The Best of Lester del Rey

Four returned winged rockets rested on a field hi Florida, but there was no sign of what had become of the men who rode down from the station in them. One winged craft stood forlornly outside Denver, and there was a scrawl in crayon inside its port that spelled the worst obscenity in the English language.

There was a library still standing in Phoenix, and the last newspaper had the dateline of the day when Sam had seen the lights brighten over the cities of Earth. There was no news beyond that of purely local importance. Most of the front page was occupied by a large box which advised readers that the government had taken over all radio communications during the crisis and would broadcast significant news on the hour. The paper was cooperating with the government in making such news available by broadcast only. The same box appeared in the nine preceding issues. Before that, the major news seemed to involve a political campaign in United South Africa.

Other scattered small libraries had differently named papers that were no different. Yet the only clue was in one of those libraries. It was a piece of paper resting under the finger bones of a skeleton that was scattered before bound copies of a technical journal. The paper was covered with doodles and stained in what might have been blood. But the words were legible:

“Lesson for the day. Assign to all students. Politics: They could not win and that is obvious. Chemistry: Their nerve gas was similar to one we tested in small quantities. It seemed safe. Yet when they dropped it over us in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, it did not settle out as the test batches had done. Practice: Such aerosols can be tested only in massive quantities. Medicine: Janice was in the shelter with me three weeks, yet there was still enough in the air to make her die in the ecstasy of a theophany. Meteorology: The wind patterns have been known for years. In three weeks, they reach all the Earth. Psychology: I am mad. But my madness is that I am become only cold logic without a soul. Therefore, I must kill myself. Religion: Nothing matters. I am mad. God is—” That was all.

7

The creche was still the same, of course. Sam sat before the entrance, staring at the Moon that was rising over the horizon. It was a full Moon again, and there was beauty to it, even here. But he was only vaguely aware of that. Below him, the great computer was busily integrating the mass of tiny details he had gathered together with all of the millions of facts it knew. That job took time, even for such a machine.

Now it called him over the radio frequencies, as he had ordered it to do earlier hi the day. He issued the formal command for it to go ahead.

“All data correlated,” it announced. “None was found fully coherent with previous data. Degree of relevancy approaches zero. Data insufficient for conclusion.”

He grunted to himself and put the machine back on stand-by. He had expected little else. He had known there was too little material for a logical conclusion.

But his own conclusion had been drawn already. Now he sat under the light of the Moon, staring up at the sky, and there was a coldness in his brain complex that seemed deeper than the reaches of space.

They had come from somewhere out there, he thought bitterly. They had appeared more than a century before and snooped and sniffed at Earth, only to leave. Now they had come back, giving Earth only a week’s warning as they approached. They had struck all Earth with glowing bombs or radiation that ruined the cities of men. And when men had still survived, they resorted to a deadly mist of insanity. “They dropped it over us,” the npie had said. And the wonderful race Sam had knoi#a’Bad died in madness, usually of some destructive kind.

There had not even been a purpose to it. The Invaders hadn’t wanted the Earth for themselves. They had simply come and slaughtered, to depart as senselessly as they had departed before.

Sam beat his fists against his leg so that the metal clanged through the night. Then he lifted his other fist toward the stars and shook it.

It was wrong that they should get away. They had come with fire and pestilence, and they should be found and met with all that they had meted out to mankind. He had supposed that evil was something found only hi fiction. But now evil had come. It should be met as it was usually met in fiction. It should be wiped from the universe in a suffering as great as it had afflicted. But such justice was apparently the one great lie of fiction.

He beat his fists against his legs again and shouted at the Moon, but there was no relief for what was in him.

Then his ears picked up a new sound and he stopped all motion to listen. It came again, weakly and from far away.

“Help!”

He shouted back audibly and by radio and was on his feet, running toward the sound. His feet crashed through the brush and he leaped over the rubble, making no effort to find the easy path. As he stopped to listen again, he heard the sound, directly ahead, but even weaker. A minute later he almost stumbled over the caller.

It was a robot. Once it had been slim and neat, covered with black enamel. Now it was bent and the bare metal was exposed. But it was still a Mark Three. It lay without motion, only a whisper coming from its speaker.

Sam felt disappointment strike through all his brain complex, but he bent over the prone figure, testing quickly. The trouble was power failure, he saw at once. He ripped a spare battery from the pack he had been carrying on his search and slammed it quickly into place, replacing the corroded one that had been there.

The little robot sat up and began trying to get to its feet. Sam reached out a helping hand, staring down at the worn, battered legs that seemed beyond any hope of functioning.

“You need help,” he admitted. “You need a whole new body. Well, there are a thousand new ones below waiting for you. What’s your number?”

It had to be one of the robots from the Moon. There had never been any others permitted on Earth.

The robot teetered for a moment, then seemed to gain some mastery over its legs. “They called me Joe. Thank you, Sam. I was afraid I couldn’t reach you. I heard your radio signal from here almost a month ago, but it was such a long way. And my radio transmitter was broken soon after we landed. But hurry. We can’t waste time here.”

“We’ll hurry. But that way.” Sam pointed to the creche entrance.

Joe shook his head, making a creaking, horrible sound of it. “No, Sam. He can’t wait. I think he’s dying! He was sick when I heard your call, but he insisted I bring him here. He—”

“You mean dying? There’s a man with you?”

Joe nodded jerkily and pointed. Sam scooped the h’ght figure up in his arms. Even on Earth, it was no great load for his larger body, and they could make much better tune than by letting the other try to run. Hal, he thought. Hal had been the youngest. Hal would be only fifty-nine, or something like that. That wasn’t too old for a man, from what they had told him.

He flicked his lights on, unable to maintain full speed by the moonlight. The pointing finger of the other robot guided him down the slope and to a worn, weed-covered trail. They had already come more than five miles from the entrance to the creche.

“He ordered me to leave him and go ahead alone,” Joe explained. “Sometimes now it is hard to know whether he means anything he says, but this was a true order.”

“You’d have been wiser to stick to your car and drive all the way withyhinf,” Sam suggested. He was forcing his way throufh-aitangle of underbrush, wondering how much farther they had to go.

“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