THE LAST TRUE GOD, by Lester del Rey

Originally published in If, Sept. 1969, under the pseudonym “Philip St. John.”

Keir Soth lifted his eyes wearily from the tattered fragment of a book he was trying to read as he heard the gritty cycle of the airlock. He sighed and rose to his feet to stare through the left vision port at the alien landscape beyond the ship.

Melok was a harsh world. Even at sunset it showed no softening of the raw desert that ran directly to the ugly brick towers of the city to Keir’s right. The sky was dull with a thin overcast of dust and haze. Three miles away most of the red sun was hidden by the immense pyramid that was the native temple. Already there was a yellow wash of light glowing from an opening in the fane.

Por Dain came into the control room to stand beside him. The scientist was older than Keir and slightly shorter but they might have been brothers from their looks. Both were normally dark of complexion and abnormally lean and sharp of features. Por Dain had removed his protective garment but sand and grit still clung to the creases around his eyes. Fatigue from the double gravity of Melok showed in the droop of his shoulders.

“Five thousand light-years of searching space in this can,” he muttered. “Then, less than thirty parsecs from home we find—this. By Earth, I’m tired of all these superstitious savages and their tin god!”

Keir Soth winced at the oath, reaching out to touch the tiny emblem that represented a hemisphere of lost Earth. He was not, of course, superstitious. But childhood habits were hard to break.

Por Dain snorted. “Can’t you get it through your head there’s no truth to the legend, Keir? How could any planet wrap itself in a silver haze and then just disappear—supposedly into some mystic higher dimension—to leave its colonies stranded? Tommyrot!”

“But we found the picture of just such a happening on that world in the third quandrant,” the captain protested.

“A world that had been barren of human life for at least twenty thousand years,” Por Dain reminded him. “Do you think our legend would have lasted that long?”

Keir Soth shook his head reluctantly. There were legends of some great war in the heavens that had blasted civilizations back some fifteen hundred years—and those were probably true. There was even evidence that Melok itself might have been the enemy world, since it had been rendered almost lethally radioactive at the same time. Its atmosphere still contained more radiation than Keir found comfortable to think of. But a legend older than twenty millennia…?

And there were other puzzles. If men had been colonizing worlds so long ago, why were there no ancient and advanced worlds? Did every planet rise to spew out colonies and then die in some new holocaust of war with those colonies? Was life so stupid?

* * * *

Lyssa the Novitiate came into the cabin then, bringing broth and platters of rations for them. She was quite typical of her kind—blond as no other women were, slight, resembling a porcelain doll. The girls who served Earth were carefully bred to look alike.

Surprisingly, Por Dain made room for her on his seat. The old agnostic usually avoided her, bitter at the law forcing all ships to carry at least one Novitiate. She smiled her usual pleasant and empty smile at him as she began the evening invocation in the ancient speech.

“’F I forgethee Ozine…”

“She did fine today,” Por Dain admitted when he saw Keir’s questioning look. “She talked that high priest Shaggoth into letting her up by that Earth-damned tin god of theirs and she planted three pickups.”

She made the circle of Earth but the blasphemy didn’t seem to bother her.

“Shaggoth calls it the last true god,” Lyssa said.

She had been uncomplaining throughout the voyage. After finding the pieces of books on the ancient planet, she had even begun teaching them the ancient tongue. That had proved fortunate, since the natives of Melok also used it for their ritual and Shaggoth spoke it enough like Lyssa’s version to be understood. She’d proved helpful enough on the voyage. Besides, men needed a woman on a long trip.

Why Shaggoth seemed to accept her was another puzzle about this dratted world. He had been rough enough on Por and Keir, forbidding them to come within three hundred feet of his fane. And he had refused to let even the girl see his sacred books, though he made no secret of their existence. The scholars back on Homeworld would give a dozen fortunes for the legends of any alien world, too!

It was dark outside—except for the red light of Melok’s four visible moons—when Por Dain finished his food and stood up to try the tricky outside receptors. The old man’s hands shook with fatigue as he tuned them. Then he grunted with pleasure and surprise. He had been tinkering with the receptors for weeks—and now at last one seemed to be working properly. It showed the inside of the temple clearly. Shaggoth was fussing about with bits of wire, making happy sounds. The high priest was a dark, hairy man, grotesquely short and ugly. There was something indecent about his expression and his chuckling.

Then the focus cleared for depth. For the first time, the two men saw the god worshiped on Melok.

“A robot!” Keir exclaimed. “A robot like the legends in the books from the ruined planet.”

Por Dain nodded slowly. “Looks like it. I knew it was metal—yet how can it be? Metal would have gone to pieces by now. It must be some kind of statue shaped of tin and made to look like the robots their legends described. These savages are worshipping a machine.”

