The Fredric Brown Megapack (20 page)

Falling, rising, falling again. His throat raw from the screaming invective of his hate. Bushes and the rough bark of trees tore his flesh.

* * * *

Into the village compound just before dawn, staggered a man, a naked terrestrial. He looked about with dull eyes that seemed to see nothing and understand nothing.

The females and young ran before him, even the males retreated.

He stood there, swaying, and the incredulous eyes of the natives widened as they saw the condition of his body, and the blankness of his eyes.

When he made no hostile move, they came closer again, formed a wondering, chattering circle about him, these Venusian humanoids. Some ran to bring the chief and the chief’s son, who knew everything.

The mad, naked human opened his lips as though he were going to speak, but instead, he fell. He fell, as a dead man falls. But when they turned him over in the dust, they saw that his chest still rose and fell in labored breathing.

And then came Alwa, the aged chieftain, and Nrana, his son. Alwa gave quick, excited orders. Two of the men carried Mr. Smith into the chief’s hut, and the wives of the chief and the chief’s son took over the Earthling’s care, and rubbed him with a soothing and healing salve.

But for days and nights he lay without moving and without speaking or opening his eyes, and they did not know whether he would live or die.

Then, at last, he opened his eyes. And he talked, although they could make out nothing of the things he said.

Nrana came and listened, for Nrana of all of them spoke and understood best the Earthling’s language, for he had been the special protégé of the Terran missionary who had lived with them for a while.

Nrana listened, but he shook his head. “The words,” he said, “the words are of the Terran tongue, but I make nothing of them. His mind is not well.”

The aged Alwa said, “Aie. Stay beside him. Perhaps, as his body heals, his words will be beautiful words as were the words of the Father-of-Us who, in the Terran tongue, taught us of the gods and their good.”

* * * *

So they cared for him well, and his wounds healed, and the day came when he opened his eyes and saw the handsome blue-complexioned face of Nrana sitting there beside him, and Nrana said softly, “Good day, Mr. Man of Earth. You feel better, no?”

There was no answer, and the deep-sunken eyes of the man on the sleeping mat stared, glared at him. Nrana could see that those eyes were not yet sane, but he saw, too, that the madness in them was not the same that it had been. Nrana did not know the words for delirium and paranoia, but he could distinguish between them.

No longer was the Earthling a raving maniac, and Nrana made a very common error, an error more civilized beings than he have often made. He thought the paranoia was an improvement over the wider madness. He talked on, hoping the Earthling would talk too, and he did not recognize the danger of his silence.

“We welcome you, Earthling,” he said, “and hope that you will live among us, as did the Father-of-Us, Mr. Gerhardt. He taught us to worship the true gods of the high heavens. Jehovah, and Jesus and their prophets the men from the skies. He taught us to pray and to love our enemies.”

And Nrana shook his head sadly, “But many of our tribe have gone back to the older gods, the cruel gods. They say there has been great strife among the outsiders, and no more remain upon all of Venus. My father, Alwa, and I are glad another one has come. You will be able to help those of us who have gone back. You can teach us love and kindliness.”

The eyes of the dictator closed. Nrana did not know whether or not he slept, but Nrana stood up quietly to leave the hut. In the doorway, he turned and said, “We pray for you.”

And then, joyously, he ran out of the village to seek the others, who were gathering bela-berries for the feast of the fourth event.

When, with several of them, he returned to the village, the Earthling was gone. The hut was empty.

Outside the compound they found, at last, the trail of his passing. They followed, and it led to a stream and along the stream until they came to the taboo of the green pool and could go no farther.

“He went downstream,” said Alwa gravely. “He sought the sea and the beach. He was well, then, in his mind, for he knew that all streams go to the sea.”

“Perhaps he had a ship-of-the-sky there at the beach,” Nrana said worriedly. “All Earthlings come from the sky. The Father-of-Us told us that.”

“Perhaps he will come back to us,” said Alwa. His old eyes misted.

* * * *

Mr. Smith was coming back, all right, and sooner than they had dared to hope. As soon, in fact, as he could make the trip to the shack and return. He came back dressed in clothing very different from the garb the other white man had worn. Shining leather boots and the uniform of the Galactic Guard, and a wide leather belt with a holster for his needle gun.

But the gun was in his hand when, at dusk, he strode into the compound.

He said, “I am Number One, the Lord of all the Solar System, and your ruler. Who was chief among you?”

Alwa had been in his hut, but he heard the words and came out. He understood the words, but not their meaning. He said, “Earthling, we welcome you back. I am the chief.”

“You were the chief. Now you will serve me. I am the chief.”

