The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  Kallana considered well, for the safety of his people was at stake. Considering, he remembered how Alwa and Nrana had died.

  He said, "It is right."

  The waiting drummer began the rhythm of the council-end, and those of the men who were young and fleet lighted torches in the fire and went out into the forest to seek the kifs, who were still in their season of marching.

  And after a while, having found what they sought, they returned.

  They took the Earthling out with them, then, and tied him to a tree. They left him there, and they left the gag over his lips because they did not wish to hear his screams when the kifs came.

  The cloth of the gag would be eaten, too, but by that time, there would be no flesh under it from which a scream might come.

  They left him, and went back to the compound, and the drums took up the rhythm of propitiation to the gods for what they had done. For they had, they knew, cut very close to the corner of a tabu—but the provocation had been great and they hoped they would not be punished.

  All night the drums would throb.

  * * *

  The man tied to the tree struggled with his bonds, but they were strong and his writhings made the knots but tighten.

  His eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

  He tried to shout, "I am Number One, Lord of—"

  And then, because he could not shout and because he could not loosen himself, there came a rift in his madness. He remembered who he was, and all the old hatreds and bitterness welled up in him.

  He remembered, too, what had happened in the compound, and wondered why the Venusian natives had not killed him. Why, instead, they had tied him here alone in the darkness of the jungle.

  Afar, he heard the throbbing of the drums, and they were like the beating of the heart of night, and there was a louder, nearer sound that was the pulse of blood in his ears as the fear came to him.

  The fear that he knew why they had tied him here. The horrible, gibbering fear that, for the last time, an army marched against him.

  He had time to savor that fear to the uttermost, to have it become a creeping certainty that crawled into the black corners of his soul as would the soldiers of the coming army crawl into his ears and nostrils while others would eat away his eyelids to get at the eyes behind them.

  And then, and only then, did he hear the sound that was like the rustle of dry leaves, in a dank, black jungle where there were no dry leaves to rustle nor breeze to rustle them.

  Horribly, Number One, the last of the dictators, did not go mad again; not exactly, but he laughed, and laughed and laughed....

  SOMETHING GREEN

  The big sun was crimson in a violet sky. At the edge of the brown plain, dotted with brown bushes, lay the red jungle.

  McGarry strode toward it. It was tough work and dangerous work, searching in those red jungles, but it had to be done. And he'd searched a thousand of them; this was just one more.

  He said, "Here we go, Dorothy. All set?"

  The little five-limbed creature that rested on his shoulder didn't answer, but then it never did. It couldn't talk, but it was something to talk to. It was company. In size and weight it felt amazingly like a hand resting on his shoulder.

  He'd had Dorothy for . . . How long? At a guess, four years. He'd been here about five, as nearly as he could reckon it, and it had been about a year before he'd found her. Anyway, he assumed Dorothy was of the gentler sex, if for no other reason than the gentle way she rested on his shoulder, like a woman's hand.

  "Dorothy," he said, "reckon we'd better get ready for trouble. Might be lions or tigers in there."

  He unbuckled his sol-gun holster and let his hand rest on the butt of the weapon, ready to draw it quickly. For the thousandth time, at least, he thanked his lucky stars that the weapon he'd managed to salvage from the wreckage of his spacer had been a sol-gun, the one and only weapon that worked practically forever without refills or ammunition. A sol-gun merely needed exposure to the rays of a sun—any bright and close sun—for an hour or two a day; it soaked up energy. And, when you pulled the trigger, it dished it out. With any weapon but a sol-gun, he'd never have lasted five years here on Kruger III.

  Yes, even before he quite reached the edge of the red jungle, he saw a lion. Nothing like any lion ever seen on Earth, of course. This one was bright magenta, just enough different in color from the purplish bushes it crouched behind so that he could see it. It had eight legs, all jointless and as supple and strong as an elephant's trunk, and a scaly head with a bill like a toucan's.

  McGarry called it a lion. He had as much right to call it that as anything else, because it had never been named. Or if it had, the namer had never returned to Earth to report on the flora and fauna of Kruger III. Only one spacer had ever landed here before McGarry's, as far as the records showed, and it had never taken off again. He was looking for it now; he'd been looking for it systematically for the five years he'd been here.

