Second Ending

by James White

  “Sink a tunnel to a depth of half a mile,” Ross directed, trying not to stammer with excitement. “Angle in from a point two hundred yards beyond the water-line to avoid the risk of flooding…”

  The digger unit unshipped itself, earth and ashes fountained briefly and it began its slow dive underground. Occasionally it altered direction to avoid large masses of metal, not because it could not go through them but merely in order to save time. It reported back continuously to the four-hundred-miles-distant Ross, by both speech and repeator instruments, and after nearly five hours’ burrowing the picture of conditions underground was complete.

  The installation had been a missile-launching base, extensive but not very deep. The bomb which had been responsible for the glass-bottomed lake, its force contained and to a great extent directed downward by the surrounding hills, had smashed its underground galleries flat. There were no survivors, but as the indications were that the base had been fully automated this did not bother Ross very much.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said while the digger unit was returning to the surface. “Our construction program should be based on a site where metal is available rather than go through the time-wasting business of transporting it back here. So I’m going to send you as many repair robots as can be spared, and while they are on the way here is what I want done.

  “You have absorbed data on open-cast mining,” Ross went on briskly, “and your report states that there are large quantities of metal within fifty feet of the surface. I want you to rejoin your transporter unit as quickly as possible and have your repair robots modify it as a bulldozer. When you have uncovered—”

  The Sister broke in at that point. “Mr. Ross,” she said firmly, “it’s time for bed.”

  Although Ross protested bitterly as he was led down to his room, underneath he was happier and more hopeful than at any other time since his awakening. He was still very far from achieving his goal of searching every square foot of the Earth’s surface, but a beginning had been made. He knew the capabilities of his robots, knew that, given the raw material — which was now available — he would have a duplicate Miner built by the end of the week, and the week after that he would have half a dozen of them. The square law, he thought, was wonderful. Compared to what he was going to do the achievements of the first few rabbits in Australia would be as nothing.

  He went to sleep dreaming happily of the orders he would have to give next day, next week and next year…

  10

  As duplicates of the first Miner were completed Ross sent them to investigate the sites of bombed towns and cities in the area, but for Miner One itself he had a special job. The inexplicable feeling of the need for urgency was still with him, as if somewhere, someone who was alive would die if he did not do the right thing quickly. Nevertheless, he sent Number One northward on a mission which did not include a search for human survivors. Fitted with special equipment and accompanied by a Sister with plant-biology programming, it had been ordered to search the polar areas for plantlife or seeds preserved under the ice. Life could survive intense cold; nobody knew that better than Ross himself.

  Then suddenly he discovered who the someone was, the someone who was alive and who would shortly die if he did not think of something quick. It was himself.

  “Using the testing procedure you suggested,” Sister reported one morning shortly after he awoke, “we have found that approximately two thirds of the remaining food on this level is edible. A random sampling of containers taken from stores on the four higher levels indicates total spoilage. We suspect chemical changes brought about by radiation filtering down from the surface, which did not reach its full effect down here. At the present rate of consumption you have food for eighteen days.

  “The matter is urgent, sir,” Sister ended, with fine if unconscious understatement. “Have you any instructions?”

  “There must be some mistake…” began Ross numbly, then went out to have a look for himself. But there was no mistake. Because it had been close to his room, he had been supplied with food from the lowest level; he had been using that store for two years, and now it turned out that it was the only one which contained edible food. This was something he should have checked on earlier, and it was now obvious that his subconscious had been trying to remind him of it during sleep. Yet if he had known earlier, what could he have done? Maybe fate had been kind to give him only three weeks’ notice on the date of his death.

  And Sister kept following him everywhere, continually asking for instructions.

  “Yes!” said Ross suddenly, as it occurred to him that there was one useful order that he could give. He had been thinking emotionally, playing a distraught, tragic figure and not using his brain at all. He went on, “Signal all Miners and assistant robots to give priority to the search for underground food stores. Except Miner One, it is too far away to get back in time to do any useful work before the deadline…”

  Deadline, he thought. Ross had a new definition of the word now — the end of a lifeline.

  “…And start opening all the cans which you think are spoiled,” he ended sharply, “in case your random sampling has missed a few, or a few dozen. Get as many robots onto it as can be packed into the storeroom. Now I’ve work to do on the surface…”

  For a long time Ross had used hard physical and mental labor as a means of not thinking about the past. Now he was using it so as not to think about the future. Psychologically, he thought mirthlessly, you are a horrible mess.

  The work involved a project which Ross had shelved temporarily in order to concentrate on the search for survivors, a robot helicopter. Now the possession of such a machine might mean the difference between life and death for him — if the search robots found food and if it could not be brought to him fast enough by land to reach him in time. So he built models and read aeronautical texts and watched his prototype helicopter chew up the hillside with its rotors in vain attempts to throw itself into the air. Then one day it staggered off the ground and circled at an altitude of one hundred feet under a rough semblance of control. Watching from the small dome, Ross felt very little satisfaction, because it had taken him thirteen days to achieve this. He had five days left.

