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
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
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,
One week after Isaac’s book was published,
