His head did a somersault in its gimbals. “Gone,” he said emptily. He whispered, “Gone.
“Machine?” said Salo. He was speaking haltingly, as much to himself as to Constant, Beatrice and Chrono. “A machine I am, and so are my people,” he said. “I was designed and manufactured, and no expense, no skill, was spared in making me dependable, efficient, predictable, and durable. I was the best machine my people could make.
“How good a machine have I proved to be?” asked Salo.
“Dependable?” he said. “I was depended upon to keep my message sealed until I reached my destination, and now I’ve torn it open.
“Efficient?” he said. “Having lost my best friend in the Universe, it now costs me more energy to step over a dead leaf than it once cost me to bound over Mount Rumfoord.
“Predictable?” he said. “After watching human beings for two hundred thousand Earthling years, I have become as skittish and sentimental as the silliest Earthling schoolgirl.
“Durable?” he said darkly. “We shall see what we shall see.”
He laid the message he had been carrying so long on Rumfoord’s empty, lavender contour chair.
“There it is — friend,” he said to his memory of Rumfoord, “and much consolation may it give you, Skip. Much pain it cost your old friend Salo. In order to give it to you — even too late — your old friend Salo had to make war against the core of his being, against the very nature of being a machine.
“You asked the impossible of a machine,” said Salo, “and the machine complied.
“The machine is no longer a machine,” said Salo. “The machine’s contacts are corroded, his bearings fouled, his circuits shorted, and his gears stripped. His mind buzzes and pops like the mind of an Earthling — fizzes and overheats with thoughts of love, honor, dignity, rights, accomplishment, integrity, independence — ”
Old Salo picked up the message again from Rumfoord’s contour chair. It was written on a thin square of aluminum. The message was a single dot.
“Would you like to know how I have been used, how my life has been wasted?” he said. “Would you like to know what the message is that I have been carrying for almost half a million Earthling years — the message I am supposed to carry for eighteen million more years?”
He held out the square of aluminum in a cupped foot.
“A dot,” he said.
“A single dot,” he said.
“The meaning of a dot in Tralfamadorian,” said Old Salo, “is —
“Greetings.”
The little machine from Tralfamadore, having delivered this message to himself, to Constant, to Beatrice, and to Chrono over a distance of one hundred and fifty thousand light years, bounded abruptly out of the courtyard and onto the beach outside.
He killed himself out there. He took himself apart and threw his parts in all directions.
Chrono went out on the beach alone, wandered thoughtfully among Salo’s parts. Chrono had always known that his good-luck piece had extraordinary powers and extraordinary meanings.
And he had always suspected that some superior creature would eventually come to claim the good-luck piece as his own. It was in the nature of truly effective good-luck pieces that human beings never really owned them.
They simply took care of them, had the benefit of them, until the real owners, the superior owners, came along.
Chrono did not have a sense of futility and disorder.
Everything seemed in apple-pie order to him.
And the boy himself participated fitly in that perfect order.
He took his good-luck piece from his pocket, dropped it without regret to the sand, dropped it among Salo’s scattered parts.
Sooner or later, Chrono believed, the magical forces of the Universe would put everything back together again.
They always did.
epilogue
REUNION WITH STONY
“You are tired, so very tired, Space Wanderer, Malachi, Unk. Stare at the faintest star, Earthling, and think how heavy your limbs are growing.”
— SALO
There isn’t much more to tell.
Malachi Constant grew to be an old man on Titan. Beatrice Rumfoord grew to be an old woman on Titan.
They died peacefully, died within twenty-four hours of each other. They died in their seventy-fourth years.