Ten years ago the stories of Robert F. Young were often to be found in the pages of this magazine. Now, after too long an absence, Young returns with a story of considerable subtlety and power, a story based upon the confrontation of mutually opposed subjective and objective value systems, their collision and their resolution—all within the delicate framework of—

THE

ADVENTURES

OF THE LAST

EARTHMAN...

ROBERT F. YOUNG

Illustrated by JEFF JONES

I AM THE LAST EARTHMAN.

I walk into bars, ostensibly to drink, but actually to observe my fellow men, none of whom are wholly human but some of whom have dregs of humanism remaining in their glass. My glass is full; I alone am human. I am the last Earthman.

I sit there in the early hours of the night before the evening blooms, and drink my drinks and listen to my thoughts. The bar I frequent most is called The Candlelight Cafe and derives its name from candles burning in rose-colored globes along its walls. The bar itself is square, which is ideal for an observer. I go there every Saturday night, to observe.

It is Saturday night now, and I am coming through the door. I see myself as I enter. I am quite tall, and time has been kind to me. I hold myself militarily erect, and my mien, my appearance are those of a much younger man. I do not stand out from the crowd; neither do I blend into it. This is as it should be: an observer should not be gray. I am wearing a dark-blue coat and slacks of a similar but slightly lighter hue; as it is cold outside (the month is March), I have a maroon muffler around my neck. Color, but neither too little nor too much. Grayness is for those who wish to efface themselves, and this I could never bear to do—not even in the company of my enemies.

It is early yet, and the bar is not yet full. The band has arrived, but has not yet begun to play. There are a number of empty barstools. I choose one next to two girls who are obviously together. I do not do this because they are unescorted and I intend to make advances, but because the location affords the best available view of the room.

I order vodka and orange from one of the three bartenders on duty. I light up a cigarette and settle back to observe.

I AM THE LAST EARTHMAN.

During the latter years of the Great War at the time when the invasion from the stars occurred I was operating a one-man radio station on a lonely Arctic island. When the aliens came down from their orbiting spaceships and entered into the minds of the peoples of Earth, my isolation saved me from suffering a similar ignominious fate. Other factors as well may have contributed to my salvation, but this is mere conjecture.

The invasion was both silent and subtle. I was unaware that it had taken place, even after I got back to Base. No marked changes were evident either in the troops stationed there or in the inhabitants of the mainland town where Base was located. The changes were to come later.

At length the war ended—whether the aliens expedited or prolonged it, I do not know—and I returned home. Only then did I detect changes in my fellow human beings. While primarily these changes had to do with sexual conduct, they involved others aspects of human behavior as well. But I ascribed them to the war. All wars bring about changes, and the changes are never for the better. I remained as unaware of the aliens' presence as they—thankfully—remained unaware of mine.

THE GIRL NEAREST TO ME notices that I am smoking and have no ashtray. She shoves hers closer to me so that we can share it. I thank her for the courtesy, and our eyes meet.

EVEN NOW, looking back, I am unable to pinpoint the exact moment when I first realized that I was the last Earthman—that everyone in the world except myself had in his or her mind a transparent alien symbiont of which he/she was utterly unaware. Probably my awakening to the truth was geared to the increasing influence these tiny creatures from the stars had upon their hosts, and became total only when that influence reached a degree where human mores were replaced by alien ones—a degree where humans, to all intents and purposes, became aliens.

"The shepherd in Virgil," wrote Dr. Johnson in his letter to Lord Chesterfield, "grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks." I, too, grew at last acquainted with Love, and found that the rocks had fallen upon him and become his tomb.

THERE IS A FLUTTER of excitement along the opposite section of the bar. Today is the birthday of one of the waitresses, and in honor of the occasion the chef has baked her a cake. On it burns a big candle bearing the numerals "21”.

The band strikes up Happy Birthday, the male vocalist sings the words, and afterward everyone applauds. Her face aglow, the waitress blows out the candle, then cuts the cake into bite-size wedges. They are passed from hand to hand around the bar, and one of them eventually finds its way to me. The girl I am sitting next to starts to hand it to me, but I say, "No thanks," and she passes it back. Our eyes meet again, and she says, "I wish I were twenty-one," and I tell her that I thought she was, which is true, although I can see now that she will never know twenty-nine again, and probably not thirty either.