  The helicopter was still clattering about the sky when one of his Miners reported in. Negatively, as usual.

  The problem, according to the robot searcher, was that its metal-detection equipment was not sensitive enough to differentiate between food canisters and the structural wreckage with which they would be associated. The only solution involved sinking test tunnels at intervals and examining the wreckage visually. This was a long, difficult process which held small probability of success, the robot warned, because, in addition to the time involved, none of the city underground shelters had been as deep as the hospital’s fifth level, so that any food which might be found would almost certainly be inedible.

  “Things are tough all over,” said Ross, and cut the connection viciously. But there was another attention signal blinking at him. He keyed it into the main screen and saw a wavering gray blur which resolved itself into a blizzard immediately the caller identified itself. It was Miner One.

  “Sir,” it began tonelessly, “data gained after forty-seven test bores leads me to the following deductions. During the war very many nuclear missiles were intercepted and exploded in the polar regions, and several interception bases and stockpiles were situated under the ice. It must have been the most heavily bombed area on the planet. The background radiation is still above normal, though not dangerously so. Analysis of the underlying soil shows complete sterility.”

  Ross didn’t know what he said to the Miner. All hope had drained out of him and suddenly he was horribly afraid. His world that he had been trying to make live again was dead, the land a crematorium and the ocean a black graveyard, and himself a wriggling blob which had lived a little past its time. And now his time was coming.

  He had never considered himself to be the suicidal type, and in the two year
s since his awakening he had never seriously considered it. But now he wanted to break cleanly with life before he could become any more afraid, something quick like a drop down the elevator shaft or a one-way swim out to sea. At the same time he knew that Sister would not allow anything like that. He knew that he was doomed to a horrible, lingering death from slow starvation, probably with Sister asking for instructions and clicking because she could not supply the one thing he needed, and he felt himself begin to tremble.

  “Have you any instructions, sir?” said Sister, over and over.

  “No!”

  The Sister’s voice was not designed to express emotion, but somehow she managed to do so as she said, “Sir, can you discuss the future?”

  In her emotionless, mechanical fashion Sister was frightened, too, and suddenly Ross remembered one of his early discussions with her. If he died then the robots’ reason for being would be gone — it was as simple as that. No wonder they were all asking for instructions, and no wonder Sister had let him work two hours past his bedtime a few nights ago. He didn’t know what death involved exactly for a robot, but it was obvious that they were scared stiff. He could feel sorry for them, because he understood how they felt.

  Softening his tone, Ross said, “My original instructions regarding the search for survivors will keep you busy for a long time, and those instructions stand. And there is another area of search which I haven’t mentioned until now. Space. There was manned space travel for six decades before the war, with a base on the moon and perhaps on other bodies as well. All of them would have had to be maintained from Earth and could not have supported life indefinitely. But with Deep Sleep techniques…”

  It’s a strong possibility, Ross thought sadly. If only I could have been around when those robots reported back.

  “…Anyway,” he went on, “I am giving you direct orders to find human survivors. Don’t stop looking until you do. You will therefore be serving me until you find your new master, so I think that solves your problem.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “The moon and Mars are the best bets,” Ross said, half to himself. “I know nothing about astronautics, but the search will turn up books on the subject, or uncompleted missiles which you can study. And be careful about the air pressure, you can operate in a vacuum but humans can’t. And when you do find them tell them that I… tell them…”

  It should be a noble, inspiring message, one that would ring gloriously across the centuries. But everything he wanted to say had a whining, frightened note to it, a coward’s soliloquy. He shook his head angrily, then repeated Dr. Pellew’s last message to himself.

  “Tell them it’s their problem now, and good luck.”

  Abruptly Ross whirled and charged out of the dome and along the corridor leading toward the elevators. Striding along, he cursed, loudly and viciously and as horribly as he knew how. He cursed to keep from crying and for no other reason, because the thought of Pellew and the brilliant, selfless, utterly splendid men who had preceded him was the greatest tragedy his world had ever known. He thought of Hanson, Pellew, Courtland and the others, of the desperate, unsuccessful experiment with the mutations, and the unending struggle to cure the incurables who were in Deep Sleep- which had been successful. But mostly he thought of those grand old men watching and working alone while all around them the patients and their colleagues slept, taking turns at going into Deep Sleep and running their relay race against time. And all for nothing. It had served merely to extend the lifetime of the human race, or more accurately the last member of it, by two miserable years.

  11

  Without remembering how he got there, Ross found himself in his room. The bed hadn’t been properly made for days and the place was a shambles of scattered books and papers. Since dismissing the Cleaners, making the bed and cleaning up had helped keep his mind occupied, but lately he had had plenty of things to occupy it with. He tipped a pile of books off his chair, and, in the act of sitting down, saw himself in the locker mirror. He dropped the chair and moved closer. It had occurred to him that he was looking at the Last Man and he felt a morbid curiosity.

