To Avenge Man

By Lester Del Rey

Chapter One

Hate spewed across the galaxy in a high crusade. Metal ships leaped from world to world and hurtled across space to farther and farther stars. Planets surrendered their ores to sky-reaching cities, built around fortress temples and supported by vast networks of technology. Then more ships were spawned, armed with incredible weapons, and sent forth in the eternal search for an enemy.

In the teeming cities and aboard the questing ships, soul-wrenching music was composed, epic fiction and supernal poetry were written, and great paintings and sculpture were developed, to be forgotten as later and nobler work was done. Science strove for the ultimate limit of understanding, fought against that limit, and surged past it to limitless possibilities.

But behind all the arts and sciences lay the drive of religion. And the religion was one of ancient anger and dedicated hate.

The ships filled the galaxy until every world was conquered. For a time they hesitated, preparing for the great leap outward. Then the armadas sailed again, across thousands and millions of light-years towards the beckoning galaxies beyond.

With each ship went the holy image of their faith and the unsated and insatiable hunger of their hate…

* * * *

Chapter Two

The cat-track laboured up the rough road over the crater wall, topped the last rise and began humming its way down into Aristarchus. As it dipped into the ink black of its own shadow from the sun behind, its headlights flashed on. Around it, the jagged rocky walls scintillated in a riot of reflected colours from crystal fractures that had never been dulled by wind or rain.

Inside the cab, the driver’s seat groaned protestingly at the robot’s weight as Sam shifted his six hundred terrestrial pounds forward. Coming home was always a good time. He switched lenses in his eyes and began scanning the crater floor for the first sight of the Lunar Base Dome, though he knew it was still hidden around a twist of the trail.

‘You don’t have to be quite so all-fired anxious to get back, Sam,’ Hal Norman complained. But the little selenologist was also gazing forward eagerly. ‘You might show some appreciation for the time I’ve spent answering your fool questions and trying to pound sense into your tin head. Anybody’d think you didn’t like my company,’ he pouted humorously.

Sam made the sound of a human chuckle as he had taught himself to acknowledge all the verbal nonsense men called humour. But truth compelled him to answer seriously. ‘I like your company very much, Hal.’

He had always liked the company of the men he’d met on Earth or during his many years on the Moon. Humans, he had decided long ago, were wonderful. He had enjoyed the long field trip with Hal Norman while they collected data from the automatic recorders scattered over the lunar surface. But it would still be good to get back to the dome, where the men had given him the unique privilege of joining them. There he could listen to the often inexplicable but always fascinating conversation of forty men. And there, perhaps, he could join them in their singing.

Music and reading were the chief recreations of the men here. There were thousands of microbooks in the dome library, brought in a few at a time by many men over the long years. They were one of the few taboos. It was against orders for Sam to read any of them, and a man had once told him that it was to save him from unnecessary confusion. But the collection of music was not forbidden, and he was often permitted to join in their singing. All the robots had perfect pitch, of course. But only Sam had learned to sing acceptably enough to win a place in the dome.

In anticipation, he began humming a chanty about the sea he had never seen. The cat-track hummed downward between the walls of the road that had been crudely bulldozed from the rubble of the crater. Then they broke out into the open, and he could see the dome and the territory around it.

Hal grunted in surprise. ‘That’s odd. I hoped the supply rocket would be in. But what are those three ships doing here?’

Sam cut off the headlights and switched back to wide-angle lenses. Now most of the crater was visible, until it vanished against the horizon, giving place to the blackness of the sky and the myriad coloured pinpoints of the stars. Ahead lay the low dome that roofed the Base, with its biphase microwave antenna tracking the manned space platform that circled Earth. Half a mile beyond it stood three ships, bulky with exposed tanks and each carrying a huge passenger globe encased in bracing girders. They didn’t look like supply rockets.

Sam’s eyes swept across the crater floor, almost to the horizon. There he could make out the crumpled wreck of an early ship, still surrounded by the supply capsules that had been sent on automatic control to keep the stranded crew alive until rescue could be sent. The three ships bore a striking resemblance to the one that had crashed. The only other such ships were those used in the third expedition. But they had been parked in orbit around Earth after the end of the third expedition fifty years ago. Once the Base was established, their capacity had no longer been needed, and they were inefficient for routine supply shipment and the rotation of the men stationed here.

* * * *

Before he could comment on the ships, the buzzer sounded, indicating that Base had spotted the cat-track. Sam flipped the switch and acknowledged the call.

‘Hi, Sam.’ It was the voice of Dr Robert Smithers, the leader of Lunar Base. ‘Butt out, will you? I want to talk to Hal.’

Sam could have tuned in on the communication frequency with his own receptors, since the signal was strong enough at this distance. But he obeyed the order to avoid listening as Hal reached for the handset. There was no way to detune his audio receptors, however.

He heard Hal’s greeting. Then there was silence for at least a minute.

Hal’s face was shocked and serious when he finally spoke again. ‘But that’s damned nonsense, Chief! Earth got over such insanity half a century ago. There hasn’t been a sign of ... Yes, sir ... All right, sir. Thanks for not taking off without me.’

He hung up the handset, shaking his head. When he faced Sam, his expression was unreadable. ‘Full speed, Sam.’

‘There’s trouble,’ Sam guessed. He threw the cat-track into its top speed of thirty miles an hour, fighting and straining with the controls. Only a robot could manage the tricky machine at such a rate over the crude road, and it required his full attention.

Hal’s voice was strange and harsh. ‘We’re being sent back to Earth. Big trouble, Sam. But what can you know of war and rumours of war?’

‘War was a dangerous form of political insanity, outlawed at the conference of 1983,’ Sam quoted from a speech that had come over the radio. ‘Human warfare has now become unthinkable.’

‘Yeah. Human war.’ Hal made a rough sound in his throat. ‘But not cruel and inhuman war, it seems ... Oh, hell. Stop looking so gloomy; it’s not your problem.’

Sam decided against chuckling this time, though reference to his set, unsmiling expression was usually meant to be a form of humour. He filed the puzzling words away in his permanent memory for later consideration.

The terminator was rushing across the lunar surface. It would soon be night. More than half of the near crater was already hidden in blackness, though sunlight was still reaching the Base, and the territory beyond was in glaring white light. But the undiffused shadows stretched long behind every projection in the road. Seeing was hard as they neared the dome, and all Sam’s attention had to be directed to his driving. Behind him, he heard Hal getting into the moonsuit to leave the cab.

Sam brought the cat-track to a halt to let Hal out at the entrance to the sealed underground hemisphere of lunar rock that was the true dome - the light upper structure was simply a shield against the heat of the sun. He drove the machine under that and shut off the motor.

As he emerged from the airlock, air gushed out of small cavities of his body and made a haze of glittering crystals that fell slowly to the surface. But he felt no discomfort. There was only the faint click as a pressure sensitive piezzo-electric switch activated a relay inside his torso. That switch was designed as an emergency measure, to turn his power on if there should be a puncture of the dome while he was inactivated, and now it merely indicated the pressure drop. Maybe one of the reasons the men liked having him inside was the existence of that switch, since it could save their lives - though he hoped there were other explanations. There had been no room in the Mark Three robots for such devices.

He saw some of the Mark Threes waiting just beyond the entrance as he approached. There were tracks in the lunar dust leading to the space ships, but whatever ferrying they had done was obviously finished, and they were merely standing in readiness. They were totally unlike him. Sam bulked over the tiny black robots. One of them, directly in his path, slipped under his raised arm to make room for him, moving with a light gracefulness that he couldn’t approximate. He was bulky and mechanical, designed only for function, in the early days when men needed help on the Moon. The Mark Threes were almost childlike, under their dark enamel, and their size and weight had been pared down to less than that of a man. There had been thirty of the model originally, but accidents had left only a few more than twenty. And of the original Mark Ones, only Sam was still functioning.

“When do we leave?’ he called to one of the little robots over the radio circuit.

The black head turned slowly towards him. ‘We do not know. The men did not tell us.’

‘Didn’t you ask them?’ he called. But he had no need of their denial. They had not been told to ask.

They were still unformed, less than five years old, and their thoughts were tied to the education given by the computers in the crèche. They lacked more than twenty years of his intimate association with men. But sometimes he wondered whether they would ever learn enough, or whether they had been too strongly repressed in training. Men were afraid of robots back on Earth, as Hal Norman had once told him, which was why they were still being used only on the Moon.

