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Softly, softly, he talked gently to this man, this last sane man. "Can we talk, sir?"
"Warren?" The plaintive voice came back.
"Sir?"
"I'm sorry."
"Sir?" He waited. There was only the sound of breathing coming through. "Sirare you on the bridge?
I'm coming up there."
"WarrenI've got it."
"No, sir." He wiped his forearm across his face, stared up at the com unit. He began to shake. "What am I supposed to do, sir?" He forced calm on himself. "What can I do to help?"
A delay. "Warren, I'll tell you what I've done. And why. You listening, Warren?"
"I'm here, sir."
"I've shut down controls. We can't beat this thing. I've shut her down for good, set her to blow if anyone tries to bypass to take off. I'm sorry. Can't let us go home& taking this back to human space. It could spread like wildfire, killkill whole colonies before the meds could get it solved. I've set a beacon Warren. She'll play it anytime some probe comes in here, when they do come, whenever."
"Sirsir, you're not thinkingA ship in spaceis a natural quarantine."
"And if we died en routeand if someone got aboardNo. No. They mustn't do that. We can't lift again."
"Sirlisten to me."
"No animals, Warren. We never found any animals. A world like this and nothing moving in it. It's a dead world. Something got it. Something lives here, in the soil, something in the air; something grew here, something fell in out of spaceand it got all the animals. Every moving thing. Can't let it go"
"Sirsir, we don't know the rest of us would have died. We don't know that. You may not, and I may not and what are we going to do, sir?"
"I'm sorry, Warren. I'm really sorry. It's not a chance to taketo go like that. Make up your own mind.
I've done the best thing. I have. Insured us against weakness. It can't leave here."
"Captain-"
Silence. A soft popping sound.
"Captain!" Warren pushed away from the wall, scrambled for the lift and rode it topside, ran down the corridor toward the bridge. He thrust his card into the lock.
It worked now. The door slid. And Burlin was there, slumped at the com station, the gun beneath his hand. The sickroom stink was evident. The fever. The minute hemorrhages on the hands. Blood pooled on the com counter, ran from Burlin's nose and mouth. The eyes stared, reddened.
Warren sat down in the navigator's chair, wiped his face, his eyes, stared blankly, Finding it hard to get his breath. He cursed Burlin. Cursed all the dead.
There was silence after.
He got up finally, pulled Burlin's body back off the com board, punched in the comp and-threw the com wide open, because the ship was all there was to talk to. "Anne," he said to comp. "Pseudosome to bridge.
Body. Dispose."
In time the lift operated and the silver pseudo-some arrived, leisurely precise. It stood in the doorway and surveyed the area with insectoid turns of the head. It clicked forward then, gathered up Burlin and walked out.
Warren stayed a time, doing nothing, sitting in the chair on the bridge, in the quiet. His eyes filled with tears. He wiped at one eye and the other, still numb.
When he did walk down to destruct to push the button, the pseudosome was still standing beside the chamber. He activated it, walked away, left the robot standing there.
It was planetary night outside. He thought of Sax out there, crazed. Of Sax maybe still alive, in the dark as alone as he. He thought of going out and hunting for him in the morning.
The outside speakers.
He went topside in haste, back to the bridge, sat down at the com and opened the port shields on night sky. He dimmed the bridge lights, threw on the outside floods, illuminating grass and small shrubs round about the ship.
He put on the outside address.
"Sax. Sax, it's Paul Warren. There's no one left but us. Listen, I'm going to put food outside the ship tomorrow. Tomorrow, hear me? I'll take care of you. You're not to blame. I'll take care of you. You'll get well, you hear me?"
He kept the external pickup on. He listened for a long time, looked out over the land.
"Sax?"
Finally he got up and walked out, down to the showers, sealed his clothes in a bag for destruct.