* * * *

It was an ancient piece in any event. Dust and grime had been polished from it but there was an unmistakable patina of centuries. It was vaguely manlike, though its face gained the touch of nobility without any definite features.

“Maybe it is the wreck of a real robot,” Por decided. “If the ancients before the bombing here had some of our alloys—it could be. Now there’s religion for you, Keir. A race of men blindly worshipping something they made for a servant.”

Lyssa touched the Earth emblem but her smile remained unchanged. She no longer protested Por’s remarks. Instead she pointed to Shaggoth, who was blowing out the torch and turning down the gas mantles.

“He’s coming here,” she said.

In that she was right. The pickup showed him moving across the sand toward them, badly distorted but recognizable.

Por had turned the gain up enough to see by the dim temple lights. He caught Keir’s attention and began tracing the thing Shaggoth had been working on.

It was a weirdly wired mess of coils and blocks of some kind, seemingly directed toward their ship. Por pointed out where the wires led from it and were either stuck on the robot body or somehow plugged in.

“Must be a mockup of some machine from the legends,” Keir guessed. “Ritual magic—similarity principle. But does he think some kind of god power is still generated in that creature?”

“There’s always power in the god,” Lyssa informed them. “Shaggoth has bragged of it. He makes miracle fires with it.”

Any power in those batteries had been dead for millennia, Keir realized. But a clever priest could fake something to convince his followers.

“Maybe he’s coming here to warn us he’s making big medicine and we’re in his power,” Por guessed.

Lyssa shook her head, her smile deepening slightly. “He’s coming to see me. He asked me; today. I think he wants to be converted to the blessed lost-Earth faith.”

“You’re not going out, Lyssa,” Keir told her sharply. “And you’re not letting him in.” He flipped a toggle to cut in the hull pickups. Around the ship were some fifty partly concealed figures waiting patiently, as they had waited every night. “That’s an order. Lyssa. Stay away from the airlock until morning.”

She nodded faintly, then more firmly at his expression. “All right,” she agreed softly, though her smile was almost gone. “Good night, then. I’ll sleep now.”

They heard her sounds of final prayers and the faint noise of her body sinking into the hammock in her tiny room. After a while Por Dain also retired.

* * * *

Keir sat watching the high priest. Shaggoth reached the ship and knocked softly. Then he squatted down in the sand, motionless and patient. Keir waited but nothing else happened. And finally he released his control seat and sank onto it. The last sounds he heard were the heavy breathing of Por Dain and Lyssa’s faintly adenoidal snores.

A heavy hand on his shoulder shook him back to consciousness. Por Dain stood over him, scowling and swearing.

“She’s gone! The Earth-damned crusading little fool—she pulled a sneak and they’re all gone.”

Keir snapped out of his stupor. By the clock, six hours of the long Melok night had passed since he fell asleep. He saw that the outside hull pickups were on, showing no sign of the natives or of Shaggoth.

“We’ve got to get out and rescue her,” he muttered thickly, reaching for the caffeine tablets.

“No chance. Holy Earth, look at them!”

Por Dain had turned the pickups toward the temple and the distorted one showed an enormous crowd of Melok natives streaming from the city and mounting toward their fane.

Then the one good pickup caught Shaggoth as the priest moved into view. Gas jets were now casting a half-light over the temple, and the priest was again busy with his wired contraption.

“Damn him,” Por growled. “He isn’t as ignorant as I thought. That savage is tuning a circuit, looks like. Ah!”

As he spoke, the contraption seemed to come to life. A blue glow ran over the coils and turned white. It seemed to spread like a spark climbing a Jacob’s ladder. Then it was a faint glow of spherical shape that stretched and grew too thin to see.

Then acolytes appeared, bearing Lyssa. She was trussed firmly but seemed unharmed. She made no sound but her smile was gone. Her eyes, wide and round with fear, were centered on Shaggoth.

A chanting began as the acolytes laid her on a stone block before their last true god. Shaggoth approached her, holding two wands from which wires led to the robot’s body.

* * * *

Keir Soth found himself blaspheming heavily as he reached for the weapons in a drawer of the control panel.

But Por Dain held him back. “Don’t be a fool, Captain. It’s a bluff. He wants us to come out to rescue her. That’s his whole plan. Then he’ll have the ship. There must be a horde of the savages waiting below the hull where we can’t pick them up.”

“Then we’ll take the ship there.”

“No.” Anger mingled with reluctant respect in Por Dain’s expression. “I recognize that field he’s generating now from the layout of parts. We’ve got one like it on Homeworld—only no bigger than a pea yet at maximum. You can’t get through. It would damp the engines half a mile before we reached the pyramid.”

