The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  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."

  "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 yesterday."

  "Two of - Oh!"

  "Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species 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 short-lived creatures we are?"

  "That's right," Walter said. "One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They're bi-sexual 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 taint 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 he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo."

  She said "Thank you," almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is 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.

  "The Zan? Oh, certainly. I've been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them."

  "But you said -"

  "Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don't have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn't have, something that renews cells."

  ***

  She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, "I think that's right. And I don't think they feel pain."

  "I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?"

  "I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg."

  "Did he bleed red?"

  "Yes but it didn't seem to annoy him. He didn't get mad about it; didn't even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was one. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan."

  Walter Phelan nodded slowly.

  "He wouldn't get angry, of course," he said. "They're emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn't do any good. They'd just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They'd just see that he didn't have a crack at any more keepers.

  "How many of them are there?" she asked.

  "About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,"

  "They did a good-"

  There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, "Come in."

  A Zan stood in the doorway.

  "Hello George," said Walter.

  "Hel-lo Wal-ter," said the Zan.

  It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.

  "What's on your mind?" Walter asked.

  "An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel."

  Walter shrugged.

  "It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him."

  "And worse. A Zan has died. This morning."

  "Is that worse?" Walter looked at him blandly. "Well, George, you'll have to get used to it, if you're going to stay around here."

  The Zan said nothing. It stood there.

  Finally Walter said, "Well?"

  "A-bout weasel. You ad-vise same?"

  Walter shrugged again. "Probably won't do any good. But sure, why not?"

  The Zan left.

  Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. "It might work, Martha," he said.

  "Mar - My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?"

  "My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago."

  "I'm sorry," said Grace "But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?"

  "We'll know tomorrow," Walter said. And she couldn't get another word out of him.

  That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.

  The next was the last.

  It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren't words.

  He said, "We go. Our council met and decided,"

  "Another of you died?"

  "Last night This is planet of death "

  Walter nodded. "You did your share. You're leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don't hurry back."

  "Is there an-y-thing we can do?"

  "Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We'll take care of the others."

  Something clicked on the door; the Zan left.

  Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.

  She asked, "What ? How?"

  "Wait," cautioned Walter. "Let's hear them blast off. It's a sound I want to remember."

  The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he'd been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.

  "There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble," he said musingly. "But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake."

  "You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But -"

  Walter nodded, "They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who 'were asleep and wouldn't wake up,' and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn't know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had noth
ing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right."

  "How did you get the snake to -?"

  Walter Phelan grinned. He said, "I told them what affection was. They didn't know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting - constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it - and the rattlesnake."

  ***

  He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.

  "Well, we've got a world to plan," he said. "We'll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we'll do better to keep and take charge of; we'll need them. But the carnivore, well, we'll have to decide. But I'm afraid it's got to be thumbs down."

  He looked at her. "And the human race. We've got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one."

  Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.

  "No!" she said.

  He didn't seem to have heard her. "It's been a nice race, even if nobody won it," he said. "It'll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can-"

  He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.

  He said, "Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back."

  The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but is no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.

  He smiled a little. See? It wasn't horrible, really.

  The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...

  REBOUND

  The power came to Larry Snell suddenly and unexpectedly, out of nowhere. How and why it came to him, he never learned. It just came; that's all.

  It could have happened to a nicer guy. Snell was a small-time crook when he thought he could get away with stealing, but the bulk of his income, such as it was, came from selling numbers racket tickets and peddling marijuana to adolescents. He was fattish and sloppy, with little close-set eyes that made him look almost as mean as he really was. His only redeeming virtue was cowardice; it had kept him from committing crimes of violence.

  He was, that night, talking to a bookie from a tavern telephone booth, arguing whether a bet he'd placed by phone that afternoon had been on the nose or across the board. Finally, giving up, he growled "Drop dead," and slammed down the receiver. He thought nothing of it until the next day when he learned that the bookie had dropped dead, while talking on the telephone and at just about the time of their conversation.

  This gave Larry Snell food for thought. He was not an uneducated man; he knew what a whammy was. In fact, he'd tried whammies before, but they'd never worked for him. Had something changed? It was worth trying. Carefully he made out a list of twenty people whom, for one reason or another, he hated. He telephoned them one at a time—spacing the calls over the course of a week—and told each of them to drop dead. They did, all of them.

  It was not until the end of that week that he discovered that what he had was not simply the whammy, but the Power. He was talking to a dame, a top dame, a striptease working in a top nightclub and making twenty or forty times his own income, and he had said, "Honey, come up to my room after the last show, huh?" She did, and it staggered him because he'd been kidding. Rich men and handsome playboys were after her, and she'd fallen for a casual, not even seriously intended, proposition from Larry Snell.

