The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  There were several scenes, showing a sky of dull green, with grayish sand and something that looked like jumbled blocks of granite. As he stared, a pattern began to show itself. Something had been built there once, and by intelligence. Closer viewing showed that the stones had been shaped geometrically, under all their weathering.

  He came to a list of statistics and skimmed through it. Then he reached the final scene.

  Miffen’s voice suddenly sounded behind him, awkward and too tense. “What about the other ships?”

  “They all got back—they’re piled up beside the field, beyond the reach of your lights. No use to us now. Thirty-nine hulks, and yours makes the fortieth—all we ever built.” He turned back to the film, but again Miffen’s voice interrupted him.

  “All? I’d expected… That bad, eh?”

  “Worse. I suppose you’re entitled to know what you’ve come back to. You’ll see it soon enough, though—and better than I can tell you.” Zeke clamped the viewer to his eye firmly, and turned to the light once more. “There was purpose when you left. Now that’s all past tense.”

  “Yeah.” Miffen let the word hang. He must have seen Zeke’s sudden tenseness and realized there was no use putting off the inspection of the final scene on the film any longer. Zeke was staring at it, but he was unconscious of what his eyes saw, and the last of the hope in him was draining slowly away.

  He stared up at Miffen, tapping the viewer. “You know what this is, of course. Or do you?”

  Miffen shook his head. “I suspected. But I never paid much attention back here, and it’s been a long time. I kept hoping I was crazy.”

  Zeke made no answer. He picked up the viewer and headed toward the control room, with Miffen following. Still silently, he pointed out through the viewports, across the leprous surface of Mars, toward the pitted beryl steel pylon that gleamed in the light from the Star Station. Then he put the viewer to his eyes again.

  The sky was green instead of black, and the sand was gray where Mars was covered with red. But the scene was the same. A gleaming metal pylon rose from the rubble of ruined blocks, carrying the queer, twisted decorations that had been typical of all Martian structures. There was no question about what race had tried to colonize Outpost—and had failed.

  Suddenly a work-gnarled hand took the viewer from him, and he turned to see Preacher Hook and the other men. They must have-followed Miffen and himself into the control room. But it didn’t matter. They must have suspected. And there was no surprise on their faces as they passed the viewer from one to another, comparing the scene with that outside.

  Almost without feeling, Zeke picked up the ultrawave microphone and called the administration building, ordering the robot to bring his rocket down beside the big star ship. He adjusted the dials carefully and spoke terse, coded symbols into the instrument. A moment later, Stendal’s voice answered him.

  “I’m bringing the four survivors down in my ship,” he reported in a voice that seemed completely detached from him. “Give us a secrecy blanket until we can report in full. And see if you can nil a few bathtubs with whiskey. We’ll need it.”

  Stendal seemed to catch his breath and then sigh, but his words were level when he spoke. “So Pandora’s box was just a fairy story, after all. Well, I never had many hopes. Okay, I’ll get the liquor, Zeke. And about your rejuvenation—I’m getting a private installation here for you. If the others need it, we’ll take care of all of you.”

  Zeke looked up at the four men, and then out toward the pylon again—all that was left of a race that had searched the stars in its need to find new frontiers. It must have been a hardy race, since it had dared to set up a colony across all those innumerable parsecs of space, without even the inspiration of other life. Then, when that colony had failed, the race had returned to the loneliness of its own little world, where the stars looked down grimly, no longer promising anything. Now Mars had been dead ten million years, and the pylon stood as the final tombstone on the world which had become a prison. The old puzzle of that race’s end was solved.

  The speaker was sputtering with Stendal’s impatient questions, as Zeke and the men studied each other, but they gave no attention to it. Preacher Hook sighed, breaking the silence.

  “Man goeth to his long home,” he quoted softly. “And the mourners go about the streets; or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern; and the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit return unto God who gave it.”

  Zeke nodded and picked up the microphone.

  “Just get the whiskey. We’ve decided to skip the rejuvenation.”

  He put the microphone back on its hook carefully and headed toward the handrails that led down, with the others behind him. Ozin had the rocket waiting, and they climbed in and strapped themselves down.

  Then the rockets blasted, and the last five men beyond the Earth were heading home.

  Instinct

  senthree waved aside the slowing scooter and lengthened his stride down the sidewalk; he had walked all the way from the rocket port, and there was no point to a taxi now that he was only a few blocks from the bio-labs. Besides, it was too fine a morning to waste in riding. He sniffed at the crisp, clean fumes of gasoline appreciatively and listened to the music of his hard heels slapping against the concrete.

  It was good to have a new body again. He hadn’t appreciated what life was like for the last hundred years or so. He let his eyes rove across the street toward the blue flame of a welding torch and realized how long it had been since his eyes had really appreciated the delicate beauty of such a flame. The wise old brain in his chest even seemed to think better now.

  It was worth every stinking minute he’d spent on Venus. At times like this, one could realize how good it was to be alive and to be a robot.