HUMANISM IS NOT a quality that can be totally obliterated, and some aliens have more than mere dregs remaining in their glass. My ex-wife's glass, for example, was 1/3 full. I married her not long after my return from the war, having fallen in love with her at first sight. Naturally our marriage could not endure for long, but that it endured for as long as it did was owing to the unusual amount of humanism her glass contained. But in the last analysis, it contained too little, and before five years had passed she walked out on me without a word, bringing our tragic misalliance to an end.

Fortunately, a symbiont cannot see into another host's mind, and thus cannot tell whether that mind is occupied without actually entering it, something one of them would never dream of doing for such a reason, since they assume in their arrogance that the takeover of the human race is complete. On the rare occasions when they wish to communicate with one another, they do so via the hosts' vocal chords or hands, and always is such a manner that the host thinks he is communicating. Thus, a symbiont asking questions of another has no way of knowing definitely whether the answers emanate from the host or the host's occupant. It is to this lack of direct contact on their part that I owe my continued independence. My ex-wife knew I was different from the rest of the human race—in fact, she frequently said so. But the symbiont in her mind never suspected why. Thankfully, no children resulted from our not-quite-five years of cohabitation.

Thankfully, also, I am an only child. My parents were too busy spiting each other to raise a large family. They separated when I was in high school; shortly afterward, the war broke out, and I enlisted. After I came out of the service, I never went near either of them again. I never will.

THE GIRL I am sitting next to (I continue to think of her as a girl although I realize now that she is a mature woman) has a remarkable way of looking at a person. She seems to pour all of herself into a single brief glance and reach out and touch you with her eyes. I find myself wondering whether it is a cultivated characteristic or a natural one. I decide that it does not matter.

All of the barstools are occupied by this time, and we have moved our own closer together. She tells me she has a fourteen-year old son and is thirty-five, not twenty-one. She adds that she is separated from her husband. I do not tell her my age; obviously she has taken me for a younger man, and I see no point in disenchanting her. Her sister, she says, is thirty-six, and is separated from her husband also. I realize that the other girl is the sister she is referring to, and I note the resemblance between them. The other girl's black hair is elaborately coiffed, and she is Junoesque and strikingly attractive. The girl next to me is Junoesque, too, but she has brown hair instead of black, and there is a touch of gentleness about her face. I know of course that it is a false gentleness; but false or not, I find this alien female far more appealing than most of her kind, and in the recesses of my mind, in the cold clinical compartment that I reserve for reasoning and which is as yet unaffected by my vodkas and orange, a red light begins to flash on and off.

On and off. On and off. On and off.

THAT I NEVER once betrayed my true nature during the years that antedated my awakening to the truth is largely attributable to two factors: (1) unaware that I was the last Earthman, I could not directly betray the fact; and (2) unaware that everyone in the world except myself was an alien, I could not very well allude to anyone as such.

It is only since my awakening that my danger has become acute, for now I am in possession of a weapon with which I can easily destroy myself, directly or by implication. Therefore, I must constantly beware of making a slip of the tongue, and never let myself be drawn into discussions that touch upon the subject I am most sensitive about.

THE GIRL AND I are sitting very close together now, and we smoke and talk and drink and laugh, and look frequently into each other's eyes. All the while, the red warning light in the clinical compartment of my mind continues to flash. On and off. On and off. A second rank of drinkers has formed behind the first, and the three bartenders are pressed to keep up with the increasing demand for drinks. The band plays louder and louder, and the music intermingles with the voices and the laughter and the smoke.

On and off. On and off. On and off.

ALTHOUGH TO DATE I have been successful in hiding my true nature, I am afraid that someday I shall inadvertently expose it. This is because of my irresistible urge to observe aliens when their guards are down, and because the only way I can do so without attracting attention to myself is by behaving as they do. This often entails my drinking far more than I should, and augments the odds on my making a slip of the tongue and my being drawn into discussions that involve treading on dangerous ground. Equally as distressing, it frequently robs me of my usual reserve and causes me to experience a sense of oneness with these morally degenerate creatures who masquerade as human beings.

More distressing yet is my proclivity to blank out after I reach a certain stage. Often on the day following an evening of prolonged observation I am unable to recall what I said or what I did during the final stages, or even how I got home.

A THIRD RANK of drinkers has formed behind the second. It is comprised largely of late-comers who have no real hope of penetrating as far as the bar and who are content to stand and gawp at what is going on. This rank causes me no concern; it is the second rank that I must beware of, or rather that part of it immediately behind me. But despite myself, I keep forgetting there are eavesdroppers nearby, and it is only when I periodically visit the men's room that I am reminded of their presence. The girl guards my barstool for me when I go, and I guard hers for her when she goes. It is an agreeable as well as a practical arrangement.

