SLAVE OF ETERNITY

"You have no choice," the patrolman said. "The Council sends for you."

He moved across the veranda of Heric's cottage, bulking dark against the sky-glow of Nyark the first city. On the slope of lawn below stood his copter, its beetle-black shell glistening faintly in the starshine.

Heric stood rigid with alarm in his doorway, still holding the book he had been reading. The night-wind ruffling his hair and the homely sounds from the kitchen where Marta prepared their evening meal made his danger doubly fantastic.

"They've found out somehow about my dreams," Heric said. "They'll put me through the adjuster and I'll come out of it—someone else. I won't go!"

He was a mild man, overseer of the cereal grain fields outside Nyark the first city, holding the confidence of his superiors and the respect of his workers. He and Marta had been happy in the quiet eddy of their isolation, until the dreams came.

The patrolman took a gleaming silver shock-cone from his belt. "I am sorry, Arnol Heric. You must come with me."

Stark panic made Heric drop his book and strike out wildly, smashing a fist into the officer's face. The patrolman staggered back, teetered for balance on the veranda's edge and fell heavily. The sound of his head striking the stone walkway below was as definite as the thud of a dropped melon.

Heric went down the steps and knelt to feel the man's limp wrist. There was no pulse. He put an ear to the slack lips, and there was no breath. Shock numbed him and drove his thoughts into strange, tortured channels.

"I've killed him," he said.

A sound caught his ear and he looked up to see Marta on the dark veranda above him, her face a pale oval blur with enormous, fright-widened eyes. "I didn't intend this to happen, Marta. I—I lost my head."

She came down at once and put a soft hand on his shoulder. "Of course, of course, darling. Here, let me help you."

Together they lifted the patrolman's body into the copter's control seat, where it lolled bonelessly against the instrument panel. Heric touched a button and the machine rose and soared eastward on a random course away from Nyark the first city.

They watched, holding hands like uneasy children, until it was lost against the stars. Then they went inside to the light and warmth of their cottage.

Heric voiced the thought first: "They'll send for me again tomorrow, when he doesn't return."

He had again the ominous sensation, felt a dozen times in as many days, of being very close to understanding the strange auguries that had so troubled his sleep of late. For a moment he hovered on the brink of complete comprehension before his fearful thought recoiled, leaving him uneasy and bewildered.

When he slept the dream came more strongly than before.

The sere globe of Earth spun below him, frightfully riven by the half-healed wounds of some ancient cataclysm. Dull seas steamed and rain fell and vegetation crept across the scars, but there was life in one place only.

There was a ruined city like a forest of standing shards, rising stark and cold against a desolate sky. A horde of silent figures poured through its streets, bent upon a myriad errands whose purposes he might have guessed but dared not—he found himself one of the throng, yet his dread of understanding hid their intent as a mist might have obscured their faces. The crowd moved always eastward, its thousand faces rapt in impossible ecstasy. His own expectancy mounted to an unbearable pitch, stifling him with the promise of total understanding. He had only to follow them and—

He awoke to find himself crouched on the cold floor of his bedroom, drenched with perspiration and trembling violently from the strain of fighting back the monstrous concept toward which his dream had carried him.

Marta's voice was urgent in his ears. Marta's hands tugged at his arm, her breath was warm on his damp face. "Arnol, wake up! Arnol!"

For an instant he had an indescribable sense of being infinitely multiplied, as if this moment were reproduced forever, a single frame in a succession that stretched endlessly before and behind him. Then the dream tilted and swept away and he let Marta lead him, unresisting, back to bed.

For a long time he lay shivering in the darkness, his face hidden against her warm shoulder. And at last, when the tension had gone out of him, he slept again.

They came for him at daybreak, four burly patrolmen with Council insignia on their helmets and silver shock-cones in their hands. Heric looked back as he entered their copter to see Marta on the verandah, lovely in the soft disarray of her too-early rising, her eyes bright and blind with unshed tears.

"I'll come back," he called. "It's going to be all right!"

When the copter rose he waved at her, buoyed up unexpectedly by the ring of certainty he had managed to force into his voice. He had a last glimpse of Marta before distance and the morning mists hid her, a small, forlorn figure with raised face staring after him, her belted house-robe fluttering in the wind.

They sank through the ordered vastness of Nyark the first city, into a bustle and rush that was symbolic of the Council's will to restore Nyark—and finally Earth—to their former glory. Heric was led to a quiet chamber where the Council, in their deep crescent of seats behind the Leader's throne, awaited him.

He had seen them before only in newscasts, when it had awed him a little to think that in their hands lay the destiny of a world in rebirth. He was surprised now to feel that their wrinkled parchment faces and thin bodies, hidden under sleeveless blue robes, lent them a futile anonymity rather than the distinction he had expected. Why, he thought, they look like scrawny, earthbound birds.

"Why am I here?" Heric demanded. Rebellion grew in him, roughening his voice. "I have broken no law, nor have I been lax in my overseeing. I protest this adjustment to what you call normalcy."

"Yet you must endure it, Arnol Heric," the Leader said. A rustle of assent whispered through the robed Council. "You should not have defied our messenger. It may be too late now."

Anger swelled Heric's demand. "What do you mean?"

He felt the breath of madness touch him....

His answer was a great, cloudy bubble that sprang from nowhere about him. The Council vanished behind its milky haze. There was a brief sensation of motion, and after that—nothing.

He was in the void of his dreams again, imprisoned in darkness. But there was a difference—the dull globe of Earth spun faint and misty, half-seen through an obscuring curtain. A smooth, hypnotic thought-current flowed into his mind from the adjuster, commanding him, warring with the half-sensed truth that still sought his awareness.

