Second Ending

by James White

  Matching pace with Ross’s weary shuffle, the robot led him through a series of short corridors, up another ramp for two levels, then into what appeared to be the administration and maintenance section. Ross was feeling quite pleased with himself. He had had a horde of robots sprung on him without warning only minutes ago, and now he was talking to one of them, almost naturally. Such powers of adaptability, he thought, were something to be proud of.

  He kept the conversation simple, of course, and confined mainly to short, direct questions regarding the rooms or machinery they passed. To some of the simple questions the robot gave concise and detailed answers, and occasionally he received a reply of “I’m sorry, sir, I have not been programmed with data on this subject…”

  At one point Ross broke off to ask, “Why do you keep calling me ‘sir’ when you know my name?”

  The robot ticked quietly to itself for a few seconds, and Ross went over the question again in his mind to see if it might sound ambiguous. It didn’t, so he repeated the question aloud.

  The ticking slowed and stopped. “A Ward Sister of my type has two choices of behavior toward human beings,” the robot said in its pleasant, feminine voice. “Toward patients we are friendly but authoritative, because we are better qualified to know what will and will not benefit them, and surnames prefixed by ‘Mr.’ are used. When a human being is mobile and shows no marked signs of physical malfunction we treat him as our superior. The choice was difficult in your case.”

  “Between a mobile Boss and a bedridden patient,” said Ross drily, “and I was a mobile patient.”

  “As my superior,” the robot went on, “you are not required to give reasons for your misuse and damaging of ward bed linen.”

  Ross began to laugh softly. Sisters were all the same, he thought; even the mechanical ones were inclined to fuss. He was still laughing when they reached Dr. Pellew’s room.

  It was much smaller than the quarters Pellew had once occupied, but it contained the same chairs, desk and bookcase. The only items missing were Beethoven and the thin, irascible person of Pellew himself. A heavy ledger lay exactly centered on the desk with an empty ashtray on one side and an adjustable calendar on the other. Pellew had been a notoriously untidy man, Ross knew, so this uncharacteristic neatness must be due to the cleaning robots while Pellew was in Deep Sleep. Knowing that the Doctor was not in a position to object, Ross sat at the desk and opened the ledger.

  It was a diary, more than half filled with Pellew’s odd, backward-leaning scrawl.

  Before he settled down to reading it, the caution of a lowly student who was making free with his superior’s holy of holies prompted a question.

  “Who is the Doctor in charge at the moment?” Ross asked. “Who’s awake, I mean.”

  “You, sir,” said the robot.

  “Me! But…”

  He had been about to say that he wasn’t qualified, that another two years of study would elapse before, if he was lucky, he could tack “Dr.” in front of his name. But there was a staff shortage, so much so that they must have been forced to awaken students to fill in for qualified doctors. The ledger would probably tell him why.

  “Have you any instructions, sir?” said the robot.

  Ross tried to think like a Doctor in charge. He hemmed a couple of times, then said, “Regarding the patients, none at present. But I’m hungry — will you get me something to eat?”

  The robot ticked at him.

  “I want food,” said Ross, making it simple and non-ambiguous. The robot left.

  5

  The first six pages of the diary were heavy going, not only because they dealt mainly with details of administration in Pellew’s almost unreadable writing, but because they were dated only a few months after Ross had gone into Deep Sleep and so contained no information likely to help in his present situation. He began cheating a little, skipping five, seven, twenty pages ahead. He read:

  Communications ceased with Section F two hours ago and we have not been able to raise the others for over a week. For purposes of morale I have suggested that this may be due to broken lines caused by the earth tremors, which have been felt even down here. I have ordered the maintenance robots to slot heavy metal girders across the elevator shaft so as to make it impossible for anyone to take the cage up. There are still a few shortsighted, quixotic fools who want to form a rescue party…

  Ross remembered an instructional circular from last night which had begun, “During the Emergency…” Apparently this part of the diary dealt with that Emergency, but he had skipped too far ahead. He was turning the pages back slowly when the robot arrived with six food cans.

  He opened one and set it on the empty ashtray so as not to mark Pellew’s desk. When he went back to the ledger the large, stiff pages had risen up and rolled past his place. Ross inserted his finger and flattened a page at random. It said:

  I took Courtland out of hibernation last week. In his present condition he will live only a few months so I have as good as killed him. The fact that he has told me several times that he doesn’t mind only makes me feel worse — his bravery pointing up my cowardice. But I need help, and he was one of the best cyberneticists of his time. He is working on a modification of our Mark 5 Ward Sisters for me.

  I wanted a robot with judgment and initiative and the Mark 5B seems to have those qualities. Courtland insists that it hasn’t, that he has merely increased its data-storage capacity, increased its ability to cross-index this memory data, and made some other changes which I can’t begin to understand. It does NOT have a sense of humor, but only gives this impression because it takes everything it is told literally. Despite all he says, Courtland is very proud of this new robot — he calls it Bea — and says that if he had proper facilities, or even a few more months of life, he could do great things.

