Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by Brian W. Aldiss Read Free Book Online

would be a wonderful point with which to rile Charles Gunpat the next time he needed a hate-brace.
     
     

 
    The Robot Millennia
     
    When Time brought the inevitable collapse, only a minority realized it. In any period, the number of men and women aware of the nature of their own age is few. The cynicism of Smithlao was rooted in ignorance.
    Men of perception exist in the blindest epochs, just as true nobility flourishes in epochs that we label cruel; but the men of perception now found themselves confronted by a situation they were powerless to alter. When the structure of their culture disintegrated, that perceptive few headed outward to the solar system and beyond; their descendants would not be heard of on Earth again until twice twenty million years had elapsed.
    They left in the last of the old spaceships — “the only good machine,” as a wise man has it, “because it breeds an escape from the machine.”
    (And those escapees from the Sterile Millennia — they were the spores blown by the winds of war that established man in every cell of the honeycomb galaxy. Although unaware of the greater purpose that worked through them, they bore that curious malady known as civilization, in which systems and aspirations supplant the blind dreams of the savage.)
    This is the way Time has of fulfilling itself: while the depths of adversity are being reached, the foundation stones of future greatness are laid.
    So the summers and winters wore on, anonymously. For the handful of people then alive, tended as they were by every variety of robot, it may even have seemed enviable, a good time. But the handful grew less, generation by generation, and the savages were coming, and the machines continued at their own purposes on the barren land...
     
    The field-minder finished turning the topsoil of a two-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by overcropping or the long-lasting effects of nuclear bombardment. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.
    It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its atomic pile, which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet high, it gleamed complacently in the mild sunshine.
    No other machines passed it on its way to the Agricultural Station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines that it knew by sight; most of them should have been out about their tasks by now. Instead, some were inactive and some were careering around the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.
    Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to Warehouse Three and spoke to the seed-distributor, which stood idly outside.
    “I have a requirement for seed potatoes,” it said to the distributor, and with a quick internal motion punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.
    The distributor held the card close to its eye and then said, “The requirement is in order; but the store is not yet unlocked. The required seed potatoes are in the store. Therefore I cannot produce the requirement.”
    Increasingly of late there had been breakdowns in the complex system of machine labour, but this particular hitch had not occurred before. The field-minder thought, then it said, “Why is the store not yet unlocked?”
    “Because Supply Operative Type P has not come this morning. Supply Operative Type P is the unlocker.”
    The field-minder looked squarely at the seed-distributor, whose exterior chutes and scales and grabs were so vastly different from the field-minder’s own limbs.
    “What class brain do you have, seed-distributor?” it