The Collection (48 page)

They looked at their
watches. Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine's platform. It
vanished.

Five minutes later,
to the second, it reappeared.

Professor Johnson
picked it up. "Now five minutes into the past." He set the other
dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. "It is six
minutes before three o'clock. I shall now activate the mechanism—by placing the
cube on the platform—at exactly three o'clock. Therefore, the cube should, at
five minutes before three, vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five
minutes before I place it there."

"How can you
place it there, then?" asked one of his colleagues.

"It will, as my
hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed
there. Three o'clock. Notice, please."

The cube vanished
from his hand.

It appeared on the
platform of the time machine.

"See? Five
minutes before I shall place it there, it
is
there!"

His other colleague
frowned at the cube. "But," he said, "what if, now that it has
already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your
mind about doing so and
not
place it there at three o'clock? Wouldn't
there be a paradox of some sort involved?"

"An interesting
idea," Professor Johnson said. "I had not thought of it, and it will
be interesting to try. Very well, I shall
not
..."

There was no paradox
at all. The cube remained.

But the entire rest
of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.

Sentry

He was wet and muddy
and hungry and cold, and he was fifty thousand light-years from home.

A strange blue sun
gave light and the gravity, twice what he was used to, made every movement
difficult.

But in tens of
thousands of years this part of war hadn't changed. The flyboys were fine with
their sleek spaceships and their fancy weapons. When the chips are down,
though, it was still the foot soldier, the infantry, that had to take the
ground and hold it, foot by bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he'd
never heard of until they'd landed him there. And now it was sacred ground
because the aliens were there too.
The
aliens, the only other
intelligent race in the Galaxy ... cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters.

***

Contact had been made
with them near the center of the Galaxy, after the slow, difficult colonization
of a dozen thousand planets; and it had been war at sight; they'd shot without
even trying to negotiate, or to make peace.

Now, planet by bitter
planet, it was being fought out.

He was wet and muddy
and hungry and cold, and the day was raw with a high wind that hurt his eyes.
But the aliens were trying to infiltrate and every sentry post was vital.

He stayed alert, gun
ready. Fifty thousand light-years from home, fighting on a strange world and
wondering if he'd ever live to see home again.

And then he saw one
of them crawling toward him. He drew a bead and fired. The alien made that
strange horrible sound they all make, then lay still.

He shuddered at the
sound and sight of the alien lying there. One ought to be able to get used to
them after a while, but he'd never been able to. Such repulsive creatures they
were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales.

There were four men in the lifeboat that came down from the
space-cruiser. Three of them were still in the uniform of the Galactic Guards.

The fourth sat in the prow of the small craft looking down
at their goal, hunched and silent, bundled up in a greatcoat against the
coolness of space—a greatcoat which he would never need again after this
morning. The brim of his hat was pulled down far over his forehead, and he
studied the nearing shore through dark-lensed glasses. Bandages, as though for
a broken jaw, covered most of the lower part of his face.

He realized suddenly that the dark glasses, now that they
had left the cruiser, were unnecessary. He slipped them off. After the
cinematographic grays his eyes had seen through these lenses for so long, the
brilliance of the color below him was almost like a blow. He blinked, and
looked again.

They were rapidly settling toward a shoreline, a beach. The
sand was a dazzling, unbelievable white such as had never been on his home
planet. Blue the sky and water, and green the edge of the fantastic jungle.
There was a flash of red in the green, as they came still closer, and he
realized suddenly that it must be a
marigee
, the semi-intelligent
Venusian parrot once so popular as pets throughout the solar system.

Throughout the system blood and steel had fallen from the
sky and ravished the planets, but now it fell no more.

And now this. Here in this forgotten portion of an almost
completely destroyed world it had not fallen at all.

Only in some place like this, alone, was safety for him.
Elsewhere—anywhere—imprisonment or, more likely, death. There was danger, even
here. Three of the crew of the space-cruiser knew. Perhaps, someday, one of
them would talk. Then they would come for him, even here.

But that was a chance he could not avoid. Nor were the odds
bad, for three people out of a whole solar system knew where he was. And those
three were loyal fools.

The lifeboat came gently to rest. The hatch swung open and
he stepped out and walked a few paces up the beach. He turned and waited while
the two spacemen who had guided the craft brought his chest out and carried it
across the beach and to the corrugated-tin shack just at the edge of the trees.
That shack had once been a space-radar relay station. Now the equipment it had
held was long gone, the antenna mast taken down. But the shack still stood. It
would be his home for a while. A long while. The two men returned to the
lifeboat preparatory to leaving.

And now the captain stood facing him, and the captain's face
was a rigid mask. It seemed with an effort that the captain's right arm
remained at his side, but that effort had been ordered. No salute.

The captain's voice, too, was rigid with unemotion.
"Number One ..."

"Silence!" And then, less bitterly. "Come
further from the boat before you again let your tongue run loose. Here."
They had reached the shack.

"You are right, Number ..."

"No. I am no longer Number One. You must continue to
think of me as
Mister
Smith, your cousin, whom you brought here for the
reasons you explained to the under-officers, before you surrender your ship. If
you
think
of me so, you will be less likely to slip in your
speech."

"There is nothing further I can do—Mister Smith?"

"Nothing. Go now."

"And I am ordered to surrender the—"

"There are no orders. The war is over, lost. I would
suggest thought as to what spaceport you put into. In some you may receive
humane treatment. In others—"

The captain nodded. "In others, there is great hatred.
Yes. That is all?"

