The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  “Under the circumstances, Wunderly, do you think it was an accident?”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  Darius Hill sighed. “You are being deliberately obtuse, my young friend. It is beyond probability that two accidental deaths should occur so closely spaced, among a group of seventeen people living in non-hazardous circumstances.”

  “Sixteen people,” I corrected.

  “No, seventeen. I see you made a tabulation but that it was made after Elsie's death so you didn't count her. But if you figure it that way, you'll have to deduct one for Otto and call it fifteen. There are now fifteen living, two dead.”

  “If you heard that scream, why didn't you go downstairs? Or did you?”

  “I did not. There were able bodied men down there to do anything that needed doing. More able-bodied, I might say, than I. I preferred to sit here in quiet thought, knowing that sooner or later someone would come to tell me what happened. As you have done.”

  The man puzzled me. Professing an interest in crime, he could sit placidly in his room while murders were being done, lacking the curiosity to investigate at first hand.

  He pursed his lips. “You countered my question with another, so I'll ask it again. Do you think Schley's death was accidental?”

  I answered honestly. “I don't know what to think. There hasn't been time to think. Things happened so---”

  His dry chuckle interrupted me. “Does not that answer your question as to why I stayed in this room? You rushed downstairs and have been rushing about ever since, without time to think. I sat here quietly and thought. There was nothing I could learn downstairs that I cannot learn now, from you. Have a drink and tell all.”

  I grinned, and reached for the bottle and glass. The more I saw of Darius Hill, the less I knew whether I liked him or not. I believed that I could like him well enough if I took him in sufficiently small doses.

  “Shall I pour one for you?” I asked him.

  “You may. An excellent precaution, Wunderly.”

  “Precaution?” I asked. “I don't understand.”

  “Did I underestimate you? Too bad. I thought you suspected the possibility of my having poisoned the whiskey in your absence. It is quite possible---as far as you know---that I am the murderer. And that you are the next victim.”

  He picked up the glass I handed to him and held it to the light. “Caution, in a situation like this, is the essence of survival. Will you trade glasses with me, Wunderly?”

  I looked at him closely to see whether or not he was serious. He was.

  He said, “You turned to the bureau to pour this. Your back was toward me. It is possible--- You see what I mean?”

  Yes, he was dead serious. And, staring at his face, I saw something else that I had not suspected until now. The man was frightened. Desperately frightened.

  And, suddenly, I realized what was wrong with Darius Hill.

  I brought a clean glass and the whiskey bottle from the bureau and handed it to him. I said, “I'll drink both the ones I poured, if I may. And you may pour yourself a double one to match these two.”

  Gravely, Darius Hill filled the glass from the bottle.

  “A toast,” I said and clinked my glass to his. “To necrophobia.”

  Glass half upraised to his lips, he stared at me. He said, “Now I am afraid of you. You're clever. You're the first one that's guessed.”

  I hadn't been clever, really. It was obvious, when one put the facts together. Darius Hill's refusal to go near the scene of a crime, despite his specialization in the study of murder---in theory.

  Necrophobia; fear of death, fear of the dead. The very depth of that fear would make murder---on paper---a subject of morbid and abnormal fascination for him.

  To some extent, his phobia accounted for his garrulity; he talked incessantly to cover fear. And he made himself deliberately eccentric in other directions so that the underlying cause of his true eccentricity would be concealed from his colleagues.

  We drank. Darius Hill, very subdued for the first time since I'd met him, suggested another. But the double one had been enough for me. I declined, and left him.

  In the corridor I heard the bolt of his door slide noisily home into its socket.

  I headed for my own room but heard footsteps coming up the stairs. It was Charlie coming down the hallway toward me. His face look gaunt and terrible. What would have been pallor in a white man made his face a grayish tan.

  He saw me and held out his right hand, palm upward. Something lay in it, something I could not identify at first. Then, as he came closer, I saw that it was the rattle from a rattlesnake's tail.

