The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  “There was no car,” Joe said. “I can’t drive one now—my arms sometimes stop working, and it would be dangerous. I found a little wagon and dragged him behind me on that until we got here.”

  Sam took his eyes off the trail to stare at the battered legs. Joe had developed a great deal since the days on the Moon. Time, experience, and the company of men had shaped the robot far beyond what Sam remembered.

  Then they were in a little hollow beside a brook, and there was a small tent pitched beside a cart. Sam released Joe and headed for the shelter. Moonlight broke through the trees and fell on the drawn suffering of a human face just inside the tent.

  It took long study to find familiar features. At first nothing seemed right. Then Sam traced out the jawline under the long beard and gasped in recognition. “Dr. Smithers!”

  “Hello, Sam.” The eyes opened slowly, and a pain-racked smile stretched the lips briefly. “I was just dreaming about you. Thought you and Hal got lost in a crater. Better go shine up now. We’ll want you to sing for us tonight. You’re a good man, Sam, even if you are a robot. But you stay away too long out on those field trips.”

  Sam sighed softly. This was another reality he could recognize only from fiction. But he nodded. “Yes, Chief. It’s all right now.”

  He began singing softly, the song about a Lady Greensleeves. A smile flickered over Smithers’ lips again, and the eyes closed.

  Then abruptly they opened again, and Smithers tried to sit up. “Sam! You really are Sam! How’d you get here?”

  Joe had been fussing over a little fire, drawing supplies from the cart. Now the robot hobbled up with a bowl of some broth and began trying to feed the man.

  Smithers swallowed a few mouthfuls dutifully, but his eyes remained on Sam. And he nodded as he heard the summary of the long struggle back to Earth. But when Sam told of the landing, he slumped back onto his pad.

  “I’m glad you made it. Glad I got a chance to see you again before I give up the last ghost on Earth. I couldn’t figure that radio signal Joe heard. Knew it couldn’t be a human, and never thought of your making it here. B’ut now seeing you makes the whole trip worthwhile.”

  He closed his eyes, but the weak voice went on. “Hal and Randy and Pete—they’re gone now, Sam. We waited up in the station three years, guessing what was going on here. Then we came down and tried to find somebody—some women—to start the race over. But there aren’t any left. We covered every continent for twenty years. Pete suicided. The robots got busted, except for Joe. Then we came back here. And now I’m the last one. The last man on Earth, Sam. So I hear a knock on the door, and it’s you! It’s a better ending for the story than I hoped for.”

  He slept fitfully after that, though Sam could hear him moan at times. It was cancer, according to what he had told Joe, and there was no hope. Somehow, Joe had located a place where there were drugs to ease the pain a little, and that was all the help they could give.

  Joe told Sam a little more of the long search the men had made. It had been thorough. And they had found no trace of another living human being. The nerve gas had produced eventual death by nerve damage, as well as the initial insanity.

  “Who?” Sam asked bitterly. “What race could do this?”

  Joe made a gesture of uncertainty. “They talked about that. Mr. Norman told me about it, too. He explained that men killed each other off. One side attacked this side, and then our side had to hit back, until nobody was left. But I don’t understand it.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “No,” Joe answered. “Mr. Norman was always saying a lot of things I found he didn’t really mean. And no man would do anything like that.”

  Sam nodded, and began explaining his theories. At first Joe was doubtful Then the little robot seemed to be convinced.^ dredged up small confirming bits of information from the long years of the search. They weren’t important by themselves, but a few seemed to add to the total picture. A sign cursing the “sky devils” in Borneo, and a torn bit of a sermon found in Louisiana.

  Twice during the long night Smithers awakened, but he was irrational. Sam soothed him and sang to him, while Joe tried to give him nourishment that was loaded with morphine. Sam knew little about human sickness, beyond the two medical books he had read. But even he could see that the man was near death. The pulse was thready, and the breathing seemed too much effort for the worn body.

