Second Ending

9

The world he knew was either incinerated or almost aseptically clean. On the surface the war had been responsible for the former, and underground the conditions had been due to overzealous cleaning robots. With the exception of Ross himself, there was no organic life inside the hospital, not even on the microscopic level. There were no lab animals, living or dead. Like the corpses of the humans who had died, they had been cremated a few hours after death, and his own body wastes were similarly treated. The food containers, which still exploded in his face with irritating frequency, held a synthetic which never had been alive.

Ross had had the idea of finding some warm, tidal pool and filling it with all the scraps and leavings of organic life that he could find in the hope that sometime something in that hodgepodge of warring microorganisms would develop and grow until the evolutionary processes could take over again. He had been thinking in terms of millions of years, naturally, taking the long view.

But the tidal pools were choked with ash and soot, and even if his idea was possible a sudden storm or unusually high tide could wash his experiment back into the sea, where the material would become so diluted that no reaction could take place. And the idea was no good anyway because the robots had done a too thorough job of cleaning up.

That was why the First Expedition did not start out until two weeks later — it required that time to reprogram the Miner to search for and protect Life and not just human life. The books on plant ecology and horticulture were severely limited in the hospital, but his instructions included the necessity for absorbing any other data on this and related subjects which the expedition might uncover during their search, Small animals if any, insects, plants, weeds or fungus growths — all were to be reported, their positions marked and steps taken for their preservation until they could be moved to the hospital with absolute safety, for them. And finally Ross had given instructions regarding every contingency he could think of and he gave the order to move out.

On four sets of massive caterpillar treads the Miner %

rumbled through the thirty-foot gap which had been cut in the dome. Ross had been forced to compromise with his original idea for an all-purpose, unspecialized machine, but as he watched his monstrous brainchild go churning past he thought that he had made a good compromise. The powered tread sections were simply a vehicle to transport the digger-nurse unit — which was the seat of the robot’s not inconsiderable brain — and to house the information-gathering and retransmitting devices. It literally bristled with antennae, both fixed and rotating, spotlights, camera supports and deep-level metal-detection equipment which gave its outline an indistinct, sketched-in look. Sitting atop this transporter section with its conical drill reflecting red highlights, the digger-nurse unit pointed aggressively forward. In operation the digger would lift itself clear of the transporter, stick its blunt nose into the ground and go straight down. Like a hot marble sinking through butter, Ross had thought when he watched the first test run. Outwardly it was a monstrous, terrifying object, which was why Ross had ordered it and the four robots following it to be painted with a large red cross. He didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about them.

Watching the cavalcade go past — Big Brother trailed by two repair robots and two Sisters modified for long-distance surface travel — Ross thought that a little stirring music would not have been amiss. He strained his eyes to keep them in sight as they rolled and lurched down the hillside, but it had been two days since the last rain and the ash was beginning to blow about again. Ross stopped himself from waving good-bye at them with a distinct effort; then he turned and began walking toward the small control dome.

Here had been installed the equipment which enabled him to see all that the search robots saw, and here it was that Ross spent every waking moment of the next five days. He watched the Miner’s radar repeater screens, its forward TV and the less detailed but more penetrating infrared vision. Every half-hour or less he checked that it was still on course, which it always was, and many times he asked if it had found anything even though the repeaters told him that it hadn’t. By turns he was bored and frantically impatient, and bad-tempered all the time.

Some of the things he said and did were petty. He knew it and was ashamed of himself, but that didn’t stop him from saying them. But one of the incidents, on the other hand, gave him just cause for losing his temper. The matter of the exploding food containers.

“I am getting fed up with being plastered with this muck every, other mealtime!” he had raged, while trying to get rid of the foul-smelling goo, which, because of some trace impurities present during its manufacture, had in two hundred years turned into a particularly noisome stink bomb. “Go through the stores and separate the unspoiled from the rotten, then bring me only the edible stuff from now on. You shouldn’t have to be told such a simple thing!”

“Doing what you suggest would mean opening every single can, sir,” Sister had replied quietly. “That would cause all the food to spoil within a short time. It is therefore impossible—”

“Is it, now?” Ross had interrupted, the acid in his voice so concentrated that he might have been trying to penetrate the robot’s steel casing with it, “I suppose it is impossible to put the unspoiled food in cold storage until I need it, using the Deep Sleep equipment? It would have to be reheated, of course, but surely your gigantic intellect would prove equal to that problem! But there is an even easier way — just shake the things. If they give a bubbling, liquid sound they’re bad, and if no sound at all then they are good.

“That rule doesn’t hold good in every case, but I don’t mind an occasional mess.”

As always, Sister had filtered out the profanity, temper and sarcasm and proceeded to deal with the instructional content of the words. She informed him that his instructions had already been relayed to a group of Cleaners, who would report when the job was finished. Then she suggested that he look at the main repeater screen, where something appeared to be happening…

Four hundred miles to the northwest it had begun to rain, pushing the visibility out to nearly a mile. The Miner’s forward TV brought him a swaying, jerking picture of a narrow valley whose floor was a mixture of muddy ash and large, flat stones which might have once been a highway. Ahead the valley widened to reveal a great, shallow, perfectly circular lake in which black wavelets merged with a rippled glass shoreline in such a way that it was difficult to make out the water’s edge. And below the pictured scene a group of winking lights indicated the presence of metal, tremendous quantities of metal.

The find came as a complete surprise to Ross, because he had been directing the expedition toward a one-time city some eighty miles to the north. Obviously this had been a military installation which had been constructed after his time, there being no mention of it in the latest maps. The important thing, however, was the metal which had been made available. Stumbling on it like that was such an incredible piece of good fortune that he couldn’t help feeling, illogically perhaps, that more good fortune must follow it.

“Sink a tunnel to a depth of half a mile,” Ross directed, trying not to stammer with excitement. “Angle in from a point two hundred yards beyond the water-line to avoid the risk of flooding…”

The digger unit unshipped itself, earth and ashes fountained briefly and it began its slow dive underground. Occasionally it altered direction to avoid large masses of metal, not because it could not go through them but merely in order to save time. It reported back continuously to the four-hundred-miles-distant Ross, by both speech and repeator instruments, and after nearly five hours’ burrowing the picture of conditions underground was complete.

The installation had been a missile-launching base, extensive but not very deep. The bomb which had been responsible for the glass-bottomed lake, its force contained and to a great extent directed downward by the surrounding hills, had smashed its underground galleries flat. There were no survivors, but as the indications were that the base had been fully automated this did not bother Ross very much.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said while the digger unit was returning to the surface. “Our construction program should be based on a site where metal is available rather than go through the time-wasting business of transporting it back here. So I’m going to send you as many repair robots as can be spared, and while they are on the way here is what I want done.

“You have absorbed data on open-cast mining,” Ross went on briskly, “and your report states that there are large quantities of metal within fifty feet of the surface. I want you to rejoin your transporter unit as quickly as possible and have your repair robots modify it as a bulldozer. When you have uncovered—”

The Sister broke in at that point. “Mr. Ross,” she said firmly, “it’s time for bed.”

Although Ross protested bitterly as he was led down to his room, underneath he was happier and more hopeful than at any other time since his awakening. He was still very far from achieving his goal of searching every square foot of the Earth’s surface, but a beginning had been made. He knew the capabilities of his robots, knew that, given the raw material — which was now available — he would have a duplicate Miner built by the end of the week, and the week after that he would have half a dozen of them. The square law, he thought, was wonderful. Compared to what he was going to do the achievements of the first few rabbits in Australia would be as nothing.

He went to sleep dreaming happily of the orders he would have to give next day, next week and next year…