The Collection (29 page)

For a while-if the pattern holds-he will hold it in check.
He will reach the stars again, to find himself already there. Why, you'll be
back on Mars within five hundred years, and I'll go there too, to see again the
canals I once helped to dig. I've not been there for eighty thousand years and
I'd like to see what time has done to it and to those of us who were cut off
there the last time mankind lost the space drive. Of course they've followed
the pattern too, but the rate is not necessarily constant. We may find them at
any stage in the cycle except the top. If they were at the top of the cycle, we
wouldn't have to go to them-they'd come to us. Thinking, of course, as they
think by now, that they are Martians.

I wonder how high, this time, you will get. Not quite as
high, I hope, as Thragan. I hope that never again is rediscovered the weapon
Thragan used against her colony on Skora, which was then the fifth planet until
the Thragans blew it into asteroids. Of course that weapon would be developed
only long after intergalactic travel again becomes commonplace. If I see it
coming I'll get out of the Galaxy, but I'd hate to have to do that. I like
Earth and I'd like to spend the rest of my mortal lifetime on it if it lasts
that long.

Possibly it won't, but the human race will last. Everywhere
and forever, for it will never be sane and only insanity is divine. Only the
mad destroy themselves and all they have wrought.

And only the phoenix lives forever.

NOT YET THE END

There was a greenish, hellish tinge to the light within the
metal cube. It was a light that made the dead-white skin of the creature seated
at the controls seem faintly green.

A single, faceted eye, front center in the head, watched the
seven dials unwinkingly. Since they had left Xandor that eye had never once
wavered from the dials. Sleep was unknown to the race to which Kar-388Y
belonged. Mercy, too, was unknown. A single glance at the sharp, cruel
features below the faceted eye would have proved that.

The pointers on the fourth and seventh dials came to a stop.
That meant the cube itself had stopped in space relative to its immediate
objective. Kar reached forward with his upper right arm and threw the
stabilizer switch. Then he rose and stretched his cramped muscles.

Kar turned to face his companion in the cube, a being like
himself. 'We are here,
^"
he said.
^"
The first
stop, Star Z-5689. It has nine planets, but only the third is habitable. Let us
hope we find creatures here who will make suitable slaves for Xandor.
^"

Lal-i6B, who had sat in rigid mobility during the journey,
rose and stretched also. "Let us hope so, yes. Then we can return to
Xandor and be honored while the fleet comes to get them. But let
^'
s
not hope too strongly. To meet with success at the first place we stop would be
a miracle. We
^'
ll probably have to look a thousand places.
^"

Kar shrugged. "Then we
^'
ll look a thousand
places. With the Lounacs dying off, we must have slaves else our mines must
close and our race will die.
^"

He sat down at the controls again and threw a switch that activated
a visiplate that would show what was beneath them. He said, "We are above
the night side of the third planet. There is a cloud layer below us. I'll use
the manuals from here."

He began to press buttons. A few minutes later he said,
^"
Look,
Lal, at the visiplate. Regularly spaced lights—a city! The planet is inhabited.
^"

Lal had taken his place at the other switchboard, the
fighting controls. Now he too was examining dials.
^"
There is
nothing for us to fear. There is not even the vestige of a force field around
the city. The scientific knowledge of the race is crude. We can wipe the city
out with one blast if we are attacked.
^"

^"
Good,
^"
Kar said.
^"
But
let me remind you that destruction is not our purpose—yet. We want specimens.
If they prove satisfactory and the fleet comes and takes as many thousand
slaves as we need, then will be time to destroy not a city but the whole
planet. So that their civilization will never progress to the point where they
^'
ll
be able to launch reprisal raids.
^"

Lal adjusted a knob.
^"
All right. I
^'
ll
put on the megrafield and we
^'
ll be invisible to them unless they see
far into the ultraviolet, and, from the spectrum of their sun, I doubt that
they do.
^"

As the cube descended the light within it changed from green
to violet and beyond. It came to a gentle rest. Kar manipulated the mechanism
that operated the airlock.

He stepped outside, Lal just behind him. "Look,"
Kar said, two bipeds. Two arms, two eyes—not dissimilar to the Lounacs, although
smaller. Well, here are our specimens.
^"

He raised his lower left arm, whose three-fingered hand held
a thin rod wound with wire. He pointed it first at one of the creatures, then
at the other. Nothing visible emanated from the end of the rod, but they both
froze instantly into statuelike figures.

^"
They
^'
re not large, Kar,
^"
Lal said.
^"
I'll carry one back, you carry the other. We can
study them better inside the cube, after were back in space.
^"

Kar looked about him in the dim light. "All right, two
is enough, and one seems to be male and the other female. Let's get going.
^"

A minute later the cube was ascending and as soon as they
were well out of the atmosphere, Kar threw the stabilizer switch and joined Lal,
who had been starting a study of the specimens during the brief ascent.

^"
Vivaparous,
^"
said Lal.
^"
Five-fingered,
with hands suited to reasonably delicate work. But—let
^'
s try the
most important test, intelligence.
^"

Kar got the paired headsets. He handed one pair to Lal, who
)ut one on his own head, one on the head of one of the specimens. Kar did the
same with the other specimen.

After a few minutes, Kar and Lal stared at each other
bleakly.

