The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  It was a swift, strange transformation of a man into nothingness.

  Neck, shoulders, chest, arms—as swiftly as butter melts on a hot stove these melted away. The upper half of his clothes fell limp, his belt sagged, the hips of his trousers caved in, the whole outfit of empty clothing fell down over his shoes. He was gone—utterly gone. As the wind blew his empty clothing along over the roof I could see the last of his disappearance—socks collapsing within empty shoes.

  “There,” said the Lord of Temporary Death with a satisfied smile. “We’ve plugged that rumor for the present.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Fifty Million in Misery

  A happier skeleton than the Lord I never hope to see. His rows of teeth were wide apart with laughter, and his ribs were shaking.

  “What did you kill him for?” My voice quivered with shock.

  “Don’t worry about him. He’s just melted away temporarily.”

  “Melted to what?”

  “To a sort of spirit with a suspended life.”

  “Another case of temporary death?”

  “The real McCoy,” said Lord Temp. “There are different forms, but this is the most convenient. I’m so clever at it I could work this on a large scale. And I will as soon as man learns to appreciate me.”

  “Just where did that custodian go when he passed out? Did he really melt into his shoes?”

  “Ha, that’s good, Flinders. It couldn’t be more aptly described. He melted into his shoes! Actually, his spirit form probably mounted to the top of the flag pole. That’s the way with our temporarily dead. They ascend to some convenient high place and there they rest until their time comes.”

  “Time for what, if I’m not too inquisitive?”

  “To come back to normal life. In his case I’ll give him only a few weeks of it. When I have a few minutes off I’ll come back and talk his silly ideas out of his head. Meanwhile he’ll be suspended in nothingness. Of course I could give him a new temporary body. He might feel a little better about it.” Lord Temp rubbed his red robe for a pair of binoculars and handed them to me. Then he gave a long swing with his arm as if lashing a team with a mile-long whip.

  Through the binoculars I saw an eagle appear on the top of the flagpole. A very nervous eagle. Its talons slipped and it started to fall but suddenly discovered it could fly, and off it went like a shot.

  Somehow I felt relieved. Then Lord Temp and I began talking and we got down to business.

  “I knew we would find pickings here, Flinders, my boy. The harvest is ready.

  I can hardly wait to get to work.”

  “Neither can I,” I said solemnly. The indecision of a few seconds earlier had not relaxed its grip upon me. This new world beckoned to me. I was attracted as a small boy is attracted to a circus.

  But the power of Lord Temp was something to reflect upon. Sailing through the clouds with him, listening to him unfold his plan, I could not help seeing my fellow mortals in a new light. Would they not prove to be a very helpless lot at the hands of this demon skeleton, the brother of the Prince of Death?

  “Here,” said the skeleton, handing me three or four more cards. “I didn’t let anyone walk off with these. We will extend our survey over more territory before we start passing out literature. What, Flinders, have you learned of this new age?”

  I turned the redback over in my hands.

  “We have leaped through a century and a half,” I began. “This is the year 2100 A.D. The world uses international currency. I have gathered a few sample one-dollar bills—redbacks. These were issued by the International Bank of Rio.”

  Lord Temp was less interested in the money than in my reaction to it. I pointed out the tiny flags that formed the border. Obviously most of the nations I knew were still in existence. The flags of the United States, Great Britain, China and Russia—altered but recognizable—occupied the corner positions.

  “I never use money,” said the skeleton, “but I will pick up a supply for your use. Your job will be to make contacts with the influential people of this country and arrange conferences for me.”

  “And what is the big idea?”

  “Have you discovered that this civilization is in the grip of a depression? And what a depression! I have traveled up and down the ages, and I have never bumped into a better one. Very promising, Flinders.”

  “Well, if there’s anything we can do to relieve it—”

  “Don’t be simple, Flinders. We’re going to capitalize on it. There are fifty million persons—workers and their families—who are utterly destitute.”

  “Fifty million? In this age?”

  My head was swimming with images of beautiful architecture, swift, streamline traffic. Poverty in the midst of such wealth seemed impossible.

  Lord Temp had fastened the reins on the chariot dash. Now he dropped the whip into its slot and sat back, propping his feet up. Those crazy horses, too, reacted in their own way, by showing a fresh burst of speed. My companion rubbed his hands together.

  “Think of it, Flinders, fifty million contactees for temporary death. All we have to do is pull the right wires.” I watched the skeleton grin and I got a sickening feeling. With those soft, bunchy clouds passing along under us, I actually felt an impulse to jump overboard.

  Lord Temp went right on talking glibly of the state of the nation. The United States had undergone some changes. For economic as well as political reasons the number of states had been reduced to twelve. Under this arrangement there was one major metropolis within each “regional” state, with transportation lines fanning outward toward all ends of the area. As I later learned the big cities had rid themselves of a lot of past grief by this arrangement. How many big cities used to overflow state lines?

  No longer did you find half of a city being subject to one set of state laws because it was on the east side of a river, and the other half under a different state government because it was on the west side. The new boundaries had much more rhyme and reason to them, and a lot of complex and thankless work done by forty-eight separate state legislatures had been greatly simplified.