No wonder the priest had refused to let them see the ancient books. He must have a technical library there—and somehow the old faker comprehended what was in them, however little he used them for the good of his followers. Shaggoth was staring directly into the pickup, as if aware that they could see him. Now he brought the wands into contact with Lyssa’s body, smiling thickly as she screamed.

Keir began warming the engines. “I’ll take the ship in as close as we dare,” he said. “Then we get out and kill as many as we can trying to reach her.”

Por Dain began loading the weapons as the engines warmed.

Again Shaggoth brought the insulated wands against the Novitiate’s body. Her muscles tensed in a wild spasm but the savage chant rose to cover any cries she made.

The ship was just beginning to respond, rising sluggishly. Keir grinned thinly, hoping a horde of Melok natives were caught under that pressure field. The ship couldn’t yet operate well but power was building up.

Again Melok brought down the wands. And this time the chant quieted.

“Help me—” Hers was a cry that should have torn the heart from a brazen idol. “For the love of Earth, help me—”

And help came.

* * * *

The robot figure moved. A metal arm swung down to tear the wires free from its body. Slowly, ponderously, the figure straightened. There was a creaking sound as the limbs moved, and dirt and scale chipped away. Then it was erect.

In two strides the metal figure had caught the frozen priest and broken him like a thin stick across one knee. Shaggoth was flung back into the mob of screaming, fleeing worshippers.

For a moment the robot halted, staring toward Lyssa. It sank to gesture of some kind. A bass voice sounded over the pickup, using an oddly pure-sounding form of the ancient tongue.

“Saintly One, I—”

The words cut off as the robot bent closer. Then something like a sigh came from it. It stood up quietly, moving to snap the bindings away from Lyssa’s limbs. She lay limp. The metal arms reached under her to lift her.

The robot turned then, facing away from the pickup for a long minute, its head up as if listening. Again there was a sigh.

“The field is too strong,” the even bass voice said in the ancient tongue. The figure turned, searching until it located the pickup.

“I go by another way,” the robot said slowly and carefully. “Your lady is safe but you who are in the ship must wait until I appear again.”

It turned quickly toward the throne on which it had sat. A foot reached out to kick the massive structure aside, while a hand made a pass through the air. Almost instantly, an opening appeared in what had seemed solid rock. The robot stepped into it, carrying the Novitiate, and disappeared. Immediately after it was gone the rock closed tightly. A small explosion seemed to take place inside.

Keir had the ship up but now there was no place to go. “Wait until he appears where?” he asked bitterly. “Or until he can get safely hidden away with her in some hole in the ground?”

“Try cruising slowly toward the pyramid,” Por Dain suggested. “Maybe there’s a secret shaft out to the bottom and he’ll show up there.”

“He’d better.”

* * * *

Before the ship was in full motion, however, they saw the robot again. This time he was only a dot on their screen until Por raised the magnification of the hull pickup. He stood three miles from the pyramid on a narrow ledge of the most ancient of the brick structures. Lyssa was still unconscious in his arms. Somehow he had traveled that distance in less than five minutes. Now he stood staring into space, as if listening to a voice from, the stars.

Then his head dropped. “So long?” he asked. “Fifteen hundred years from the radiation that paralyzed my mind until the right words could waken me?” He sighed again and seemed to listen once more. He nodded slightly and turned to face the ship. From the receiver of the now useless temple pickup a softer and warmer voice spoke, using standard Homeworld speech. “Bring your ship close to me and open your airlock. I will leap across. And do not fear. I shall be the Watcher for Homeworld now, since these people have forfeited all right to one.”

Keir Soth manipulated the ship very delicately across the small distance while Por Dain went down to the airlock. It was tricky maneuvering but Keir had time enough to see a series of small explosions running like a mole’s trail from the pyramid across the desert to the big brick building. Whatever secret way the robot had known was destroyed now.

The metal figure leaped when the ship was fifty feet away. Keir flinched and held his breath. Then he heard the lock cycling to full space closure and the robot came into the control room, with Lyssa conscious and smiling her pleasant and empty smile beside him. Por Dain stood in the doorway as the robot glanced around at the controls.

“I have brought the few books from here that you can use,” the robot said, pointing to a small sack Por Dain was holding. “There is no need to wait here longer.”

He slipped confidently into the captain’s chair, reaching for the controls. With unerring accuracy he plotted the course toward Homeworld and the ship began its gradual acceleration into the red sky and toward space.

Keir Soth shook his head, benumbed by wonder. “How could Melok have lost any war if they could create robots like you?”

The Watcher looked back at the three humans and his voice was soft but filled with immense pride. “I was never created on Melok,” he said. “I came from Earth!”

There was only the soft drone of the ship’s engines as Lyssa and Keir Soth slipped to their knees, to be followed a moment later by a former agnostic, Por Dain.