I buy a round of drinks for her, her sister and myself. During the lull occasioned by the transaction, they begin talking with each other. The sister is cynical, and has mistaken my intentions. "All a man ever sees in a woman is a piece of ass," she says, loudly enough for me to hear. I can tell from the glance she throws in my direction that she thinks such language will shock me, and a while ago it would have. But it does not shock me now, and I look back at her with complete nonchalance. The warning light in the clinical compartment of my mind still flashes on and off, but the flashes are growing weaker and farther apart. It is as though the battery is running down.

WHILE I HAVE ALWAYS thought of the aliens' take-over of the peoples of Earth as an invasion, the term does not truly apply. "Invasion" connotes a concerted, organized action for the purpose of conquest. The take-over of the human race has been nothing of the sort.

To aid myself in comprehending the true nature of the take-over, I have developed an analogy: a fleet of naval vessels anchors off a primitive South Sea island; the admiral grants a week's shore-leave to as many of the enlisted personnel as there are native quarters available and puts the rest on a waiting list, their leave subject to the construction of additional quarters; the sailors swarm over the island in successive waves and after several days make it, to all intents and purposes, their own.

The island in the present instance is Earth; the fleet is an armada of leviathan spaceships from the stars; the native quarters are human hosts; and the sailors are tiny bisexual symbionts who enjoy copulating but cannot do so except vicariously, and a week of whose time equals a century—if not more—of ours. Like most sailors on shoreleave, they are antagonistic, irresponsible, and prone to get drunk.

This is not precisely what occurred—the ways of the alien beings are by their very nature incomprehensible to an Earthman. But it reduces what occured to dimensions that the human mind can grasp.

THE GIRL'S SISTER remarks that men can't really be blamed for regarding women the way the do, nor women for regarding men the way they do. "After all," she says, "what else is there in life but sex?" I am reminded of what Hemingway said when asked why he no longer wished to live, and I repeat his words as well as I can remember them.

ALTHOUGH IN THE BEGINNING there were not nearly enough hosts to accommodate the fleet's enlisted personnel, the upswing in population that followed the war soon eased the shortage, and by now, in the year of our Lord 1973, most of the sailors are on leave. Someday, if proliferation continues at its present rate and there is no reason to suppose it will not, there will be more hosts than there are sailors to occupy them, but I do not think that this will happen in my lifetime. In a perverse way, I hope that it does not: being the last Earthman may not be an enviable distinction, but it is the only one I have ever known. One thing about the symbionts has always puzzled me. Clearly from their very nature they can exist outside the mind of a host or outside the specialized environments of the ships for only a limited period of time. What, then, does one of them do when its host dies and it must wait to be assigned to another? Does it return to its ship or does it take up temporary quarters and wait till the assignment comes through?

Obviously, it must return to its ship. No human mind could accommodate two alien sailors for more than a few moments, and, discounting the minds of subhuman creatures, there would be no other quarters available.

IN ESSENCE, what Hemingway said (or is reputed to have said) was that life is not worth living unless a man can work well, and enjoy food, booze and sex. This coincides in part with what the girl's sister said, and she is pleased to have her credo endorsed by so famous a personage.

I realize that I have implied that I, too, endorse the doctrine that Sex is All—a tenet that goes against the grain of my strongest principles. I hasten to set the two sisters straight. "While it's natural that sex should play a major role in our lives," I tell them, "it's unnatural that we should blow it up into an immense red balloon and parade down the street with it, shouting, `Hallelujah!' "

At this point I notice that I have two full vodkas and orange sitting on the bar, and I pause long enough to down them. Abruptly the room seems to shift, the rose-colored candlelight to take on a deeper hue . . . Subtly, the space which I and the two sisters occupy becomes the focal point of the room, of the world, of the universe; all else spreads infinitely out from this tiny rose-colored atoll like a meaningless and softly murmuring sea. The warning light in the clinical compartment of my mind gives a final flicker and goes out; simultaneously, the scene seems to freeze. It is as though time has stopped; and yet, although it has stopped in one sense, it goes ineluctably on in another

THE TWO SISTERS are staring at me. The eavesdroppers have moved in closer. I do not even lower my voice. "To regard sex as an end in itself is an alien, not a human attitude," I say loudly. "In order for it truly to become an end, it must first be blessed by Love. But the human race has murdered Love and cut off his head and his right hand. They have adopted the values of drunken sailors from the stars and thrown away their own. They have transformed the Earth into a cosmic Candlelight Cafe. They have become aliens—"

I pause. The two sisters are putting on their coats; they are moving on, they say, to another cafe. They tell me politely that they have enjoyed talking with me, but they do not invite me to go with them. I invite myself. But somehow by the time I reach the door they are all the way across the street and climbing into their car. I watch them drive off, feeling like a fool; then I get into my own car and somehow drive the half dozen miles to the efficiency-apartment complex where I live. My tiredness overwhelms me as I climb the stairs to my flat. Somehow I find my way to my bedroom, and undress and get into bed. Sleeps descends upon me like a sledgehammer the moment I turn out the light.