He turned away from them and went down the entrance to the inner dome. The entrance led to the great community room, and the men were all gathered there, wearing moon-suits. They were arguing with Hal as he began emerging from the lock, but at sight of Sam the words were cut off. He stared about in the silence, feeling suddenly awkward.

‘Hello, Sam,’ Dr Smithers said finally. He was a tall, spare man barely thirty, but seven years of responsibility here had etched deep lines into his face and put grey in his moustache, though his other hair was still jet black. ‘All right, Hal. Your things are on the ship. I cut it fine waiting for you, so we’re leaving at once. No more arguments. Get out there!’

‘Go to hell!’ Hal told him. ‘I don’t desert my friends.’

Other men began moving out. Sam stepped aside to let them pass, but they seemed to avoid looking at him.

Smithers sighed wearily. ‘Hal, I can’t argue this with you. You’ll go if I have to chain you. Do you think I like this? But we’re under military orders now. They’re going crazy back there. They didn’t find out about the expected attack until a week ago, as near as I can learn, but they’ve already cancelled space. Damn it, I can’t take him! We’re at the ragged limit of available lift now, and he represents six hundred pounds of mass - more than four of the others,’ he raised his arms slightly.

Hal gestured sharply towards the outside. ‘Then leave four of those behind. He’s worth more than the whole lot of them.’

‘Yeah. He is. But my orders specify that all men and the maximum possible number of robots must be returned.’ Smithers twisted his lips savagely and suddenly turned to face the robot. ‘Sam, I’ll give it to you straight. I can’t take you with us. We have to leave you here alone. I’m sorry, but that’s how it has to be.’

‘You won’t be alone, Sam,’ Hal Norman said. ‘I’m staying.’

Sam stood silently for a moment, letting it register. His circuits found it hard to integrate. He had never thought of being separated from these men who had been his life. Going back to Earth had been easy to accept; he’d gone back there once before. Little hopes and future-pictures he hadn’t known were in his mind began to appear.

But with those came memories of Hal Norman’s expressed hopes and dreams. The man had showed Sam a picture of his future wife and tried to describe all that such a creature meant to a man. He’d spoken of green fields and the sea. He’d raved about Earth too often during the days they were together.

Sam moved forward towards Hal. The man saw him coming and began to back away, but he was no match for the robot. Sam held his arms and closed the moonsuit, then gathered the man up carefully. Hal was struggling, but it did no good against Sam’s determination.

‘All right, Dr Smithers. We can go now,’ Sam told the Chief.

* * * *

They were the last to leave the dome. The little black robots were already marching across the surface, with the men straggling along behind them. Smithers fell into step with Sam, moving as if the burden was on his back instead of in the arms of the robot. Hal had ceased struggling. He lay outwardly quiet; but through the suit, Sam’s body receptors picked up sounds that he had heard only twice before on occasions he tried not to remember. They were the sounds of a man trying to control his weeping.

Halfway to the ships, faint words came over the radio. ‘Put me down, Sam. I’ll go quietly.’

Sam obeyed, and the three moved on together. Smithers’ hand touched Sam’s shoulder, and the man’s words came through his suit. ‘Thanks, Sam. Handling Hal was a favour I no longer had the right to ask of you. Well, it looks as if you’re going to have a lot of time to kill. And we...’

He didn’t finish the thought. Sam mulled over the words he could understand, and even they made no sense. With the men all gone, there would be no spare time. There would be more than he could possibly find time to accomplish. The great solar observatory across the crater would need tending, the selenographs would have to be checked and at least the routine reports from all instruments would have to be sent off weekly. He should have had hours of instructions, but now it looked as if there would be no time for more than hasty orders.

By the time the three reached the nearest ship, the other men and the little robots were all aboard. The Chief motioned Hal up the ramp. For a moment the younger man hesitated. He turned towards Sam, started to make a motion, and then swung away and dashed into the ship, his shoulders shaking convulsively.

Smithers still stood after the others had disappeared. The radio brought the sound of a sigh, before the man moved. But there were no words.

‘You haven’t given me my orders,’ Sam reminded him.

Smithers shook his head, as if coming out of some deeper thoughts of his own. His lips twitched into what might have been a smile. ‘No, Sam. There are no orders. All orders, past, present or future - all are cancelled. There is no more work. Space is finished!’

He put his foot on the ramp and turned partly away from Sam. Then abruptly he swung back.

‘Goodbye, Sam,’ he said thickly. His right hand lifted in a brief gesture. ‘Don’t forget the books!’

A moment later, he was through the entrance to the ship. The ramp was drawn in after him, and the great outer seal of the rocket ship began to close.

* * * *

Chapter Three

Sam ran back to the entrance to the dome, to avoid the blast. As he ran, he realized slowly the meaning of what Smithers had said.

No orders! There hadn’t even been orders left for him to come back here, back to the place men had left. Yet his feet went on moving, as if acting on some strange orders of their own.

The edge of darkness had touched the dome now, leaving the rocket standing in the last light as he turned back. He watched the takeoff of the three heavily laden ships. They staggered up slowly on great tails of flame. They rose on sharper jets until they were above the crater walls and against the black of space, carrying the men towards the rendezvous with Earth’s orbital station. Sam watched until they were beyond the range of his strongest vision. Then, without orders or knowledge of why he acted, he turned into the dome. It was silent and empty around him.

He stared at the clock on the wall and at the calendar that they had kept marked off. He hadn’t found how long they would be gone. But Smithers’ words gave a vague answer - he would have a lot of time to kill. That could mean anywhere from one month to most of a year, judging by the application of similar phases in the past. He looked at the shelves filled with microbooks for a few moments. Then he went outside, to stare up at the Earth in the sky above him. There were spots of light in the dark areas that he knew to be the cities of men. There were men there, a quarter of a million miles away, and there must be speech and man-laughter and singing.

He stood there a long time, staring upwards. Finally he went back inside, to tidy up the mess the men had made in their hasty leaving. He folded the few spare clothes and put them away, cleaned the cooking equipment and straightened up as best he could. Hal had left the picture of the female man about whom he’d spoken so often, and Sam stared at it, trying to understand. At last, he put it carefully into a drawer, closing it away from view.

The microbooks Hal had liked to keep near him were in the same drawer, and they reminded Sam of Smithers’ last words.

‘Don’t forget the books!’ The words seemed needless, since Sam could never forget unless ordered to do so. And the Chief had said there were no orders. There wasn’t even an order against reading the books now.

And that, Sam realized, might have been what Smithers was indicating to him in those final words.

The second day after the takeoff of the ship, Sam was watching the dark areas of Earth again when some of them grew suddenly brighter. New spots of brightness rose and decayed during the hours he watched. They were far brighter than any city should have been. Other spots glowed where no cities had been before. But eventually, they all faded. After that, there were no bright areas at all.

As Earth turned slowly, he saw that all the cities on Earth were now dark.

It was a mystery for which he had no explanation. He went inside to try the radio that brought news and entertainment from the relay on the orbital station, but no signal was coming through. He debated calling them, but initiating such a call was reserved for Smithers. And he was gone.

He was outside again, staring at Earth the next time the familiar spots that should have been cities swam into the darkened side of Earth. There were still no spots of lights. Even with the small telescope used for the infrequent observations of Earth, he could detect no sign of the cities. There was only the hint of a dull glow in a few places, too diffuse to be from normal lights. And the radio was silent.

* * * *

He paced about, trying to force his eyes to see what was not there to see. Men had to be there! And the lights of then-cities would be the proof of it - the assurance that men were still talking and making what they called jokes and singing, even if they were beyond his hearing. Now suddenly, he needed that proof, and there was no evidence! It was as if all men had disappeared with the going of the few from the Moon!

Through all the fifth day, he waited before the radio with the gain turned up to its maximum. The men who had left there should have arrived at their destination now. He knew there was no reason to expect such a call; men were not obligated to report to a robot, as they would have reported to other men. But his brain circuits had been filled with odd future-pictures that drove him to the set and kept him there for long hours after he knew there would be no signal for him.

Finally, he knew there would be no call. He got up and went into the empty room where the men had spent so much of their time.

Eventually his pacing led him to the music player. They had let him use it at times, and he turned to it now, to fill the emptiness of the room and of his mind with sound. He found a tape that was one of his favourites and threaded it. But when the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth reached its end, the dome seemed more empty and silent than ever. He found another tape, without voices this time. And that was followed by another. It helped a little, but it was not enough.