  He smiled mirthlessly. “Bill,” he said, “Lord help the astronomers on a night like this. Somebody's got a rattlesnake that won't give warning before it strikes. Better take your bed apart tonight before you get into it.”

  “Come in and talk a while,” I suggested, opening my door.

  Charlie Lightfoot shook his head. “Be glad to talk, but let's KO up on the roof. I need fresh air. I feel as though I'd been pulled through a keyhole.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but first shall we---”

  “Have a drink?” he finished for me. “We shall not. Or rather, I shall not. That's what's wrong with me at the moment, Bill. Sobering up.”

  We were climbing the steps to the roof now. Charlie opened I lie door at the top and said, “This breeze feels good. May blow the alky fumes out of my brain. Look at that dome in the moonlight, will you? Looks like a blasted mosque. Well, why not? An observatory is a sort of mosque on the cosmic scale, where the devotees worship Betelgeuse and Antares, burning parsecs for incense and chanting litanies from an ephemeris.”

  “Sure you're sober?” I asked him.

  “I've got to be sober; that's what's wrong. I was two-thirds pie-eyed when Otto--- Say, thanks for closing that garage door. You kept most of them in. I didn't dare take time to go out, because of Otto.”

  I asked, “Was it murder, Charlie? Or could the box have come apart accidentally if Otto moved it?”

  “Those boxes were nailed shut, Bill. Someone took the four nails out of the lid of one of them, with a nail-puller. Then the box was stood on end leaning against the door, with the lid on the under side and the weight of the box holding the lid on. Otto must have heard it fall when he went in but must not have guessed what it was.”

  “How many of the snakes did you find?”

  “You kept seventeen of them in the garage when you slammed the door. I got two more in the grass near the door. That leaves eleven that got away, and I'll have to hunt for them as soon as it's light. That's why I've got to sober up. And, dammit, sobering up from the point I'd reached does things to you that a hangover can't touch.”

  I said, “Well, at last there's definite proof of murder, anyway. Do you think the trap was set for Otto Schley, or could it have been for someone else? Is he the only one who would normally have gone to the garage?”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes. He always makes a round of the buildings before he turns in. Nobody else would be likely to, at night.”

  “You know everybody around here pretty well,” I said. “Tell me something about--- Well, about Lecky.”

  “Brilliant astronomer, but rather narrow-minded and intolerant.”

  “That's bad for Paul Bailey,” I said. “I mean, now that the cat's out of the bag about his affair with Elsie. You think Lecky will fire him?”

  “Oh, no. Lecky will overlook that. He doesn't expect his assistants to be saints. I meant that he's intolerant of people who disagree with him on astronomical matters. Tell him you think there isn't sufficient proof of the period-luminosity law for Cepheid variables---and you'd better duck. And he's touchy as hell about personal remarks. Very little sense of humor.”

  “He and Fillmore get along all right?”

  “Fairly well. Fillmore's a solar system man, and Lecky doesn't know there's anything closer than a parsec away. They ignore each other's work. Fillmore's always grousing b
ecause he doesn't get much time with the scope.”

  I strolled over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it, looking down into the shadow of the building on the ground below. Somewhere down there, eleven rattlesnakes were at large. Eleven? Or was it ten? Had the murderer brought the silent one, the de-rattled one, into the building with him?

  And if so, for whom?

  “For you, maybe,” said Charlie.

  Startled, I turned to look at him.

  He was grinning. “Simple, my dear Wunderly---as my friend Darius Hill would say. I could almost hear you taking a mental census of rattlesnakes when you looked down there. And the next thing you'd wonder about was obvious. No, I haven't a detective complex like Darius has. How do you like Darius, by the way?”

  “He could be taken in too large doses,” I admitted. “Charlie, what do you know about Eric Andressen?”

  “Not much. He's rather a puzzle. Smart all right but I think In: missed his bent. He should have been an artist or a musician instead of a scientist. Just the opposite of Paul Bailey.”

  “Is Bailey good?”

