Henry Kuttner
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 realise - 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 undertake 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 by-product. 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 sombrely. “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 co-guarantor?”
“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 scepticism 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 well-being. 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 wheelchair 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 revelled in him. There were, of course, worse men, but being mortal and vulnerable they were more reticent.