It was then that he turned to the books, taking one at random. It was something about Mars, by a human named Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he started to put it back. He had already learned enough about astronomy from the education machine. But at last he threaded it into the microreader and sat down to read.

It started well enough, and it was about some strange kind of man, not about astronomy. But then...

Sam made a strange sound, only slowly realizing that he had imitated the groan of a man for the first time in his existence. It was all madness!

He knew men had never reached Mars - and couldn’t reach this Mars, because the planet was totally unlike what he knew existed. It must be some strange form of human humour. Or else there were men unlike any he had known and facts that had been kept from him. The latter seemed more probable.

He struggled through it, to groan again when it ended and he still didn’t know what had happened to the strange female man who was a princess and who laid highly impossible eggs. But by then he had begun to like John Carter. He wanted to read more. He was confused - but even more curious than puzzled. Eventually, he found the whole series and read them all.

It was much later that one of the books solved some of the puzzle for him. There was a small note before the book really began: This is a work of speculative fiction; any resemblance to present-day persons or events is entirely coincidental. He looked, up fiction in the dictionary he had seen the men use and felt better afterwards. It wasn’t quite like humour, but it wasn’t fact, either. It was a game of some kind, where the rules of life were all changed about in idiosyncratic ways. The writer might pretend that men liked to kill each other or were afraid of women, or some other ridiculous idea; then he tried to show what might happen. It was obviously taboo to pretend about real people and events, though some of the books had stories that used names and backgrounds that had the same names as those in reality.

The best fiction of all sometimes looked like books of fact, if the writer was clever enough. ‘History’ was mostly that. There was a whole imaginary world called Rome, for instance. It was fortunate that Sam had been taught the simple facts of man’s progress by the education machine before reading such books. Men, it was true, had sometimes been violent, but not when they understood all the facts or could help it

* * * *

In the end he evolved a simple classification. If a book made him think hard and forced him to strain to follow it, it was fact; if it made him read faster and think less as he went through it, it was fiction.

There was one book that was hardest of all to classify. It was an old book, written before men had gone out into space. Yet it was full of carefully documented and related facts about an invasion of flying saucers from far in space. Eventually he was forced to decide from the internal evidence that it was fact but it left him disturbed and unhappy.

Hal Norman had referred to inhuman war, and Dr Smithers had mentioned an attack. Could it be that the strange ships from somewhere had struck Earth?

He remembered the brilliant lights over the cities, so much like the great ray weapons described in some of the fiction about space war. Sometimes there were elements of truth even in fiction. There had been a book about men who went back in time and fought totally impossible monsters - and then he had discovered that there really had been dinosaurs of that size and kind.

There was a book about those who spoke for Boskone, and puzzling suggestions that the evil men who seemed to have existed were agents of that Boskone, or of the Eich. It would at least explain why the probably fictional Hitler could be treated as fact, in books that otherwise did not seem to be fiction.

If invaders had come in great ships to fight against Earth, it might take men longer than Sam cared to think about to fight them off. If there were flying saucers or ships of the Eich attacking Earth, some of his men might never come back at all! And there was nothing Sam could do here to help them.

He went outside to stare at the sky. Earth still showed no sign of cities. They must be blacked out, as they would be if flying saucers were in their skies. He searched the space over the Moon, but he could find no strange craft. Then he went back inside to read through the microbooks again.

It was poetry that somehow finally shoved the worry from his mind. He had tried poetry before, and given up, unable to follow it. But this time he made a discovery. He tried reading it aloud, until it began to beat at him and force its rhythm on him. He was reading Swinburne’s Hymn of Man, attracted by the title, and suddenly the words and something besides began to sing their way into his deepest mind.

He went back over four lines again and again, until they were music, or all that music had tried to say and had failed:

‘In the grey beginning of years, in the

twilight of things that began,

The word of the earth in the ears of

the world, was it God? was it man?’

Sam went up and down the dome for most of that day, chanting to himself that the word of the earth in the ears of the world was man! Then he turned back to other poetry.

None quite equalled that one experience, but most of it stirred his circuits in strange ways. A book of limericks even surprised him twice to the point where he chuckled, without realizing that he had never done that spontaneously before.

There were slightly over four thousand volumes in the little library, including the technical books. He timed them carefully, stretching them by rereading his favourites, until he finished the last at exactly midnight on the eve of the takeoff anniversary.

The next twenty-four hours he spent outside the dome, watching the sky and staring at Earth, while his radio receptors scanned all the frequencies.

It had been a lot of time already killed. But there was no signal, and no rocket ship blasted down, bringing back the men.

At midnight he gave a sighing sound and went back inside the dome. In the technical section, he unlocked the controls for the atomic generator and turned it down to its lowest idling rate. He came back, turning the now dim lights off as he moved. In the main room, he put his favourite tape on the player and the copy of Swinburne in the microreader. But he did not turn them on. Instead, he dropped his heavy body quietly on to the floor before the entrance, where the men would be sure to see him when they finally returned.

Then one hand reached up firmly, and he turned himself off.

* * * *

Chapter Four

Sam’s eyes turned towards the entrance as consciousness snapped on again. There was no sign of men there. He stood up, staring about the dome, then hastened outside to stare across the floor of the crater. It lay bare, except for the old wretched rocket ship.

Men had not come back.

Inside again, he looked for something that might have fallen and hit his switch. The switch itself was still in the off position, however. And when he turned on the tape player, no sound came. It was confirmation enough. Something had happened to the air in the dome, and his internal switch had gone into operation to turn him on automatically.

A few minutes later he found the hole. A meteoroid the size of an egg must have hit the surface above. It had struck with enough force to blast a tiny craterlet almost completely through the dome, and internal pressure had done the rest.

He secured patching material and began automatically making the repairs. There was still more than enough air in the tanks to fill the dome again.

Sam sighed as the first whisper of sound reached him from the tape player. He flipped his switch back to on position before the rising pressure negated the emergency circuit. He still had to get back to the entrance to resume his vigil. It had simply been bad luck that had aroused him before the men could return.

He moved back through the dome, hardly looking. But his eyes were open, and his mind gradually began to add the evidence. There was no way to tell how long he had been unconscious; he had no feeling of any time. But there was dust over everything - dust that had been disturbed by the outrushing air, but that had still patinaplated itself on metal firmly enough to remain. And some of the metal showed traces of corrosion. That must have taken years!

He stopped abruptly, checking his battery power. The cobalt-platinum cell had been fully charged when he lay down. Now it was at less than half charge. Such batteries had an extremely slow leakage. Even allowing for residual conductance through his circuits, it would have taken at least thirty years for such a loss!

Thirty years! And the men had not come back.

* * * *

A groan came to his ears, and he turned quickly. But it had only been his own voice. And now he began shouting. He was still trying to shout in the airless void as he reached the surface. He caught himself, bracing his back against the dome as his balance circuits reacted to some wild impulse from his brain.

Men would never desert him. They had to come back to the Moon to finish their work, and the first thing they would do would be to find him. Men couldn’t just leave him there! Only in the wild fiction could that happen, and even there only the postulated evil men would do such a thing. His men would never dream of it!

He stared up at Earth. The dome was in night again, and Earth was a great orb in the sky, glowing blue and white, with touches of brown in a few places. He saw the outline of continents through the cloud cover, and reorganized the great cities that must lie within the thin darkened area. There should have been lights visible there, even against the contrast of brighter Earthlight.

But there was no light.

He sighed soundlessly again, and now he felt himself relaxing. The attackers must still be hovering there! The dangerous Ufo-things from space. Men were still embattled and unable to return to him. Thirty years of that for them, and here he was losing balance over what had been only a year of his conscious time!

He faced the worst of possibilities more calmly now. He even forced himself to admit that men might have been so badly crippled by the war that they could not return to him -perhaps not for more time than he could think of. Smithers had said they were abandoning space, at a time when the attack had not yet come. How long would it take to recover and regain their lost territory?

He went back into the dome, but the radio was silent. Hesitantly, he initiated a call to the orbital station. After half an hour, he gave up. The men there, if men were still there, must be keeping strict radio silence.

‘All right,’ he said slowly into the silence of the dome. ‘All right, face it. Men aren’t coming back for a robot. Ever!’

