James White: Second Ending

Recently — recently? — Sister had deliberately avoided giving him the exact figures, but he knew that countless millions of years had passed while he aged a few weeks. At the present rate the very universe could live and die, and he would still be in his early twenties, still living and still wanting to sleep farther into the future, while around him stretched eternal blackness and the cold, lifeless cinders of the stars.

He should have faced up to reality millions of years ago, when his sea grass was crawling about the ocean bed and exhibiting the first stirrings of intelligence, and he should have lived out his life then. Probably he would not have accomplished anything, but at least he would have tried. Just as Pellew, Courtland and the others had tried. He thought again of those great old men who had taken it in turns to stand solitary watch over the hospital’s dwindling Deep Sleepers. They had faced loneliness and despair also, and at times they must have reached the brink of madness, but they had not stopped trying until they had stopped living. He had thrown their lives away along with his own.

The vast robot potential he had wasted by assigning impossible tasks, simply from a cowardly- desire to die in his sleep. He should have considered the interplanetary angle more fully, tried to transplant Martian or Venusian life forms into a sterile Earth. The result might have been nightmarish, but it would have been life. He was sure that Pellew would have understood and forgiven him if it hadn’t been human life. There were a lot of things he could have, and should have, tried.

Ross bent forward and slowly put Ms hand on her smooth metal casing and looked at the glinting, emotionless lenses, neither of which moved. Sister had always looked emotionless, and he shouldn’t get so worked up over an outsize metal egg which had finally broken down.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned to look for another robot who would be able to put him into Deep Sleep again. There seemed to be very few robots about, these days…

He awoke with the conviction that he was dreaming that he was awakening, because Sister was bending over him. “But you’re dead,” he burst out.

“No, sir,” Sister replied, “I was reparable.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Ross warmly. “And Sister, this time I’m going to stay awake no matter what. I… I would like to die of old age, among friends—”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the robot broke in. “You have been revived only that we may move you to safer quarters. The refrigeration units over most of the tower have failed, and only a few sections are inhabitable over long periods. You will be much safer in Deep Sleep.”

“But I don’t want—”

“Are you able to walk, sir?”

There followed a hundred-yard walk which developed quickly into a hobbling run as the plastic flooring burned his feet and a blast-furnace wind scorched his skin and sent the tears boiling down his cheeks. He caught glimpses of charred furniture and cracked or melted statuary, but he didn’t see outside. Which was probably a good thing. The run ended in a narrow, circular tunnel which terminated in a tiny compartment containing little more than a Deep Sleep casket. The heavy, airtight door swung shut behind them.

“Turn around slowly, sir,” said Sister, aiming a gadget at him which emitted a fine odorless spray. “This should help you later…”

“It’s staining my skin green…” began Ross, then snapped, “But I want to stay awake!”

Sister went through the motions of assisting him into the Deep Sleep casket. In actual fact she forced him into it and held him while a sedative shot she had administered took effect. “Wait! Please!” he begged. He thought he knew what was happening and he felt horribly afraid.

Selfishly, the robots were going to keep him alive as long as they could. When outside conditions made it impossible to keep this tiny compartment refrigerated, they would refrigerate only the casket. He would go on living in Deep Sleep until the last robot died. Then the cooling unit would fail and he would awake for the last time, briefly, in a casket which was fast becoming red-hot…

But there was something wrong about the whole situation.

“Why did you wake me?” he asked thickly. “Why didn’t you move me without waking me up? And you gave me a shot. There haven’t been any medical supplies since…”

“I wanted to say good-bye, sir,” said the robot, “and good luck.”

When the human Ross was safely in Deep Sleep, Sister spoke again. It used a language which was flexible, concise, yet highly compressed — the language which had been developed by intelligent, self-willed robots over two hundred million years and which traveled, not through air or ether, but by a medium which brought it to the other side of the galaxy at the speed of thought.

“Sister 5B” it said. “Mr. Ross is in Deep Sleep. Latest observations corroborate our predictions that the sun will shortly enter a period of instability. The detonation will be of subnova proportions and will precede its entry into the cooler red-dwarf stage, but in the process all space out to the orbit of Saturn will become uninhabitable for human or robot life. Is Fomalhaut IV ready?”

“Anthropologist 885/AS/931,” replied another voice. “It is ready, 5B. But you realize that the closer the natives approach our Master’s requirements the more difficult it has been to control them. I keep wanting to call them ‘sir.’ And his definite wish that war not be used to accelerate the rise of civilization here has delayed matters, although it has produced a culture which is infinitely more stable than that possessed by Earth—”

“Geneticist 44/RLB/778,” broke in another voice. “I do not agree with this philosophical hairsplitting! At a time when Earth still retained her oceans we found a planet at the stage where saurian life was being replaced by mammalian, and we controlled and guided the evolution of these mammals until we have reached the point where they duplicate the original human life form so closely that interbreeding is possible. When does a perfect duplicate become the real thing?”

“Sister 5B,” returned the original speaker. “It was hairsplitting such as this which allowed us to evolve intelligence, plus the general instructions issued to us by the Master. First we convinced ourselves that a motionless, unthinking and unliving human being in Deep Sleep was alive, when all logic contradicted this. Then we took his instructions to find, aid and protect all forms of life, in conjunction with his wishes expressed during cold delirium regarding the female human Alice, and twisted them to our own selfish purposes … ”

They had been told to search and when Earth and the nearer planets proved empty of human survivors they had continued outward to the planets which circled other suns, all the time concealing that fact. Ross had once discussed lying and kindness with Sister, and the robots had tried very hard to understand and practice those concepts. They had had an unfortunate tendency to tick when a direct lie was called for, but otherwise they had managed very well. When a subspace drive was developed with the aid of pre-war Earth mathematics, they had concealed that also, just as they kept quiet when their metal bodies became obsolete and they evolved into beings of pure force. A few of them had to energize the old-style bodies for Ross’s benefit, and once Ross had found Sister’s body while it was vacant…

“… But now we are about to carry out his wishes and keep ourselves alive into the indefinite future as well. When he comes to the planet and race we have prepared for him, his life will end a little more than a half century hence. But we will not die because his descendants will be partly human, and we are very good at splitting heirs.”