The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  "You have already guessed that you are in the future—in what, to you, seems to be the future. The clothes and the room must have told you that. I planned it that way so the shock would not be too sudden, so you would realize it over the course of several minutes rather than read it here—and quite probably disbelieve what you read.

  "The `closet' from which you have just stepped is, as you have by now realized, a time machine. From it you stepped into the world of 2004. The date is April 7th, just fifty years from the time you last remember.

  "You cannot return.

  "I did this to you and you may hate me for it; I do not know. That is up to you to decide, but it does not matter. What does matter, and not to you alone, is another decision which you must make. I am incapable of making it.

  "Who is writing this to you? I would rather not tell you just yet. By the time you have finished reading this, even though it is not signed (for I knew you would look first for a signature), I will not need to tell you who I am. You will know.

  "I am seventy-five years of age. I have, in this year 2004, been studying `time' for thirty of those years. I have completed the first time machine ever built—and thus far, its construction, even the fact that it has been constructed, is my own secret.

  "You have just participated in the first major experiment. It will be your responsibility to decide whether there shall ever be any more experiments with it, whether it should be given to the world, or whether it should be destroyed and never used again."

  End of the first page. You look up for a moment, hesitating to turn the next page. Already you suspect what is coming.

  You turn the page.

  "I constructed the first time machine a week ago. My calculations had told me that it would work, but not how it would work. I had expected it to send an object back in time—it works backward in time only, not forward—physically unchanged and intact.

  "My first experiment showed me my error. I placed a cube of metal in the machine—it was a miniature of the one you just walked out of—and set the machine to go backward ten years. I flicked the switch and opened the door, expecting to find the cube vanished. Instead I found it had crumbled to powder.

  "I put in another cube and sent it two years back. The second cube came back unchanged, except that it was newer, shinier.

  "That gave me the answer. I had been expecting the cubes to go back in time, and they had done so, but not in the sense I had expected them to. Those metal cubes had been fabricated about three years previously. I had sent the first one back years before it had existed in its fabricated form. Ten years ago it had been ore. The machine returned it to that state.

  "Do you see how our previous theories of time travel have been wrong? We expected to be able to step into a time machine in, say, 2004, set it for fifty years back, and then step out in the year 1954 . . . but it does not work that way. The machine does not move in time. Only whatever is within the machine is affected, and then just with relation to itself and not to the rest of the Universe.

  "I confirmed this with guinea pigs by sending one six weeks old five weeks back and it came out a baby.

  "I need not outline all my experiments here. You will find a record of them in the desk and you can study it later.

  "Do you understand now what has happened to you, Norman?"

  You begin to understand. And you begin to sweat.

  The I who wrote that letter you are now reading is you, yourself at the age of seventy-five, in the year of 2004. You are that seventy-five-year-old man, with your body returned to what it had been fifty years ago, with all the memories of fifty years of living wiped out.

  You invented the time machine.

  And before you used it on yourself, you made these arrangements to help you orient yourself. You wrote yourself the letter which you are now reading.

  But if those fifty years are—to you—gone, what of all your friends, those you loved? What of your parents? What of the girl you are going—were going—to many?

  You read on:

  "Yes, you will want to know what has happened. Mom died in 1963, Dad in 1968. You married Barbara in 1956. I am sorry to tell you that she died only three years later, in a plane crash. You have one son. He is still living; his name is Walter; he is now forty-six years old and is an accountant in Kansas City."

  Tears come into your eyes and for a moment you can no longer read. Barbara dead—dead for forty-five years. And only minutes ago, in subjective time, you were sitting next to her, sitting in the bright sun in a Beverly Hills patio ...

  You force yourself to read again.

  "But back to the discovery. You begin to see some of its implications. You will need time to think to see all of them.

  "It does not permit time travel as we have thought of time travel, but it gives us immortality of a sort. Immortality of the kind I have temporarily given us.

  "Is it good? Is it worthwhile to lose the memory of fifty years of one's life in order to return one's body to relative youth? The only way I can find out is to try, as soon as I have finished writing this and made my other preparations.

  "You will know the answer.

  "But before you decide, remember that there is another problem, more important than the psychological one. I mean overpopulation.

  "If our discovery is given to the world, if all who are old or dying can make themselves young again, the population will almost double every generation. Nor would the world—not even our own relatively enlightened country—be willing to accept compulsory birth control as a solution.

  "Give this to the world, as the world is today in 2004, and within a generation there will be famine, suffering, war. Perhaps a complete collapse of civilization.

  "Yes, we have reached other planets, but they are not suitable for colonizing. The stars may be our answer, but we are a long way from reaching them. When we do, someday, the billions of habitable planets that must be out there will be our answer ... our living room. But until then, what is the answer?

  "Destroy the machine? But think of the countless lives it can save, the suffering it can prevent. Think of what it would mean to a man dying of cancer. Think ..."

  Think. You finish the letter and put it down.

  You think of Barbara dead for forty-five years. And of the fact that you were married to her for three years and that those years are lost to you.

  Fifty years lost. You damn the old man of seventy-five whom you became and who has done this to you . . . who has given you this decision to make.

  Bitterly, you know what the decision must be. You think that he knew, too, and realize that he could safely leave it in your hands. Damn him, he should have known.

  Too valuable to destroy, too dangerous to give.

  The other answer is painfully obvious.