"You are Arnol Heric, overseer of cereal plantings. You have had no disturbing dreams. Forget, Arnol Heric. There is no need for alarm...."

There was a long struggle before his will fought clear, and he knew that the Leader's fear of being too late had been realized. The pitted Earth-sphere grew plain, the desolate city sharpened and drew near. He walked the thronged streets and turned his face toward the east, and this time he did not repulse the truth when it lay before him.

There was a silent room where a figure reclined laxly in a chair made massive by its crystal maze of shining coils. Two guards flanked the chair watchfully, and in it sat—

Himself.

Anger shook him like a terrible wind, without warning. It was all a monstrous farce, then—he was the center of it all, and they had hidden him in his overseer's niche to blind him to reality.

He opened his eyes in the adjuster, pushing the futile thought-current from his mind. The guards stiffened at his movement, their silver shock-cones ready.

"I know myself now," Heric said. He stood up, shaking off the web of crystal contacts from the adjuster. "And I know you. Put away your useless weapons."

They dropped their cones and stood with lowered eyes, waiting his pleasure with a deference that made his lip curl. He left the room without a backward look, knowing they would warn the Council but having no need now for secrecy.

He went down a wide-arched corridor, striding with sure step to the city's heart. He found the power source at ground level, in a vast dim cavern full of soft-purring machines. He singled out the great operations board with its master switch that controlled the city's life—and in his path he found the Leader and his council, shielding the control from him with the massed crescent of their bodies.

"Stand back," Heric commanded.

The Council stirred uneasily, but did not break.

"Hear us out, Arnol Heric," the Leader begged. "Remember that we, being not-human, yet have human emotions. We are the end result of the robot race men created to serve them in ages past, and you are right when you suppose that we may not defy you because we are your property. But there is a thing which you do not know, hidden from you even in your dreams for your own safety. Stay your hand, Master."

The sound of Heric's laughter echoed emptily through the vast room.

"Stay my hand and let you adjust me into submission again? Let you send me back to planting wheat, drowning my identity in ignorance? I know the human race is almost dead—I know that you hide the truth from the few of us who remain because you think us doomed to extinction. You would bury us in ignorance and rule in our stead as if you were men and we your servants."

"We are the servants," the Leader said. "Yet you would immobilize us. Why?"

"Because I would rather know my fate and meet it without your meddling," Heric answered. "Because I do not believe that my race can ever die completely. I shall stop you in your tracks like the mechanical things you are, and I shall find the others of my people who are left and start life over with them. And this time we shall know better than to build machines!"

"We have no desire to perpetuate ourselves," the Leader said. "We were created to serve humanity, and to insure our obedience to the love of men was made our strongest instinct. Without men our life would be an endless torture of loneliness, for we can be happy only in your happiness. We hid the truth from you, and kept you busy outside Nyark the first city, to protect your sanity."

Heric took a forward step. "Back, all of you!"

They drew aside to let him pass. The Leader knelt as Heric brushed by him, and the Council knelt with averted faces behind him. Their sigh whispered through the great room.

"Wait, Arnol Heric. Do you know that we have made you immortal?"

"Wait, Arnol Heric. Do you know that we have made you immortal?"

He paused with his hands upon the master control, disturbed by a resurgence of that indescribable extension he had felt on waking from his dream. Angrily he shook it off, bracing himself.

He wrenched open the switch.

The machine-murmur died. The cavernous chamber stilled until Heric's heart beat loud in the tomblike silence. The Council knelt motionless, like even rows of cold statuary.

He turned from them and went through the hushed room and out into the streets of Nyark the first city. Silence lay before him. Vehicles stood unpowered, drivers frozen. In the shops the crowds hovered motionless like static, three-dimensional shadows.

He went swiftly through the dead city with his face turned toward the hills. The silence bore him down with an implacable weight, and the desire to escape it grew upon him until he found himself running, dodging wildly in and out among stalled vehicles and frozen pedestrians.

He reached the city's edge, but the sun and wind of open country did not dispel his oppression. The sun was as silent as the city, and the breeze was a drear lament in his ears. Loneliness crept at his heels like a black, timorous hound; he felt as if he were the only living thing in a dead and forgotten world. Panic claimed him.

It was noon when he reached his cottage. He crawled up the verandah steps, spent and panting, and found the silence with him here even in his last retreat.

"Marta!" he croaked. He pulled himself erect, clutching at the arched doorway for support.

"Marta!"

He had been so sure that there would be other men. He had been able to fend off madness back there on the plain, only because he had known that Marta was here waiting for him....

He found her standing in the silent living room, her still face turned toward the door through which he must come when he returned. She wore the clinging, colorful gown he had liked best, and her bright, fair hair was carefully arranged as if she were on the point of going out.

Her lashes were lowered as if in sleep, and he had the instant conviction that she had closed her lids to hide the mechanical luster of her eyes from him when he should come and find her.

"Marta," he whispered.

He sagged against the entrance arch, with the bitter sound of the Leader's words in his ears: "We can be happy only in your happiness...."

Not one of them was human, not even Marta. He was the last man on Earth.

And he was immortal.

This was the thing that had been hidden from him even in his dream, lest he go mad. This silence that pressed him down was the silence of eternity.

He was alone in a world of death and dust, and would be alone forever.

He felt the breath of madness touch him. He heard the Council's sighing whisper of "Immortal ..." and he recalled the eerie sensation of infinite multiplication that had come to him when he pulled open the master switch.

He thought: How many times has this happened? And how many times will it happen again?

When he spoke, he used unconsciously the same words he had used when he left her at daybreak.

"I'll come back, Marta," he said. "It's going to be all right."

Then he went outside and turned his face toward the silent city and began to run....