IMMORTALITY FOR SOME

by J. T. McIntosh

  “At eighty I was subject to increasing pressure to accept Rebirth. I didn’t want it. I wanted the twenty years I’ve had since then, the twenty or thirty more I could have. But Ralph Charles Coleman had no choice. He was too important, too valuable. The world couldn’t afford to lose his valuable brain. The pressure was approaching a point where it would become compulsion.

  “I had to escape. I was selfish. I didn’t care about the value to the world of Ralph Charles Coleman. I was concerned about my value to myself. I wanted to go on being myself.

  “And the only way I could do so was to cease being myself.

  “My plans worked well, as you’ll agree. If only people had left poor harmless old Benny Rice alone, they’d have worked perfectly. Knowing I had no natural ability in music I went to Musicosmos as a caretaker. Completely lacking in talent, how could I give myself away? But unfortunately one woman liked me, another loved me. And things happened, and it was discovered that twenty years ago the man who died wasn’t the man who fired the shot.”

  He looked straight at the judge. There was complete silence in court.

  And at that moment, of all moments, a picture of what had happened twenty years ago flashed through his mind.

  Old Benny had died, and he had shot him, but he hadn’t killed him. It was after Benny died of a seizure that the brilliant Ralph Charles Coleman conceived his fantastically complicated scheme to steal his own life from the Rebirth Institute. Only a doctor could have done it. Many things had had to be done—many things had been done. But the only part of it which had been found out, even now, was that the fall had preceded the shot.

  Coleman could be acquitted. Even now he could be acquitted. He could have a fuller investigation made, and this time, not merely looking for evidence that a suicide was murder, the investigators would find that there had been neither, and that a dead man had been shot.

  But that wouldn’t be acquittal. That way led to Rebirth for Coleman.

  “I have made this statement,” he said, “because imprisonment would be worse to me than Rebirth. But I must suffer imprisonment, Rebirth or death. Society would not let me go free, to die my own death. I killed a man to escape Rebirth. The crime still keeps me safe from it. So since it must be imprisonment or death, may I ask for mercy?

  “May I ask for death?”

  There was silence for a long time. And then the judge granted his wish.

  The wonder didn’t quite last nine days. After the execution, the legal question whether Coleman could be convicted for the murder of Rice after being convicted, as Rice, of the murder of Coleman, became academic.

  It was decided that the verdict was wrong.

  And after that everybody wanted to forget about it.

  Marita was married within three weeks to Kensel, much to everybody’s surprise, including their own. He was a little old for her; but then, he was sixty years younger than Benny.

  Everyone still thought of him as Benny. Indeed, one reason why the hubbub soon died was the nasty taste which was left behind by the case. Some felt that even a man like Ralph Charles Coleman should be allowed to live his own life if he wanted to, and not have Rebirth thrust upon him. Some felt a man shouldn’t have to kill to avoid Rebirth. Nearly everybody, sympathetic or unsympathetic, felt that the whole business undermined the name and fame of a great man.

  It was much better to think of him as Benny Rice.

  At the Rebirth Institute Dr. Martin looked at the sleeping boy and recalled with wonder the shambling old idiot who had certainly had him fooled. Must have been a pretty good actor, the old boy.

  Betty Rogers came and stood at his shoulder.

  “He’s new, isn’t he?” she said—she could speak now. Also she had begun to care how she looked, and in a white nylon dress, she looked all right.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dick Herman.” Or Benny Rice, or Ralph Charles Coleman, Martin thought. Poor old Benny, who didn’t want Rebirth but couldn’t escape it.

  “Why has he been asleep so much longer than everybody else?”

  “We weren’t sure he’d be allowed to stay. You see, Betty, we wanted him here, as we want all of you, but if people have done certain things, they’re not allowed to stay. Dick was brought here, because we wanted him so much, and because somebody thought, being such a nice boy, he couldn’t really have done what he was supposed to have done, after all.”

  And that was quite a nice allegory to explain how old Benny had been brought from the gas chamber, unconscious but certainly not dead, and put through the Rebirth process still thinking that he’d died in the gas chamber—if you could put it like that.

  “How could they think he had done something if he hadn’t?” Betty asked.

  The questions of a Reborn child were quite as difficult to answer as those of an ordinary one. But Martin accepted the challenge.

  “He wanted everybody to think he had done it, because he didn’t want to stay here.”

  The police had eventually decided that after Benny Rice died of natural causes, Coleman had evolved a brilliant scheme which won him twenty more years of life and nearly got him executed at the end of it. But there were red faces all round at the way Benny Rice had not merely been arrested but had been convicted of a murder when there hadn’t really been a murder at all, and if there had been it would have been the other way round.

  Martin wondered daringly whether the powers that be had simply decided that there hadn’t been a murder because a man like Coleman couldn’t be allowed to go to the gas chamber merely for putting a creature like Benny Rice out of its presumed misery. But such thoughts were dangerous.

  “Why didn’t he want to stay here?” Betty asked.

  “He didn’t know what it was like,” said Martin patiently, “or he wouldn’t have minded.”

  “How do you know? Didn’t I want to stay here either?”

  “You didn’t mind coming here. Look, Dick’s wakening up.”

  Betty bent over him like a child mother. “You’ll like it here, Dick,” she said soothingly.

  Under his breath, Martin bet he would. He wouldn’t mind marrying Betty Rogers himself in a year or two. But then, the Rebirth Institute didn’t actually fix marriages. Marriages were made in heaven.

  With material supplied by the Rebirth Institute, of course.

  “You can’t talk yet,” said Betty, “but we’ll teach you to talk. Oh, Dr. Martin, look what a nice smile he has. I think I’m going to like him.”

  In heaven, something was made.