The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  "And after that?"

  "After that I got kicked around a while until I started in to do my share of the kicking."

  "That wouldn't have been very long," she said. It wasn't a question and he didn't answer it.

  She said, "I know what crimes they know you committed-without having been able to prove it. I'll say you confessed to them."

  Crag shrugged. "Tell them what you like."

  "Why do you hate women so much?"

  "Is that personal curiosity? Or does it have to go in your report?"

  She smiled. "As a matter of fact, both."

  "I was married at the time I lost my job and my hand and my license. To a girl with hair like yours. Married only a few months and mad about her. Do I have to draw a diagram of what she did to me?"

  She said soberly, "I can guess."

  "You should be able to. You're more beautiful than she. And more evil."

  Her face flamed and for a moment he thought she was going to strike him. But training told, and in seconds she was smiling again.

  She said, "Not evil, Crag. Just ruthless, like you. I try to get what I want. But we're not psyching me, and it's time to end this now. Close your eyes and pretend to be unconscious."

  He did. He heard her walk to the wall and throw the switch that shut off the machine. She came back and reconnected the terminal behind his shoulder, and still he kept his eves closed.

  He'd half-expected it, but it jarred him when it came. It was a kiss that should have wakened a statue, but outwardly he took it with complete passiveness. He kept his own lips still.

  And he hated her the more because the kiss brought to life in him things he'd thought were dead. And he knew that he'd hate her forever and probably kill her when he saw her again if, now, she laughed.

  But she didn't laugh, or even speak. She left the room very quietly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NEW LIFE

  A few minutes later the guards came. Only two of them this time; they weren't afraid of him now. They unstrapped him from the chair and carried him somewhere on a stretcher and rolled him off onto a bed.

  When he was pretty sure that at least half an hour had gone by, he opened his eyes and looked around as though dazed. But the acting had been unnecessary; he was alone in a room. A few minutes later a nurse' looked in and found him sitting up.

  She came on into the room. "How are you feeling, sir?"

  Crag shook his head. He said, "I feel all right, but I can't seem to remember anything. Who I am, or how I got here-wherever here is."

  She smiled at him and sat down on the chair beside the bed. "You've just had the equivalent of an attack of amnesia. That's all I'm supposed to tell you. But as soon as you feel equal to it, we'll send you to a man who will explain everything to you, and help you. Meanwhile, there's nothing for you to worry about. When you feel able to leave, come to the desk in the hall and I'll give you the address and money to get there."

  Crag swung his feet off the bed. "I can go now," he said. But he made his voice sound uncertain.

  "Please lie down and rest a while first. There's no hurry."

  She went out, and Crag lay back down, obediently. He let another half hour pass and then went out into the corridor and to the desk. The nurse looked up at him and handed him a card and a ten-credit note. She said, "Please go to that address before you do anything else. Judge Olliver has a job for you and he will explain about your amnesia and tell you as much as it is necessary for you to know about your past."

  He thanked her and went out, alert to watch his temper if any incident were staged to test him. But none was, although he was, he felt sure, watched to see whether he headed immediately for the atocab stand just outside the building and gave the address he'd been handed on the card-an address he already knew but pretended to read off the card to the cabby.

  Twenty minutes later he walked up to the guard at Olliver's front door and asked if he might see the Judge. "Your name Crag?"

  He almost said yes before he thought. "Sounds silly," he said, "but I don't know my name. I was sent here to find out."

  The guard nodded and let him in. "He's waiting for you," he said. "Second door down the hall."

  Crag entered the small room in which he'd talked to Olliver and Evadne the evening before. Only Oliver was " there now, at the desk.

  "Everything go all right?" he asked.

  Crag threw himself into a chair. "Perfect," he said, "except for two beatings up that weren't on the menu."

  "You should feel it's worth that to be free, Crag. And now-you're still interested in earning that million?"

  "Yes. But the price has gone up."

  Olliver frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean besides that I want you to do a spot of research downtown and get me twelve names, and addresses for each. The six guards who put me in a cell last night and the six-they were different ones-who put me back in the cell after the trial this morning."

  Olliver stared at him a moment and then laughed. He said, "All right, but not till after the job is over. Then if you're fool enough to want to look them up, it's your business, not mine."

  "Which gets us to the job. Where is it, what is it, how long will it take."

  "It's on Mars. We're going there in four days; I can't get away any sooner than that. I told you what it is-a job of burglary, but not a simple one. How long it takes depends on you; I imagine you'll need some preparation, but if you can't do it in a few weeks, you can't do it at all."

  "Fair enough," Crag said. "But if I've got that long to wait, how about an advance?"

  "Again on a condition, Crag. I don't want you to get into any trouble before you've done the job. I want you to stay here. You can send out for anything you want."

  Crag's short nod got him a thousand credits.

  He needed sleep, having got none the night before because of pain from the first, and worst, beating. And every muscle in his body still ached.

  But before he even tried to sleep he sent out for Martian tot, and drank himself into insensibility.

  * * * *

  He slept, then, until late afternoon of the next day. When he woke, he drank the rest of the liquor and then went downstairs, not quite steady on his feet and with his eyes bloodshot and bleary. But under control, mentally.

  And it was probably well that he was, for in the downstairs hallway, he encountered Evadne for the first time since his return to Olliver's. She glanced at him and took in his condition, then passed him without speaking and with a look of cold contempt that-well, if he hadn't been under control mentally.

  The next day he was sober, and stayed that way. He told himself he hated Evadne too much to let her see him otherwise. And after that he spent most of his time reading. He had breakfast and lunch alone, but ate dinner with Olliver and Evadne, and spent part of the evening with them.

  He didn't mention the job again; it was up to Olliver, he thought, to bring that up. And Oliver did, on the evening of the third day.

  He said, "We're going to Mars tomorrow, Crag. Forgot to ask you one thing. Can you pilot a Class AB space cruiser, or do I hire us a pilot?"

  "I can handle one."

  "You're sure? It's space-warp drive, you know. As I understand it, the last slip you worked on was rocket."

  Crag said, "The last ship I flew legally was rocket. But how about a license, unless you want to land in a back alley on Mars?"

  "You're licensed. If a license is invalidated for any reason other than incompetency, it's automatically renewed if you've been readjusted through the psycher. And today I picked up a stet of your license and a copy of the psycher certificate. After I got them, though, I remembered I didn't know whether you could handle space-warp."

  Evadne said, "It doesn't matter, Jon. I'm licensed; I can handle the cruiser."

  "I know, my dear. But I've told you; I do not think it safe to travel in space with only one person who is qualified to pilot the ship. Perhaps I'm ultra-conservative, but why take unnec
essary risks?"

  Crag asked, "Ready now to tell me about the job?"

  "Yes. When we reach Mars, we'll separate. Evadne and I will stay in Marsport until you have accomplished your mission."

  "Which is to be done where?"

  "You've heard of Kurt Eisen?"

  "The one who helped develop space-warp?"

  "That's the one. He has his laboratory and home just outside Marsport. He's fabulously wealthy; it's a tremendous estate. About eighty employees, thirty of them armed guards. The place is like a fortress. It'll almost have to be an inside job-another good reason why you couldn't have handled it without a psycher certificate."

  Crag nodded. "At least it will be easier if I can get in. And just what am I looking for after I get there?"

  "A device that looks like a flat pocket flashlight. Blued steel cast. Lens in the center of one end, just like an atomic flashlight, but the lens is green and opaque-opaque to light, that is."

  "You've seen it?"

  "No. The party's source of information is a technician who used to work for Eisen. He's now a member of the party. He worked with Eisen in developing it, but can't make one by himself; he wasn't fully in Eisen's confidence-just allowed to help with details of design. Oh, and if you can get the plans, it'll help. We can duplicate the original, but it'll be easier from the plans. And one other thing. Don't try it out."

  "All right," Crag said, "I won't try it out-on one condition. That you tell me what it is and what it does. Otherwise, my curiosity might get the better of me."

  Olliver frowned, but he answered. "It's a disintegrator. It's designed to negate the-well, I'm not up on atomic theory, so I can't give it to you technically. But it negates the force that holds the electrons to the nucleus. In effect, it collapses matter into neutronium."

  Crag whistled softly. "And you say it's an ineffective weapon?"

  "Yes, because its range is so short. The size needed increases as the cube of the cube of the distance-or something astronomical like that. The one you're after works up to three feet. To make one that would work at a hundred feet it would have to be bigger than a house. And for a thousand feet-well, there aren't enough of the necessary raw materials in the Solar System to build one; it would have to be the size of a small planet. And besides, there's a time lag. The ray from the disintegrator sets up a chain reaction in any reasonably homogeneous object it's aimed at, but it takes seconds to get it started. So if you shoot at somebody-at a few feet distance-they're dead all right, but they've got time to kill you before they find it out." Olliver smiled. "Your left hand is much more effective, Crag, and has about the same range."

  "Then why is it worth a million credits to you?"

  "I told you, the by-product. Neutronium."

  Crag had heard of neutronium; every spaceman knew that some of the stars were made of almost completely collapsed matter weighting a dozen tons to the cubic inch. Dwarf stars, the size of Earth and the weight of the sun. But no such collapsed matter existed in the Solar System. Not that there was any reason why it shouldn't-if a method had been found to make atoms pack themselves solidly together. Pure neutronium would be unbelievably heavy, heavier than the center of any known star.

  "Neutronium," he said, thoughtfully. "But what would you use it for? How could you handle it? Wouldn't it sink through anything you tried to hold it in and come to rest at the center of the earth-or whatever planet you made it on?"

  "You're smart, Crag. It would. You couldn't use it for weighting chessmen. I know how to capitalize on it-but that's one thing I don't think you have to know. Although I may tell you later, after you've turned over the disintegrator."

  Crag shrugged. It wasn't his business, after all. A million credits was enough for him, and let Olliver and his party capitalize on neutronium however they wished. He asked, "Did this technician who worked for Eisen give you a diagram of the place?"

  Olliver opened a drawer of the desk and handed Crag an envelope.

  Crag spent the rest of the evening studying its contents.

