gang thanks for coming today we've got a packed agenda I think we're clocked in at like 34 30 so we're gonna start right at the pen we can't take any questions to get through all of it but I tell you what we will stay as long as it takes to answer all your questions so don't think that we're fleeing the scene or anything like that I promise we'll be with you and I think we're about two minutes out thank you very much for coming in if you guys in the back it's not like the blue man group we won't spread anything on here anything so feel free plenty of places up front thanks again call the coup con police on you all right ladies and gentlemen my name's Shane this is my good friend will and this whole week at coup con you're gonna hear amazing success story after amazing success story delivered by some of the most brilliant people in our industry so will and I we're gonna give you a break from all that right now we're gonna tell you about a misadventure we had running a large-scale kubernetes cluster and the reason why we think you're gonna be interested in this is we believe that many of you in this room right now are on this misadventure with us it's just no one told you our misadventure begins we're all great misadventure begins a misunderstanding you see we took the things that we knew to be true in kubernetes and misapplied all those concepts the things that were actually governed by the linux performance rules and it turns out that's kind of a big mistake to make but it's an easy one to make you see we were thinking in course because that's how kubernetes thinks about stuff right there is a node object with the number of CPUs on it and every time you schedule something it decrements that object it's definitely a thing however linux has an abstraction layer and it thinks in time not cores now I get it I'm probably sounding like the crazy guy on the kubernetes subway right the cores are a lot so let me explain that for just a second okay so I'm gonna use the least controversial feature in all of kubernetes to explain this kubernetes limits now I know I know right there's there's a little bit take how you feel about kubernetes limits and put that aside for me for just a second because it is the best way to understand how kubernetes thinks in time and how dangerous it can be to think in cores just as a quick review there is metadata attached to a container a specific container for how much CPU it can take in a given period of time that period of time happens to be 100 milliseconds just follow that number away for me real quick we'll need that in just a few slides and every period we reset this quota of limits pretty straightforward right but what I didn't understand is when I was configuring cores what was really going on behind the scenes is it was converting into time let's explain how that works really quickly see in my mind I was configuring one core and that's broken up into 1000 little chunks called millis CPU right and if I configure 10 millis CPU which is the minimum value what I'm really saying here is whatever value that I configure divided by that base value of one CPU or 1000 millicores there's a percentage but a percentage of what it's one percent of this 100 millisecond period in time or one millisecond which is why that's the smallest value now how is that different so someone would come up to me and like Shane my application needs half a core sounds pretty reasonable sure but what's happening when I convert that into time you see that is 50% of that 100 millisecond period or 50 milliseconds in time how is 50 milliseconds in time different from half a core well you see I didn't think to have the good sense to ask them anything about this app and it turns out with our fictitious app we have four threads running on four cores and if I add up the total bill the total amount of CPU utilization in this 100 milliseconds of time that's passing in the real world I get 400 milliseconds that I've just say no that was nowhere near the 50 that I thought when I'm thinking in time it sounds reasonable but let's take a step back right if if can anyone tell you the right way to set your limits if they didn't know this information how many threads you're running how you're gonna how many parallel processes actually one person can it turns out Prometheus can so by using the familiar see advisor metric container CPU usage seconds total this isn't second so we're gonna do a little prom foo right prom QL and convert that into periods right we're gonna save all that I promise I'll share that with you at the end but when we measure that in time what's the value exactly the amount that we needed to set it for to keep it from throttling did I need a Ouija board right a dream catcher and five million blogs to set it no I just needed like a five second chart and Prometheus to get this all down was it really that hard it's not when you're thinking in time okay Shane is it really that easy alright I left a few things out so let's cover that our application we decided to do the number of threads static but we had an option to have that go dynamic with user load what would happen as the load goes up would the value be the same if the thread count was dynamic in fact it would not be whoops thinking in terms of static can be highly dangerous more on that in just a second but how does this affect things in the real world well you see I've got four cores that I'm running in test right and so I'm running like a runtime maybe let go laying or something that says oh cool you gave me four cores well I'm gonna run for OS threads and I'll run my go routines on that well what happens when I go to production and I give it an eight core box it's gonna go all you gave me a course great is the number for performance gonna measure out to be the same if I have eight OS threads in fact it's not whoops whoops so few things that we have to think about when we do this sort of thing cool so you get this wrong like I got it wrong I used to start to do these percentage of periods and all this type of stuff and I wasn't thinking in time so I'd go to will all judgy and stuff right I'd be like will you're 99% throttle on your application how could you and he'd be like oh do dude what we set it for and I'd be like I don't know right and so because you know it's just some random percentage up there and he'd look at me all disappointed kind of like you're looking at me right now sir and and I'd be like man there's got to be a better way to do this right well you see I'd go back and I do my engineering right some engineer I got this right we'll double it right he's one and one we'll run two cores cuz that sounds good to my ear oh you've done it don't you judge me and so I do two cores now right that sounds like a lot but when we think in time immediately we see the problem so just converting between these two pretty simple just drop the zero right going back and forth and what is it 200 milliseconds time what did I just do man I just have his application performance sorry buddy right and in that 100 milliseconds of time if I didn't have another application that needed to run guess what goes out as idle right so I got 50% utilization but I got a huge performance problem that would be a monstrous problem to try to figure out unless we were thinking in time you see luckily I have the CPU seconds throttle total and if I just convert that to periods and again I'll share this with you low and behold what number is it the exact number I need to raise it by right I had 200 I needed to add an extra 200 to get it to 400 the exact value I needed to stop the throttles stuff's actually quite simple it was two little charts I need to look out for five seconds and I didn't need all this stuff that's been going on for years right but I know exactly what you're thinking right now you're thinking shame you didn't even cover per CPU slice allocation on the global container for the metadata of the container what kind of amateur knight are you running up there man that's a little harsh but I got you fam don't worry I wrote a whole blog post going into the brain damaging details of all this now I know the the grandmaster of Kubernetes himself Tim Hawkins try to get us not to shoot ourselves in the foot years ago but there's actually some cool stuff coming out you see in a new version of the Linux kernel that's coming there's rollover and burst values for the stuff so limits might be cool again but more importantly you're in a multi-tenant talk right now and us as multi-tenant operators we don't get to control what people do in our containers we need a safety net and if you need a safety net this stuff's actually not too bad if you think in time now someone if not all of you are gonna send me this oh but you can do all this stuff with request it turns out that's actually a more fascinating topic and might not work quite like you think to discuss that let's go explore that universe for just a bit the gentleman on the slides name is Edwin Hubble and about two hours from where I live in Los Angeles back in the 1920s Edwin Hubble provided direct evidence that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate now some mathematicians at the time were