  There were only twelve stars in the present flag. And instead of a congress packed with more public representatives than any well informed public could possibly keep track of, there were now only the twelve representatives—“Goldfish”—one from each regional state. These were the famous Council of Twelve at the head of the government. They and their “executive secretary,” who was chosen from the nation at large but could vote only in case of tie, were responsible for keeping the U.S.A. in a healthy state.

  In some ways it sounded like a good scheme. There was little chance for any Council member to loaf on the job. The twelve “Goldfish” and their executive secretary were always under the spotlight. If they were good conscientious men the country ran smoothly; if they were political shysters, their vast powers could roll the nation right down the hill and over the brink of disaster.

  Lord Temp pondered this arrangement and from the way he rubbed his ivory hands together must have contemplated a nice juicy disaster.

  “These times are ripe for revamping men’s souls,” he grinned. “Stay with me, Flin. We’ll make spiritual history.”

  Lord Temp turned his yellow skull toward me and again his hollow eyes seemed to be winking.

  “Why so silent, Flinders?”

  “I suppose this question is out of order,” I said, “but could you see your way to give those fifty million persons life? Not merely a dreary existence, but some honest-to-goodness living.”

  “None of that sabotage, Flinders. Maybe you don’t realize that we are about to make the first original contribution to man’s existence in a million years. You realize that I am the brother of the Prince of Death. This plan is my special appanage. I have searched the ages for the most favorable time. Your space-ship did not strike this century by chance. I rode it down.”

  I had suspected as much. I made no comment. My own thoughts were frightening. Would I hire ou
t to do murder? This diabolical plan sounded like a dozen wars and a century of murders all rolled into one package.

  “What does man’s cycle consist of?” the misanthrope beside me went on. “Birth—life—death. There you have it in a nutshell. I will revolutionize that cycle by contributing temporary death. Eh, Flinders?”

  “I still don’t understand your plan.”

  “Tonight you will see more. Keep your eyes open for huge bonfires burning on the hillsides.”

  Bonfires? We sighted thousands of them in the weeks that followed. They were the mass meetings of hungry men and women who gathered to talk over their grievances.

  Often we would attend these meetings from a safe distance and listen to the speeches and hard luck stories and reports on the latest waves of technological unemployment.

  These were laborers, all. They had helped to build the fine, comfortable civilization that spread over this land. But they had built too well. Their durable automatic machinery had replaced them, thousands at a time.

  We heard them speak in public auditoriums, pleading with local authorities for a fair hearing. We saw squads of officers break up their meetings and disperse their street-corner throngs.

  Talk about depression! My sympathies welled up like a balloon. But the effects of these visits on Lord Temp were a bit more complicated. The more misery he saw the more he rubbed his rattling palms in glee.

  “This is the ideal age, the choice decade, the pick of all the years,” he would say. “Friend Flinders, we’re going to have ourselves a fling.”

  Then one week I found myself alone. My calcareous master had taken leave for a few weeks or months—but he promised me he’d be back before long. (His brother, the Prince of Death, needed help handling a pestilence back in the Middle Ages.) Could I get along in this new world alone now?

  “I’m able bodied,” I said. “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Don’t circulate my cards too freely till you know our way around.”

  I could have buried his cards gladly. I didn’t like the lump they made in my hip pocket, and my clothes were conspicuous enough without them.

  Lord Temp swung his whip over the four white horses and sailed off into the sky, and at once I found myself very much down to earth.

  I had a fair supply of redbacks, but I decided I’d better hold onto them. They made my left hip pocket balance my right. A job, nothing less, would give me security. I sallied forth with the brisk step and confident eye that I used to recommend so heartily in my editorials to every down-and-outer.

  I thought I knew all about unemployment.

  I thought my heart was attuned to the awfulness of want and misery. I thought my past equipped me as the perfect sounding-board for the masses of hopeless, jobless canaille who were inevitably a drag on the national economy during a depression.

  But at last I was to go through those terrifying, morbid experiences myself, and my new sensations were to make the old vicarious ones counterfeit in comparison.

  I was looking for work, I a stranger in a strange land.

  What had been beauty to me in this fresh new world now became a beauty of mockery. The great buildings turned their cold shoulders toward me, and when I trudged in their shadows they breathed an icy breath upon me.

  “THIS WAY IN. WE HAVE THE VERY JOB FOR YOU.”

  How those signs on the employment agency doors mocked me . . . me and millions of others. At some doors long lines of shuffling ragged men would wait for hours, all held by that amaranthine spark within man’s breast called hope. Eventually four or five would be cornered for further interviews, and finally the best three of them would be notified that one job was waiting—for the one that reached it first.

  Away they would race, like three starved greyhounds. From the window you could see them dash through traffic, risking life and limb to catch the passing public conveyance.

  Perhaps an officer would collar them, snarl something about breakneck speed, and those with the swift start would lose the race.

  Once I saw two men flattened by a rush of oncoming traffic. I thought of Lord Temp and his strange theories—that persons under too much pressure become reckless of life and hurl themselves into the path of death—purposefully (though their conscious thoughts might never admit this was the case).

