Ahead of Time

by Henry Kuttner

  With that rumor abroad, I thought Griswold would act. There is no way to check such news. A man seldom announces openly that he is going into the Park. It could even be the truth, for all I knew. And for all Griswold knew, his supremacy was in deadly peril before he had even enjoyed his Triumph. There would be danger, of course, if he went out to defend his victory. Lindman and Cowles are both good Hunters. But Griswold, if he did not suspect my trap, had a chance at one sure victory—myself, Honest Roger Bellamy, waiting in berserker fury at a known rendezvous and with a right hand useless for fighting. Did it seem too obvious? Ah, but you don't know Griswold.

  When it was dark I put on my hunting clothes. They are bulletproof, black, close-fitting but very easy with every motion. I blacked my face and hands. I took gun, knife and machete with me, the metal treated so that it will not catch or reflect the light. I like a machete especially. I have strong arms. I was careful not to use my bandaged hand at all, even when I thought no one watched me. And I remembered that I must seem on the verge of berserker rage, because I knew Griswold's spies would be reporting every motion.

  I went toward Central Park, the entrance nearest the carousel site. That far Griswold's men could track me. But no farther.

  At the gate I lingered for a moment—do you remember this, Bellamy within me? Do you remember the plastic monuments we passed on the edge of the Park? Falconer and Brennan and the others, forever immortal, standing proud and godlike in the clear, eternal blocks. All passion spent, all fighting done, their glory assured forever. Did you envy them too, Bellamy?

  I remember how old Falconer's eyes seemed to look through me contemptuously. The number of heads he had taken is engraved on the base of his monument, and he was a very great man. Wait, I thought. I’ll stand in plastic too. I’ll take more heads than even you, Falconer, and the day that I do it will be the day I can lay this burden down. . . .

  Just inside the gate, in the deep shadows, I slipped the bandage from my right hand. I drew my black knife and close against the wall I began to work my way rapidly toward the little gate which is nearest Griswold’s mansion. I had, of course, no intention of going anywhere near the carousel site. Griswold would be in a hurry to get to me and out again and he might not stop to think. Griswold was not a thinker. I gambled on his taking the closest route.

  I waited, feeling very solitary and liking the solitude. It was hard to stay angry. The trees whispered in the darkness. The moon was rising from the Atlantic beyond Long Island. I thought of it shining on the Sound and on the city. It would rise like this long after I was dead. It would glitter on the plastic of my monument and bathe my face with cold light long after you and I, Bellamy, are at peace, our long war with each other ended.

  Then I heard Griswold coming. I tried to empty my mind of everything except killing. It was for this that my body and mind had been trained so painfully ever since I was six years old. I breathed deeply a few times. As always, the deep, shrinking fear tried to rise in me. Fear, and something more. Something within me—is it you, Bellamy?—that says I do not really want to kill.

  Then Griswold came into sight, and the familiar, hungry hatred made everything all right again.

  I do not remember very much about the fight. It all seemed to happen within a single timeless interval, though I suppose it went on for quite a long while. He was suspicious, even as he entered the gate. I thought I had made no sound, but his ears were very sharp and he moved in time to avoid my first shot that should have finished the thing then and there.

  It was not a stalk this time. It was a hard, fast, skillful fight. We both wore bulletproof clothing, but we were both wounded before we got close enough to try for each other's heads with steel. He favored a saber and it was longer than my machete. Still, it was an even battle. We had to fight fast, because the noise might draw other Hunters, if there were any in the Park tonight.

  But in the end, I killed him.

  I took his head. The moon was not yet clear of the high buildings on the other side of the Park and the night was young. I looked up at the calm, proud faces of the immortals along the edge of the Park as I came out with Griswold’s head.

  I summoned a car. Within minutes I was back in my mansion, with my trophy. Before I would let the surgeons treat me I saw that the head was taken to the laboratory for a quick treatment, a very quick preparation. And I sent out orders for a midnight Triumph.

