A thin blue thread of smoke rose above the trees far below.
Webster pointed to it. 'What about them?'
'The Squatters stay,' said Adams, 'if they want to. There will be plenty of work for them to do. And there'll always be a house or two that they can have to live in.
'There's just one thing that bothers me. I can't be here all the time myself. I'll need someone to manage the project. It'll be a lifelong job.'
He looked at Webster.
'Go ahead, Johnny,' said Gramp.
Webster shook his head. 'Betty's got her heart set on that place out in the country.'
'You wouldn't have to stay here,' said Adams. 'You could fly in every day.'
From the foot of the hill came a hail.
'It's Ole,' yelled Gramp.
He waved his cane 'Hi, Ole. Come on up.'
They watched Ole striding up the hill, waiting for him, silently.
'Wanted to talk to you, Johnny,' said Ole. 'Got an idea. Waked me out of a sound sleep last night.'
'Go ahead,' said Webster.
Ole glanced at Adams. 'He's all right,' said Webster. 'He's Henry Adams. Maybe you remember his grandfather, old F. J.'
'I remember him,' said Ole. 'Nuts about atomic power, he was. How did he make out?'
'He made out rather well,' said Adams.
'Glad to hear that,' Ole said. 'Guess I was wrong. Said he never would amount to nothing. Day-dreamed all the time.'
'How about that idea?' Webster asked.
'You heard about dude ranches, ain't you?' Ole asked.
Webster nodded.
'Place,' said Ole, 'where people used to go and pretend they were cowboys. Pleased them because they really didn't know all the hard work there was in ranching and figured it was romantic-like to ride horses and-'
'Look,' asked Webster, 'you aren't figuring on turning your farm into a dude ranch, are you?'
'Nope,' said Ole. 'Not a dude ranch. Dude farm, maybe: Folks don't know too much about farms any more, since there ain't hardly no farms. And they'll read about the frost being on the pumpkin and how pretty a-'
Webster stared at Ole. 'They'd go for it, Ole,' be declared. 'They'd kill one another in the rush to spend their vacation on a real, honest-to-God, old-time farm.'
Out of a clump of bushes down the hillside burst a shining thing that chattered and gurgled and screeched, blades flashing, a cranelike arm waving.
'What the-' asked Adams.
'It's that dadburned lawn mower!' yelped Gramp. 'I always knew the day would come when it would strip a gear and go completely off its nut!'
NOTES ON THE SECOND TALE
Still alien by all other standards, the second tale strikes a more familiar note than did the first. Here, for the first time, the reader gains an impression that this tale might have been born about a Doggish campfire, a situation unthinkable so far as the first tale is concerned.
Here is voiced some of the high moral and ethical concepts which the Dogs have come to value. Here, too, is a struggle which a Dog can understand, even though the struggle does reveal the mental and moral deterioration of its central character.
For the first time, too, a character emerges which has a familiar ring — the robot. In the robot Jenkins, first introduced in this story, one comes to know a character which for thousands of years has been a puppish favourite. Jenkins is regarded by Tige as the real hero of the legend. In him he sees an extension of Man's influence beyond the day of Man's disappearance, a mechanical device by which human thought continued to guide the Dogs long after Man himself was gone.
We still have our robots, valuable and lovable little contraptions that exist for one purpose only — to furnish us with hands. Throughout the years, however, a Dog's robot has become so much a part of him that no Dog now regards his robot as a thing apart.
Tige's insistence that the robot is an invention of Man, a heritage that our race carries forward from Man, has been sturdily attacked by most other students of the legend.
The idea that the robot may have been fashioned and given to the Dogs as an aid to the development of their culture, Bounce believes, is an idea which must be summarily ruled out by the very virtue of its romanticism. It is, he contends, a story device on the face of it and as such must necessarily be suspect from the first.
There is no way now of knowing how the Dogs evolved a robot. Those few scholars who have given some time to a study of the development of robotry, point out that the highly specialized use to which the robot is put does indeed argue that it was invented by a Dog. To be so specialized, they argue, the robot must necessarily have been invented and developed by the race for whose particular use it is so singularly fitted. No one other than a Dog, they contend, could have done so good a job on so intricate a tool.
To say that no Dog today could build a robot is begging the question. No Dog today could build a robot because there is no need to build one, since the robots build themselves. When there was a need, it is quite evident that a Dog did build a robot and, by building a robot endowed with the reproductive urge which resulted in his building others like himself, solved the problem in a typically Doggish manner.
In this story likewise is introduced an idea which runs through the rest of the legend and which for long has puzzled all students and most readers. That is the idea that one may move physically off this world, out into space, crossing it to reach other worlds. While the idea in most part has been regarded as pure fantasy which, of course, has its proper place in any legend, a good deal of study has been devoted to it. Most studies have confirmed the belief that such a thing is impossible. Such a belief would argue that the stars which we see at night are mighty worlds at great distances from our worlds. Everyone knows, of course, that they are only lights hanging in the sky and that most of them are very near to us.
Bounce advances what may be the best explanation for the origin of the across-space world idea. It is, he says, no more than an ancient story-teller's twist on the cobbly worlds, the existence of which the Dogs have known since dim antiquity.
The drizzle sifted from the leaden skies, like smoke drifting through the bare-branched trees. It softened the hedges and hazed the outlines of the buildings and blotted out the distance. It glinted on the metallic skins of the silent robots and silvered the shoulders of the three humans listening to the intonations of the black-garbed man, who read from the book cupped between his hands.
'For I am the Resurrection and the Life-'
The moss— mellowed graven figure that reared above the door of the crypt seemed straining upwards, every crystal of its yearning body reaching towards something that no one else could see. Straining as it had strained since that day of long ago when men had chipped it from the granite to adorn the family tomb with a symbolism that had pleased the first John J. Webster in the last years he held of life.
' And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me-'
Jerome A. Webster felt his son's fingers tighten on his arm, heard the muffled sobbing of his mother, saw the lines of robots standing rigid, heads bowed in respect to the master they had served. The master who now was going home — to the final home of all.
Numbly, Jerome A. Webster wondered if they understood — if they understood life and death — if they understood what it meant that Nelson F. Webster lay there in the casket, that a man with a book intoned words
