Strange, but he didn’t remember talking with Gavin or anyone else about Tokayuki! And he could not have remembered about a man who had lived a century after his. But he could pursue this later.
Getting back to the gist of the matter, Cordoban had said that he knew little about the twentieth century. Yet Cordoban had not seemed anxious to question him at length. A few words about the philosophy of science, a dry enough subject, and he had called his secretary Myria—yes, Smith now saw, Cordoban had called Myria to relieve himself of Smith’s presence. Here was an obviously astute man, and an historian, foregoing an opportunity to learn about an era of which he professed ignorance.
Well, I suppose one untrained man doesn’t know much about an era, even his own, Smith thought. That is, not by thirty-first century standards. But, then, how do they know what I know? he wondered. Nobody has asked me any very searching questions.
Gavin and his schedules, now! All the occasions were purely social. That was strange! Most of the people weren’t those likely to have much detailed interest in another era. Decorators, some, like the Lollards, apparently entirely idle-retired, perhaps. Anyway, the conversation was so much social chitchat.
Cordoban, now, had been an historian, even though he hadn’t been curious. But that, too, was a purely social occasion. And Gavin himself! Just a sort of guide to a man from another age. Certainly not a curious man. Why not? Were men of the twentieth century so common here? But certainly he would have been brought into contact with others. Besides, time traveling was absurd!
But that was getting off the track. He was here. He didn’t need Cordoban or Gavin to assure him of that. Being here, he would expect serious questioning by a small group—not all these frivolous, if delightful, parties. Surely he could tell them a great deal they had not asked.
Well, for instance, what could he tell them? His own personal experiences. What had happened day by day. But what had happened day by day? His schooling, for one thing. High school, in particular. As he thought about high schools, there quickly rose in his mind a sequence of facts about their organization and curriculum. It was as if he were reviewing a syllabus on the subject.
The three-minute talks were getting him, he decided. He was so used to these impersonal summaries that they came to his mind automatically. Right now, he must be tired. He would spend more time thinking in the morning.
So Smith went to bed, thought about the events of the day a little, including the Lollards’ amusing fire-breathing dragon, and was quickly asleep.
The following morning Smith did not feel chipper. He rose and bathed out of a sense of duty and routine. But then he sat down and ignored the buzzing of the cupboard which announced his breakfast. A pattern had crystallized in his mind over night. His thoughts in their uncertainty had paved the way for this, no doubt. But what was in his mind was no uncertain conclusion.
He, Smith, was no man of the twentieth century! He had carefully implanted memories, factual theses concerning his past, summaries of twentieth century history. But no real past! The little details that made a past were missing. Time travel was absurd. He was a fraud! An impostor!
But whom was he fooling? Not Gavin, he saw now. Not men like Cordoban. Was he fooling anyone? All of the people seemed eager to talk with him. Cordoban himself had been eager to talk with him. Cordoban had not been feigning. Cordoban had not been fooled. It seemed likely that Smith himself was the only one fooled.
But why? It was a stupid trick for people so obviously intelligent. What did they get out of this silly game? It could hardly be any personal quality of his—any charm. They were all so charming themselves.
Myria, Cordoban’s secretary, for instance. A lovely woman. Handsome, poised, beautifully dressed. Suddenly a little three-minute talk about women in the twentieth century formed in Smith’s mind. In part of his mind, that is. In away, he watched it unfold. And with surprise.
He had thought of Myria as merely handsome and handsomely dressed. But even across the centuries—no, he must remember that he was not from the twentieth century. Across whatever gulf there was, there could have been more than this. Just how did he, Smith, differ from other men?
Well, what did he know of mankind? He reviewed matters in his mind, and went through little summaries on psychology, anthropology and physiology. It was in the midst of this last that he felt a horrible conviction which changed his course from thought to action.
His first action was to wind a small gold chain which was a part of his clothing tightly around the tip of his index finger. The tip remained smooth and brown.
Dropping the chain, he dug the sharp point of a writing instrument into his fingertip, ignoring the pain. The point passed into the rubbery flesh. There was no blood! But there was a little flash and a puff of vapor, and the finger went numb.
He was a cleverly constructed period piece, like the Lollards’ dragon! Like a clockwork nightingale! That was why these people admired him briefly, for what he was—a charming mechanical toy!
Smith scarcely thought. The little review of twentieth century psychology returned to his mind, and automatically he opened the door onto the balcony and stepped over the railing. Consistent to the last, he thought in dull pain as he fell toward the ground twenty stories below.
But it wasn’t the last. There was a terrible wrenching shock, a clashing noise, and confusion. Afterwards, there were still vision and hearing. True, the world stood at an odd angle. He saw the building leaning crazily into the sky. From the brief synopsis of physiology he gleaned that his psychokinetic sense was gone. He no longer felt which way his head and eyes were turned. Other senses than sight and sound were gone as well, and when he tried he found that he could not move. Junk, lying here, he thought bitterly. Not even release! But now he could see Gavin bending over him, and another man who looked as if he might be a mechanic.
“Junk,” the mechanic said. “It’s lucky we couldn’t put the brain in that, or it would be gone, too. Making a new body won’t be so bad: he added.
“I suppose we’ll have to turn off the brain and reform the patterns,” Gavin mused.
“You’d have had to, anyway,” the mechanic said. “You must have put in something inconsistent or we wouldn’t have had this failure.”
“It’s a shame, though,” Gavin said. “I got to like him. Silly, isn’t it? But he seemed so nearly alive. We spent a lot of time together. Now everything that happened, everything he learned, will have to be wiped out.”