  While I lay on the table and the surgeons washed and dressed my wounds, the news was flashing through the city already. My servants were in Griswold’s mansion, transferring his collections to my reception hall, setting up extra cases that would hold all my trophies, all True Jonathan Hull’s and all of Griswold’s too. I would be the most powerful man in New York, under such masters as old Murdoch and one or two more. All my age group and the one above it would be wild with envy and hate. I thought of Lindman and Cowles and laughed with triumph.

  I thought it was triumph—then.

  I stand now at the head of the staircase, looking down at the lights and the brilliance, the row upon row of trophies, my wives in all their jewels. Servants are moving to the great bronze doors to swing them ponderously open. What will be revealed? The throng of guests, the great Hunters coming to give homage to a greater Hunter? Or—suppose no one has come to my Triumph after all?

  The bronze doors are beginning to open. But there’ll be no one outside. I can’t be sure yet, but I know it, I’m certain of it. The fear that never leaves a Hunter, except in his last and greatest Triumph, is with me now. Suppose, while I stalked Griswold tonight, some other Hunter has lain in wait for bigger game? Suppose someone has taken old Murdoch’s head? Suppose someone else is having a Triumph in New York tonight, a greater Triumph than mine?

  The fear is choking me. I’ve failed. Some other Hunter has beaten me. I’m no good. . . .

  No. No! Listen. Listen to them shouting my name! Look, look at them pouring in through the opened doors, all the great Hunters and their jewel-flashing women, thronging in to fill the bright hall beneath me. I feared too soon. I was the only Hunter in the Park tonight, after all. So I have won, and this is my Triumph. There they stand among the glittering glass cases, their faces turned up to me, admiring, envious. There’s Lindman. There’s Cowles. I can read their expressions very, very easily. They can’t wait to get me alone tonight and challenge me to a duel in the Park.

  They all raise their arms toward me in salute. They shout my name.

  Bellamy within—listen! This is our Triumph. It shall never be taken away from us.

  I beckon to a servant. He hands me the filled glass that is ready. Now I look down at the Hunters of New York—I look down from the height of my Triumph—and I raise my glass to them.

  I drink.

  Hunters—you cannot rob me now.

  I shall stand proud in plastic, godlike in the eternal block that holds me, all passion spent, all fighting done, my glory assured forever.

  The poison works quickly.

  This is triumph.

  By These Presents

  THE DEVIL SMILED uneasily at James Fenwick.

  "It's very irregular," he said. "I'm not at all sure——"

  "Do you want my soul or don't you?" James Fenwick demanded.

  "Naturally I do," the devil said. "But I'll have to think this over. Under the circumstances I don’t exactly see how I could collect."

  "All I want is immortality," Fenwick said, with a pleased smile. "I wonder why no one has ever thought of this before. In my opinion it’s foolproof. Come, come, now, make up your mind. Do you want to back out?"

  "Oh no," the devil said hastily. "It’s just that—— Look here, Fenwick. I’m not sure you realize—immortality’s a long time, you know."

  "Exactly. The question is, will it ever have an end. If it does, you collect my soul. If not——" Fenwick made an airy gesture. "I win," he said.

  "Oh, it has an end," the devil said, somewhat grimly. "It’s just that right now I’d rather not underta
ke such a long-term investment. You wouldn’t care for immortality, Fenwick. Believe me."

  Fenwick said, "Ha."

  "I don't see why you're so set on immortality," the devil said a little peevishly, tapping the point of his tail on the carpet.

  "I'm not," Fenwick told him. "Actually, it's just a byproduct. There happen to be quite a number of things I’d like to do without suffering the consequences, but——"

  "I could promise you that," the devil put in eagerly.

  "But," Fenwick said, lifting his hand for quiet, "the deal would obviously end right there. Played this way, I get not only an unlimited supply of immunities of all kinds, but I get immortality besides. Take it or leave it, my friend."

  The devil rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the room, scowling at the carpet. Finally he looked up.

  "Very well," he said briskly. "I accept."

