"The Robots will cure the Plague," someone else, a woman, declared.
Johnny laughed and had never heard such a sound before, from his lips or any others. "The Robots will cure nothing," he said. "Has anyone here ever seen the Robots?"
The faltering wave of sound from the crowd was in the negative.
"I have seen them," Johnny told his people, with whom he could no longer live. "My father wanted it that way. He sent me to the cities and to the mysterious places between the cities, the gleaming, white-surfaced roads which we use no longer, to see the Robots. And I tell you this: they will not cure the Plague. If anything they'll spread it."
A hushed silence fell, like a pall, on the assembly. None of them had ever seen the Robots, but that was because it is not proper for a mortal to see a deity. "This was the truth my father could not tell you in his lifetime," Johnny went on. "He knew you would have laughed and mocked—or worse. In his death I tell it to you for him. Along with his wish to be interred in the ground, it was his final thought."
DeReggio did not look Johnny squarely in the eye. "I think you had better go, lad. You have no right to talk like that."
Johnny shrugged, feeling the weight of a knowledge and wisdom beyond his years. "I am twenty-three," he said. "I was an infant when the War ended. Yet my father could teach me certain things and other things I could see for myself because he taught me to be curious and take nothing for granted. You could learn the same. Someday, perhaps...."
"By the Robots!" DeReggio swore softly, hissing the words almost in Johnny's ears. "Go before you antagonize them. If they start throwing things again, I won't be able to save you."
Johnny turned his back and squared his shoulders in a gesture compounded as much of defiance as contempt. He told DeReggio, "At least do one thing for me."