  * * * *

  They took off from Albuquerque spaceport the following afternoon and landed on Mars a few hours later. As soon as the cruiser was hangared, they separated, Crag presumably quitting his job with Olliver. He promised to report in not more than two weeks.

  A man named Lane Knutson, was his first objective. He had full details about Knutson and an excellent description of him; that had been an important part of the contents of the envelope he had studied the final evening on Earth. Knutson was the head guard at Eisen's place and did the hiring of the other guards. According to Crag's information, he hung out, in his off hours, in spacemen's dives in the tough section of Marsport.

  Crag hung out there, too, but spent his time circulating from place to place instead of settling down in any one. He found Knutson on the third day. He couldn't have missed him, from the description. Knutson was six feet six and weighed two hundred ninety. He had arms like an ape and the strength and disposition of a Venusian draatr.

  Crag might have made friends with him in the normal manner, but he took a short cut by picking a quarrel. With Knutson's temper, the distance between a quarrel and a fight was about the same as the distance between adjacent grapes under pressure in a wine press.

  Crag let himself get the worst of it for a minute or two, so Knutson wouldn't feel too bad about it, and then used his left hand twice, very lightly, pulling his punches. Once in the guts to bend the big man over, and then a light flick to the side of the jaw, careful not to break bone. Knutson was out cold for five minutes.

  After that, they had a drink together and got chummy. Within half an hour Crag had admitted that he was looking for a job-and was promptly offered one.

  He reported for work the following day and, after Knutson had shown him around, he was glad he hadn't decided to try the outside. The place really was a for-tress. A twenty-foot-high electronic barrier around the outside; inside that, worse things. But it didn't matter, since he was already inside. Even so, he had to undergo a strenuous physical and verbal examination and Olliver had been right about the psycher certificate; without it, he'd have been out on his ear within an hour.

  He spent the next five days learning all the ropes. He knew where the big safe was-in the laboratory. But he wanted to learn the position of every guard and every alarm between the room in which he slept and the laboratory itself. Fortunately, he was given a day shift.

  On the fifth night he made his way to the laboratory and found himself facing the blank sheet of durasteel that was the door of the safe. All his information about that safe was that the lock was magnetic and that there were two alarms.

  He'd brought nothing with him-all employees were searched on their way in as well as on their way out-but all the materials he needed to make anything he wanted were there at hand in the laboratory. He made himself a detector and traced two pairs of wires through the walls from the safe into adjacent rooms and found the two alarms-both hidden inside air ducts-to which they were connected. He disconnected both alarms and then went back to the safe. On Eisen's desk near it, he'd noticed a little horseshoe magnet-a toy-that was apparently used as a paperweight. He got the hunch (which saved him much time) that, held in the proper position against that sheet of steel-six by six feet square-it would open the door.

  And, unless it was exactly at one corner, there'd have to be a mark on the door to show where the magnet was to be held. The durasteel door made it easy for him; there weren't any accidental marks or scratches on it to confuse him. Only an almost imperceptible fly-speck about a foot to the right of the center. But fly-specks scrape off and this mark didn't-besides, there are no flies on Mars.

  He tried the magnet in various positions about the speck and when he tried holding it with both poles pointing upward and the speck exactly between them, the door swung open.

  The safe-it was a vault, really, almost six feet square and ten or twelve feet deep-contained so many things that it was almost harder to find wha
t he was looking for than it had been to open the safe. But he found it. Luckily, there was a tag attached to it with a key number which made it easy to find the plans for the disintegrator in the file drawers at the back of the safe.

  He took both disintegrator and plans to the workbenches of the laboratory. Eisen couldn't possibly have provided better equipment for a burglar who wished to leave a possible duplicate of whatever object he wanted to steal. And he'd even provided a perfectly sound-proofed laboratory so even the noisier of the power-tools could be used safely. Within an hour, Crag had made what, outwardly, was a reasonably exact duplicate of the flashlight-sized object he was stealing. It didn't have any insides in it, and it wouldn't have disintegrated anything except the temper of a man who tried to use it, but it looked good. He put the tag from the real one on it and replaced it in the proper drawer in the safe.

  He spent a little longer than that forging a duplicate of the plans. Not quite a duplicate; he purposely varied a few things so that no one except Eisen himself could make a successful disintegrator from them.

  He spent another hour removing every trace of his visit. He reconnected the alarms, removed every trace-except a minute shortage of stock-of his work in the laboratory, made sure that every tool was restored to place, and put back the toy magnet on the exact spot and at the exact angle on Eisen's desk that it had been before.

  When he left the laboratory there was nothing to indicate that he had been there-unless Eisen should ever again decide to try out his disintegrator. And since he had tried it once and presumably discarded it as practically useless, that didn't seem likely.

  There remained only the obstacle of getting it out of the grounds, and that was simple. One large upstairs room was a museum which held Eisen's collection of artifacts of the Martian aborigines. Crag had seen several primitive bows and quivers of arrows. He wrapped and fastened the plans around the shaft of a long, strong arrow and securely tied the disintegrator to its crude metal head. He went on up to the roof and shot the arrow high into the air over the electronic barrier and the strip of cleared ground outside it, into the thick jungle beyond.