The Collection (28 page)

There is little in a name, and that is a fortunate thing-for
I do not remember mine. That is less strange than you think, for a hundred and
eighty thousand years is a long time and for one reason or another I have
changed my name a thousand times or more. And what could matter less than the
name my parents gave me a hundred and eighty thousand years ago?

I am not a mutant. What happened to me happened when I was
twenty-three years old, during the first atomic war. The first war, that is, in
which both sides used atomic weapons-puny weapons, of course, compared to
subsequent ones. It was less than a score of years after the discovery of the
atom bomb. The first bombs were dropped in a minor war while I was still a
child. They ended that war quickly, for only one side had them.

The first atomic war wasn't a bad one-the first one never
is. I was lucky for, if it had been a bad one-one which ended a
civilization-I'd not have survived it despite the biological accident that
happened to me. If it had ended a civilization, I wouldn't have been kept alive
during the sixteen-year sleep period I went through about thirty years later.
But again I get ahead of the story.

I was, I believe, twenty or twenty-one years old when the
war started. They didn't take me for the army right away because I was not
physically fit. I was suffering from a rather rare disease of the pituitary
gland-Somebody
^'
s syndrome. I've forgotten the name. It caused
obesity, among other things. I was about fifty pounds overweight for my height
and had little stamina. I was rejected without a second thought.

About two years later my disease had progressed slightly,
but other things had progressed more than slightly. By that time the army was
taking anyone; they'd have taken a one-legged one-armed blind man if he was
willing to fight. And I was willing to fight. I'd lost my family in a dusting,
I hated my job in a war plant, and I had been told by doctors that my disease
was incurable and I had only a year or two to live in any case. So I went to
what was left of the army, and what was left of the army took me without a
second thought and sent me to the nearest front, which was ten miles away. I
was in the fighting one day after I joined.

Now I remember enough to know that I hadn't anything to do
with it, but it happened that the time I joined was the turn of the tide. The
other side was out of bombs and dust and getting low on shells and bullets. We
were out of bombs and dust, too, but they hadn't knocked out
all
of our
production facilities and we'd got just about all of theirs. We still had
planes to carry them, too, and we still had the semblance of an organization to
send the planes to the right places. Nearly the right places, anyway; sometimes
we dropped them too close to our own troops by mistake. It was a week after I'd
got into the fighting that I got out of it again-knocked out of it by one of
our smaller bombs that had been dropped about a mile away.

I came to, about two weeks later, in a base hospital, pretty
badly burned. By that time the war was over, except for the mopping up, and
except for restoring order and getting the world started up again. You see, that
hadn't been what I call a blow-up war. It killed off-I'm just guessing; I don't
remember the fraction-about a fourth or a fifth of the world's population.
There was enough productive capacity left, and there were enough people left,
to keep on going; there were dark ages for a few centuries, but there was no
return to savagery, no starting over again. In such times, people go back to using
candles for light and burning wood for fuel, but not because they don't know
how to use electricity or mine coal; just because the confusions and
revolutions keep them off balance for a while. The knowledge is there, in
abeyance until order returns.

It's not like a blow-up war, when nine-tenths or more of the
population of Earth-or of Earth and the other planets is killed. Then is when
the world reverts to utter savagery and the hundredth generation rediscovers
metals to tip their spears.

But again I digressed. After I recovered consciousness in
the hospital, I was in pain for a long time. There were, by then, no more
anesthetics. I had deep radiation burns, from which I suffered almost
intolerably for the first few months until, gradually, they healed. I did not
sleep-that was the strange
_.
thing. And it was a terrifying thing,
then, for I did not understand what had happened to me, and the unknown is
always terrifying. The doctors paid little heed-for I was one of millions
burned or otherwise injured-and I think they did not believe my statements that
I had not slept at all. They thought I had slept but little and that I was
either exaggerating or making an honest error. But I had
not
slept at
all. I did not sleep until long after I left the hospital, cured. Cured,
incidentally, of the disease of my pituitary gland, and with my weight back to
normal, my health perfect.

I didn't sleep for thirty years. Then
I did sleep,
and
I slept for sixteen years. And at the end of that forty-six-year period, I was
still, physically, at the apparent age of twenty-three.

Do you begin to see what had happened as I began to see it
then? The radiation-or combination of types of radiation-I had gone through,
had radically changed the functions of my pituitary. And there were other
factors involved. I studied endocrinology once, about a hundred and fifty
thousand years ago, and I think I found the pattern. If my calculations were
correct, what happened to me was one chance in a great many billions.

The factors of decay and aging were not eliminated, of
course, but the rate was reduced by about fifteen thousand times. I age at the
rate of one day every forty-five years. So I am not immortal. I have aged
eleven years in the past hundred and eighty millennia. My physical age is now
thirty-four.

And forty-five years is to me as a day. I do not sleep for
about thirty years of it-then I sleep for about fifteen. It is well for me that
my first few "days" were not spent in a period of complete social
disorganization or savagery, else I would not have survived my first few
sleeps. But I did survive them and by that time I had learned a system and
could take care of my own survival. Since then, I have slept about four
thousand times, and I have survived. Perhaps someday I shall be unlucky.
Perhaps someday, despite certain safeguards, someone will discover and break
into the cave or vault into which I seal myself, secretly, for a period of
sleep. But it is not likely. I have years in which to prepare each of those
places and the experience of four thousand sleeps back of me. You could pass
such a place a thousand times and never know it was there, nor be able to enter
if you suspected.

No, my chances for survival between my periods of waking
life are much better than my chances of survival during my conscious, active
periods. It is perhaps a miracle that I have survived so many of those, despite
the techniques of survival that I have developed.

