The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (7 page)

Under her breath she repeated the figure as he called it out. “Eight million, nine hundred thousand!” He lowered his head back to the pillow. “I know you want me gone and that’s why you leave windows open all over the place, but as a point of decency, Ethel, couldn’t you do it more subtly?”

Ethel smoothed out his blankets. “The doctor said you needed some air. He said it was stuffy in here.” She patted his hand which he drew away sharply.

He suddenly saw the prescription in her other hand. “What’s this?” Bedeker said, yanking it out of her fingers. “Where’d you get this? I’m not sick, but he gives you a prescription for medicine for me. Nothing wrong with me and while I lie here helpless, he’s out there telling you that I’ve got a life expectancy of twenty minutes.” He puckered up his mouth like a prune. “Don’t deny it, Ethel. Kindly don’t deny it. I smelled the collusion the moment he left the room!”

Ethel’s eyes closed as a wave of weakness hit her. Then she took a deep breath. “It is for vitamins, Walter, for me.”

Bedeker bolted upright in bed. “Vitamins? For
you
.” Then he turned to the wall and spoke to it, nodding familiarly at it. “I lie here while the life seeps out of me, and that quack prescribes medicines for my wife. See? I’m dying and she gets vitamins!” He broke into a spasm of coughing. When Ethel tried to pat his back he pushed her away, then very limply and weakly he lay back down on the bed, shook his head and closed his eyes.

“Never mind, Ethel. Go on, get out of here. Let me die in peace.”

“All right, Walter,” Ethel said softly.

“
What
?” Bedeker shouted.

This time it was Ethel’s eyes that closed. “I meant,” she whispered, “I’ll let you alone, Walter, so you can take a little nap.”

He lay there quietly for a moment and then suddenly jumped up and sat on the edge of the bed. “I can’t nap,” he squealed. “Why does a man have to die anyway? I asked you a question, Ethel. Why does a man have to die?” He got out of bed and went to the window, feeling the sash at the bottom for any errant air that might intrude. “The world goes on for millions and millions of years and how long is a man’s life?” He held up two fingers. “This much! A drop. A microscopic fragment. Why can’t a man live five hundred years? Or a thousand years? Why does he have to die almost the minute he’s born?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, dear.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Go on, get out of here, Ethel.”

“Yes, dear,” she said, and escaped into the living room with the tremendous sense of relief she always felt after getting out of Walter Bedeker’s presence. Today had been one of the worst days. He had called the doctor four times that morning, then had Ethel phone the hospital to check on the availability of an oxygen tent. He had insisted right after lunch that she phone the janitor to come and check the heating pipes. The janitor had arrived and Walter had immediately engaged him with a running broadside from the bed as the janitor pounded on the hot water pipes and steam and damp heat floated into the room.

“You want heat, Mr. Bedeker?” the janitor had said to him gleefully. “In about twenty minutes, it’ll be about a hundred and five in here. So heat you’ll get!”

Livid with rage at the noise of the janitor’s pounding, Bedeker had shouted at him, “Ape! Get out of here. If I’m to die, at least I’ll die in comfort and peace. Go on, get out of here!”

The janitor surveyed his principal irritation in an apartment house of eighty-three families. “Well, if you do die, Bedeker,” he’d said, “and you go where you’re going—as far as the temperature goes, YOU ain’t gonna be able to tell the difference!”

Now Ethel felt the result of the janitor’s promise. The apartment was stuffy beyond belief. She opened up one of the living room windows and let the cool, fall air ripple over her hot, tired flesh. But she could still hear Walter Bedeker’s running monologue from the bedroom.

“It’s a crime for a man to live such a short span of years. An absolute crime,” Bedeker’s muffled voice said.

Ethel went into the tiny kitchen, shut the door and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Walter Bedeker sat propped up in bed looking at his reflection in the dresser mirror across the room. “A crime,” he repeated. “What I wouldn’t give! What I wouldn’t give to live a decent number of years. Two hundred. Three hundred.” He heaved a deep sigh and shook his head.

A voice, deep, resonant, with a chuckle in it, said, “Why not five or six hundred?”

Bedeker nodded agreeably. “Why not? Or a thousand. What a miserable thing to contemplate. A handful of years, then an eternity in a casket down under the ground. The dark, cold ground!”

“With worms yet,” the voice answered him.

