he would go insane. He nearly had, a few times, left alone with his thoughts as he was. He was a peculiar case. Having built and invented the engine that made interstellar flight possible, he was the first to land on an uninhabited Earth-like planet. He had been careful. The air was safe, the fruit was safe, but some combination of the fruit he ate along with the air he had breathed had caused a strange reaction in his immune system. When he came back to Earth he had immediately contracted a cold he could never shake. The Silent Virus was not the only new disease formed from the radiation. Shortly after the war began, his cold changed into something that co-existed well with his body, but that every other human was immune to. And that was lethal to the Silent Virus. So he, alone, was unaffected by the fatal disease.

The knock comes again. The man jumps, startled. He backs away from the door. It is not the wind. Something, perhaps someone, is out there. "Who's there?" he calls apprehensively. Another knock. The man hesitates. It is just the wind, he tells himself again. Perhaps there is a branch near the door. He eases forward, turns the doorknob, and swings the door open.

He freezes, panicked, not sure what to make of the man standing before him. The man his height, with the same eyes, the same hair. He is looking at himself, but his self of several years ago. The younger man steps forward, steps inside, inside of the man. They become one, the younger one, and history joins them. The man looks at his hands in horror. He is in the past, at a dreadful moment. The moment just after the first bomb detonated to start the unbreakable chain of events he had just lived through. The moment just after he released the button that detonated it.

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