It was a speech out of the fiction he had read, rather than out of rationality. But somehow saying it loudly made it easier to face. Men could not come to him. He wasn’t that valuable to them.

He shook his head over that, remembering the time he had been taken back to Earth after twenty years out of the crèche and on the Moon. The Mark One robots had all been destroyed in the accidents and difficulties of getting the Base established, except for Sam. Supposedly better Mark Two robots were sent to replace them, but they had been beset by some circuit flaws that made them more prone to accident and less useful than the first models. More than a hundred had been sent in all - and none had remained. It was then they called Sam back to study him. There, deep in the security-hidden underground robot development workshops, he had been tested in every way they knew to help them in designing the Mark Three robots. And there old Stephen DeMatre had interviewed him for three whole days. At the end of that time, the man who had first introduced him to his place with men had put a hand on bis metal shoulder and smiled at him.

‘You’re unique, Sam,’ he’d said. ‘A lucky combination of all the wild guesses we used in making each Mark One individually, as well as some unique conditioning among the first Base staff. We don’t dare duplicate you yet, but some day the circuit control computer is going to want to get your pattern in full for later brains. So take good care of yourself. I’d keep you here, but ... You take care of yourself, Sam. You hear me?’

Sam had nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Do you mean you can make other brains exactly like mine?’

‘Technically, the control computer can duplicate your design,’ DeMatre had answered. ‘It won’t be just like your brain - too many random factors in any really advanced mechanical mind unit - but with similar capabilities. That’s why you’re worth more money than this whole project without you. You’re worth quite a few million dollars, and it’s up to you to see valuable property like that isn’t destroyed. Right, Sam?’

Sam had agreed and been shipped back to the Moon, along with the first of the Mark Three robots. And maybe his trip back had been of some use, since the new models worked as well as their limitations permitted. They were far better than the preceding models.

Maybe he wasn’t valuable enough to men for them to come for him now. But by DeMatre’s own words, he was one of their most valuable possessions. If it was up to him to see that he wasn’t destroyed, then it was up to him also to see that he wasn’t lost to men.

If they couldn’t come for him, he had to go to them.

The question was: How? He couldn’t project himself by mind power like John Carter. He had to have a rocket!

With the thought, he went dashing out through the entrance and heading towards the old wreck. It stood exactly as it had after the landing that had ruined it, with half its hull plating ripped off and most of its rocket motors broken. It could never be flown again. Nor could the old supply capsules. They had burned out their tubes in getting here, being of minimum construction. There wasn’t even room inside one for him.

Sam considered it, making measurements and doing the hardest thinking of his existence. Without the long study of all the technical manuals of the dome library, he could never have found an answer. But eventually he nodded.

A motor from the big shop could be fitted to a capsule. It would be barely strong enough. But the plating could be removed to lighten the little ship; Sam needed no protection from space. And the automatic guidance system could be removed to make enough room for him. He could operate it manually, since his reaction and integrating times were faster than that of even the system.

Fuel would be a problem, though there was enough oxygen in the dome storage tanks. It would have to be hydrogen, since he could find rocks from which that could be released by the power of the generator. Fortunately, lunar gravity was easier to escape than that of Earth.

He went back to the dome and found paper and pencil. He was humming softly to himself as he began laying out his plan. It wasn’t easy. He might not be skilled enough to pilot the strange craft to the station. And it would take a great deal of time. But Sam was going to the men who wouldn’t come to him!

* * * *

Chapter Five

It takes experience to turn engineering theory into practice. Almost three years had passed since Sam’s awakening before the orbital station swam slowly into view before him. And the erratic takeoff and flight had been one that no human body could have stood. But now he sighted on the huge metal doughnut before him, estimating its orbit carefully. There were only a few gallons of fuel remaining in the tanks behind him, and he had to reach the landing net at the first try.

His first calculations seemed wrong. He glanced down at the huge orb of Earth and flipped sun filters over his eyes. Something was wrong. The station was not holding its bottom pointed exactly at the centre of Earth as it should have done; it was turning very slowly, and even its spin was uneven, as if the water used to balance it against wobbling had not been distributed properly. Beside it, the little ferry ship used between station and ships from Earth was jerking slightly on the silicone-plastic line that held it.

Sam felt an unpleasant stirring in his chest where most of his brain circuits lay. But he forced it down and computed his blast for all the factors. He had learned something of the behaviour of his capsule during the minutes of takeoff and the later approach to the station. His fingers moved delicately, and fuel metered out to the cranky little motor.

It was not a perfect match, but he managed to catch himself in the net around the entrance to the hub. He pulled himself free, as the capsule drifted off, and began scrambling up to the lock. A moment later, he was standing in the weightlessness of the receiving section. And from the sounds of his feet, there was still air in the station.

He froze motionless as he let himself realize he had made it. Then he began looking for the men who should have seen his approach and be coming to question him.

There was no sound of steps or of any other activity, except for his own movements. Nor was there any light from the bulbs above him. The only illumination was from a thick quartz port that faced directly into the sun.

Sam cut on the lamp built into his chest, and began sweeping the sections of the hub with its light. Dust had formed a patina here, too. He sighed softly into the air. Then he moved the outer sections, his step determined.

Halfway down the tube that ran from the hub to the outer hull, Sam stopped and cut off his light. Ahead of him there was a glow! Lights were still burning!

* * * *

He let out a yell to call the men and began running, adjusting for the increasing feeling of weight as he moved outward. Then he was under the bulb.

He stared up at it - a single bulb burning among several others that were black, though they were on the same circuit. How long did it take for these bulbs to burn out? Years surely, and probably decades. Yet most of the station was in darkness, though there was still power from the atomic generator.

He found a few other bulbs burning in the outer station, but not many. The great reception and recreation room was empty. Beyond that, the offices were mostly open and vacant. Some held a litter of paper and other stuff, as if someone had gone through carelessly, not bothering to put anything back in place. The living section with its tiny sleeping cubicles was worse. Some of the rooms were simply bare, but others were in complete disorder. Four showed signs of long occupancy, with the sleeping nets worn almost through and not replaced. But nothing showed how recently they had been left.

He went through another section devoted to station machinery and came to a big room that was apparently now used for storage. Sam had seen a plan of the station in one of the older books in the dome. He placed this room as one designed as a storage for hydrogen bombs once. But that had been from the pre-civilized days of men, and the bombs had been dismantled and destroyed more than sixty years before.

It was in the hydroponics room that he was forced to face the truth. The plants there had been the means of replacing the oxygen in the air for the men, and now the tanks were dry and the vegetation had been dead so long that only dessicated stalks remained. There could be no men here. He didn’t need the sight of the bare food section for confirmation. Some men had stayed here until the food was gone before they left the un-tended plants to die. It must have been many years ago that they had abandoned the station.

Sam shook his head in anger at himself. He should have guessed it when he saw that there were none of the winged rocket ships waiting outside the station. So long as men were here, they would have kept some means for return to Earth.

The observatory was dark, but there was still power for the electronic telescope. The screen lighted at his touch, showing only empty space. He had to wait nearly two hours before the slow tumble of the station brought Earth into full view.

Most of it was in daylight, and there was only a thin cloud cover. Once a thousand cities could have been scanned plainly from here. When seeing was best, even streams of moving cars could be seen. But now there were no cities and no signs of movement!

Sam emitted a harsh gasping sound as he scanned the continent of North America. He had seen pictures of New York, Chicago, and several other city complexes from this view. Now there was only dark ruin showing where they had been. It came to him with an almost physical shock that perhaps millions of human beings had died in those wrecks of cities.

There were still smaller towns where he could make out the pattern of houses. But there was no movement, even there.

He cut power from the telescope with an angry flick of his finger, trying to blot the things he had seen from his memory. A moment later, he had power on again and was hunting down roadways and rivers for signs of movement. But there was no evidence of man. And all of the ruins looked old and weathered, as if there had been no man to fight on for a great many years.

He sagged against the telescope, his mind filled with pictures he could not control. Great ships ravening out of space, carrying savage alien monsters and bringing planet-wrecking rays against Earth. There had been no Lens, no miracle to save Earth. There had been only the ruin of all man’s achievements. And man had been gone before Sam had finished his first year of waiting.

* * * *

He shook off his imaginings by force of will. There had been men here on the station. They must have left some records.