  "You do?" Fenwick was aware of a slight sinking feeling. Now that it actually came to the point, maybe. . . . He looked uneasily toward the drawn blinds of his apartment. "How will you go about it?" he asked.

  "Biochemically," the devil said. Now that he had made up his mind he seemed quite confident. "And with quantum mechanics. Aside from the internal regenerative functions, some space-time alterations will have to be made. You’ll become independent of your external environment. Environment is often fatal."

  "I’ll stay right here, though? Visible, tangible—no tricks?"

  "Tricks?" the devil looked wounded. "If there’s any trickery, it seems to me you’re the offender. No indeed, Fenwick. You’ll get value received for your investment. I promise that. You’ll become a closed system, like Achilles. Except for the heel. There will have to be a vulnerable point, you see."

  "No," Fenwick said quickly. "I won’t accept that."

  "It can’t be helped, I’m afraid. You’ll be quite safe inside the closed system from anything outside. And there’ll be nothing inside except you. It is you. In a way this is in your own interest." The devil’s tail lashed upon the carpet. Fenwick regarded it uneasily. "If you wish to put an end to your own life eventually," the devil went on, "I can’t protect you against that. Consider, however, that in a few million years you may wish to die."

  "That reminds me," Fenwick said. "Tithonus. I’ll keep my youth, health, present appearance, all my faculties——"

  "Naturally, naturally. I’m not interested in tricking you over terms. What I had in mind was the possibility that boredom might set in."

  "Are you bored?"

  "I have been, in my time," the devil admitted.

  "You’re immortal?"

  "Of course."

  "Then why haven’t you killed yourself? Or couldn’t you?"

  "I could," the devil said bleakly. "I did. . . . Now, the terms of our contract. Immortality, youth, health, etc., etc., invulnerability with the single exception of suicide. In return for this service, I shall possess your soul at death."

  "Why?" Fenwick asked with sudden curiosity.

  The devil looked at him somberly. "In your fall, and in the fall of every soul, I forget my own for a moment." He made an impatient gesture. "This is quibbling. Here." He plucked out of empty air a parchment scroll and a quill pen.

  "Our agreement," the devil said.

  Fenwick read the scroll carefully. At one point he looked up.

  "What’s this?" he asked. "I didn’t know I was supposed to put up surety."

  "I will naturally want some kind of bond," the devil said. "Unless you can find a coguarantor?"

  "I’m sure I couldn’t," Fenwick said. "Not even in the death house. Well, what kind of security do you want?"

  "Certain of your memories of the past," the devil said. "All of them unconscious, as it happens."

  Fenwick considered. "I’m thinking about amnesia. I need my memories."

  "Not these. Amnesia is concerned with conscious memories. You will never know the structure I want is missing."

  "Is it—the soul?"

  "No," the devil said calmly. "It is a necessary part of the soul, of course, or it would be of no value to me. But you will keep the essentials until you choose to surrender them to me at death. I will then combine the two and take possession of your soul. But that will no doubt be a long time from now, and in the meantime you will suffer no inconvenience."

  "If I write that into the contract, will you sign?"

  The devil nodded.

  Fenwick scribbled in the margin and then signed his name with the wet red point of the quill. "Here," he said.

  The devil, with a tolerant air, added his name. He then waved the scroll into emptiness.

  "Very well," he said. "Now stand up, please. Some glandular readjustment is necessary." His hands sank into Fenwick’s breast painlessly, and moved swiftly here and there. "The thyroid . . . and the other endocrines . . . can be reset to regenerate your body indefinitely. Turn around, please."

  In the mirror over the fireplace Fenwick saw his red visitor’s hand sink softly into the back of Fenwick’s head. He felt a sudden dizziness.

  "Thalamus and pineal," the devil murmured. "The space-time cognition is subjective . . . and now you’re independent of your external environment. One moment, now. There’s another slight . . ."

  His wrist twisted suddenly and he drew his closed hand out of Fenwick’s head. At the same time Fenwick felt a strange, sudden elation.

