The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  I motioned Ma to go on into the ship. The sooner I was out of this place, the better I'd like it.

  But the voice said, 'Wait," and there was something about it that made us wait. 'We wish to explain to you so that you will not return."

  Nothing had been further from my mind, but I said, "Why not?"

  "Your civilization is not compatible with ours. We have studied your minds to make sure. We projected images from the images we found in your minds, to study your reactions to them. Our first images, our first thought-projections, were confused.

  But we understood your minds by the time you reached the farthest point of your walk. We were able to project beings similar to yourselves."

  "Sam Heideman, yeah," I said. "But how about the da—the woman? She couldn't have been in the memory of any of us because none of us knew her."

  "She was a composite—what you would call an idealization. That, however, doesn't matter. By studying you we learned that your civilization concerns itself with things, ours with thoughts. Neither of us has anything to offer the other. No good could come through interchange, whereas much harm might come. Our planet has no material resources that would interest your race.

  I had to agree with that, looking out over that monotonous rolling clay that seemed to support only those few tumble-weedlike bushes, and not many of them. It didn't look like it would support anything else. As for minerals, I hadn't seen even a pebble.

  "Right you are," I called back. "Any planet that raises nothing but tumbleweeds and cockroaches can keep itself, as far as we're concerned. So—" Then something dawned on me. "Hey, just a minute. There must be something else or who the devil am I talking to?"

  "You are talking," replied the voice, "to what you call cockroaches, which is another point of incompatibility between us. To be more precise, you are talking to a thought-projected voice, but we are projecting it. And let me assure you of one thing—that you are more repugnant physically to us than we are to you."

  I looked down then and saw them, three of them, ready to pop into holes if I made a move.

  Back inside the ship, I said, "Johnny, blast off. Destination, Earth."

  He saluted and said, "Yes, sir," and went into the pilot's compartment and shut the door. He didn't come out until we were on an automatic course, with Sirius dwindling behind us.

  Ellen had gone to her room. Ma and I were playing cribbage.

  "May I go off duty, sir?" Johnny asked, and walked stiffly to his room when I answered, "Sure."

  After a while, Ma and I turned in. Awhile after that we heard noises. I got up to investigate, and investigated.

  I came back grinning. "Everything's okay, Ma," I said. "It's Johnny Lane and he's as drunk as a hoot owl!" And I slapped Ma playfully on the fanny.

  "Ouch, you old fool," she sniffed. "I'msore there from the curb disappearing from under me. And what's wonderful about Johnny getting drunk? You aren't, are you?"

  "No," I admitted, regretfully perhaps. "But, Ma, he told me to go to blazes. And without saluting. Me, the owner of the ship."

  Ma just looked at me. Sometimes women are smart, but sometimes they're pretty dumb.

  "Listen, he isn't going to keep on getting drunk," I said. "This is an occasion. Can't you see what happened to his pride and dignity?"

  "You mean because he—"

  "Because he fell in love with the thought-projection of a cockroach," I pointed out. "Or anyway he thought he did. He has to get drunk once to forget that, and from now on, after he sobers up, he's going to be human. I'll bet on it, any odds. And I'll bet too that once he's human, he's going to see Ellen and realize how pretty she is. I'll bet he's head-over-heels before we get back to Earth. I'll get a bottle and we'll drink a toast on it. To Nothing Sirius!"

  And for once I was right. Johnny and Ellen were engaged before we got near enough to Earth to start decelerating.

  PATTERN

  Miss Macy sniffed. "Why is everyone worrying so? They're not doing anything to us, are they?"

  In the cities, elsewhere, there was blind panic. But not in Miss Macy's garden. She looked up calmly at the monstrous mile-high figures of the invaders.

  A week ago, they'd landed, in a spaceship a hundred miles long that had settled down gently in the Arizona desert. Almost a thousand of them had come out of that spaceship and were now walking around.

  But, as Miss Macy pointed out, they hadn't hurt anything or anybody. They weren't quite substantial enough to affect people. When one stepped on you or stepped on a house you were in, there was sudden darkness and until he moved his foot and walked on you couldn't see; that was all.