  Then he sobered as he came to the old bio-labs. Once there had been plans for a fine new building instead of the old factory in which he had started it all four hundred years ago. But somehow, there’d never been time for that. It had taken almost a century before they could master the technique of building up genes and chromosomes into the zygote of a simple fish that would breed with the natural ones. Another century had

  gone by before they produced Oscar, the first artificially made pig. And there they ‘seemed to have stuck. Sometimes it seemed to Senthree that they were no nearer recreating Man than they had been when they started.

  He dilated the door and went down the long hall, studying his reflection in the polished walls absently. It was a good body. The black enamel was perfect and every joint of the metal case spelled new techniques and luxurious fitting. But the old worries were beginning to settle. He grunted at Oscar LXXII, the lab mascot, and received an answering grunt. The pig came over to root at his feet, but he had no time for that. He turned into the main lab room, already taking on the worries of his job.

  It wasn’t hard to worry as he saw the other robots. They were clustered about some object on a table, dejection on every gleaming back. Senthree shoved Ceofor and Beswun aside and moved up. One look was enough. The female of the eleventh couple lay there in the strange stiffness of protoplasm that had died, a horrible grimace on her face.

  “How long—and what happened to the male?” Senthree asked,

  Ceofor swung to face him quickly. “Hi, boss. You’re late. Hey, new body!”

  Senthree nodded, as they came grouping around, but his words were automatic as he explained about falling in the alkali pool on Venus and ruining his worn body completely. “Had to wait for a new one. And then the ship got held up while we waited for the Arcturus su-perlight ship to land. They’d found half a dozen new planets to colonize, and had to spread the word before they’d set down. Now, what about the creatures?”

  “We finished educating about three days ago,” Ceofor told him. Ceofor was the first robot trained hi Senthree’s technique of gene-building and the senior assistant. “Expected
you back then, boss. But… well, see for yourself. The man is still alive, but he won’t be long.”

  Senthree followed them back to another room and

  looked through the window. He looked away quickly. It had been another failure. The man was crawling about the floor on hands and knees, falling half the time to his stomach, and drooling. His garbled mouthing made no sense.

  “Keep the news robots out,” he ordered. It would never do to let the public see this. There was already too much of a cry against homovivifying, and the crowds were beginning to mutter something about it being unwise to mess with vanished life forms. They seemed actually afraid of the legendary figure of Man.

  “What luck on Venus?” one of them asked, as they began the job of carefully dissecting the body of the female failure to look for the reason behind the lack of success.

  “None. Just another rumor. I don’t think Man ever established self-sufficient colonies. If he did, they didn’t survive. But I found something else—something the museum would give a fortune for. Did my stuff arrive?”

  “You mean that box of tar? Sure, it’s over there hi the corner.”

  Senthree let the yielding plastic of his mouth smile at them as he strode toward it. They had already ripped off the packing, and now he reached up for a few fine wires in the tar. It came off as he pulled, loosely repacked over a thin layer of wax. At that, he’d been lucky to sneak it past customs. This was the oldest, crudest, and biggest robot discovered so far—perhaps one of the fabulous Original Models. It stood there rigidly, staring out of its pitted, expressionless face. But the plate on its chest had been scraped carefully clean, and Senthree pointed it out to them.

  MAKEPEACE ROBOT, SER. 324MD2991. SURGEON.

  “A mechanic for Man bodies,” Beswun translated. “But that means…”

  “Exactly.” Senthree put it into words. “It must know how Man’s body was built—if it has retained any memory. I found it in a tarpit by sheer accident, and it seems to be fairly well preserved. No telling whether there were any magnetic fields to erode memories, of course, and it’s all matted inside. But if we can get it to working…”

  Beswun took over. He had been trained as a physicist before the mysterious lure of the bio-lab had drawn him here. Now he began wheeling the crude robot away. If he could get it into operation, the museum could wait. The recreation of Man came first!

  Senthree pulled x-ray lenses out of, a pouch and replaced the normal ones in his eyes before going over to join the robots who were beginning dissection. Then he switched them for the neutrino detector lenses that had made this work possible. The neutrino was the only particle that could penetrate the delicate protoplasmic cells without ruining them and yet permit the necessary millions of tunes magnification. It was a fuzzy image, since the neutrino spin made such an insignificant field for the atomic nuclei to work on that few were deflected. But through them, he could see the vague outlines of the pattern within the cells. It was as they had designed the original cell—there had been no reshuffling of genes in handling. He switched to his micromike hands and began the delicate work of tracing down the neuron connections. There was only an occasional mutter as one of the robots beside him switched to some new investigation.

  The female should have’ lived! But somewhere, in spite of all their care, she had died. And now the male was dying. Eleven couples—eleven failures. Senthree was no nearer finding the creators of his race than he had been centuries before.

  Then the radio hi his head buzzed its warning and he let it cut in, straightening from his work. “Senthree.”

  “The Director is in your office. Will you report at once?”

  “Damn!” The word had no meaning, but it was strangely satisfying at times. What did old Emptinine want… or wait again, there’d been a selection while he was on Venus investigating the rumors of Man. Some young administrator—Arpeten—had the job now.