pretty bummed because their whole life work was on the universe was static right overnight just completely bad this makes me feel a lot better because all my math and all my performance calculations on Linux for one because I thought the Linux universe was static now I don't want to brag but when I was in the United States Marine Corps I was so good at basic math they gave me a special box of crayons to do hard things like ratios right so when it came to take my CKA course I was feeling pretty confident like I got this now tell me if you learn the same thing right so one request equals 1024 shares and if I got double those amount of request I get double the amount of shares and just like shares at a company whoever gets the most shares gets a greater percentage of the company right so in my mind at work like this this application got 25% of shares this application got 50% of shares except none of that is true I'm read my hero Brendan Greg right who makes me feel like I probably should be working at Best Buy not doing this but he says hey crayon eater guess what it's only the busy shares that count wait what so you mean if this container is idle it doesn't count in the performance calculation it's just these two that completely changes my performance ratio on this node oh my goodness wait a minute wait a minute I have hundreds of pods forget containers I got startup containers and I rather try to figure out the heat death of the universe then try to figure out like what containers gonna be busy at any given time if I could do that kind of math I would have gotten the ML right and would it be the same if I could calculate it on a node would it be on all all thousand nodes no it wouldn't oh I'm getting a little anxious now right but is this practical you see when I was thinking in cores a developer come up to me and like can I have a core sure buddy here you go right but what was actually happening let's say just to stretch a point we were we were working in stage would all the containers be busy in stage like they are prod no so I do some performance Greshan you all do performance regression on your apps right so we do a little performance regression what happens it takes up that entire node because nothing else is going on right if I was thinking in cores I'd be convinced I had another core but I'm actually taking up the whole box whoops what happens when I move to production would I get the same performance profile indeed I wouldn't I'd be like what's going on and would that be the same across all 1,000 boxes that were running and I think no oh my goodness okay so now I'm just disillusion right I'm screaming at the lanes guys why does this have to be so brain-damaging right and it turns out it was just my mental model was all wrong you see once these tasks or threads get put on a particular CPU right really what we're talking about this weighted share system is who gets to run next on that particular CPU oh well that kind of makes sense now because if this task doesn't need to run on CPU doesn't need to be in that share calculation of who gets to run on next no oh thank goodness now I understand I just misunderstood all of Kubernetes no big deal right oh goodness okay to really understand this though we'll have to do the completely fair scheduler and gang we have 30 seconds per slide so I need a little over confidence from me in the crowd right now we're gonna learn the completely fair scheduler in exactly 30 seconds are you feeling it this morning are you ready yes I'm talking about all right little delusional over confidence right all right gang will time us go sweet all right gang this task is running 100 milliseconds on the CPU it is hogging up all the CPU time meanwhile this poor task is waiting patiently for that CPU it has only had 10 milliseconds of run time on the CPU that's not fair Linux fair scheduler to the rescue it sees us and it says wait a minute this task has the lowest run time let's put that on CPU once these two a task have the same amount of time or their fair share of the CPU time bam that's it ladies and gentlemen completely fair schedule time 39 oh come see my presentation over confidence tomorrow I'm gonna kill it it'll be much better I promise all right all right all right so why did I take you through that okay what is a request at the end of the day a little hand wavy here but bear with me all right I got my CPU hog is back run time 100 milliseconds in time what I'm actually saying here with request is one is divide this runtime by the number of shares this is an advanced crayon math hang with me but when you divide a number evidently it makes it smaller right and so when you have the shortest runtime as you guys are already experts at now right the shortest time is the highest priority right cool and if I was to increase that value it's even shorter oh my goodness we're messing with time again okay all right so let's think about this for a minute but am I the master and commander of everything that's going to the node or is there maybe something else that might be in play we call that meeting the witness right okay here we go all right there was something I didn't tell you and all this and that was that that 10 millisecond task was waiting on I owe and so what was happening is it didn't even need to run on CPU now if I was running a real time scheduler what would happen this CPU hog would get interrupted at every so often right hey you know do I need to run something no no no and I would waste all those CPU cycles we don't want that that's where CFS shines right so I want to let the CPU hog run as long as it wants and when this packet comes back I set a flag saying I need to run now wanted to run it as fast as possible and you know what happens from here right lowest time wins right it goes in but it's an IO task so I want you to think about this it's probably gonna run on CPU for very small and then go back I owe task by default are probably gonna be the smallest time what starts happening when I do aggressive requests and all this type of stuff on something that's already pretty aggressive right oh wait there's a lot going on here evidently cool so how did I get this fictitious version of the universe right well it turns out you know I did CPU stress and all the containers at the same time and we know if all containers are busy that doesn't happen in the real world right I ran the note at a hundred percent busy hopefully that's not happening in the real world right I had a fixed number of threads when they could be dynamic and I had no IO based thing so I got this like fictitious version of the universe and how that worked okay so what would be this new mental model that I would have to paint like what would that look like and in my head it looks something like this so I have two containers or call them task groups each with four threads or task in them there's a million places we can go with this but I'm gonna focus on this concept of saturation you see this is what my node really looks like and on this CPU I have one task it's all so the cache is all warm it's at its peak performance however this one where I have two tasks going on it's gonna take double the amount of time right to get that same resource now what I didn't know is if the CPU wasn't a hundred percent man I was packing that notice dents as a neutron star right what's the big deal well it turns out maybe that wasn't the best but to understand that I want you to do a thought experiment with me real quick game let's just pretend right that these two CPUs are 100% utilized I'm gonna stretch a point to make a point here right but this task is actually perfect right there it's it's 100% utilized but that's fine right because it's perfectly optimized but you let me been pack your notes so on this side oh my goodness right I've got so many tasks context which I'm not getting any real work done whoops right so it turns out would I see this saturation metric that I've saturated this with utilization in fact I wouldn't but I would argue gang is multi-tenant people that need to do these things super dense that's the more important metric out of the two now I'm a little crestfallen I'm not gonna win the Nobel Prize for any of this it looks like there has been a family of node metrics called pressure stall information that tell you all of this wonderful data right we just didn't turn it on right and what we did the findings were pretty crazy so sure okay there was like you know 50% of threads waiting and all that type of stuff maybe we should use go max prox or something to limit the thread counts and stuff like that but interestingly enough that wasn't the most interesting thing that we found we found that we were stalled on memory up to 10% we were thrashing the memories on the box they were saturated and the most fascinating thing was IO stall means every single thread on the box was stalled up to 35% of the time whoops because we weren't even looking at this sort of thing there is all kinds of amazing work by guys like Chris down that's did like see groups version 2 in the meta Facebook guys that I really recommend that you watch but the point is I was super excited about all this and I was thinking