  You must be custodian of this discovery and keep it secret until it is safe to give, until mankind has expanded to the stars and has new worlds to populate, or until, even without that, he has reached a state of civilization where he can avoid overpopulation by rationing births to the number of accidental—or voluntary—deaths.

  If neither of those things has happened in another fifty years (and are they likely so soon?), then you, at seventy-five, will be writing another letter like this one. You will be undergoing another experience similar to the one you're going through now. And making the same decision, of course.

  Why not? You'll be the same person again.

  Time and again, to preserve this secret until Man is ready for it.

  How often will you again sit at a desk like this one, thinking the thoughts you are thinking now, feeling the grief you now feel?

  There is a click at the door and you know that the time lock has opened, that you are now free to leave this room, free to start a new life for yourself in place of the one you have already lived and lost.

  But you are in no hurry now to walk directly through that door.

  You sit there, staring straight ahead of you blindly, seeing in your mind's
eye the vista of a set of facing mirrors, like those in an old-fashioned barber shop, reflecting the same thing over and over again, diminishing into far distance.

  KNOCK

  There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

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

  Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the two sentences at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.

  But it wasn't horrible, really.

  The last man on Earth - or in the universe, for that matter - sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He'd just noticed how peculiar it was and he'd been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn't horrify him, but it annoyed him.

  Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrified easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn't much to look at, and he knew it.

  Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn't much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour, the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman - one woman. And that was a fact which didn't concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He'd probably never see her and didn't care too much if he didn't.

  Women just hadn't been a factor in Walter's life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn't been a good wife - albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he'd loved Martha, in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he'd been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but - well - he just hadn't thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn't any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them.

  True, company would be nice, but he'd get along without it. Maybe after a while, he'd get so he'd enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way.

  An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn't look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they'd done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills-and it had been done much more efficiently.

  ***

  But they had given him plenty of books. They'd been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forever. Even a brilliant mind - and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds - has its idiosyncrasies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we digress.

  There was a knock on the door.

  You've got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I'm going to fill that in and show you that it wasn't horrible at all.

  Walter Phelan called out, "Come in," and the door opened. It was of course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn't found it. It was about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth - nothing, that is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there.

  Walter said, "Hello, George." When he'd learned that none of them had names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn't seem to mind.

  This one said, "Hel-lo, Wal-ter." That was ritual; the knock on the door and the greetings. Walter waited.

  "Point one," said the Zan "You will please henceforth sit with your chair turned the other way."

  Walter said, "I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent from the other side, isn't it?"

  "It is trans-parent."

  "Just what I thought. I'm in a zoo Right?"

  "That is right."

  Walter sighed. "I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single piece of furniture against it. And made of something different from the other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You will kill me? - I ask hopefully."

  "We will take a-way your books."

  "You've got me there George. All right I'll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?"

  "Two hundred and six-teen."

  Walter shook his head. "Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that - could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?"

  "Random samples yes All species would have been too man-y. Male and female each of one hundred and eight kinds,"

  "What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean."

  "We make food Synthetic."

  "Smart," said Walter. "And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?"

  "Flora was not hurt by vibrations. It is all still growing."

  "Nice for the flora," said Walter. "You weren't as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with 'point one.' I deduced there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?"

  "Something we do not un-der-stand. Two of the other animals sleep and do not wake? They are cold."

  "It happens in the best regulated zoos, George," Walter Phelan said. "Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they're dead."

  "Dead? That means stopped. But nothing stopped them. Each was a-lone."

  Walter stared at the Zan. "Do you mean, George, you don't know what natural death is?"

  "Death is when a being is killed, stopped from living."

  Walter Phelan blinked. "How old are you, George?" he asked.

  "Six-teen-you would not know the word. Your planet went a-round your sun a-bout seven thou-sand times, I am still young."

  Walter whistled softly. "A babe in arms," he said. He thought hard a moment. "Look, George," he said, "you've got something to learn about this planet you're on. There's a guy here who doesn't hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hour-glass. Your vibrations didn't kill him."

  "What is he?"

  "Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our people and animals live until somebody - Old Man Death stops them ticking."

  "He stopped the two creatures? He will stop more?"

  ***

  Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan's voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such.

  "How about taking me to these animals who won't wake up?" Walter asked. "Is that against the rules?"

  "Come," said the Zan.

  That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan's books and furniture. When they'd finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away.

  He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered.

  Walter bowed slightly, "Walter Phelan," he said, "in case George didn't tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn't know all of our ways."

  The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, "My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What's this all about? Why did they bring me here?"

  Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about
the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he'd always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easygoing informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.

  "I think I know why they brought you here but let's go back a bit," he said. "Do you know just what has happened otherwise?"

  "You mean that they've killed everyone?"

  "Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?" She sank into a comfortable chair nearby.

  "No," she said, "I don't know just how. Not that it matters does it?"

  "Not a lot. But here's the story - what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn't a great number of them - here, anyway. I don't know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don't know where that is, but I'd guess it's outside the Solar System. You've seen the space ship they came in?"

  "Yes It's as big as a mountain."

  "Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration - they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it's more like a radio wave than a sound vibration - that destroys all animal life. It - the ship itself - is insulated against the vibration. I don't know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred-odd animals in this zoo, weren't killed was because we were inside the ship. We'd been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don't you?"

  "I - I suspected it."

  "The front walls are transparent from the outside The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we're in, are of plastic, and they've got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn't have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn't any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race - specifically you and I - can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us."