WAITING…
SECOND SERIES COMPLETE.
WAITING…
Two minutes later, twenty checks had been run on the lock and seal of the door behind him. Only then was the computer satisfied.
PROCEED.
The sphincter door raised, let him through, and whirled shut again. He brought the tank to a halt just outside the tunnel mouth and, stunned, looked at the world he had been so long in reaching.
XXIII
The sky looked like the bottom of a spittoon. Ugly gray-brown masses of roiling vapors and darker, heavier clouds like clots of mucous scudded down the throat of the world. He could see no blue sky at all. Not a single bird graced the heavens; and no sun shone. It was, he thought, the vault of hell.
He did not faint.
He simply sat and stared, too numbed to feel the full emotional jolt of it.
The land was also gray and dead. It contained no trees. No grass or flowers. The only growing things were towering fungoid forms that reached from the ground like the rotting fingers of dead giants who were determined to push out of their graves. The earth was all dressed in rags of fungus and moss that resembled — though this was a much more virulent form of it — that wriggling monstrosity which he had encountered in the storm drains during his escape from the dungeon. Soupy brown fog drifted between these towers of fungus, like an intelligent entity seeking something unspeakable. There was no other movement than the fog. No animals scampered through the vegetation; no breeze stirred a leaf, for there was neither breeze nor leaf. There were no cities, no houses, no people. Just these endless vistas of death…
He had known that he must come out here. He had known there was something he must see, something into which he must plunge in the manner of a child leaping blindly into a pool in order to sink or swim. The scene was too devastating, the truth behind it too horrible for him to absorb it a piece at a time; absorbing one bit, he would have backed quickly away from the rest of the knowledge, a reluctant Adam with a rotten apple. He'd needed to face it all at once or not at all. And now, weeping softly, he saw it, and he remembered…
This was the pitiful world which man had inherited when the planet's ecological systems began to break down in the late 1990s and on into the Twenty-first Century. In those Last Days, the government had constructed the inverted pyramid deep beneath the flatlands of Utah, a last bastion of mankind where more than two thousand top administrators and scientists searched frantically for some way to perpetuate the species. While hundreds of millions died from a complex chain of ecological disasters, those deep inside the Utah pyramid, Joel among them, had worked in conjunction with NASA to launch the seeds of mankind toward the stars.
They had not been trying to save mankind precisely as an old biology text would have defined the species. They were willing to alter the outward appearance to preserve the inner essence. In a hundred deep-space, faster-than-light drone probes, NASA had never discovered a planet enough like Earth to permit comfortable human colonization. Therefore, it had been necessary for them to create genetic alternatives to man and to put these quasi-human creatures on the interstellar ships which had been readied to take Earth's new children from their dying home.
The aquamen, he thought. They hadn't been entirely a part of Galing's stage setting. They had once been real — still were real, out there on some distant world. The aquaman was a strain of human being that was engineered for survival on a marine planet.
When this work was done, when the staff of the Utah installation had seen their creations shot into space, they next studied and perfected the science of cryogenics. They had built sixteen life suspensions pods — only sixteen, because their supply of certain delicate and crucial instruments was limited — into which volunteers, drawn from a pool of six hundred, were placed for a thousand-year sleep. It was hoped that when they woke they would find themselves in a world where ecological balance had been restored through the tedious but effective processes of Nature.
However, fifty years later, all but one of the pods were damaged in the riots when rational society within the pyramid dissolved. Ten centuries later, Joel woke alone.
It wasn't the Twenty-third Century, as Harttle had said. They were just trying to break him in easy. It was much later than that. Instead, the date must be three thousand and something, A.D.
When he had come awake after ten centuries of sleep, Joel did not find paradise. The air beyond the fortress was still quite poisonous. The water was an acid that had to be refined before it could be used even for bathing. He had been shocked to find no one alive at all. Not even his wife, Alicia Corley, was alive to share the awful future with him. Her pod had been ruined in the riots, of which he found few but detailed records.
He was the last man on Earth.
For several weeks, he remained alone, brooding, contemplating suicide or a return to the pod. But he was basically a man of action, and eventually he acted. He switched on the hermetically sealed nucleotide vats, activated the computers controlling them, and he built one dozen androids.
His thoughts drifted back to the present, his eyes to the fungus beyond the tank. He looked down at Allison. She was still sleeping, though she murmured quietly and stirred a bit. He smiled and touched her dark hair.
Originally, he had intended to treat these artificial companions as men had treated them since they'd been first successfully manufactured in 1993: as tools, as slaves, but never as equals. He wanted to hypno-educate them, assign them to various projects, then return to his pod, checking up on them for a week or two each century. Because androids were, in effect, immortal, they could pass ten thousand years searching for some way to roll back the ecological disaster.
One hitch developed in this plan, although it had not seemed like a hitch at first. He discovered, through various laboratory tests, that his own tissues had reached stasis as a result of the thousand-year sleep. They had ceased to die or renew themselves. No activity took place within them; they lay beneath the microscope like photographs, not like real cells. His tissues were reproducing only when he was injured in some way and matter had to be replaced. He was now immortal himself. He did not need to return to the pod. He was elated. However, over the months that he worked side by side with the vat-formed men and women, he began to think of them as more than animals or slaves. He felt that they were equals — and soon he fell in love with the one who looked a bit like Alicia: he fell in love with Allison, a vat-born woman.
She whispered in her sleep now.
He rested one hand on her face and watched as she took steady, deep breaths.
Falling in love with an android was in the nature of a cardinal sin: a womb-born must never have sexual relations with a vat-born. Never in human history had there been such a universally held, fiercely evangelized, and rigidly obeyed rule against miscegenation. He loathed himself for loving her. He tried to overcome his prejudice, couldn't, and decided that anti-android propaganda must have been fed to him during hypno-training sessions during his early days in the pyramid. This loathing was too strong to be naturally bred. And nothing short of a point-for-point opposing, pro-android propaganda tape could cure him. Yet, without knowing what that original propaganda had been, he was unable to establish a curative program. Androids were a off-shoot of the search for viable space travelers. They were tools. Slaves. They were even pets. But they were never lovers. They were inhuman, unhuman, not fit objects for desire.
Unable to treat his own illness, he had decided to assign the android team various research tasks and return to his pod even though he no longer required it. He hoped that another hundred years of sleep would erase either his love or his prejudice. However, he woke a century later with both: he loved her, and he loathed himself for wanting her…