who do I know that runs a large-scale multi-tenant cluster my buddy will so I pick up the phone and I'm like hey will guess what I don't know anything about Kubernetes and he's like oh I know man I know why she's telling what's going on and I was like jabber non like a monkey and I'm like yeah all right all right Shane click hey babe I think I think Shane hit his head bungee jumping again but in the morning I started thinking about some of these decisions that would made at aquia in a little bit of a different light see we were scaling our customer workloads on CPU utilization as a percent of requests and I mean that's a Kubernetes default right it practically comes out of the box so could it really have bit us that bad well turns out it could this is one customer namespace over a period of like a week and you can see we're running hundreds of nodes an hour thousands a day that it turns out after I looked into it a little bit we did not need their load did not look like this right so we have all this churn but why well what is percent of requests I never really thought about it before but when Shane tells us all this about requests I mean he's talking about these weights right and like the Linux fair scheduler and stuff like that he's not talking about like using a certain percent of your weight right what does that even mean well turns out in this context right percent of requests is simply the actual CPU usage per second on average and remember Linux thinks in time right so this is a this is the amount of time that something spent on the CPU well not something actually to be specific it's all the processes and all the threads in that container added up on average per second and we just divide that by the requests so if something ran for 500 milliseconds per second on average on the CPU and it requested a thousand millicores we just take those units we throw them out the window and we do 500 divided by a thousand and we get 50 percent of requests right simple enough well with that in mind let's revisit an example that Shane gave us a little earlier let's take two containers right we're gonna run them as hot as they can they're just gonna eat up as much CPU as possible the first container we're gonna give one core right and it's request and the second we're gonna get three it shouldn't surprise us at this point that on a four core node that first container is gonna get one CPU second on average and the second one's gonna get three and when we do that division out with Shane special box of crayons we do one second divided by one core and we get a hundred percent simple enough right I mean this is kind of intuitively how we would expect all this stuff to work but what happens if we change those requests around a little bit see Shane tells us it's just the ratio of these requests that matter right so as far as Linux is concerned whether it's one core and three cores or a hundred millicores and 300 millicores it is actually honest to goodness as far as Linux is concerned the same exact situation right so we get the same performance one second and three seconds but when we do that math with our Kubernetes brains right we take one second divided by a hundred millicores and we get a thousand percent of requests that's a little misleading right I mean it's wildly different numbers a hundred percent and a thousand percent that both describe the exact same situation as far as Linux sees it but I wasn't quite convinced at this point right I mean that's interesting and odd maybe you know not how I expected that it would work but Shane's asking me to basically redo my entire scaling metric for all you know five thousand six thousand of our of our customers so you know I needed to dive a little deeper on this see what we're doing really when we're calculating this percent request and we're thinking this way we're comparing what's essentially a performance metric right how long something's running with a number that frankly we're just kind of using to figure out how many pods we want to run on that node right how densely we want to pack that no which as Shane talks about it's maybe a little bit more complicated and we're doing that comparison between these two concepts with really no regard to how Linux actually views that number and sometimes don't get me wrong sometimes that comparison is a perfectly valid one to make it gives us a lot of information but by no means does it give us a complete and accurate view of what's actually going on within the system let's look at a more extreme example of this let's say we have just one container and every time it gets a request like a web request or something it has some work to churn through and that work takes about eight seconds of CPU time but let's say we weren't thinking in time right let's say okay well that's a pretty big container right it's doing a lot of work I'll give it four cores right four cores has to be enough right it ran on a four core box before four cores is plenty well what happens when we try to run that on Kubernetes we send that up to the API server and it says great you want four cores I'll give you four cores here you go but let's say it schedules us on an eight core node well when that container comes up on Linux and there's nothing else running on the box it can really spread out right over all eight cores which means it can get its eight seconds of work done in just one second of real time which is wonderful right I mean we're getting a lot of work done as fast as we can but when we look at this when we look at our metrics we're gonna see eight seconds divided by four cores that's 200% of requests oh no we say right 200% of requests we must be overloaded we must be putting too much work on this pod so what do we do as Kubernetes aficionados when something's overloaded we scale up right we add another pod so let's say we do let's say we just set that you know dash dash scale replicas to done now next pod comes up Kubernetes helps us out right doesn't want to waste space puts us on the same node give us us another four cores but now when that container comes up it's not a free range anymore right Linux has to constrain both of those workloads equally because they have the same request to 50% of the time so now in each one second of real time they only get four seconds on the CPU each but when we look at our percent of requests we're gonna say okay four seconds over four cores hundred percent of requests right hooray we solve the problem where we're not overloaded anymore but is this is this a good thing did we help I mean we still have the same eight seconds of work right that didn't change but in the first case when we have one container it's getting it done in one second and by adding that second container we're doubling the amount of time it takes to get that work done but if we just look at this percent of requests which is all the HPA is doing right we could be misleading ourselves pretty easily to think that we're actually helping that we're actually doing something good right now okay fine requests maybe maybe it's a little misleading right maybe it's a little not the whole picture right but maybe we should be asking ourselves a little bit of you know we should back it up a little bit maybe we should ask some more fundamental question what makes us think that CPU is the right metric to scale our workloads on at all well let's take these two web applications let's say they're both saturated they're right they're both taking as many web requests as they possibly can but one on the left though right every web request is getting it's just doing some data processing right number crunching something like that that all shows up on the CPU wonderful but more typical web applications right they don't necessarily do that let's say we're waiting on a database or maybe we're calling out to some external thing it doesn't really matter none of that shows up as CPU utilization so we have two wildly different CPU utilization and the same saturation it turns out that CPU utilization right it just tells us what the app is doing namely whether it's spending its you know free time on the CPU or whether it's doing something else we'll find okay at this point you know I give Shane a call back and I say Shane I don't say this enough but you were right I don't like percent of requests anymore right it's it's not it doesn't I can't trust it CPU you know it doesn't even work for my application what do I do what do I scale on how do I solve this problem right and he looks at me with that confident glint in his eyes that 39 second confident glint in his eyes and he says right which is what all the blogs say right request per second scalar applications are in quest per second because of that specific CPU problem but it turns out request per second has kind of exactly the same problem see we run a lot of different applications at Aquia right some let's say they're really simple sites maybe they're serving static content or something right not a complicated request to fulfill so that can take a lot of requests per second but the more complicated sites right spending a lot of time in the database maybe they have some crazy back-end proprietary stuff or