But with those came memories of Hal Norman’s expressed hopes and dreams. The man had showed Sam a picture of his future wife and tried to describe all that such a creature meant to a man. He’d spoken of green fields and the sea. He’d raved about Earth too often during the days they were together.
Sam moved forward toward Hal. The man saw him coming and began to back away, but he was no match for the robot. Sam held Hal’s arms and closed his moonsuit, then gathered him up carefully. Hal was struggling, but his efforts did no good against Sam’s determination.
“All right, Dr. Smithers. We can go now,” Sam told the Chief.
They were the last to leave the dome. The little black robots were already marching across the surface, with the men straggling along behind them. Smithers fell into step with Sam, moving as if the burden was on his back instead of in the arms of the robot. Hal had ceased struggling. He lay outwardly quiet; but through the suit, Sam’s body receptors picked up sounds that he had heard only twice before on occasions he tried not to remember. They were the sounds of a man attempting to control his weeping.
Halfway to the ship, faint words came over the radio. “Put me down, Sam. I’ll go quietly.”
The three moved on together. By the time they reached the ship, the others were all aboard. The Chief motioned the younger man up the ramp. For a moment, Hal hesitated. He turned toward Sam, started to make a motion, and then swung away and dashed up the ramp, his shoulders shaking convulsively.
Smithers still stood after the other had disappeared. The radio brought the sound of a sigh, before the man moved. “Thanks, Sam. That was a favor I no longer had the right to ask. And don’t tell me it’s all right. Nothing’s right any more.” He sighed again, then smiled faintly. “Remember the books?”
“I won’t disturb them,” Sam promised. There were a great many microbooks in the dome library, brought hi a few at a time by many men over the long years. They were one of the few taboos; it was against orders for Sam to read any of them. A man had once told him that it was to save him from unnecessary confusion.
Smithers shook his head sharply. “Nonsense. You’re going to have a lot of time to kill. The ban is off. Read any or all of them if you like. It’s about all I can do for you, but you’re entitled to that, at least.”
He put a foot off the ramp and turned partly away from Sam. Then biiiptly he swung back.
“Good-by, Sim,” he said thickly. His right hand came out and grasped that of the robot strongly. “Good-by and God bless you!”
A second later, Smithers was hurrying up the ramp. It was drawn in after him, and the great outer seal of the rocket ship began to close.
Sam ran back to the entrance of the dome to avoid the blast. The edge of darkness had touched the dome now, leaving the rockets standing in the last light as he turned to look at them. He watched the takeoff of the three heavily laden ships. They staggered up slowly, carrying the men toward the rendezvous with Earth’s orbital station. It wasn’t until they were beyond the range of his strongest vision that he turned into the dome. It was silent and empty around him.
He stared at the clock on the wall and at the calendar on which they had marked off the days. He hadn’t found how long they would be gone. But Smithers’ words gave a vague answer—he would have a lot of time to kill. That could mean anywhere from one month to most of a year, judging by the application of similar phrases in the past. He looked at the shelves filled with microbooks for a few moments. Then he went outside, to stare through his telephoto lenses at the Earth in the sky above him. There were spots of light in the dark areas that he knew to be the cities of men.
The second day after the takeoff of the ship, Sam was watching the dark area of Earth again when some of the spots of light grew suddenly brighter. New spots of brightness rose and decayed during the hours he watched. They were far brighter than any city should have been. Other spots glowed where no cities had been before. But eventually they all faded. After that, there were no bright areas at all. As Earth turned slowly, he saw that all the cities on Earth were now dark.
It was a mystery for which he had no explanation. He went inside to try the radio that brought news and entertainment from the relay on the orbital station, but no signal was coming through. He debated calling them, but that was reserved for the decision of Smithers, and the Chief was gone.
There was no call on the fifth day, when the men should have reached the station. He knew there was no reason to expect such a call; men were not obligated to report their affairs to a robot. But his brain circuits seemed to be filled with odd future-pictures that ‘kept him by the set for long hours after he knew there would be no signal for him.
Finally he got up and went to the music player. They had let him use it at times, and he felt no disloyalty to them as he found a tape that was one of his favorites and threaded it. But when the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth reached its end, the dome seemed more empty than ever. He found another tape, without voices this time. And that was followed by another. It helped a little, but it was not enough.
It was then that he turned to the books, taking one at random. It was something about Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he started to put it back. He had already learned enough about astronomy from the education machine. But at last he threaded it into the microreader and sat down to read.
It started well enough, and it was about some strange kind of man, not about astronomy. But then…
Sam made a strange sound, only slowly realizing that he had imitated the groan of a man for the first time in his existence. It was all madness! He knew men had never reached Mars—and couldn’t reach such a Mars, because the planet was totally unlike what he knew existed. It must be some strange form of human humor. Or else there were men unlike any he had known and facts that had been kept from him. The latter seemed more probable.
He struggled through it, to groan again when it ended and he still didn’t know what had happened to the strange female man who was a princess and who laid highly impossible eggs. But by then, he had begun to like John Carter, and he wanted to read more. He was confused—but even more curious than puzzled. Eventually, he found the whole series and read them all.
It was a much later book that solved some of the puzzle of it for his soul. There was a small note before the book really began this is a work of speculative fiction; any resemblance to present-day persons OR EVENTS IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL. He looked up fiction in the dictionary he had seen the men use and felt better afterward. It wasn’t quite like humor, but it wasn’t fact, either. It was a game of some kind, where the rules of life were all changed about in idiosyncratic ways. The writer might pretend that men liked to kill each other or were afraid of women, or some other ridiculous idea; then he tried to imagine what might happen under such conditions. It was obviously taboo to pretend about real people and events, though some of the books had stories that used background and people that had the same names as those in reality.
The best fiction of all sometimes looked like books of fact, if the writer was clever enough. History was mostly like that; there was a whole imaginary world called Rome, for instance. It was fortunate Sam had been taught the simple facts of man’s progress by the education machine before he read such books. Men, it was true, had sometimes been violent, but not when they understood all the facts or could help it.