  "What did you do then?" he asked, turning.

  No one stood behind him. The apartment was quite empty. The devil had disappeared.

  It could, of course, have been a dream. Fenwick had anticipated this possible skepticism after the event. Hallucinations could occur. He thought he was immortal and invulnerable now. But this is, by common standards, a psychotic delusion. He had no proof.

  But he had no doubt, either. Immortality, he thought, is something tangible. An inward feeling of infinite wellbeing. That glandular readjustment, he thought. My body is functioning now as it never did before, as no one’s ever did. I am a self-regenerating, closed system which nothing can injure, not even time.

  A curious, welling happiness possessed him. He closed his eyes and summoned up the oldest memories he could command. Sunlight on a porch floor, the buzzing of a fly, warmth and a rocking motion. He was aware of no lack. His mind ranged freely in the past. The rhythmic sway and creak of swings in a playground, the echoing stillness of a church. A piano-box clubhouse. The roughness of a washcloth scrubbing his face, and his mother’s voice. . . .

  Invulnerable, immortal, Fenwick crossed the room, opened a door and went down a short hallway. He walked with a sense of wonderful lightness, of pure pleasure in being alive. He opened a second door quietly and looked in. His mother lay in bed asleep, propped on a heap of pillows.

  Fenwick felt very happy.

  He moved softly forward, skirting the wheel chair by the bed, and stood looking down. Then he tugged a pillow gently free and lifted it in both hands, to lower it again slowly, at first, toward his mother’s face.

  Since this is not the chronicle of James Fenwick’s sins, it is clearly not necessary to detail the steps by which he arrived, within five years, at the title of the Worst Man in the World. Sensational newspapers reveled in him. There were, of course, worse men, but being mortal and vulnerable they were more reticent.

  Fenwick’s behavior was based on an increasing feeling that he was the only permanent object in a transient world. "Their days are as grass," he mused, watching his fellow Satanists as they crowded around an altar with something unpleasant on it. This was early in his career, when he was exploring pure sensation along traditional lines, later discarded as juvenilia.

  Meanwhile, perfectly free, and filled with that enduring, delightful sense of well-being, Fenwick experimented with many aspects of living. He left a trail of hung juries and baffled attorneys behind him. "A modern Caligula!" said the New York News, explaining to its readers who Caligula had been, with examples. "Are the shocking charges against James Fenwick true?"
/>
  But somehow, he could never quite be convicted. Every charge fell through. He was, as the devil had assured him, a closed system within his environment, and his independence of the outer world was demonstrated in many a courtroom. Exactly how the devil managed things so efficiently Fenwick could never understand. Very seldom did an actual miracle have to happen.

  Once an investment banker, correctly blaming Fenwick for the collapse of his entire fortune, fired five bullets at Fenwick's heart. The bullets ricocheted. The only witnesses were the banker and Fenwick. Theorizing that his unharmed target was wearing a bulletproof vest, the banker aimed the last bullet at Fenwick's head, with identical results. Later the man tried again, with a knife. Fenwick, who was curious, decided to wait and see what would happen. What happened was that eventually the banker went mad.

  Fenwick, who had appropriated his fortune by very direct means, proceeded to increase it. Somehow, he was never convicted of any of the capital charges he incurred. It took a certain technique to make sure that the crimes he committed would always endanger his life if he were arrested for them, but he mastered the method without much difficulty and his wealth and power increased tremendously.

  He was certainly notorious. Presently he decided that something was lacking, and began to crave admiration. It was not so easy to achieve. He did not yet possess enough wealth to transcend the moral judgments of society. That was easily remedied. Ten years after his bargain with the devil, Fenwick was not perhaps the most powerful man in the world, but certainly the most powerful man in the United States. He attained the admiration and the fame he thought he wanted.

  And it was not enough. The devil had suggested that in a few million years Fenwick might wish to die, out of sheer boredom. It took only ten years for Fenwick to realize, one summer day, with a little shock of unpleasant surprise, that he did not know what he wanted to do next.