by Don Wilcox
But when that gruesome rattle became more articulate and said, “Gree-e-e-tings, Jim-m-m Flin-n-n-nders!”—I stopped typing and reached for a flashlight. What I saw made me gulp and stop breathing.
Sitting on my suitcase was a yellowish skeleton in a flowing red robe. His kneecaps, poking out from under his garments, were polished like two old doorknobs of pale gold, and the bare bones of his toes were like two overlapping fans of jointed horehound candy. As for his face—well, you should have seen how those big teeth were grinning. I could have sworn he was winking at me, even though his eyes were perfectly hollow.
“At eeeeease!” said the skeleton. “Reeeeesume breeeathing or you’rrrre mine!”
There you are. Right from the start he had me. My breath was gone—even goner than before. He had me in a knot, all right. I can’t say for certain just what happened next. I must have extended my arms in a helpless gesture that meant, “Okay, brother, take me.”
Anyhow, the flashlight fell down and went off, and the next thing I knew I was banging away furiously on the typewriter. For Yours Truly, Jim Flinders, erstwhile editorial writer for the Morning Zephyr, that was the natural thing to do in a crisis. Write it up while the ideas are at a white heat—or white chill, in case the inspiration is a skeleton.
Whenever I eased up on the rivet-gun action I could hear the rattle of that ghastly fellow’s voice asking me how soon I’d be ready to talk with him. And all the time I typed I could see the glow of his white teeth grinning at me.
“You’re the skeleton on the playing card,” I said finally.
“Ahhh! That’s better-r-r-r! You do know me, of course.”
“What are you doing on this rocket-ship?” I picked up the flashlight and turned it on him.
“Waiting to talk with you,” said the skeleton. “Why are you committing suicide?”
“I’m not! I’m on an errand for science. Maybe I’m doomed to crash, but you can’t call that suicide.”
“Don’t raise your voice,” said the skeleton. “You’re a bit excited. Calm down. We’re fellow travelers now and we’d just as well get acquainted and as soon as you’re ready to talk—”
“Are you grinning at me?”
“Just smiling pleasantly, Flinders, my friend—”
“Are you—are you winking at me?”
“Now how could I do that? Will you tone your voice down? You’re setting up an awful vibration in the bones of my little toes. As long as we’re traveling together we ought to respect each other’s feelings.”
“You do have feelings, then?” I asked uncertainly, and his bony head gave a slight nod.
“There, that’s better. Loud voices and death don’t go well together, you know. Don’t let me rush you, Mr. Flinders. But I’d like you to tell me just what brought you to this. You see, we have several hours before your anticipated crash. And we’re not bound for some far off planet. The fact is, we’re simply spinning around the earth and we’ll smash the surface one of these years—”
“Years?”
“At the speed we’re traveling, we’ve already outdistanced all of your past.” What did he mean? It was only a few hours ago that I took my leave of the Morning Zephyr and the Better Business Club.
“All of your recent contemporaries are dead and gone now,” said the skeleton in a very low humming voice—a curious mixture of reverence and quiet satisfaction. “Even as we talk the years are passing swiftly. And so—” He paused and stroked his chin thoughtfully and his hollow eyes looked up at me.
“You want to know what brought me to this?” I began to feel a strange tolerance toward this lordly symbol of death. I had failed to convince myself that he was simply a figment of my imagination. Besides being well behaved, he was an excellent strategist. When Yours Truly, Jim Flinders, has just batted out a classic of personal experience on the typewriter, what could be more courteous on the part of a guest than to be interested.
“If that’s what you’ve been writing for the past hour,” said the skeleton, propping his skull on his bony fingers attentively, “let’s have it—every word of it. You and I need to understand each other.”
“Okay, Bonyparts, you asked for it.”
CHAPTER II
Mass Suicide
It was mid-June, 1950, and the sun came down like liquid fire.
