The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  The attendant said, "Gaw!" again, and then over his shoulder to Charlie: "Mister, how did you-That there case is her-hermetchically sealed. It's airproof. Lookit that bird. It's-"

  It already had; the duck fell over, either dead or unconscious.

  The attendant grasped Charlie's arm. He said firmly, "Mister, you come with me to the boss." And less firmly, "Uh . . . how did you get that thing in there? And don't try to tell me you didn't, mister. I was through here five minutes ago, and you're the only guy's been in here since."

  Charlie opened his mouth, and closed it again. He had a sudden vision of himself being questioned at the headquarters of the museum and then at the police station. And if the police started asking questions about him, they'd find out about the worm and about his having been in the hospital for-- And, golly, they'd get an alienist maybe, and--

  With the courage of sheer desperation, Charlie smiled. He tried to make it an ominous smile; it may not have been ominous, but it was definitely unusual. "How would you like," he asked the attendant, "to find yourself in there?" And he pointed with his free arm through the entrance and out into the main hallway at the stone sarcophagus of King- Mene-Ptah. "I can do it, the same way I put that duck--"

  The museum attendant was breathing hard. His eves looked slightly glazed, and he let go of Charlie's arm. He said, "Mister, did you really--"

  "Want me to show you how?"

  "Uh . . . Gaw!" said the attendant. He ran.

  Charlie forced himself to hold his own pace down to a rapid walk, and went in the opposite direction to the side entrance that led out into Beeker Street.

  And Beeker Street was still a very ordinary-looking street, with lots of midday traffic, and no pink elephants climbing trees and nothing going on but the hurried confusion of a city street. Its very noise was soothing, in a way; although there was one bad moment when he was crossing at the corner and heard a sudden noise behind him. He turned around, startled, afraid of what strange thing he might see there.

  But it was only a truck, and he got out of its way in time to avoid being run over.

  V

  Lunch. And Charlie was definitely getting into a state of jitters. His hand shook so that he could scarcely pick up his coffee without slopping it over the edge of the cup.

  Because a horrible thought was dawning in his mind. If something was wrong with him, was it fair to Jane Pemberton for him to go ahead and marry her? Is it fair to saddle the girl one loves with a husband who might go to the icebox to get a bottle of milk and find-God knows what?

  And he was deeply, madly in love with Jane.

  So he sat there, an unbitten sandwich on the plate before him, and alternated between hope and despair as he tried to make sense out of the three things that had happened to him within the past week.

  Hallucination?

  But the attendant, too, had seen the duck!

  How comforting it had been--it seemed to him now--that, after seeing the angelic angleworm, he had been able to tell himself it had been an hallucination. Only an hallucination.

  But wait. Maybe--

  Could not the museum attendant, too, have been part of the same hallucination as the duck? Granted that he, Charlie, could have seen a duck that wasn't there, couldn't he also have included in the same category a museum attendant who professed to see the duck? Why not? A duck and an attendant who sees it--the combination could he as illusory as the duck alone.

  And Charlie felt so encouraged that he took a bite out of his sandwich.

  But the burn? Whose hallucination was that? Or was there some sort of a natural physical ailment that could produce a sudden skin condition approximating mild sunburn? But, if there were such a thing, then evidently Doc Palmer didn't know about it.

  Suddenly Charlie caught a glimpse of the clock on the wall, and it was one o'clock, and he almost strangled on that bite of sandwich when he realized that he was over half an hour late, and must have been sitting in the restaurant almost an hour.

  He got up and ran back to the office.

  But all was well; Old Man Hapworth wasn't there. And the copy for the rush circular was late and got there just as Charlie arrived.

  He said "Whew!" at the narrowness of his escape, and concentrated hard on getting that circular through the plant. He rushed it to the Linotypes and read proof on it himself, then watched make-up over the compositor's shoulder. He knew he was making a nuisance of himself, but it killed the afternoon.

  And he thought, "Only one more day to work after today, and then my vacation, and on Wednesday-"Wedding on Wednesday.

  But--

  If--

  The Pest came out of the proofroom in a green smock and looked at him. "Charlie," she said, "you look like something no self-respecting cat would drag in. Say ... what's wrong with you? Really?"

  "Ph . . . nothing. Say, Paula, will you tell Jane when you get home that I may be a bit late this evening? I got to stick here till these handbills are off the press."

  "Sure, Charlie. But tell me-"

  "Nix. Run along, will you? I'm busy."

  She shrugged her shoulders, and went back into the proofroom.

  The machinist tapped Charlie's shoulder. "Say, we got that new Linotype set up. Want to take a look?"

  Charlie nodded and followed. He looked over the installation, and then slid into the operator's chair in front of the machine. "How does she run?"

  "Sweet. Those Blue Streak models are honeys. Try it."

  Charlie let his fingers play over the keys, setting words without paying any attention to what they were. He sent in three lines to cast, then picked the slugs out of the stick. And found that he had set: "For men have died and worms have eaten them and ascendeth unto Heaven where it sitteth upon the right hand-"

  "Gaw!" said Charlie. And that reminded him of—

  VI

  Jane noticed that there was something wrong. She couldn't have helped noticing. But instead of asking questions, she was unusually nice to him that evening.

