James White: Second Ending

He had to rest once, lying face downward on a slope of loose earth, rock and what looked like pieces of fused glass. There was a peculiar tang in the air which his nose, still inflamed by dust, refused to identify. With the lip of the tunnel only a few yards ahead, the dull, gray light was all around him. Ross thought that it was just his luck to pick dusk, or shortly after dawn, as his time to climb out. After a few minutes he pushed himself to his feet and began, wobbling and sliding, to run.

Ross looked slowly around him while the dark gray fog drove past, blackening his arms and clothing as he watched. To the limit of visibility, which was about fifty yards, the ground was dark gray and black — the smooth, shiny black of partly melted rock and the sooty gray of finely divided ash. The ash swirled and drifted from trough to trough in that frozen ocean of glass, or eddied upward to become the dry fog blowing past him. The sun was high in the sky, a dull red smudge with an enormous ring around it, and the sound of waves reached him from the half-mile-distant beach.

He had done a lot of swimming on that beach, alone, with other students, with Alice. Yelling and floundering and splashing for hours on end; “playing” was the only word which described that activity. And the sea had played, too — a trifle roughly, at times, considering that it was the vast, all-powerful mother of life on the planet and one of her most recent offspring was giving her cheek.

Ross began moving toward the beach. His brain seemed to be frozen with shock, because no time elapsed between the decision to go and his arrival.

The sun was a brighter red and visibility was up to half a mile — the breeze blowing in from the sea was relatively free of ash. But the great rollers which marched in were mountains of ink, and when they broke and roared, foaming, up the beach, the foam was dirty and left streaks of black and gray on the sand. The tidal pools were as warm and as numerous as he remembered, but all were lined by a thin film of black and nothing moved in them. There was no seaweed, no evidence of the green scum which collects in stagnant pools, nothing inside the most recently washed up seashells.

They had killed the sea, too.

Ross sat down on a rock which had been smoothed by the sea and given a mirror polish by the tiny sun which had come into being here, for a split second, over a century ago. He sat for a long time. It began to rain and the ash clouds which had obscured his view inland settled to the ground, disclosing a line of robots coming over the shoulder of the hill containing the tunnel mouth. He watched them for several minutes, wondering whether he should take off his ridiculous toga and dive for the last time into the breakers. But Ross was against suicide on principle. The world had ended, he was probably the last living human being, and the future held nothing but loneliness or madness. So it couldn’t be hope which made him sit motionless while the dirty gray foam beckoned, for that had become a meaningless word. Perhaps it was because Ross was only twenty-two.

When the robots arrived and performed a neat encircling movement, the Ward Sister said, “You must return to bed, Mr. Ross.” Seconds later a Cleaner lay his weakly resisting body along its back, pinioned him with five sets of metal arms and rolled back toward the tunnel mouth.

It took Ross several minutes to realize that he had undergone a change of status. The Ward Sister, it appeared, had heard him coughing in the ash-filled air at the mouth of the tunnel, had noted the many cuts and grazes on hands and legs he had acquired during the climb, and these, taken together with his somewhat abnormal recent activities, had caused the robot to react in accordance with its basic programming. He was no longer a Doctor in charge called “sir,” but a patient called “Mr. Ross.” And patients did what Ward Sister told them to do, not the other way around.

He was confined to bed for seventeen days.

Until each tiny cut was healed and the last square centimeter of scab dropped away, Ross’s every order was ignored. When sheer impatience made him abusive, that also was ignored, as were most of his threats.

The one threat which was not ignored occurred on the second day. Ross had been throwing a tantrum over not being allowed to exercise for a few hours every day. He had ended by observing, at the top of his voice, that such an inhuman confinement was likely to drive him around the bend, that it could very well force him into taking his life, perhaps, through sheer boredom. To this the robot had replied that physical examination showed he was in a severely weakened state, due to both recent revivication and his too-exhausting trip to the surface, and that prolonged rest was indicated. Also, since the danger of Ross’s injuring himself had been mentioned as a possibility — the chief reasons cited being loneliness and boredom, two conditions not likely to improve — it was the Ward Sister’s duty to guard him against this danger for the rest of his life.

Just then Ross did not want to think of the future. He wanted to chat about unimportant things such as how he should have his hair cut and why some items of his clothing had deteriorated while others had not. But Ward Sisters were supposed to be too busy to chat with patients while on duty, and Ross was now a patient. Three or four times a day he received a few words of encouragement, and that was all.

Ross did not like the pictures he saw when he closed his eyes, so he kept them open as much as possible, staring at the ceiling, moving them slowly around the room, or squinting at the three-inches-distant bed sheet in an effort to resolve its weave. But the ceiling was white and free from discoloration, the room’s fittings were bright, angular and cast no shadows, and trying to make his eyes behave like a microscope only gave him a headache. There were no angles or shadows or tricks of light on which his mind could build the nice, harmless pictures which would keep him from dwelling on his present terrifying position, and so he would be forced to look at the robot.

A smooth, upright ovoid with one fixed and one rotating eyepiece, and to Ross’s mind a cybernetic miracle by virtue of its compactness alone. A servant, guardian and trained nurse, placed in this position of responsibility because of a shortage of human nurses, which had later become a shortage of human beings…

At that point the pictures which he did not want to see would come, whether his eyes were closed or not.

Pictures of Alice in crisp blue and white, serious, dedicated, untouchable. With her short hair, unplucked eyebrows and thin lips, her face had resembled that of a studious young boy. When he had discovered that she was neither unapproachable nor untouchable — toward himself, anyway — he had once told her that she looked like a boy. They had been swimming and Alice’s dark brown hair was plastered tightly against her scalp, increasing the resemblance. A small, wet, feminine hand had made contact with his dripping back in a slap which stung, in memory, even now, and he had had to add a hasty qualifier to the effect that he meant from the neck up. Strangely enough, it had been later in that same day that he discovered that her lips were not thin, that they only seemed that way because she habitually kept them pressed together. Alice worried a lot, about examinations, her patients, about many trivial things which a less dedicated type would have ignored. She had very nice lips.

Pictures of Alice stretched on the sand behind the low rock which sheltered them from the wind, the heat of the sun covering them like a too-warm blanket. It was a picture in five sensual dimensions: the warm, damp smell as the sun blotted up the last remaining sea water from swimsuit and hair; the sensitive, tanned face looking up into his with eyes which seemed to grow larger and softer until he could see nothing else; then the kiss which, no matter how long, never lasted long enough; sometimes then she would sigh and murmur softly to him — but he rarely heard what she said, because the silly girl kept playing with his ears every time she tried to tell him something. They would kiss again and the emotional gale rising within him, the roaring in his ears and the mounting thunder of his pulse, would almost drown the slower thunder of the breakers, the great dead, filthy breakers which still crashed against a black and lifeless beach…