Free Second Ending by James White Page B

It literally bristled with antennae, both fixed and rotating, spotlights, camera supports and deep-level metal-detection equipment which gave its outline an indistinct, sketched-in look. Sitting atop this transporter section with its conical drill reflecting red highlights, the digger-nurse unit pointed aggressively forward. In operation the digger would lift itself clear of the transporter, stick its blunt nose into the ground and go straight down. Like a hot marble sinking through butter, Ross had thought when he watched the first test run. Outwardly it was a monstrous, terrifying object, which was why Ross had ordered it and the four robots following it to be painted with a large red cross. He didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about them.
     
    Watching the cavalcade go past — Big Brother trailed by two repair robots and two Sisters modified for long-distance surface travel — Ross thought that a little stirring music would not have been amiss. He strained his eyes to keep them in sight as they rolled and lurched down the hillside, but it had been two days since the last rain and the ash was beginning to blow about again. Ross stopped himself from waving good-bye at them with a distinct effort; then he turned and began walking toward the small control dome.
     
    Here had been installed the equipment which enabled him to see all that the search robots saw, and here it was that Ross spent every waking moment of the next five days. He watched the Miner's radar repeater screens, its forward TV and the less detailed but more penetrating infrared vision. Every half-hour or less he checked that it was still on course, which it always was, and many times he asked if it had found anything even though the repeaters told him that it hadn't. By turns he was bored and frantically impatient, and bad-tempered all the time.
     
    Some of the things he said and did were petty. He knew it and was ashamed of himself, but that didn't stop him from saying them. But one of the incidents, on the other hand, gave him just cause for losing his temper. The matter of the exploding food containers.
     
    "I am getting fed up with being plastered with this muck every, other mealtime!" he had raged, while trying to get rid of the foul-smelling goo, which, because of some trace impurities present during its manufacture, had in two hundred years turned into a particularly noisome stink bomb. "Go through the stores and separate the unspoiled from the rotten, then bring me only the edible stuff from now on. You shouldn't have to be told such a simple thing!"
     
    "Doing what you suggest would mean opening every single can, sir," Sister had replied quietly. "That would cause all the food to spoil within a short time. It is therefore impossible —"
     
    "Is it, now?" Ross had interrupted, the acid in his voice so concentrated that he might have been trying to penetrate the robot's steel casing with it, "I suppose it is impossible to put the unspoiled food in cold storage until I need it, using the Deep Sleep equipment? It would have to be reheated, of course, but surely your gigantic intellect would prove equal to that problem! But there is an even easier way — just shake the things. If they give a bubbling, liquid sound they're bad, and if no sound at all then they are good.
     
    "That rule doesn't hold good in every case, but I don't mind an occasional mess."
     
    As always, Sister had filtered out the profanity, temper and sarcasm and proceeded to deal with the instructional content of the words. She informed him that his instructions had already been relayed to a group of Cleaners, who would report when the job was finished. Then she suggested that he look at the main repeater screen, where something appeared to be happening…
     
    Four hundred miles to the northwest it had begun to rain, pushing the visibility out to nearly a mile. The Miner's forward TV brought him a swaying, jerking picture of a narrow valley whose floor was a mixture of