The Essential Ellison Part 3

[This essay was originally published in 1976. It has been chronologically updated, current as of July 2000]

I wrote it on a kitchen table in Lester and Evelyn del Rey's dining room in Red Bank, New Jersey, in April of 1955. It was the first story of the many I'd written since I was ten years old that actually sold. I received something slightly less than a penny-and-a-half per word for its 3000 word length: forty dollars. It was my first professional sale and I was twenty-one years old.

There was an English professor named Shedd at Ohio State University in 1954. He told me I had no talent, could not write, ought to forget ever trying to make a living from the craft of writing, and that even if I did manage to eke out some sort of low-level existence through dint of sheer, dogged persistence, I would never write anything of consequence, would never make a name for myself, and would sink into the dust of oblivion justifiably forgotten by lovers of properly constructed literature.

I told him to go f.u.c.k himself.

I was thrown out of Ohio State University in January of 1955, went home to Cleveland to marshal my thoughts and consider my options. I spent three months publis.h.i.+ng what turned out to be the final issue of my science fiction fanzine, Dimensions, and then packed what little I could carry, and sprinted for New York, my dear mother weeping in the background.

In the Fifties, New York was Mecca for writers. There was a vitality, a gauche wildness about New York City that called all tyro writers. James Thurber had come out of Ohio, as had Ruth McKenney and Milton Caniff and Earl Wilson and Herbert Gold. It was a terrific place to come from: the very apotheosis of America, the mythic boondock from which the pepsinogen Ellison would emerge, surfeited with talent, festooned with all the proper mid-American credentials, shuckin' and jivin', ready to sweep the fallen banner of contemporary epopee from the dust where Faulkner and Steinbeck and Nathanael West and Dos Pa.s.sos had dropped it in their rush toward posterity and the grave.

I arrived in New York and had nowhere to live.

Lester and Evelyn took me in for a while. And in their dining room I wrote "Glowworm." I needed a scientific rationale for an impossible plot-line. Lester suggested anaerobic bacteria, a microorganism able to live without the presence of free oxygen. It was one of the few times I was ever anything even remotely resembling a "science fiction" writer. I was a fantasist and didn't know it.

It took me two days to write the story. I went into the city and tried to sell it. John Campbell at Astounding (now a.n.a.log) rejected it. Horace Gold at Galaxy rejected it. James Quinn at If rejected it. Anthony Boucher at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction rejected it. Half a dozen other editors at the lesser sf magazines flouris.h.i.+ng during that period rejected it. I put the story aside.

I went to stay with Algis Budrys, a successful sf writer, on West 23rd Street. He had recently married and I was a clot in his marital bloodstream. I went uptown and took a $10 a week room at 611 West 114th Street, across Broadway from Columbia University, in the same old building where Robert Silverberg was living. He was selling regularly, and I envied him more than I can say.

I went down to Brooklyn and joined a kid gang. I commuted back and forth between the ident.i.ty of Phil "Cheech" Beldone and Harlan Ellison. Ten weeks later someone mentioned that one of the Confidential-type magazines, Lowdown, might want to publish an account of my time in the Red Hook gang. I went to see the editor of Lowdown. He said write it up. I wrote "I Ran with a Kid Gang!" and they bought it. Twenty-five bucks. They took my picture to accompany the article. I thought it was my first professional sale. I was wrong.

The magazine was published in August of 1955 with the headline TODAY, YOUNG HOODS! TOMORROW-WHAT? Not one word of what I had written was in the piece. They ran my picture, and the art director had airbrushed a scar on my left cheek. I was still an unpublished writer.

Larry Shaw was, at that time, editing a new magazine called Infinity for Royal Publications. It was a science fiction magazine that featured a department called "Fanfare." Reprints of fanzine articles.

He wanted to use a piece by Dean Grennell that I had published in Dimensions. He asked me if I cared to submit a story. I pulled out "Glowworm" and sent it to him.

About two weeks later he called (there was a pay phone on the wall outside my room at 611 West 114th) and said, "How would you like some dinner?"

I was awfully hungry.

Larry took me to a Chinese restaurant a few blocks downtown on Broadway, and over egg foo yung he told me he was buying "Glowworm." Forty dollars. He handed me a check. I d.a.m.ned near fainted.