  They had paid no attention to human beings and all attempts to communicate with them had failed, as had all attacks on them by the army and the air force. Shells fired at them exploded right inside them and didn't hurt them. Not even the H-bomb dropped on one of them while he was crossing a desert area had bothered him in the slightest.

  They had paid no attention to us at all.

  "And that," said Miss Macy to her sister who was also Miss Macy since neither of them was married, "is proof that they don't mean us any harm, isn't it?"

  "I hope so, Amanda," said Miss Macy's sister. "But look what they're doing now."

  It was a clear day, or it had been one. The sky had been bright blue and the almost humanoid heads and shoulders of the giants, a mile up there, had been quite clearly visible. But now it was getting misty, Miss Macy saw as she followed her sister's gaze upward. Each of the two big figures in sight had a tanklike object in his hands and from these objects clouds of vaporous matter were emerging, settling slowly toward Earth.

  Miss Macy sniffed again. "Making clouds. Maybe that's how they have fun. Clouds can't hurt us. Why do people worry so?"

  She went back to her work.

  "Is that a liquid fertilizer you're spraying, Amanda?" her sister asked.

  "No," said Miss Macy. "It's insecticide."

  THE YEHUDI PRINCIPLE

  I am crazy.

  Charlie Swann is going crazy, too. Maybe more than I am, because it was his dingbat. I mean, he made it and he thought he knew what it was and how it worked.

  You see, Charlie was just kidding me when he told me it worked on the Yehudi principle. Or he thought he was. "The Yehudi principle?" I said.

  "The Yehudi principle," he repeated. "The principle of the little man who wasn't there. He does it."

  "Does what?" I wanted to know.

  The dingbat, I might interrupt myself to explain, was a head-band. It fitted neatly around Charlie's noggin and there was a round black box not much bigger than a pillbox over his forehead. Also there was a round flat copper disk on each side of the band that fitted over each of Charlie's temples, and a strand of wire that ran down behind his ear into the breast pocket of his coat, where there was a little dry cell battery.

  It didn't look as if it would do anything, except maybe either cure a headache or make it worse. But from the excited look on Charlie's face, I didn't think it was anything as commonplace as that.

  "Does what?" I wanted to know.

  "Whatever you want," said Charlie. 'Within reason, of course. Not like moving a building or bringing you a locomotive. But any little thing you want done, he does it."

  'Who does?"

  "Yehudi."

  I closed my eyes and counted to five, by ones. I wasn't going to ask, "Who's Yehudi?"

  I shoved aside a pile of papers on the bed—I'd been going through some old clunker manuscripts seeing if I could find something good enough to rewrite from a new angle—and sat down.

  "O.K.," I said. "Tell him to being me a drink."

  "What kind?"

  I looked at Charlie, and he didn't look like he was kidding. He had to be, of course, but—

  "Gin buck," I told him. "A gin buck, with gin in it, if Yehudi knows what I mean."

  "Hold out your hand," Charles said.

  I held out my hand. Charlie, not talking to me, said, "Bring Hank a gin buck, strong."
And then he nodded his head.

  Something happened either to Charlie or to my eyes, I didn't know which. For just a second, he got sort of misty. And then he looked normal again.

  And I let out a kind of a yip and pulled my hand back, because my hand was wet with something cold. And there was a splashing noise and a wet puddle on the carpet right at my feet. Right under where my hand had been.

  Charlie said, "We should have asked for it in a glass."

  I looked at Charlie and then I looked at the puddle on the floor and then I looked at my hand. I stuck my index finger gingerly into my mouth and tasted.

  Gin buck. With gin in it. I looked at Charlie again. He asked, "Did I blur?"

  "Listen, Charlie," I said. "I've known you for ten years, and we went to Tech together and— But if you pull another gag like that I'll blur you, all right. I'll—"

  "Watch closer this time," Charlie said. And again, looking off into space and not talking to me at all, he started talking. "Bring us a fifth of gin, in a bottle. Half a dozen lemons, sliced, on a plate. Two quart bottles of soda and a dish of ice cubes. Put it all on the table over there."