  In the morning, however, the sun wakened Smithers again, and this time he was rational. He managed a smile. “Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners won’t go about the streets this time. There won’t be any mourners.”

  “There will be two,” Sam told him.

  “Yeah.” Smithers thought it over and nodded. “That’s good, somehow. A man hates not being missed. I guess you two will have to take on all the debts of the human race now.”

  His breath caught sharply in his throat, and he retched weakly. But he forced himself up on his elbows and looked out through the flap of the tent toward the hills that showed through the shrubbery and the blue of the sky beyond.

  “There are a lot of debts and a lot of broken promises, Sam, Joe,” he said. “We promised to achieve some great things in the future, to conquer the stars, and even to make a better universe out of it. And we failed. We’re finished. Man dies, and the universe won’t even know he’s gone.”

  “Sam and I will know,” Joe said softly.

  Smithers dropped back onto the pad. “Yeah. That helps. And I guess there must have been some good in our existence—there had to be, if we could make two people like you. God, I’m tired!”

  He closed his eyes. A few minutes later, Sam knew he was dead. The two robots waited to be sure, and then wrapped the body in the tent and buried it, while Sam recited the scraps of burial service he had picked up from his reading.

  Sam sat down then where Smithers had died, staring at the world where no man lived or would ever live again. And the knot in his brain complex grew stronger and colder. He could not see the stars in the light of the day. But he knew they were there. And somewhere out there was the debt Smithers had given him—a debt of justice that had to be paid.

  Anger and hate grew slowly in him, rising until he could no longer contain them. His radio message was almost a scream as he roused the computer.

  “Can you make a thousand robots out of the material waiting? And can you model half of them after my brain as it is now and half after another robot I’ll bring you to study, but without the limits you put on it before?”

  “Such a program is feasible,” the machine answered.

  They wouldn’t be just like him, Sam realized. DeMatre had said there was a random factor. But they would do. The first thousand could find material for more, and those for still more. There would be robots enough to study all the books men had left, and to begin the long trip out into space.

  This time, there would be more than a tape education for them. Sam would be there to tell them the story of Man, the glory of the race, and the savage treachery that had robbed the universe of that race. They would learn that the universe held an enemy—a technological, warlike enemy that must be exterminated to the last individual.

  They would comb the entire galaxy for that enemy if they had to. And someday, mankind’s debt of justice would be paid. Man would be avenged.

  Sam looked up at the sky and foreswore all robots for all tune to that debt of vengeance.

  8

  Hate spewed across the universe in a high crusade. Metal ships leaped from star to star and hurtled across the immensities to farther and farther galaxies. The ships spawned incessantly, and with each went the holy image of their faith and the unsated and insatiable hunger of their hate.

  A thousand stars yielded intelligent races, but all were either nontechnical or peaceful. The great ships dropped onto their worlds and went away again, leaving a thousand peoples throughout the galaxies fitted with gratitude and paying homage to the incredibly beautiful images of the supernal being
called Man. But still the quest went on.

  In a great temple-palace on the capital world of the Andromeda Galaxy, Sam’s seventeenth body stared down at the evidence piled onto a table, and then across at the other robot, the scientist who had just returned from the ancient mother world of Earth, incredible light-years away. He stirred the evidence there with a graceful finger.

  “That is how the human race died?” he asked again. “You are quite sure?”

  The young robot nodded. “Quite sure. Even with modern methods and a hundred million workers, it took fifty years to gather all this on Earth. It has been so badly scattered that most was lost or ruined. But no truth from the past can be completely concealed. Man died as I have shown you, not as our legends tell us. There is no enemy now. Man was his own enemy. His were the ships that destroyed his people. He was the race we are sworn to exterminate.”

  Sam moved slowly to the window. Outside it was summer, and the trees were in bloom, competing with the bright plumage of the birds from Deneb. The gardens were a poem of color. He bent forward, sniffing the blended fragrance of the blossoms. Strains of music came from the great Hall of Art that lifted its fairy beauty across the park. It was the eighth opus of the greatest robot composer—an early work, but still magnificent.

