He came to rest – if that is what his action could be called – on the crater’s rim and for a moment failed to understand what he was seeing.
Some sort of shining substance extended all around the rim and sloped inward to the center to form what appeared to be a concave mirror. But it was not a mirror, for it was nonreflective.
Then, quite suddenly, an image formed upon it and if he could have caught his breath, he would have.
Two creatures, one large, the other smaller, stood on a ledge above a deep cut in the earth, with a striated sandstone bluff rising up above them. The smaller one was digging in the bluff with a hand tool of some sort – a hand tool that was grasped in what must be a hand, which was attached to an arm and the arm hooked up to a body, which had a head and eyes.
Myself, he thought – the smaller one, myself.
He felt a weakness and a haziness and the image in the mirror seemed to be trying to pull him down to join and coalesce with this image of himself. The gates of memory opened and the old, restricted data came pouring in upon him – the terms and relationships – and he cried out against it and tried to push it back, but it would not push back. It was as if someone were holding him so he could not get away and, with a mouth close against his ear, was telling him things he did not wish to know.
Humans, father, son, a railroad cut, the Earth, the finding of that first trilobite. Relentlessly the information came pouring into him, into the intellectual force field that he had become, that he had evolved into, or been engineered into, and that had been a comfort and a refuge until this very moment.
His father wore an old sweater, with holes in the elbows of the sleeves, and an old pair of black trousers that were baggy at the knees. He smoked an ancient pipe with a fire-charred bowl and a stem half-bitten through, and he watched with deep paternal interest as the boy, working carefully, dug out the tiny slab of stone that bore the imprint of an ancient form of life.
Then the image flickered and went out and he sat (?) upon the crater’s rim, with the dead mirror sweeping downward to its center, showing nothing but the red and blue reflections of the suns.
Now he knew, he thought. He knew, not what he was, but what he once had been – a creature that had walked upon two legs, that had a body and two arms, a head and eyes and a mouth that cried out in excited triumph at the finding of a trilobite. A creature that walked proudly and with misplaced confidence, for it had none of the immunity against its environment such as he now possessed.
From that feeble, vulnerable creature, how had he evolved?
Could it be death, he wondered, and was aghast at death, which was a new concept. Death, an ending, and there was no end, never would be one; a thing that was an intellect trapped within a force field could exist forever. But somewhere along the way, somewhere in the course of evolution, or of engineering, could death have played a part? Must a man come to death before he came to this?
He sat upon the crater’s rim and knew the surface of the planet all about him – the red of land, the yellow of the sky, the green and purple of the flowers, the gurgle of the liquid running in its courses, the red and blue of suns and the shadows that they cast, the running thing that threw up spurts of sand, the limestone and the fossils.
And something else as well and with the sensing of that something else a fear and panic he had never known before. Had never had the need to know, for he had been protected and immune, untouchable, secure, perhaps even in the center of a sun. There had been nothing that could get at him, no way he could be reached.
But that was true no longer, for now he could be reached. Something had torn from him an ancient memory and had shown it to him. Here, on this planet, there was a factor that could get at him, that could reach into him and tear from him something even he had not suspected.
He screamed a question and phantom echoes ran across the land, bouncing back to mock him. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Fainter and fainter and the only answers were the echoes.
It could afford not to answer him, he knew. It need not answer him. It could sit smug and silent while he screamed the question, waiting until it wished to strip other memories from him, memories for its own strange use, or to further mock him.
He was safe no longer. He was vulnerable. Naked to this thing that used a mirror to convince him of his own vulnerability.
He screamed again and this time the scream was directed to those others of his kind who had sent him out.
Take me back! I am naked! Save me!
Silence.
I have worked for you – I have dug out the data for you – I have done my job – You owe me something now!
Silence.
Please!
Silence.
Silence – and something more than silence. Not only silence, but an absence, a not being there, a vacuum.
The realization came thudding hard into his understanding. He had been abandoned, all ties with him had been cut – in the depth of unguessed space, he had been set adrift. They had washed their hands of him and he was not only naked, but alone.
They knew what had happened. They knew everything that ever happened to him, they monitored him continuously and would know everything he knew. And they had sensed the danger, perhaps even before he, himself, had sensed it. Had recognized the danger, not only to himself, but to themselves as well. If something could get to him, it could trace back the linkage and get to them as well. So the linkage had been cut and would not be restored. They weren’t taking any chances. It had been something that had been emphasized time and time again. You must remain not only unrecognized, but entirely unsuspected. You must do nothing that will make you known. You must never point a finger at us.
Cold, callous, indifferent. And frightened. More frightened, perhaps, than he was. For now they knew there was something in the galaxy that could become aware of the disembodied observer they had been sending out. They could never send another, if indeed they had another, for the old fear would be there. And perhaps an even greater fear – based upon the overriding suspicion that the linkage had been cut not quite soon enough, that this factor which had spotted their observer had already traced it back to them.
Fear for their bodies and their profits …
Not for their bodies, a voice said inside him. Not their biologic bodies. There are no longer any of your kind who have biologic bodies …
Then what? he asked.
An extension of their bodies, carrying on the purpose those with bodies gave them in a time when the bodies still existed. Carried on mindlessly ever since, but without a purpose, only with a memory of a purpose …
Who are you? he asked. How do you know all this? What will you do with me?
In a very different way, it said, I am one like you. You can be like me. You have your freedom now.
I have nothing, he said.
You have yourself, it said. Is that not enough?
But is self enough? he asked.
And did not need an answer.
For self was the basis of all life, all sentience. The institutions, the cultures, the economics were no more than structures for the enhancement of the self. Self now was all he had and self belonged to him. It was all he needed.
Thank you, sir, said he, the last human in the universe.
TRAIL CITY’S HOT-LEAD CRUSADERS
Cliff Simak wrote this story under the name “Gunsmoke Goes to Press,” but it was published, in the September 1944 issue of New Western Magazine, under a new title … and these days it’s likely that many readers will miss the play on words in the new title. If you’ve read a few Westerns, you probably know that “hot lead” is a euphemism for a gunfight – but the protagonist of this story is a frontier newspaper editor in the days when newspaper publishing often required melting down and recasting the lead alloy used to set type on the printing press. (As it turned out, “Gunsmoke Goes to Press” was retained as a chapter heading in the newly titled story.)