It was published in the February 1956 issue of Infinity, which hit the newsstands on December 27th, 1955-but by that time I'd had two or three stories already appear in sf or detective magazines. But it was my first real sale.

That singular, wonderful year, 1955, the first year of writing as a full-time professional, pursuing a craft Dr. Shedd had said I was not cut out for, I sold four stories. The next year, 1956, I sold 100 stories. I have not worked at any other profession since that time.

It has been forty-five years, and I've written or edited seventy-five books, more than seventeen hundred magazine stories, columns and articles, and I'm listed in WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA. I've won nearly every writing award there is to win, in any genre I've attempted, and some I've won in multiples. Lifetime Achievement accolades. Best American Short Stories a few years ago. Harper's, The New Yorker, anthologized by Joyce Carol Oates. One great thing after another for forty-five years.

I like to think I've come a distance from "Glowworm," which the late and very wonderful critic James Blish once called "the single worst story ever published in the field of science fiction." I'm not ashamed of "Glowworm," for all its dreadful syntax and soph.o.m.oric style. How can one be ashamed of the first-born?

And though he's never responded, until about thirteen years ago I sent every single published story to Dr. Shedd at Ohio State. One should never say f.u.c.k you unless one is prepared to back it up.

Now, more than four decades since its first appearance, "Glowworm" is back in print again. This is now only the fourth time it has appeared in print, but seeing it set in type again brings back that night in December of 1955...the warm smells of the Chinese restaurant...the impish grin of dear Larry Shaw...his bulldog pipe clenched in his teeth...as he handed me a forty dollar check that was to change my life from that day to this. There is a G.o.d. For each of us. Mine was named Larry.

Larry Shaw died on April 1, 1985, but not before Robert Silverberg and I were privileged to present him with a special citation of recognition for his years as an editor, at the 42nd World Science Fiction Convention, in Anaheim, California, September 2, 1984, at the Hugo Awards ceremony.

Glowworm.

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 unwavering way in the darkest of nights.

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."

The green glow had been with him for two years, and he was, at last, accustomed to it. It was useful in many ways. Scavenging food without the help of a flashlight could be arduous. Seligman never had that trouble.

Bombed-out groceries and shattered store windows revealed their contents eagerly to his luminous searching.

It had even helped him find the s.h.i.+p.

After his cross-continent search for anyone else left alive, and his return in failure, he had been pa.s.sing through the outskirts of Newark. Night had seemed to come even sooner in the days following the final bombs. It was as though some G.o.d despaired of the sight the Earth presented and shrouded it from sight.

The rubble of Newark was cast low across the land, and the crumble-towered heap that was New York still rose on the horizon.

His glow slid out from him and across the checkered blacktop that had been a s.p.a.ceport. He had taken this route in hopes there might be a port copter or gas-buggy left unimpaired, with fuel miraculously filling the tank. No such miracle had occurred, however, and he was turning to find the highway into New York when his glow reflected back from something a distance away. It was a momentary gleam but it caught his eye. Then he saw the tapered hull of it rising dark against the darker black of the night. It was a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, of course.

Curiosity had sent Seligman hurrying toward it. How had one s.h.i.+p escaped the debacle? Was there a possibility he could liberate parts from it to make a copter or landcar function?

Even the pocked and cratered surface of the blast area could not dim his enthusiasm. His eyes fastened on the s.h.i.+p as, unbidden, thoughts even he would have marveled at rose in his mind.

It was one of the latest model s.h.i.+ps: a Smith cla.s.s cruiser with conning bubble set far back on the tapered nose, and the small, ugly black depressions behind which the Bergsil cannons rested on sliding tracks.

There were a number of places on the hull where repairs had obviously been in progress when the attack came: yawning rectangles revealing naked girdering could be seen. But, improbably, the s.h.i.+p was intact. The drive chambers had not been split, so the tanks of reactor fuel had not exploded. The hull still shone tin-foil bright, and that a.s.sured him the flight deck had not shorted out and caught fire. It appeared, from outside, to be in perfect shape. A windfall of rare caliber.

He circled it several times, in something close to awe. Awe at the strength of this piece of machinery to have withstood everything two frenzied nations at war might throw at it, and still point proudly at the stars it had been built to conquer.

The two years since his discovery had not dimmed in the slightest his recollection of that first glimpse of the s.h.i.+p. As he threaded carelessly through the debris he remembered his reflection s.h.i.+ning back at him from the beryllium skin of the cruiser.