  If he found it, it might—just barely might—contain, intact, some of the electronic tubes which had been smashed in the crash landing of his own spacer. And if it did, he could get back to Earth.

  He stopped ten paces short of the edge of the red jungle and aimed the sol-gun at the bushes behind which the lion crouched. He pulled the trigger, and there was a bright green flash, brief but beautiful—oh, so beautiful—and then the bushes weren't there any more, nor was the eight-legged lion.

  McGarry chuckled softly. "Did you see that, Dorothy? That was green, the one color you don't have on this bloody red planet of yours. The most beautiful color in the universe, Dorothy. Green! And I know where there's a world that's mostly green, and we're going to get there, you and I. Sure we are. It's the world I came from, and it's the most beautiful place there is, Dorothy. You'll love it."

  He turned and looked back over the brown plain with brown bushes, the violet sky above, the crimson sun. The eternally crimson sun Kruger, the sun that never set on the day side of this planet, which always faced it as one side of Earth's moon always faces Earth.

  No day and night—unless one passed the shadow line into the night side, which was too freezingly cold to sustain life. No seasons. A uniform, never-changing temperature, no wind, no storms.

  He thought for the thousandth—or the millionth —time that it wouldn't be a bad planet to live on, if only it were green like Earth, if only there was something green upon it besides the occasional flash of his sol-gun. Breathable atmosphere, moderate temperature—ranging from about forty Fahrenheit near the shadow line to about ninety at the point directly under the red sun, where its rays were straight instead of slanting. Plenty of food, and he'd learned long ago which plants and animals were, for him, edible, and which made him ill. Nothing he'd tried was poisonous.

  Yes, a wonderful world. He'd even got used, by now, to the solitude of being the only intelligent creature on it. Dorothy was helpful, there. Something to talk to, even if she didn't talk back.

  Except—Oh, God—he wanted to see a green world again.

  Earth, the only planet in the universe where green was the predominant color, where plant life was based on chlorophyll.

  Other planets, even in the solar system, Earth's neighbors, had no more to offer than greenish streaks in rare rocks, an occasional tiny life-form of a shade that might be brownish green if you wanted to call it that. Why, you could live years on any planet but Earth, anywhere in the system, and never see green.

  McGarry sighed. He'd been thinking to himself, but now he thought out loud, to Dorothy, continuing his thoughts without a break. It didn't matter to Dorothy. "Yes, Dorothy," he said, "it's the only planet worth living on—Earth! Green fields, grassy lawns, green trees. Dorothy, I'll never leave it again, once I get back there, I'll build me a shack out in the woods, in the middle of trees, but not trees so thick that grass doesn't grow under them. Green grass. I'll paint the shack green, Dorothy. We've even got green pigments back on Earth."

  He sighed and looked a
t the red jungle ahead of him.

  "What's that you asked, Dorothy?" She hadn't asked anything but it was a game to pretend that she talked back. A game that helped him to keep sane. "Will I get married when I get back? Is that what you asked?"

  He gave it consideration. "Well, it's like this, Dorothy. Maybe and maybe not. You were named after a woman back on Earth, you know. A woman I was going to marry. But five years is a long time, Dorothy. I've been reported missing and presumed dead. I doubt if she's waited this long. If she has, well, yes, I'll marry her, Dorothy.”

  "Did you ask, what if she hasn't? Well, I don't know. Let's not worry about that till we get back, huh? Of course, if I could find a woman who was green, or even one with green hair, I'd love her to pieces. But on Earth, almost everything is green except the women."

  He chuckled at that and, sol-gun ready, went on into the jungle, the red jungle that had nothing green except the occasional flash of his sol-gun.

  Funny about that. Back on Earth a sol-gun flashed blue. Here under a red sun it flashed green when he fired it. But the explanation was simple enough. A sol-gun drew energy from a nearby star and the flash it made when fired was the complementary color of its source of energy. Drawing energy from Sol, a yellow sun, it flashed blue. From Kruger, a red sun, green.

