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 outby the twisted wreckage rising obscenely against the hills, Seligmancontinued 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 hisway in the darkest night. It had been with him for two years now.
Though Seligman had never been a melodramatic man, he had more thanonce 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 havetermed "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 thesearching wind, picking its way cautiously between the slow-rustinggirders 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 inself-pity, hopelessness and hatred.
"They were at fault!" he screamed at the tortured piles of masonry inhis path.
Across the viewer of his mind, thoughts twisted nimbly, knowing theroute, having traversed it often before.
Man had reached for the stars, finding them within his reach were hewilling to give up his ancestral home.
Those who had wanted space more than one planet had gone, out past theEdge, into the wilderness of no return. It would take years to getThere, and the Journey Back was an unthinkable one. Time had set itsseal 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 ofMars, the ice of Pluto, the sun-bake of Mercury. There had been noEarthmen left in the system of Sol. Except, of course, on Earth—whichhad been left to madmen.
And they had been too busy throwing things at each other to worryabout the stars.
The men who knew no other answer stayed and fought. They were the oneswho fathered the Attilas, the Genghis Khans, the Hitlers. They werethe ones who pushed the buttons and launched the missiles that chasedeach other across the skies, fell like downed birds, exploded, blasted,cratered, chewed-out and carved-out the face of the planet. They werealso the little men who had failed to resist, even as they had failedto 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 lostthing in the night.
His mind carried him back through the years to the days near the endof what had to be the Last War, because there would be no one left tofight another. He was carried back again to the sterile white roomswhere the searching instruments, the prying needles, the cluckingscientists, all labored over him and his group.
They were to be a last-ditch throwaway. They were the indestructiblemen: a new breed of soldier, able to live through the searing heat ofthe bombs; to walk unaffected through the purgatory hail of radiation,to assault where ordinary men would have collapsed long before.
Seligman picked his way ove