Space On My Hands

by Fredric Brown

  USE

  SNIVELY’S

  SOAP

  For just a second did his satisfaction last. Then his face began to turn apoplectic purple.

  “My God!” said Mr. Sniveley. “It’s spelled wrong!”

  His face grew more purple still and then, as a tree falls, he fell backward through the window.

  An ambulance rushed the fallen magnate to the nearest hospital, but he was pronounced dead — of apoplexy — upon entrance.

  But misspelled or not, the eternal stars held their position as of that midnight. The aberrant motion had stopped and again the stars were fixed. Fixed to spell — USE SNIVELY’S SOAP!

  Of the many explanations offered by all the sundry who professed some physical and astronomical knowledge, none was more lucid — or closer to the actual truth — than that put forward by Wendell Mehan, president emeritus of the New York Astronomical Society.

  “Obviously, the phenomenon is a trick of refraction,” said Dr. Mehan. “It is manifestly impossible for any force contrived by man to move a star. The stars, therefore, still occupy their old places in the firmament.

  “I suggest that Sniveley must have contrived a method of refracting the light of the stars, somewhere in or just above the atmospheric layer of earth, so that they appear to have changed their positions. This is done, probably, by radio waves or similar waves, sent on some fixed frequency from a set — or possibly a series of four hundred and sixty-eight sets — somewhere upon the surface of the earth. Although we do not understand just how it is done, it is no more unthinkable that light rays should be bent by a field of waves than by a prism or by gravitational force.

  “Since Sniveley was not a great scientist, I imagine that his discovery was empiric rather than logical — an accidental find. It is quite possible that even the discovery of his projector will not enable present-day scientists to understand its secret, any more than an aboriginal savage could understand the operation of a simple radio receiver by taking one apart.

  “My principal reason for this assertion is the fact that the refraction obviously is a fourth-dimensional phenomenon or its effect would be purely local to one portion of the globe. Only in the fourth dimension could light be so refracted …”

  There was more, but it is better to skip to his final paragraph:

  “This effect cannot possibly be permanent — more permanent, that is, than the wave-projector which causes it. Sooner or later, Sniveley’s machine will be found and shut off, or it will break down or wear out of its own volition. Undoubtedly it includes vacuum tubes, which will some day blow out, as do the tubes in our radios …”

  The excellence of Mr. Mehan’s analysis was shown, two months and eight days later, when the Boston Electric Co. shut off, for non-payment of bills, service to a house situated at 901 West Rogers Street, ten blocks from the mansion. At the instant of the shut-off, excited reports from the night side of Earth brought the news that the stars had flashed back into their former positions instantaneously.

  Investigation brought out that the description of one Elmer Smith, who had purchased that house six months before, corresponded with the description of Rutherford R. Sniveley, and undoubtedly Elmer Smith and Rutherford R. Sniveley were one and the same person.

  In the attic was found a complicated network of four hundred and sixty-eight radio-type antennae, each antenna of different length and running in a different direction. The machine to which they were connected was not larger, strangely, than the average ham’s radio projector, nor did it draw appreciably more current, according to the electric company’s record.

  By special order of the President of the United States, the projector was destroyed without examination of its internal arrangement. Clamorous protests against this high-handed executive order arose from many sides. But inasmuch as the projector had already been broken up, the protests were of no avail.

  Serious repercussions were, on the whole, amazingly few.

  Persons in general appreciated the stars more, but trusted them less.

  Roger Phlutter got out of jail and married Elsie. Dr. Milton Hale found he liked Seattle, and stayed there. Two thousand miles from his sister Agatha, he found it possible for the first time to defy her openly. He enjoys life more but, it is feared, will write fewer books.

  There is one fact remaining which is painful to consider, since it casts a deep reflection upon the basic intelligence of the human race. It is proof, though, that the President’s executive order was justified, despite scientific protests.

  That fact is as humiliating as it is enlightening. During the two months and eight days during which the Sniveley machine was in operation, sales of Sniveley Soap increased 915%!

  knock

  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 herd been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusion didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him.

  Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time 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. Abstractly, 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, for-ev-er. Even a brilliant mind — and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds — had its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a matter of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we digress.

  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 hence-forth sit with your chair turned the oth-er 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 asked 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 many. Male and female each of one hun-dred 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 growing.”

  “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 deduce there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?”

  “Something we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er an-i-mals sleep and do not waken? 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 noth-ing 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 thou-sand 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 hourglass. 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 their 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 slightly. “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 easy-going 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 the fact that they’ve — killed everyone?”

  “Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?”

  She sank down into a comfortable chair nearby. “No,” she said. “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters, does it?”

  “Not a bit. 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 know this is a zoo, don’t you?”

  “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 overestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are.”

  “That we were — what?”

  “They can be killed, but they don’t know what natural death is. They didn’t, anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yester
day.”

  “Two of — Oh!”

  “Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two pieces gone irrevocably. And by the Zan’s way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens.”

  “You mean they didn’t realize what shortlived creatures we are?”

  “That’s right,” Walter said. “One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bisexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core — if they have cores. At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo — two by two instead of one by one. They figure we’ll last longer collectively if not individually.”

  “Oh!” Grace Evans stood up, and there was a faint flush on her face. “If you think — if they think —” She turned toward the door.

  “It’ll be locked,” Walter Phelan said calmly. “But don’t worry. Maybe they think, but I don’t think. You needn’t even tell me you wouldn’t have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances.”

  “But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?”

  “It isn’t so little; we’ll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don’t think I don’t agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not be perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo.”

  She said “Thank you,” almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her cheeks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that it wasn’t anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought.

  He smiled at her and said, “Otherwise —”

  She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. “If you were a man, you’d be thinking of some way to — They can be killed, you said?” Her voice was bitter.