The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  His technique had grown from failures, and now the sperm cell found and pierced the ovum. As he watched, the round single cell began to lengthen and divide across the middle. This was going to be one of his successes! There were two, then four cells, and his hands made lightening, infinitesimal gestures, keeping it within the microscope field while he changed the slide for a thin membrane, lined with thinner tubes to carry oxygen, food and tiny amounts of the stimulating and controlling hormones with which he hoped to shape its formation.

  Now there were eight cells, and he waited feverishly for them to put out a tube toward the membrane as they did toward the pig’s womb…. But they did not! As he watched, another division began, but stopped; the cells had died again. All his labor and thought had been futile, as always.

  He stood there silently, relinquishing all pretensions to godhood. His mind abdicated, letting the dream vanish into nothingness; and there was nothing to take its place and give him purpose and reason—only a vacuum instead of a design.

  Dully he unbarred the rude cage and began chasing the grumbling, reluctant pigs out and up the tunnel, into die forest and away. It was a dull morning, with no sun apparent, and it matched his mood as the last one disappeared, leaving him doubly lonely. They had been poor companions, but they had occupied his time, and rite little ones had appealed to him. Now even they were…

  Wearily he dropped his six hundred pounds onto the turf, staring at the black clouds over him. An ant climbed up his body inquisitively, and he watched it without interest. Then it, too, was gone.

  “Adam!” The cry came from the woods, ringing and compelling. “Adam, come forth!”

  “God!” With metal limbs that were awkward and unsteady, he jerked upright. In the dark hour of his greatest need, God had finally come! “God, here I am!”

  “Come, forth, Adam, Adam! Come forth, Adam!”

  With a wild cry, the robot dashed forward toward the woods, an electric tingling suffusing him. He was no longer unwanted, no longer a lost chip in the storm. God had come for him. He stumbled, tripping over branches, crashing through bushes, heedless of his noise; let God know his eagerness. Again the call came, no longer from straight ahead, and he turned a bit, lumbering forward. “Here I am, I’m coming!”

  God would ease his troubles and explain why he was so different from the pigs; God would know all that. And then there’d be Eve, and no more loneliness! He’d have trouble keeping her from the Tree of Knowledge, but he wouldn’t mind that!

  And from still a different direction the call reached him…. Perhaps God was not pleased with his noise. The robot quieted his steps and went forward reverently. Around him the birds sang, and now the call came again, ringing and close. He hastened on, striving to blend speed with quiet in spite of his weight.

  The pause was longer this time, but when the call came it was almost overhead. He bowed lower and crept to the ancient oak from which it came, uncertain, half-afraid, but burning with anticipation.

  “Come forth, Adam, Adam!” The sound was directly above, but God did not manifest Himself visibly. Slowly the robot looked up through the boughs of the tree. Only a bird was there—and from its open beak the call came forth again. “Adam, Adam!”

  A mockingbird he’d heard imitating the other birds now mimicking his own voice and words! And he’d followed that through the forest, hoping to find God! He screeched suddenly at the bird, his rage so shrill that it leaped from the branch in hasty flight, to perch in another tree and cock its head at him. “God?” it asked in his voice, and changed to the raucous call of a jay.

  The robot slumped back against the tree, refusing to let hope ebb completely from him. He knew so little of God; might not He have used the bird to call him here? At least the tree was not unlike the one under which God had put Adam to sleep before creating Eve.

  First sleep, then the coming of God! He stretched out determinedly, trying to imitate the pigs’ torpor, fighting back his mind’s silly attempts to speculate as to where his rib might be. It was slow and hard, but he persisted grimly, hypnotizing himself into mental numbness; and bit by bit, the sounds of the forest faded to only a trickle in his head. Then that, too, was stilled.

  He had no way of knowing how long it lasted, but suddenly he sat up groggily, to the rumble of thunder, while a torrent of lashing rain washed in blinding sheets over his eyes. For a second, he glanced quickly at his side, but there was no scar.

