Second Ending Read online

  Second Ending

  James White

  “Five miles below the surface, Ross was awakened from the deep sleep of suspended animation to find himself in an empty world. There was no noise, or people, and no motion save for the steady activity of the hospital robots” (blurb). Ross, the sole survivor of World War Last, must meet up with some other human beings — even if he’s got to create them himself. And, with the hibernation technique and omnicompetent robots at his command, he eventually does just that. After a fashion. White’s most beautifully fitted piece of work, with this fitting Dedication: “TO PEGGY, who isn’t the last girl on Earth, just the only one.”

  Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1962.

  Second Ending

  by James White

  About this book

  “Second Ending” is one of my own favorite stories, and not just because it was voted onto the short list of five novels for the 1963 Hugo award (Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a much longer, and better, story, won it that year). So strongly did I feel about the story that when it was submitted to my favorite editor and he requested a few changes — including a reduction in length to twenty thousand words and the introduction of a surviving island of humanity! — I demurred. It was the only time in my writing career that I said “No” to an editor in such forthright language. After close on a quarter of a century in the game, I have now learned how to make all my “No’s” sound like “Well, maybe’s.”

  Returning to the original question, “Where on Earth do you get those crazy ideas from?”, it seems that in my case they come from unfulfilled ambitions, feelings of injustice, meeting a bedraggled dog or a beautiful girl, or from a friend with polluted pants. But the simple answer is that all of the ideas have a solidly terrestrial origin, and so the question answers itself.

  1

  For Ross the process of awakening was a slow thaw. Gradually there was growing within his mind a spot of warmth, melting and clearing the long-unused channels of memory and perception. For a time he knew only that he was somebody and that it was very cold, and then he began to remember other cold awakenings and the nightmares which followed them. He tried to tell himself that this was all wrong, that nightmares preceded awakening and not the other way around, but his memory insisted otherwise. It insisted so strongly that, had such a reaction been physically possible, Ross would have broken into a sweat of fear. Eventually sound and vision came to him, the icy fog of Deep Sleep cleared and he saw Beethoven.

  Someone had given Beethoven’s hair a coat of black enamel, painted the face with a realistic flesh tint and touched in the eyes with blue, but it was still the same bust which had occupied a place of honor in Pellew’s consulting room. That someone, Ross knew, was in for trouble, because Dr. Pellew was not a man who took kindly to practical jokes. All at once that line of thought became a very comforting one for Ross, because it opened up the possibility that the nightmares had been practical jokes also. He seemed to remember that there had been quite a few jokers in this place, especially on the thirty-first level. But why such a needlessly cruel trick, and why had they picked him? Who, exactly, were they? What was this place, what was he doing here, who was Pellew…?

  Ross didn’t know, exactly. His mental processes were quickening, but he was demanding answers from a memory which was still woefully incomplete. He sighed audibly, and suddenly Beethoven was talking to him.

  “When the patient has recovered consciousness,” Beethoven said in a dry, lecturing voice which was remarkably like that of Dr. Pellew, “it is important that he make no sudden movements, which at this stage could result in severe muscular damage. He, or she, must be urged to move gently. The patient should also be assured, as often as seems necessary considering his emotional state, that he has been cured he has been cured he has been cured he has been cured…”

  Like a record with a faulty groove, the same words droned out over and over and over. Ross stuck it out for as long as he could, which was about six minutes; then he croaked, “Shut up, I believe you!”

  The voice ceased. Ross became aware of a steadily mounting pressure at the back of his head and shoulders. Chest, neck and leg muscles cracked painfully, and he realized that his posture was altering. The padded surface on which he lay had broken in two places. It was swinging upward from a point below his waist and falling away at the level of his knees. He was being forced from a supine into a sitting position. The process was slow and was probably meant to be gentle. Ross would have yelled in sheer agony, if he had not known that filling his lungs for the yell would have expanded his chest muscles suddenly and added to the pain. Finally he was sitting upright, held by a strap around his middle. He felt the strap, because his eyes showed little more than drifting patches of blackness. Strain as he might to see more, for the moment the blackness continued to prevail. The voice began again:

  “With long-term patients there will be psychological difficulties as well,” the bust said through its motionless, painted lips. “He is awakening into an environment which is completely strange, and perhaps frightening, to him. Someone with an understanding of his background should be present, and the shock can be lessened by surrounding him with his more valuable personal possessions…”

  Ross blinked until the black patches faded from sight. He was in a small room which contained, in addition to the contraption he was sitting in, a bed, some recessed cupboards and a floor which was neatly paved with what looked like foam-rubber mattresses. Close by was an instrument trolley containing the talking bust of Beethoven, three shiny cans and his wallet, opened to show the picture of Alice.

