After some rote hemming and hawing from Strangeways — and some heavily italicized gibberish from Karst about time as mankind’s comeuppance for original sin, and mankind itself as a race of undeserving monkeys, and heaven as a kind of perpetual-motion machine — Strangeways agrees to have his life compacted, and in no time at all he’s deloused and depilated and basted in radioactive Vaseline and inserted, buck naked, into a “thrumming titanium cervix” (Orson’s words, Mrs. Haven, not mine), at which point everyone puts on goggles and the space rays are harnessed and something goes horribly wrong. The experiment has the opposite of the expected result: instead of living his entire life in a single fervent moment, Strangeways’s existence is stretched out so infinitely thin that he might as well not be existing at all. He’s traded his brief, Judeo-Christian lifespan for a diaphanous kind of immortality: he’s sidestepped the life God intended for him and become an accidental god himself.
Uncharacteristically for my father — a believer in tidy endings, like most of his peers in the trade — it’s left open whether Strangeways’s default godhood is a blessing or a curse.
The editors of Preposterous! Stories weren’t too taken with “The Un-Extended Life,” much to Orson’s consternation. They accepted it grudgingly — as a kind of stopgap between “Titans’ Battle,” by Heinrich Hauser, and “Warlord of Peace,” by Leroy P. Yerxa — and paid him half the normal rate per word. Orson sent them an indignant letter, seven pages long, demanding an explanation for the slight. Their answer took the form of a nine-word postcard, all in caps:
MORE TITS TOLLIVER. MORE POINTER SISTERS. MORE JUJU FRUITS.
My father scrupulously avoided repeating this error in the 136 stories that followed. From that day onward, his extraterrestrials were nearly always female, dressed inadequately or not at all, and possessed of proud, heaving, pendulous breasts, whenever possible in multiples of three.
* * *
I’m rambling again, Mrs. Haven. Something odd seems to have happened to the air. Could the pilot light have gone out in the kitchen?
XI
ENZIAN AND GENTIAN had just celebrated their birthday — an orgy of Bavarian cream and marzipan at which no expense was spared — when Hitler’s Wehrmacht arrived at the gates to the city, politely requested the key, and received it with an ingratiating flourish. Vienna in ’38 was no longer the glistening pudding, studded with exotic candied fruits, that it had been in the years of its prime — but the Führer discovered, to his profound satisfaction, that it practically melted on his tongue.
The Toula-Silbermanns watched the victory procession from the mezzanine balcony of their apartment — close enough, as Kaspar’s father-in-law put it, “to trim your whiskers on the bayonets.” The phalanxes of uniformed torsos, extending up the Ringstrasse as far as the eye could see, were impressive enough; but the fervor of the crowd was grander still. Teenagers flung confetti; couples kissed in the street; men sang ardently along with songs they didn’t know the words to yet; and everywhere that stiff-armed, armpit-exposing, supremely unsavory salute. In terms of pure spectacle, that tremendous parade was unsurpassed in the city’s three-thousand-year history: a whirling laterna magica of jet black and scarlet, submission and patriotism, sweating men and fawning women, eros and repression, brotherly feeling and hate. And at the navel of it all, at its heroic center, Waldemar von Toula — all two hundred kilos’ worth — sat artfully arranged in the back of a Daimler convertible.
He was mountainous now, more massive even than Reichsmarschall Goering, and his spectacles had been replaced by a cobalt-tinted monocle on a length of silver cord. He was squinting blandly out into the crowd, searching for familiar faces, but his gaze never rose to the level of his brother’s balcony. The family looked on in silence as the Daimler rolled past; even the twins seemed momentarily abashed. Sonja stood at the railing, ashen-faced and white-knuckled; Kaspar huddled behind her, staring out through his fingers, contending with actuality at last. But it was one Felix Ungarsky — Trotskyist agitator, occasional pimp and current tenant of the yellow divan — who put the collective feeling into words.
“I couldn’t possibly eat as much dinner,” Ungarsky growled into his beard, “as I’d like to be able to puke.”
* * *
On the nineteenth of March — an unseasonably balmy Saturday — the same Daimler convertible eased to a stop in front of 37 Ringstrasse, its brakes chuffing softly, and a monocled man in a cherry-red suit stepped out into the piping noonday sun. As chance or fate or Providence would have it, it was Felix Ungarsky who answered the door, and none too cordially either: he’d done almost nothing but sleep since the transfer of government, and the doorbell had roused him from a wonderfully Wermacht-free dream. Blinking out at the caller through nearsighted eyes, his face piggish with sleep, Ungarsky did his best to get his jumbled thoughts in order. The man regarded him warmly, in no apparent hurry, beaming like Saint Nicholas himself. In his fuddled condition, Ungarsky failed to recognize the caller; he decided — not altogether wrongly — that he was a peddler of religious literature.
“You’ve chosen the wrong house, I’m afraid. Our souls are brimming with fulfillment as it is. We’re part of the German Reich now, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I did hear something to that effect,” the man replied.
“There you have it, then. This family has no time for you today.”
“No time for me?” the caller answered brightly, stepping past him. “Run upstairs and announce me, there’s a good fellow. I rather think you’ll find that I’m expected.”
This was by no means the first time Ungarsky had been mistaken for the butler, but in his grogginess he made a rash decision: he decided, just this once, to let it get under his skin.
“One moment now, Father Christmas,” he said, catching hold of the visitor’s sleeve. “My name is Felix Ungarsky, and I happen to reside in these apartments. You seem to be under the mistaken impression—”
“You’re neglecting your other caller, Felix.”
The hallway seemed to darken, and Ungarsky, gripped by a sudden premonition, let the man’s sleeve go and turned to look behind him. A second man stood backlit in the doorway. He wore a gray loden cape over a jet-black uniform with gleaming silver buttons, and he smiled at Ungarsky as if he knew him well.
“Felix Ungarsky — Hauptsturmführer Kalk,” said the man in the suit, halfway up the stairs already. “The two of you have an interest in common.”
“An interest in common?” Ungarsky echoed. He was clearheaded now, as sober and awake as he had ever been, and he’d recognized the caller at last.
“Exactly so,” said the man in black, pulling the door of the house shut behind him. “Can you guess what it is?”
“I don’t—” Ungarsky stammered. “That’s to say, I couldn’t—”
“It’s you, Felix Ungarsky! You yourself.”