  Fire forked downward into a nearby tree, throwing splinters of it against him. This was definitely not the way the film had gone! He groped to his feet, flinging some of the rain from his face, to stumble forward toward his cave. Again lightning struck, nearer, and he increased his pace to a driving run. The wind lashed the trees, snapping some with wild ferocity, and it took the full power of his magnets to forge ahead at ten miles an hour instead of his normal fifty. Once the wind caught him unaware, and crashed him down over a rock with a wild clang of metal, but it could not harm him, and he stumbled on until he reached the banked-up entrance of his muddy tunnel.

  Safe inside, he dried himself with the infra-red lamp, sitting beside the hole and studying the wild fury of the gale. Syrely its furor held no place for Eden, where dew dampened the leaves in the evening under caressing, musical breezes!

  He nodded slowly, his clenched jaws relaxing. This could not be Eden, and God expected him there. Whatever evil knowledge of Satan had lured him here and stolen his memory did ·not matter; all that counted was to return, and that should be simple, since the Garden lay among rivers. Tonight out of the storm he’d prepare here, and tomorrow he’d follow the stream in the woods until it led him where God waited.

  With the faith of a child, he turned back and began tearing the thin berylite panels from his laboratory tables and cabinets, picturing his homecoming and Eve. Outside the storm raged and tore, but he no longer heard it. Tomorrow he would start for home! The word was misty in his mind, as all the nicer words were, but it had a good sound, free of loneliness, and he liked it.

  Six hundred long endless years had dragged their slow way into eternity, and even the tough concrete floor was pitted by those centuries of pacing and waiting. Time had eroded all hopes and plans and wonder, and now there was only numb despair, too old to vent itself even in rage or madness.

  The female robot slumped motionlessly on the atomic excavator, her eyes staring aimlessly across the dome, beyond the tiers of books and films and the hulking machines that squatted eternally on the floor. There a pickax lay, and her eyes rested on it listlessly; once, when the dictionary revealed its picture and purpose, she had thought it the key to escape, but now it was only another symbol of futility.

  She wandered over aimlessly, picking it up by its two metal handles and striking the wooden blade against the wall; another splinter chipped from the wood, and century-old dust dropped to the floor, but that offered no escape. Nothing did. Mankind and her fellow robots must have perished long ago, leaving her neither hope for freedom nor use for it if freedom were achieved.

  Once she had planned and schemed with all her remarkable knowledge of psychology to restore man’s heritage, but now the note-littered table was only a mockery; she thrust out a weary hand—

  And froze into a metal statue! Faintly, through all the metal mesh and concrete, a dim, weak signal trickled into the radio that was part of her!

  With all her straining energy, she sent out an answering call; but there was no response. As she stood rigidly for long minutes, the signals grew stronger, but re-. mained utterly aloof and unaware of her. Now some sudden shock seemed to cut through them, raising their power until the thoughts of another robot mind were abruptly clear—thoughts without sense, clothed in madness! And even as the lunacy registered, they began to fade; second by second, they dimmed into the distance and left her alone again and hopeless!

  With a wild, clanging yell, she threw the useless pickax at the wall, watching it rebound in echoing din. But she was no longer aimless; her eyes had noted
chipped concrete breaking away with the sharp metal point, and she caught the pick before it could touch the floor, seizing the nub of wood in small, strong hands. The full force of her magnets lifted and swung, while her feet kicked aside the rubble that came cascading down from the force of her blows.

  Beyond that rapidly crumbling concrete lay freedom and—madness! Surely there could be no human life hi a world that could drive a robot mad, but if there were… She thrust back the picture and went savagely on attacking the massive wall.

  The sun shone on a drenched forest filled with havoc from the storm, to reveal the male robot pacing tirelessly along the banks of the shallow stream. In spite of the heavy burden he carried, his legs moved swiftly now, and when he came to sandy stretches, or clear land that bore only turf, his great strides lengthened still further; already he had dallied too long with delusions in this unfriendly land.