He tried to eat after that, wrapped in his robe, sitting down in the galley because it was a smaller place than the living quarters and somehow the loneliness was not so deep there; but he had no appetite. His throat was pricklish& exhaustion, perhaps. He had reason enough. The air-conditioning felt insufficient in the room.
But he had driven himself. That was what.
He had the coffee at least, and the heat suffused his face, made him short of breath.
Then the panic began to hit him. He thrust himself up from the table, dizzy in rising, vision blurred felt his way to the door and down the corridor to the mirror in the showers. His eyes were watering. He wiped them, tried to see if there was hemorrhage. They were red, and the insides of the lids were red and painful. The heat he had felt began to go to chill, and he swallowed repeatedly as he walked back to the galley, testing whether the soreness in his throat was worse than he recalled over the last few hours.
Calm, he told himself. Calm. There were things to do that had to be done or he would face dying of thirst of hunger. He set about gathering things from the galley, arranged dried food in precise stacks beside the cot in the lower-deck duty station, near the galley. He made his sickbed, set drugs and water and a thermal container of ice beside it.
Then he called the pseudosome in, walked it through the track from his bed to the galley and back again programmed it for every errand he might need.
He turned down the bed. He lay down, feeling the chill more intense, and tucked up in the blankets.
The pseudosome stood in the doorway like a silver statue, one sensor light blinking lazily in the faceplate. When by morning the fever had taken him and he was too weak to move coherently, he had mechanical hands to give him water. Anne was programmed to pour coffee, to do such parlor tricks, a whim of Harley's.
It wished him an inane good morning. It asked him How are you? And at first in his delirium he tried to answer, until he drifted too far away.
"Assistance?" He would hear it say then, and imagined a note of human concern in that voice.
"Malfunction? Nature of malfunction, please?"
Then he heaved up, and he heard the pseudosome's clicking crescendo into alarm. The emergency Klaxon sounded through the ship as the computer topside registered that there was something beyond its program. Her lights all came on.
"Captain Burlin," she said again and again, "Captain Burlin, emergency."
The pulsing of headache and fever grew less. Warren accepted consciousness gradually this time, fearful of the nausea that had racked him the last. His chest hurt. His arms ached, and his knees. His lips were cracked and painful. It amazed him that the pain had ebbed down to such small things.
"Good morning."
He rolled his head on the pillow, to the soft whirr of machinery on his right. Anne's smooth-featured pseudosome was still waiting.
He was alive. No waking between waves of fever. His face felt cool, his body warm from lying too long in one place. He lay in filth, and stench.
He propped himself up, reached for the water pitcher, knocked it off the table. It rolled empty to Anne's metal feet.
"Assistance?"
He reached for her arm. "Flex."
The arm bent, lifting him. Her motors whirred in compensation. "Showers."
She reoriented herself and began to walk, with him leaning on her, his arm about her plastic-sheathed shoulder, like some old, familiar friend.
She stopped when she had brought him where he wished, out of program. He managed to stand alone tottering and staring at himself in the mirror. He was gaunt, unshaven, covered with filth and sores. His eyes were like vast bruises. He swore, wiped his eyes and felt his way into a shower cabinet.
He fainted there, in the shower stall, came to again on the floor, under the warm mist. He managed to lever himself up again, got the door open, refused a second dizziness and leaned there till it passed.
"Anne." A whirring of motors. She planted herself in the doorway, waiting.
She got him topside, to the living quarters, to his own compartment door. "Open," he told her hoarsely; and she brought him inside, to the edge of his own unused bed, to clean blankets and clean sheets. He fell into that softness panting and shivering, hauled the covers over himself with the last of his strength.
"Assistance?"
"I'm all right."
"Define usage: right."
"Functional. I'm functional."
"Thank you."
He laughed weakly. This was not Anne. Not she. It. Anne was across the living quarters, in controls, all the company there was left.
Thank you. As if courtesy had a point. She was the product of a hundred or more minds over the course of her sixteen-year service, men and women who programmed her for the moment's convenience and left their imprint.
