Alfred Bester became a prolific writer for many genres and contributed significantly in all of them -- SF, comics, radio, TV. This one was published in 1941.
This story is poignant and quite memorable. I remembered it. An aspiring and ambitious rocket scientist gets it right! Launches the first rocket to reach outer space, but, sadly there is one unforeseen, and terrible, consequence. The consequence is an incredibly potent catalyst is released to spread around the world and destroy all life on the surface.
The story is told in flashbacks, a format that is fraught with risk in the form of readers getting confused. But in this case it works.
The format is much like my "Only Living Person in New York" in that the protagonist is talking to hallucinations. In this case hallucinations of people he knew before the accident, not the reader as I have in Only Living Person.
The ending embraces evolution. I like that. The twist is this is a civilization that predates our own by 10 billion years, which puts it at the crack of dawn of the planet and the solar system. He also adds a touch of pansperma -- having life on Earth start from the organisms of a crashed alien being who came to earth sometime earlier. (In 2011, by the way, the solar system is figured to have started forming 4.5 billion years ago, life on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, and the universe started some 13 billion years ago.)
His description of this post-Apocalypse Earth is vivid, but not particularly accurate. And there are Technofiction flaws:
o This man packs two months of food in his knapsack, and crawls, not walks, but crawls along with that on his back? For two months?
o His dog survives for two months without food, and follows without contact for that entire two months?
o He describes reaching outer space as reaching the Roche Limit. The Roche Limit has to do with how close a moon can orbit a parent body without being pulled apart by tidal stress, it's not particularly relevant as a limit for reaching space. But, then again, this is 1941, so no one really has a practical idea of how to define where space begins.
o Our scientist plans on parachuting out of the rocket as it falls back to earth. Not likely given the hypersonic speeds that reentry entails. But then again, this is 1941, three years pre-V-2, so... OK.
o After two months of plentiful rain, wind and sun, this cinder stuff he's crawling on has neither consolidated into mud pan nor started producing gullies, deltas and dunes?
In spite of these Technofiction problems, the story is vivid, poignant and memorable. LoL! I read something like this, and I wonder a bit about the value of the Technofiction concept.