"It is a thing," the old man said, "that I cannot tell you.”
"Perhaps we can come back and see you again," said Caroline. "After all this trouble is over.”
"No, my child," he said. "You will never come, for ours are lives that never should have met. You represent the beginning and I represent the end.
And I am proud that the Earth's last man could have been of service to one of the beginners.”
They fastened down their helmets and walked toward the door.
"I will walk with you to your ship," said the old man. "I do not walk a great deal now, for the cold and the thin air bother me. I must be getting old.”
Their feet whispered through the sand and the wind keened above the desert, a shrill-voiced wind that played an eternal overture for the stage of desolation old Earth had become.
"I live with ghosts," said the old man as they walked toward the ship.
"Ghosts of men and events and great ideals that built a mighty race.
"Probably you wonder that I resemble a man so much. Perhaps you thought that men, in time to come, would evolve into specialized monstrosities — great, massive brains that had lost the power of locomotion, or bundles of emotional reactions, unstable as the very wind, or foolish philosophers, or, worse yet, drab realists. But we became none of these things. We kept our balance. We kept our feet on the ground when dreams filled our heads.”