me an authority on the
Southwest with many regional volumes to his credit: _For God and Texas_,
_America's Heartland_, _The Southwest_, and _San Antonio, City of the
Sun_. But he never lost his interest in space travel, assisting Hubertus
Strughold on the writing of _The Green and Red Planet_, a scientific
appraisal of the possibilities of life on the planet Mars published in
1953. He also served for a time as London correspondent for FORTUNE
MAGAZINE._

It is strange to be alone, and so cold. To be the last man on earth....

The snow drives silently about me, ceaselessly, drearily. And I am
isolated in this tiny white, indistinguishable corner of a blurred
world, surely the loneliest creature in the universe. How many thousands
of years is it since I last knew the true companionship? For a long time
I have been lonely, but there were people, creatures of flesh and blood.
Now they are gone. Now I have not even the stars to keep me company, for
they are all lost in an infinity of snow and twilight here below.

If only I could know how long it has been since first I was imprisoned
upon the earth. It cannot matter now. And yet some vague
dissatisfaction, some faint instinct, asks over and over in my throbbing
ears: What year? What year?

It was in the year 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was
then a very great man who performed operations on his fellows to compose
their vitals--we called such men surgeons. John Granden wore the title
"Sir" before his name, in indication of nobility by birth according to
the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir
John's, if I must be precise, for, while he had achieved an enormous
reputation as a surgeon, he always felt that his real work lay in the
experimental end of his profession. He was, in a way, a dreamer, but a
dreamer who could make his dreams come true.

I was a very close friend of Sir John's. In fact, we shared the same
apartments in London. I have never forgotten that day when he first
mentioned to me his momentous discovery. I had just come in from a long
sleigh-ride in the country with Alice, and I was seated drowsily in the
window-seat, writing idly in my mind a description of the wind and the
snow and the grey twilight of the evening. It is strange, is it not,
that my tale should begin and end with the snow and the twilight.

Sir John opened suddenly a door at one end of the room and came hurrying
across to another