  I think he has done great things already. If only Ross can carry on. It will be his problem soon.

  Ross felt his scalp begin to prickle. Seeing his own name staring up at him had been a shock, but what was the problem mentioned?

  “How long since you talked to Dr. Pellew?” he asked the robot suddenly.

  “Twenty-three years and fifteen days, sir.”

  “Oh, as long ago as that. When is he due to be awakened?”

  The robot began to tick.

  “That is a simple question!” began Ross angrily, then stopped. Maybe it wasn’t a simple question, maybe… “Is Pellew dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ross swallowed. He said, “How many, both patients and staff, are left?”

  “One, sir. You.”

  He had been hungry and had meant to eat. Ross began spooning the contents of the food can into his mouth, trying to pretend that it had not happened. Or maybe these were the blind involuntary movements of a body which has died and does not yet realize it. Pellew was dead, Alice was dead, Hanson, everyone. Claustrophobia was something which normally had not bothered Ross, but now suddenly he wanted out. Everyone he knew — and so far as his mind was concerned, he had known and spoken to them only two days ago — was dead and buried, most of them for hundreds of years. The hospital had become a vast, shining tomb staffed by metal ghouls, and he was buried in it. He was suddenly conscious of five miles of earth pressing down on him. But he was alive! He wanted out!

  Ross did not realize that he had been shouting until the robot said, “Dr. Pellew told me that you might behave in a non-logical manner at this time. He said to tell you that the future of the human race might depend on what you do in the next few years, and not to do anything stupid in the first few hours.”

  “How can I get out?” said Ross savagely.

  A human being would have avoided the question or simply refused to reply, but the Ward Sister was a robot and had no choice in the matter. Even so, while it was giving the information requested it managed to insert a truly fantastic number of objections to his going. The elevator shaft was blocked, there was danger of contamination and the robot’s basic programming fo
rbade it to allow Ross to endanger himself…

  “Do you know what going mad is?” said Ross, in a voice he didn’t recognize as his own. “Have you had experience of mental instability in humans?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It is against your programming to force me, by your inaction, into that state?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get me to the surface!”

  It took three hours.

  The Ward Sister ticked a lot and generally got into the nearest approach that a machine could manage to a tizzy. Clearing the elevator shafts — there were five altogether — required the help of heavy maintenance robots and these had been put into a state of low alert two centuries ago and would respond only to direct orders from a human being. But they weren’t nearly so bright as the Sister type and, while a single word was enough to set them in motion, it required a great many words to make them understand what he wanted. And the Ward Sister refused to let him into the cage until a full load of Cleaners had tested it first. These delays, by forcing him to think coherently, had a diluting effect on his original feeling of panic, but even he knew that his actions were not those of a sane man.

  During the waiting periods between ascents he read parts of the ledger, and now knew what the Emergency had been. A war. According to Pellew it had lasted five months and had been fought to the bitter end by opposing automatic devices, because after the first week no human being could have survived on the surface…

  Ross wanted out. Desperately, he wanted away from the unhuman attentions of robots and the sterile death of the wards. He did not expect to find living people on the surface, but he would settle for living things. Trees, insects, grass, weeds. And a sky with clouds and a sun in it and cold, natural air on his face. He didn’t think there would be any survivors, but he never stopped hoping…

  Each leg of the journey upward was the same. With the Ward Sister at his heels he would stumble out of the cage, yelling for a robot native to the section. When one appeared, invariably another Sister, he would ask, “How many human beings alive in this section?” When the inevitable reply came back he would pause only briefly, then say, “Where are your maintenance robots?” Within minutes he would be surrounded by a mechanical menagerie of repair and construction robots, all ticking at him or asking for clarification of their instructions in voices that were so human that it made Ross’s flesh creep. Eventually they would be made to clear the way up to the next section.

  Once he came to a level which he recognized as being the lowest section of the hospital of his pre-Sleep days. In this section the dust of centuries lay like gray snow in the corridors and the robots he summoned became the centers of choking, blinding dust storms.

  The first level, which was less than one hundred feet beneath the surface, was a shambles. Lighting, elevators, even the native robots were so much wreckage. Great, gaping cracks grew across walls and ceiling like jagged vines and there had been many cave-ins. But there was also a tunnel, sloping upward steeply and with a fuzzy patch of gray light showing at its other end. In the robot’s spotlight Ross could not tell whether the people of this level had dug their way out before they died or someone had dug down in an attempt to escape the holocaust above. He began climbing frantically, the Sister — whose three wheels were not suited to such a rough surface — falling slowly behind him.

  He had to rest once, lying face downward on a slope of loose earth, rock and what looked like pieces of fused glass. There was a peculiar tang in the air which his nose, still inflamed by dust, refused to identify. With the lip of the tunnel only a few yards ahead, the dull, gray light was all around him. Ross thought that it was just his luck to pick dusk, or shortly after dawn, as his time to climb out. After a few minutes he pushed himself to his feet and began, wobbling and sliding, to run.

