Read Online Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak - Free Book Online Page B

responsibility. Let me try to tell you.”
    “Please do,” said Lansing. “You said back at the inn that you took care of your humans, which was a strange way to say it. You said there were few humans left and you took care of them.”
    “Before I say anything,” said Jurgens, “tell me one thing. You spoke of what your friend had said—I believe you said he babbled. About alternate worlds, alternate earths splitting off from one another at certain crisis points. I believe you said that was what may have happened.”
    “Yes, I did. For all its madness…”
    “And those alternate worlds each would follow its own world line. They’d exist simultaneously through time and space. Would that mean, if we indeed are from different alternate worlds, that all of us would come from the same time frame?”
    “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Lansing, “and I don’t really know. You understand that this all is supposition. But if the alternate world theory should be true and we do come from such worlds, I see no reason to believe we’d all have to be from the same time frame. Any agency that could put us here probably could be rather arbitrary about time as well.”
    “I am glad to hear you say that, for it has bothered me. I must come from a frame much later in time than the rest of you. You see, I existed in a world that had been deserted by the human race.”
    “Deserted?”
    “Yes, everyone gone to other worlds circling other stars. Deep into space, I have no idea how far. The Earth, my Earth, was worn out. The environment had been ruined and natural resources gone. The last of the resources were used to build the ships that took the humans into space. They left it stripped and gutted…”
    “But there were humans left. Only a few of them, you said.”
    “There were humans left—the ne’er-do-wells, the utterly incompetent, the persistent fumblers, the idiots. The ones who were not worth the ship space they would have taken. There were robots left as well—the hopelessly obsolete, the outdated, those who had somehow escaped the scrap heap. The incompetents were left behind, both human and robot, while the others, the bright and normal humans, the sophisticated robots, went beyond the Earth to seek a brave new life. We, the rejects of thousands of years of evolution, were left behind to make our way as best we could. And we robots, the ones who were abandoned, have tried for centuries to do what we could for the humans who were left. We failed—for centuries we failed. The descendents of those pitiful humans who were left behind have not improved in mental or moral quality through the years. At times there would be a spark or two of hope, two or three in a single generation might show some promise, but the promise always lost in the morass of the gene pool, I finally admitted to myself that the humans were breeding down, not up, that there was no hope for them. Each generation they grew more foul, more cruel, more worthless.”
    “So you were trapped,” said Lansing. “Trapped by your commitment to your humans.”
    “You say it well,” said Jurgens. “You do understand. We were trapped, indeed. Still we felt we must stay on, for we owed those degenerating creatures the best that we could give them, which was never enough.”
    “Now that you have broken out of your circumstance, you feel free.”
    “Yes, free. More free than I have ever felt. Finally my own man, my own robot. Is this wrong of me?”
    “I don’t think it’s wrong. A bad job come to an end.”
    “Here, as you say,” said Jurgens, “we don’t know where we are nor what we are supposed to do. But at least a clean slate, a starting over.”
    “And among people who are glad to have you.”
    “I’m not sure of that. The Parson does not care for me.”
    “Screw the Parson,” Lansing said. “I’m glad that you are here. With the possible exception of the Parson, we’re all glad you are here. You must remember that it was the