I awake with a black headache. I lie there with my eyes closed, the events of the preceding evening running through my mind like an old movie. When the movie reaches the part where I downed the two vodkas and orange in a row, the film begins to flicker. A moment later, it breaks.

I force myself to open my eyes, to confront the day. My bed-stand clock says 10:25; late-morning sunlight fills the room. I get up, wash, dress and go into the kitchen. I put water on for coffee. While waiting for it to boil, I run the movie through again. The film breaks in exactly the same place.

I go into the living room and look through the window down into the parking lot. A light dusting of snow covers the withered grass and the parked cars. My car is standing in the slot reserved for it, equidistant from two others. This reassures me, but not very much.

Again, I run the movie through my mind. Again, the film breaks in the same place. It has a sound-track, but not a very good one. In the final scene I am talking loudly. I am saying something about sex being a big red balloon. In God's name, what did I say after that?

In God's name. In God's name. In God's name.

DURING THE FINAL YEAR of our marriage, my wife accused me of drinking more than I should, and to humor her I went to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, after a number of lengthy interviews, told me that I drank to excess because I had erected a barrier of fear and mistrust between myself and the rest of the world and could breach it only by resorting to alcohol in large quantities. He said that I was incapable of establishing meaningful relationships, and that it was my periodic need to establish them that caused me to breach the barrier. Basically, he said I drank because of a suppressed need to be loved. My problem was compounded, he said, by a Victorian attitude toward sex which I had acquired during my youth and which I had superimposed upon a perfectly normal sexual urge.

He recommended group-therapy, and offered to make the necessary arrangements. I never went near him again.

AT NOON, I force myself to drive to the shopping center for a Sunday paper. Every other second I check my rearview mirror to see whether anyone is following me. I know that I am overreacting--that even if I did betray myself last night I need fear nothing from symbionts who already have hosts—but I cannot help myself.

Traces of snow lie along the curbs and upon the hoods and roofs of parked cars. The sky is a brisk bright blue. I buy the paper quickly and hurry home. But I do not read it—I watch TV instead. Each time I hear a car pull into the parking lot I go to the window and look down, fearful that someone has come for me. I keep telling myself that no one will, but it does no good.

It should be obvious to me by this time that I did not betray myself, for if I had I would already be occupied. Word of my availability would have been sent out immediately to the fleet via whatever means of Earth-to-space communication the symbionts employ, and a sailor—either one waiting to go on leave or one recently vacated by the death of its host—would have been informed of whatever it was I said that impugned my alienness, and tentatively assigned to me.

But if there were a sailor in my mind, would I be aware of the fact? Wouldn't I, like everyone before me, simply regard my new values as normal and simultaneously regard my old ones as abnormal? Moreover, wouldn't it already have cancelled out my awareness of it and its kind, and wouldn't it have supplied my memory with what I said last night so that when the need arose I would be able either to deny or to compensate for my words?

No, there is no symbiont in my mind. If there were, I wouldn't be sitting here wondering what I said after I blanked out—I would know what I said. And I wouldn't be sitting here worrying about becoming an alien—I would be one.

FOR MANY YEARS after my awakening I entertained doubts as to the validity of my conclusions concerning the takeover of the Earth by alien sailors from the stars. I was certain my reasoning had been flawless, but until I had some sort of substantiation, the truth which I had so painstakingly and conscientiously arrived at could be classified only as theory. This despite the fact that no other single cause could account for the moral degeneration that had taken place in the human race during the decades following the war.

Substantiation finally came during the summer of '70 in the form of the aliens' flagship. I do not know why it descended from the heavens that sultry afternoon in June, but descend it did. It hovered awesomely in the sky, perhaps a mile above the ground, dark and amorphous and sheathed with jagged fire. Trailing behind it, curving through half of the heavens, was its rainbow-hued flag.