  He wasn’t much to look at, Ross thought: a skinny body dressed in a ridiculous toga. The face was thin and sensitive, with further proof of that sensitivity — or weakness — apparent in the way the lips quivered and in the dampness around the eyes. It was a young, impressionable, enthusiastic face, the face of a man who was too much of a coward to face reality and too stupid to give up hope. Ross turned away and threw himself onto his unmade bed.

  For two years he had tried to avoid thinking of the past because of the awful sense of loneliness and loss it brought, and he had concentrated instead on a bright, distant, rather indistinct future in which he would gradually bring together a nucleus of humanity and set out bravely to repopulate the world. Now he had to face the fact that he was going to die soon, that there was no future, and that the only thing of value left to him was the past. He wanted to remember his preawakening period, now — in some strange way he considered it his duty to remember as many places and events and people as he possibly could.

  Gradually his fear had been replaced by a mood of vast solemnity, a sadness so complete and all-embracing that it was almost a pleasure. Now he knew what he had to do with his remaining days of life.

  Remember.

  For the days which followed Ross set a timetable for himself — a loose, unhurried timetable which was subject to change without notice. In the mornings he read, chiefly from books which he had hitherto considered painful or a waste of time. He did not complete the works but dipped briefly into poetry, into brute violence, into sickly-sweet romance. Sometimes he would merely look at the dust jackets, at the ordinary, studious or pseudo-Bohemian faces who had had three children, or gained a Nobel Prize or been married three times, and who had produced works like The Body Doesn’t Bleed, Alternative Method for Producing the Hannigar Meson Reaction or Dawn Song. He did not try to criticize or evaluate; the good, bad, tragic, sordid and glorious were remembered, and nothing more. In a way Ross was holding a wake, remembering the good and bad points of the deceased, and he had an awful lot of remembering to do.

  In the afternoons he would pace the long, shining corridors and go over in his mind what he had read that morning, or he would listen to music or lecture tapes — the few remaining which had not become distorted beyond use by the passage of time — or try to hum a piece of music which originally had been scored for full orchestra. Then in the evening he would return to his room and get into philosophical arguments with Sister until the lights went out.

  It was then that his hands would begin to shake and he would begin to wonder if he would be able to carry on with this act of quiet resignation to the end, or, when his hunger became extreme and he no longer had the strength to read or hold a book, would he start crying and begging for the robots to do something, and die blubbering like a baby? He was only twenty-four and he didn’t think he could trust himself.

  On the fourth day — the last in which he would have full rations — he Went onto the surface. It had rained during the night and visibility was fairly good. He found a rock on the hillside facing the sea and sat watching the grimy rollers breaking on a black shore. It was his own life he was remembering now, some ingrained habit of politeness returning people and incidents in their reverse order of importance. His sheltered childhood, the emotional confusion of adolescence, the hospital with its acid-voiced ogre Dr. Pellew, the parents he was beginning to appreciate only now, and Alice…

  Suddenly restless, Ross got up from his rock and began climbing the hill again. He walked quickly past the control dome, to which the search robots continued to send in their negative reports — no food, no survivors, no life of any kind. When he came to the landward-facing slope, which had once been the hospital park, he stopped.

  An expanse of rich, dark earth streaked with ash in which nothing grew, not because it was incapable of supporting growth but because all growing thin
gs were dead. On the day before he was to go into Deep Sleep it had not been like this, however; Ross felt that he could remember every unpruned bush and knee-high blade of grass. The park never had been well tended.

  He had been trying to act as though nothing very important was going to happen, as if Deep Sleep was a simple appendectomy. When Alice came off duty he had asked her to go swimming with him, the way he had always done. Ross wanted to have a last swim and to say good-bye to her on the beach. But Alice had insisted that the sea wind was too cold — it was late September — and she wanted to go for a walk instead. She had held his hand tightly even before they left the hospital building, and Alice had previously been too shy for such public demonstrations of affection, and they had gone into the park. He had tried to keep the conversation gay and inconsequential for as long as he could, but eventually he had to begin to say goodbye…

  While the idea of Deep Sleep had frightened Ross, it had been nowhere near as strong as a fear of death. He knew that he would awaken someday and so far as he was concerned there would be no interval of time. But he had not realized that to Alice he was going to die tomorrow, going to disappear from the world and from her life. He had not been prepared for this Alice, who clung so fiercely to him that he could hardly breathe, and wet his cheeks with her tears and whose eyes, when they looked into his, held so much love and sheer compassion that…

  She had been a quiet, thoughtful girl — pleasant, but practical. They were to be married when Ross qualified, but even with him she had maintained a certain reserve. He remembered her telling him laughingly that she preferred to neck on the beach, because there the ocean was handy for him to cool off in.

  Standing on that muddy hillside with its eternal smell of damp smoke, Ross knew that Alice was his most precious memory. He thought that at this moment, with the memory of that slow walk back through warm-smelling grass which caught at their feet sharp and clear in his mind, he was prepared to die.