He looked out across the deserted remains that had once been the outskirts of Newark, and in the distance, by the light of a gun-metalled moon, he saw that same s.h.i.+p. The two years of intensive reading and puttering with the few remaining sc.r.a.ps that had been s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps caught on the ground had shown him the fantastic improbability of it all. Every other s.h.i.+p was a total unsalvageable wreck. Parts of s.h.i.+ps had been flung half a mile and been driven through plastic walls. Only that one cruiser, lost in its height among the flattened remnants of its kind.

It had been months after he had found the s.h.i.+p, he recalled, before the idea had come to him. There was no real reason why it should not have occurred immediately, but it hadn't. It had come to him...

He paused in his moonlit hurrying and tried to bring the scene back into sharper focus. Yes, it had been when he had gone into the computer room of the s.h.i.+p. When he had first seen the vessel, he had tried to liberate equipment he could jerry-rig in a copter, but the parts were all heavy-poured-molded and none of them would have fit a small vehicle. So he had abandoned the s.h.i.+p. What good was it?

The weeks following, he remembered, had been singularly annoying. More than just the emptiness of sole owners.h.i.+p of a whole world, those weeks had disturbed him with a thought just beneath the level of recognition.

Then he had found himself drawn back inexplicably to the s.h.i.+p. He climbed the makes.h.i.+ft ladder to the control deck and looked around again as he had weeks before. Nothing. It was still layered with dust, the huge rectangular viewport streaked by rain and dirt, a manual of some sort still turned over like a tiny tent on the arm of the pilot's couch.

Then he had noticed the door to the computer room. He had been slovenly in his search, had overlooked it the first time in his eagerness to get to the drive compartment belowdecks.

The door had been ajar, and he kicked at it, sending it open, noiselessly.

The man was slumped over the puncher, a decaying finger still tip-flattened against a tabulator b.u.t.ton. How had he died? Seligman couldn't tell. Shock? Asphyxiation? No, it couldn't have been that; he looked perfectly normal, no blueness or contortion of the face.

Seligman leaned over, cautiously, to see what he had been coding out. It was a destination verification: USSS 7725, Em 0500 7/22 EARTHPORT ETA 0930 11/5 PROXIMA II. Unfortunately, for the computerman, his estimated time of departure had been indefinitely postponed.

Seligman caught just a glimpse of the dead guy's face before he left the room. It seemed totally unconcerned. Somehow that bothered him. Why wasn't he worried? Didn't he care if the s.h.i.+p sailed across deep s.p.a.ce to Proxima II? It had been the most wonderful achievement of his race when the first s.h.i.+p had made it. Were they so bored, then, that such a thing was commonplace?

Ah! It was left to Seligman to remind them that it was still a remarkable thing.

He left the s.h.i.+p then; but he returned many times, just as he had tonight. He stalked, glowing, under the moon; across the dead land; toward the rocket field where the s.h.i.+p waited. Now he knew why he had gone back that night two years ago. It was clear and, in a way, inescapable.

If only he were not so-so...

His mind faltered at describing himself. If only he had not been changed this way.

Which was not entirely true. There was no longer anyone he might have termed "normal" for comparison. Not only were there no more human beings, 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 colored the word with 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 viewscreen 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 if only he was willing to give up the ancestral home.

Those who had wanted eternity, more than they had wanted a single, tiny planet had gone; out past the Edge; into the wilderness of no return. It would take decades 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 back: we won't be here waiting for you.

So they had gone, leaving Earth to the egocentric and macho barbarians, the great majority of unworthy humanity. They had left behind the poisonous veil of Venus, the waterless desert 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.

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 b.u.t.tons 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, who had failed to get involved, 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, the sound a lost thing in the night.

His mind carried him back through the years to the days near the end of what had certainly been the Last War...because there was 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, had 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 a.s.sault where ordinary men would have collapsed.

Seligman picked his way through the rubble, his aura casting the faintest phosph.o.r.escence across the ruptured metal and plastic trailerings. He paused for a long moment, eyeing the blasted remnants of a fence, to which clung a sign, held to the twined metal by one rusting bolt: NEWARK s.p.a.cEPORTENTRANCE BYAUTHORIZATION ONLY.

