“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 years 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.