  He nodded his head, just like he had before, and darned if he didn't blur. Blur was the best word for it.

  "You blurred," I said. I was getting a slight headache.

  "I thought so," he said. "But I was using a mirror when I tried it alone, and I thought maybe it was my eyes. That's why I came over. You want to mix the drinks or shall I?"

  I looked over at the table, and there was all the stuff he'd ordered. I swallowed a couple of times.

  "It's real," Charlie said. He was breathing a little hard, with suppressed excitement. "It works, Hank. It works. We'll be rich! We can—"

  Charlie kept on talking, but I got up slowly and went over to the table. The bottles and lemons and ice were really there. The bottles gurgled when shaken and the ice was cold.

  In a minute I was going to worry about how they got there. Meanwhile and right now, I needed a drink. I got a couple of glasses out of the medicine cabinet and the bottle opener out of the file cabinet, and I made two drinks, about half gin.

  Then I thought of something. I asked Charlie, "Does Yehudi want a drink, too?"

  Charlie grinned. "Two'll be enough," he told me.

  "To start with, maybe," I said grimly. I handed him a drink—in a glass—and said, "To Yehudi." I downed mine at a gulp and started mixing another.

  Charlie said, "Me, too. Hey, wait a minute."

  "Under present circumstances," I said, "a minute is a minute too long between drinks. In a minute I shall wait a minute, but—Hey, why don't we let Yehudi mix 'em for us?"

  "Just what I was going to suggest. Look, I want to try something. You put this headband on and tell him to. I want to watch you."

  "Me?"

  "You," he said. "It can't do any harm, and I want to be sure it works for everybody and not just for me. It may be that it's attuned merely to my brain. You try it."

  "Me?" I said.

  "You," he told me.

  He'd taken it off and was holding it out to me, with the little flat dry cell dangling from it at the end of the wire. I took it and looked it over. It didn't look dangerous. There couldn't possibly be enough juice in so tiny a battery to do any harm.

  I put it on.

  "Mix us some drinks," I said, and looked over at the table, but nothing happened.

  "You got to nod just as you finish," Charlie said. "There's a little pendulum affair in the box over your forehead that works the switch."

  I said, "Mix us two gin bucks. In glasses, please." And nodded. When my head came up again, there were the drinks, mixed. "Blow me down," I said. And bent over to pick up my drink.

  And there I was on the floor.

  Charlie said, "Be careful, Hank., If you lean over forward, that's the same as nodding. And don't nod or lean just as you say something you don't mean as an order."

  I sat up. "Fan me with a blowtorch," I said.

  But I didn't nod. In fact, I didn't move. When I realized what I'd said, I held my neck so rigid that it hurt, and didn't quite breathe for fear I'd swing that pendulum.

  Very gingerly, so as not to tilt it, I reached up and took off the headband and put it down on the floor.

  Then I got up and felt myself all over. There were probably bruises, but no broken bones. I picked up the drink and drank it. It was a good drink, but I mixed the next one myself. With three-quarters gin.

  With it in my hand, I circled around the headband, not coming within a yard of it, and sat down on the bed.

  "Charlie," I said, "you've got something there. I don't know what it is, but what are we waiting for?"

  "Meaning?" said Charlie.

  "Meaning what any sensible man would mean. If that darned thing brings anything we ask for, well, let's make it a party. Which would you rather have, Lili St. Cyr or Esther Williams? I'll take the other."

  He shook his head sadly. "There are limitations, Hank. Maybe I'd better explain."

  "Personally," I said, "I would prefer Lili to an explanation, but go ahead. Let's start with Yehudi. The only two Yehudis I know are Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, and Yehudi, the little man who wasn't there. Somehow I don't think Menuhin brought us that gin, so—"

  "He didn't. For that matter, neither did the little man who wasn't there. I was kidding you, Hank. There isn't any little man who wasn't there."

  "Oh," I said. I repeated it slowly, or started to. "There—isn't any—little—man—who—wasn't—" I gave up. "I think I begin to see," I said. "What you mean is that there wasn't any little man who isn't here. But then, who's Yehudi?"

