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