or let's be honest maybe they're just not the most optimized in the world right they can't take as many requests per second no judgment request per second just like CPU right it tells us what the application is doing namely how fast is processing request but it doesn't give us that context to tell us how many more it can do before we actually need another replica before before it's gonna fall over so we really sat back and we thought about it we said okay what do we want to scale on and we decided that any metric that's worth scaling on needs to at the very least it needs to be highly correlated with what's actually going on inside the application right at the very least we wanted something smooth right we didn't want these big spikes up and down and wasting all that time scheduling all those pods and lastly we wanted an early enough signal that we could actually respond to it right so not something like a latency which sure is very highly correlated right but if you're already having high latency then you've already failed right scaling too late see every application has this kind of curve as you apply load when the load's light right your application can handle it no problem but maybe it's not as utilized as otherwise could be and if you scale at that point right you end up just kind of scaling empty right we're not taking as much as a good advantage of the resources where we have available to it but if you push that load too far right you end up introducing latency or drops or errors or crashes or ooms or whatever right like you and well hopefully not but you end up with issues in your application right what we were looking for is a metric that told us where that inflection point was right right before we start introducing issues and we wanted to set our HPA to a little bit before that right the idea being that as we scaled up and down we would be holding the majority of our replicas in that optimized zone right now for us that ended up being essentially the number of threads that were active at any one time right it didn't tell us what those threads were doing and it didn't need to it just told us hey they're busy they can't take another request right and when you have a fixed number of threads like Shane was saying you know kind of how much of that you can take until you need another replica now for you this metric is very likely to be something very different right depending on the application the language and all that but the point is the process we went through to find that metric it forced us to learn a lot about our application about what happened when we apply load to it and what it looked like when it was about to fall over right and I'm happy to report we started rolling this out to production and we drastically reduced the churn right turns out when you're scaling on the proper metric maybe you don't need to be running 73,000 buds every single day right now when our customer scales because they actually need to right it's because they they need the threads which makes us really happy because it greatly simplifies our cluster setup right we don't have these crazy churn and all the problems that come with it and that's a whole nother talk and it makes our customers happy right because a lot of customers aren't particularly CPU heavy right sometimes they've weighed a long time in the database and now they scale just as well as those well better everybody scales better but just as well as the people that use high CPU originally there we go our time together is that and then but two things before you go you see we got caught up that what we needed was WebAssembly base injected Envoy BPF and it was the fundamentals that we had the whole time and when we focused on those fundamentals that's when we got the biggest gain and we thought someone was gonna come on a silver platter with this best practice this thing and it was always wrong because we had to measure what was going on to really understand what the best practices were for our cluster and it turns out that Prometheus is the way to do that but it turns out everything we knew about all that stuff was wrong too and that's an even more fascinating universe but that's a tale for another day on a personal note gang I just want to give you a heartfelt I got rejected for gubcom three times in a row and this is like my last big thing and so the fact that it's like standing room only in 700 of you guys showed up I can't tell you what that means to us this is a big labor of love we spent three months on it we'd love to get your feedback if you dig this kind of stuff or you rather hear from like adults on this sort of thing in the future so if you feel that out of be grateful gang we will stay as long as it takes to answer all your questions we sorry we couldn't take them live have a wonderful rest of your QCon


What's going on you lot welcome back to my channel if you're new here hi, hello, my name's Lydia And I'm into how videos here on YouTube pretty much every day Oh my god, you can see that I'm watching the TV on a totally legal website Anyway, what's going on you lot today? We are talking about splitting and if you don't know what splitting is It's a term very well known within the BPD community So what's splitting is essentially black and white. You go from liking on to hating on And it can happen in many circumstances The example I'm going to use is a relationship. You can go from loving someone to get out with them A very real and very hard thing that people will be the BPD go through We don't even mean to do it necessarily Sometimes it's very handy and it gets us out of situations all the time It's what causes the breakdowns in our relationship Any connection we have with people because we just split on them Because from liking them and being aware and then be like bye and we do it so often We don't even realise what we're doing as a way of coping, as a way of control As a way of managing our own emotions in a situation Splitting is something I've never talked about before on this channel There's not that much to it. There's not that much information I can put out on it But some assume it's a bad thing, a bad trait, a bad part, a BPD I have to disagree. Yes, I can see why it would be a bad thing You know, I'm not completely naive, I'm not stupid, I do know these things Where it's good is when you're in relationships Sometimes you need that black and white thinking to be able to just get out of them You go from being in a situation and then you're not in it Relationships, you can go from loving them to walking away And people see it as emotionless, as horrible And I and myself have had people have said, oh you're just splitting, you're being a bitch You know, it makes you horrible and that's so not true Yeah, might be blunt, but how I feel, it's very true, very real And that's where the intense emotion things ties into this It's common, it's like one of the most well-known things BPD We have intense emotions, that with splitting, yeah, we can be blunt, you know I will say this and I will stand by this no matter what anyone say is I like the fact that I am blunt with people Because there's no room, there's no wiggle room, you know how I feel about you Splitting essentially, I hate you don't leave me Which is a book about BPD, which I highly recommend actually It's black and white thinking, it's like them, you don't like them It can be very quick to switch and that's really hitting I honestly think it's been short, I know it's not as long as some might have a video I don't have that much to say on my subject So if you are new, make sure you hit the subscribe button I make videos pretty much every day, I struggle with depression But the reason this looks tidy is because I've just done this so I can film And yeah, I'm gonna end the video here, so thank you for watching And if you are new, make sure you hit the subscribe button And you know, leave a question in the comments down below Because I wanted to film a Q&A video but I don't have a question yet So questions in the comments section, that's what I meant Also I found my glasses while I was tidying my room Even though you can see some of the floor now Yeah, bye guys