“Of course, with worms,” Bedeker said. Then his eyes grew wide as suddenly across the room, materializing rather rapidly in the bedroom chair, he saw a large, fat man in a dark suit. Bedeker gulped, gaped, blinked his eyes and then just stared.

The gentleman smiled and nodded. “I subscribe to your views wholly, Mr. Bedeker,” he said. “I mean wholly.”

Bedeker continued to stare at him and said, “I’m delighted. And who might you be?”

“Cadwallader’s my name,” the gentleman answered. “At least I’m using it this month. It has a nice feeling on the tongue.”

Bedeker surreptitiously looked around the room, checking the door, the window, then took a quick look under the bed. Then he looked at the man accusingly. “How did you get in?”

“Oh, I’ve never been gone,” Cadwallader said. “I’ve been here for some time.” Then he leaned forward in the manner of a man about to start his business. “I’ll be brief, Mr. Bedeker,” he said. “You look like a man with a nose for a bargain. I’d like to make a proposition to you. We each have something the other wants, and that seems a relatively solid basis for a bargain.”

Bedeker’s voice was coolly appraising. “Do we? What in the world do you have that I could possibly want?”

The fat man smiled and lit a cigarette, then he sat back comfortably. “Oh, many things, Mr. Bedeker,” he said. “You’d be surprised. Many things. Varied and delightful.”

Bedeker studied the man’s face. An odd face, he reflected. Fat, but not unpleasant. Nice white teeth, even though the eyes were a little shiny and wild. Bedeker scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “What do I have that could remotely interest you?”

Cadwallader’s smile was deprecating. “Actually a minor item,” he said. “Smaller than minor. Insignificant. Microscopic.” He held up two fat, little fingers. “Teensy weensy!”

The two men’s eyes locked.

“What did you say your name was?” Bedeker asked.

“What’s in a name, Mr. Bedeker? Cadwallader replied ingratiatingly. “Just a question of semantics—language. A stretch of words, really. For example, what is it you want? You want an extended life span. You want a few hundred years to play around with. Now some people would call it immortality of a sort. But why give it that kind of description? Why make it sound so imposing. Let’s call it—the two of us—let’s call it some additional free time! After all what are a few hundred years or a few thousand years?”

Bedeker swallowed. “A few...
thousand
?”

“Or five thousand or ten thousand—” Cadwallader threw the numbers into the breach like a used car salesman bringing up his heavy artillery. “The world will go on ad infinitum, so what’s a few thousand years more or less, give or take, add or subtract.”

Bedeker rose warily from the bed and studied the fat man. “This little item, Mr. Cadwallader, that I am to give you in exchange—what do you call that?”

Cadwallader gave him a little Santa Claus wink. “What
do
we call that?” he asked. “Let’s see! We can call it a little piece of your make-up. A little crumb off the crust of your structure. A fragment of an atom from your being.” His smile persisted, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Or, we might call it a—”

“Or a soul!” Bedeker shrieked at him triumphantly.

The smile on Cadwallader’s face was positively beatific. “Or that,” he said softly. “After all, what is it? And when you’re gone, thousands of years hence—what do you need it for?”

Walter Bedeker stood up and pointed a wavering finger in the direction of Mr. Cadwallader.
“You’re the Devil,”
he announced.

Cadwallader bowed slightly from the giant equator that was his waist and said modestly, “I’m at your service. How about it, Mr. Bedeker? Why not? A partnership of a sort. You deed me over your so-called soul and I give you immortality. Life everlasting—or as long as you want it to be everlasting. And indestructibility, Mr. Bedeker. Think of it! Complete indestructibility. Nothing can ever hurt you!”

Bedeker looked off dreamily. “Nothing can hurt me? And I can live forever?”

Cadwallader smiled and said, “Why not? Certainly forever. Again, Mr. Bedeker, just terms. And everything’s relative. For you, it’s forever. For me, it’s just a walk around the block. But we’re
both
satisfied.”

Bedeker stood there lost in thought and Mr. Cadwallader walked over to his elbow. His voice was soft and gentle, but also rich with promise. “Think of it,” Cadwallader said, “to be without fear of dying. To be indestructible. Invincible. Not to have to worry about disease. Accidents. Pestilence. War. Famine. Anything. Governments and institutions disintegrate. People die. But Walter Bedeker goes on and on!”

Bedeker, his head tilted, a smile playing on his puckish, gnome-like face, walked over to the mirror and studied his reflection. “Walter Bedeker goes on and on,” he said thoughtfully.

