"That's all right, Daddy's holding you," Dale said aloud, softly. Then there was a flash of white so bright that it could be seen as easily through the walls as through the window, for there were no walls, and all the breath was drawn out of their bodies at once, their voices robbed from them so suddenly that they all involuntarily shouted and then, forever, were silent. Their shout was taken up in a violent wind that swept the sound, wrung from every throat in perfect unison, upward into the clouds forming over what had once been Denver.
And in the last moment, as the shout was drawn from his lungs and the heat took his eyes out of his face, Dale realized that despite all his foreknowledge, the only life he had ever saved was that of a maitre d' hotel, whose life, to Dale, didn't mean a thing.
FAT FARM
The receptionist was surprised that he was back so soon.
"Why, Mr. Barth, how glad I am to see you," she said.
"Surprised, you mean," Barth answered. His voice rumbled from the rolls of fat under his chin.
"Delighted."
"How long has it been?" Barth asked.
"Three years. How time flies."
The receptionist smiled, but Barth saw the awe and revulsion on her face as she glanced over his immense body. In her job she saw fat people every day. But Barth knew he was unusual. He was proud of being unusual.
"Back to the fat farm," he said, laughing.
The effort of laughing made him short of breath, and he gasped for air as she pushed a button and said, "Mr. Barth is back."
He did not bother to look for a chair. No chair could hold him. He did lean against a wall, however. Standing was a labor he preferred to avoid.
Yet it was not shortness of breath or exhaustion at the slightest effort that had brought him back to Anderson's Fitness Center. He had often been fat before, and he rather relished the sensation of bulk, the impression he made as crowds parted for him. He pitied those who could only be slightly fat-- short people, who were not able to bear the weight. At well over two meters, Barth could get gloriously fat, stunningly fat. He owned thirty wardrobes and took delight in changing from one to another as his belly and buttocks and thighs grew. At times he felt that if he grew large enough, he could take over the world, be the world. At the dinner table he was a conqueror to rival Genghis Khan.
It was not his fatness, then, that had brought him in. It was that at last the fat was interfering with his other pleasures. The girl he had been with the night before had tried and tried, but he was incapable-- a sign that it was time to renew, refresh, reduce.
"I am a man of pleasure," he wheezed to the receptionist, whose name he never bothered to learn. She smiled back.
"Mr. Anderson will be here in a moment."
"Isn't it ironic," he said, "that a man such as I, who is capable of fulfilling every one of his desires, is never satisfied!" He gasped with laughter again. "Why haven't we ever slept together?" he asked.
She looked at him, irritation crossing her face. "You always ask that, Mr. Barth, on your way in. But you never ask it on your way out."
True enough. When he was on his way out of the Anderson Fitness Center, she never seemed as attractive as she had on his way in.
Anderson came in, effusively handsome, gushingly warm, taking Barth's fleshy hand in his and pumping it with enthusiasm.
"One of my best customers," he said.
"The usual," Barth said.
"Of course," Anderson answered. "But the price has gone up."
"If you ever go out of business," Barth said, following Anderson into the inner rooms, "give me plenty of warning. I only let myself go this much because I know you're here."
"Oh," Anderson chuckled. "We'll never go out of business."
"I have no doubt you could support your whole organization on what you charge me."
"You're paying for much more than the sitnple service we perform. You're also paying for privacy. Our, shall we say, lack of government intervention."
"How many of the bastards do you bribe?"
"Very few, very few. Partly because so many high officials also need our service."
"No doubt."
"It isn't just weight gains that bring people to us, you know. It's cancer and aging and accidental disfigurement. You'd be surprised to learn who has had our service."
Barth doubted that he would. The couch was ready for him, immense and soft and angled so that it would be easy for him to get up again.
"Damn near got married this time," Barth said, by way of conversation.
Anderson turned to him in surprise.
"But you didn't?"
"Of course not. Started getting fat, and she couldn't cope."
"Did you tell her?"
"That I was getting fat? It was obvious."
"About us, I mean."
"I'm not a fool."
Anderson looked relieved. "Can't have rumors getting around among the thin and young, you know."
"Still, I think I'll look her up again, afterward. She did things to me a woman shouldn't be able to do. And I thought I was jaded."
Anderson placed a tight-fitting rubber cap over Barth's head.
"Think your key thought," Anderson reminded him. Key thought. At first that had been such a comfort, to make sure that not one iota of his memory would be lost. Now it was boring, almost juvenile. Key thought. Do you have your own Captain Aardvark secret decoder ring? Be the first on your block. The only thing Barth had been the first on his block to do was reach puberty. He had also been the first on his block to reach one hundred fifty kilos.
How many times have I been here? he wondered as the tingling in his scalp began. This is the eighth time. Eight times, and my fortune is larger than ever, the kind of wealth that takes on a life on its own. I can keep this up forever, he thought, with relish. Forever at the supper table with neither worries nor restraints.
"It's dangerous to gain so much weight," Lynette had said. "Heart attacks, you know." But the only things that Barth worried about were hemorrhoids and impotence. The former was a nuisance, but the latter made life unbearable and drove him back to Anderson.
Key thought. What else? Lynette, standing naked on the edge of the cliff with the wind blowing. She was courting death, and he admired her for it, almost hoped that she would find it. She despised safety precautions. Like clothing, they were restrictions to be cast aside. She had once talked him into playing tag with her on a construction site, racing along the girders in the darkness, until the police came and made them leave. That had been when Barth was still thin from his last time at Anderson's. But it was not Lynette on the girders that he held in his mind. It was Lynette, fragile and beautiful Lynette, daring the wind to snatch her from the cliff and break up her body on the rocks by the river.
Even that, Barth thought, would be a kind of pleasure. A new kind of pleasure, to taste a grief so magnificently, so admirably earned.
And then the tingling in his head stopped. Anderson came back in.
"Already?" Birth asked.
"We've streamlined the process." Anderson carefully peeled the cap from Barth's head, helped the immense man lift himself from the couch.
"I can't understand why it's illegal," Barth said. "Such a simple thing."
"Oh, there are reasons. Population control, that sort of thing. This is a kind of immortality, you know. But it's mostly the repugnance most people feel. They can't face the thought. You're a man of rare courage."