  “…At the same time the patient must take nourishment and exercise his muscles as soon as possible after revivication. The method recommended is to raise him into a sitting position, massage, administer a light, liquid meal liquid meal liquid meal liquid meal…”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” Ross groaned, and reached out carefully for one of the food containers. This, he thought, was the most intricate and senseless joke he had ever heard of. He did not feel hungry, but doing what he was told seemed to be the only way of shutting off that maddening, repetitious voice.

  The can warmed up as soon as he lifted it and the top flipped back, spilling some of the stuff onto his bare legs. He swore, sniffed, then began to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t hungry after all. The stuff tasted every bit as good as it smelled, and it warmed him right down to his toes. But when he had emptied the can Beethoven continued to drone “Liquid meal liquid meal” at him. Presumably he was expected to empty all three.

  The second can exploded in his face.

  Several things happened at once. He jerked backward instinctively as the hot, foul-smelling liquid sprayed his face and chest. The sudden movement triggered off a cramp which nearly tied him in knots, and he began slipping toward the floor. The retaining strap took his weight for a moment; then it parted with a soft tearing sound and he collapsed onto the floor.

  That drop of perhaps three feet onto a thickly padded surface brought a shock of pain worse than anything he had ever experienced. It also brought him finally and fully awake.

  Up to now Ross had been treating everything which was happening as some sort of involved practical joke which was being played on him; he was both angered at the cruelty of it and relieved that he had not awakened to the nightmare of being crushed to death in a tubular metal cage which ticked. From his new position he could see a small extension speaker unit attached to the back of Beethoven’s head, and a cable which ran from it across the floor and out through a hole in the wall. This could have been the sort of joke that his fellow students might have played on him — involving stink bombs, a talking bust and an edited playback of one of Pellew’s lectures — but for one thing. The t
ape had led him to believe that he was cured. No one in the hospital would joke about that.

  And if it wasn’t a joke…

  2

  The First Atomic War had occurred fifty years before Ross had been born. It had started because of malfunctioning of some early-warning equipment and raged for three weeks before the mistake was realized and all parties agreed to the cease-fire. Had it continued for another three weeks the world would have undoubtedly been depopulated completely, but as it was, one out of every ten people survived. Far from causing the collapse of civilization, the war seemed to give it an explosive boot in the pants. Scientific advances came thick and fast; because there were no longer multitudes to be thrown out of work, industry became fully automated, and the world seemed well on the way to becoming a Utopia — except for the nervous tendency of people to build deep instead of high. Possibly because there was still a lot of distrust about, and possibly through sheer force of habit, improvements in nuclear weapons were keeping pace with everything else.

  Like everyone else, Ross had been cynical and uncaring about the war. He had never known an overcrowded Earth, and was rather glad he had not been born into such a period. He enjoyed having twenty-one hours of leisure in the twenty-four. But then had come the realization, when he was still in his early teens, that the long-term effects of the war were still horribly evident. The incidence of male and female sterility had passed the 40-percent mark and was still climbing, too few children were being born, and if the trend could not be checked the effect would be exactly the same as if the war had not been stopped.

  All at once human life became a rare and precious thing, and promised to become rarer and more precious as time went on. No effort or expense was too great to save, extend or propagate a human life. No case was ever considered hopeless. If a patient could not be cured there and then, well, in the next decade the researchers were bound to come up with the answer, or perhaps in the decade after that. In the meantime the patient was put into suspended animation. They would develop a cure eventually, and while there was life there was hope.

  So Ross had applied to train as a doctor in one of the “incurables” hospitals. As well as his basic studies, he had specialized in the techniques of what the purists called hibernation anesthesia and the patients called Deep Sleep, when they both weren’t calling it suspended animation. Then, in his fifth year, at the age of twenty-two, it was discovered that he had a rare lukemic condition — one on which very little research had been done. He had been told that, owing to the fact that he was not likely to be awakened for some time, they would be putting him at the bottom of the heap.

  As was customary with long-term patients, Dr. Pellew supervised the freezing personally. And now it seemed to be only hours ago since the old boy had murmured, “Good night, young man, and good luck,” in a tone of voice which Ross had never before heard him use to a student, and had administered the shot which kept the patient from feeling the gradually increasing cold.

  But it had been more than a matter of hours, obviously.

  Ross was thinking of the food container which must have been improperly sealed and whose contents had gone off in both senses of the word. And of the thick retaining strap which had come apart like so much dry putty. An awful lot of time must have passed. Now that he thought back on it, even the recorded voice of Dr. Pellew had sounded older and more tired. But none of those things was important. Neither was the fact that his body was only a little fatter than a demonstration skeleton, or that every square inch of it ached.

  He was cured!

  Carefully, Ross pushed himself onto his hands and knees and began crawling slowly around the room. His cheek muscles ached because he could not keep himself from grinning, and if he had had the breath for it he would probably have been singing at the top of his voice. A period of sustained, gentle exercise was the next step, and although it was odd that the physiotherapist hadn’t arrived, Ross did not mind taking it the hard way. He continued to crawl across soft sponge rubber, feeling the stiffness leave his muscles, smiling and occasionally laughing out loud. He tried not to think about Alice, or the fact that she was probably in her fifties by now and that a very awkward and painful situation would arise between them in the near future. He did not want any hint of sadness to spoil the moment in which he knew that he was no longer under sentence of death.

