"Evidently we — those of us who are doomed, from time to time, to the supreme torment of indeterminate immortality as manager of Hell — committed the most unspeakable crimes in some other existence. While Hell would no doubt supply plenty of torment without our help, a manager is evidently required to assure the most efficient and economical distribution of misery. So this is our punishment. We must redeem ourselves with infinitely greater pain than any of the other damned souls.
"I have done so, at the cost of five thousand years of the most intense anguish; monotony, boredom, loneliness. You have escaped loneliness by your spell, but I greatly fear the cure will prove worse than the disease, if you will excuse the trite expression. I am unutterably tired and anxious for an end to my torment.
"However, I must warn you not to count on redemption within five millennia. Before you leave this place, you will be required to find and train a successor, one who deserves what eventually seems like eternal damnation. You will seize and discard any number before you strike one who is cursed as we are, for unspeakable crimes in those other planes are damnably rare, it seems. You will live in a perpetual agony of hope that each generation will deliver up your successor. And you will never know, until almost the last moment, when your successor is at hand, except by the most intensive search for him ... or her! That could as easily be a million years —"
Hale's nerves had gone completely limp. There was no more rebellion in him. You get what you want, if you try hard enough — and then wish you hadn't. You can't escape first principles.
Victory was defeat. Why? Because: "By grasping the principle that anything you do, irrespective of your intentions, will increase the misery and torments of the people, you have confirmed my belief that you were to be my successor, for you understand that that is how Hell is constructed. If you didn't know it before, you do now, most emphatically!"
One hope had been smashed, the solitary hope that he might, by defeating Lucifer, escape relatively eternal torment. He had succeeded. What was the result of his victory? It bound him forever to his defeat. So far from defeating Lucifer, he had become Lucifer.
"I don't want —" he said. "I didn't intend —"
Johnson patted his arm sympathetically. "I know, my boy. That's the way it was with me, when I invented hope. That's the way it is with all of us. It's part of our fate." He sat back, puffing his cigar. "Yes, William, I can never express my relief that I have not put my trust in you to no purpose. You were my last hope, and for a while I feared you were too nervous and temperamental for the job. If you had failed me, I don't know what I should have done.
"Ah, my boy, what gratification it gives me! Developing you, watching you, guiding you, to take my place as the supremely damned manager of Hell. In training you as my successor, I have not wasted thirty years!"
Hale was shocked erect. "Thirty years! You mean you planned all this ... Gloria and everything —"
"I'm sorry," Johnson reached across Hale's lap and took something from Gloria. "I see your eternal helpmate has unwrapped your birthday present." He put the second ankh in Hale's limp grasp. "I mean thirty-two!"
"Isn't it cute, Billie-willie?" cried Gloria.
Hale stared at the object. Billie-willie ... .Cute ... The ankh, immortality, cute!
He sat, numbed and dumbly cold, staring at the bright, hard gold that symbolized his inescapable eternity of doom.
The End