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Title: Glow Worm
Author: Harlan Ellison
Illustrator: WILIMCZYK
Release Date: February 8, 2022 [eBook #67362]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GLOW WORM ***
Glow Worm
By HARLAN ELLISON
Illustrated by WILIMCZYK
_He was the last man on Earth, all
right. But--was he still a man?_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
When the sun sank behind the blasted horizon, its glare blotted out
by the twisted wreckage rising obscenely against the hills, Seligman
continued to glow.
He shone with a steady off-green aura that surrounded his body,
radiated from the tips of his hair, crawled from his skin, and lit his
way in the darkest night. It had been with him for two years now.
Though Seligman had never been a melodramatic man, he had more than
once rolled the phrase through his mind, letting it fall from his lips:
"I'm a freak."
Which was not entirely true. There was no longer anyone he might have
termed "normal" for his comparison. Not only were there no more men,
there was no more life of any kind. The silence was broken only by the
searching wind, picking its way cautiously between the slow-rusting
girders of a dead past.
Even as he said, "Freak!" his mind washed the word with two waves,
almost as one: vindictiveness and a resignation inextricably bound in
self-pity, hopelessness and hatred.
"_They_ were at fault!" he screamed at the tortured piles of masonry in
his path.
Across the viewer of his mind, thoughts twisted nimbly, knowing the
route, having traversed it often before.
Man had reached for the stars, finding them within his reach were he
willing to give up his ancestral home.
Those who had wanted space more than one planet had gone, out past the
Edge, into the wilderness of no return. It would take years to get
There, and the Journey Back was an unthinkable one. Time had set its
seal upon them: Go, if you must, but don't look behind you.
So they had gone. They had left the steam of Venus, the grit-wind of
Mars, the ice of Pluto, the sun-bake of Mercury. There had been no
Earthmen left in the system of Sol. Except, of course, on Earth--which
had been left to madmen.
And _they_ had been too busy throwing things at each other to worry
about the stars.
The men who knew no other answer stayed and fought. They were the ones
who fathered the Attilas, the Genghis Khans, the Hitlers. They were
the ones who pushed the buttons and launched the missiles that chased
each other across the skies, fell like downed birds, exploded, blasted,
cratered, chewed-out and carved-out the face of the planet. They were
also the little men who had failed to resist, even as they had failed
to look up at the night sky.
They were the ones who had destroyed the Earth.
Now no one was left. No man. Just Seligman. And he glowed.
"_They_ were at fault!" he screamed again, and the sound was a lost
thing in the night.
* * * * *
His mind carried him back through the years to the days near the end
of what had to be the Last War, because there would be no one left to
fight another. He was carried back again to the sterile white rooms
where the searching instruments, the prying needles, the clucking
scientists, all labored over him and his group.
They were to be a last-ditch throwaway. They were the indestructible
men: a new breed of soldier, able to live through the searing heat of
the bombs; to walk unaffected through the purgatory hail of radiation,
to assault where ordinary men would have collapsed long before.
Seligman picked his way over the rubble, his aura casting the faintest
phosphorescence over the ruptured metal and plastic shreds. He paused
momentarily, eyeing the blasted remnants of a fence, to which clung a
sign, held to the twined metal by one rusting bolt:
NEWARK SPACEPORT
ENTRANCE BY
AUTHORIZATION ONLY
Shards of metal scrap moved under his bare feet, their razored edges
rasping against the flesh, yet causing no break in the skin. Another
product of the sterile white rooms and the strangely-hued fluids
injected into his body?
Twenty-three young men, routine volunteers, as fit as the era of war
could produce, had been moved to the solitary block building in Salt
Lake City. It was a cubed structure with no windows and only one door,
guarded night and day. If nothing else, they had security. No one knew
the intensive experimentation going on inside those steel-enforced
concrete walls, even the men upon whose bodies the experiments were
being performed.
It was because of those experiments performed on him that Seligman was
here now, alone. Because of the myopic little men with their foreign
accents and their clippings of skin from his buttocks and shoulders,
the bacteriologists and the endocrine specialists, the epidermis men
and the blood-stream inspectors--because of all of them--he was here
now, when no one else had lived.
