"Brown, Fredric - KNOCK" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Fredric)

FREDRIC BROWN

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 horrifled 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.
True, company would be nice, but he'd get along without it. Maybe
after a while, he'd get so he'd enjoy the occasional company of one of the
Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so
alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion,
intelligent though they were, in a way.
An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established
communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants,
although they didn't look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan
regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants.
Certainly what they'd done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills-and