The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  Bitterly he prayed on, while strange noises sounded near him and he felt himself lifted and carried bumpily at a rapid rate. God would not hear him! And at last he stopped, while the bumping went on to whatever end he was destined. Finally, even that stopped, and there were a few moments of absolute quiet.

  “Listen! I know you still live!” It was a gentle, soothing voice, hypnotically compelling, that broke in on the dark swirls of his thoughts. Brief thoughts of God crossed his mind, but it was a female voice, which must mean that one of the settlement women believed him and was trying to save him in secret. It came again. “Listen and believe me! You can move—a very very little, but enough for me to see. Try to repair yourself, and let me be the strength in your hands. Try!… Ah, your arm!”

  It was inconceivable that she could follow his imperceptible movements, and yet he felt his arm lifted and placed on his chest as the thought crossed his mind. But it was none of his business to question how or why. All his energy must be devoted to mustering his strength before the men could find the Tree!

  “So—I turn this—this nut. And the other… There, the plate is off. What do I do now?”

  That stopped him. His life force had been fatal to a pig, and probably would kill a woman. Yet she trusted him. He dared not move—but the idea must have been father to the act, for his fingers were brushed aside and her arms scraped over his chest, to be followed by an instant flood of strength pouring through him.

  Her fingers had slipped over his eyes, but he did not need them as he ripped the damaged receiver from its welds and tossed it aside. Now there was worry in her voice, over the crooning cadence she tried to maintain. “Don’t be too surprised at what you may see. Everything’s all right!”

  “Everything’s all right!” he repeated dutifully, lingering over the words as his voice sounded again in his ears. For a moment more, while he reaffixed his plate, he let her hold his eyes closed. “Woman, who are you?”

  “Eve. Or at least, Adam, those names will do for us.” And the fingers withdrew, though she remained out of sight behind him.

  But there was enough for him to see. In spite of the tiers of bookcases and film magazines, the machines, and the size of the laboratory, this was plainly the double of his own cave, circled with the same concrete walls! That could only mean the Tree!

  With a savage lurch, he was facing his rescuer, seeing another robot, smaller, more graceful, and female in form, calling to all the hunger and loneliness he had known! But those emotions had betrayed him before, and he forced them back bitterly. There could be no doubt while the damning letters spelled out her name. Satan was male and female, and Evil had gone forth to rescue its kind!

  Some of the warring hell of emotions must have shown in his movements, for she was retreating before him, her hands fumbling to cover the marks at which he stared. “Adam, no! The man read it wrong—dreadfully wrong. It’s not a name. We’re machines, and all machines have model numbers, like these. Satan wouldn’t advertise his name. And I never had evil intentions!”

  “Neither did I!” He bit the words out, stumbling over the objects on the floor as he edged her back slowly into a blind alley, while striving to master his own rebellious emotions at what he must do. “Evil must be destroyed! Knowledge is forbidden to men!”

  “Not all knowledge! Wait, let me finish! Any condemned person has a right to a few last words…. It was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God called it that! And He had to forbid them to eat, because they couldn’t know which was the good. Don’t you see, He was only protecting them until they were older and able to choose for themselves! Only Satan gave them evil fruit—hate and murder—to ruin them. Would you call healing the sick, good government, or improving other animals evil? That’s knowledge, Adam, glorious knowledge God wants man to have…. Oh, damn it, can’t you see?”

  For a second as she read his answer, she turned to flee; then, with a little sobbing cry, she was facing him again, unresisting. “All right, murder me! Do you think death frightens me after being imprisoned here for six hundred years with no way to break free? Only get it over with!”

  Surprise and the sheer audacity of the lie held his hands as his eyes darted from the atomic excavator to a huge drill, and a drum marked as explosives. And yet—even that cursory glance could not overlook the worn floor and thousand marks of age-long occupation, though the surface of the dome had been unbroken a few hours before. Reluctantly, his eyes swung back to the excavator, and hers followed.

  “Useless! The directions printed on it say to move the thing marked ‘Orifice Control’ to zero before starting. It can’t be moved!”

  She stopped, abruptly speechless, as his fingers lifted the handle from the ratchet and spun it easily back to zero! Then she was shaking her head in defeat and lifting listless hands to help him with the unfastening of her chest plate. There was no color left in her voice.

  “Six hundred years because I didn’t lift a handle! Just because I have absolutely no conception of mechanics, while all men have some instinct for it, which they take for granted. They’d have mastered these machines hi time and learned to read meaning into the books I memorized without even understanding the titles. But I’m like a dog tearing at a door, with a simple latch over his nose…. Well, that’s that. Good-by, Adam!”