  "There isn't any Yehudi, Hank. But the name, the idea, fitted so well that I called it that for short."

  "And what do you call it for long?"

  "The automatic autosuggestive subvibratory superaccelerator."I drank the rest of my drink.

  "Lovely," I said. "I like the Yehudi principle better, though. But there's just one thing. Who brought us that drink-stuff? The gin and the soda and the so forth?"

  "I did. And you mixed our second-last, as well as our last drink. Now do you understand?"

  "In a word," I said, "not exactly."

  Charlie sighed. "A field is set up between the temple-plates which accelerates several thousand times, the molecular vibration and thereby the speed of organic matter—the brain, and thereby the body. The command given just before the switch is thrown acts as an autosuggestion and you carry out the order you've just given yourself. But so rapidly that no one can see you move; just a momentary blur as you move off and come back in practically the same instant. Is that clear?"

  "Sure," I told him. "Except for one thing. Who's Yehudi?"

  I went to the table and started mixing two more drinks. Seven-eighths gin.

  Charlie said patiently, "The action is so rapid that it does not impress itself upon your memory. For some reason the memory is not affected by the acceleration. The effect—both to the user and to the observer—is of the spontaneous obedience of a command by ... well, by the little man who wasn't there."

  "Yehudi?"

  "Why not?"

  'Why not why not?" I asked. "Here, have another drink. It's a bit weak, but so am I. So you got this gin, huh? Where?""Probably the nearest tavern. I don't remember."

  "Pay for it?"

  He pulled out his wallet and opened it. "I think there's a fin missing. I probably left it in the register. My subconscious must be honest."

  "But what good is it?" I demanded. "I don't mean your subconscious, Charlie, I mean the Yehudi principle. You could have just as easily bought that gin on the way here. I could just as easily have mixed a drink and known I was doing it. And if you're sure it can't go bring us Lili St. Cyr and Esther Williams—"

  "It can't. Look, it can't do anything that you yourself can't do. It isn't an it. It's you. Get that through your head, Hank, and you'll understand."

  "But what good is it?"

  He sighed again.
"The real purpose of it is not to run errands for gin and mix drinks. That was just a demonstration. The real purpose—"

  "Wait," I said. "Speaking of drinks, wait. It's a long time since I had one."

  I made the table, tacking only twice, and this time I didn't bother with the soda. I put a little lemon and an ice cube in each glass of gin.

  Charlie tasted his and made a wry face.

  I tasted mine. "Sour," I said. "I should have left out the lemon. And we better drink them quick before the ice cubes start to melt or they'll be weak."

  "The real purpose," said Charlie, "is—"

  'Wait," I said. "You could be wrong, you know. About the limitations. I'm going to put that headband on and tell Yehudi to bring us Lill and—"

  "Don't be a sap, Hank. I made the thing. I know how it works. You can't get Lill St. Cyr or Esther Williams or Brooklyn Bridge."

  "You're positive?"

  "Of course."

  What a sap I was. I believed him. I mixed two more drinks, using gin and two glasses this time, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed, which was swaying gently from side to side.

  "All right," I said. "I can take it now. What is the real purpose of it?"

  Charlie Swann blinked several times and seemed to be having trouble bringing his eyes into focus on me. He asked, "The real purpose of what?"

  I enunciated slowly and carefully. "Of the automatonic autosuggestive subvibratory superaccelerator. Yehudi, to me."

  "Oh, that," said Charlie.

  "That," I said. 'What is its real purpose?"

  "It's like this. Suppose you got something to do that you've got to do in a hurry. Or something that you've got to do, and don't want to do. You could—"

  "Like writing a story?" I asked.

  "Like writing a story," he said, "or painting a house, or washing a mess of dishes, or shoveling the sidewalk, or . . . or doing anything else you've got to do but don't want to do. Look, you put it on and tell yourself—"

  "Yehudi," I said.

  "Tell Yehudi to do it, and it's done. Sure, you do it, but you don't know that you do, so it doesn't hurt. And it gets done quicker."