The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of his desk. Obviously he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand. Just start anywhere, I said, and tell me about it. As before, without waiting for an answer, he continued, the coin clutched tightly in one hand. I'm Charles J. Fisher, Professor of Philosophy at Reiser College. He looked at me quickly, or at least I was until recently, for a second his face was boyish. Professor of Philosophy, that is. I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side I read the words, the statement on the other side of this coin is false. The patient watched me with an expressionless face. I turned over the coin, is engraved with the words, the statement on the other side of this coin is false. That's not the problem, he said. Not my problem. I had the coin made when I was an undergraduate. I enjoyed reading one side, turning it over, reading the other side, and so on, a fetish enjoyment like boys planning where to put the tipped-over outhouse. I looked at the patient. He was 38, single, medium-billed, and had an MA and PhD from an Eastern university. I knew this and more from the folder on my desk. Eight months ago, he continued, I read about the sphere found in Painey Island. He stopped, looking at me questioningly. Yes, I know, I said. I opened my desk drawer, took out a clipping from the newspaper, and handed it to him. That's it. I read the clipping before putting it back in the drawer. Manila, September 24, I&S. Archeologists from the University of California have discovered an earth fault of recent quake, a sphere of two-feet in diameter of an unidentifiable material. Dr. Carl Schwartz, head of the group, said the sphere was returned to the university for study. He declined to answer questions on cultural origin of the sphere. There wasn't any more in the newspaper about it, he said. I have a friend in California who got me the photographs. He looked at me intently. You won't believe any of this. He pressed a coin into the palm of his hand. You won't be able to. The photographs, he continued as a flexuring, were of characters projected by the sphere when placed before a focused light. The sphere was transparent, you see, embedded with dark microscopic specs. By moving the sphere a certain distance each time, there was a total projection of 360 different characters and 18 different orderings, or 19 different orderings if you count one that was the list of all the characters. I made a mental note of the numbers. I felt they were significant. As I said, he continued, I obtained photographs of characters, very strange shapes totally unlike the characters of oriental languages, but yet that was the closest way to describe them. He jerked forward in his chair, except of course ostensibly. Later, I said, I wanted to get through the preliminaries first. There would be time later to see the photographs. The characters projected by the sphere, he said, weren't like the characters of any known language. He paused dramatically. There was reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture, a culture more scientifically advanced than our own. And the reason for the supposition I asked? The material. The material of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as sphero-plastic, totally unknown, amazing in perviousness, a synthetic material, hardly the product of a former culture. For Mars, I said smiling. There were all kinds of conjectures, but of course the important thing was to see if the projections of characters was a message. The message, if any, would mean more than any conjecture. You translated it. He polished coin on his jacket. You won't dare believe it, he said sharply. He cleared his throat and stiffened it in a more rigid posture. It wasn't exactly translation. You see, to us, none of the characters had designation, they were just characters. So it was a problem of decoding, I asked. As it turned out, no. Decoding is dependent on knowledge of language characteristics, characteristics of known languages. Decoding was tried, but without success. Now, what we had to find was a key to the language. You mean like the runestones. More or less. In principle, we needed a picture of a cow and a sign of meaning indicating one of the characters. For me, there is no possibility of finding similarities between the characters and characters of other languages. That would require tremendous linguistic knowledge and library facilities. Or could I use a decoding approach? That would require special knowledge of techniques and access to electronic computers and other mechanical aids. No, I had to work on the assumption that the key to the sphere was implicit in the sphere. You hoped to find a key to the language in the language itself? Exactly. You know, of course, some languages do have an implicit key. For example, hieroglyphics or picture language. The word for cow is a picture of a cow. You looked at the toes of the shoes. You won't be able to believe it. It's impossible to believe. I used the word impossible in its logical sense. In most languages, he continued looking up from the shoes, the sound of some words themselves indicate the meaning of the word, anemonic peat words like bow-wow, buzz, and the key to the unknown language, I asked. How did he find it? I watched him push the coin against back of his arm, then lift it and read backwards letter pressed into his skin. He looked up and he smiled. I built models of the characters, big material ones exactly proportionate to the ones projected. Then quite by accident, I viewed one of them through glass globes size of the original sphere. What do you think I saw? What? I noticed he had a boyish look again. A distortion of the model. But that's not what's important. The distortions on study gave specific visual entities, like when looking at one of those trick pictures and suddenly seeing the line in the grass. The lines outlining the line are there all the time, only the observer has to view them as the outline of a line. It was the same with the models of the characters, except the shapes that appeared were not lines and other recognizable things. But they did suggest. He pressed the coin against his forehead, closed his eyes, and appeared to be thinking deeply. Yes, impossible to believe, no one can believe it. In addition to the visual response, the distortions gave me definite feelings. Not mixtures of feelings, but one definite emotional experience. How do you mean? One character when viewed through the globe gave me a visual image and, at the same time, a strong feeling of light hilarity. I take it then that these distortions seemed to connote meanings rather than denote them. You might say that their meaning was conveyed through a gestalt experience on the part of the observer. Yes, each character gave a definite gestalt, but the gestalt was the same for each observer. Or at least for thirty-five observers there is an eighty percent correlation. I whistled softly. And the translation? Doctor? What would you say if I told you the translation was unbelievable, that it couldn't be seriously entertained by any man? What if I said that it would take the sanity of any man who believed it? I would say it might well be incorrect. He took some papers from his pocket and laughed excitedly, slumping down into the chair. This is the complete translation in idiomatic English. I'm going to let you read it. But first I want you to consider a few things. He hid the papers behind the back of his chair. His face became even more boyish, almost as if he were deciding where to put the tipped-over outhouse. Consider first, doctor, that there were a total projection of three hundred and sixty different characters, the same number as the number of degrees in a circle. Consider also that there were eighteen different orderings of the characters, or nineteen counting the alphabetical west. The square root of three hundred and sixty would lie between eighteen and nineteen. Yes, I said. I remember there was something significant about the numbers, but I wasn't sure that it was this. Consider also, he continued, that the communication was through the medium of a sphere. Moreover, keep in mind that physics accepts the path of a beam of light as its definition of a straight line, yet the path is a curve. If extended sufficiently it would be a circle. The section of a sphere. All right, I said. By now the patient was pounding the coin against the sole of one shoe. And, he said, keep in mind that in some sense time can be thought of as another dimension. He suddenly thrust the papers at me and sat back in the chair. I picked up the translation and began reading. The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand. Just start anywhere, I said, and tell me about it. As before, without waiting for an answer, he continued. The coin clutched tightly in one hand. I'm Charles J. Fisher, professor of philosophy at Reiser College. He looked at me quickly, or at least I was until recently. For a second his face was boyish. Professor of philosophy, that is. I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side I read the words. The statement on the other side of this coin is false. The patient watched me with an expressionless face. End of, As Long as You Wish, by John O'Keefe. The Coming of the Ice. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Giles Baker. The Coming of the Ice. By G. Peyton Wurtenbaker. It's strange to be alone and so cold to be the last man on earth. The snow drives silently about me, ceaselessly, derirly. 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 in 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. But, 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 realise 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 had 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, Sir John! I cried, half inclined to laugh. I mean it, he said. You know I have 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 have 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, mirabiletic too, 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 turned aside 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 it 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. Donal, 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, Donal, 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 apotheosis 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. What you are would 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, Donal. 