By Harry Harrison
‘Tell me how the world ended, Grandfather, won’t you please?’ the boy pleaded, looking up at the seamed face of the old man sitting next to him on the trunk of the fallen tree.
‘I’ve told you often enough,’ the old man said, dozing a bit in the warm sun. ‘I bet you’d rather hear about the old trains. They used to—’
‘The world, Grandfather. Tell me how it ended, how everything went bust.’
The old man sighed and scratched a bit on his thigh, defeated by the obstinacy of the very young. ‘You shouldn’t say that it ended, Andy.’
‘That’s what you always say.’
‘What I always say is that the world as we knew it ended. A drastic upheaval. Death, destruction, and chaos, murder, raping, and looting.’ Andy squirmed with happiness on the other end of the log. This was always the best part.
‘And blood and terror, Grandfather, don’t forget that.’
‘It was all of that, too. And it was all because of Alexander Partagas Scobie, cursed be his evil name.’
‘Did you ever meet him, Grandfather?’ Andy asked, knowing all the cues.
‘Yes, I saw Scobie. He passed just as close to me as you’re sitting now, even stopped to talk to me. I was polite to him. Polite! If I knew then what I know now ... There were factories then, I was an honest working man in the factory and ran a hydraulic press. Instead of Yes, Doctor Scobie, Thank you, Doctor Scobie, I should have fed him into my hydraulic press, that’s what I should have done.’
‘What’s a hyndraulie press?’
Grandfather didn’t hear. He was by himself now, reliving the days before the world ended, the days when mankind had been supreme upon the earth.
* * * *
‘Scobie was mad. They said so later, when it was too late of course, but no one had the brains to see it at the time. They treated him nice and listened to his ideas and tried to talk to him, and when he wouldn’t listen they just let him go, that’s all. Just let him go! Him mad as a hatter, with a laboratory as big as a mountain and all his money in the bank and a pension just in case he didn’t have enough.’
‘He hated everybody and wanted to kill them all, old Scobie did. Didn’t he, Grandfather?’
‘Wouldn’t be fair to say that.’ The old man shifted sideways a bit to get back into the sun, and opened the ragged remains of a once fine suit so that he could feel the warmth on his skin. ‘I hate Scobie just as much as the next man, but fair’s fair. They killed him so fast when they found out what he had done that no one bothered to ask him why he had done it. Maybe he thought he was doing right. Or maybe he liked robots more than people. He sure knew how to design robots, Scobie did, give him credit for that. I remember years before the end there were a lot of Scobie robots around and people were afraid they would take away their jobs and stuff like that. They didn’t know the half of it. Robots took away everything. People were always afraid that the robots would fight them, turn into monsters and make war on them. Didn’t happen at all like that. Scobie made robots that didn’t even know people were there.’
‘He made yhem and turned them loose in secret so no one would know?’ Andy asked eagerly. This was the part of the story he liked best.
‘Made God knows how many and smuggled them out. All over the World, in all of the out of the way places. Some he dropped off near auto junkyards and they burrowed under the old cars and disappeared. Other ones he put down near steel mills where they hid under the scrap. They were everywhere, in storage dumps and warehouses, for months before they were discovered, and by that time it was too late. Too late by far, there was no stopping them.’
‘They built each other.’
* * * *
‘They didn’t build each other, that’s not exactly right. The ones that Scobie dropped were already built. Built fine, simple, and smart. Programmed with a steel tape brain. Programmed to do only one thing, and that was to build other robots just like themselves. And when a robot was finished building another robot he activated him with a magnetic copy of his own brain tape and the new robot went to work doing the same thing. Versatile those robots were. Some of them were made almost all out of aluminum, just dump one of them down in a warehouse of mothballed airplanes and within the week there would be two robots, if maybe it could find an old tin can to make a steel tape out of. Scobie even had one kind that had mostly wooden gears and burned charcoal to run, and these did fine in the jungles of the Amazon and upper Congo. They were everywhere you could think of, and places you would never think of but Scobie did, because he was mad. And all of the first robots were made to be afraid of the light. So they scuttled around in the dark and no one ever saw them before it was too late. By the time people realized what was going on there was almost as many robots as there were people. A few days later there were more robots than people and it was the end.’
‘But everyone fought them? All the guns and tanks and everything? Blew the old robots up?’
‘By the thousands. But new ones were being made by the millions. And the tanks ran out of ammunition because the factories were being taken apart by the robots and made into more robots, and while the guns in the front of a tank were blowing up the robots other robots would be taking off the back of the tank to make more robots. It was hell, I tell you. I fought, all of us fought, but we couldn’t possibly win. Robots didn’t mind getting blown up. Blow off the bottom of a robot and the top would keep on working making another robot. And the other robots would stand around watching - by this time they weren’t afraid of the light any more - pushing and eager, ready to grab up the broken parts to make more robots. In the end we just all gave up. There was nothing else we could do. Just tried to look after ourselves. Just eating and staying alive was a job.’
A bit of wind had come up, rustling the leaves, the sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees. Grandfather rose and stretched: he didn’t want to catch a chill.
‘Better start back,’ he said.
‘Then the world was ended?’ Andy asked, pulling at the old man’s knobby hand, not wanting the story to be over.
‘End of the world as I knew it, as you’ll never know it. End of civilization, end of freedom, end of the nobility of men, end of his rule as the top creature on this planet - the robots rule now.’
‘Teacher says they don’t rule, they just exist like trees or stones, and are just as neutral - that’s what teacher said.’
‘What does your teacher know?’ Grandfather mumbled testily. ‘Young kid, twenty years old. I could tell him. The robots rule. Mankind has fallen from the pinnacle of power.’
* * * *
They emerged from the woods then and the first thing they saw was a robot squatting by the path, industriously filing a gear out of a metal blank. Grandfather kicked out in sudden rage and caught the thing on its side with a dull metallic boom. It had been badly assembled, or made of inferior material, because when it fell over its head came off. Almost before it hit the ground there was the thud of rushing feet and a flock of robots raced by, plucking up the head and chasing after the rolling gear wheel. There was a brief flurry of motion and the decapitated robot was dismembered: the robots hurried off.
‘Andy -! his mother’s voice called from the pleasant cottage at the end of the flagstone walk.
‘We’re late for dinner again, I bet,’ the boy said with sudden guilt. He ran quickly up the steps that were made of robot bodies welded solidly together, and grabbed the handle of the door. This had been a robot’s hand; you just shook hands and turned it to open the door. He vanished inside.
Grandfather lingered, not wanting to face his daughter’s sharp tongue. Not yet. He could hear it still echoing in his head from the last time. ‘Don’t fill the boy’s head with your nonsense. It’s a good world. Why don’t you wear decent clothes of robot insulation like the rest of us, instead of those awful old pre-R smelly things? Robots are a national resource - the national resource - not the enemy. We never had it so good.’ On and on, the same old record.
He packed his pipe - made of robot fingers - with tobacco and sucked it alight. There was the quick sound of running feet and a farm wagon ran around the corner. Thick boards were bolted to the truncated torsos of a dozen robots. Just the pelvic motors and legs were left of each one, and they made a fine form of transportation that was completely independent of roads. All of the truck farmers around the village used them now. No expense and no upkeep. An unlimited supply of free replacement parts.
‘It is not a Utopia the way they say!’ Grandfather mumbled fiercely through a cloud of smoke. ‘Man was meant to work and work hard. Shouldn’t have everything handed to him so easy. They’re using robot parts for everything now, a man can’t find an honest day’s work even if he wants to.
‘End of the world, that’s what it was.
‘End of my world!’