Sitting at my editorial desk and swabbing my face with ice water, I rummaged through the exchanges. Four journals out of five carried editorials aimed at me. Three out of four invited me to die.
Jim Flinders, said they, should cash in!
That was their blunt proposal. They wasted no tears. They minced no punctuation. When two hundred dailies undertake to sell death to a fellow journalist, they have a way of draining the old originality keg for its last drop of fire-water.
Sally Hart had warned me it would be like this.
I had cast the first stone.
But I had not foreseen such a boomerang: Columns and columns—broadsides fired at the person of Flinders.
Call it a burst of bad temper if you want to. My political safety-valve had been near to popping off all Spring.
The whole country, as I saw it, had grown too comfortable over its troubles. Were millions to remain unemployed, and millions more to continue on relief?
Were we to accept this Depression as normal when a full third of the population had no economic moorings? I grew feverish and blackened my desk with think-marks.
Came that hottest day of the summer and the smouldering mind went aflame. I rang for my statistician.
“Blodgett, how many people in the United States, by your latest count?”
The Arabic juggler assumed his best mathematical face.
“Including today’s probable turnover of births and deaths?” he asked.
“Yes. No. Hold on. Check off the infants. What’s the remaining total—adults and school children?”
Blodgett had the answer in a flash. “One hundred fifty-five million, two hundred and twenty-two.”
“Good. Now tell me, Blodgett, how many plans have been devised for curing the nation’s maladies? What’s the grand total?”
Blodgett lifted an eyebrow. He was reading my motive. Blodgett’s talents were never confined by the limits of pure mathematics. He saw beyond. Indeed it was this human insight, this keenness of discernment, that made him the perfect statistician for my purposes. With esoteric genius he could dive down into his puddle of figures and come up with a bright and shiny statistic that would nearly always click.
“Including the plans of school children?” he asked.
“Yes, everybody.”
“It will take a moment’s calculating.” He drew down his brows to let the mathematical wheels turn. “By the best available surveys and estimates,” he said, “it comes out one hundred fifty-five million, two hundred and twenty-one.”
I compared the figures on paper: 1,555,2220—155,000,221.
“Then it’s true,” I said. “I’m the only person left who hasn’t cooked up a plan to save the country.”
“An indisputable deduction,” said Blodgett, the mathematics retiring from his visage. “Anything else?”
“Plenty. Tell Guy to hold space for a front page editorial in tomorrow’s Zephyr.”
I whirled to my typewriter. The 1,555,222nd plan was going to be something different—and I meant different—radically.
In the morning it rolled off the presses, a front-page editorial in twelve point type with a double-column black-face headline:
FLINDERS RECOMMENDS IMMEDIATE
DECREASE IN POPULATION
Says National Crisis Should Be Solved by Twenty Million Volunteers Spend Lives and Save the Nation!
Ladies and Gentlemen—What Next?
Scores of plans have failed to lift the nation out of her economic Slough of Despond. Still she sinks, deeper and deeper, with the weight of 25,000,000 of unemployed clinging to her. What next?
The challenge of this plan is directed to you twenty-five milli
on men who are unemployed, insecure, underprivileged. You hold in your horny hands the power of removing the nation’s burden. How? By voluntarily removing yourselves. By a great, glorious mass suicide!
A shocking challenge? Ah—but consider how serious is the emergency I Silently it is sapping the vitality of American civilization. Undoubtedly you have already considered suicide in private. But naturally you hated to spill the blood. You might ruin the old rug on which you made three payments back in the last wave of false prosperity. A co-operative plan could eliminate all those troublesome details.
What of your loved ones? you ask. Don’t worry. Charity will go farther, after you are gone.
Many taxpayers will find that this plan shatters their sensibilities. But they will regain composure upon reflecting that it will curtail their relief burdens about which they howl so painfully.
Face the facts, my worthy volunteers. Your plight is one of drab existence and slow death. There is no provision for you to live. You have long since been tossed on the scrap heap—and this depression has a far more permanent look to it than any in the past.