“You know,” the mechanic said, “it gives me the creeps, sometimes. I mean, thinking, if I were just a body, connected by a tight beam to a brain off somewhere. And if, when the body was destroyed, the brain—”
“Nonsense,” said Gavin.
He gestured toward Smith’s crumpled body, and then up toward the building where, presumably, was Smith’s brain.
“You’ll be thinking that that thing was conscious, next,” he said. “Come on, let’s turn the brain off.”
Smith stared numbly at the crazily leaning building, waiting for them to turn off his brain.
Who knocks on the door of the last man on earth?
Knock
By Fredric Brown
There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”
Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.
But it wasn’t horrible, really.
The last man on Earth - or in the universe, for that matter - sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He’d just noticed how peculiar it was and he’d been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him.
Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the tim
e two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrified easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn’t much to look at, and he knew it.
Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn’t much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour, the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman - one woman. And that was a fact which didn’t concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He’d probably never see her and didn’t care too much if he didn’t.
Women just hadn’t been a factor in Walter’s life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn’t been a good wife - albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he’d loved Martha, in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he’d been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but - well - he just hadn’t thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn’t any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them.
True, company would be nice, but he’d get along without it. Maybe after a while, he’d get so he’d enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way.
An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn’t look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they’d done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills-and it had been done much more efficiently.
But they had given him plenty of books. They’d been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forever. Even a brilliant mind - and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds - has its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we disgress.
There was a knock on the door.
You’ve got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I’m going to fill that in and show you that it wasn’t horrible at all.
Walter Phelan called out, “Come in,” and the door opened. It was of course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn’t found it. It was about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth - nothing, that is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there.
Walter said, “Hello, George.” When he’d learned that none of them had names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn’t seem to mind.
This one said, “Hel-lo, Wal-ter.” That was ritual; the knock on the door and the greetings. Walter waited.
“Point one,” said the Zan “You will please henceforth sit with your chair turned the other way.”
Walter said, “I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent from the other side, isn’t it?”
“It is trans-par-ent.”
“Just what I thought. I’m in a zoo Right?”
“That is right.”
Walter sighed. “I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single piece of furniture against it. And
made of something different from the other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You will kill me? - I ask hopefully.”
“We will take a-way your books.”
“You’ve got me there George. All right I’ll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?”
“Two hun-dred and six-teen.”
Walter shook his head. “Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that - could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?”
“Ran-dom sam-ples yes All spe-cies would have been too man-y. Male and female each of one hundred and eight kinds,”
“What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean.”
“We make food Syn-thet-ic.”
“Smart,” said Walter. “And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?”
“Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still grow-ing.”
“Nice for the flora,” said Walter. “You weren’t as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with ‘point one.’ I deduced there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?”
“Some-thing we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er a-nimals sleep and do not wake? They are cold.”
“It happens in the best regulated zoos, George,” Walter Phelan said. “Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they’re dead.”
“Dead? That means stopped. But nothing stopped them. Each was a-lone.”
Walter stared at the Zan. “Do you mean, George, you don’t know what natural death is?”
“Death is when a be-ing is killed, stopped from liv-ing.”
Walter Phelan blinked. “How old are you, George?” he asked.
“Six-teen-you would not know the word. Your pla-net went a-round your sun a-bout sev-en thousand times, I am still young.”
Walter whistled softly. “A babe in arms,” he said. He thought hard a moment. “Look, George,” he said, “you’ve got something to learn about this planet you’re on. There’s a guy here who doesn’t hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hour-glass. Your vibrations didn’t kill him.”
“What is he?”
“Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our people and animals live until somebody Old Man Death stops them ticking.”
“He stopped the two crea-tures? He will stop more?”
Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan’s voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such.
“How about taking me to these animals who won’t wake up?” Walter asked. “Is that against the rules?”
“Come,” said the Zan.
That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan’s books and furniture. When they’d finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away.
He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered.
Walter bowed shghtly, “Walter Phelan,” he said, “in case George didn’t tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn’t know all of our ways.”
The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, “My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What’s this all about? Why did they bring me here?”
Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he’d always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easygoing informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.
“I think I know why they brought you here but let’s go back a bit,” he said. “Do you know just what has happened otherwise?”
“You mean that they’ve killed everyone?”
“Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?” She sank into a comfortable chair nearby.
“No,” she said, “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters does it?”
“Not a lot. But here’s the story - what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn’t a great number
of them - here, anyway. I don’t know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don’t know where that is, but I’d guess it’s outside the Solar System. You’ve seen the space ship they came in?”
“Yes It’s as big as a mountain.”
“Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration - they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it’s more like a radio wave than a sound vibration - that destroys all animal life. It - the ship itself - is insulated against the vibration. I don’t know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred-odd animals in this zoo, weren’t killed was because we were inside the ship. We’d been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don’t you?”
“I - I suspected it.”
“The front walls are transparent from the outside The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we’re in, are of plastic, and they’ve got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn’t have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn’t any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race - specifically you and I - can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us.”
Grace Evans smiled faintly. “Another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess. Do you remember being captured? I don’t. I went to sleep one night and woke up in a cage on the space ship.”
“I don’t remember either ” Walter said. “My hunch is that they used the vibratory waves at low intensity first, just enough to knock us all out. Then they cruised around, picking up samples more or less at random for their zoo. After they had as many as they wanted, or as many as they had space in the ship to hold, they turned on the juice all the way. And that was that. It wasn’t until yesterday they knew they’d made a mistake and had underestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are.”
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