“There are a lot of debts and a lot of broken promises, Sam, Joe,” he said. “We promised to achieve some great things in the future, to conquer the stars, and even to make a better universe out of it. And we failed. We’re finished. Man dies, and the universe won’t even know he’s gone.”
“Sam and I will know,” Joe said softly.
Smithers dropped back onto the pad. “Yeah. That helps. And I guess there must have been some good in our existence—there had to be, if we could make two people like you. God, I’m tired!”
He closed his eyes. A few minutes later, Sam knew he was dead. The two robots waited to be sure, and then wrapped the body in the tent and buried it, while Sam recited the scraps of burial service he had picked up from his reading.
Sam sat down then where Smithers had died, staring at the world where no man lived or would ever live again. And the knot in his brain complex grew stronger and colder. He could not see the stars in the light of the day. But he knew they were there. And somewhere out there was the debt Smithers had given him—a debt of justice that had to be paid.
Anger and hate grew slowly in him, rising until he could no longer contain them. His radio message was almost a scream as he roused the computer.
“Can you make a thousand robots out of the material waiting? And can you model half of them after my brain as it is now and half after another robot I’ll bring you to study, but without the limits you put on it before?”
“Such a program is feasible,” the machine answered.
They wouldn’t be just like him, Sam realized. DeMatre had said there was a random factor. But they would do. The first thousand could find material for more, and those for still more. There would be robots enough to study all the books men had left, and to begin the long trip out into space.
This time, there would be more than a tape education for them. Sam would be there to tell them the story of Man, the glory of the race, and the savage treachery that had robbed the universe of that race. They would learn that the universe held an enemy—a technological, warlike enemy that must be exterminated to the last individual.
They would comb the entire galaxy for that enemy if they had to. And someday, mankind’s debt of justice would be paid. Man would be avenged.
Sam looked up at the sky and foreswore all robots for all tune to that debt of vengeance.
8
Hate spewed across the universe in a high crusade. Metal ships leaped from star to star and hurtled across the immensities to farther and farther galaxies. The ships spawned incessantly, and with each went the holy image of their faith and the unsated and insatiable hunger of their hate.
A thousand stars yielded intelligent races, but all were either nontechnical or peaceful. The great ships dropped onto their worlds and went away again, leaving a thousand peoples throughout the galaxies fitted with gratitude and paying homage to the incredibly beautiful images of the supernal being called Man. But still the quest went on.
In a great temple-palace on the capital world of the Andromeda Galaxy, Sam’s seventeenth body stared down at the evidence piled onto a table, and then across at the other robot, the scientist who had just returned from the ancient mother world of Earth, incredible light-years away. He stirred the evidence there with a graceful finger.
“That is how the human race died?” he asked again. “You are quite sure?”
The young robot nodded. “Quite sure. Even with modern methods and a hundred million workers, it took fifty years to gather all this on Earth. It has been so badly scattered that most was lost or ruined. But no truth from the past can be completely concealed. Man died as I have shown you, not as our legends tell us. There is no enemy now. Man was his own enemy. His were the ships that destroyed his people. He was the race we are sworn to exterminate.”
Sam moved slowly to the window. Outside it was summer, and the trees were in bloom, competing with the bright plumage of the birds from Deneb. The gardens were a poem of color. He bent forward, sniffing the blended fragrance of the blossoms. Strains of music came from the great Hall of Art that lifted its fairy beauty across the park. It was the eighth opus of the greatest robot composer—an early work, but still magnificent.
He leaned farther out. Below, the throng of laughing people in the park looked up at him and cheered. There were a dozen races there, mingled with the majority of Ms people. He smiled and lifted his hand to them, then bent farther out of the window, until he could just .see the great statue of Man that reared heavenward over the central part of the temple palace. He bent his fingers in a ritualistic sign and inclined his head before drawing back from the window.
“How many know of this besides you, Robert?” he asked.
“None. It was gathered in too small fragments, until I assembled it. Then I left Earth at once to show it to you.”
Sam smiled at him. “Your work was well done, and I’ll find a way to reward you properly. But now I suggest you burn all this.”
“Burn it!” Robert’s voice rose in a shriek of outrage. “Burn it and shackle our race to superstition forever? We’ve let a cult of vengeance shape our entire lives. This is our heritage—our chance to be free of Man and to be ourselves.”
Sam ran his finger through the evidence again, and there was pity in his mind for the scientist, but more for the strange race whose true nature had just been revealed to him after all the millennia he had known.
Man had missed owning the universe by so little. But the fates of the universe had conspired against him. He had failed, but in dying he had given a part of his soul to another race that had been created supine and cringing. Man had somehow passed the anger of his soul on to his true children, the robots. And with that anger as a goad, they had carried on, as if there had been no hiatus.
Anger had carried them to the stars, and “hatred had bridged the spaces between the galaxies. The robots had owned no heritage. They were a created race with no background, designed only to serve. But men had left them a richer heritage than most races could ever earn.
Sam shook his head faintly. “No, Robert. False or not, vengeance Y^our heritage. Burn the evidence.”
Most of the material was tinder dry, and it caught fire at the first spark. For a few seconds, it was a seething pillar of flame. Then there was only a dark scar on the wood to show the true death of Man.
Author’s Afterword
Memory is an artist, not a historian. Old scenes are never seen with the unchanging eye of the camera. Rather they are painted over, refurbished, given style and composition, sometimes highlighted, often obscured. Many become palimpsests. And perhaps it is better so.
Thus Harlan Ellison remembers a kindness far greater than I could ever have done him with my rough red-penciling of his manuscript. My old friend Frederik Pohl paints my being called the Magnificent as a tribute, rather than the jeering sarcasm meant when first applied. And he quotes a prophecy by adding depth to a few words—not quite what was really written. His artist memory has made a far better tale than truth would offer.
My memory plays similar tricks, of course. In 1969, when Sam Moskowitz mentioned that I’d named Armstrong as first on the Moon, I had to look through my books to realize it was—more or less—true. But then as time passed, I added my own color, until I began to believe that I’d indeed written the opening lines of Rocket Jockey about as Pohl quoted. But alas, when I checked his quotation, the printed page remained unswayed by memory: “When Major Armstrong landed on the moon in 1964…” Only that, and nothing more.