  Ross looked slowly around him while the dark gray fog drove past, blackening his arms and clothing as he watched. To the limit of visibility, which was about fifty yards, the ground was dark gray and black — the smooth, shiny black of partly melted rock and the sooty gray of finely divided ash. The ash swirled and drifted from trough to trough in that frozen ocean of glass, or eddied upward to become the dry fog blowing past him. The sun was high in the sky, a dull red smudge with an enormous ring around it, and the sound of waves reached him from the half-mile-distant beach.

  He had done a lot of swimming on that beach, alone, with other students, with Alice. Yelling and floundering and splashing for hours on end; “playing” was the only word which described that activity. And the sea had played, too — a trifle roughly, at times, considering that it was the vast, all-powerful mother of life on the planet and one of her most recent offspring was giving her cheek.

  Ross began moving toward the beach. His brain seemed to be frozen with shock, because no time elapsed between the decision to go and his arrival.

  The sun was a brighter red and visibility was up to half a mile — the breeze blowing in from the sea was relatively free of ash. But the great rollers which marched in were mountains of ink, and when they broke and roared, foaming, up the beach, the foam was dirty and left streaks of black and gray on the sand. The tidal pools were as warm and as numerous as he remembered, but all were lined by a thin film of black and nothing moved in them. There was no seaweed, no evidence of the green scum which collects in stagnant pools, nothing inside the most recently washed up seashells.

  They had killed the sea, too.

  Ross sat down on a rock which had been smoothed by the sea and given a mirror polish by the tiny sun which had come into being here, for a split second, over a century ago. He sat for a long time. It began to rain and the ash clouds which had obscured his view inland settled to the ground, disclosing a line of robots coming over the shoulder of the hill containing the tunnel mouth. He watched them for several minutes, wondering whether he should take off his ridiculous toga and dive for the last time into the breakers. But Ross was against suicide on principle. The world had ended, he was probably the last living human being, and the future held nothing but loneliness or madness. So it couldn’t be hope which made him sit motionless while the dirty gray foam beckoned, for that had become a meaningless word. Perhaps it was because Ross was only twenty-two.

  When the robots arrived and performed a neat encircling movement, the Ward Sister said, “You must return to bed, Mr. Ross.” Seconds later a Cleaner lay his weakly resisting body along its back, pinioned him with five sets of metal arms and rolled back toward the tunnel mouth.

  It took Ross several minutes to realize that he had undergone a change of status. The Ward Sister, it appeared, had heard him coughing in the ash-filled air at the mouth of the tunnel, had noted the many cuts and grazes on hands and legs he had acquired during the climb, and these, taken together with his somewhat abnormal recent activities, had caused the robot to react in accordance with its basic programming. He was no longer a Doctor in charge called “sir,” but a patient called “Mr. Ross.” And patients did what Ward Sister told them to do, not the other way around.

  He was confined to bed for seventeen days.

  6

  Until each tiny cut was healed and the last square centimeter of scab dropped away, Ross’s every order was ignored. When sheer impatience made him abusive, that also was ignored, as were most of his threats.

  The one threat which was not ignored occurred on the second day. Ross had been throwing a tantrum over not being allowed to exercise for a few hours every day. He had ended by observing, at the top of his voice, that such an inhuman confinement was likely to drive him around the bend, that it could very well force him into taking his life, perhaps, through sheer boredom. To this the robot had replied that physical examination showed he was in a severely weakened state, due to both recent revivication and his too-exhausting trip to the surface, and that prolonged rest was indicated. Also, since the danger of Ross’s injuring himself had been mentioned as a possibility — the chief reasons cited being loneliness and boredom, two c
onditions not likely to improve — it was the Ward Sister’s duty to guard him against this danger for the rest of his life.

  Just then Ross did not want to think of the future. He wanted to chat about unimportant things such as how he should have his hair cut and why some items of his clothing had deteriorated while others had not. But Ward Sisters were supposed to be too busy to chat with patients while on duty, and Ross was now a patient. Three or four times a day he received a few words of encouragement, and that was all.

  Ross did not like the pictures he saw when he closed his eyes, so he kept them open as much as possible, staring at the ceiling, moving them slowly around the room, or squinting at the three-inches-distant bed sheet in an effort to resolve its weave. But the ceiling was white and free from discoloration, the room’s fittings were bright, angular and cast no shadows, and trying to make his eyes behave like a microscope only gave him a headache. There were no angles or shadows or tricks of light on which his mind could build the nice, harmless pictures which would keep him from dwelling on his present terrifying position, and so he would be forced to look at the robot.

  A smooth, upright ovoid with one fixed and one rotating eyepiece, and to Ross’s mind a cybernetic miracle by virtue of its compactness alone. A servant, guardian and trained nurse, placed in this position of responsibility because of a shortage of human nurses, which had later become a shortage of human beings…

  At that point the pictures which he did not want to see would come, whether his eyes were closed or not.