Seligman rubbed his forehead at the base of the hairline. _Why_ had he
lived? Was it some strain of rare origin running through his body that
had allowed him to stand the effects of the bombs? Was it a combination
of the experiments performed on him--and only in a certain way on him,
for none of the other twenty-two had lived--_and_ the radiation? He
gave up, for the millionth time. Had he been a student of the ills of
man he might have ventured a guess, but it was too far afield for a
common foot-soldier.
All that counted was that when he had awakened, pinned thighs, chest
and arms under the masonry of a building in Salt Lake City, he was
alive and could see. He could see, that is, till the tears clouded the
vision of his own sick green glow.
It was life. But at times like this, with the flickering light of his
passage marked on the ash-littered remains of his culture, he wondered
if it was worth the agony.
* * * * *
He never really approached madness, for the shock of realizing he was
totally and finally alone, without a voice or a face or a touch in all
the world, overrode the smaller shock of his transformation.
He lived. He was that fabled, joked-about Last Man On Earth. But it
wasn't a joke now.
Nor had the months after the final dust of extinction settled
across the planet been a joke. Those months had labored past as he
searched the country, taking what little food was still sealed from
radiation--though why radiation should bother him he could not imagine;
habit more than anything--and disease, racing from one end of the
continent in search of but one other human to share his torment.
But of course there had been no one. He was cut off like a withered arm
from the body that was his race.
Not only was he alone, and with the double terror of an aura that never
dimmed, sending the word, "Freak!" pounding through his mind, but there
were other changes, equally terrifying. It had been in Philadelphia,
while grubbing inside a broken store window that he had discovered
another symptom of his change.
The jagged glass pane had ripped the shirt through to his skin--but
had not damaged him. The flesh showed white momentarily, and then
even that faded. Seligman experimented cautiously, then recklessly,
and found that the radiations, or his treatments, or both, had indeed
changed him. He was completely impervious to harm of a minor sort: fire
in small amounts did not bother him, sharp edges could no more rip
his flesh than they could a piece of treated steel, work produced no
callouses; he was, in a limited sense of the word, invulnerable.
The indestructible man had been created too late. Too late to bring
satisfaction to the myopic butchers who had puttered unceasingly about
his body. Perhaps had they managed to survive they might still not
comprehend what had occurred. It was too much like the product of a
wild coincidence.
But that had not lessened his agony. Loneliness can be a powerful
thing, more consuming than hatred, more demanding than mother love,
more driving than ambition. It could, in fact, drive a man to the stars.
Perhaps it had been a communal yearning within his glowing breast;
perhaps a sense of the dramatic or a last vestige of that unconscious
debt all men owe to their kind; perhaps it was simply an urge to
talk to someone. Seligman summed it up without soul-searching in the
philosophy, "I can't be any worse off than I am now, so why not?"
It didn't matter really. Whatever the reason, he knew by the time his
search was over that he must seek men out, wherever in the stars they
might be, and tell them. He must be a messenger of death to his kin
beyond the Earth. They would mourn little, he knew, but still he had
to tell them.
He would have to go after them and say, "Your fathers are gone. Your
home is no more. They played the last hand of that most dangerous of
games, and lost. The Earth is dead."
He smiled a tight, grim smile as he thought: At least I won't have to
carry a lantern to them; they'll see me coming by my own glow. _Glow
little glow worm, glimmer, glimmer...._
* * * * *
Seligman threaded his way through the tortured wreckage and crumpled
metalwork of what had been a towering structure of shining-planed glass
and steel and plastic. Even though he knew he was alone, Seligman
turned and looked back over his shoulder, sensing he was being watched.
He had had that feeling many times, and he knew it for what it was. It
was Death, standing straddle-legged over the face of the land, casting
shadow and eternal silence upon it. The only light came from the lone
man stalking toward the rocket standing sentry like a pillar of January
ice in the center of the blast area.
