{"id":1043,"date":"2021-05-03T12:36:14","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T12:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1043"},"modified":"2021-05-20T13:06:02","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T13:06:02","slug":"the-number-you-have-reached-by-thomas-m-disch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1043","title":{"rendered":"The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Number You Have Reached<\/em><\/strong> by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse<\/em> #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a \u2018last man on Earth\u2019 piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife\u2019s name is Lidia, and that he isn\u2019t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn\u2019t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting\u2014more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat about the millions\u2014\u201d
\u201cThe millions?\u201d he interrupted her.
\u201c\u2014of dead,\u201d she said. \u201cAll of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.\u201d
\u201cI didn\u2019t do it. I wasn\u2019t even here when it happened. You can\u2019t blame me.\u201d
\u201cWell, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you\u2019d been ordered to, you would have done it. You\u2019d do it now\u2014when there\u2019s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.\u201d
\u201cYou\u2019d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.\u201d
\u201cYou think I don\u2019t exist? Maybe you think the others didn\u2019t exist either? Lidia\u2014and all the millions of others.\u201d
\u201cIt\u2019s funny you should say that.\u201d
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. \u201cThat\u2019s how it feels in space. It\u2019s more beautiful than anything else there is. You\u2019re alone in the ship, and even if you\u2019re not alone you can\u2019t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that\u2019s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don\u2019t exist.\u201d
\u201cYou know what you should do?\u201d she said.
\u201cWhat?\u201d
\u201cGo jump in the lake.\u201d\u00a0 p. 163 (World\u2019s Best Science Fiction 1968<\/em>, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)<\/p>

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn\u2019t badly done, but a \u2018last man\u2019 story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[139],"tags":[21,10,216,269,12,140],"class_list":["post-1043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thomas-m-disch","tag-21","tag-10","tag-science-fantasy","tag-sf-impulse","tag-short-story","tag-thomas-m-disch"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1043"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1221,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043\/revisions\/1221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}