  Maybe that, he thought, had been the one thing, aside from Dorothy's company, that had kept him sane. A flash of green several times a day. Something green to remind him what the color was. To keep his eye attuned to it, if he ever saw it again.

  It turned out to be a small patch of jungle, as patches went on Kruger III. One of what seemed countless millions of such patches. And maybe it really was millions; Kruger III was larger than Jupiter. Actually it might take more than a lifetime to cover it all. He knew that, but he didn't let himself think about it. It might be bad if he once let himself doubt that he would ever find the wreckage of the only ship that had ever preceded him here. Or if he let himself doubt that, once he found the ship, he would find the parts he needed to make his own spacer operative again.

  This patch of jungle was a mile square but it was so dense that he had to sleep once and eat several times before he had finished it. He killed two more lions and one tiger. And when he had finished, he walked around the circumference of it, blazing each of the largest of the trees along the outer rim so he wouldn't repeat by searching this particular jungle again. The trees were soft; his pocket knife took off the red bark down to the pink core as easily as it would have taken the skin off a potato.

  Then out across the dull brown plain again.

  "Not that one, Dorothy. Maybe the next. The one over there, just on the horizon. Maybe it's there."

  Violet sky, red sun, brown plain, brown bushes

  "The green hills of Earth, Dorothy. Oh how you'll love them—"

  The brown endless plain.

  The never-changing violet sky.

  Was there a sound up there? There couldn't be. There never had been. But he looked up, and saw it.

  A tiny black speck high in the violet. Moving. A spacer. It had to be a spacer. There were no birds on Kruger III. And birds didn't trail jets of fire behind them—

  He knew what to do; he'd thought of it a million times, how he could signal a spacer if one ever came in sight. He yanked his sol-gun from the holster, aimed it straight in the violet air, and pulled the trigger. It didn't make a big flash, from the distance of the spacer, but it made a green flash. If the pilot were only looking, or if he would only look before he got out of sight, he couldn't miss a green flash on a world with no other green.

  He pulled the trigger again.

  And the pilot of the spacer saw. He cut and fired his jets three times—the standard answer to a signal of distress—and began to circle.

  McGarry stood there trembling. So long a wait, and so sudden an end to it. He put his hand on his left shoulder and touched the little five-legged pet that felt, to his fingers as well as to his naked shoulder, so like a woman's hand.

  "Dorothy," he said. "It's—" He ran out of words.

  The spacer was circling in for a landing now. McGarry looked down at himself, suddenly ashamed at the way he would look to his rescuer. His body was naked except for the belt that held his holster and from which dangled his knife and a few other tools. He was dirty and he probably smelled. And under the dirt his body looked thin and wasted, almost old; but that was due, of course, to diet deficiencies; a few months of proper food—Earth food —would take care of that.

  Earth! The green hills of Earth!

  He ran now, stumbling sometimes in his eagerness, toward the point where he saw the spacer landing. It was low now, and he could see that it was a one-man job, as his had been. But that was all right; a one-man spacer can carry two in an emergency, at least as far as the nearest habitated planet where he could get other transportation back to Earth. To the green hills, the green fields, the green valleys

  He prayed a little and swore a little as he ran. There were tears running down his cheeks.

  He was there, waiting, as the door opened and a tall slender young man in the uniform of the Space Patrol stepped out

  "You'll take me back?"

  "Of course," said the young man. "Been here long?"

  "Five years!" McGarry knew he was crying now, but he couldn't stop.

  "Good Lord!" said the young man. "I'm Lieutenant Archer, Space Patrol. Of course I'll take you back, man. We'll leave as soon as my jets cool enough for a take-off. I'll take you as far as Carthage, on Aldebaran II, anyway; you can get a ship out of there for anywhere. Need anything right away? Food? Water?"

  McGarry shook his head dumbly. His knees felt weak. Food, water—what did such things matter now?

  The green hills of Earth! He was going back to them. That was what mattered, and all that mattered. So long a wait, so sudden an ending. He saw the violet sky suddenly swimming then it went black as his knees buckled under him.