Please and thank you. Cream or sugar, sir? She could apply a wrench or laser through the pseudosome lift a weight no man could move, bend a jointing into line or make a cup of coffee. But nothing from initiative.
Thank you.
It was another few hours before he was sure he was going to live. Another day before he did more than send Anne galleyward and back, eat and sleep again.
But at last he stood up on his own, went to his locker, dressed, if feebly.
The pseudosome brightened a second sensor at this movement, then a third. "Assistance?"
"Report, Anne."
"Time: oh six four five hours ten point one point two three. Operating on standby assistance, program E one hundred; on program A one hundred; on additional pro"
"Cancel query. Continue programs as given." He walked out into the living quarters, walked to the bridge, stood leaning on Burlin's chair, surrounded by Anne's lazily blinking consoles, by scanner images no one had read for days. He sat down from weakness.
"Anne. Do you have any program to lift off?"
The console lights rippled with activity. Suddenly Burlin's deep voice echoed through the bridge. "Final log entry. Whoever hears this, don'trepeat, don'tland. Don't attempt assistance. We're dead of plague.
It got aboard from atmosphere, from soil& somehow. It hit everyone. Everyone is dead. Biological records are filed under"
"Cancel query. Reply is insufficient. Is there a course program in your records?"
"Reply to request for course: I must hold my position. If question is made of this order, I must replay final log entry& Final log entry"
"Bypass that order. Prepare for lift!"
The lights went red. "I am ordered to self-destruct if bypass is attempted. Please withdraw request."
"Cancelcancel bypass order." Warren slumped in the chair, stared at the world beyond the viewport deadly beguiling morning, gold streaming through cumulus cloud. It was right. Burlin had been right; he had ensured even against a survivor. Against human weakness.
"Anne." His voice faltered. "Take program. If I speak, I'm speaking to you. I don't need to say your name.
My voice will activate your responses. I'm Paul Warren. Do you have my ID clear?"
"ID as Warren, Paul James, six eight seven seven six five eight"
"Cancel query. How long can your pseudosome remain functional?"
"Present power reserve at present rate of consumption: three hundred seventy-eight years approximate to the nearest"
"Cancel query. Will prolonged activity damage the pseudosome?"
"Modular parts are available for repair. Attrition estimate: no major failure within power limits."
Warren gazed out at the daybreak. Sax, he thought. He had made a promise and failed it, days ago. He tried to summon the strength to do something about it, to careto go out and search in the hope that a man could have lived out there, sick, in the chill of nights and without food. He knew the answer. He had no wish to dwell on guilt, to put any hope in wandering about out there, to find another corpse. He had seen enough. More than enough.
"Library. Locate programming manual. Dispense."
An agitation ran across the board and a microfilm shot down into the dispenser. He gathered it up.
There was this, for his comfort. For three hundred seventy-eight years.
Anne was a marvelous piece of engineering. Her pseudosome was capable of most human movements; its structure imitated the human body and her shining alloy was virtually indestructible by heat or corrosion.
Walk-through programming made her capable in the galley: her sensitive vid scanners could read the tapes on stored foods; her timing system was immaculate. She carried on domestic tasks, fetched and carried, and meanwhile her other programs kept more vital functions in working order: circulation heating, cooling throughout the ship, every circuit, all automated, down to the schedule of lighting going on and off, to the inventory reports going up on the screens each morning, for crew who would no longer read them.
Warren worked, ignoring these processes, trusting Anne for them. He read the manual, wrote out programs, sitting naked in bed with the microfilm reader on one side and a coffee pot on the other and a lap full of notes.
An illusion, that was all he asked, a semblance of a mind to talk to. Longer plans he refused as yet. The plotting and replotting that filled the bed and the floor about him with discarded balls of paper was his refuge, his defense against thinking.
He dreaded the nights and kept the lights on while the rest of the ship cycled into dark.
