Second Ending (13 page)

And then suddenly his newly achieved mood of calm and solemn acceptance of his fate was shattered, by that same memory. He began to tremble violently as the realization grew in him that he might, just possibly, not have to die at all. On that September day he had been given more than he knew: He had been given his life. Oh, Alice… he thought.

Behind him Sister was expressing concern over his shivering and making determined efforts to take his temperature. This struck him as being excruciatingly funny and he began to laugh. Sister became even more concerned. "I'm all right," he said, sobering. In a voice which was still far from steady he gave his orders. All search robots were to be recalled for a special project. He gave minutely detailed instructions regarding it to Sister, and made her repeat them back, because he would not be available himself when they arrived. Finally, immediate preparations must be made to put him into Deep Sleep…

Four hours later he was lying in the padded, coffinlike container with the section above his face hinged back to reveal the glittering lenses of Sister staring down at him. The cold had passed the uncomfortable stage and was becoming almost pleasant.

"Now remember," he said for about the fourth time, "if the idea doesn't work out I don't want to be awakened. You'd be wakening me only to let me die of starvation…"

"I understand, sir," said Sister. "Have you any other instructions?"

"Yes…" began Ross, but lost track of what he said after that. The chill was accelerating through his body and he must have been in a kind of cold delirium. Soon the entire room and its contents would be similarly refrigerated as a precaution against a breakdown of his container, a point which he had forgotten until a few hours ago. He kept seeing the ludicrous picture of three Path Sisters dissecting the cuffs of his old tweed trousers. Swim or walk, sea or park, death or life. He wanted Alice. "I'm sorry, sir."

The flap closed with a gentle click and the cold was like an explosion within him that engulfed his mind in icy darkness. But deep inside him there was a spot of warmth which had no business being there, and a light which grew until it pained his eyes. Faulty equipment, he thought disgustedly, or they've muffed it. When his vision cleared he glared up at Sister, too angry and disappointed to speak.

"Do not try to move, Mr. Ross," the Sister said sharply. "You are to undergo a half-hour massage, after which you should be able to walk unassisted. Are you ready…?"

It might be massage to Sister, Ross thought as he gritted his teeth in agony, but to him it felt like the treatment received in the worst of the old-time concentration camps rather than something of therapeutic value. At the end of the longest half-hour of his life Sister lifted him to a sitting position, and he succeeded in gathering enough breath to speak.

"What happened? Why did you wake me up…?"

"Can you stand up, Mr. Ross, and move around?" asked Sister, ignoring him. Ross could, and did. The robot said, "I suggest we go to the surface, sir."

Noting the "sir," Ross snarled. "So I'm not your patient anymore, somebody you could order about and beat half to death? Now I'm the boss again, and I want some straight answers. What went wrong, why did you halt the cool-down? Have you found an edible food cache…?"
 

"You have been in Deep Sleep," said Sister quietly, "for forty-three thousand years."

The reply left Ross mentally stunned. He was unable to speak, much less ask further questions during the trip to the surface, and there he received a greater shock.

The sun shone clear and yellow and incandescent out of a pale blue sky, and from his feet a rippling sea of green stretched to the horizon. Five miles away the hills which he had not been able to see since his first Deep Sleep had a misty look, but it was the pale shimmer of a heat haze rather than windblown smoke. The air tasted like nothing he had remembered, so clean and fresh and sparkling that he seemed to be drinking rather than breathing it. Ross closed his eyes and with heart pounding madly in his throat turned a half circle; then he opened them.

Pale blue sky and deep blue sea were separated at the horizon by a distant range of white cumulus. The bay was filled with whitecaps and the biggest rollers that Ross had ever seen burst like liquid snow onto a beach that was clean yellow sand for as far as the eye could see.

Suddenly visibility was reduced to nil by a mist in his eyes, although Ross never felt less like crying in all his life.

"It took much longer than you had estimated," the Sister's voice came from behind him, "for the grass grown from your seedlings to make the change from interior cultivation in artificial UV to surface beds covered by transparent plastic, and even longer before they would grow unprotected on the surface. This was due to finely divided ash in the atmosphere having a masking effect on those sections of the solar spectrum necessary for the growth of plant life. However, time and natural mutational changes had produced a strain capable of surviving surface conditions."