  And Charlie, who had gone to see her with the resolution to tell her the whole story, found himself weakening. As men always weaken when they are with the women they love and the parlor lamp is turned low.

  But she did ask: "Charles-you do want to marry me, don't y? I mean, if there's any doubt in your mind and that's what has been worrying you, we can postpone the wedding till you're sure whether you love me enough-"

  "Love you?" Charlie was aghast. "Why-"

  And he proved it pretty satisfactorily.

  So satisfactorily, in fact, that he completely forgot his original intention to suggest that very postponement. But never for the reason she suggested. With his arms around Jane-well, the poor chap was only human.

  A man in love is a drunken man, and you can't exactly blame a drunkard for what he does under the influence of alcohol. You can blame him, of course, for getting drunk in the first place; but you can't put even that much blame on a man in love. In all probability, he fell through no fault of his own. In all probability his original intentions were strictly dishonorable; then, when those intentions met resistance, the subtle chemistry of sublimation converted them into the stuff that stars are made of.

  Probably that was why he didn't go to see an alienist the next day. He was a bit afraid of what an alienist might tell him. He weakened and decided to wait and see if anything else happened.

  Maybe nothing else would happen.

  There was a comforting popular superstition that things went in groups of three, and three things had happened already.

  Sure, that was it. From now on, he'd be all right. After all, there wasn't anything basically wrong; there couldn't be. He was in good health. Aside from Tuesday, he hadn't missed a day's work at the print shop in two years.

  And-well, by now it was Friday noon and nothing had happened for a full twenty-four hours, and nothing was going to happen again.

  It didn't, Friday, but he read something that jolted him out of his precarious complacency.


  A newspaper account.

  He sat down in the restaurant at a table at which a previous diner had left a morning paper. Charlie read it while he was waiting for his order to be taken. He finished scanning the front page before the waitress came, and the comic section while he was eating his soup, and then turned idly to the local page.

  GUARD AT MUSEUM IS SUSPENDED

  Curator Orders Investigation

  And the cold spot in his stomach got larger and colder as he read, for there it was in black and white.

  The wild duck had really been in the showcase. No one could figure out how it had been put there. They'd had to take the showcase apart to get it out, and the showcase showed no indication of having been tampered with. It had been puttied up air-tight to keep out dust, and the putty had not been damaged.

  A guard, for reasons not clearly given in the article, had been given a three-day suspension. One gathered from the wording of the story that the curator of the museum had felt the necessity of doing something about the matter.

  Nothing of value was missing from the case. One Chinese coin with a hole in the middle, a haikwan tad, made of silver, had not been findable after the affair; but it wasn't worth much. There was some doubt as to whether it had been stolen by one of the workmen who had disassembled the showcase or whether it had been accidentally thrown out with the debris of old putty.

  The reporter, telling the thing humorously, suggested that probably the duck had mistaken the coin for a doughnut because of the hole, and had eaten it. And that the curator's best revenge would be to eat the duck.

  The police had been called in, but had taken the attitude that the whole affair must have been a practical joke. By whom or how accomplished, they didn't know. Charlie put down the paper and stared moodily across the room.

  Then it definitely hadn't been a double hallucination, a case of his imagining both duck and attendant. And until now that the bottom had fallen out of that idea, Charlie hadn't realized how strongly he'd counted on the possibility.

  Now he was back where he'd started.

  Unless--

  But that was absurd. Of course, theoretically, the newspaper item he had just read could be an hallucination too, but--No, that was too much to swallow. According to that line of reasoning, if he went around to the museum and talked to the curator, the curator himself would be an hallucin--

  "Your duck, sir."

  Charlie jumped halfway out of his chair.

  Then he saw it was the waitress standing at the side of the table with his entree, and that she had spoken because he had the newspaper spread out and there wasn't room for her to put it down.

  "Didn't you order roast duck, sir? I--"

  Charlie stood up hastily, averting his eyes from the dish.

  He said, "Sorry-gotta-make-a-phone-call," and hastily handed the astonished waitress a dollar bill and strode out. Had he really ordered--Not exactly; he'd told her to bring him the special.

  But eat duck? He'd rather eat ... no, not fried angle-worms either. He shuddered.

  He hurried back to the office, despite the fact that he was half an hour early, and felt better once he was within the safe four walls of the Hapworth Printing Co. Nothing out of the way had happened to him there.

  As yet.

  VII

  Basically, Charlie Wills was quite a healthy young man. By two o'clock in the afternoon, he was so hungry that he sent one of the office boys downstairs to buy him a couple of sandwiches.

  And he ate them. True, he lifted up the top slice of bread on each and looked inside. He didn't know what he expected to find there, aside from boiled ham and butter and a piece of lettuce, but if he had found-in lieu of one of those ingredients-say, a Chinese silver coin with a hole in the middle, he would not have been more than ordinarily surprised.