Alwa’s old eyes were bewildered at the strangeness of this. He said, “I will serve you, yes. All of us. But it is not fitting that an Earthling should be chief among—”

The whisper of the needle gun. Alwa’s wrinkled hands went to his scrawny neck where, just off the center, was a sudden tiny pin prick of a hole. A faint trickle of red coursed over the dark blue of his skin. The old man’s knees gave way under him as the rage of the poisoned needle dart struck him, and he fell. Others started toward him.

“Back,” said Mr. Smith. “Let him die slowly that you may all see what happens to—”

But one of the chief’s wives, one who did not understand the speech of Earth, was already lifting Alwa’s head. The needle gun whispered again, and she fell forward across him.

“I am Number One,” said Mr. Smith, “and Lord of all the planets. All who oppose me, die by—”

And then, suddenly all of them were running toward him. His finger pressed the trigger and four of them died before the avalanche of their bodies bore him down and overwhelmed him. Nrana had been first in that rush, and Nrana died.

The others tied the Earthling up and threw him into one of the huts. And then, while the women began wailing for the dead, the men made council.

They elected Kallana chief and he stood before them and said, “The Father-of-Us, the Mister Gerhardt, deceived us.” There was fear and worry in his voice and apprehension on his blue face. “If this be indeed the Lord of whom he told us—”

“He is not a god,” said another. “He is an Earthling, but there have been such before on Venus, many many of them who came long and long ago from the skies. Now they are all dead, killed in strife among themselves. It is well. This last one is one of them, but he is mad.”

And they talked long and the dusk grew into night while they talked of what they must do. The gleam of firelight fell upon their bodies, and the waiting drummer.

The problem was difficult. To harm one who was mad was taboo. If he was really a god, it would be worse. Thunder and lightning from the sky would destroy the village. Yet they dared not release him. Even if they took the evil weapon-that-whispered-its-death and buried it, he might find other ways to harm them. He might have another where he had gone for the first.

Yes, it was a difficult problem for them, but the eldest and wisest of them, one M’Ganne, gave them at last the answer.

“O Kallana,” he said, “let us give him to the
kifs
. If
they
harm him—” and old M’Ganne grinned a toothless, mirthless grin “—it would be
their
doing and not ours.”

Kallana shuddered. “It is the most horrible of all deaths. And if he is a god—”

“If he is a god, they will not harm him. If he is mad and not a god, we will not have harmed him. It harms not a man to tie him to a tree.”

Kallana considered well, for the safety of his people was at stake. Considering, he remembered how Alwa and Nrana had died.

He said, “It is right.”

The waiting drummer began the rhythm of the council-end, and those of the men who were young and fleet lighted torches in the fire and went out into the forest to seek the
kifs
, who were still in their season of marching.

And after a while, having found what they sought, they returned.

They took the Earthling out with them, then, and tied him to a tree. They left him there, and they left the gag over his lips because they did not wish to hear his screams when the
kifs
came.

The cloth of the gag would be eaten, too, but by that time, there would be no flesh under it from which a scream might come.

They left him, and went back to the compound, and the drums took up the rhythm of propitiation to the gods for what they had done. For they had, they knew, cut very close to the corner of a taboo—but the provocation had been great, and they hoped they would not be punished.

All night the drums would throb.

* * * *

The man tied to the tree struggled with his bonds, but they were strong and his writhings made the knots but tighten.

His eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

He tried to shout, “I am Number One, Lord of—”

And then, because he could not shout and because he could not loosen himself, there came a rift in his madness. He remembered who he was, and all the old hatreds and bitterness welled up in him.

He remembered, too, what had happened in the compound, and wondered why the Venusian natives had not killed him. Why, instead, they had tied him here alone in the darkness of the jungle.

Afar, he heard the throbbing of the drums, and they were like the beating of the heart of night, and there was a louder, nearer sound that was the pulse of blood in his ears as the fear came to him.

The fear that he knew why they had tied him here. The horrible, gibbering fear that, for the last time, an army marched against him.

He had time to savor that fear to the uttermost, to have it become a creeping certainty that crawled into the black corners of his soul as would the soldiers of the coming army crawl into his ears and nostrils while others would eat away his eyelids to get at the eyes behind them.

And then, and only then, did he hear the sound that was like the rustle of dry leaves, in a dank, black jungle where there were no dry leaves to rustle nor breeze to rustle them.

Horribly, Number One, the last of the dictators, did not go mad again; not exactly, but he laughed, and laughed and laughed.…

ANSWER

Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. “Yes,
now
there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

KNOCK

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.