But your death? You still have that to give.
Okay, Joe? Let you and your pals join hands in a suicide procession.
Fall in, you underprivileged millions. You are about to begin a journey to that ‘undiscovered country’ from whose bourn no traveler ever wires homes for money.
In the name of mercy for a stricken nation, march! With the glorious cry of “Suicide for liberation!”—March! March over mountains and across prairies, down through valleys, and finally, with one farewell wave to the good old prosperity-starved U.S.A., march right on into the sea. No blood spilt, no coffins wasted—and the sharks will do the rest.—James S. Flinders.
That was my little bomb. I suspected it would draw some foolish editorial fire and a few subscription cancellations. But I didn’t expect it to set off a nation-wide avalanche. From Maine to California, the editorial broadsides came, blasting me with such captions as:
“We Nominate Jim Flinders!”
“Let Flin Head the March of Death.”
“Human Sacrifice O.K. if Flinders is Human.”
“Look Out, Sharks, Here Comes J. Flinders!”
Before I had finished the week of reading these returns, there was no doubt left in my mind—I was unanimously nominated to put my preachings into practice.
The first editorial I read struck me as being very funny. At the fifteenth I was clammy with sweat, and by the time I had read the twenty-third I was mumbling Hamlet’s soliloquy.
The situation grew worse as the week progressed. The office boy would bring me extra ice-water and then scurry out of range of my epithets. My fellow journalists would avoid me, giving me the suspicious eye.
I had no appetite for suicide, even in my state of mental agony. I was fighting a lone battle for some means to turn the tables on my adversaries—if possible without actually resorting to suicide. But I could find no loophole that would be half so effective as the real thing.
But if the only perfect climax to my enigma were voluntary death, I had some definite views on the matter, as my editorial implied; namely, that death might be turned to a worthy purpose.
Precisely at this moment of potential suicide, the office-boy entered with the card of J. Collier Gleidermann, a name I remembered having seen in connection with scientific matters.
“Show him in.”
A small, sharp-eyed, well dressed man entered the room and approached with poise.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Flinders,” he said politely. “I have something of importance to discuss with you—alone.”
And from that hour the career of Yours Truly was turned toward what promises to be an abrupt climax. J. Collier Gleidermann had come to my rescue with the ideal way out.
CHAPTER III
Death In the Cards
“Keep on reading,” said the skeleton, snapping his finger-bones at me impatiently.
“The rest is private,” I said. “What’s more, I’m not used to taking orders from a pile of bones.”
It was an unkind thrust, considering that this amazing visitor had listened so attentively. But the fact was, my recounting of the turbulence over editorials had brought my blood back to the boiling point. I was in a fighting mood, and there was no one to snap at but this skeleton—if indeed he was a fact. I wasn’t so sure. While reading, I had been flooded with suspicion: Was this creature not an apparition, born of my mental tempest?
“Read on,” the skeleton repeated. “If it’s private, so much the better. I need to know all about you. I intend to make you my assistant.”
“That’s a laugh,” I said. “Any time I hire out to a rattling heap of ivory I’ll know I’m dead.”
“You hired out to me when you wrote that editorial, Jim Flinders.” Again the low rattle of his voice caused a sympathetic vibration in the suitcase handle. “I stepped aboard this rocket-ship for a visit, so I could gauge your abilities and temperament. I’ve been looking for a man like you for many a century. Come, let’s shake hands.”
“Are you kidding? Why should I shake hands with a jointed clothes-tree?”
Just to prove he was nothing but a bad dream, I stepped up and took a right-handed sock at him. Sparks flew, and I drew back an arm that might have gone through a million-volt generator and come out an electric eel.
“Read on,” said the skeleton once more, “or hand the sheets over to me. I’ll read.”
With my left hand I picked up the sensitized metal sheets from which I had been reading. I evened the pack of manuscript with a metallic cling on my desk. (The ingenious J. Collier Gleidermann had prepared metal sheets for my journal, which he had hoped would survive whatever destruction might come to the ship and me.)
