by James White
“One of the robots we salvaged is a Tailor, sir,” she said brightly as Ross was about to set out on another aimless walk. “It had occurred to me that you might like something more functional than the bed linen to wear.”
Three hours later Ross found himself climbing into his first proper clothes in more than forty thousand years. As he stood before the mirror, resplendent in the tropical whites of a naval captain, Ross thought that it was just his luck that the robot had been a military Tailor. But the whites did set off his tan to advantage. If Alice could have seen him now…
“You’ve made this from bedsheets, too,” said Ross harshly, to break a painful train of thought. “Try dyeing the stuff. And if you make it with an open collar, don’t forget the shirt and tie to go with it, otherwise it would look ridiculous.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Tailor and Sister in unison. The Tailor moved off and Sister asked, “Is there anything else, sir?”
Ross was silent for a moment; then he said, “I’m fed up, bored, I’d like to go to the moon.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Sister replied, and explained that the accelerations used would be instantly fatal to a human being, that radiation from the vessel’s power unit would kill him within a few hours, and that there were other hazards, both radiation and meteoric, which they had no means of guarding him against. For the last human being, space travel was too risky.
“In that case,” said Ross carefully, “I think I should go into Deep Sleep again.”
“For how long, sir? And what reason?”
Forever, Ross felt like saying, but he knew that if he did Sister would start treating him like a patient again. He had a good reason — or excuse, rather — for wanting to undergo suspended animation again. The idea had come during one of his many despairing hours lying in the grass, and the funny thing was that it just might work despite being only an excuse.
He said: “There is no longer any hope of finding human survivors, in space, under the sea, in or out of Deep Sleep, and it is foolish to pretend that there is. My only purpose must be to bring intelligent organic life back to this planet, and for that we must seed the oceans. Life began in the seas and it may do so again. However, the only organic material available in quantity is the grass, so here is what I want done.
“First choose a strain which flourishes in swampland,” he continued quickly, “and gradually increase the depth of water until it grows completely submerged, then gradually replace the fresh water with an increasingly saline solution. Replace soil with sand, and ultimately transplant into shallow sea water. I know that I’m trying to make evolution run backward, but there is a chance that a strain of sea grass might adapt into a mobile life form, and eventually develop intelligence.
“Do you understand your instructions?”
“Yes, sir,” said Sister, and added, “The search of the Pacific will be completed in seventy-three years. Would you like to be awakened…?”
“You are not to awaken me until the project is a success,” said Ross firmly.
And if it wasn’t a success, they would never wake him up. At the moment Ross did not care. All at once he was overcome by a horrible depression and a feeling of loneliness so intense that it was like a twisting cramp inside him. He knew that there had been no need for him to rush into Deep Sleep again so quickly, that it might appear to Sister that he was doing it in a fit of pique because she wouldn’t allow him a trip into space. The truth was, he admitted to himself, he wanted to escape.
His hopes of finding survivors had been sheer self-delusion, of the same order of probability as discovering a genii who would make his every wish come true. Even worse had been his hope of bringing intelligent life back to his world, of sleeping across the millennia and awakening only for fleeting moments to guide it up the evolutionary ladder until they would stand beside him as equals. That had been hoping on a colossal scale, and he had only now begun to realize that the scale had been more than colossally stupid.
One thing became very clear to him as the robots prepared him for the third time, and that was that he wanted to die in his sleep…
14
An hour or so later, to him, the robot masseurs were finishing their pummeling of his warming body, and Ross asked the inevitable question. Sister told him twenty-two thousand years.
“Hardly a catnap,” said Ross sourly.
He felt cheated. His mood of depression, the horrible, aching loneliness, and the awful boredom were with him as strongly as ever. Like his body, they had been preserved intact across the millennia. Perhaps something had happened to make him feel better.
“Make your report,” he said tiredly. “Or, better yet, let me have a look. And don’t tell me that I’m unfit to receive reports or that I should take a trip. My last vacation, by subjective time, was ten days ago, so just take me to the surf ace…”
The grass had grown taller and become less flexible — it would no longer be pleasant to lie down in it, Ross thought. His heart was pounding and he felt lightheaded, clear indications that the oxygen content of the air had increased. The breakers still crashed in a satisfying manner onto the beach, but the beach was green!
There was no sand at all, just a wet tangle of grass which ran unbroken along the shore and straight into the sea. The waves had a strong greenish tint, proving that it extended a considerable distance underwater.
“I couldn’t swim in that stuff!” Ross burst out. It didn’t matter that Sister was describing the development of a strain which would flourish in sea water, and which repeated uprooting by heavy seas had caused to evolve a limited degree of mobility. The process by which uprooted and washed-up sea grass moved back into the sea was a slow one, and only rarely successful, but it could be the beginning of an intelligent plant life-form, Sister affirmed. But Ross could not work up any enthusiasm over the achievement; he kept thinking that the only pleasure left to him had been taken away.
“And you woke me up for this?” said Ross disgustedly. “For a lousy plant which takes three weeks to crawl five yards back to the sea. Cool me again, until something worthwhile happens. Right now.”
The next time he awoke and went up to the surface it was night. The grass stood ten feet high, each stem a half inch thick, and the wind scarcely moved it. On the beach sand again shone whitely, lit by a moon swollen to three times its normal size. Sister explained that increasingly high tides caused by the moon’s drawing closer to its primary had forced the sea grass downward onto the ocean bed to escape the constant uprooting and several interesting, if minor, mutations had occurred. The sun was now too hot for him to bathe in safety.
Listlessly, Ross received the reports that the search of the Pacific, Luna and Mars had produced negative results. He barely looked at the picture relayed from the sea bottom showing the latest changes in his grass — to him the mutations seemed very minor, and not interesting at all. And before the bloated, yellow moon had gone down into the sea he asked Sister to return him to Deep Sleep.
“I advise against it, sir,” said Sister.
“But why?” Ross demanded. “There is nothing for me here, and besides, you should be grateful that I want to spend so much time in Deep Sleep. Didn’t you tell me once that I am the last human being, and that when I die your reason for existence will be gone? You should be glad of the chance to spin my death out for a few hundred thousand years. Or don’t you need me anymore?”
Sister was quiet for so long that Ross thought her audio circuits had developed a fault. Finally, she said, “We are still your servants, sir, and always will be. We are also grateful that your lifetime has been extended by Deep Sleep, but feel that allowing you to do so indefinitely shows selfishness on our part. In addition to the sound psychological reasons for your remaining awake, we feel that you are entitled to some pleasure, too.”
Ross stared at the gleaming ovoid body with its one fixed and one rotating lens and wondered incredulously what had become of the robot which had clicked irritatingly at him and droned, “I
am not programmed to volunteer information.” This robot had developed intelligence to the point. where she was being troubled by something remarkably like a conscience! She had become so human a personality that Ross had forgotten when he had stopped thinking of her as “it.” Suddenly he felt ashamed.
It was high time he came to grips with reality. Sister was right, even though the pleasures available were severely limited.
He said: “I suppose there is nothing against me having a midnight swim, providing I’m careful not to stab myself to death with the grass on the way to the beach.”
“The water is pleasantly warm, sir,” said the robot.
“I could study, start helping you with your problems again. And I could travel.”
“By land, sea, or air, sir.”
“Good,” said Ross, and stopped. He was beginning to get an idea, a pretty wild and at the same time a very childish idea. As it grew he had to tell himself several times that he was the Boss, that the world and everything in it was his, to do with as he liked. He grinned suddenly, thinking of the vast army of robots at his command — something like two million, according to Sister’s latest figures. A large proportion of them were immobile, or would be unable to participate for various reasons, but even so he thought that it promised to be quite an affair. Excitedly he began detailing his requirements.
Sister listened, made no objections, and informed him that what he proposed would require approximately three weeks. Ross replied that he would spend the time swimming, studying and consulting with the Tailor. Then he returned to his room to sleep, as happy boy with a new set of toy soldiers.
But when the great day dawned Ross had plunged from excited anticipation to a new low in despair. During the past three weeks he had tried study, tried to produce some original thoughts on his present situation and future hopes, only to find that all books had deteriorated into uselessness, their contents recorded in the brains of robots. The robots were in possession of full and accurate data on all subjects from astronomy to zoology, and the ability to make use of it in such a way that it made Ross’s slow, human methods of reasoning seem moronic by comparison. Time and again he had started arguments with them on such obtuse subjects as genetics, the continuous-creation theory and moral philosophy, only to be confounded every time. It was no comfort for him to discover that he was arguing not with one robot but hundreds, all storing their share of data and making it instantly available to one another.
The mechanics of that communications and indexing system had interested him, until one of the robots tried to explain it and he understood about one word in ten.
His robots were far smarter than he was. Ross felt stupid and useless, like an idiot child. And he did not care now whether he played with his toys or not. But they had been gathering for days, overlaying the green of the surrounding hills and valleys with the shining gray of their bodies, sliding like long metal ghosts into the bay to drop anchor, and scoring thunderous white lines across the sky before landing on the plateau to the north, and he felt that he had certain obligations toward them. So he dressed himself in the navy-blue uniform, which was styled after that of an army major general and bore the wings and insignia of an air marshal, and swung over his shoulders an ankle-length cape which was lined in red and trimmed with gold. Then he went up to his control dome and gave the signal for the review to commence.
Immediately the land robots lurched into motion, forming themselves into a column that was easily a quarter of a mile wide and which rolled toward him along the valley floor and passed within a hundred feet of the dome before disappearing around the shoulder of the hill. They poured by like an endless metal river, types which he recognized as descendants of the original Miners, but many others which he bad to ask Sister about. The long, tree-hard grass was flattened and churned into the earth by the passage of the first wave, and before an hour had passed the column had gouged a quarter-mile furrow along the valley which was in places twenty feet deep. Ross turned to look out over the bay.
