 What is the name of the song Charles plays on the phonograph?
"Phone Me in Central Park" By JAMES There should be an epitaph for every man, big or little, but a really grand and special one for Loner Charlie. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo. New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet attacked in force. Some of the billboards were shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. On sudden impulse he switched it on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead on full automatic. Life was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until...." Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier. Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national governments around the world. Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal left on earth. But the lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the coasts began to move inland. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained in New York. And now.... "I've got to find out," Charles told himself. Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every human on earth. Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for man what no ordinary census could have. Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's four billion inhabitants. Only once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room. All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer room. The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness of the world.
 The Isle of the Dead
 The Land of the Dead  The Isle of the Dead  The Song of the Dead  The Night of the Dead