His fingers twitched as he thought of the two years' work that had
gone into erecting that shaft of beryllium. Innumerable painstaking
trips to and from the junk heaps of that field, pirating pieces from
other ships, liberating cases of parts from bombed-out storage sheds,
relentlessly forcing himself on, even when exhaustion cried its claim.
Seligman had not been a scientist or a mechanic. But determination,
texts on rocket motors, and the original miracle of finding an only
partially-destroyed ship with its drive still intact had provided him
with a means to leave this place of death.
It was one of the latest model ships; a _Smith_ class cruiser with
conning bubble set far back on the tapered nose, and the ugly black
depressions behind which the Bergsil cannons rested on movable tracks.
He climbed the hull-ladder into the open inspection hatch, finding his
way easily, even without a torch. His fingers began running over the
complicated leads of the drive-components, checking and re-checking
what he already knew was sound and foolproof--or as foolproof as an
amateur could make them.
Now that it was ready, and all that remained were these routine
check-tests and loading the food for the journey, he found himself more
terrified of leaving than of remaining alone till he died--and when
that might be with his stamina he had no idea.
How would they receive a man as transformed as he? Would they not
instinctively fear, mistrust, despise him? _Am I stalling?_ The
question suddenly formed in his mind, causing his sure inspection to
falter. Had he been purposely putting the takeoff date further and
further ahead? Using the checks and other tasks as further attempts to
stall? His head began to ache with the turmoil of his thoughts.
Then he shook himself in disgust. The tests were necessary, it was
stressed repeatedly in all of the texts lying about the floor of the
drive chamber.
His hands shook, but that same impetus which had carried him for two
years forced him to complete the checkups. Just as dawn oozed up over
the outline of the tatters that had been New York, he finished his work
on the ship.
Without pause, sensing he must race, not with time, but with the doubts
raging inside him, he climbed back down the ladder and began loading
food boxes. They were stacked neatly to one side of a hand-powered lift
he had restored. The hard rubber containers of concentrates and the
bulbs of carefully-sought-out liquids made an imposing and somewhat
perplexing sight.
Food is the main problem, he told himself. If I should get past a point
of no return and find my food giving out, my chances would be nil. I'll
have to wait till I can find more stores of food. He estimated the time
needed for the search and realized it might be months, perhaps even
another year till he had accrued enough from the wasted stores within
any conceivable distance.
In fact, finding a meal in the city, after he had carted box after box
of edibles out to the rocket, had become an increasingly more difficult
job. Further, he suddenly realized he had not eaten since the day
before.
The day before?
He had been so engrossed in the final touches of the ship he had
completely neglected to eat. Well, it had happened before, even before
the blast. With an effort he began to grope back, trying to remember
the last time he _had_ eaten. Then it became quite clear to him. It
leaped out and dissolved away all the delays he had been contriving.
_He had not eaten in three weeks._
Seligman had known it, of course. But it had been buried so deeply that
he only half-feared it. He had tried to deny the truth, for when that
last seemingly insurmountable problem was removed, there was nothing
but his own inadequacies to prevent his leaving.
Now it came out, full-bloom. The treatments and radiation had done more
than make him merely impervious to mild perils. He no longer needed to
eat! He boggled at the concept for a moment, shaken by the realization
that he had not recognized the fact before.
He had heard of anaerobic bacteria or yeasts that could derive their
energy from other sources, without the normal oxidation of foods.
Bringing the impossible to relatively homely terms made it easier for
him to accept. Maybe it was even possible to absorb energy directly. At
least he felt no slightest twinge of hunger, even after three weeks of
back-breaking work without eating.
Probably he would have to take along a certain amount of proteins to
replenish the body tissue he expended. But as for the bulky boxes
of edibles dotting the space around the ship, most were no longer a
necessity.
Now that he had faced up to the idea that he had been delaying through
fear of the trip itself, and that there was nothing left to stop his
leaving almost immediately, Seligman again found himself caught up in
the old drive.
He was suddenly intent on getting the ship into the air and beyond.
* * * * *
Dusk mingled with the blotching of the sun before Seligman was ready.
It had not been stalling this time, however. The sorting and packing of
needed proteins took time. But now he was ready. There was nothing to
keep him on Earth.
