The Collection by Fredric Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

tiny, almost unnoticeable, perfectly healed
scars.
    It had happened!
    The scouter, under automatic control, was already entering
the hatch of the mothership. The grapples pulled it into its individual lock,
and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the lock was airfilled. Carson
opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through the double door of the lock.
    He went right to Brander’s office, went in, and saluted.
    Brander still looked dazed. ‘Hi, Carson,’ he said. ‘What you
missed; what a show!’
    ‘What happened, sir?’
    ‘Don’t know, exactly. We fired one salvo, and their whole
fleet went up in dust! Whatever it was jumped from ship to ship in a flash,
even the ones we hadn’t aimed at and that were out of range! The whole fleet
disintegrated before our eyes, and we didn’t get the paint of a single ship
scratched!
    ‘We can’t even claim credit for it. Must have been some
unstable component in the metal they used, and our sighting shot just set it
off. Man, too bad you missed all the excitement!’
    Carson managed a sickly ghost of a grin, for it would be
days before he’d be over the impact of his experience, but the captain wasn’t
watching.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. Common sense, more than modesty, told
him he’d be branded as the worst liar in space if he ever said any more than
that. ‘Yes, sir, too bad I missed all the excitement....’
     

IMAGINE
     
     
    Imagine ghosts, gods and devils.
    Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and
cities sunken in the sea.
    Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns and banshees.
    Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, familiars,
demons.
    Easy to imagine, all of those things: mankind has been imagining
them for thousands of years.
    Imagine spaceships and the future.
    Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there'll be
spaceships in it.
    Is there then anything that's hard to imagine?
    Of course there is.
    Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself
aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of
matter that you're in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.
    Imagine a universe—infinite or not, as you wish to picture
it—with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.
    Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those
suns.
    Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with
it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination. Imagine!
     

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
     
     
    Although there was no way in which he could have known it,
Lorenz Kane had been riding for a fall ever since the time he ran over the girl
on the bicycle. The fall itself could have happened anywhere, any time; it
happened to happen backstage at a burlesque theater on an evening in late
September.
    For the third evening within a week he had watched the act
of Queenie Quinn, the show's star stripper, an act well worth watching, indeed.
Clad only in blue light and three tiny bits of strategically placed ribbon,
Queenie, a tall blond built along the lines of a brick whatsit, had just
completed her last stint for the evening and had vanished into the wings, when
Kane made up his mind that a private viewing of Queenie's act, in his bachelor
apartment, not only would be more pleasurable than a public viewing but would
indubitably lead to even greater pleasures. And since the finale number, in which
Queenie, as the star, was not required to appear, was just starting, now would
be the best time to talk to her with a view toward obtaining a private viewing.
    He left the theater and strolled down the alley to the stage
door entrance. A five-dollar bill got him past the doorman without difficulty
and a minute later he had found and was knocking upon a dressing room door
decorated with a gold star. A voice called out "Yeah?" He knew better
than to try to push a proposition through a closed door and he knew his way
around back-stage well enough to know the one question that would