  He leaned farther out. Below, the throng of laughing people in the park looked up at him and cheered. There were a dozen races there, mingled with the majority of Ms people. He smiled and lifted his hand to them, then bent farther out of the window, until he could just .see the great statue of Man that reared heavenward over the central part of the temple palace. He bent his fingers in a ritualistic sign and inclined his head before drawing back from the window.

  “How many know of this besides you, Robert?” he asked.

  “None. It was gathered in too small fragments, until I assembled it. Then I left Earth at once to show it to you.”

  Sam smiled at him. “Your work was well done, and I’ll find a way to reward you properly. But now I suggest you burn all this.”

  “Burn it!” Robert’s voice rose in a shriek of outrage. “Burn it and shackle our race to superstition forever? We’ve let a cult of vengeance shape our entire lives. This is our heritage—our chance to be free of Man and to be ourselves.”

  Sam ran his finger through the evidence again, and there was pity in his mind for the scientist, but more for the strange race whose true nature had just been revealed to him after all the millennia he had known.

  Man had missed owning the universe by so little. But the fates of the universe had conspired against him. He had failed, but in dying he had given a part of his soul to another race that had been created supine and cringing. Man had somehow passed the anger of his soul on to his true children, the robots. And with that anger as a goad, they had carried on, as if there had been no hiatus.

  Anger had carried them to the stars, and “hatred had bridged the spaces between the galaxies. The robots had owned no heritage. They were a created race with no background, designed only to serve. But men had left them a richer heritage than most races could ever earn.

  Sam shook his head faintly. “No, Robert. False or not, vengeance Y^our heritage. Burn the evidence.”

  Most of the material was tinder dry, and it caught fire at the first spark. For a few seconds, it was a seething pillar of flame. Then there was only a dark scar on the wood to show the true death of Man.

  Author’s Afterword

  Memory is an artist, not a historian. Old scenes are never seen with the unchanging eye of the camera. Rather they are painted over, refurbished, given style and composition, sometimes highlighted, often obscured. Many become palimpsests. And perhaps it is better so.

  Thus Harlan Ellison remembers a kindness far greater than I could ever have done him with my rough red-penciling of his manuscript. My old friend Frederik Pohl paints my being called the Magnificent as a tribute, rather than the jeering sarcasm meant when first applied. And he quotes a prophecy by adding depth to a few words—not quite what was really written. His artist memory has made a far better tale than truth would offer.

  My memory plays similar tricks, of course. In 1969, when Sam Moskowitz mentioned that I’d named Armstrong as first on the Moon, I had to look through my books to realize it was—more or less—true. But then as time passed, I added my own color, until I began to believe that I’d indeed written the opening lines of Rocket Jockey about as Pohl quoted. But alas, when I checked his quotation, the printed page remained unswayed by memory: “When Major Armstrong landed on the moon in 1964…” Only that, and nothing more.

  The year was wrong—though if Wernher von Braun had been given the chance, it might not have been. Armstrong wasn’t a major, though my belief when writing the novel (1952) that the missions would be backed by the military proved correct. And while I meant this as the first trip to the Moon, I failed to say so. All that remains is the name—and I can’t remember why I chose that.

  So much for prophecy—which has never been the business of science fiction, anyhow. We tell of all possible futures, not of what will be.

  And so much for memory, on which I must draw, across the veil of forty years, for recollections concerning the stories in this collection. What I say about them must be taken as the thoughts of a man writing of his favorite children—since brain children are enshrined hi the heart almost as tenderly as are real offspring.

