«You’ve got me there, George. All right, I’ll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?»
«Two hun-dred and six-teen.»
Walter shook his head. «Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that — could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?»
«Ran-dom sam-ples, yes. All spe-cies would have been too many. Male and female each of one hun-dred and eight kinds.»
«What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean.»
«We make food. Syn-thet-ic.»
«Smart,» said Walter. «And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?»
«Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still growing.»
«Nice for the flora,» said Walter. «You weren’t as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna. Well, George, you started out with ‘point one.’ I deduce there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?»
«Some-thing we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er an-i-mals sleep and do not waken? They are cold.»
«It happens in the best regulated zoos, George,» Walter Phelan said. «Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they’re dead.»
«Dead? That means stopped. But noth-ing stopped them. Each was a-lone.»
Walter stared at the Zan. «Do you mean, George, you don’t know what natural death is?»
«Death is when a be-ing is killed, stopped from liv-ing.»
Walter Phelan blinked. «How old are you, George?» he asked.
«Six-teen — you would not know the word. Your pla-net went a-round your sun a-bout sev-en thou-sand times. I am still young.»
Walter whistled softly. «A babe in arms,» he said. He thought hard a moment. «Look, George,» he said, «you’ve got something to learn about this planet you’re on. There’s a guy here who doesn’t hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hourglass. Your vibrations didn’t kill him.»
«What is he?»
«Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our People and animals live until somebody — Old Man Death — stops their ticking.»
«He stopped the two crea-tures? He will stop more?»
Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan’s voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such.
«How about taking me to these animals who won’t wake up?» Walter asked. «Is that against the rules?»
«Come,» said the Zan.
That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan’s books and furniture. When they’d finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away.
He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered.
Walter bowed slightly. «Walter Phelan,» he said, «in case George didn’t tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn’t know all of our ways.»
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 easy-going 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 the fact that they’ve — killed everyone?»
«Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?»
She sank down into a comfortable chair nearby. «No,» she said. «I don’t know just how. Not that it matters, does it?»
«Not a bit. 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 know this is a zoo, don’t you?»
«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 overestimated 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 pieces 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 shortlived creatures we are?»
«That’s right,» Walter said. «One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bisexual 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 faint 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.»