Shards of metal sc.r.a.p 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 vast, ominous, cubed structure with no windows and only one door, guarded night and day. If nothing else, they had terrific security. No one knew the intensive experimentation going on behind those steel-reinforced concrete walls. No one knew, not even the men upon whose bodies the experiments were being performed.

It was because of those experiments that Seligman was here now, alone. Because of the myopic little men with their foreign accents and their clippings of skin from his b.u.t.tocks and shoulders, the prying bacteriologists and the snooping endocrine specialists, the epidemiologists and the bloodstream busybodies-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-because none of the other twenty-two had lived-and the radiation, what about all that miserable 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 blasted remnants of that cube 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 a life. That was absolutely the best that could be said for it. A live life. Alive. Nothing else. But at times like this, with the flickering light of his pa.s.sage marked on the ash-littered remains of his past, and everyone he'd known or given a d.a.m.n about, he wondered if it was worth the agony.

He never really approached madness: 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 somehow less troublesome shock of his transformation.

He lived, and to Seligman's blunt manner 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 land, scavenging what little food was left, 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 to the other in search of just one other human to share his torment.

But of course there had been no one.

It had been in Philadelphia, while grubbing inside a broken store window, that he had discovered another symptom of his change.

The jagged gla.s.s pane ripped the s.h.i.+rt through to his skin-but had not damaged him. The flesh showed white for a few seconds, and then even that faded. Seligman experimented cautiously, then recklessly, and found that the radiations, or his treatments, or both, or neither, had indeed worked strange systemic miracles on him. Now: completely impervious to harm of any minor sort; fire, for periods of up to thirteen minutes, if it wasn't at direct flamethrower intensity, did not bother him; sharp edges could no more rip his flesh than they could a piece of treated steel; work produced no calluses; 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 pottered 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 had proved to 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. Seligman summed it up, without soul-searching, in the philosophy, "I can't be any worse off than I am now, so why the h.e.l.l not?"

It didn't matter. Not really. Whatever the reason, he knew by the time his search was over that he had to go out there, wherever in the stars they might be. He had to tell them. 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 glowworm, glimmer, glimmer...

Seligman threaded his way through the wreckage and crumpled metalwork of what had been a towering, s.h.i.+ning structure of paned gla.s.s and steel and pre-stressed concrete. 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 spraddle-legged over the face of the land, casting shadow and eternal silence upon it. Darkness blanketed this sad world. The only light came from the lone man stalking toward the rocket that stood 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 he had expended erecting that shaft of beryllium. Innumerable painstaking trips to and from the junk heaps surrounding the field, pirating pieces from other s.h.i.+ps, liberating cases of parts from bombed-out storage sheds, relentlessly forcing himself on, even when exhaustion cried its claim. Now the rocket was finished.

Seligman had not been a scientist or a mechanic. But determination, texts on rocket motors, and the miracle of an only partially destroyed s.h.i.+p with its drive still intact had provided him with a means to leave this place of death.

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 rechecking what he already knew was sound and foolproof-or as foolproof as an amateur could make them. If he died in the attempt, he had only his lame, inadequate handiwork to blame.

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 new stamina, he had no idea.

How would they receive a creature as...rearranged...as he: part jack o' lantern, part ambulatory reminder of where they had come from, what they had gone to s.p.a.ce to escape? 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 farther and farther ahead? Using the checks and other tasks as further attempts to put off the moment of no turning back? His head began to ache with the turmoil of his thoughts.

Then he shook himself in disgust. The tests were necessary, covered in anyone of the texts lying about the floor of the drive chamber.

His hands shook, but the same inarticulate frenzy, the unquestioned impetus that had driven 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 s.h.i.+p.

Without pause, sensing he must race, not with time, but with the doubts now raging inside him, the fears that had finally broken through, he climbed back down the ladder and began loading food factors. They were stacked neatly to one side of a hand-powered lift he had restored. The interlocking non-frangible 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. Obviously, I can't go yet...subconsciously I must have known that...even without exact information, my good brain did the calculations! I can't leave yet. 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 bay after bay 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 his final preparations, he had completely neglected to eat. Well, this wasn't the first time it had happened...even before the blast. With an effort, he began to grope back in recollection, 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 had been allowed to ignore the knowledge. He had tried to deny the truth, because if that last seemingly insurmountable problem could be removed, there was nothing but his own bottled-up terror to prevent his leaving.