Doomster

EARTH ABIDES (373 pp.)--George R. Sfewart--Random House ($3).

If all the books about the finish of the human race were laid end to end, authors might get the idea and stop writing them. Until then, readers can only hope that once in a while somebody will write a pretty good one, as bestselling Author George R. Stewart (Storm) has done.

The fashion in finishes was once fire or flood, but recently the doomsters have gone atomic or bacteriological. Stewart is a measles man--"super-measles"--but he has no stomach to describe the death agonies he inflicts.

Instead, he is more interested in what happens to the handful who survive to wander over the bare world like ants in the hand of God. Two of the survivors, Ish and Em, meet and begin as bravely as Adam & Eve to repopulate the world. Soon others join them, and by the time Author Stewart leaves The Tribe, it seems to have grown to a community of several hundred.

Stewart hasn't the glimmer of an idea how men feel when their world is suddenly snuffed out, but he does make some good guesses about how they exist. The dynamos run down, the reservoirs run dry, the cigarettes go flat and the canned goods lose their flavor, yet The Tribe cannot find the patience or the seed to keep a garden, nor the wit to catch a cow. The children scarcely learn to read, and soon begin to think of the vanished Americans as a race of gods.

The book is best in those parts where it describes the ecological earthquakes in man's wake: the successive but ultimately unsuccessful attempts of the ants, the rats, and the cattle to inherit man's estate.

Stewart also manages a poignant conclusion: one by one the old American survivors die off, and Ish, an antique god whose scepter is a hammer, is left alone with the new generation. One day through the fog of years he sees a half-naked savage standing respectfully before him. "Are you happy?" he quavers. "Things are as they are," the savage replies in puzzlement, "and I am part of them." The Last American passes his scepter to the savage, and dies, murmuring with the grasses and the winds and with Ecclesiastes: "Men go and come, but earth abides."

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