Second Ending Read Online Free Page A

and personal decoration. Yet everything he saw was so clean. Somebody was responsible for the spotless condition of the place, but who and where? The whole thing was ridiculous!
     
    Maybe they were playing hide and seek, Ross thought wildly; if so, he was getting tired of the game, tired of being "it"…
     
    "Come out, come out!" Ross yelled at the top of his voice, "Wherever you are!" They came out.
     
    They were long cylindrical objects mounted on four padded wheels, possessing at least ten thick, multi-jointed metal arms and various other projections of unknown function. As they rolled steadily toward him, Ross knew with a terrible certainty that what he was seeing was his nightmare — multiplied by twenty. There was almost a score of the things coming at him from the left-hand fork of the corridor. The lights gleamed off their shiny metal sides and folded arms. He could see that each had a double lens arrangement mounted vertically atop a short, headless neck. The upper lens rotated slowly; the lower was directed forward. They advanced without a sound. Ross wanted to run, but his brain seemed to have gotten its signals crossed. All he could do was tremble and sweat, until…
     
    "Our previous instructions were to conceal ourselves until after you had spent some time in Dr. Pellew's room," said a quiet, female voice behind him, "and we were warned that to do otherwise might result in severe psychological disturbance to yourself. The wording of your last order, however, is such that it overrides our previous instructions."
     
    Ross turned around, slowly. The thing behind him was a large, erect ovoid mounted on three wheels and surmounted by one fixed and one swiveling eyepiece. There were no arms but the smooth, egglike body showed the outlines of several panels which might open to reveal anything. Clamped to one of the wheel struts was a large square box with a cable running from it to the main body. It gave the impression of having been stuck on as an afterthought. One of its wheels had a worn tread which emitted a faint sighing sound as it moved toward him. Ross thought of dodging around it and running — or trying to run; he felt almost too weak to stand now — for the ramp, but behind the egg there were more cylinders coming fast.
     
    With his head jerking from side to side Ross watched them roll up to within a yard of him and stop. The rotating lenses turned slowly; the stationary ones were fixed on him.
     
    After several unsuccessful tries Ross made his tongue work. He said, "What… what is all this?"
     
    The cylinders began to tick like runaway clocks and then the egg spoke again. It said, "The question, requiring as it does complete and detailed knowledge of astronomy, anthropology, cybernetics, evolution, mass psychology, metallurgy, medicine, nuclear physics as well as other sciences about which I have no data, is beyond the scope of an electronic brain. For your information, sir, when asking questions or giving orders to a robot the wording must be detailed and non-ambiguous."
     
    So they were only robots who could answer questions — simple questions — and obey orders. Ross began to relax. His first thought was to tell them all to get to blazes out of his sight, but then he decided that that, also, might be too confusing for them. He considered for a moment, then said timidly, "Go back to whatever you were doing before I called you."
     
    They all began to move away, including the egg-shaped one. Ross called, "Not you. Wait. Your voice is familiar — are you the one who came into my room last night?"
     
    "Yes, sir."
     
    "But I'd thought… the mutations…" Ross stammered. "What happened to the mutants?"
     
    "They are dead, sir. The research was discontinued before I was programmed."
     
    Ross shook his head. He had been expecting mutants and had found robots instead. In a way he ought to have expected something like this, because the trend had been well developed even in his time. Full-scale