  Now the stream joined a larger one, and he stopped, dropping his ungainly bundle and ripping it apart. Scant minujtes later, he was pushing an assembled berylite boat out and climbing in. The little generator from the electron microscope purred softly and a steam jet began hissing underneath; it was crude, but efficient, as the boiling wake behind him testified, and while slower than his fastest pace, there would be no detours or impassable barriers to bother him.

  The hours sped by and the shadows lengthened again, but now the stream was wider, and his hopes increased, though he watched the banks idly, not yet expecting Eden. Then he rounded a bend to jerk upright and head toward shore, observing something totally foreign to the landscape. As he beached the boat, and drew nearer, he saw a great gaping hole bored into the earth for a hundred feet in depth and a quarter-mile in diameter, surrounded by obviously artificial ruins. Tall bent shafts stuck up haphazardly amid jumbles of concrete and bits of artifacts damaged beyond recognition. Nearby a pole leaned at a silly angle, bearing a sign.

  He scratched the corrosion off and made out dim words: Welcome to Hoganville. Pop. 1,876. It meant nothing to him, but the ruins fascinated him. This must be some old trick of Satan; such ugliness could be nothing else.

  Shaking his head, he turned back to the boat, to speed on while the stars came out. Again he came to ruins, larger and harder to see, since the damage was more complete and the forest had claimed most of it. He was only sure because of the jagged pits in which not even a blade of grass would grow. And sometimes as the night passed there were smaller pits, as if some single object had been blasted out of existence. He gave up the riddle of such things, finally; it was no concern of his.

  When morning came again, the worst rums were behind, and the river was wide and strong, suggesting that the trip must be near its end. Then the faint salty tang of the ocean reached him, and he whooped loudly, scanning the country for an observation point.

  Ahead, a low hill broke the flat country, topped by a rounded bowl of green, and he made toward it. The boat crunched on gravel, and he was springing off over the turf to the hill, up it, and onto the bowl-shaped top that was covered with vines. Here the whole lower course of the river was visible, with no more large

  branches in the twenty-five miles to the sea. The land was pleasant and gentle, and it was not hard to imagine Eden out there.

  But now for the first time, as he started down, he noticed that the mound was not part of the hill as it had seemed. It was of the same gray-green concrete as the walls of the cave from which he had escaped, like a bird from an egg.

  And here was another such thing, like an egg un-hatched but already cracking, as the gouged-out pit on its surface near him testified. For a moment, the idea contained in the figure of speech staggered him, and then he was ripping away the concealing vines and dropping into the hole, reaching for a small plate pinned to an unharmed section nearby. It was a poor tool, but if Eve were trapped inside, needing help to break the shell, it would do.

  “To you who may survive the holocaust, I, Simon Ames—” The words caught his eyes, drawing his attention to the plate in spite of his will, their terse strangeness pulling his gaze across them. “—dedicate this. There is no easy entrance, but you will expect no easy heritage. Force your way, take what is within, use it! To you who need it and will work for it, I have left all knowledge that was….”

  Knowledge, Knowledge, forbidden by God! Satan had put before his path the unquestioned thing meant by the Tree of Knowledge symbol, concealed as a false egg, and he had almost been caught! A few minutes more—! He shuddered, and backed out, but optimism was freshening inside him again. Let it be the Tree! That meant this was really part of Eden, and being forewarned by God’s marker, he had no fear for the wiles of Satan, alive or dead.

  With long, loping strides he headed down the hill toward the meadows and woods, leaving the now useless boat behind. He would enter Eden on his own feet, as God had made him!

  Half an hour later he was humming happily to himself as he passed beside lush fields, rich with growing things, along a little woodland path. Here was order and logic, as they should be. This was surely Eden!

  And to confirm it catae Eve! She was coming down the trail ahead, her hair floating behind, and some loose stuff draped over her hips and breasts, but the form underneath was Woman, beautiful and unmistakable. He drew back out of sight, suddenly timid and uncertain, only vaguely wondering how she came here before him. Then she was beside him, and he moved impulsively, his voice a whisper of ecstasy!

  “Eve!”

  “Oh, God! Dan! Dan!” It was a wild shriek that cut the air, and she was rushing away in panic, into the deeper woods. He shook his head in bewilderment, while his own legs began a more forceful pumping after her. He was almost upon her when he saw the serpent, alive and stronger than before!

  But not for long! As a single gasp broke from her, one of his arms lifted her aside, while the other snapped out to pinch the fanged head completely off the body. His voice was gently reproving as he put her down. “You shouldn’t have fled to the serpent, Eve!”

  “To—ugh! But… you could have killed me before it struck!” The taut whiteness of fear was fading from her face, replaced by defiance and doubt.

  “Killed you?”

  “You’re a robot! Dan!” Her words cut off as a brawny figure emerged from the underbrush, an ax in one hand and a magnificent dog at his heels. “Dan, he saved me… but he’s a robot!”

  “I saw, Syl. Steady! Edge this way, if you can. Good! They sometimes get passive streaks, I’ve heard. Shep!”

  “Yeah, Dan?” The dog’s thick growl answered, but his eyes remained glued to the robot.

  “Get the people; just yell ‘robot’ and hike back. Okay, scram! You—what do you want?”

  SA-10 grunted harshly, hunching his shoulders. “Things that don’t exist! Companionship and a chance to use my strength and the science I know. Maybe I’m not supposed to have such things, but that’s what I wanted!”

  “Mmm. There are fairy stories about friendly robots hidden somewhere to help us, at that…. We could use help. What’s your name, and where from?”

  Bitterness crept into the robot’s voice as he pointed up river. “From the sunward side. So far, I’ve only found who I’m not!”

  “So? Meant to get up there myself when the colony got settled.” Dan paused, eying the metal figure speculatively. “We lost our books in the hell-years mostly, and the survivors weren’t exactly technicians. So while we do all right with animals, agriculture, medicine and such, we’re pretty primitive otherwise. If you really do know the sciences, why not stick around?”

  The robot had seen too many hopes shattered like his clay man to believe wholly in this promise of purpose and companionship, but his voice caught as he answered. “You—want me?”

  “Why not? You’re a storehouse of knowledge, Say-Ten, and we—”

  “Satan?”

  “Your name—there on your chest.” Dan pointed with his left hand, his body suddenly tense. “See? Right there!”

  And now, as SA-10 craned hi
s neck, the foul letters were visible, high on his chest! Ess, aye—

  His first warning was the ax that crashed against his chest, to rock him back on his heels, and come driving down again, powered by muscles that seemed almost equal to his own. It struck again, and something snapped inside him. All the strength vanished, and he collapsed to the ground with a jarring crash, knocking his eyelids closed. Then he lay there, unable even to open them.

  He did not try, but lay waiting almost eagerly for the final blows that would finish him. Satan, the storehouse of knowledge, the tempter of men—the one person he had learned to hate! He’d come all this way to find a name and a purpose; now he had them! No wonder

  God had locked him away in a cave to keep him from men.

  “Dead! That little fairy story threw him off guard.” There was a tense chuckle from the man. “Hope his generator’s still okay. We could heat every house in the settlement with that. Mmm… wonder where his hideout was?”

  “Like the one up north with all the weapons hidden? Oh, Dan!” A strange smacking sound accompanied that, and then her voice sobered. “We’d better get back for help in hauling him.”

  Their feet moved away, leaving the robot still motionless but no longer passive. The Tree of Knowledge, so easily seen without the vine covering over the hole, was barely twenty miles away, and no casual search could miss it! He had to destroy it first!

  But the little battery barely could maintain his consciousness, and the generator ho longer served him. Delicate detectors were sending their messages through his nerves, assuring him it was functioning properly under automatic check, but beyond his control. Part of the senseless signaling device within him must have been defective, unless the baking of the clay man had somehow overloaded a part of it, and now it was completely wrecked, shorting aside all the generator control impulses, leaving him unable to move a finger.

  Even when he blanked his mind almost completely out, the battery could not power his hands. His evil work was done; now he would heat their houses, while they sought the temptation he had offered them. And he could do nothing to stop it. God denied him the chance even to right the wrong he had done.