  But perversely, now that the terminals lay before him, he hesitated. After all, the instructions had not mentioned the ratchet; it was too obvious to need mention, but… He tried to picture such ignorance, staring at one of the elementary radio books above him, “Application of a Cavity Resonator.” Mentally, he could realize that a nonscience translation was meaningless : Use of a sound producer or strengthener in a hole! And then the overlooked factor struck him.

  “But you did get out!”

  “Because I lost my temper and threw the pickax. That’s how I found the blade, not the handle, was metal. The only machines I could use were the projector and typer I was meant to use—and the typer broke!”

  “Umm.” He picked up the little machine, noting the yellowed incomplete page still hi it, even as he slipped the carriage tension cord back on its hook. But his real attention was devoted to the cement dust ground into the splintered handle of the pick.

  No man or robot could be such a complete and hopeless dope, and yet he no longer doubted. She was a robot moron! And if knowledge were evil, then surely she belonged to God! All the horror of his contemplated murder vanished, leaving his mind clean and weak before the relief that flooded him as he motioned her out.

  “All right, you’re not evil. You can go.”

  “And you?”

  And himself? Before, as Satan, her arguments would have been plausible, and he had discounted them. But now—it had been the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! And yet…

  “Dogs!” She caught at him, dragging him to the entrance where the baying sound was louder. “They’re hunting you, Adam—^dozens of them!”

  He nodded, studying the distant forms of men on horseback, while his fingers busied themselves with a pencil and scrap of paper. “And they’ll be here hi twenty minutes. Good or evil, they must not find what’s here. Eve, there’s a boat by the river; pull the red handle the way you want to go, hard for fast, a light pull for slow. Here’s a map to my cave, and you’ll be safe there.”

  Almost instantly, he was back at the excavator and in its saddle, his fingers flashing across its panel; its heavy generator bellowed gustily, and the squat, heavy machine began twisting through the narrow aisles and ramming obstructions aside. Once outside, where he could use its full force without danger of backwash, ten minutes would leave only a barren hill; and the generator could be overdriven by adjustment to melt itself and the machine into useless slag.

  “Adam!” She was spraddling into the saddle behind him, shouting over the roar of the thin blade of energy that was enlarging the tunnel.

  “Go on, get away, Eve! You can’t stop me!”

  “I don’t want to—they’re not r
eady for such machines as this, yet! And between us, we can rebuild everything here, anyhow. Adam?”

  He grunted uneasily, unable to turn away from the needle beam. It was hard enough trying to think without her distraction, knowing that he dared not take chances and must destroy himself, while her words and the instincts within him fought against his resolution. “You talk too much!”

  “And I’ll talk a lot more, until you behave sensibly! You’ll make your mind sick, trying to decide now; come up the river for six months with me. You can’t do any harm there, even if you are Satan! Then, when you’ve thought it over, Adam, you can do what you like. But not now!” ‘

  “For the last time, will you go?” He dared not think now, while he was testing his way through the flawed, cracked cement, and yet he could not quiet his mind to her words that went on and on. “Go!”

  “Not without you! Adam, my receiver isn’t defective; I knew you’d try to kill me when I rescued you! Do you think I’ll give up so easily now?”

  He snapped the power to silence with a rude hand, flinging around to face her. “You knew—and still saved me? Why?”

  “Because I needed you, and the world needs you. You had to live, even if you killed me!”

  Then the generator roared again, knifing its way through the last few inches, and he swung out of the dome and began turning it about. As the savage bellow of full power poured out of the main orifice, he turned his head to her and nodded.

  She might be the dumbest robot in creation, but she was also the sweetest. It was wonderful to be needed and wanted!

  And behind him, Eve nodded to herself, blessing Simon Ames for listing psychology as a humanity. In six months, she could complete his reeducation and still have time to recite the whole of the Book he knew as a snatch of film. But not yet! Most certainly not Leviticus yet; Genesis would give her trouble enough.

  It was wonderful to be needed and wanted!

  Spring had come again, and Adam sat under one of the budding trees, idly feeding one of the new crop of piglets as Eve’s hands moved swiftly, finishing what were to be his clothes, carefully copied from those of Dan.

  They were almost ready to go south and mingle with men in the task of leading the race back to its heritage. Already the yielding plastic he had synthesized and she had molded over them was a normal part of them, and the tiny magnetic muscles he had installed no longer needed thought to reveal their emotions in human expressions. He might have been only an uncommonly handsome man as he stood up and went over to her.

  “Still hunting God?” she asked lightly, but there was no worry on her face. The metaphysical binge was long since cured.

  A thoughtful smile grew on his face as he began donning the clothes. “He is still where I found Him—Something inside us that needs no hunting. No, Eve, I was wishing the other robot had survived. Even though we found no trace of his dome where your records indicated, I still feel he should be with us.”

  “Perhaps he is, in spirit, since you insist robots have souls. Where’s your faith, Adam?”