  Ceofor looked up guiltily, obviously having tuned in.

  “I should have warned you. We got word three days ago he was coming, but forgot it in reviving the couple. Trouble?”

  Senthree shrugged, screwing his normal lenses back in and trading to the regular hands. They couldn’t have found out about the antique robot. They had been seen by nobody else. It was probably just sheer curiosity over some rumor that they were reviving the couple. If his appropriation hadn’t been about exhausted, Senthree would have told him where to go; but now was hardly the time, with a failure on one hand and a low credit balance on the other. He polished his new head quickly with the aid of one of the walls for a mirror and headed toward his office.

  But Arpeten was smiling. He got to his feet as the bio-lab chief entered, holding out a well-polished hand. “Dr. Senthree. Delighted. And you’ve got an interesting place here. I’ve already seen most of it. And that pig—they tell me it’s a descendant of a boar out of your test tubes.”

  “Incubation wombs. But you’re right—the seventy-second generation.”

  “Fascinating.” Arpeten must have been reading too much of that book Proven Points to Popularity they’d dug up in the ruins of Hudson ten years before, but it had worked. He was the Director. “But tell me. Just what good are pigs?”

  Senthree grinned, in spite of himself. “Nobody knows. Men apparently kept a lot of them, but so far as I can see they are completely useless. They’re clever, in a way. But I don’t think they were pets. Just another mystery.”

  “Umm. Like men. Maybe you can tell me what good Man will be. I’ve been curious about that since I saw your appropriations. But nobody can answer.”

  “It’s in the records,” Senthree told him sharply. Then he modified his voice carefully. “How well do you know your history? I mean about the beginning.”

  “Well…”

  He probably knew some of it, Senthree thought. They all got part of it as legends. He leaned back in his seat now, though, as the biochemist began the old tale of the beginning as they knew it. They knew that there had been Man a million years before them. And somebody—Asimov or Asenion, the record wasn’t quite clear—had apparently created the first robot. They had improved it up to about the present level. Then there had been some kind of a contest in which violent forces had ruined the factories, most of the robots, and nearly all of the Men. It was believed from the fragmentary records that a biological weapon had killed the rest of man, leaving only the robots.

  Those first robots, as they were now known, had had to start on a ruined world from scratch—a world where mines were exhausted, and factories were gone. They’d learned to get metals from the seas, and had spent years and centuries slowly rebuilding the machines to build new robots. There had been only two of them when the task was finished, and they had barely time enough to run one new robot off and educate him sketchily. Then they had discharged finally, and he had taken up rebuilding the race. It was almost like beginning with no history and no science. Twenty millennia had passed before they began to rebuild a civilization of their own.

  “But why did Man die?” Senthree asked. “That’s part of the question. And are we going to do the same? We know we are similar to Man. Did he change himself in some way that ruined him? Can we change ourselves safely? You know that there are a thousand ways we could improve ourselves. We could add antigravity, and get rid of our cumbersome vehicles. We could add more arms. We could eliminate our useless mouths and talk by radio. We could add new circuits to our brains. But we don’t dare. One school says that nobody can build a better race than itself, so Man must have been better than we are—and if he made us this way, there was a reason. Even if the psychologists can’t understand some of the circuits in our brains, they don’t dare touch them.

  “We’re expanding through the universe—but we can’t even change ourselves to fit the new planets. And until we can find the reasons for Man’s disappearance, that makes good sense. We know he was planning to change himself. We have bits of evidence. And he’s dead. To make it worse, we have whole reels of educat
ion tape that probably contain all the answers—but information is keyed to Man’s brain, and we can’t respond to it. Give us a viable Man, and he can interpret that. Or we can find out by comparison what we can and cannot do. I maintain we can do a lot.”

  Arpeten shook his head doubtfully. “I suppose you think you know why he died!”

  “I think so, yes. Instinct! That’s a built-in reaction, an unlearned thought. Man had it. If a man heard a rattlesnake, he left the place hi a hurry, even though he’d never heard it before. Response to that sound was built into him. No tape impressed it, and no experience was needed. We know the instincts of some of the animals, too—and one of them is to struggle and kill—like the ants who kill each other off. I think Man did just that. He couldn’t get rid of his instincts when they were no longer needed, and they killed him. He should have changed—and we can change. But I can’t tell that from animals. I need intelligent life, to see whether instinct or intelligence will dominate. And robots don’t have instincts—I’ve looked for even one sign of something not learned individually, and can’t find it. It’s the one basic difference between us. Don’t you see, Man is the whole key to our problem of whether we can change or not without risking extermination?”

  “Umm.” The director sounded noncommittal. “Interesting theory. But how are you going to know you have Man?”

  Senthree stared at the robot with more respect. He tried to explain, but he had never been as sure of that himself as he might. Theoretically, they had bones and ‘bits of preserved tissue. They had examined the gene pattern of these, having learned that the cells of the individual contain the same pattern as that of the zygote. And they had other guides—man’s achievements, bits of his literature. From these, some working theories could be made. But he couldn’t be quite sure—they’d never really known whether man’s pigment was dark