It hovered there for no more than a quarter of an hour, then vanished as subtly as it had appeared, seeming to disperse into the sky. Those of my alien-occupied contemporaries who also must have seen it probably ascribed it to natural phenomena. They could not have admitted the evidence of their eyes even if they had wanted to. And so the alien flagship came and went, and only I—the last Earthman—bore witness to the event.

I DO NOT take a drink till midafternoon. For convenience, I bring the bottle into the living room and keep it beside me as I watch TV. Toward midnight, I doze off, and when I awake the screen is empty. I mix a good strong nightcap to see me through the rest of the night. I make certain all the doors are locked; then I undress and go to bed.

I put in a terrible day at the insurance agency where I work. When at last it is done, I buy a sixpack of beer and go directly home. I spend the evening drinking beer and watching TV. I do not feel up to anything else. After I finish the last bottle, I go straight to bed.

By Tuesday I am feeling better, and the old movie, with the exception of a few disconnected scenes, has faded from my mind. On Wednesday, my confidence begins coming back. Blank-outs are inexorable, and I shall never know what I said during mine; but I am certain by this time that whatever it was, it did not betray me for what I am.

Thursday and Friday breeze by. I am down to two bottles of beer a night. Saturday morning I sleep late; Saturday night finds me parking my car behind the Candlelight Cafe, looking forward to a pleasant evening of observation.

As I open the barroom door, a sudden thought occurs to me: I am well-known in the Candlelight Cafe, but by face, not by name; perhaps a symbiont has been assigned to me after all, but does not know where to find me and is waiting for someone to point me out!

Waiting, moreover, in the very room I am about to enter.

It is true that my observations of the aliens over the years have led me to conclude that a host would not be able to accommodate two symbionts simultaneously for more than a few moments; but I do not know this. Like a number of my other conclusions, it is, of necessity, an assumption.

There is a good chance, then, that I may be walking into a trap.

However, I refuse to be daunted, and step boldly into the room.

Just within the door, I pause.

The two sisters are sitting at the bar. A short distance from them sits one of the drinkers who stood behind me last Saturday night. All three have turned on their barstools and are facing the door.

However, this is not why I have paused.

It is because they are pointing at me.

I start to turn, intending to bolt from the room. Then I see that in opening the door I have inadvertently let in a big brown dog, and realize it is he the two sisters and the eavesdropper are pointing at, not I.

I stand there feeling like a fool.

THERE MUST be a limit to how high on the slopes of unreason a man can climb; and it must be that when he reaches that limit he stumbles over a commonplace object, loses his footing and comes tumbling back down to earth.

I can think of no other answer.

In my case, the commonplace object is a scene. In the scene, three perfectly ordinary people are pointing at a perfectly ordinary dog which a third person has just let into a perfectly ordinary room. There are other people present, but they do not count.

It is the very ordinariness of this scene that lends it its effect. In one form or another, it has been enacted a thousand—a million times. And perhaps this is why a "last Earthman" won't fit into it.

Whatever the answer, the fantastic structure which I put together brick by preposterous brick to rationalize my failure to identify with the human race and my inability to adapt to change comes tumbling down around me, and for a devastating moment I see myself as I really am: a man grown old without once having tasted life, hopelessly lost in a rapidly changing world, clinging desperately to values he refuses to admit are dead; creating spaceships out of rainclouds, aliens out of hostile looks, and fears out of black hangovers.

AS I TURN miserably to leave, I see that the dog is sitting at my feet, looking up at me. His golden eyes contain a preternatural intelligence. Subtly, the intelligence reaches out and embraces me, drives away my despair...

The animal gives a low whine, then slinks through the doorway and out into the night.

I close the door behind him.

Deliberately I walk over to the bar and sit down next to the girl with the brown hair. I buy drinks for her, her sister and myself.

They thank me, but it is clear from their icy looks that they want no part of me. After what I said last Saturday night about alien attitudes and Love being dead and humans living it up like drunken sailors, I do not blame them. Why, I must have been insane! ...

Well I am sane now. To prove it, both to the two sisters and myself, I make a pass at the one with the brown hair. "Like I said," says the black-haired one triumphantly, "all a man ever sees in a woman is a piece of ass!"

"What else is there to see?" I ask, and the ice in their eyes starts to melt, and the future, warm and wide and welcoming, spreads out before me like a sunlit plain; and Love, who is not dead after all, steps out of a grove of little trees, and waves. His aspect has changed: he has hooves, his legs are hairy, and from his forehead sprouts a pair of horns.

—ROBERT F. YOUNG