Second Ending

13

The land surfaces of the planet had been searched, thoroughly, to within a few hundred miles of the poles. One thousand, seven hundred and fifty-eight underground installations had been discovered and examined, which included launching bases, hospitals, underground towns and single residences, and mines converted into bomb shelters. In the sea seventy-two military or naval establishments had been examined up to the present, but two thirds of the Pacific and much of the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans had yet to be searched. So far three bases had been discovered on the moon, but none of them had been able to survive the warheads sent against them.

The search had uncovered vast quantities of usable metal, all of which had been salvaged, and many functioning robots and other servomechanisms of the nonthinking type. Millions of books of all kinds, engineering blueprints and various pictorial forms of data had been scanned, absorbed and stored in special memory banks, where they could be reproduced at will. As a result of this his robots had become much more adaptable, and gained tremendously in initiative. Now his most general and loosely worded instructions, even wishes he had left uncompleted, would be acted upon correctly and as quickly as was possible.

Altogether a tremendous achievement. But on the negative side…

No human survivors had been found, no animal life of any kind. Birds that flew, insects that crawled, worms that burrowed: none. The sea, lifeless.

Looking out of his dome, Ross began to hate the grass which rolled away on three sides of him. Apart from himself, it was the only thing which was originally alive oh the whole planet, and the only thing which he had gained by his last sleep was a well-stocked larder.

He took to wandering about the valley and throwing himself down on the grass at a different spot each day. He would lie for hours at a time, staring at the sky and praying just one spider or earwig or ladybird would crawl across his arm or leg. He began speaking to the robots less and less, which distressed Sister considerably. She began looking for ways and means of interesting him, and one day she actually succeeded.

“One of the robots we salvaged is a Tailor, sir,” she said brightly as Ross was about to set out on another aimless walk. “It had occurred to me that you might like something more functional than the bed linen to wear.”

Three hours later Ross found himself climbing into his first proper clothes in more than forty thousand years. As he stood before the mirror, resplendent in the tropical whites of a naval captain, Ross thought that it was just his luck that the robot had been a military Tailor. But the whites did set off his tan to advantage. If Alice could have seen him now…

“You’ve made this from bedsheets, too,” said Ross harshly, to break a painful train of thought. “Try dyeing the stuff. And if you make it with an open collar, don’t forget the shirt and tie to go with it, otherwise it would look ridiculous.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Tailor and Sister in unison. The Tailor moved off and Sister asked, “Is there anything else, sir?”

Ross was silent for a moment; then he said, “I’m fed up, bored, I’d like to go to the moon.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Sister replied, and explained that the accelerations used would be instantly fatal to a human being, that radiation from the vessel’s power unit would kill him within a few hours, and that there were other hazards, both radiation and meteoric, which they had no means of guarding him against. For the last human being, space travel was too risky.

“In that case,” said Ross carefully, “I think I should go into Deep Sleep again.”

“For how long, sir? And what reason?”

Forever, Ross felt like saying, but he knew that if he did Sister would start treating him like a patient again. He had a good reason — or excuse, rather — for wanting to undergo suspended animation again. The idea had come during one of his many despairing hours lying in the grass, and the funny thing was that it just might work despite being only an excuse.

He said: “There is no longer any hope of finding human survivors, in space, under the sea, in or out of Deep Sleep, and it is foolish to pretend that there is. My only purpose must be to bring intelligent organic life back to this planet, and for that we must seed the oceans. Life began in the seas and it may do so again. However, the only organic material available in quantity is the grass, so here is what I want done.

“First choose a strain which flourishes in swampland,” he continued quickly, “and gradually increase the depth of water until it grows completely submerged, then gradually replace the fresh water with an increasingly saline solution. Replace soil with sand, and ultimately transplant into shallow sea water. I know that I’m trying to make evolution run backward, but there is a chance that a strain of sea grass might adapt into a mobile life form, and eventually develop intelligence.

“Do you understand your instructions?”

“Yes, sir,” said Sister, and added, “The search of the Pacific will be completed in seventy-three years. Would you like to be awakened…?”

“You are not to awaken me until the project is a success,” said Ross firmly.

And if it wasn’t a success, they would never wake him up. At the moment Ross did not care. All at once he was overcome by a horrible depression and a feeling of loneliness so intense that it was like a twisting cramp inside him. He knew that there had been no need for him to rush into Deep Sleep again so quickly, that it might appear to Sister that he was doing it in a fit of pique because she wouldn’t allow him a trip into space. The truth was, he admitted to himself, he wanted to escape.

His hopes of finding survivors had been sheer self-delusion, of the same order of probability as discovering a genii who would make his every wish come true. Even worse had been his hope of bringing intelligent life back to his world, of sleeping across the millennia and awakening only for fleeting moments to guide it up the evolutionary ladder until they would stand beside him as equals. That had been hoping on a colossal scale, and he had only now begun to realize that the scale had been more than colossally stupid.

One thing became very clear to him as the robots prepared him for the third time, and that was that he wanted to die in his sleep…