The Collection (47 page)

The room, the cube of light, dimmed; it seemed to tilt.
Still standing, he was going over backward, his position becoming horizontal
instead of vertical.

His weight was on his back and under him was the soft-hard
smoothness of his bunk, the roughness of a gray sheet blanket. And he could
move; he sat up.

He had been dreaming? Had he really been outside the asylum?
He held up his hands
_,
touched one to the other, and they were wet
with something sticky. So was the front of his shirt and the thighs and knees
of his trousers.

And his shoes were on.

The blood was there from climbing the wall. And now the
analgesia was leaving, and pain was beginning to come into his hands, his
chest, his stomach and his legs. Sharp biting pain.

He said aloud.
"I am not mad. I am not mad."
Was
he screaming it?

A voice said, "No. Not yet." Was it the voice that
had been here in the room before? Or was it the voice of the man who had stood
in the lighted room? Or had both been the same voice?

It said, "Ask, `What is man?' "

Mechanically, he asked it.

"Man is a blind alley in evolution, who came too late
too compete, who has always been controlled and played with by The Brightly
Shining, which was old and wise before man walked erect.

"Man is a parasite upon a planet populated before he
came
_,
populated by a Being that is one and many, a billion cells
but a single mind, a single intelligence, a single will-as is true of every
other populated planet in the universe.

^"
Man is a joke, a clown, a parasite. He is
nothing; he will be less."

"Come and go mad."

He was getting out of bed again; he was walking. Through the
doorway of the cubicle, along the ward. To the door that led to the corridor; a
thin crack of light showed under it. But this time his hand did not reach out
for the knob. Instead he stood there facing the closed door, and it began to
glow; slowly it became light and visible.

As though from somewhere an invisible spotlight played upon
it, the door became a visible rectangle in the surrounding blackness; as
brightly visible as the crack under it.

The voice said, "You see before you a cell of your
ruler, a cell unintelligent in itself, yet a tiny part of a unit which is
intelligent, one of a million units which make up
the
intelligence which
rules the earth-and you. And which earth-wide intelligence is one of a million
intelligences which rule the universe.
^"

"The
door? I
don't-"

The voice spoke no more; it had withdrawn, but somehow
inside his mind was the echo of silent laughter.

He leaned closer and saw what he was meant to see. An ant
was crawling up the door.

His eyes followed it, and numbing horror crawled apace, up
his spine. A hundred things that had been told and shown him suddenly fitted
into a pattern, a pattern of sheer horror. The black, the white, the red; the
black ants, the white ants, the red ants; the players with men, separate lobes
of a single group brain, the intelligence that was one. Man an accident, a
parasite, a pawn; a million planets in the universe inhabited each by an insect
race that was a single intelligence for the planet-and all the intelligences
together were the single cosmic intelligence that was-
God!

The one-syllable word wouldn
^'
t come.

He went mad, instead.

He beat upon the now-dark door with his bloody hands
_,
with his knees, his face, with himself, although already he had forgotten why,
had forgotten what he wanted to crush.

He was raving mad-dementia praecox, not paranoia-when they
released his body by putting it into a strait jacket, released it from frenzy
to quietude.

He was quietly mad-paranoia, not dementia praecox-when they
released him as sane eleven months later.

Paranoia, you see, is a peculiar affliction; it has no
physical symptoms, it is merely the presence of a fixed delusion. A series of
metrazol shocks had cleared up the dementia praecox and left only the fixed
delusion that he was George Vine, a reporter.

The asylum authorities thought he was, too, so the delusion
was not recognized as such and they released him and gave him a certificate to
prove he was sane.

He married Clare; he still works at the
Blade-
for a
man named Candler. He still plays chess with his cousin, Charlie Doerr. He
still sees-for periodic checkups-both Dr. Irving and Dr. Randolph.

Which of them smiles inwardly? What good would it do you to
know? Yes it was
_,
is, one of those four.

It doesn't matter. Don't you understand? Nothing matters!

Professor Jones had been working on time theory for many
years.

^"
And I have found the key equation,
^"
he told his daughter one day.
^"
Time is a field. This machine I
have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.
^"

Pushing a button as he spoke, he said,
^"
This
should make time run backward run time make should this," said he, spoke
he as button a pushing.

^"
Field that, reverse even, manipulate can
made have I ma-chine this. Field a is time.
^"
Day one daughter
his told he,
^"
Equation key the found have I and.
^"

Years many for theory time on working been had Jones Professor.

Daptine is the secret
of it. Adaptine, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let
us adapt.

They explained it all
to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to
understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just
after we landed on Mars.

"You're
home
,
children," the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite
dome they'd built for us there. And he told us there'd be a special lecture for
us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.

And that evening he
told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He
had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature
in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the
air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from
inside his helmet.

"Children,"
he said, "you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend
the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived
five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years,
until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you
will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors.

"Then you will
go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry
and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians.

"It is time you
were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a
part."

Then he told us.

Man, he said, had
first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there
is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had
found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only
by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of
them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was
too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays
harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him.
The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to
bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.

For fifty years he
had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome
which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite
dome much smaller and less than a mile away.

It had looked as
though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system
besides Earth for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he
couldn't live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others.

And then, in 2034,
thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine.
A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given,
but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after
inoculation.

It gave his progeny
almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were
made gradually.

Dr. Waymoth had inoculated
and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by
placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing
conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of
those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero
Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was
thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal
and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have
killed one of its parents within minutes.

Subsequent
experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to
similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to
live under those conditions.

"Ten years
later, ten years ago," the Head Teacher told us, "you children were
born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the
experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled
and gradually changing conditions.

"From the time
you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its
oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in
capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your
teachers and attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like
that of Mars, the difference will be even greater.

"Your bodies are
growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now
under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four
years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to
survive conditions that seem normal to you.

"In another ten
years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be
your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy
for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because
of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational
pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you.

"It will be your
planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are
the first Martians."

Of course we had
known a lot of those things already.

The last year was the
best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where
our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were
allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

The last few months
they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates,
although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day,
after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my
choice long since and I'd felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right.

Tomorrow is the day
of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians,
the
Martians. Tomorrow we
shall take over the planet.

Some among us are
impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and
we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final
day.

And tomorrow is the
final day.

Tomorrow, at a
signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go
forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.

We have dissimulated
for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how
disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so
narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need
amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty
hairless skins.

We shall kill them
and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will
die too.

If more Earthmen ever
come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they'll never find
us. And if they try to build more domes here we'll smash them. We want no more
to do with Earth.

This is our planet
and we want no aliens. Keep off!

Experiment

"The first time
machine, gentlemen," Professor Johnson proudly informed his two
colleagues. "True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate
only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances
into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works."

The small-scale model
looked like a small scale—a postage scale—except for two dials in the part
under the platform.

Professor Johnson
held up a small metal cube. "Our experimental object," he said,
"is a brass cube weighing one pound, two point three ounces. First, I
shall send it five minutes into the future."

He leaned forward and
set one of the dials on the time machine. "Look at your watches," he
said.