  Did he have the Power? He tried it the next morning, before she left him. He asked her how much money she had with her, and then told her to give it to him. She did, and it was several hundred dollars.

  He was in business. By the end of the next week he was rich; he had made himself that way by borrowing money from everyone he knew—including slight acquaintances who were fairly high in the hierarchy of the underworld and therefore quite solvent—and then telling them to forget it. He moved from his fleabag pad to a penthouse apartment atop the swankiest hotel in town. It was a bachelor apartment, but need it be said that he slept there alone but seldom, and then only for purposes of recuperation.

  It was a nice life but even so it took only a few weeks of it to cause it to dawn on Snell that he was wasting the Power. Why shouldn't he really use what he had by taking over the country first and then the world, make himself the most powerful dictator in history? Why shouldn't he have and own everything, including a harem instead of a dame a night? Why shouldn't he have an army to enforce the fact that his slightest wish would be everyone else's highest law? If his commands were obeyed over the telephone certainly they would be obeyed if he gave them over radio and television. All he had to do was pay for (pay for?, simply demand) a universal network that would let him be heard by everyone everywhere. Or almost everyone; he could take over when he had a simple majority behind him, and bring the others into line later.

  But this would be a Big Deal, the biggest one ever swung, and he decided to take his time planning it so there would be no possibility of his making a mistake. He decided to spend a few days alone, out of town and away from everybody, to do his planning.

  He chartered a plane to take him to a relatively uncrowded part of the Catskills, and from an inn—which he took over simply by telling the other guests to leave—he started taking long walks alone, thinking and dreaming. He found a favorite spot, a small hill in a valley surrounded by mountains; the scenery was magnificent. He did most of his thinking there, and found him-self becoming more and more elated and euphoric as he began to see that it could and would work.

  Dictator, hell. He'd have himself crowned Emperor. Emperor of the World. Why not? Who could defy a man with the Power? The Power to make anyone obey any command that he gave them, up to and including "Drop dead!" he shouted from the hilltop, in sheer vicious exuberance, not caring whether or not anyone or anything was within range of his voice .. .

  A teenage boy and a teenage girl found him there the next day and hurried back to the village to report having found a dead man on the top of Echo Hill.

  THE STAR MOUSE

  Mitkey The Mouse, wasn't Mitkey then.

  He was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plaster of the house of the great Herr Professor Oberburger, formerly of Vienna and Heidelberg; then a refugee from the excessive admiration of the more powerful of his fellow-countrymen. The excessive admiration had concerned, not Herr Oberburger himself, but a certain gas which had been a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel-which might have been a highly successful something else.

  If, of course, the Professor had given them the correct formula. Which he-Well, anyway, the Professor had made good his escape and now lived in a house in Connecticut. And so did Mitkey.

  A small gray mouse, and a small gray man. Nothing unusual about either of them. Particularly there was nothing unusual about Mitkey; he had a family and he liked cheese and if there were Rotarians among mice, he would have been a Rotarian.

  The Herr Professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. A confirmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but he considered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constant verbal communion with himself while he worked. That fact, it turned out later, was important, because Mitkey had excellent ears and heard those night-long soliloquies. He didn't understand them, of course. If he thought about them at all, he merely thought of the Professor as a large and noisy super-mouse who squeaked over-much.

  "Und now,
" he would say to himself, "ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broberly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vunhundredth thousandth of an indtch. Ahhh, it iss berfect. Und now-"

  Night after night, day after day, month after month. The gleaming thing grew, and the gleam in Herr Oberburger's eyes grew apace.

  It was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, and it rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the room that served the Herr Professor for all purposes. The house in which he and Mitkey lived was a four room structure, but the Professor hadn't yet found it out, seemingly. Originally, he had planned to use the big room as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep on a cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the little cooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted down golden grains of TNT into a dangerous soup which he salted and peppered with strange condiments, but did not eat.

  "Und now I shall bour it into tubes, and see vether vun tube adjacendt to another eggsplodes der secondt tube vhen der virst tube iss-"

  That was the night Mitkey almost decided to move himself and his family to a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turn handsprings on its foundations. But Mitkey didn't move after all, because there were compensations. New mouse-holes all over, and-joy of joy!-a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the Professor kept, among other things, food.

  Of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or the house would not have remained around the mouseholes. And of course Mitkey could not guess what was coming nor understand the Herr Professor's brand of English (nor any other brand of English, for that matter) or he would not have let even a crack in the refrigerator tempt him.