  Eventually he was able to stand upright, with one hand steadying himself against the wall. He opened the locker which contained his clothing, and was met by a blast of cold air which made his eyes water. Moisture began condensing on everything inside the locker, and Ross decided wryly that there was no point in catching pneumonia through wearing damp clothing after all that had been done to keep him alive. He left the locker door wide open so that the room heaters would dry them. It wasn’t that he was a prude, Ross told himself, but his blotchy, emaciated body looked horrible even to him. The sooner it was covered the better. Alice might come in.

  Ross walked unsteadily to the bed and sat down. He was beginning to feel hurt by the lack of attention being shown him. Someone should have been around to welcome him back to the land of the living or to say a few words of congratulation — or to check on his condition, at least. There should have been a physician supervising the revivication, a couple of nurses or physiotherapists to walk him about before putting him to bed, and a psychiatrist to cushion him against the mental shocks of awakening. That was how things had been done in his time.

  Instead there was a painted, bronze bust, a disjointed lecture tape played through a loudspeaker and rubber mattresses scattered about the floor to keep him from hurting himself. Ross was suddenly afraid. There must be a shortage of staff, he thought.

  An acute shortage of staff.

  Ross found himself standing with his hand on the doorknob, not remembering how he had got there but knowing by the way that his legs ached that he had moved too fast. The door slid open easily and he stumbled outside. Immediately he knew that he was in a section of the hospital which he had not seen before, perhaps an extension built after he had gone into Deep Sleep. It was a short, brightly lit and spotlessly clean corridor with three doors opening off each side. A few yards to his right the corridor came to a dead end and in the opposite direction it terminated in a semitransparent door which gave the suggestion of a sloping ramp on the other side of it. Just inside the door stood a small desk and chair. There was a pale green folder lying on the desk; there was nobody in the chair.

  Propping himself against the wall, Ross moved around to the door facing his own and slid it open. It was dark inside, but light from the corridor showed a stripped bed, locker doors standing open and an empty Deep Sleep casket. He closed it and began a stumbling zigzag along the corridor, trying all the doors. The rooms were dark and empty, but looked as if they had been regularly cleaned — he tested some of the furniture with his fingers. There was a cleaning staff, then, as well as the people responsible for rigging the crazy equipment in his room. It was high time somebody put in an appearance, Ross thought as he moved toward the desk to sit down.

  And began to laugh gently to himself, because the green folder lying on the desk had his name on it.

  Since his revivication Ross had both fed and exercised himself without assistance, and now it looked as though he was expected to handle his own reorientation problems as well. Abruptly he stopped laughing, when he realized that there was nothing at all to laugh at in the situation. Ross split the folder’s all-around seal with a fingernail — his nails had grown very long despite the fact that all body processes were supposed to be halted by suspended animation — and went through the contents quickly. There were seven of the green 508 forms — the type used for hibernation-anesthesia patients — and about ten sheets of various sizes which looked like interdepartmental memos. Ross went back to the beginning and began to read.

  The first green form was familiar to him — Ross had been present when it had been filled in. It was dated 29th September, 2017, and gave hi
s name and the details of the condition which required his going into Deep Sleep. It was signed by Dr. Pellew and his assistant. The next one was similarly signed, was dated 4th June, 2036, and stated that the patient had been revived but kept under complete sedation for three weeks while a new treatment was tested. It was unsuccessful. The third form was dated 1st May, 2093, and was signed by a Dr. Hanson. On this occasion he was revived but unconscious for six weeks while a complex treatment involving micro-injections of his bone marrow was tried, again unsuccessfully. His eyes went back to the date: 1st May, 2093!

  The problem of Alice was solved, he thought numbly, by simple mathematics: 2017 from 2093 was seventy-six years, and Alice had been twenty-two. His eyes began to sting and Ross hurriedly changed to a less emotionally loaded train of thought. The notes on his chart showed that medical science had left him far behind; relatively, his training was as outdated as bread poultices and bloodletting. And the growth of his fingernails was explained by the periods during which he had been revived but unconscious. He blinked a couple of times, then turned to the next form.

  It was dated 17th May, 2233.

  Ross could not believe it at first. He suspected a misprint or a new system of dating, until he began to read the notes of the physician in charge. They ran to around three hundred neat, closely written words which detailed a treatment so complex that Ross could only guess at what it had entailed. As before, he had been revived but kept under sedation. Something had been done to him — whether it was something injected or attached or surgically implanted he couldn’t tell — which had brought about a long-term cure, because the notes ended with a terse “Treatment successful, to be revived permanently in 75 years from this day.”