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 experience 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. But Carl, 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, and I could not retreat now from my resolve. I was perhaps very schoolboyish, but I felt it would be cowardice to back out now. But it was Alice again who perceived a final aspect of the matter. Carl, 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. I could not 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. Is 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. All 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 good-bye 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. Nothing 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. Bravely 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. Something cried in the back of my head that they must stay. One cannot explain these things except by 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 woke 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 then 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. For 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've hardly managed to keep him quiet. We will have to keep it from him until he's 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. Yet I recovered. I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigor in my limbs a vast force that was something tangibly expressive to eternal life.  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.  I began to toy idly with mathematical formulae 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 right. Need I say that I lived? Thereafter many thousands of thousands of years until this day. I cannot detail that life. It's 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 millenniums 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. Students were much amazed to see me a man of 30 odd coming back to college. But Judas Denil, 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. Even 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. Revelling in study has no student revelled ever before. There was no need of hurry in my life no fear of death too soon. There was a magnificence of vigor 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. For several centuries changing my name and passing from place to place I continued my studies. I had no consciousness of monotony for to 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 Zarentsov. 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 Zarentsov 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 am afraid, Mudevsky, he said addressing me by the name I was at the time using. I am 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 the 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 Zarentsov and 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 I never did understand Zarentsov. 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 won. 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 year 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 those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth of their world and those who were not killed by our hands those few returned silently home again and I've 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 atrophied 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 ridding 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 with 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 154th dynasty from the last war or as we would have counted in my time about 200,000 AD 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 fear 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 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 I also saw 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 beautiful glimpses of them as we sped on in our mechanics over the snow great hungry haggard skeletons of cities shrouded in banks of snow snow that 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 planes 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 remained now and we were becoming terrestric 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 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 shriveled limbs into this shriveling kale of swirling gusting 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 will be never men to read I have been sitting here waiting and I have thought often of Sir John and Alice all my 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 am 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've written I am frozen my breath freezes as it mingles with the air and I can hardly move my numb 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'm cold cold but is it you Alice is it you end of the coming of the ice by G. Peyton Wurtenbaker recording by Giles Baker The Eternal Wall by Raymond Z. Galoon this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org reading by Greg Marguerite The Eternal Wall by Raymond Z. Galoon a scream of breaks the splash into icy wooders a long descent into alkaline depths it was death but Ned Vince lived again a million years later see you in half an hour Betty said Ned Vince over the party telephone will be out at the silver basket before ten thirty Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved that was why he was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley where she lived he swung it recklessly around Pitt Bend there was where death tapped him on the shoulder another car leaped suddenly into view its lights glaring blindingly passed a high up jutting mass of Jurassic Rock at the turn of the road dazzled and befuddled by his own rash speed Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful telescoping collision he flicked his wheel smoothly to the right but the county highway commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic loosened gravel at the bend Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning his car hit the white painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through tumbled down a steep slope struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little and arched outward falling as gracefully as a swan diver toward the inky wooders of the Pitt fifty feet beneath Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash he had only a dazzling welt on his far head and a gag of terror in his throat movement was slower now as he began to sink trapped inside his wrecked car nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this the Pitt was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground spring fed the edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white for the water on which dead birds so often floated was surcharged with alkali as that heavy natronious liquid rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet Ned Vince knew that his friends and family would never see his body again lost beyond recovery in this abyss the car was deeply submerged the light had blinked out on the dash panel leaving Ned in absolute darkness a flood rushed in at the shattered window he clawed at the door trying to open it but it was jammed in the crash-bent frame and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water the welt left by the blow he had received on his forehead put a thickening mist over his brain so that he could not think clearly presently when he could no longer hold his breath bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs his last thoughts were those of a drowning man the machine shop he and his dad had had in Harwich Betty Moore with the smiling Irish eyes like in the song Betty and he had planned to go to the state university this fall and to be married sometime goodbye Betty the ripples that had ruffled the surface-wooders in the pit quieted again to glassy smoothness the eternal stars shown calmly the geologic Dakota Hills which might have seen the dinosaurs still bulked along the highway time the brother of death and the father of change seemed to wait Kali Kali the human throat could quite have duplicated accurately arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity the noonday sun was red and huge the air was tenuous dehydrated chill at first there was only one voice uttering those weird triumphant sounds then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail and those short sharp chuckles of eagerness other questioning wondering notes mixed with the cadence lacking qualities identifiable as human the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable the desolate expanse around the gulch was all but without motion the icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque angling drifts of soil nearly waterless for eons patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the upjudding rocks but in the desert itself no other life was visible even the hills had sagged away flattened by incalculable ages of erosion at a mile distance a crumbling heap of rubble arose once it had