^"
Seven points below minimum,
^"
Kar said.
^"
They could not be trained even for the crudest labor
in the mines. Incapable of understanding the most simple instructions. Well, we
^'
ll
take hem back to the Xandor museum.
^"

^"
Shall I destroy the planet?
^"

^"
No,
^"
Kar said.
^"
Maybe
a million years from now—if our race lasts that long—they
^'
ll have
evolved enough to become suitable for our purpose. Let us move on to the next
star with planets.
^"

***

The make-up editor of the
Milwaukee Star
was in the
composing room, supervising the closing of the local page. Jenkins, the head
make-up compositor, was pushing in leads to tighten the second last column.

^"
Room for one more story in the eighth
column, Pete,
^"
he said. "About thirty-six picas. There are
two there in the overset that will fit. Which one shall I use?
^"

The make-up editor glanced at the type in the galleys lying
on the stone beside the chase. Long practice enabled him to read the headlines
upside down at a glance.
^"
The convention story and the zoo
story, huh? Oh, hell, run the convention story. Who cares if the zoo director
thinks two monkeys disappeared off Monkey Island last night?
^"

It was rather funny for a while, the business about Ronson's
Linotype. But it began to get a bit too sticky for comfort well before the end.
And despite the fact that Ronson came out ahead on the deal, I
^'
d
have never sent him the little guy with the pimple, if I
^'
d guessed
what was going to happen. Fabulous profits or not, poor Ronson got too many
gray hairs out of it.

^"
You
^'
re Mr. Walter Merold?
^"
asked the little guy with the pimple. He
^'
d called at the desk of the
hotel where I live, and I
^'
d told them to send him on up.

I admitted my identity, and he said,
^"
Glad
to know you, Mr. Merold. I’m—
^"
and he gave me his name, but I
can
^'
t remember now what it was. I'm usually good at remembering
names.

I told him I was delighted to meet him and what did he want,
and he started to tell me. I interrupted him before he got very far, though.

^"
Somebody gave you a wrong steer," I
told him.
^"
Yes, I've been a printing technician, but I
^'
m
retired. Anyway, do you know that the cost of getting special Linotype mats cut
would be awfully high? If it
^'
s only one page you want printed with
those special characters, you
^'
d do a lot better to have somebody
hand-letter it for you and then get a photographic reproduction in zinc.

"But that wouldn't do, Mr. Merold. Not at all. You see,
the thing is a secret. Those I represent— But skip that. Anyway, I daren
^'
t
let anyone see it, as they would have to, to make a zinc.
^"

Just another nut, I thought, and looked at him closely.

He didn
^'
t look nutty. He was rather
ordinary-looking on the whole, although he had a foreign—rather an Asiatic—look
about him, somehow, despite the fact that he was blond and fair-skinned. And he
had a pimple on his forehead, in dead center just above the bridge of the nose.
You
^'
ve seen ones like it on statues of Buddha, and Orientals call it
the pimple of wisdom and it
^'
s something special.

I shrugged my shoulders. 'Well," I pointed out, "you
can't have the matrices cut for Linotype work without letting somebody see the
characters you want on them, can you? And whoever runs the machine will also
see—
^"

^"
Oh, but I'll do that myself,
^"
said the little guy with the pimple. (Ronson and I later called him the
L.G.W.T.P., which stands for
^"
little guy with the pimple,
^"
because Ronson couldn
^'
t remember his name, either, but I
^'
m
getting ahead of my story.) "Certainly the cutter will see them, but he
^'
ll
see them as individual characters, and that won
^'
t matter. Then the
actual setting of the type on the Linotype I can do myself. Someone can show me
how to run one enough for me to set up one page—just a score of lines, really.
And it doesn
^'
t have to be printed here. Just the type is all I
^'
ll
want. I don
^'
t care what it costs me.
^"

"O.K.," I said. "I'll send you to the proper
man at Merganthaler, the Linotype people. They
^'
ll cut your mats.
Then, if you want privacy and access to a Linotype, go see George Ronson. He
runs a little country biweekly right here in town. For a fair price, he'll turn
his shop over to you for long enough for you to set your type.
^"

And that was that. Two weeks later, George Ronson and I went
fishing on a Tuesday morning while the L.G.W.T.P. used George's Linotype to
assemble the weird-looking mats he'd just received by air express from
Mergenthaler. George had, the afternoon before, showed the little guy how to
run the Linotype.

We caught a dozen fish apiece, and I remember that Ronson
chuckled and said that made thirteen fish for him because the L.G.W.T.P. was
paying him fifty bucks cash money just for one morning
^'
s use of his
shop.

And everything was in order when we got back except that
George had to pick brass out of the hellbox because the L.G.W.T.P. had smashed
his new brass matrices when he
^'
d finished with them, and hadn
^'
t
known that one shouldn
^'
t throw brass in with the type metal that
gets melted over again.

The next time I saw George was after his Saturday edition
was off the press. I immediately took him to task.

^"
Listen,
^"
I said,
^"
that
stuff about misspelling words and using bum grammar on purpose isn
^'
t
funny anymore. Not even in a country newspaper. Were you by any chance trying
to make your newsletters from the surrounding towns sound authentic by
following copy out the window, or what?
^"

Ronson looked at me kind of funny and said,
^"
Well—yes.
^"

^"
Yes, what?
^"
I wanted to
know.
^"
You mean you were deliberately trying to be funny, or
following copy out the—"

He said,
^"
Come on around and I
^'
ll
show you.
^"

^"
Show me what?
^"

^"
What I
^'
m going to show you,
^"
he said, not very lucidly. "You can still set type, can
^'
t you?
^"

"Sure. Why?"

^"
Come on, then," he said firmly.
^"
You
^'
re
a Linotype technician, and besides you got me into this.
^"