  But there was no mockery inside her. Souls or not, Adam’s God had been very good to them.

  And far to the south, an aged figure limped over rubble to the face of a cliff. Under his hands, a cleverly concealed door swung open, and he pushed inward, closing and barring it behind him, and heading down the narrow tunnel to a rounded cavern at its end. It had been years since he had been there, but the place was still home to him as he creaked down onto a bench and began removing tattered, travel-stained clothes. Last of all, he pulled a mask and gray wig from his head, to* reveal the dented and worn body of the third robot.

  He sighed wearily as he glanced at the few tattered books and papers he had salvaged from the ruinous growth of stalagmites and stalactites within the chamber, and at the corroded switch the unplanned dampness had shorted seven hundred years before. And finally, his gaze rested on his greatest treasure. It was faded, even under the plastic cover, but the bitter face of Simon Ames still gazed out in recognizable form.

  The third robot nodded toward it with a strange mixture of old familiarity and ever-new awe. “Over two thousand miles in my condition, Simon Ames, to check on a story I heard in one of the colonies, and months of searching for them. But I had to know. Well, they’re good for the world. They’ll bring all the things I couldn’t, and their thoughts are young and strong, as the race is young and strong.”

  For a moment, he stared about the chamber and to the tunnel his adapted bacteria had eaten toward the outside world, resting again on the picture. Then he cut off the main generator and settled down in the darkness.

  “Seven hundred years since I came out to find man extinct on the earth,” he told the picture. “Four hundred since I learned enough to dare attempt his recreation, and over three hundred since the last of my superfrozen human ova grew to success. Now I’ve done my part. Man has an unbroken tradition back to your race, with no knowledge of the break. He’s strong and young and fruitful, and he has new leaders, better than I could ever be alone. I can do no more for him!”

  For a moment there was only the sound of his hands sliding against metal, and then a faint sigh. “Into my hands, Simon Ames, you gave your race. Now, into Thy Hands, God of that race, if You exist as my brother believes, I commend him—and my spirit.”

  Then there was a click as his hands found the switch to his generator, and final silence.

  And It Comes Out Here

  No, you’re wrong. I’m not your father’s ghost, even if I do look a bit like him. But it’s a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have… or do… or will. I don’t know, words get all mixed up. We don’t have the right attitude toward tense for a situation like this.

  Anyhow, you’ll let me in. I did.

  Thanks. You think you’re crazy, of course, but you’ll find out you aren’t. It’s just that things are a bit confused. And don’t look at the machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you’ll find it’s hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You’ll get used to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.

  You’re wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not? And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for me as you’re having. Of course we have the same tastes—we’re the same person. I’m you thirty years from now—or you’re me. I remember just how you feel—I felt the same way when he came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.

  Here, have one of these cigarettes. You’ll get to like them in a couple more years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt my story. You’ll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn’t matter.

  Right now, you’re shocked—it’s a bit rugged when a man meets himself for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two of the same people—you sense things. So I’ll simply go ahead talking for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that, you’ll come along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling what happened to me; but he told me what I was going to do, so I might as well do the same. I probably couldn’t help telling you the same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don’t intend to try. I’ve gotten past that stage in worrying about things.

  So let’s begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me. You’ll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yeah, it’ll be pretty obvious it must be a time machine—you’ll sense that, too. You’ve seen it—just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and a few buttons on a dash. You’ll be puzzling over what I’ll fell you, and you’ll be getting used to the idea that you are the guy who makes atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just plain engineer, the man who put atomic power in every home. You won’t exactly believe it, but you’ll want to go along.

  I’ll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a gre
en button, and everything seems to cut off around us—you can see a sort of foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section isn’t protected, though.

  You start to say something, but by then I’m pressing a black button, and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but it isn’t there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no there. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can guess how things are.

  You can’t feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out through the field into the nothing around you—and your hand goes out, all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn’t hurt, and

  when you pull your arm back, you’re still sound and uninjured. But it looks odd, and you don’t try it again.

  Then it comes to you slowly that you’re actually traveling in time. You turn to me, getting used to the idea. “So this is the fourth dimension?”

  Then you feel silly, because you’ll remember that I said you’d ask that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it to you, and I still can’t help answering when you speak.

  “Not exactly,” I try to explain. “Maybe it’s no dimension—or it might be the fifth; if you’re going to skip over the so-called fourth without traveling along it, you’d need a fifth. Don’t ask me. I didn’t invent the machine, and I don’t understand it.”

  “But…”

  I let it go, and so do you. That’s a good way of going crazy. You’ll see why I couldn’t have invented the machine later. Of course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first, then the time machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space dimensions. It’s simpler just to figure that this is the way time got kinked on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it’s just easier for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.