  It was a dull afternoon at the plant, and Charlie had time to do quite a bit of thinking. Even a bit of research. He remembered that the plant had printed, several years before, a textbook on entomology. He found the file copy and industriously paged through it looking for a winged worm. He found a few winged things that might be called worms, but none that even remotely resembled the angleworm with the halo. Not even, for that matter, if he disregarded the golden circle, and tried to make identification solely on the basis of body and wings.

  No flying angleworms.

  There weren't any medical books in which he could look up-or try to look up-how one could get sun-burned without a sun.

  But he looked up "tael" in the dictionary, and found that it was equivalent to a Jiang, which was one-sixteenth of a catty. And that one official hang is equivalent to a hectogram.

  None of which seemed particularly helpful.

  Shortly before five o'clock he went around saying good-by to everyone, because this was the last day at the office before his two weeks' vacation, and the good-byes were naturally complicated by good wishes on his impending wedding-which would take place in the first week of his vacation.

  He had to shake hands with everybody but the Pest, whom, of course, he'd be seeing frequently during the first few days of his vacation. In fact, he went home with her from work to have dinner with the Pembertons.

  And it was a quiet, restful, pleasant dinner that left him feeling better than he'd felt since last Sunday morning. Here in the calm harbor of the Pemberton household, the absurd things that had happened to him seemed so far away and so utterly fantastic that he almost doubted if they had happened at all.

  And he felt utterly, completely certain that it was all over. Things happened in threes, didn't they? If any thing else happened--But it wouldn't.

  It didn't, that night.

  Jane solicitously sent him home at nine o'clock to get to bed early. But she kissed him good night so tenderly, and withal so effectively, that he walked down the street with his head in rosy clouds.

  Then, suddenly--out of nothing, as it were--Charlie remembered that the museum attendant had been suspended, and was losing three days' pay, because of the episode of the duck in the showcase. And if that duck business was Charlie's fault-even indirectly-didn't he owe it to the guy to step forward and explain to the museum directors that the attendant had been in no way to blame, and that he should not be penalized?

  After all, he, Charlie, had probably scared the poor attendant half out of his wits by suggesting that he could repeat the performance with a sarcophagus instead of a showcase, and the attendant had told such a disconnected story that he hadn't been believed.

  But-had the thing been his fault? Did he owe--

  And there he was butting his head against that brick wall of impossibility again. Trying to solve the insoluble.

  And he knew, suddenly, that he had been weak in not breaking his engagement to Jane. That what had happened three times within the short space of a week might all too easily happen again.

  Gosh! Even at the ceremony. Suppose he reached for the wedding ring and pulled out a--

  From the rosy clouds of bliss to the black mire of despair had proved to be a walk of less than a block.

  Almost he turned back toward the Pemberton home to tell them tonight, then decided not to. Instead, he'd stop by and talk with Pete Johnson.

  Maybe Pete--

  What he really hoped was that Pete would talk him out of his decision.

  VIII

  Pete Johnson had a gallon jug, almost full, of wine. Mellow sherry. And Pete had sampled it, and was mellow, too.

  He refused even to listen to Charlie, until his guest had drunk one glass and had a second on the table in front of him. Then he said, "You got something on your mind. O. K., shoot."

  "Lookit, Pete. I told you about that angleworm business. In fact, you were practically there when it happened. And you know about what happened Tuesday morning on my way to work. But yesterday-well, what happened was worse, I guess. Because another guy saw it. It was a duck."

  "What was a duck?"

  "In a showcase at- Wait, I'll start at the beginning." And he di
d, and Pete listened.

  "Well," he said thoughtfully, "the fact that it was in the newspaper quashes one line of thought. Uh ... fortunately. Listen, I don't see what you got to worry about. Aren't you making a mountain out of a few molehills?"

  Charlie took another sip of the sherry and lighted a cigarette and said, "How?" quite hopefully.

  "Well, three screwy things have happened. But you take any one by itself and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans, does it? Any one of them can be explained. Where you bog down is in sitting there insisting on a blanket explanation for all of them.

  "How do you know there is any connection at all? Now, take them separately-"

  "You take them," suggested Charlie. "How would you explain them so easy as all that?"

  "First one's a cinch. Your stomach was upset or something and you had a pure hallucination. Happens to the best people once in a while. Or-you got a second choice just as simple-maybe you saw a new kind of bug. Hell, there are probably thousands of insects that haven't been classified yet. New ones get on the list every pear."

  "Urn," said Charlie. "And the heat business?"

  "Nell, doctors don't know everything. You got too mad seeing that teamster beating the horse, and anger has a physical effect, hasn't it? You slipped a cog somewhere. Maybe it affected your thermodermal gland."

  "What's a thermodermal gland?"

  Pete grinned. "I just invented it. But why not? The medicos are constantly finding new ones or new purposes of old ones. And there's something in your body that acts as a thermostat and keeps your skin temperature constant. Maybe it went wrong for a minute. Look what a pituitary gland can do for you or against you. Not to mention the parathyroids and the pineal and the adrenals.

  "Nothing to it, Charlie. Have some more wine. Now, let's take the duck business. If you don't think about it with the other two things in mind, there's nothing exciting about it. Undoubtedly just a practical joke on the museum or by somebody working there. It was just coincidence that you walked in on it."