  “Good? He's a wiz in his field. He can think circles around the other assistants---even your Annabel.”

  “What's Bailey's specialty?”

  “He's going to be an astrochemist. After university, he worked five years as research man in a commercial chem lab before he got into astronomy. I guess it was Zoe and her father who got him interested in chemistry on the cosmic scale. He knew Zoe at university. They were engaged.”

  I whistled. “Then this Elsie business must have hit Zoe pretty hard, didn't it?”

  “Not at all. Bailey came here about eight months ago, and his engagement with Zoe lasted only a month after he came. And it was mutual; they just decided they'd made a mistake. And I guess they had at that. Their temperaments weren't suited to one another at all.”

  “And they're still on friendly terms?”

  “Completely. What animosity there is seems to be between Bailey and Fillmore, instead of between Bailey and Zoe. Fillmore didn't like their decision to break the engagement and he seemed to blame Paul for it, although I'm pretty sure the original decision was Zoe's. They're still cool toward one another---Paul and Fillmore, I mean. But for other reasons.”

  “What kind of reasons?” I asked.

  “Well---professional ones, in a way. I don't know the whole story but Fillmore was very friendly toward Paul when Paul and Zoe were engaged. He is really the one who persuaded Paul to come here as an assistant. And talked the board of regents, back in Los Angeles, into hiring Paul.

  “Then he had a reaction when the engagement was broken. I think he tried to undermine Paul then and to get him fired. At any rate, he threatened to do it.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Sounds as though Fillmore isn't quite the disinterested scientist at heart.”

  “There may be something on his side,” said Charlie. “Fillmore himself isn't too popular with Lecky and with the regents. And he thinks, rightly or wrongly, that Paul Bailey is shooting for his, Fillmore's, job. If so, it's quite possible Paul will succeed. He's got an ingratiating personality and he knows how to rub Lecky the right way.”

  “Who has the say-so on hiring and firing---the director or the regents?”

  “The regents, really. But under ordinary circumstances, they'd take Lecky's advice.”

  I glanced at the luminous dial of my wrist watch. “Getting late,” I said. “If you're going to hunt those rattlesnakes at dawn, hadn't you better get some sleep?”

  “Don't think I'll sleep tonight. It's too late, now, to turn in. And anyway--- Oh, hell, I just don't want to sleep. I'm too jittery.”

  Chapter 6

  Design for Dying

  Back in my room, I picked up the manuscript of the book Hill had given me. I was beginning to get a bit sleepy and “The Murderer's Guide” ought to affect that, one way or the other. I didn't care which way. If it made me sleepy, I'd sleep.

  It started out slowly, dully. I was surprised, because the random paragraphs I had read previously had been far from dull. In fact, they'd been uneasy reading in a place where murder had just been done.

  But, before I became really sleepy, I reached the second chapter. It was entitled “The Thrill of Killing; a Study in Atavism.”

  And here Darius really started to ride his hobby and to become eloquent about it. Man, he said, survived his early and precarious days by being a specialist in the art of killing. He killed to live, to cat, to obtain clothing in the form of furs. Killing was a necessary and natural function.

  “Man,” Darius wrote, “has a gruesomely long heritage of murder. Nationalities, government, and progress are based upon it. The first inventions that raised man above the lesser beasts who were stronger than he, were means of murder---the club, the spear, the missile. . . .

  “Is it any wonder, then, that in most of us survives an atavistic tendency to kill? In many it is rationalized as a desire to indulge in the murder-sports of hunting and fishing.

  “But occasionally this atavistic impulse breaks through to the surface in its original, primitive violence. Often the first step is an unintended slaying. The murderer, without really intending to do so, or forced to do so by circumstances beyond his control, has tasted blood. And blood, to a creature with man's heritage, can be more heady than wine. . . .”

  And his third chapter was “The Mass Murderer; Artist of Crime.”

  A clever man who kills many, Hill wrote, is less likely to be caught and punished than one who commits a single crime. He gave a host of instances---uncaught and unpunished Jack-the-Rippers.

