The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, “My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What’s this all about? Why did they bring me here?”
Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he’d always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easygoing informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.
“I think I know why they brought you here but let’s go back a bit,” he said. “Do you know just what has happened otherwise?”
“You mean that they’ve killed everyone?”
“Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?” She sank into a comfortable chair nearby.
“No,” she said, “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters does it?”
“Not a lot. But here’s the story—what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn’t a great number of them—here, anyway. I don’t know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don’t know where that is, but I’d guess it’s outside the Solar System. You’ve seen the space ship they came in?”
“Yes It’s as big as a mountain.”
“Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration—they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it’s more like a radio wave than a sound vibration—that destroys all animal life. It— the ship itself—is insulated against the vibration. I don’t know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred-odd animals in this zoo, weren’t killed was because we were inside the ship. We’d been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don’t you?”
“I—I suspected it.”
“The front walls are transparent from the outside The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we’re in, are of plastic, and they’ve got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn’t have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn’t any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race—specifically you and I—can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us.”
Grace Evans smiled faintly. “Another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess. Do you remember being captured? I don’t. I went to sleep one night and woke up in a cage on the space ship.”
“I don’t remember either ” Walter said. “My hunch is that they used the vibratory waves at low intensity first, just enough to knock us all out. Then they cruised around, picking up samples more or less at random for their zoo. After they had as many as they wanted, or as many as they had space in the ship to hold, they turned on the juice all the way. And that was that. It wasn’t until yesterday they knew they’d made a mistake and had underestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are.”
“That we were—what?”
“They can be killed but they don’t know what natural death is. They didn’t anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yesterday.”
“Two of—Oh!”
“Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species gone irrevocably. And by the Zan’s way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens.”
“You mean they didn’t realize what short-lived creatures we are?”
“That’s right,” Walter said. “One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bi-sexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core—if they have cores. At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo—two by two instead of one by one. They figure we’ll last longer collectively if not individually.”
“Oh!” Grace Evans stood up and there was a taint flush on her face. “If you think—If they think—” She turned toward the door.
“It’ll be locked,” Walter Phelan said calmly “But don’t worry. Maybe they think, but I don’t think. You needn’t even tell me you wouldn’t have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances.”
“But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?”
“It isn’t so little; we’ll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don’t think I don’t agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo.”
She said “Thank you,” almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is wasn’t anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought.
He smiled at her and said, “Otherwise—”
She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. “If you were a man, you’d be thinking of some way to—They can be killed, you said?” Her voice was bitter.
“The Zan? Oh, certainly. I’ve been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them.”
“But you said—”
“Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don’t have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn’t have, something that renews cells.”
She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, “I think that’s right. And I don’t think they feel pain.”
“I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?”
“I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg.”
“Did he bleed red?”
“Yes but it didn’t seem to annoy him. He didn’t get mad about it; didn’t even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was one. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan.”
Walter Phelan nodded slowly.
“He wouldn’t get angry, of course,” he said. “They’re emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn’t do any good. They’d just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They’d just see that he didn’t have a crack at any more keepers.
“How many of them are there?” she asked.
“About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,”
“They did a good—”
There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, “Come in.”
A Zan stood in the doorway.
“Hello George,” said Walter.
“Hel-lo Wal-ter,” said the Zan.
It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.