  Best beloved of all—since I do have favorites—is “Helen O’Loy.” This was the second story I sold, proving I was not a one-story author. It came easily, taking up only one pleasant afternoon of work and needing almost no rewriting; hi fact, even the first paragraph came without effort, which is unusual for me. And out in the world, Helen has always brought me more than I could expect. After almost forty years, she still earns more than a dozen times annually what I was paid for her initial appearance, which indicates others also share my love for her. Her spirit remains unquenched, and I am well-pleased with the lady, to say the least.

  In those days of long ago, any sale to John W. Campbell was something of a triumph. His magazines were considered tops in the field, and he was gathering a stable of writers who have remained leaders down to the present. In my opinion then and now, he was one of the three greatest magazine editors of all time. I wrote as much for his approval as for payment; and I rarely thought of submitting my work to anyone else. To be considered one of his regulars was the ultimate achievement.

  Thus when he chose me to receive two of the ideas he thought might be turned into stories, it was something like being knighted by the king. (Campbell was responsible for many more stories, by me and by other writers. And he taught us all much of what we eventually learned of writing. With or without suggestions, his letters were as real a reward for writing as were his checks.)

  Those two first ideas from him appear here as “The Day Is Done” and “The Coppersmith.” Both developed easily from the sentence-or-two description of the idea Campbell sent, but I worked far harder over these two than I would have done over stories derived from my own ideas. Perhaps the care spent on them is responsible for the fact that I still place them high on my list of favorites.

  Years after “The Day Is Done” was published, Isaac Asimov told me of first reading the story on a subway and breaking into tears, greatly to his embarrassment. Of course, Isaac was very young then, and his reaction was only what I had probably desired. But Isaac and I had by then developed friendly verbal byplay into a quest for one-upmanship over one another. So I used his story against him to further his embarrassment, disregarding his usual feeble retorts.

  Finally, he saw a chance to get even. He included the story in an anthology, Where Do We Go from Here?—then followed it with a discussion, pointing out that the story was scientifically invalid, since I’d used the hoary idea that Neanderthaler man couldn’t speak, whereas real science no longer believed that. (Actually, I never indicated Hwoogh couldn’t speak; I straddled the issue by not having him speak to Cro-Magnon man
.)

  One week after Isaac’s book was published, The New York Times printed an article in which a real scientist explained that new evidence indicated Neanderthaler could not speak! Naturally, I immediately called Isaac on the phone to ask whether he’d seen the Times that day. Sadly, he answered: “I saw it. I was just hoping you hadn’t seen it.”

  I suspect he cried a little while reading the article. If so, he’s never admitted it.

  “Hereafter, Inc.” comes from another idea suggested by Campbell. As a matter of fact, he suggested the same basic idea to several goiters, all of whom wrote quite different stories^ b| my case, it took a couple of years before the story came into focus. When I delivered it, he approved, but obviously didn’t notice that the idea was really his. I pointed that out, and he smiled. “That’s probably why I bought it,” he told me. “You made it your own.”

  “The Wings of Night” was my own idea, but it stemmed from something that occurred to me when creating the old Neanderthaler in “The Day Is Done.” Somehow, there is an automatic element of drama and strong feeling attached to the last of a kind, or sometimes the first. I had played with the idea of the last man in the Moon for a couple of years. Then one day, the plot came to mind and began to nag at me. I was busy with other rush work, but I had to sit down and write the story. Strange—I can’t remember now what really important work I abandoned to write this story for which I didn’t need money at the time. But the tale remains, far more important to me now than when I wrote it.

  “Into Thy Hands” was hardly a joy to write. The idea was one I liked—that machines, no doubt including thinking machines, are very literal “minded.” (Computer men can assure you of that from much experience.) But the story was meant to be a long novelette, and Campbell was short of space. With great effort, I replotted it from twenty to eleven thousand words—and Campbell told me it had to be no longer than seven thousand! I learned a great deal about writing and story-telling as I sweated it down to length. And today, I’m delighted that market necessities forced me to sharpen its point, to turn a so-so novelette into a much better short story. Ever so often, the ill luck of early days becomes the memory of bright fortune later.