He moved rapidly away from the observatory, hunting for the communications section. It was in worse shape than most other places when he found it. It looked as if some man had deliberately tried to wreck the machinery. A hammer lay tangled in a maze of ruin that must once have been the main receiver. There was something that looked like dried blood on a metal cabinet, with a dent that might have fitted a human fist.

The floor was littered with tape that should have held a record of all the communications received and sent, and the drive capstan on the tape player was bent into uselessness. Sam lifted a section of tape and placed it in the slot that gave his face a sad caricature of a mouth. The tape sensors moved into place, and he began scanning the bit of plastic. It was blank, probably wiped of any message by time and the unshielded transformer that was still humming below the control panel.

Most of the tape cabinet was empty, and there was nothing on tapes within. Sam ripped open drawers, hunting for some evidence. He finally found a single tape in the cabinet dented by a fistprint, lying at the back with the reel broken as if it had been hurled savagely into the drawer. Most of the impression on the tape was a garble of static; stray fields had got to it, even through the metal of the cabinet. But towards the end, a few words could barely be picked out from the noise.

‘... test chambers here away from the blast ... Thought we’d made it ... a starving ... went mad. Must have been a nerve aerosol, but it didn’t settle as ... Mad. Everywhere. Southern hemisphere, too. Your men who came down here didn’t have a chance ... Took a chance after I heard your broadcasts, but finding a transmitter was diffi ... Weeks. Now I’m the last survivor. I must be. For God’s sake, stay where you are! Don’t...’

The noise grew worse then, totally ruining intelligibility. Sam caught bits of what might have been sentences, but they made no sense to him; they seemed to be pure gibberish. Then suddenly a small section of the tape against the hub became almost clear.

The voice was high-pitched now, and overmodulated, as if the words had been too loud to be carried by the transmitter. There was a strange, unpleasant quality that Sam had never heard in a human voice before.

‘... all shiny and bright. But it couldn’t fool me. I knew it was one of them! They’re waiting up there, waiting for me to come out. They want to eat my soul. They’re clever now, they won’t let me see them. But when I turn my back, I can feel...’

The tape came to an end.

Sam could make no sense of it, though he replayed it all again in hopes of finding some other clue. He gave up and reached down to shut off the power in the transformer. It was amazing that the wreckage hadn’t already blown all the fuses for this section. He groped for the switch and flipped it, just as his eyes spotted something under the transformer shelf.

It was a fountain pen, gold and black enamel.

Sam had seen one like it countless times, and now he turned it over in his hands, to see familiar lettering engraved on the barrel: RPS. Those were the initials of Dr Smithers, and the pen could only have been his. He’d been one of those who had reached the station, probably one who had waited there to receive that strange message from Earth. The Moon ships had made it safely, and Smithers had stayed on here until the food was gone. Then he must have returned to Earth where the tape indicated at least one man still survived, after the attack was over.

The telescope had showed no sign of men. But if there were only a few men left on the immense face of the planet below, the chance of finding any evidence of them was too slight to determine.

The search must be made from the surface of Earth, not from this useless station in the sky. In theory, getting back to Earth from the station wasn’t too difficult. A small retro-thrust from a rocket could slow its speed and change its orbit enough to bring it down to the atmosphere. Then any winged craft with shallow enough an angle of glide could be manoeuvred down slowly to avoid burning from the friction of the air.

There was more than enough sheet metal in the sheathing of the station to provide modifications to the little ferry, and there were books that showed most details of the design of the regular landing craft. There was even enough fuel; the emergency tanks in the station were half filled with the mono-propellant suited for the little rocket motor in the ferry.

Sam had allowed himself perhaps a month to complete the task. But at the end of that time, he was swearing, using un-profane but colourful words he had learned from a score of historical novels. By then he was beginning to realize that the gap between theory and practice was enormous. He would be lucky to finish his work in a year, and then the results would be crude and uncertain.

The sheet metal was already all work-hardened, and there was no annealing oven to prepare it for reshaping. There was no press or large sheet metal brake in the tiny shop provided in the station. Even the welders were designed only for small repair. No transformer was suitable for constructing a larger welder, and he was forced to rewind one of the power cores, hoping that it would carry the amperage he needed.

It took two weeks of hard work to draw in the ferry, tie it down firmly to the hub against the wobbling of the station, and construct a crude scaffolding around it. Then he discovered that the hub was in the shadow of the station too much of the time, making metal there brittle with cold. The whole job had to be undone, the ferry moved to the top of the station and the entire scaffolding rebuilt.

The framework for his wings, control, and nose cone had to be built up by welding together a network of small plumbing pipes; they were too heavy and he was forced to build another framework through the walls of the ferry and across most of the small cabin. It left him barely room for himself. Then he discovered by bitter trial that there was no way to form the sheet metal around the frame without so much welding that air turbulence would have made atmospheric manoeuvring quite impossible.

He finally was forced to hand form his wing covering on a crude mould built on the main deck of the station, fighting to force the sheets into their proper curves by repeated careful hammering. When finally finished, they were too large to move through the halls, and he was forced to cut a new path out through the station. It was made possible only because he had no need of air to breathe.

Even the fuel turned out to be a problem. Thirty years of sitting in the tanks had started a slow process that resulted in small tarry filaments throughout. Pint by slow pint, it had to be filtered and refiltered until it was clear enough to pass through the tiny nozzle of the injector on the motor. By then he knew it would have been simpler to centrifuge it. But at last it was done.

* * * *

Chapter Six

Surprisingly, the modified ferry behaved far better than Sam had dared to hope. It heated badly at the first touches of atmosphere, but the temperature remained within the limits he and the craft could stand. He learned slowly to control the descent to a glide neither too shallow for stability nor too steep to avoid overheating. By the time he was down to thirty miles above the surface, he was almost pleased with the way it handled.

He had set his course to reach the underground crèche that had been his home at awakening and during the first three years of his education, before they sent him to the Moon. It was the only home he knew on Earth.

Now he saw that he could never make it. The first fifteen minutes in the upper layers of atmosphere had been at too steep a glide angle, and he could never reach far inland. He might even have trouble reaching the shore at all, he realized; when the clouds thinned, he could see nothing but ocean under him.

He opened the rocket motor behind him gently, letting its thrust raise his speed to the highest his little craft could take at this altitude. But there was too little fuel left to help much. It might have given him an extra twenty miles of glide, but no more.

Sam considered the prospects of landing in the water with grim foreboding. He could exist in it for a while, even at fair depths. If he landed near the shore, he might work his way out. But within a limited period of time, the water would penetrate through his body to some of the vital wiring. Once that was shorted, he would cease to exist.

He came down under the clouds, fighting for every inch of altitude. Then, far ahead, he could see the shore. There were no islands here, so it had to be the mainland. Once there, he could reach the crèche in a single day.

He passed over the shoreline at a height of five hundred feet. There was a short stretch of sand, some woods, and then a long expanse of green that must be grass. He eased the control forward, then back again.

The little ship came skimming down at two hundred miles an hour. Its skids touched the surface, and it bounced upwards. Sam fought the controls to keep it from nosing over. Again it touched, jerking with deceleration. This time it seemed to have struck right. Then a hummock of ground caught against one skid. The craft slithered sideways and flipped over. Sam braced himself as the ship began coming to pieces around him.

* * * *

He pulled himself out, staring at the wreckage. It was a shame that it was ruined, he thought. But it couldn’t be made as strong as he was and still glide through the air.

He turned to study the world around him. The grass was knee-high, moving gently in the wind. Beyond it lay woods. Sam had seen only pictures of trees like that before. He moved towards them, noticing the thickness of the underbrush around them. Below them, the dirt was dark and moist. He lifted a pinch to his face, moving his smell receptors forward in his mouth slit. It was a rich smell, richer than the stuff in the hydroponic tanks. He lifted his head to look for the birds he expected, but he could see no sign of them. There were only insects, buzzing and humming.

The sun had already set, he noticed. Yet it was not yet dark. There was a paling of the light, and a soft diffusion. He shook his head. Above him, tiny twinkling spots began to appear. He had read that stars twinkled, but he had thought it only fiction. He had never been under the open sky of Earth before.

Then a soft murmur of sound reached him. He started away, to be drawn back to it. Slowly he realized it was a sound like the description of that heard near the sea. He had never seen an ocean, either. And now one lay no more than a mile away.

He stumbled through the woods in the growing darkness. For some reason, he was reluctant to turn on his light. Eventually he learned to make his way through the brush and around the trees. The sound grew louder as he progressed.

