James White - Second Ending

Ross found himself wondering why exactly he had been working himself to death. He had his whole life in front of him. What was the hurry?

If there were survivors underground somewhere, they would be eleventh- or twelfth-generation, and in no immediate danger of extinction if they had managed to stay alive until now. Similarly, there was no frantic hurry about finding any who were surviving in Deep Sleep; they would keep indefinitely. Ross was understandably anxious to contact any other survivors that there might be, he wanted to find and talk to other human beings in the worst possible way, but even that did not explain the way he had driven himself lately, at least not altogether. There was something else, some deeper, more driving urgency. It continued to drive him even when he was asleep.

He was running through ash and smoke toward a trim single-story house seen through the trees of its surrounding garden and the ever-present smoke. There were the sounds of children playing — two, or maybe three — and a woman singing over a hammering noise which was coming from the back of the house. But no matter how fast he ran, the house with its unbelievably green trees moved away from him and he was running into an eternal black snowstorm. Or he was swimming frantically through an oily black ocean toward a shoreline of low, grassy-topped dunes which were not quite tall enough to hide the roofs of houses inland, only to see these symbols of life, both plant and human, swallowed up in the dirty, acrid-smelling fog.

There were many variations but the theme remained the same: frantic urgency, hurry hurry hurry or you won’t make it. Ross knew that there had to be a good reason for that driving urgency — something in the present situation must be fairly screaming at his subconscious that there wasn’t much time left — but try as he would he could not bring that reason up to the surface levels of his mind.

Not all the dreams were unpleasant, however; those in which Alice figured were quite the reverse. In these the sky was always blue and the black ocean never obtruded itself. Here again the theme was always the same, with no very subtle variations, and such that he woke up hating his cold white room with its untidy piles of books and Beethoven scowling at him. After a dream like that he would gulp his breakfast and go storming up to the surface or to the first-level library and work even harder, and sometimes he would be able to forget it.

Now he was not allowed to work at all. Now he had no way of forgetting Alice, or the beach, or the small park — not very well tended — on the inland side of the hill, or the hospital as it had been. Except when he lost his temper and threw Sister’s selected light reading back in the place where her face should have been. Sometimes that would start an argument, bad language and a furious silence on his part, at others an exchange in which he tried to make Sister feel as confused as possible while she tried to reassure him.

Sister was much smarter these days, and had absorbed several textbooks on psychology.

After one particularly hot session on the twelfth day of what Ross considered his imprisonment, he asked suddenly, “Do you know what is meant by telling a lie, or doing a kindness, or making a pun?”

Sister had been spouting Freud and sex urges at him as if she had used them all her life, and Ross had grown annoyed because the robot knew so much more psychology than he did that he couldn’t even make a fight of it. This was his way of putting Sister in her place.

“I have no data on puns or their methods of construction,” Sister replied briskly. “Doing a kindness means to render assistance, and telling a lie is, I have read, the transmission as true of data which is incomplete or false.”

Ross said, “I take it, then, that you would do me a kindness but you would not tell me a lie.”

“Of course, Mr. Ross.”

“But suppose, in order to render assistance, you had to tell a lie,” Ross went on. “For the sake of argument, let’s suppose a man is devoting considerable time and effort to a project which you know will fail, you being in possession of more data on the subject. You also know that to inform him of this fact, which it is your duty to do, would cause him extreme mental distress, insanity and eventually death. Would you tell a lie then?”

“It is against our basic programming to give false or incomplete data,” Sister replied. “I would require guidance by another human before making such a decision—”

“Stop ducking the question,” said Ross sharply. “Our supposition calls for there being only one human, the one you have to he to.” Then, in a quieter, more serious voice, he added, “I am trying to teach you the difference between giving assistance and being kind. If I can get the idea across to you, you may begin to think a little more like a human being.”

“A human mind possesses free will, initiative,” Sister protested. “No robot could—”

“Exercise initiative. But you did it when you awakened me without a brace of Cleaners sitting on my chest And since then there have been improvements. The robots have given way to steamships.” He laughed awkwardly and added, “That was a pun.”

Sister said, “From my reading I know that steam-driven vessels were a later development than those propelled by oars, just as you have caused us to develop since your awakening. But I cannot understand why you used the word ‘robots’ when you should have said ‘row-boats,’ unless the accidental similarity of sounds…”

That particular discussion lasted for nearly three hours and broke off only because it was time for the lights to go out. To Sister the division between waking and sleeping periods was sharp. In the middle of a sentence she stopped speaking, paused, then finished, “It is time to go to sleep, Mr. Ross. Is there anything you want before I go into low alert?”

It was always the same formula and Ross had become tired of hearing it. Bitterly he said, “Yes, there is. I want a human female aged twenty, weighing one hundred and fifteen pounds, dark brown hair, brown eyes…” Under his breath he added, “…called Alice.”

“Your request has been noted, but at the present time we are unable to—” began the robot.

“Good night, Sister,” Ross said, and rolled onto his side.

He wanted to dream about Alice that night, but instead he dreamed that he was in a small, sealed room deep underground where the air was rapidly going stale. If he wanted to go on living it was imperative that he do something, quickly…

When Sister finally released him by speaking the magic word “sir” the First Expedition, as Ross liked to think of it, was ready to go. The same sense of frantic urgency which claimed his waking and sleeping moments alike tempted him to send it out quickly and with no change in the instructions he had already given. But although Sister had forbidden him to do everything else, she had not stopped him from thinking, or rather revising his thinking with regard to the purpose of the expedition. He had to consider the possibility that there might not be any other human beings left alive in the world he was proposing to search. If that should be the case Ross would have to take a long-term view.

A very long-term view…

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