“I take it, doctor, that your work is done,” it said.
Carter started, then settled back, tamped tobacco in his pipe.
“I’d almost forgotten about you, Buster,” he told the robot. “You sit so still.”
The man stared out of the window-port that framed the wild, red emptiness of Mars. Fine, weatherworn sand that whispered when one walked. Off to the left the fantastic towers of harder rock which had resisted the forces that had leveled down the planet. To the right the faintest hint of spires and turreted battlements — the Martian city where dwelt Elmer, the Martian Ghost. Nearer at hand the excavations where twenty years of digging and sifting and studying had netted a pitiful handful of facts about the Martian race — facts that lay within the pages of the manuscript piled on his desk.
“No, Buster,” he said, “my work isn’t done here. I’m only quitting it. Someone will come along some day and take up where I left off. Perhaps I should stay — but these have been lonely years. I’m running away from loneliness and I am afraid I won’t succeed. I’ve been on the verge of it many times before. But something kept me here — the knowledge it was not only my work I was doing, but someone else’s work as well.”
“Dr. Lathrop’s work,” rasped Buster’s thoughts.
Carter nodded.
Twenty years ago Steve Lathrop had dropped out of sight. Carter could remember perfectly the morning Steve had left for the little outpost of Red Rocks to get supplies. Each detail of that morning seemed etched into his consciousness. During those intervening years he had lived it over and over again, almost minute by minute, trying to unearth even the tiniest incident that might be a clue. But there had never been a clue. Stephen Lathrop, to all intent and purpose, simply had walked off the face of Mars, vanished without a trace. He had left to get supplies; he had never returned. That, in itself, was the beginning and the end. That was all there was.
Soon he would have to start packing, Carter knew. The manuscript was finished. His notes were all in order. All but a few of the specimens were labeled, ready for packing. The laborers had been discharged. As soon as Alf came back, they would have to get to work. Alf had gone to town three days before and hadn’t returned — but that was nothing unusual. Somehow, Carter could feel no irritation toward Alf. After all, an occasion such as this, the end of twenty years of labor, called for a spree of some sort.
The last rays of the setting sun streamed into the window and splashed across the room, lighting up and bringing out the color of the collection of Martian water jugs ranged along the wall. Not a very extensive collection when measured against some of those gathered by professional collectors, but a collection that brought warmth into Carter’s soul. Those jugs, in a way, represented the advance of Martian culture, starting with the little lopsided jug over on the left up to the massive symbolic piece of art that marked the peak of the jug cult’s development. Jugs from every part of Mars, brought to him by the scrawny, bewhiskered old jug hunters who ranged the deserts in their everlasting search, always hopeful, always confident, always dreaming of the day when they would find the jug that would make them rich.