  A single crime, he said, is almost always a strongly motivated one, and motivation gives it away. If a killer kills only for deep-lying cause, the motive can almost invariably be traced back to him and proved. On the contrary, a man who kills for the most casual and light of reasons is far less likely to be suspected of his crimes.

  “The indigent heir who kills for a fortune, the betrayed husband who slays, the victim who kills his blackmailer---all these act from the most obvious of motives and are therefore doomed from the start, no matter how subtle the actual methods they use. The man who puts nicotine in another man's coffee merely because the latter is a bore, is far more likely to remain free.

  “Taking advantage of this, the clever killer will often extend his crime from a single one to a series, one or more of which are, by design, completely without motive. Confronted with such a series, the police are helpless to use their usual effective methods.”

  There was more, much more, in this vein. Case after case quoted, most of them solved, if at all, only by a voluntary confession years after the crimes. Case after case of series of crimes which have never been solved to this day.

  And suddenly, as I read something came to my mind with a shock.

  Undoubtedly the murderer, the man or woman who had killed Elsie Willis and Otto Schley had read this very book. Was using it, in fact, as a blueprint for murder. . . .

  There was a soft rap on my door. I said “Come in,” and Charlie Lightfoot stuck his head in the doorway.

  He said, “Come on down to the kitchen for coffee, Bill.”

  “Huh? At this time of night?”

  Charlie grinned. “Night is day in an observatory, Bill. These guys never go to bed till later than this in seeing weather. Even in bad weather they stay up late out of habit. They always have coffee around this time.”

  Coffee sounded good, now that Hill's book had made me wakeful again. I said, “Sure, I'll be down in a minute,” and Charlie went on.

  I put on slippers instead of replacing my shoes, and put the manuscript away in a drawer of the bureau.

  As I neared the bottom of the staircase, I noticed Fergus Fillmore writing at a desk in a niche off the hallway. I wondered for a moment why he didn't find it more convenient to work in his room---then I remembered he didn't have a room here, and was cut off from his own house until Charlie gathered in the rest of the rattlesnakes in t
he morning.

  He looked up at me and nodded a greeting. “Hullo, Wunderly. I see you're turning nocturnal like the rest of us.”

  “Having coffee?” I asked him.

  “In a few minutes. The police will be here tomorrow or the next day; they'll get through somehow. They'll want our testimony, and I'm making notes while things are fresh in my mind. I'm almost through.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I'll do the same when I get back upstairs.”

  I went on into the kitchen.

  “It's cafeteria, Wunderly,” Darius Hill told me. “Pour yourself a cup and sit down.”

  He, Charlie Lightfoot, Eric Andressen and Rex Parker were seated around the square table in the center of the big kitchen. Charlie slid his chair to make room for me. He said, “I guess Paul Bailey's asleep. I rapped lightly on his door and he didn't answer.”

  Andressen said, “He should sleep through all right; we gave him a pretty strong dose. Where's Fergus?”

  “Right here,” said Fillmore from the doorway. “Darius, what's this about your twisting the tails of spectroscopic binaries?”

  “Haven't made them holler yet” said Darius slowly, “but maybe I've got something. Look, Fergus, on an eclipsing binary the maximum separation of the spectral lines when they are double determines the relative velocity of the stars in their orbits.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Therefore---” said Darius, and went on with it. At the fourth cosine, I quit listening and reached for a ham sandwich.

  As I ate, I looked at the faces of the men around me. Charlie Lightfoot, Eric Andressen, Rex Parker, Fergus Fillmore, Darius Hill. . . . Was one of these men, I wondered, a murderer? Was one of these men even now planning further murders?

  It seemed impossible, as I studied their faces. The Indian's haggard and worried, Hill and Fillmore eager on their abstruse discussion with Andressen listening intently and Rex looking bored.

  Charlie was the first to leave, then Parker and Andressen together. When I stood up, Darius Hill stood also. He asked: