Robots did not die, but here one lay dead, and it was not only this one, something seemed to tell him, but all the robots who had served the ants. All the robots and all the ants and still the building stood, an empty symbol of some misplaced ambition, of some cultural miscalculation. Somewhere the ants had gone wrong and had they gone wrong, he wondered, because Joe had built a dome? Had the dome become a be-all and an end-all? Had it seemed to ants that their greatness lay in the construction of a dome, that a dome was necessary for them to continue in their greatness?
Jenkins fled. And as he fled, a crack appeared in the ceiling far overhead and there was a crunching, grating sound as the crack snaked its way along.
He plunged out of the hole in the wall and raced out into the meadow. Behind him he heard the thunder of a part of the roof collapsing. He turned around and watched as that small portion of the building tore itself apart, great shards falling down into all those dead anthills, toppling the emblems of the kicking human foot that had been planted on their tops.
Jenkins turned away and went slowly across the meadow and up the hill to Webster House. On the patio, he saw that for the moment the collapse of the building had been halted. More of the wall had fallen and a great hole gaped in the structure held up by the wall.
In this matchless autumn day, he thought, was the beginning of the end. He had been there at the start of it and he still was here to see the end of it. Once again he wondered how long it might have been and regretted, but only a small regret, that he had not kept track of time.
Men were gone and Dogs were gone, and except for himself, all the robots, too. Now the ants were gone and the Earth stood lonely except for one hulking robot and some little meadow mice. There might still be fish, he thought, and other creatures of the sea and he wondered about those creatures of the sea. Intelligence, he thought. But intelligence came hard and it did not last. In another day, he thought, another intelligence might come from the sea, although deep inside himself he knew it was most unlikely.
The ants had shut themselves in, he thought. Their world had been a closed world. Was it because there was no place for them to go that they had failed? Or was it because their world had been a closed one from the start? There had been ants in the world as early as the Jurassic, 180 million years, and probably before that. Millions of years before the forerunners of man had existed the ants had established a social order. They had advanced only so far; they had established their social order and had been content with it – content because it was what they wanted, or because they could go no further? They had achieved security and in the Jurassic and for many millions of years later, security had been enough. Joe’s dome had served to re-enforce that security and it had then been safe for them to develop further if they held the capacity to develop. It was quite evident, of course, they had the capability, but, Jenkins told himself, the old idea of security had continued to prevail. They had been unable to rid themselves of it. Perhaps they never even tried to rid themselves of it, had never recognized it as something that should be gotten off their backs. Was it, Jenkins wondered, that old, snug security that had killed them?
With a booming crash that went echoing around the horizon, another section of the roof fell.
What would an ant strive for, Jenkins wondered. A maintenance of security, and what else? Hoarding, perhaps. Grubbing from the earth everything of value and storing it away, against another day. That, in itself, he realized, would be no more than another facet to the fetish of security. A religion of some sort, perhaps – the symbols of the kicking foot that stood atop the hills could have been religious. And again security. Security for the souls of ants. The conquest of space? And perhaps the ants had conquered space, Jenkins told himself. For a creature the size of an ant the world itself must have appeared to be a quite sufficient galaxy. Conquering one galaxy with no idea that an even greater galaxy lay beyond. And even the conquering of a galaxy might be another sort of security.
It was all wrong, Jenkins realized. He was attributing to ants the human mental process and there might be more to it than that. There might lie in the minds of ants a certain ferment, a strange direction, an unknown ethical equation which had never been a part, or could ever be a part, of the minds of men.
Thinking this, he realized with horror that in building a picture of an ant he’d built the picture of a human.
He found a chair and sat down quietly to gaze across the meadow to the place where the building of the ants still was falling in upon itself.
But Man, Jenkins remembered, had left something behind him. He had left the Dogs and robots. What, if anything, had the ants left? Nothing, certainly, that was apparent, but how was he to know?
A man could not know, Jenkins told himself, and neither could a robot, for a robot was a man, not blood and flesh, as was a man, but in every other way. The ants had built their society in the Jurassic or before and had existed within its structure for millions of years, and perhaps that was the reason they had failed – the society of the hill was so firmly embedded in them they could not break away from it.
And I? he asked himself. How about me? I am embedded as deeply in man’s social structure as any ant in hers. For less than a million years, but for a long, long time, he had lived in, not the structure of man’s society, but in the memory of that structure. He had lived in it, he realized, because it had offered him the security of an ancient memory.
He sat quietly, but stricken at the thought – or at least at the fact that he could allow the thought.
‘We never know,’ he said aloud. ‘We never know ourselves.’
He leaned far hack in the chair and thought how unrobotlike it was to be sitting in a chair. He never used to sit. It was the man in him, he thought. He allowed his head to settle back against the rest and let his optic filters down, shutting out the light. To sleep, he wondered – what would sleep be like? Perhaps the robot he had found beside the hill – but, no, that robot had been dead, not sleeping. Everything was wrong, he told himself. Robots neither sleep nor die.
Sounds came to him. The building still was breaking up and out in the meadow the autumn breeze was rustling the grasses. He strained a little to hear the mice running in their tunnels, but for once the mice were quiet. They were crouching, waiting. He could sense their waiting. They knew, somehow, he thought, that there was something wrong.
And another sound, a whisper, a sound he’d never heard before, an entirely alien sound.
He snapped his filters open and sat erect abruptly and out in front of him he saw the ship landing in the meadow.
The mice were running now, frightened, running for their lives, and the ship came to rest like floating thistledown, settling in the grass.
Jenkins leaped to his feet and stabbed his senses out, but his probing stopped at the surface of the ship. He could no more probe beyond it than he could the building of the ants before it came tumbling down.
He stood on the patio, utterly confused by this unexpected thing. And well he might be, he thought, for until this day there had been no unexpected happenings. The days had all run together, the days, the years, the centuries, so like one another there was no telling them apart. Time had flowed like a mighty river, with no sudden spurts. And now, today, the building had come tumbling down and a ship had landed.
A hatch came open in the ship and a ladder running out. A robot climbed down the ladder and came striding up the meadow toward Webster’s house. He stopped at the edge of the patio.
‘Hello, Jenkins.’ he said. ‘I thought we’d find you here.’
‘You’re Andrew, aren’t you?’
Andrew chuckled at him. ‘So you remember me.’
‘I remembering everything,’ said Jenkins. ‘You were the last to go. You and two others finished up the final ship and then you left the Earth. I stood and watched you go. What have you found out there?’
‘You used to call us wild robots,’ Andrew said. ‘I guess you thought we were. You thought that we were crazy.’
‘Unconventional.’ said Jenkins.
‘What is conventional?’ asked Andrew. ‘Living in a dream? Living for a memory? You must be weary of it.’
‘Not weary . . .’ said Jenkins, his voice trailing off. He began again: ‘Andrew, the ants have failed. They’re dead. Their building’s falling down.’
‘So much for Joe,’ said Andrew. ‘So much for Earth. There is nothing left.’
‘There are mice,’ said Jenkins. ‘And there is Webster House.’
He thought again of the day the Dogs had given him a brand new body as a birthday gift. The body had been a lulu. A sledge hammer wouldn’t dent it and it would never rust and it was loaded with sensory equipment he had never dreamed of. He wore it even now and it was good as new and when he polished the chest a little the engraving still stood out plain and clear: To Jenkins From the Dogs.
He had seen men go out to Jupiter to become something more than men, and the Websters to Geneva for an eternity of dreams, the Dogs and other animals to one of the cobbly worlds, and now, finally, the ants gone to extinction.
He was shaken to realize how much the extinction of the ants had marked him. As if someone had come along and put a final period to the written story of the Earth.
Mice, he thought. Mice and Webster House. With the ship standing in the meadow, could that be enough? He tried to think. Had the memory worn thin? Had the debt he owed been paid? Had he discharged the last ounce of devotion?
‘There are worlds out there,’ Andrew was saying, ‘and life on some of them. Even some intelligence. There is work to.’
He couldn’t go to the cobbly world that the Dogs had settled. Long ago, at the far beginning, the Websters had gone away so the Dogs would be free to develop their culture without human interference. And he could do no less than Websters, for he was, after all, a Webster. He could not intrude upon them; he could not interfere.
He had tried forgetfulness, ignoring time, and it had not worked, for no robot could forget.
He had thought the ants had never counted. He had resented them, at times even hated them, for if it had not been for them, the Dogs would still be here. But now he knew that all life counted.
There were still the mice, but the mice were better left alone. They were the last mammals left on Earth and there should be no interference with them. They wanted none and needed none and they’d get along all right. They would work out their own destiny and if their destiny be no more than remaining mice, there was nothing wrong with that.
‘We were passing by,’ said Andrew. ‘Perhaps we’ll not be passing by again.’
Two other robots had climbed out of the ship and were walking about the meadow. Another section of the wall fell and some of the roof fell with it. From where Jenkins stood, the sounding of falling was muted and seemed much farther than it was.
So Webster House was all and Webster House was only a symbol of the life that it once had sheltered. It was only stone and wood and metal. Its sole significance, Jenkins told himself, existed in his mind, a psychological concept that he had fashioned.
Driven into a corner, he admitted the last hard fact: He was not needed here. He was only staying for himself.
‘We have room for you,’ said Andrew, ‘and a need of you.’
So long as there had been ants, there had been no question. But now the ants were gone. And what difference did that make? He had not liked the ants.
Jenkins turned blindly and stumbled off the patio and through the door that led into the house. The walls cried out to him. And voices crying out, as well, from the shadow of the past. He stood and listened to them and now a strange thing struck him. The voices were there, hut he did not hear the words. Once there had been words, but now the words were gone and, in time, the voices as well? What would happen, he wondered, when the house grew quiet and lonely, when all the voices were gone and the memories faded? They were faded now, he knew. They were no longer sharp and clear; they had faded through the years.
Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.
In time the wood would rot and the metal flake away; in time the stone be dust. There would, in time, be no house at all, but only a loamy mound to mark where a house had stood.
It all came from living too long, Jenkins thought – from living too long and not being able to forget. That would be the hardest part of it; he never would forget.
He turned about and went back through the door and across the patio. Andrew was waiting for him, at the bottom of the ladder that led into the ship.
Jenkins tried to say goodbye, but he could not say goodbye. If he could only weep, he thought, but a robot could not weep.
About the Author
Clifford D. Simak was born in Wisconsin in 1904. After leaving university he began work with a number of Mid-west newspapers. His first published story appeared in Wonder Stories in 1931, though he only became a full-time writer of SF after his retirement. Simak’s novels included Cosmic Engineers, City, Time is the Simplest Thing, They Walked Like Men and The Visitors. During his career he won three Hugo Awards, as well as the Grand Master Nebula Award in 1977. He died in 1988.
Also by Clifford D. Simak
NOVELS
Cosmic Engineers (1950)
Time and Again (1951)
City (1952)
Ring Around the Sun (1953)
Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)
They Walked Like Men (1962)
Way Station (1963)
All Flesh is Grass (1965)
Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967)
The Werewolf Principle (1967)
The Goblin Reservation (1968)
Out of Their Minds (1970)
A Choice of Gods (1971)
Destiny Doll (1971)
Cemetery World (1973)
Our Children’s Children (1974)
Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975)
Shakespeare’s Planet (1976)
A Heritage of Stars (1977)
Mastodonia (1978)
The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978)
The Visitors (1980) Project Pope (1981)
Special Deliverance (1982)
Where the Evil Dwells (1982)
Highway of Eternity (1986)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Strangers in the Universe (1956)
The Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
Aliens for Neighbours (1961)
All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories (1962)
Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1962)
The Night of the Puudly (1964)
Worlds Without End (1964)
Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak (1967)
So Bright the Vision (1968)
The Best of Clifford D. Simak (1975)
Skirmish: The Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak (1977)
Brother and Other Stories (1986)
The Marathon Photograph and Other Stories (1986)
Off-Planet (1988)
The Autumn Land and Other Stories (1990)
Immigrant and Other Stories (1991)
The Creator and Other Stories (1993)
Over the River and Through the Woods: The Best Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak (1996)
The Civilization Game and Other Stories (1997)
NON-FICTION
The Solar System: Our New Front Yard (1962)
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Text copyright © Clifford D. Simak 1952, 1973
Introduction copyright © Gwyneth Jones 2010
All rights reserved
The right of Clifford D. Simak to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Gwyneth Jones to be identified as the author of the introduction, have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This edition
first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10524 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
City (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 26
