The Collection (22 page)

^"
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.

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."