James White: Second Ending

“Do you understand your instructions?”

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

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

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

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

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

An hour or so later, to him, the robot masseurs were finishing their pummeling of his warming body, and Ross asked the inevitable question. Sister told him twenty-two thousand years.

“Hardly a catnap,” said Ross sourly.

He felt cheated. His mood of depression, the horrible, aching loneliness, and the awful boredom were with him as strongly as ever. Like his body, they had been preserved intact across the millennia. Perhaps something had happened to make him feel better.

“Make your report,” he said tiredly. “Or, better yet, let me have a look. And don’t tell me that I’m unfit to receive reports or that I should take a trip. My last vacation, by subjective time, was ten days ago, so just take me to the surf ace…”

The grass had grown taller and become less flexible — it would no longer be pleasant to lie down in it, Ross thought. His heart was pounding and he felt lightheaded, clear indications that the oxygen content of the air had increased. The breakers still crashed in a satisfying manner onto the beach, but the beach was green!

There was no sand at all, just a wet tangle of grass which ran unbroken along the shore and straight into the sea. The waves had a strong greenish tint, proving that it extended a considerable distance underwater.

“I couldn’t swim in that stuff!” Ross burst out. It didn’t matter that Sister was describing the development of a strain which would flourish in sea water, and which repeated uprooting by heavy seas had caused to evolve a limited degree of mobility. The process by which uprooted and washed-up sea grass moved back into the sea was a slow one, and only rarely successful, but it could be the beginning of an intelligent plant life-form, Sister affirmed. But Ross could not work up any enthusiasm over the achievement; he kept thinking that the only pleasure left to him had been taken away.

“And you woke me up for this?” said Ross disgustedly. “For a lousy plant which takes three weeks to crawl five yards back to the sea. Cool me again, until something worthwhile happens. Right now.”

The next time he awoke and went up to the surface it was night. The grass stood ten feet high, each stem a half inch thick, and the wind scarcely moved it. On the beach sand again shone whitely, lit by a moon swollen to three times its normal size. Sister explained that increasingly high tides caused by the moon’s drawing closer to its primary had forced the sea grass downward onto the ocean bed to escape the constant uprooting and several interesting, if minor, mutations had occurred. The sun was now too hot for him to bathe in safety.

Listlessly, Ross received the reports that the search of the Pacific, Luna and Mars had produced negative results. He barely looked at the picture relayed from the sea bottom showing the latest changes in his grass — to him the mutations seemed very minor, and not interesting at all. And before the bloated, yellow moon had gone down into the sea he asked Sister to return him to Deep Sleep.

“I advise against it, sir,” said Sister.

“But why?” Ross demanded. “There is nothing for me here, and besides, you should be grateful that I want to spend so much time in Deep Sleep. Didn’t you tell me once that I am the last human being, and that when I die your reason for existence will be gone? You should be glad of the chance to spin my death out for a few hundred thousand years. Or don’t you need me anymore?”

Sister was quiet for so long that Ross thought her audio circuits had developed a fault. Finally, she said, “We are still your servants, sir, and always will be. We are also grateful that your lifetime has been extended by Deep Sleep, but feel that allowing you to do so indefinitely shows selfishness on our part. In addition to the sound psychological reasons for your remaining awake, we feel that you are entitled to some pleasure, too.”

Ross stared at the gleaming ovoid body with its one fixed and one rotating lens and wondered incredulously what had become of the robot which had clicked irritatingly at him and droned, “I am not programmed to volunteer information.” This robot had developed intelligence to the point. where she was being troubled by something remarkably like a conscience! She had become so human a personality that Ross had forgotten when he had stopped thinking of her as “it.” Suddenly he felt ashamed.

It was high time he came to grips with reality. Sister was right, even though the pleasures available were severely limited.

He said: “I suppose there is nothing against me having a midnight swim, providing I’m careful not to stab myself to death with the grass on the way to the beach.”

“The water is pleasantly warm, sir,” said the robot.

“I could study, start helping you with your problems again. And I could travel.”

“By land, sea, or air, sir.”

“Good,” said Ross, and stopped. He was beginning to get an idea, a pretty wild and at the same time a very childish idea. As it grew he had to tell himself several times that he was the Boss, that the world and everything in it was his, to do with as he liked. He grinned suddenly, thinking of the vast army of robots at his command — something like two million, according to Sister’s latest figures. A large proportion of them were immobile, or would be unable to participate for various reasons, but even so he thought that it promised to be quite an affair. Excitedly he began detailing his requirements.

Sister listened, made no objections, and informed him that what he proposed would require approximately three weeks. Ross replied that he would spend the time swimming, studying and consulting with the Tailor. Then he returned to his room to sleep, as happy boy with a new set of toy soldiers.

But when the great day dawned Ross had plunged from excited anticipation to a new low in despair. During the past three weeks he had tried study, tried to produce some original thoughts on his present situation and future hopes, only to find that all books had deteriorated into uselessness, their contents recorded in the brains of robots. The robots were in possession of full and accurate data on all subjects from astronomy to zoology, and the ability to make use of it in such a way that it made Ross’s slow, human methods of reasoning seem moronic by comparison. Time and again he had started arguments with them on such obtuse subjects as genetics, the continuous-creation theory and moral philosophy, only to be confounded every time. It was no comfort for him to discover that he was arguing not with one robot but hundreds, all storing their share of data and making it instantly available to one another.