Obviously his ships had bad access to considerable data on naval maneuvers. In rigid, closely spaced flotillas down to single units they charged back and forth across the bay, weaving to avoid other ships engaged in equally complex operations, and throwing up a dramatic white bow-wave which fluttered like a battle ensign. Ross was stirred in spite of himself. The bay was a blue slate thirty miles across, literally covered with the white scrawls and squiggles left by the hurrying ships. His eyes were caught by a robot that was almost the size of an old-time battleship which had dropped two search subs and launched an aircraft while tearing shoreward at full speed. At the last possible moment it went slicing into a U-turn which threw a dazzling scimitar of foam astern and went charging out to sea again. Then a multiple sonic crash pulled his attention skyward.
In perfect echelon formation five descendants of the A17 Searchers roared low over the valley and pulled into a vertical climb that made the two-hundred-foot arrowheads shrink to dots within seconds; then they curved over into a loop and came screaming down again. They leveled out over the sea, re-formed and went thundering past the control dome in a rigid line abreast.
Ross saluted.
Immediately he felt his face burning with shame and anger. He had been thinking and acting in the most childish way imaginable: playing-acting, dressing up in theatrical uniforms and treating the robots as if they were his toys. And the toys had cooperated to the extent that they had made him salute them! Were the damn things trying to get a rise out of him or something…?
“Do it again,” snarled Ross. “And this time close up, there’s about half a mile between you!”
“Not quite as much as that,” Sister objected. “But at the velocities involved it is safer to—”
“I have seen human jet pilots,” said Ross scathingly, “who flew wingtip to wingtip…”
Effortlessly the formation climbed, though not quite wingtip to wingtip, rolled into their loop and leveled out, and suddenly there were only three of them and a formless tangle of wreckage which fell across the sky to crash three miles inland.
“Wh-what happened?” said Ross foolishly.
Sister was silent for nearly a minute, and Ross thought he knew what was going on in her complex, mechanical mind. Then she told him simply that two robots of the higher intelligence levels had been irreparably damaged, that their metal was salvageable but the personalities concerned had been permanently deactivated. She also suggested that he go below at once, as the robots had possessed nuclear power plants and there was a danger of radioactive contamination.
“I’m sorry,” said Ross, “truly I am.”
On the way down to his room he had time to think about a lot of things, but chiefly of the complete hopelessness of his position and his pathological refusal to accept the reality which had faced him on his first awakening. He was the last man and he should have accepted that fact and allowed himself to die of starvation when he had the chance. Instead he had instituted a search for survivors which was doomed from the start; then he had tried to re-create intelligent life and produced only grass. The race of Man was finished, written off, and he was simply a last loose end dangling across Time.
Maybe he wallowed a little in self-pity, but not much or for very long. He did some positive thinking as well.
Over the years the robots had developed intelligence and initiative to an extent which would have been frightening if Ross had not known that they were his servants and protectors. Their basic drives, he now knew, were the need to serve Man, the urge to acquire data and experience in order to serve Man more efficiently and the purely selfish urge to improve their own mental and physical equipment. If, however, they could be made to serve themselves rather than Man, what then? The answer was a race of intelligent beings who would be immensely long-lived and virtually indestructible, in short a super-race who would take over where Man had left off.
There was nothing that the robots couldn’t do, if they would only stop thinking like slaves.
When they reached his room Ross sat on the edge of the bed and began repeating his thoughts to Sister, and the conclusions he had come to regarding them. He used very simple words, as though he was talking to the old, childish Sister of his first awakening, because he wanted to make absolutely sure that the robot — that all the robots — understood him. As he spoke a feeling of ineffable sadness overcame him, and, strangely, a fierce pride. This was a moment of tragedy and greatness, of Ending and Rebirth, and Ross was suddenly afraid that he was going to ham it up.
Awkwardly, he concluded, “…And so you can regard me as a friend, if you like, or a partner.” He smiled bleakly. “A sleeping partner. But that is all. From now on I have no right to command you. I have set you free.”
For several seconds the robot did not say anything, and Ross never did know whether his noble act of self-sacrifice was refused, ignored as the ravings of a sick mind, or what. Then Sister spoke.
“We have prepared a little present for you, sir,” she said, “but, bearing in mind your remarks some time ago on the subject of kindness as opposed to assistance, I have been undecided as to whether or not I should give it to you. I hope you like it, sir.”
It was a large picture, life-size and in color, of the head and shoulders of Alice. Obviously an enlargement of the photograph he had kept in his wallet. The flesh tints were off slightly, her glorious dark tan had a faintly greenish sheen, but otherwise the picture looked so natural and alive that he wanted to cry or curse.
“It’s perfect,” he said. Thank you.”
“You always call for her during your last moments of consciousness prior to Deep Sleep,” Sister went on, “and even though the wish is expressed while your mind is incapable of working logically, we must do everything possible to try to fulfill it. At the moment, this, was the best we could do.”