And those techniques are good. I've lived through seven
major atomic-and super-atomic-wars that have reduced the population of Earth to
a few savages around a few campfires in a few still habitable areas. And at
other times, in other eras, I've been in five galaxies besides our own.

I've had several thousand wives, but always one at a time,
for I was born in a monogamous era and the habit has persisted. And I have
raised several thousand children. Of course, I have never been able to remain
with one wife longer than thirty years before I must disappear, but thirty
years is long enough for both of us-especially when she ages at a normal rate
and I age imperceptibly. Oh, it leads to problems, of course, but I've been
able to handle them. I always marry, when I do marry, a girl as much younger
than myself as possible, so the disparity will not become too great. Say I am
thirty; I marry a girl of sixteen. Then when it is time that I must leave her,
she is forty-six and I am still thirty. And it is best for both of us, for
everyone, that when I awaken I do not again go back to that place. If she still
lives, she will be past sixty and it would not be well, even for her, to have a
husband come back from the dead-still young. And I have left her well provided,
a wealthy widow-wealthy in money or in whatever may have constituted wealth in
that particular era. Sometimes it has been beads and arrowheads, sometimes
wheat in a granary and once-there have been peculiar civilizations-it was fish
scales. I never had the slightest difficulty in acquiring my share, or more, of
money or its equivalent. A few thousand years
^'
practice and the
difficulty becomes the other way-knowing when to stop in order not to become
unduly wealthy and so attract attention.

For obvious reasons, I've always managed to do that. For
reasons that you will see, I've never wanted power, nor have I ever--after the
first few hundred years-let people suspect that I was different from them. I
even spend a few hours each night lying thinking, pretending to sleep.

But none of that is important, any more than I am important.
I tell it to you only so you will understand how I
know
the thing that I
am about to tell you.

And when I tell you, it is not because I'm trying to sell
you anything. It's something you can't change if you want to, and-when you
understand it-you won't want to.

I'm not trying to influence you or to lead you. In four
thousand lifetimes I've been almost everything-except a leader. I've avoided
that. Oh, often enough I have been a god among savages, but that was because I
had to be one in order to survive. I used the powers they thought were magic
only to keep a degree of order, never to lead them, never to hold them back. If
I taught them to use the bow and arrow, it was because game was scarce and we
were starving and my survival depended upon theirs. Seeing that the pattern
was necessary, I have never disturbed it.

What. I tell you now will not disturb the pattern.

It is this: The human race is the only immortal organism in
the universe.

There have been other races, and there are other races
throughout the universe, but they have died away or they will die. We charted
them once, a hundred thousand years ago, with an instrument that detected the
presence of thought, the presence of intelligence, however alien and at
whatever distance-and gave us a measure of that mind and its qualities. And
fifty thousand years later that instrument was rediscovered. There were about
as many races as before but only eight of them were ones that had been there
fifty thousand years ago and each of those eight was dying, senescent. They
had passed the peak of their powers and they were dying.

They had reached the limit of their capabilities
^-
and
there is always a limit-and they had no choice but to die. Life is dynamic; it
can never be static
^-
at however high or low a level-and survive.

That is what I am trying to tell you, so that you will never
again be afraid. Only a race that destroys itself and its progress
periodically, that goes back to its beginning, can survive more than, say,
sixty thousand years of intelligent life.

In all the universe only the human race has ever reached a
high level of intelligence without reaching a high level of sanity. We are
unique. We are already at least five times as old as any other race has ever
been and it is because we are not sane. And man has, at times, had glimmerings of
the fact that insanity is divine. But only at high levels of culture does he
realize that he is collectively insane, that fight against it as he will he
will always destroy himself-and rise anew out of the ashes.

The phoenix, the bird that periodically immolates itself
upon a flaming pyre to rise newborn and live again for an-other millennium, and
again and forever, is only metaphorically a myth. It exists and there is only
one of it.

You are the phoenix.

Nothing will ever destroy you, now that-during many high
civilizations-your seed has been scattered on the planets of a thousand suns,
in a hundred galaxies, there ever to repeat the pattern. The pattern that
started a hundred and eighty thousand years ago-I think.

I cannot be sure of that, for I have seen that the twenty to
thirty thousand years that elapse between the fall of one civilization and the
rise of the next destroy all traces. In twenty to thirty thousand years
memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the
superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the
wind, the rain, and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very
continents change-and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years
before is under miles of earth or miles of water.

So I cannot be sure. Perhaps the first blow-up that I knew
was not the first; civilizations may have risen and fallen before my time. If
so, it merely strengthens the case I put before you to say that mankind
may
have
survived more than the hundred and eighty thousand years I know of, may have
lived through more than the six blow-ups that have happened since what I think
to have been the first discovery of the phoenix's pyre.

But-except that we scattered our seed to the stars so well
that even the dying of the sun or its becoming a nova would not destroy us-the
past does not matter. Lur, Candra, Thragan, Kah, Mu, Atlantis-those are the six
I have known, and they are gone as thoroughly as this one will be twenty
thousand years or so hence, but the human race, here or in other galaxies, will
survive and will live forever.

***

It will help your peace of mind, here in this year of your
current era, to blow that-for your minds are disturbed. Perhaps, I do know, it will
help your thoughts to know that the coming atomic war, the one that will
probably happen in your generation, will not be a blow-up war; it will come too
soon for that, before you have developed the really destructive weapons man has
had so often before. It will set you back, yes. There will be darkish ages for
a century or a few centuries. Then, with the memory of what you will call World
War III as a warning, man will think-as he has always thought after a mild
atomic war-that he has conquered his own insanity.