Orphans of the Void by Michael Shaara (great reads .txt) 📕

Millenia passed. The pile broke down again, was rebuilt, and so the cycle was repeated. By infinitesimal steps, the robots learned and recorded their learning in the minds of new robots. Eventually they reached the limits of their capability.

The pain returned and never left.

Steffens left his desk, went over and leaned against the screen. For a long while he stood gazing through the mists of carbon air at the pitiful, loyal mechanicals who thronged outside the ship. He felt an almost overwhelming desire to break something, anything, but all he could do was swear to himself.

Ball came back, looked at Steffens' eyes and into them. His own were sick.

"Twenty-five thousand years," he said thickly, "that's how long it was. Twenty-five thousand years...."

Steffens was pale and wordless. The mass of the robots outside stood immobile, ageless among rock which was the same, hurting, hurting. A fragment of an old poem came across Steffens' mind. "They also serve who only stand and wait...."

Not since he was very young had he been so deeply moved. He stood up rigidly and began to talk to himself, saying in his mind:

It is all over now. To hell with what is past. We will take them away from this place and let them serve and, by God....

He faltered. But the knowledge of what could be done strengthened him. Earthmen would have to come in ships to take the robots away. It would be a little while, but after all those years a little while was nothing, less than nothing. He stood there thinking of the things the robots could do, of how, in the Mapping Command alone, they would be invaluable. Temperature and atmosphere meant nothing to them. They could land on almost any world, could mine and build and develop....

And so it would be ended. The robots would serve Man.

Steffens took one long, painful breath. Then he strode from the room without speaking to Ball, went forward to the lockers and pulled out a suit, and a moment later he was in the airlock.

He had one more thing to do, and it would be at once the gladdest and most difficult job that he had ever attempted. He had to tell the robots.

He had to go out into the sand and face them, tell them that all of the centuries of pain had been for nothing, that the Makers were dead and would never return, that every robot built for twenty-five thousand years had been just surplus, purposeless. And yet—and this was how he was able to do it—he was also coming to tell them that the wasted years were over, that the years of doing had begun.