been a building a gigantic jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest red debris that had once been steel a launching catapult for the last spaceships built by the gods in exodus perhaps it was half a million years ago man was gone from the earth glacial ages war, decadence, disease and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems had done that kali the sounds were not human they were more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals but there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of the gulch too the glint of metal sharpened burnished the flat streamlined bulk of a flying machine shiny and new the bell-like muzzle of a strange excavator apparatus which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity man it seemed had a successor as ruler of the earth loy chuck had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east out from the city of kar-ra and he was very happy now flushed with a vast and unlooked for success on his haunches at the dry bottom of the pit the breeze rumpled his long brown fur he wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors a foot tall perhaps as he squatted there in that antique stance of his his tail was short and furred his undersides creamy white whiskers spread around his inquisitive pink tipped snout but his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd beady eyes betraying the slow heritage of time of survival of the fittest of evolution he could think and dream and invent in the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient 20th century loy chuck and his fellow workers were gathered tense and gleeful around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight there was a gob of junk scarcely more than a regular formation of flaky rust but embedded in it was a huddled form brown and hard as old wood the dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators but soiled clothing still hung to it after perhaps a million years metal had gone into decay, yes but not this body the answer to this was simple alkali a mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis a perfect preservative for organic tissue aided probably during most of these passing eras by desert dryness had turned arid very swiftly this body was not a mere fossil it was a mummy kali man, that meant not the star conquering demigods but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on earth and in the early 21st century the first interplanetary rockets no wonder loy chuck and his co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm a strange accident happening in a legendary antiquity that made them in their quest for knowledge at last loy chuck gave a soft chirping signal the chant of triumph ended while instruments flicked in his tiny hands the final instrument he used to test the mummy looked like a miniature stereoscope with complicated details he held it over his eyes on the tiny screen within through the agency of focused x-rays he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse what his probing gaze revealed to him made his pleasure even greater than before in twittering chattering sounds he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen though devoid of moisture the mummy was perfectly preserved even to its brain cells medical and biological sciences were far advanced among loy chuck's kind perhaps by the application of principles long known to them this long dead body could be made to live again it might move speak, remember its past what a marvelous subject for study it would make back there in the museums of cara but loy silenced this fresh eager chattering with a command work was always more substantial than cheering with infinite care small sharp hand tools were used now the mummy of ned vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile with infinite care it was crated in a metal case and hauled into the flying machine watching flame the latter arose bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition the craft shot eastward at bullet like speed the spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl backward beneath a tremendous sand desert marked with low washed down mountains and the vague angular geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever beyond the eastern rim of the continent the plane dipped downward steeply the white of dried salt was on the hills but there was a little green growth here too the dead sea bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands far out in a deep valley cara the city of the rodents came into view a crystalline maze of low bubble like structures glinting in the red sunshine but this was only its surface aspect Lloyd Chuck's people had built their homes mostly underground since the beginning of their foggy evolution besides in this latter day the nights were very cold the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome the mummy was taken to Lloyd Chuck's laboratory a short distance below the surface here at once the scientist began his work the body of the ancient man was put in a large vat fluids submerged it slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long the fluid was changed often until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more then the more delicate process began still submerged in liquid the corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy passing between complicated electrodes the cells of antique flesh and brain gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known at last the final liquid was drained away and the mummy lay there a mummy no more but a pale silent figure in its tatters of clothing Lloyd Chuck put an odd metal fabric helmet on its head and a second much smaller helmet on his own connected with this arrangement was a black box of many uses for hours he worked with his apparatus studying and guiding the recording instruments the time passed swiftly at last eager and ready for whatever might happen now Lloyd Chuck pushed another switch with a cold rosy flair energy blazed around that moveless form for Ned Vince timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist when he could see clearly again he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him though it had been dehydrated his brain had been kept perfectly intact through the ages and now it was restored so his memories were as vivid as yesterday yet through that crystalline vet in which he lay he could see a broad low room in which he could barely have stood erect he saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alien this and knowledge beyond the era he had known the walls were lavender and phosphorescent fossil bone fragments were mounted in shallow cases dinosaur bones some of them seemed from their size but there was a complete skeleton of a dog too and the skeleton of a man and a second man skeleton that was not quite human its neck vertebrae were very thick and solid its shoulders were wide and its skull was gigantic all this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince a sudden nostalgic panic something was fearfully wrong the nervous terror of the unknown was on him feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection which he could not understand remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pitt Bend he caught the edge of the transparent vat and pulled himself to a sitting posture there was a muffled murmur around him of some vast unearthly metropolis take it easy Ned Vince the words themselves and the way they were assembled were old familiar friends but the tone was wrong it was high shrill parrot like and mechanical Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice located the black box just outside of his crystal vat from that box the voice seemed to have originated before it crouched a small brownish animal with a bulging head the animals tiny fingered paws hands they were really were touching rows of keys to Ned Vince it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible a rodent looking like a prairie dog a little but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence and a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie as this Ned Vince did not know how Lloyd Chuck had probed his brain with the aid of a pair of helmets and the black box apparatus he did not know that in the latter his language taken from his own revitalized mind was recorded and that Lloyd Chuck had only to press certain buttons to make the instrument express his thoughts in common long dead English Lloyd whose vocal organs were not human would have had great difficulty speaking English words anyway Ned's dark hair was wildly dry his gaunt young face held befuddled terror he gasped in the thin atmosphere I've gone nuts he pronounced with a curious calm stark, staring nuts Lloyd's box with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors could translate for its master too as the man spoke Lloyd read the illuminated symbols in his own language flashed on a frosted crystal plate before him thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying Lloyd Chuck pressed more keys and the box reproduced his answer no Ned not nuts not a bit of it there are just a lot of things that you've got