Farewell Message

An alien visitor has spent years studying humanity. His spaceship sits squarely in the middle of an airport runway while he gathers notes on Terran customs, habits, and especially marriage. Governments tolerate the inconvenience and the quiet condescension that follows him everywhere, hoping nothing will provoke the powerful outsider who casually trades miraculous devices like cheap trinkets. At last the visitor prepares to leave. Cameras gather as he climbs the gangplank of his ship and delivers a farewell message to the world. He speaks calmly about Earth’s quarrelsome nature and predicts that humanity will eventually destroy itself. It sounds like the final judgment of a superior civilization—until a brilliant new star suddenly appears in the sky and changes the meaning of everything he has just said. “Farewell Message” is a sharp and elegant piece of classic science fiction built around a single unforgettable moment. David Mason uses the alien observer to hold a mirror up to humanity, allowing the story’s quiet turn to land with surprising force. What begins as a lecture ends as something far more uncomfortable. David Mason published a number of short science fiction stories in the 1950s and early 1960s in magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction and If: Worlds of Science Fiction, where “Farewell Message” originally appeared. His work often favored brief, tightly constructed ideas that build toward a sudden reversal, a style well suited to the magazine era of science fiction where a powerful final line could echo long after the story ended.