Without pausing. Sister went on, "While this strain was developing the ash was gradually being absorbed by the sea and land surface, causing an increase in sunlight. This accelerated the spread of the grass, which in turn hastened the fixing of ash into the soil. And as the grass had no natural enemies or competing life forms, its spread across the planet was, relatively, quite rapid. But it required an additional several millennia for it to evolve, and for us to isolate, edible grains suitable for processing into food.

"This has now been done," Sister concluded, "and your food-supply problem is solved."

"Thank you," Ross mumbled. He couldn't take his eyes off the bright yellow sand on the beach. Wind, rain and salt water — mostly the salt water, he thought — had brought about chemical changes which had given the once-grimy beach this freshly laundered look. All it had needed was a little time.

Forty-three thousand years…!

Even the ghosts of the past were dead now, and the proud works of Man, with the exception of this one, robot-tended hospital, were so many smears of rust in the clay. Ross shivered suddenly.

Sister began speaking again, interrupting what was becoming a very unpleasant train of thought.

She said, "Your present physical condition is such that, although you cannot be classified as a patient, an immediate return to full-time duties is to be avoided. I suggest, therefore, that you do not concern yourself with our various progress reports just yet, and instead that you take a vacation…"

There was a clap of thunder that went on and on. Ross looked around wildly, then up. He saw a tiny silver arrowhead at an unguessable altitude drawing a dazzling white line across the sky. As he watched the vapor trail developed a curve and the ship went into a turn which would have converted any flesh-and-blood pilot into strawberry jam. It lost speed and altitude rapidly and within minutes was sliding low over the valley and heading out to sea again. The noise made it hard for Ross to think, but it seemed that the ship had slowed to far below its stalling speed. Then a shimmering heat distortion along its underside gave him the explanation: vertically mounted jet engines. It came to a halt above the beach and began to sink groundward. For a moment it was lost in a sandstorm of its own making; then the thunder died and it lay silent and shining — all two hundred feet of it!

He hadn't mentioned vertical-takeoff models to the robots, Ross told himself excitedly; this was something they must have worked out for themselves, probably with the help of books…

"Now that it is possible, we thought you might like to travel during your convalescence," Sister resumed, "and the robot which you see on the beach contains accommodation for a human being. If you feel up to it I would suggest —"

Ross laughed. "Let's go!" he shouted, giving Sister a slap on her smooth, unfeeling hide. He stumbled twice on the way down, but it was sheerest pleasure to fall onto that long, sweet-smelling grass, and the too-hot sand which burned his bare feet was like a sharp ecstasy. Then he was climbing into the cool interior of the ship and looking over the accommodation.

The observation compartment was small, contained a well-padded chair and gave an unobstructed view ahead and below. There was a larger compartment opening off it, containing a bunk, toilet facilities and a well-stuffed bookcase. Ross would not have minded betting that the books were all light, noncerebral works.

''You've thought of everything," he said, spontaneously.

"Thank you, sir," said the aircraft, speaking through a grille behind the observation chair. In a pleasant, masculine voice it went on, "I am Searcher A17/3, one of five models designed for long-range reconnaissance and search-coordination duties. On this assignment, however, the maneuvers and accelerations used should cause you the minimum of physical discomfort. Where would you like to go, sir?"

Later, Ross was to remember that day as being the happiest of his life…

At altitudes of ten miles down to a few hundred feet, and at speeds ranging from zero to Mach Eight, Ross looked at his world — his fresh, green world. He did not think that he was being conceited for regarding it as his own, because he had found it a blackened corpse and he had brought life to it again. For the grass, which had originated from a few tiny seedlings caught in the cuffs of his trousers, covered all the land. Ross was happy, excited, stunned by the sheer wonder of it.

In equatorial Africa and around the Amazon Basin the grass was a tangle of lank, vivid green. The old-time grasslands were emerald oceans which stretched, unrelieved by a single tree or bush, to the horizon. Sparse and wiry, the grass struggled to within twenty miles of the Arctic ice, and on the highest mountains it stopped just short of the snowline. There were seasonal changes of color, of course, and variations due to increasing altitude and latitude, but they were too gradual to be easily apparent. To Ross it looked as though someone had gone over the whole land surface with a paintbrush, coating everything with the same, even shade of green. Sometimes an inland lake, or a desert, or a snowcapped range of mountains would suddenly break the monotony of land- or seascape, and Ross would tell himself smugly that although his world might run heavily to unrelieved blue and green, that was a much nicer color scheme than gray and black.