to get used to that's all you drowned about a million years ago I discovered your body I brought you back to life we have science that can do that I'm Lloyd Chuck it took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear bold friendly terms thus Lloyd sought with calm human logic to make his charge feel at home probably though he was a fool to suppose that he could succeed thus Vince started to mutter struggling desperately to reason it out a prairie dog he said speaking to me one million years evolution the scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea dogs are smart so maybe super prairie dogs could come from them a lot easier than men from fish it was all sound logic even Ned Vince knew that still his mind tuned to ordinary simple things couldn't quite realize all the vast things that had happened to himself and to the world the scope of it all was too staggeringly big one million years God Vince made a last effort to control himself his knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat I don't know what you've been talking about he graded wildly but I want to get out of here I want to go back where I came from do you understand whoever or whatever you are Lloyd Chuck pressed more keys but you can't go back to the 20th century said the box nor is there any better place for you to be now than Kara you are the only man left on earth those men that exist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore though their forefathers originated on this planet they have gone far beyond you in evolution to them you would be only a senseless curiosity you are much better off with my people our minds are much more like yours we will take care of you and make you comfortable but Ned Vince wasn't listening now you are the only man left on earth that had been enough for him to hear he didn't more than half believe it his mind was too confused for conviction about anything everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare but then it might all be real instead and that was abysmal horror Ned was no coward death in danger of any ordinary earthly kind he could have faced bravely but the loneliness here hideous like being stranded alone on another world his heart was pounding heavily and his eyes were wide he looked across this eerie room there was a ramp there at the other side leading upward instead of a stairway fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair to try to learn the facts for himself possessed him he bounded out of the vat and with head down dashed for the ramp he had to go most of the way on his hands and knees the slanting passage was low excited animal chuckleings around him and the occasional touch of a furry body hurried his feverish scrambling but he emerged at last at the surface he stood there panting in that frigid rarified air it was night the moon was a gigantic pockmarked bulk the constellations were unrecognizable the rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow crystalline domes set among odd scrub trees and bushes the crags loomed on all sides all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone in that ghastly moonlight the ground glistened with dry salt well I guess it saw true huh, Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone behind him he heard an excited squeaky chattering rodents in pursuit looking back he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes he might as well be an exile on another planet so changed had the earth become a wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed those inconceivable eons separating himself from his friends from Betty from almost everything that was familiar he started to run away from those glittering rodent eyes he sensed death in that cold sea bottom but what of it what reason did he have left to live he'd be only a museum piece here a thing to be caged and studied prison or a madhouse would be far better he tried to get a hold of his courage but what was there to inspire it, nothing he laughed harshly as he ran welcoming that bitter killing cold nostalgia had him in its clutch and there was no answer in this hell world lost beyond the barrier of the years Lloyd Chuck and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form a mile from the city of Cara in a flying machine they took him back and applied stimulants he came too in the same laboratory room as before but he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time so that he could not escape again there he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him it gave him a few crumbs of hope hey, somebody he called you'd better get some rest, Ned Vince came the answer from the black box Lloyd Chuck speaking again but listen, Ned protested you know, a lot more than we did in the 20th century and well there that thing called time travel that I used to read about maybe you know how to make it work maybe you could send me back to my own time after all little Lloyd Chuck was in a black discouraged mood himself he could understand the utter sick dejection of this giant from the past lost from his own kind probably looming in far less extreme circumstances than this death from homesickness had come Lloyd Chuck was a scientist in common with all real scientists regardless of the species from which they spring he loved the subjects of his researches he wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy or this creature would be of scant value for study so Lloyd considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested time travel, almost a legend an assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Lloyd's but he was bent now on the well being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected this human, this Kali Lloyd jabbed buttons on the black box yes Ned Vince said the Sonic apparatus time travel, perhaps that is the only thing to do to send you back to your own period of history for I see that you will never be yourself it will be hard to accomplish but we'll try now I shall put you under an anesthetic Ned felt better immediately for there was real hope now where there had been none before maybe he'd be back in his hometown of Harwich again maybe he'd see the old machine shop there in the trees greening out in spring maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley soon Ned relaxed as a tiny hypo needle bit into his arm Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness Lloyd Chuck went to work once more using that pair of brain helmets again exploring carefully the man's mind after hours of research he proceeded to prepare his plans the government of Kar-Ra was a scientific oligarchy of which Lloyd was a prime member it would be easy to get the help he needed a horde of small gray furred beings and their machines toiled for many days Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it he was wandering aimlessly in a familiar room the girders of the roof above were of red painted steel his tool benches were there greasy and littered with metal filings just as they had always been he had a tractor to repair and a seed drill outside of the machine shop the old familiar yellow sun was shining across the street was the small brown house where he lived Betty Moore in the doorway she wore a blue dress and a mischievous smile curved her lips as though she had succeeded in creeping up on him for a surprise why Ned she chuckled you look as though you've been dreaming and just woke up he grimaced ruefully as she approached with a kind of fierce gratitude he took her in his arms yes, she was just like always I guess I was dreaming Betty he whispered feeling that mighty sense of relief he must have fallen asleep at the bench here and had a nightmare I thought I had an accident at Pitt Ben and that a lot of worse things happened but it wasn't true Ned Vince's mind over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off accepted apparent facts simply he did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him soothing and dimming his brain so that it would never question or doubt or observe too closely in congruous circumstances that must often appear the lack of traffic in the street without for instance, and the lack of people besides himself and Betty he didn't know that this machine shop was built from his own memories of the original he didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy units and soft plastic the trees outside were only lantern slide illusions it was all built inside a great opaque dome but there were hidden television systems too thus, Lloyd Chuck's kind could study this ancient man this Kali, thus their motives were mostly selfish Lloyd though was not observing now, he had wandered far out into the cold, sad sea bottom to ponder he squeaked and chattered to himself, contemplating the magnificent inexorable march of the ages he remembered the ancient ruins left by the final supermen the Kali believes himself home, Lloyd was thinking he will survive and be happy but there was no other way time is an eternal wall our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth even they who once ruled the earth never escaped from the present by so much as an instant End of The Eternal Wall by Raymond Z. Galoon