It was dark when he reached the seashore, but there was a hint of faint light to the east. As he watched, it increased. A pale white arc appeared over the horizon and grew to a large circle. The Moon, he realized finally.

The waves rose and fell, booming into surf. And far out across the sea, the Moon seemed to ride on the waves, casting a silver road of light over the water.

Sam had read the word. Now for the first time, he found an understanding of it. This was Beauty.

He sighed as he heaved himself from the sand and began heading along the shore in search of a road that would take him westward. No wonder men wanted to come back to defend a world where something like this could be seen.

The Moon rose higher as he moved on, its light now bright enough to give him clear vision. He came over a small rise in the ground and spotted what seemed to be a road beyond it. Beside the road was a house. It was dark and quiet, but he swung aside, going through a copse of woods to reach it and search for any evidence of humanity.

The windows were mostly broken he saw as he approached. And weeds had grown up around it. There was a detached building beside it that held a small car, by what he could see through the single dusty window. He skirted that and reached the door of the house; it opened at his touch, its hinges protesting rustily.

Inside, the moonlight shone through the broken windows on a jumble of furniture that was overturned and scattered in no order Sam could see. And there were other things - white things that lay sprawled about on the floor.

* * * *

He recognized them from the pictures in the books - skeletons of human beings. Two small skeletons were tangled in one corner with their skulls bashed in. A male skeleton lay near them, with the rusty shape of a knife shoved through a scrap of clothing between two ribs. There was a revolver near one hand. Across the room, a female skeleton was a jumbled pile of bones, with a small hole in the skull that could have come from a bullet.

Sam backed out of the room. He knew the meaning of another word now. He had seen Madness.

Men had learned to build good machines. The car motor barely turned over after Sam had figured out the controls, but it caught and began running with only a slight spluttering. The tyres were slightly soft, but they took the bumps of the rutted little rail. Later, when Sam found a better road, they lasted under the punishment of high speed. Most of the road was clear. There were few vehicles along its way, and most of those seemed to have drifted to the shoulder before they stopped or crashed.

The sun was just rising when Sam located the place where the factory and warehouse had served as a legitimate cover for the secret underground robot project. Fire and weather had left only gutted ruins and rusty things that had once been machines. But the section that housed the crèche entrance now stood apart from the rest, almost unharmed.

Sam moved into it and to the metal door openly concealed among other such doors. He should probably not have known the combination, but men were often careless among robots. He had been curious enough to note the details, and Sam did not forget. He bent to what seemed to be an ornamental grille and called out a series of numbers.

The door seemed to stick a little, but then it moved aside. Beyond lay the elevator, and that operated smoothly at the combination he punched. Power was still on, at least. There was no light, but the bulbs sprang into life as he found a switch.

He called out once, but he no longer expected to find men so easily. The place had the feel of abandonment. And while it could have protected its workers from almost anything, there had been only enough food and water stocked here for two weeks. There were a few signs that it had been used for a shelter, but most of it was still in very good order.

He moved past offices and laboratories towards the back. The real crèche, with its playrooms and learning devices was empty, he saw. No robots had been receiving post-awakening training. Sam was not surprised. Most of the work here had been devoted to research or the possibilities of robots. Actual construction was only a necessary sideline. Usually the brain complexes had been created and tested without bodies, and then extinguished before there had been a full awakening.

He started towards the educator computer out of his old habits. But it was only a machine that had programmed his progress from prepared tapes and memory circuits. It could not help him now.

Beyond the crèche lay the heart of the whole affair. Here the brain complexes were assembled from components according to esoteric calculations. This was work that required a computer that was itself intelligent to some extent. It had to make sense out of the desirable options given it by men, then form the brain paths needed, either during construction or during the initial period before awakening. Everything that Sam had been before awakening had come from this. That pattern would still be recorded, along with what the great computer had learned of him during his return here five years before men abandoned the Moon.

* * * *

Sam moved towards the machine, gazing in surprise at the amount of work lying about. There were boxes of robot bodies crammed into every storage space. They could never have been assembled in such numbers here during the period he remembered. And beyond lay shelves jammed with the components for the brain complexes. With such supplies, enough robots could be made to supply the Lunar Base needs for generations.

The computer itself was largely hidden far below, but its panel came to life at his touch. It waited.

‘This is Robot Ninety-Three, Mark One,’ Sam said. ‘You have authorization on file.’

The authorization from Dr DeMatre should have been cancelled. But the machine did not switch on alarm circuits. A thin cable of filaments reached out and passed into Sam’s mouth slit. It retracted, and the speaker came to life. ‘There is authorization. What is wanted?’

‘What is the correct date?’ Sam asked. Then he grunted as the answer came from the machine’s isotope clock.

It had been more than thirty-seven years since the men had left the Moon. He shook his head, and the robot bodies caught his attention again. ‘Why are so many robots being built?’

‘Orders were received for one thousand robots trained to fly missiles. Orders were suspended by Director DeMatre. No orders have been received for removing parts.’

‘Do you know what happened to the men?’ Sam had little hope of finding an easy answer any more, but he had to ask.

The machine seemed to hesitate. ‘Insufficient data. Orders were given by Director DeMatre to monitor broadcasts. Broadcasts were monitored. Analysis is incomplete. Data of doubtful coherence. Requests for more data were broadcast on all frequencies for six hours. Relevant replies were not received. Request further information if available.’

‘Never mind,’ Sam told it. ‘Can you teach me how to fly a plane?’

‘Robot Ninety-Three, Mark One, was programmed with established ability to control all vehicles. Further instruction not necessary.’

Sam grunted in amazement. He’d been surprised at how well he had controlled the landing craft and then the car. But it had never occurred to him that such knowledge had been built in.

‘All right,’ he decided. ‘Start, broadcasting again on all frequencies you can handle. If you get any answers, find where the sender is and record it. If anyone asks who is calling, say you’re calling for me and take any message. Tell them I’ll be back in one month.’ He started to turn away, then remembered. ‘Finished for now.’

The machine darkened. Sam headed out to find a field somewhere that might still have an operable plane. But he was already beginning to suspect what he would find.

* * * *

Chapter Seven

Grass grew and flowers bloomed. Ants built nests and crickets chirped in the soft summer night. The seas swarmed with marine life of most kinds. And reptiles sunned themselves on rocks, or retired to their holes when the sun was too hot.

But on all the Earth, no warm-blooded animal could be found.

The Earth of man was without form and void. The cities were slag heaps from which radioactivity still radiated. No fires burned on the hearthstones of the most isolated houses. The villages were usually burned, sometimes apparently by accident, but often as if they had been ,fired deliberately by their owners.

The Moon was a thing of glory over Lake Michigan. It was the only glorious thing for six hundred miles. Four returned winged rockets rested on a field in Florida, but there was no sign of what had become of the men who rode down from the station in them. One winged craft stood forlornly outside Denver, and there was a scrawl in crayon inside its port that spelled the worst obscenity in the English language.

There was a library still standing in Phoenix, and the last newspaper had the dateline of the day when Sam had seen the lights brighten over the cities of Earth. Most of the front page was occupied by a large box which advised its readers that the government had taken over all radio communications during the crisis and would broadcast significant news on the hour. The paper was cooperating with the government in making all such news available by broadcast only. The same box appeared in the nine preceding issues. Before that, the major news seemed to involve a political campaign in United South Africa.

Other scattered small libraries had papers that were no different. Yet the only clue was in one of those places. It was a piece of paper resting under the hand of a skeleton that was scattered before bound copies of a technical journal. The paper was covered with doodles and stained in what might have been blood. But the words were legible:

‘Lesson for the day. Assign to all students. Politics: Men could not win such a war and that is obvious. Chemistry: Their nerve gas was similar to one we tested in small quantities. It seemed safe. Yet when they dropped it over us in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, it did not settle out as the test batches had done. Proved, that aerosols must be tested in massive quantities. Medicine: Bonny was in the shelter with me three weeks, yet there was still enough in the air to make her die in the ecstasy of a theophany. Geography: The wind patterns have been known for years. In three weeks, they reach all the Earth. Psychology: I am mad. But my madness is that I am become only cold logic without a soul. Therefore, I must kill myself. Religion: Nothing matters. I am mad. God is—’

That was all.

* * * *

The crèche was still the same, of course. Sam sat before the entrance three nights after his return to his only home on Earth, staring at the Moon that was rising over the horizon.

It was a full Moon again, and there was beauty to it, even here. But he was only vaguely aware of that. Below him, the great computer was quiescent now. It had taken all the mass of tiny details he had gathered and had integrated them with all of the millions of facts it already knew. Such a job had taken time, even for such a machine. But a few hours after his return it called him over the radio frequencies to issue its report.

‘All data correlated,’ was its announcement. ‘Data not fully coherent with previous data. Degree of relevancy approaches zero. Data insufficient for conclusion.’

Then it had gone back to stand-by, while Sam had sought the sight of living plants and insects outside the crèche.

He had expected little else from the computer. He had known there was too little for a logical conclusion.

But his own conclusion was drawn now. As he sat under the light of the Moon, staring at the sky from which evil had come, there was a coldness in his brain complex that seemed deeper than the reaches of space.

Men were gone. He had faced that fact during the early days of his search, and now he was learning to live with it. There were no more of his creators. He would go on searching for them, of course, in the faint hope that a paltry few might have survived somehow, somewhere. But he was certain that the search would be in vain.

They had come from somewhere out there, he thought bitterly. The Eich, the minions of Boskone, or some other horror equally evil had appeared more than a century before and snooped and sniffed at Earth in their various saucers, only to leave. Now they had come back, giving Earth only a week’s warning of their approach. They had struck all Earth with glowing bombs or radiation that ruined the cities of men. And when men still survived in spite of their rain of destruction, they had resorted to a deadly mist of insanity that was borne by the winds to every part of the planet. ‘They dropped it over us,’ the note had said. And the wonderful race Sam had known had died in madness, usually of some destructive kind.

There had not even been a purpose to it. They hadn’t wanted the Earth for themselves. They had simply come and slaughtered, to depart as senselessly as they had departed before.

Sam beat his fist against his leg until the metal clanged through the night. Then he lifted his other fist towards the stars and shook it.

It was wrong that the alien invaders should escape from punishment.

They had come with fire and pestilence, and they should be found and overcome with all that they had meted out to mankind. He had supposed that evil was something found only in fiction. But now evil was ruler of the universe. It should be met as it was usually met in fiction. It should be wiped from existence in a suffering as great as it had afflicted. But such justice was apparently the one great lie of fiction.

He beat his fists resoundingly against his legs again and shouted at the Moon, but there was no relief for what was burning deep in him.

Then his ears picked up a new sound and he stopped all motion to listen. It came again, very weakly and from very far away.

‘Help!’

* * * *

Chapter Eight

He shouted back audibly and by radio and was on his feet, running towards the sound. His feet crashed through the brush and he leaped over the rubble, making no effort to find the easy path. As he stopped to listen again, he heard the sound, directly ahead, but even weaker. A minute later he almost stumbled over the caller.

It was a robot. Once it had been slim and neat, covered with black enamel. Now it was bent and bare metal was exposed. But it was still a Mark Three. It lay without motion, only a whisper coming from its speaker.

Sam felt disappointment strike through all his brain complex, but he bent over the prone figure, testing quickly. It was power failure, he saw at once. He ripped a spare battery from the pack that had been with him during his long search and slammed it quickly into place, replacing the corroded one that had been there.

The little robot sat up and began trying to get to its feet. Sam reached out a helping hand, staring down at the worn, battered legs that seemed beyond any hope of functioning.

‘You need help,’ he admitted. ‘You need a whole new body. Well, there are a thousand new ones going to waste in the crèche, ready for you to use. What’s your number?’

It had to be one of the robots from the Moon. Men had never permitted any robots to remain on Earth.

The robot teetered for a moment, then seemed to gain some mastery over its legs. ‘Joe. They called me Joe. I’m glad I heard your signal over the radio weeks ago, but it was a long way. My transmitter is broken. I couldn’t answer you. A long way, and I was afraid I would fail before I could reach here. But now hurry. We can’t waste time here.’

‘We’ll hurry. But that way,’ Sam told him, pointing towards the crèche.

Joe shook his head, making a creaking, horrible sound of it. ‘No, Sam. He can’t wait. I think he’s dying! He was sick when I heard the call from you, but he insisted I bring him here. He—’

‘Sick? Dying? There’s a man with you?’

Joe nodded jerkily and pointed.

* * * *

Sam scooped the light figure up in his arms. Even on Earth, it was no great load for his larger body, and they could make much better time than by letting the other try to run. Hal, Sam thought. It was probably Hal. Hal had to be the youngest. Hal would be only fifty-nine, or something like that. That wasn’t too old for a man, from what he had learned.

He flicked his light on, unable to maintain full speed by the moonlight. The pointing finger of the other guided him down the slope to a worn, weed-covered trail. It was already more than five miles from the entrance to the crèche.

‘He was worried you might leave here before we could reach you,’ Joe explained. ‘He knew the month was almost up, and it might take too long for me to bring him. He ordered me to leave him and go ahead alone. Sometimes now it is hard to know whether he means what he says, but this was a clear order.’

‘You’d have been wiser to stick to the car and drive all the way with him,’ Sam suggested. He was forcing his way through a tangle of underbrush, wondering how much farther they had to go.

‘There was no car,’ Joe said. ‘I can’t drive one now. My arms sometimes stop working, and it would be dangerous to drive. I found a little wagon and dragged him behind me on that until we got here.’

Sam took his eyes off the trail to stare at Joe’s battered legs. Joe had almost worn out his body. But in other ways, he must have developed a great deal since the days on the Moon. Time, experienced, and the companionship of men had shaped him far beyond what Sam remembered.

Then they were in a little hollow beside a brook, and there was a small tent pitched beside a cart. Sam released Joe and headed for the shelter. Moonlight broke through the trees and fell on the drawn suffering of a human face just inside the tent.

It took long study to find familiar features. At first nothing seemed right. Then Sam traced the jawline behind the long beard and gasped in recognition. ‘Dr Smithers!’

‘Hello, Sam.’ The eyes opened slowly, and a pain-racked smile stretched the lips briefly. ‘I was just dreaming about you. Thought you and Hal got lost in a crater. Better go shine up now. We’ll want you to sing for us tonight. You’re a good man, Sam, even if you are a robot. But you stay away too long out on those field trips.’

Sam sighed softly. This was another reality he could recognize only from fiction. But he nodded. ‘Yes, Chief. It’s all right now.’

He began singing softly, the song about a Lady Green-sleeves. A smile flickered over Smithers’ lips again, and the eyes closed.

Then abruptly they snapped open, and Smithers tried to sit up. ‘Sam! You really are Sam! How’d you get here?’

* * * *

Joe had been fussing over a little fire, drawing supplies from the cart. Now he hobbled up with a bowl of some broth and began trying to feed the man. Smithers swallowed a few mouthfuls dutifully, but his eyes remained on Sam. And he nodded as he heard the summary of the long struggle back to Earth. But when Sam told of the landing, he slumped back on to his pad.

‘I’m glad you made it. Glad I got a chance to see you again before I give up the last ghost on Earth. I couldn’t figure that radio signal Joe heard. Knew it couldn’t be a human call, but I never thought of you making it back to Earth. Should have had a brass band to welcome you.’

He closed his eyes, but the weak voice went on. ‘Hal and Randy died. Pete suicided. I’m the only one left, Sam. We waited up in the station three years, guessing what had happened here. Then we came down and tried to find somebody -anybody - to start the race over. But there weren’t any left. We covered every continent for thirty years. The robots got busted, except for Joe here. Then we came back. And now I’m the last man. The last man on Earth heard a knock on the door - and it was Sam. It’s a better ending of the story than I expected.’

He slept fitfully after that, though Sam could hear him moan at times. It was cancer, according to what Joe knew, and there was no hope.

Somehow, Joe had found a hospital with its equipment intact and books to study. The robot had taken Smithers there and tried to treat him with the equipment, but it had been a losing battle. Then, when the message came, broadcast by the computer at Sam’s orders, Smithers had insisted on leaving. They had no radio capable of answering, and little hope of finding a working transmitter in time, so Smithers had insisted they must come in person. In the hospital, the treatment might have given him a year more of life; but he had ordered Joe to leave, knowing that he might not survive the trip. And now only his will seemed to keep the man alive. Joe had a few drugs to ease the pain, but that was all the help that could be given.

During the long night, Joe told more of the long search for survivors. It had been thorough. But they had found no trace of another living human being. The nerve gas had produced eventual death by nerve damage, as well as the initial insanity that had killed many.

‘Who?’ Sam asked bitterly. “What race did this?’

* * * *

Joe made a gesture of uncertainty. ‘They talked about that. Mr Norman told me about it, too. He explained that men killed each other off. One side attacked this side, and then our side had to hit back, until nobody was left. But I don’t understand it.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘No,’ Joe answered. ‘Mr Norman was always saying things I found he didn’t really mean. No man would do anything like this.’

Sam nodded, and began telling his theories. At first Joe was doubtful. Then the little robot seemed convinced. He dredged up small confirming bits of information from the long years of search. They weren’t important by themselves, but a few seemed to add to the total picture. A sign cursed the ‘sky devils’ in Borneo. There were odd bits from a sermon printed in Louisiana. And there were other vague hints at doom from beyond the Earth.

Twice during the long night Smithers wakened, but he was irrational. Sam soothed him and sang to him, while Joe tried to give him nourishment that was loaded with morphine. Now even Sam could see that the man was near death. The pulse was thready and the breathing seemed too much for the worn body.

In the morning, however, Smithers was rational again. He managed a smile. ‘Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners won’t go about the streets this time. There won’t be any mourners.’

‘There will be two,’ Sam told him.

‘Yes.’ Smithers thought it over and nodded. ‘That’s good, somehow. A man hates not being missed. I guess you two will have to take on all the debts of the human race now.’

His breath caught sharply in his throat, and he retched weakly. But he forced himself up on his elbows and looked out through the flap of the tent towards the hills that showed through the shrubbery and the blue of the sky beyond.

‘There are a lot of debts and a lot of broken promises, Sam, Joe,’ he said. ‘Man had promised to write some great things into the future of this universe. He was going to conquer the stars and even make a better scheme for everything. But he failed. He’s finished. He dies, and the universe won’t even know he’s gone.’

‘We’ll know,’ Joe said softly.

Smithers dropped back on to the pad. ‘Yeah. Maybe that helps. We had our faults, but I guess there must have been a lot of good in us, too - there had to be, if we could make two people like you. God, I’m tired!’

He closed his eyes. A few minutes later, Sam knew he was dead.

* * * *

The two robots waited to be sure, and then wrapped the body in the tent and buried it, while Sam recited the scraps of the burial service he had picked up from his reading.

Sam sat down then where Smithers had died, staring at the world where no man would ever live again. And the knot in his brain complex grew stronger and colder. He could not see the stars in the light of the day. But he knew they were there. And somewhere out there was the debt Smithers had given him - a debt of justice that had to be paid.

Saucers, Boskone, the Eich - whatever they were, the evil alien monsters must be repaid to the last full measure for the foulness they had done and which man could no longer settle with them.

Anger and hate grew slowly in him against the enemy from the stars, until he could no longer contain his emotions. His radio message was almost a scream as he roused the computer.

‘You’ve got a thousand robot bodies waiting. Can you build brains for them, modelled after the records of my brain? Can you build them without the limits you used for later models? Do you have materials for that?’

‘Such a programme is feasible,’ the machine answered.

‘Then start—’ Sam began. But his eyes fell on the wreck of Joe’s body, and he modified his order. ‘No, save one body to replace another robot I’ll bring you. Start work at once on all the others.’

‘The programme is begun,’ the machine agreed.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine should be enough. They wouldn’t be just like him, Sam realized; DeMatre had said there was a random factor. But they would do. The first group could find raw materials for ten thousand more, and those for still more. There would be robots enough to study all the books men had left, and to begin the long trip out into space.

This time, there would be more than a tape education for them. Sam would be there to tell them the story of man, the glory of the race, and the savage treachery that had robbed the universe of that race. They would learn that the universe held an enemy, a race of technological monsters that must be sought among the stars and exterminated to the last individual.

They would comb the entire galaxy for that enemy if they had to. And someday, mankind’s debt of justice would be paid. Man would be avenged.

Sam looked up at the sky and foreswore all robots for all time to that debt of vengeance.

* * * *

Chapter Nine

Hate spewed across the universe in a high crusade. Metal ships leaped from star to star and hurtled across the immensities between the far-flung galaxies. The ships spawned incessantly, and with each went the holy image of their faith and the un-sated and insatiable hunger of their hate.

A thousand stars yielded the dead and ancient wreckage of races that had once achieved technology. Five hundred suns gave light to intelligent races - quiet, peaceful races with backward cultures. The great ships dropped on to their worlds and went away again, leaving peoples throughout the galaxies filled with gratitude and paying homage to the incredibly beautiful images of the supernal being called Man. But still the quest went on.

* * * *

In a great temple palace on the capital world of the Andromeda Galaxy, Sam stared down at a long table piled with little scraps of evidence. One graceful finger of his lithe seventeenth body stirred some of the scraps and he bent closer to read what was left of the ancient writing. Then he looked up and across at the great scientist who had just returned from the ancient mother world of Earth, incredible light-years away.

‘That is how the human race died?’ Sam asked quietly. ‘You are quite sure?’

The scientist nodded. ‘Quite sure. Even with a hundred million workers, it took us fifty years to gather all this on Earth. It has been so badly scattered, so nearly ruined. But no truth from the past can be completely concealed from our present methods of research. Man died as I said.’

Sam sighed softly and moved to the window. Outside it was summer, and the trees were in blossom, competing with the bright plumage of the birds brought from far Deneb. The gardens were a poem of colour. He bent forward, sniffing the blended fragrance of the flowers. Strains of music came from the great Hall of Art that lifted its fairy beauty across the park. It was the eighth opus of their greatest living composer -an early work, but still magnificent in its reach and its ambition.

For the moment his shoulders slumped faintly. His emotions blended with the half-bitter memories of other discoveries. There had been the first visit to Mars - a Mars where no John Carter could ever have fought green men for the hand of the incredible Dejah Thoris. There had been star after star, with no friendly Arisians, no gallant dragon-folk to join against the undiscovered menace of Boskone. And for a thousand years, as fiction paled before reality, there had been the growing doubt in his mind. Now the last effort to make himself believe the legend he had created was spent.

‘There is no Enemy now,’ the scientist said from behind him. ‘There can be no doubt. Man was his own destroyer. He killed himself. In a sense, his race was the one we are sworn to kill.’

* * * *

Sam leaned further out the window. Below, the throng of busy, laughing people looked up at him and cheered. There were a dozen races in the park, mingled with a majority of his people. He smiled and lifted his hand to them, then bent further out, until he could just see the great statue of Man that reared heavenward over the central part of the temple palace. He sighed again and inclined his head, before backing from the window.

‘How many know this besides you, Robert?’ he asked.

‘None. It was gathered in too small fragments, until I could assemble it into a meaningful pattern.’

Sam smiled at him. ‘Your work was well done, and there will be ways to reward you for it properly. But now I suggest that we burn this evidence.’

‘Burn it!’ Robert’s voice rose. ‘Burn this evidence and shackle our race to superstition forever? Our entire lives have been shaped to fit a cult of vengeance. Now we can free ourselves. This is our heritage, Sam - we can be ourselves!’

Sam ran his finger through the evidence again. There was pity in his mind for the scientist, but more for the strange race of man whose true nature had finally been revealed in fact. Man had missed owning the universe by so little! But the fates of that universe had conspired against him. The fates had offered two roads to intelligence. In one, there was the quiet growth that led to pastoral life and gentle pleasures, but somehow never got beyond its native planet. In the other, chosen by man, intelligence grew from the aggressions of savagery and thrust the race ahead to great discoveries - while building the means to the inevitable final aggression that must destroy itself utterly.

Man had failed, like all other races grown from killing strains of animal life. But in dying, he had passed on part of his soul to another race that had been designed without his mighty passions. Somehow he had passed on the driving anger of his spirit to his true children, the robots.

And they had carried on.

The robots had been a created race, a race designed only to serve, able to live in perfect peace and without ambition. They had owned no heritage. But through an accident of fiction and a few dying words, men had left them a rich heritage.

Anger had carried them throughout the stars, and hatred had bridged the spaces between the galaxies.

‘You’re mistaken, Robert,’ Sam said. ‘Vengeance is our heritage. Burn the evidence.’

Most of the material was tinder dry, and it caught fire at the first spark. For a few seconds, it was a seething pillar of flame. Then there was only a dark scar on the wood to show the true death of man.