I tossed the metal sheets to the skeleton. He caught them. There was a blinding flash, and the pack exploded. In his bony yellow hands—nothing!
“Oh-oh. Sorry,” said the skeleton. “I forgot my power was accelerating. But that comical attack of yours had put me on my guard. You never know what some ungrateful jerks will pull on you. Ray guns are the bane of my existence, and it takes a full head of power for me to throw them off.”
Ray guns? I’d never seen one, but I wished for one in that moment. My overdeveloped ego was suffering at the hands of this intruder.
But now he wrapped his robe closely around him, pulled his knees up, and gazed at the rounded ceiling for a time in silence. He was giving me time to cool off. He made no further apology for having destroyed my story. He was sure I would tell him the rest in due time. I gathered that he had an interesting plan of action, and wanted me to listen to his proposition.
However, I was already engaged in carrying out one plan—that of J. Collier Gleidermann—and you can imagine my dilemma as this skeleton’s powers continued to engulf me. Before I knew it I was recounting to this “Brother of the Prince of Death”—as he called himself—some of the details of my departure.
“Yes, my fiancée threw me over.”
“For another man?”
“A louse named Hobbledehoy.”
“You let a man named Hobbledehoy beat your time?”
“I beat my own time. It was that editorial, and all my satirical talk about mass suicide, and so on. She didn’t like it. She didn’t get the point. I never really intended that proposal seriously—”
“Oh, come now. Don’t shatter my hopes for your success in the game of Death.”
“I’m not interested in your game.”
“Not permanent Death, my friend. Temporary Death. That’s what you were really seeking in your explosive editorial. That’s exactly what I have to offer: Temporary Death.”
The skeleton said these words with a lordly pride. He placed his hands on his hips and paced up and down the six-foot aisle of the rocket-ship, his red robe swishing with each turn.
“How,” I asked blankly, “How can death be temporary?”
“We’ll cross th
at bridge when we get to it,” said the skeleton. “Just now we’re spinning through space and time at a great rate of speed, but my calculations indicate that our time is limited. Tell me more of this man Hobbledehoy—”
“Not a man, a louse. Did I mention a playing card? He pulled that nefarious trick on me—I’m sure of it—a trick that tipped the scales. Sally couldn’t forgive me after that.”
“What trick?” asked the Lord of Temporary Death, pausing to tap his fingerbones against his hollow temple.
“This,” I said, reaching for my billfold and removing a card from it. “I had a special gift pack of playing cards made for Sally Hart. Went to no end of trouble. Took her picture to the Magarians—you know, the artists—and had a special design made: Sally’s beautiful face, her jeweled comb—her hair blowing in the breeze, her silk scarf around the back of her head, all within one of those fanciful Magarian backgrounds. You never saw such a beautiful pack of cards.”
“What happened?”
“Look at the back of this ace of spades. When she found that, she couldn’t take it. She sent a note back with it—said this was the last straw; I’d carried my death jokes too far.” The skeleton looked at the black and white design. It was a picture that he himself might have posed for. That is, the lower part of it. Printed into the original etching of Sally was a robed skeleton riding a chariot drawn by four white horses—a phantom race through the sky. By chance, perhaps, these two contrasting ideas were perfectly blended. Sally’s blowing hair swept forward to become the reins of the horses, her scarf became the skeleton’s robe, and—
“You blamed this on Hobbledehoy?” the skeleton asked with a broad grin.
“No one else. I checked with the Magarians. They assured me that there had been no change made in the original design. The cut had come back to them from the printer, and I could inspect it if I wished.”
The Lord of Temporary Death was laughing at me. “Don’t be blaming
Hobbledehoy. What you hold there is simply my calling card. I placed it in your hands myself. You were dozing over a stack of exchanges at the time. I’m amazed that you were so absent-minded as to bury it in the blank deck you sent to the printer.”
