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Alien invaders find a deserted earth and revive a human mummy to get answers. He doesn't have a clue and they kill him. They revive a man's ashes from the city and he disappears.

In the end the man has arranged things so that the aliens fearing they are taking him back to their home planet commit suicide by aiming their spaceship into a sun while the man leaves the ships with the secret of the device that animates dead bodies.

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    If you are searching for two separate short stories, you should post two separate questions.
    – phantom42
    Jan 5, 2015 at 15:39
  • The first story is "Resurrection" aka "The Monster" by A. E. van Vogt. This question has come up before, see the answer to this question.
    – user14111
    Jan 5, 2015 at 16:04
  • I've removed the second question. I'd suggest you re-ask the second question as a new question.
    – Valorum
    Jan 5, 2015 at 16:37

1 Answer 1

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Based on the comment by @user14111, this is "Resurrection", also known as "The Monster", by A. E. van Vogt, which you can read at the Internet Archive.

Here's the quote about resurrecting a mummy:

Out of the mummy's skull had come the multi-quadrillion memory shapes from which a response was being evoked. As ever, the memory held true.

A man blinked, and opened his eyes.

"It is true, then," he said aloud, and the words were translated into the Ganae tongue as he spoke them. "Death is merely an opening into another life—but where are my attendants?" At the end, his voice took on a complaining tone.

From Wikipedia:

Enash, an alien of the Ganae race, lands in a city that is crumbling with age and covered with the remains of bodies. There is no sign of warfare, and it appears the inhabitants met their doom knowingly and willingly. The Ganae are mystified; given the obvious technological capacity, if they faced a worldwide threat why did they not move to another star? They suspect they did not have the ability to find star systems containing planets, a technique the Ganae only learned by accident.

They find a museum and use their advanced machinery to revive a body that turns out to be an Egyptian Pharaoh who is upset his attendants are missing. He can offer no useful information, so Captain Gorsid has him killed. A second body is revived; he is an alcoholic who believes the aliens to be the result of delirium tremens. They quickly place him as having lived long before the catastrophic event, and he too is killed.

[...]

After locking the controls into a collision course, Enash has a thought. Asking the ship's astronomer, he learns that the crew of the ship had difficulty destroying the locators because one of the doors was locked. He realizes that in the seconds after being revived, the monster had already visited the ship and learned all he needed. The rest was simply a ruse to get the crew to kill themselves, while he returned to Earth and revived the race without the rest of the Ganae learning of their existence.

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