Grandfather didn't hear. He was by himself now, reliving the days before the world ended, the days when mankind had been supreme upon the Earth.
"Scobie was mad. They said so later, when it was too late of course, but no one had the brain to see it at the time. They treated him nice and listened to his ideas and tried to talk to him, and when he wouldn't listen they just let him go, that's all. Just let him go! Him mad as a hatter, with a laboratory as big as a mountain and all his money in the bank and a pension just in case he didn't have enough."
"He hated everybody and wanted to kill them all, old Scobie did. Didn't he, Grandfather?"
"Wouldn't be fair to say that." The old man shifted sideways a bit to get back into the sun, and opened the ragged remains of a once fine suit so that he could feel the warmth on his skin. "I hate Scobie just as much as the next man, but fair's fair. They killed him so fast when they found out what he had done that no one bothered to ask him why he had done it. Maybe he thought he was doing right. Or maybe he liked robots more than people. He sure knew how to design robots, Scobie did, give him credit for that. I remember years before the end there were a lot of Scobie robots around and people were afraid they would take away their jobs and stuff like that. They didn't know the half of it. Robots took away everything. People were always afraid that the robots would fight them, turn into monsters and make war on them. Didn't happen at all like that. Scobie made robots that didn't even know people were there."
"He made them and turned them loose in secret so no one would know?" Andy asked eagerly. This was the part of the story he liked best.
"Made God knows how many and smuggled them out. All over the world, in all of the out-of-the-way places. Some he dropped off near auto junkyards and they burrowed under the old cars and disappeared. Other ones he put down near steel mills where they hid under the scrap. They were everywhere, in storage dumps and warehouses, for months before they were discovered, and by that time it was too late. Too late by far; there was no stopping them."
"They built each other."
"They didn't build each other, that's not exactly right. The ones that Scobie dropped were already built. Built fine, simple, and smart. Programmed with a steel tape brain. Programmed to do only one thing, and that was to build other robots just like themselves. And when a robot was finished building another robot he activated him with a magnetic copy of his own brain tape and the new robot went to work doing the same thing. Versatile those robots were. Some of them were made almost all out of aluminum, just dump one of them down in a warehouse of mothballed airplanes and within the week there would be two robots, if maybe it could find an old tin can to make a steel tape out of. Scobie even had one kind that had mostly wooden gears and burned charcoal to run, and these did fine in the jungles of the Amazon and upper Congo. They were everywhere you coTtld think of, and places you would never think of but Scobie did, because he was mad. And all of the first robots were made to be afraid of the light. So they scuttled around in the dark and no one ever saw them before it was too late. By the time people realized what was going on there was almost as many robots as there were people. A few days later there were more robots than people and it was the end."
"But everyone fought them? All the guns and tanks and everything? Blew the old robots up?"
"By the thousands. But new ones were being made by the millions. And the tanks ran out of ammunition because the factories were being taken apart by the robots and made into more robots, and while the guns in the front of a tank were blowing up the robots other robots would be taking off the back of the tank to make more robots. It was hell, I tell you. I fought, all of us fought, but we couldn't possibly win. Robots didn't mind getting blown up. Blow off the bottom of a robot and the top would keep on working making another robot. And the other robots would stand around watching — by this time they weren't afraid of the light anymore — pushing and eager, ready to grab up the broken parts to make more robots. In the end we just all gave up. There was nothing else we could do. Just tried to look after ourselves. Just eating and staying alive was a job."
A bit of wind had come up, rustling the leaves, the sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees. Grandfather rose and stretched he didn't want to catch a chill.
"Better start back.” he said.
"Then the world was ended?" Andy asked, pulling at the old man's knobby hand, not wanting the story to be over.
"End of the world as I knew it, as you'll never know it. End of civilization, end of freedom, end of the nobility of men, end of his rule as the top creature on this planet — the robots rule now."