He took one last look around. It seemed the thing to do. Sentimentalism
was not one of Seligman's more outstanding traits, but he did it in
preparation for anyone who might ask him, "What did it look like--at
the end?" It was with a twinge of regret that he brought the fact to
mind; he had never really _looked_ at his sterile world in the two
years he had been preparing to leave it. One became accustomed to
living in a pile of rubble, and after a bit it no longer offered even
the feel of an environment.
He climbed the ladder into the ship, carefully closing and dogging the
port behind him. The chair was ready, webbing flattened back against
the deep rubber pile of its seat and backrest. He slid into it and
swung the control box down on its ball-swivel to a position before his
face.
He drew the top webbing across himself and snapped its triple-lock
clamps into place. Seligman sat in the ship he had not even bothered to
name, fingers groping for the actuator button on the arm of the chair,
glowing all the while, weirdly, in the half-light of the cabin.
So this was to be the last picture he might carry with him to the
heavens: a bitter epitaph to a race misspent. No warning; it was too
late for such puny action. All was dead and haunted on the face of the
Earth. No blade of grass dared rise; no small life murmured in its
burrows and caves, in the oddly dusty skies, or for all he knew, to the
very bottom of the Cayman Trench. There was only silence. The silence
of a graveyard.
He pushed the button.
The ship began to rise, waveringly. There was a total lack of the
grandeur he remembered when the others had left. The ship sputtered and
coughed brokenly as it climbed on its imperfect drive. Tremors shook
the cabin and Seligman could feel something wrong, vibrating through
the chair and floor into his body.
Its flames were not so bright or steady as those other take-offs, but
it continued to rise and gather speed. The hull began to glow as the
rocket lifted higher into the dust-filled sky.
Acceleration pressed down on Seligman, though not as much as he
had expected. It was merely uncomfortable, not punishing. Then he
remembered that he was not of the same stamp as those who had preceded
him.
His ship continued to pull itself up out of the Earth's atmosphere. The
hull oranged, then turned cherry, then straw-yellow, as the coolers
within its skin fought to counteract the blasting fury.
Again and again Seligman could feel the _wrongness_ of the climb.
Something was going to give!
As the bulkheads to his right began to strain and buckle, he knew what
it was. The ship had not been built or re-welded by trained experts,
working in teams with the latest equipment. He had been one lone
determined man, with only book experience to back him. Now his errors
were about to tell.
The ship passed beyond the atmosphere, and Seligman stared in horror as
the plates cracked and shattered outwards. He tried to scream as the
air shrieked outwards, but it was already impossible.
Then he fainted.
* * * * *
When the ship passed the moon, Seligman still sat, his body held in
place by the now-constricted webbing, facing the gaping squares and
sundered metal that had been the cabin wall.
Abruptly, the engines cut off. As though it were a signal, Seligman's
eyes fluttered and opened wide.
He stared at the wall, his reviving brain grasping the final truth. The
last vestige of humanity had been clawed from him. He no longer needed
air to live.
His throat constricted, his belly knotted, and the blood that should
theoretically be boiling pounded thickly in his throat. His last
kinship with those he was searching was gone. If he had been a freak
before, what was he _now_?
The turmoil fought itself out in him as the ship sped onward and he
faced what he had become, what he must do.
He was more than a messenger, now. He was a shining symbol of the end
of all humanity on Earth, a symbol of the evil their kind had done. The
men out there would never treasure him, welcome him, or build proud
legends around him. But they could never deny him. He was a messenger
from the grave.
They would see him in the airless cabin, even before he landed. They
would never be able to live with him, but they would have to listen to
him, and to believe.
Seligman sat in the crash-chair in the cabin that was dark except for
the eerie glow that was part of him. He sat there, lonely and eternally
alone. And slowly, a grim smile grew on his lips.
The bitter purpose that had been forced on him was finally clear.
For two years, he had fought to find an escape from the death and
loneliness of ruined Earth. Now that was impossible. One Seligman was
enough.
Alone? He hadn't known the meaning of the word before! It would be his
job to make _sure_ that he was alone--alone among his people, until the
end of time.
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