The
Ultimate
Experiment
by
THORNTON DeKY
No living soul breathed upon the
earth. Only robots, carrying on the
last great order.
"THEY were all gonenow, The Masters, alldead and their atoms scattered tothe never ceasing winds that sweptthe great crysolite city towers inever increasing fury. That had beenthe last wish of each as he hadpassed away, dying from sheer oldage. True they had fought on aslong as they could to save theirkind from utter extinction but thecomet that had trailed its poisoningwake across space to leave behind it,upon Earth, a noxious, lethal gasvapor, had done its work too well."
No living soul breathed upon theEarth. No one lived here now, butKiron and his kind.
"And," so thought Kiron to himself,"he might as well be a great unthinkingrobot able to do only onething instead of the mental giant hewas, so obsessed had he become withthe task he had set himself to do."
Yet, in spite of a great lonelinessand a strong fear of a final frustration,he worked on with the others ofhis people, hardly stopping for anythingexcept the very necessities neededto keep his big body working in perfectcoordination.
Tirelessly he worked, for The Mastershad bred, if that is the word touse, fatigue and the need for restorationout of his race long decades ago.
Sometimes, though, he would stophis work when the great red dyingsun began to fade into the west andhis round eyes would grow wistful ashe looked out over the great city thatstretched in towering minarets andlofty spires of purest crystal blue formiles on every side. A fairy city ofrarest hue and beauty. A city for theGods and the Gods were dead. Kironfelt, at such times, the great lonelinessthat the last Master must have known.
They had been kind, The Masters,and Kiron knew that his people, asthey went about their eternal tasksof keeping the great city in perfectshape for The Masters who no longerneeded it, must miss them as he did.
Never to hear their voices ringing,never to see them again gathered ingroups to witness some game or toplay amid the silver fountains andflowery gardens of the wondrous city,made him infinitely saddened. It wouldalways be like this, unless....
But thinking, dreaming, reminiscingwould not bring it all back for therewas only one answer to still the longing:work. The others worked and didnot dream, but instead kept busy tendingto the thousand and one tasks TheMasters had set them to do—had leftthem doing when the last Masterperished. He too must remember thetrust they had placed in his handsand fulfill it as best he could.
From the time the great red eye ofthe sun opened itself in the East untilit disappeared in the blue haze beyondthe crysolite city, Kiron labored withhis fellows. Then, at the appointedhour, the musical signals would pealforth their sweet, sad chimes, whisperinggoodnight to ears that wouldhear them no more and all operationswould halt for the night, just as it haddone when The Masters were here tosupervise it.
Then when morning came he wouldstart once more trying, testing, experimentingwith his chemicals andplastics, forever following labyrinthof knowledge, seeking for the greattriumph that would make the workof the others of some real use.
His hands molded the materialscarefully, lovingly to a pattern thatwas set in his mind as a thing tocherish. Day by day his experimentsin their liquid baths took form underhis careful modeling. He mixed hischemicals with