He slept in the light when he had to sleep, and woke and worked again while the pseudosome brought him his meals and took the empty dishes back again.
He called the star Harley, because it was his to name. The world he called Rule, because Harley and Rule were sometime lovers and it seemed good. Harley was a middling average star, the honest golden sort which cast an easy warmth on his back, as an old friend ought. Rule stretched everywhere, rich and smelling sweet as Rule always had, and she was peaceful.
He liked the world better when he had named It, and felt the sky friendlier with an old friend's name beaming down at him while he worked.
He stretched the guy ropes of a plastic canopy they had never had the chance to use on harsher worlds screwed the moorings into the grassy earth and stood up in pleasant shade, looking out over wide billows of grass, with forest far beyond them.
Anne kept him company. She had a range of half a kilometer from the ship over which mind and body could keep in contact, and farther still if the booster unit were in place, which project he was studying.
He had not yet had the time. He moved from one plan to the next, busy, working with his hands, feeling the strength return to his limbs. Healing sunlight erased the sores and turned his skin a healthy bronze. He stretched his muscles, grinned up at the sun through the leaf-patterned plastic. Felt satisfied.
"Anne. Bring the chair, will you?"
The pseudosome came to life, picked up the chair that remained on the cargo lift, carried it out. And stopped.
"Set it down." His good humor turned to disgust. "Set it down."
Anne set it, straightened, waited.
"Anne. What do you perceive?"
Anne's sensors brightened, one after the other. "Light, gravity, sound, temperature."
"You perceive me."
"Yes, Warren. You're directly in front of me."
"Anne, come here."
She walked forward, into the shade, stopped, hands at her sides, sensors pulsing behind her dark faceplate like so many stars in a void.
"Anne, I'm your duty. I'm all the crew. The directives all apply only to me now. The others have stopped functioning. Do you understand? I want you to remain active until I tell you otherwise. Walk at your own judgment. Identify and accept all stimuli that don't take you out of range."
"Program recorded," Anne purred. "Execute?"
"Execute."
Anne walked off. She had a peculiar gait, precise in her movements like an improbable dancer, stiffly smooth and slow-motion. Graceful, silver Anne. It always jarred when he looked into the vacant faceplate with the starry lights winking on and off in the darkness. She could never appreciate the sun, could never perceive him except as a pattern of heat and solidity in her sensors. She looked left, looked right, walk- walk-walk-walk, looked left, right, walk-walk-walk-walk, neither breathing the scents of life nor feeling the wind on her plastic skin. The universe held no perils for Anne.
Warren wept. He strode out, overtook her, seized her as she turned to him." Anne. Where are you? Where are you going?"
"I am located four oh point four seven meters from base center. I am executing standard survey proceeding"
"Cancel query. Anne, look about you. What have you learned?"
Anne swiveled her head left and right. Her sensors flickered. "This world is as first observed. All stimuli remain within human tolerance. There are no native lifeforms in my scan."
She turned then, jerking from his hands, and walked off from him, utterly purposeful.
"Anne!" He called, alarmed. "Anne, what's wrong?"
She stopped, faced him. "The time is 1100 hours. Standard timed program 300-32-111PW."
Lunch. Anne was, if nothing else, punctual.
"Go on."
She turned. He trailed after her to the edge of the canopy, cast himself into the chair and sat disconsolate.
Adrenalin surged. Rage. There was no profit in that. Not at a machine. He knew that. He told himself so.
He attached the booster unitnot out of enthusiasm, but because it was another project, and occupied him. It took two days& in which he had only Anne's disembodied voice, while the pseudosome lay disemboweled in the shop. He had difficulty, not with the insertion of the unit, which was modular, but in getting the ring-joints of the waist back together; it occasioned him panic, real and sweating dread. He consulted library, worked and fretted over it, got the first ring and the second, and so on to the fifth. She had lost nothing vital, only some of her auxiliary apparatus for hookups of use on frigid moons. That could be put back if need be.