  My own great difficulty was that I could never establish my identity satisfactorily. Most of the citizens of this age, employed or otherwise, carried cards that gave them government classifications of various kinds: a registration card with vital statistics; an employment card with a work record; a health card indicating physical examinations, vaccinations, etc., required for public welfare.

  I had no cards, and in one instance I decided to rely upon the truth and admit that I was a visitor from the year 1950. The employment agent was in a bad mood, and his impatience with all unemployed came bouncing down on me like a ton of bricks.

  “You’ve no business here if you haven’t kept your work card up to date. If you’ve lost it, you ought to have sense enough to get a new one before you enter my door.”

  He pounded his desk with both fists at once.

  “Sorry. What are the damages?” I got out my handsome roll of bills and started counting out redbacks, five at a time. He was impressed just enough to restrain himself from throwing me out.

  “Maybe you don’t need a job,” he said sarcastically. “You seem to be in the dough.”

  “It was given to me. I don’t like to spend what I don’t earn.”

  “Where’d you steal that wad?”

  “I didn’t steal it. If you must know, a skeleton gave it to me. Maybe he stole it—”

  “Ugh!” The agent paced back and forth studying my face in the different lights. Then he picked up the telephone. “Get me the state hospital, Bertha, and see that the doors are locked . . . No, he’s not violent—not so far—”

  I biffed him and handed him his mirror off the office wall so he could see what was happening under his eye. Then I walked out.

  Bertha, the receptionist, had left the switchboard in a frenzy and was screaming for Frank Wurzichski or someone to come and guard the door. When she turned and saw me sauntering out of the elevator, I thought she was going to faint.

  I put on an act. I laughed as if I were the biggest practical joker in the world, and went straight to her telephone desk and pretended to hold an uproarious conversation with the agent, whose eye I had just blackened.

  “You win the ten, J.P. She fell for it, just as you said she would. Yeah, in another minute she’d have had the door bolted and guarded with ray guns . . . Okay, J.P., I’ll tell her it was just a hoax. All right, we’ll recommend her for a raise, since you insist.”

  I hung up.

  “Just a hoax!” she gasped. “Thank Goodness! I thought you were really mad!”

  “I manage to get along,” I laughed, and favoring her and the bewildered doorman with, a wink apiece, I left.

  CHAPTER VII

  I Dream of Sally

  Nor was that the only time that I was closely shaved with the charge of being an escaped something-or-other. Passports were all too important in this realm, and I was forever being reminded of my lack of credentials.

  We’ll skip some weeks of downright misery, when hunger and cold and mental depression began to swallow me up.

  We’ll pass over my mad ambition to prove my stamina equal to that of those broke, hungry guys who became my pals.

  We’ll pass over my several attempts to forget that I had redbacks in my pocket and to make my way with my hands. Whenever hunger hit me I failed miserably at becoming a buoyant spirit among downhearted men.

  It was only after I’d steal away from the streets full of homeless down-and-outers and get a square meal under my belt that I could come back to these lads and say, “Don’t be down in the mouth, boys. It’s all psychological. You’re a helluva lot better off than you think you are. Look at me. I can still smile. You guys can too. Maybe there’s a job around the corner.�
�� (Some weak voice piped back that he was too low ever to get around the corner.)

  Well, you can imagine what happened to me and my dough under these conditions. I began taking my pals and their families out for food on the sly. Give ’em a little food, and what would happen? They’d steam up with hope and come back to their gang and start talking things up.

  “If we could get pepped up once, boys, we might stage a revolution. Isn’t that right, Flinders?”

  “Dangerous business, but you’ve sure as hell got to do something.”

  “Nothing short of revolution will bring those wafflebottoms in the Government up on their toes. They don’t care if we starve. But if we’d stage a hunger march on the Glass Capitol and tell them they’ve got to give us a share of the world’s work—”

  “Sh-s-s-sh. They’ve got coppers scattered round among us, like as not.”

  “Sure. You never know who’s planted. It might even be the guy that talks loudest for revolution.”

  With this comment the fellows began to look around suspiciously at one another, and a lot of eyes began drilling me, since I was one of these newest floaters in this run-down end of the city.

  But the fellows I’d fed stuck up for me; they said nobody dared accuse me of being anything less than a good revolutionist.

  “Flinders is for us a hundred percent.”

  “Damn right,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for you for a hundred and fifty years—no kidding.”

  But the old conflicts were welling up in me as never before. Three forces were tugging at me.

  Out of friendship for these birds I wanted to say to myself, “Okay, Jim Flinders, pitch in and help these helpless millions put over an A-l revolution to win the better living they deserve.” But the choke-hold that diabolical Lord of Temporary Death had on me was squeezing out something like this: “Have a fling at playing God, Flinders. Here’s a rare opportunity to see how the human race will react to an experimental something as potent as birth and death. Here are your guinea pigs—these unrooted masses of destitute people. Apply a vast wave of temporary death to them. See what happens. The worst you can do is relieve them of their present misery.”