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planet. For a long time he gazed in silence. It was like the moon and yet —despite the craters, despite the desolation, there was a familiar suggestion of the linked Americas, stretching from pole to pole — a bulge which might have been the West African coast. Gratz gazed in silence for a great while. At last he turned away.
    "How Long?" he asked.
    "Some millions of years..."
    "I don't understand. It was only the other day—.
    Goin started to explain but Gratz heard none of it. Like a man dreaming he walked out of the building. He was seeing again the Earth as she had been—a place of beauty, beautiful in spite of all that man had made her suffer. And now she was dead, a celestial cinder.
    Close by the edge of the cliff which held the observatory high above Takon he paused. He looked out across an alien city in an alien world towards a white point that glittered in the heavens. The Earth which had borne him was dead. Long and silently he gazed.
    Then, deliberately, with a step that did not falter, he walked over the cliff's edge.
The Perfect Creature
    #3 The Best Of John Wyndham
THE PERFECT CREATURE
    (1937)
    THE first thing I knew of the Dixon affair was when a deputation came from the village of Membury to ask us if we would investigate the alleged curious goingson there.
    But before that, perhaps, I had better explain the word 'us'.
    I happen to hold a post as Inspector for the S.S.M.A.—in full, the Society for the Suppression of the Maltreatment of Animals—in the district that includes Membury. Now, please don't assume that I am wobbleminded on the subject of animals. I needed a job. A friend of mine who has influence with the Society got it for me; and I do it, I think, conscientiously. As for the animals themselves, well, as with humans, I like some of them. In that, I differ from my coInspector, Alfred Weston; he likes—liked? — them all; on principle, and indiscriminately.
    It could be that, at the salaries they pay, the S.S.M.A. has doubts of its personnel—though there is the point that where legal action is to be taken two witnesses are desirable; but, whatever the reason, there is a practice of appointing their inspectors as pairs to each district; one result of which was my daily and close association with Alfred.
    Now, one might describe Alfred as the animalloverpar excellence. Between him and all animals there was complete affinity—at least, on Alfred's side. It wasn't his fault if the animals didn't quite understand it; he tried hard enough. The very thought of four feet or feathers seemed to do something to him. He cherished them one and all, and was apt to talk of them, and to them, as if they were his dear, dear friends temporarily embarrassed by a diminished I.Q.
    Alfred himself was a wellbuilt man, though not tall, who peered through heavilyrimmed glasses with an earnestness that seldom lightened. The difference between us was that while I was doing a job, he was following a vocation—pursuing it wholeheartedly, and with a powerful imagination to energize him.
    It didn't make him a restful companion. Under the powerful magnifier of Alfred's imagination the commonplace became lurid. At a runofthemill allegation of horsethrashing, phrases about fiends, barbarians and brutes in human form would leap into his mind with such vividness that he would be bitterly disappointed when we discovered, as we invariably did, (a) that the thing had been much exaggerated, anyway, and (b) that the perpetrator had either had a drink too many, or briefly lost his temper.
    It so happened that we were in the office together on the morning that the Membury deputation arrived.
    They were a more numerous body than we usually received, and as they filed in I could see Alfred's eyes begin to widen in anticipation of something really good—or horrific, depending on which way you were looking at it. Even I felt that this ought to produce something a cut above cans tied to cats' tails, and that kind of thing.
    Our