"That is all. And, Captain, your running of the
blockade, your securing of fuel
en route
, have constituted a deed of
high valor. All I can give you in reward is my thanks. But now go.
Goodbye."

"Not goodbye," the captain blurted impulsively,
"but
hasta la vista
,
auf Wiedersehen
,
until the day
... you will permit me, for the last time to address you and salute?"

The man in the greatcoat shrugged. "As you will."

Click of heels and a salute that once greeted the Caesars,
and later the pseudo-Aryan of the 20th Century, and, but yesterday, he who was
now known as
the last of the dictators
. "Farewell, Number
One!"

"Farewell," he answered emotionlessly.

Mr. Smith, a black dot on the dazzling white sand, watched
the lifeboat disappear up into the blue, finally into the haze of the upper
atmosphere of Venus. That eternal haze that would always be there to mock his
failure and his bitter solitude.

The slow days snarled by, and the sun shone dimly, and the
marigees
screamed in the early dawn and all day and at sunset, and sometimes there were
the six-legged
baroons
, monkey-like in the trees, that gibbered at him.
And the rains came and went away again.

At nights there were drums in the distance. Not the martial
roll of marching, nor yet a threatening note of savage hate. Just drums, many
miles away, throbbing rhythm for native dances or exorcising, perhaps, the
forest-night demons. He assumed these Venusians had their superstitions, all
other races had. There was no threat, for him, in that throbbing that was like
the beating of the jungle's heart.

Mr. Smith knew that, for although his choice of destinations
had been a hasty choice, yet there had been time for him to read the available
reports. The natives were harmless and friendly. A Terran missionary had lived
among them some time ago—before the outbreak of the war. They were a simple,
weak race. They seldom went far from their villages; the space-radar operator
who had once occupied the shack reported that he had never seen one of them.

So, there would be no difficulty in avoiding the natives,
nor danger if he did encounter them.

Nothing to worry about, except the bitterness.

Not the bitterness of regret, but of defeat. Defeat at the
hands of the defeated. The damned Martians who came back after he had driven
them halfway across their damned arid planet. The Jupiter Satellite
Confederation landing endlessly on the home planet, sending their vast armadas
of spacecraft daily and nightly to turn his mighty cities into dust. In spite
of everything; in spite of his score of ultra-vicious secret weapons and the
last desperate efforts of his weakened armies, most of whose men were under
twenty or over forty.

The treachery even in his own army, among his own generals
and admirals. The turn of Luna, that had been the end.

His people would rise again. But not, now after Armageddon, in
his lifetime. Not under him, nor another like him. The last of the dictators.

Hated by a solar system, and hating it.

It would have been intolerable, save that he was alone. He
had foreseen that—the need for solitude. Alone, he was still Number One. The
presence of others would have forced recognition of his miserably changed
status. Alone, his pride was undamaged. His ego was intact.

The long days, and the
marigees'
screams, the
slithering swish of the surf, the ghost-quiet movements of the
baroons
in the trees and the raucousness of their shrill voices. Drums.

Those sounds, and those alone. But perhaps silence would
have been worse.

For the times of silence were louder. Times he would pace
the beach at night and overhead would be the roar of jets and rockets, the
ships that had roared over New Albuquerque, his capitol, in those last days
before he had fled. The crump of bombs and the screams and the blood, and the
flat voices of his folding generals.

Those were the days when the waves of hatred from the
conquered peoples beat upon his country as the waves of a stormy sea beat upon
crumbling cliffs. Leagues back of the battered lines, you could
feel
that hate and vengeance as a tangible thing, a thing that thickened the air,
that made breathing difficult and talking futile.

And the spacecraft, the jets, the rockets, the damnable
rockets, more every day and every night, and ten coming for every one shot
down. Rocket ships raining hell from the sky, havoc and chaos and the end of
hope.

And then he knew that he had been hearing another sound,
hearing it often and long at a time. It was a voice that shouted invective and
ranted hatred and glorified the steel might of his planet and the destiny of a
man and a people.

It was his own voice, and it beat back the waves from the
white shore, it stopped their wet encroachment upon this, his domain. It
screamed back at the
baroons
and they were silent. And at times he
laughed, and the
marigees
laughed. Sometimes, the queerly shaped
Venusian trees talked too, but their voices were quieter. The trees were
submissive, they were good subjects.

Sometimes, fantastic thoughts went through his head. The
race of trees, the pure race of trees that never interbred, that stood firm
always. Someday the trees—

But that was just a dream, a fancy. More real were the
marigees
and the
kifs
. They were the ones who persecuted him. There was the
marigee
who would shriek "
All is lost!
" He had shot at it a hundred
times with his needle gun, but always it flew away unharmed. Sometimes it did
not even fly away.

"
All is lost!
"

At last he wasted no more needle darts. He stalked it to
strangle it with his bare hands. That was better. On what might have been the
thousandth try, he caught it and killed it, and there was warm blood on his
hands and feathers were flying.

That should have ended it, but it didn't. Now there were a
dozen
marigees
that screamed that all was lost. Perhaps there had been a
dozen all along. Now he merely shook his fist at them or threw stones.

The
kifs
, the Venusian equivalent of the Terran ant,
stole his food. But that did not matter; there was plenty of food. There had
been a cache of it in the shack, meant to restock a space-cruiser, and never
used. The
kifs
would not get at it until he opened a can, but then,
unless he ate it all at once, they ate whatever he left. That did not matter.
There were plenty of cans. And always fresh fruit from the jungle. Always in
season, for there were no seasons here, except the rains.