Mr. Cadwallader stepped up behind him so that his reflection joined Bedeker’s.

“Mr. Cadwallader,” Bedeker said, “about this soul. You say I won’t miss it?”

“Why, you’ll never know it’s gone.”

“And I’ll go on and on quite unable to die, you say?”

“Quite.”

“No tricks?” Bedeker asked. “No hidden clauses? I’ll just live as long as I want to live, is that it!”

Cadwallader chuckled at him. “That’s it. That’s precisely it.”

Mr. Cadwallader went back over to his chair and sat down again. Bedeker remained at the mirror studying his face, running a questioning finger over it.

“How about my appearance?” he asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t do much about that,” Cadwallader said thoughtlessly, but he glided over the slip. “What I mean is—you should look pretty much the same.”

“But in five hundred years,” Bedeker insisted, “I don’t want to look like any dried up old prune.”

Cadwallader looked up toward the ceiling, and shook his head at the enormity of the competition. “Oh, Mr. Bedeker,” he said, “you drive a mean bargain. A most difficult bargain. But,” he made a gesture of resignation, “You’ll find me a cooperative”—he smiled apologetically while he searched for the right word—“man?—And we’ll throw this into the bargain. Whatever aging takes place on your features will be more or less imperceptible.”

Bedeker turned to him from the mirror. “Cadwallader, I believe we’re close to making a deal.”

Cadwallader began to rub his hands together and then quickly put them behind his back. “Mr. Bedeker,” he said happily, you’ll never regret this. Not to your dying day!” Bedeker looked at him sharply. “Which by rights,” Cadwallader added hurriedly, “should not be for several thousand years. However, there is something, Mr. Bedeker—”

Bedeker waggled a finger at him. “Ah ha. Ah ha. Ah ha! Now it comes out, huh?”

“It’s for your benefit, I can assure you.” Cadwallader took a large, thick document from his pocket and thumbed through it. “Article 93,” he exclaimed. “Here it is, right here.” He pointed to the page and turned it around so that Bedeker could see it.

“It’s for your benefit, I can assure you.” Cadwallader took a large, thick document from his pocket and thumbed through it. “Article 93,” he exclaimed. “Here it is, right here.” He pointed to the page and turned it around so that Bedeker could see it.

“What about it?” Bedeker asked warily. “Read it to me.”

The fat gentleman cleared his throat. “It’s in the nature of an escape clause” he said. “
Your
escape clause. Whereas the party of the first part upon due notification to the party of the second part—” Cadwallader mumbled. “Oh, this is tiresome. I’ll just give it to you thumb nail. It’s simply this. If you ever get tired of living, Mr. Bedeker, you can exercise this clause by calling on me and requesting your—” He smiled. “Oh there go the semantics again. Your demise? At which point I shall see to it that you are given a rapid and uncomplicated—” he held up his hands and wiggled his fat fingers—“departure?’

Bedeker puckered up his mouth in a wise, elfish little look, snapped his fingers and beckoned for the document. Cadwallader handed it over with a flourish, then loosened his tie as Bedeker riffled through the pages. Mr. Cadwallader took a large crimson handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

“You sure keep it hot in here!” he murmured.

Bedeker finished the last page, then handed the document back to the fat man. “It appears to be in order, Mr. Cadwallader, but I can assure you that I’m not the sort of man to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. When you talk immortality to me, brother, I
mean
immortality! You’re going to have a long, long, long wait!”

Again Cadwallader bowed his assent. “Mr. Bedeker,” he said, “nothing would please me more!”

Bedeker said, “Then I think you’ve got a deal.”

This time Mr. Cadwallader couldn’t restrain himself from rubbing his hands together. His eyes positively glittered and it struck Bedeker that he was looking at a two-holed opening into a furnace. He could reflect no longer upon this because Mr. Cadwallader reached into the air and pulled out what appeared to be a smoking rubber stamp. This he swung in a wide arc and brought it down on the front page of the document. There was a sizzling sound and the document floated to the floor, burning at the edge. Bedeker could see that on the lower right-hand corner was the imprint of a seal. It looked like a circle with horns in the middle. After a moment the fire went out and the paper lay smoking. Bedeker bent over and picked it up.

“Yes, it seems to be pretty much in order,” Bedeker said. “Now a few other questions, Mr.—”