  He was lying flat and the young man was holding a flask to his lips and he took a long draught of the fiery stuff it held. He sat up and felt better. He looked to make sure that the spacer was still there and he felt wonderful.

  The young man said, "Buck up, old timer; we'll be off in half an hour. You'll be in Carthage in six hours. Want to talk, till you get your bearing again? Want to tell me all about it, everything that's happened?"

  They sat in the shadow of a brown bush, and McGarry told him about it. Everything about it. The landing, his ship smashed past repair. The five-year search for the other ship he'd read had crashed on the same planet and which might have intact the parts he needed to repair his own ship. The long search. About Dorothy, perched on his shoulder, and how she'd been something to talk to.

  But, somehow, the face of Lieutenant Archer was changing as McGarry talked. It grew even more solemn, even more compassionate.

  "Old-timer," Archer said gently, "what year was it when you came here?"

  McGarry saw it coming. How can you keep track of time on a planet whose sun and seasons are unchanging? A planet of eternal day, eternal summer.

  He said flatly, "I came here in forty-two. How much have I misjudged, Lieutenant? How old am I —instead of thirty, as I've thought?"

  "It's twenty-two seventy-two, McGarry. You came here thirty years ago. You're fifty-five. But don't let that worry you too much. Medical science has advanced. You've still got a long time to live."

  McGarry said it softly. "Fifty-five. Thirty years."

  Lieutenant Archer looked at him pityingly. He said, "Old-timer, do you want it all in a lump, all the rest of the bad news? There are several items of it. I'm no psychologist, but I think maybe it's best for you to take it now, all at once, while you can throw in the scale against it the fact that you're going back. Can you take it, McGarry?"

  There couldn't be anything worse than he'd learned already—the fact that thirty years of his life had been wasted here. Sure, he could take the rest of it—as long as he was getting back to Earth, green Eart
h.

  He stared up at the violet sky, the red sun, the brown plain. He said quietly, "I can take it, Lieutenant. Dish it out."

  "You've done wonderfully for thirty years, McGarry. You can thank God for the fact that you believed Marley's spacer crashed on Kruger III. It wasn't Kruger III; it was Kruger IV. You'd never have found it here, but the search, as you say, kept you—reasonably sane." He paused a moment. His voice was gentle when he spoke again. "There isn't anything on your shoulder, McGarry. This Dorothy has been a figment of your imagination. But don't worry about it; that particular delusion has probably kept you from cracking up completely."

  Slowly McGarry put his hand to his left shoulder. It touched—his shoulder. Nothing else.

  Archer said, "My God, man, it's marvelous that you're otherwise okay. Thirty years alone; it's almost a miracle. And if your one delusion persists, now that I've told you it is a delusion, a psychiatrist back at Carthage or on Mars can fix you up in a jiffy.”

  McGarry said dully, "It doesn't persist. It isn't there now. I—I'm not even sure, Lieutenant, that I ever did believe in Dorothy. I think I made her up on purpose, to talk to, so I'd remain sane except for that. She was—she was like a woman's hand, Lieutenant. Or did I tell you that?"

  "You told me. Want the rest of it now, McGarry?"

  McGarry stared at him. "The rest of it? What rest can there be? I'm fifty-five instead of thirty. I've spent thirty years—since I was twenty-five—hunting for a spacer I'd never have found because it was on another planet. I've been crazy—in one way, but only one—most of that time. But none of that matters, now that I can go back to Earth."

  Lieutenant Archer was shaking his head slowly. "Not back to Earth, old-timer. To Mars, if you wish, the beautiful brown and yellow hills of Mars. Or, if you don't mind heat, to purple Venus. But not to Earth, old-timer. Nobody lives there now."

  "Earth—is—gone? I don't—"

  "Not gone, McGarry. It's there. But it's black and barren, a charred ball. The war with the Arcturians, twenty years ago. They struck first, and got Earth. We got them, we won, we exterminated them, but Earth was gone before we started. I'm sorry, old-timer, but you'll have to settle for somewhere else."