Jack had a sudden premonition that for the first time in his life he was about to meet his match.
He was right.
1956
THREESIE
Very nearly every day of the year this office turns down a Pact-with-the-Devil story; but only on alternate 31sts of February do we find a Satanic compact worked out with such humor and such pure Unknown-type fantasy logic as Theodore Cogswell brings to Threesie. “I love the Pact-with-the-Devil,” Cogswell writes, “simply because it is such an oldie that—like the locked room and the time paradox—technically it’s a lot of fun to try to work out a new twist. If some day I can successfully combine solutions to all three in one short, I’ll die happy.” That will be a story which F&SF must print, even at the cost of running a Cogswell obit in the same issue; meanwhile, here’s a wholly fresh new answer to one third of the paradoxic trinity.
THERE IS AN EVIL IN THIRDS THAT Joseph Cruthers should have recognized; the third on a match the swimmer going down for the third time, the crowd instead of the company, the strike that makes an out, the violence implicit in the eternal triangle. If he had been satisfied with two, things might have worked out differently; but Joseph Cruthers fancied himself a shrewd operator. At the moment he was operating shrewdly in the area of the supernatural.
The girl at the classified ad desk read through the text of the slip he had handed her, yawned, and then asked for a dollar and twenty-seven cents.
“You’re sure it will be in tomorrow morning’s paper?” asked Joseph anxiously.
The girl gave a bored nod. “Just look under ‘Miscellaneous for Sale.’ ”
“Thanks,” he said, started to turn, and then swung back suddenly in a perfect double take. “Hey, wait a minute. I wanted that in the ‘Personal Column.’ In fact it has to be. I don’t think the party I am trying to contact is interested in bargains in used refrigerators.”
“Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. “Ya got something you want to sell, it ain’t real estate, automotive, or live stock, it goes in ‘Miscellaneous for Sale.’ That’s the policy of the paper. Me, I just work here.” Joseph started to argue but stopped when he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere. “Look,” he said finally, “if I get it right, all that you are objecting to are the words ‘For Sale’. Am I correct?”
“Keerect. Ya got something for sale, it ain’t real estate, automotive, or—”
“All right, all right,” interrupted Joseph hastily. “So I strike out ‘For Sale.’ Now can it go into personals?
She picked up the slip of paper and read through it again. “ ‘Soul in good condition available at usual terms. Box 379.’ Sure, that’ll go. Like I said, mister, I just work here. The boss tells me, ‘Myrtle, ya get an ad that wants to sell something that ain’t real estate, automotive . . .”
Joseph had to renew the ad six times before he finally got a reply. An envelope was forwarded to him by the newspaper that contained nothing but a slip of paper with a telephone number on it. Hardly able to believe that he had made contact at last, he rushed to the telephone and dialed. At the third ring he heard the receiver lift at the other end and a harsh voice answer.
“Yeah?”
Joseph had trouble making his vocal chords operate. “I was told to call this number,” he said huskily.
“Who told ya?”
“I had an advertisement in the paper and this morning a letter came with a telephone number in it. I naturally assumed—”
“Hold it,” interrupted the other. His voice dimmed as he turned away from the phone to call to somebody else.
“Hey, Mac, you send out our number to some creep who had an ad in the paper? You did? OK.” There was silence for a minute and then the sound of a typewriter clicking. At last the voice returned.
“What church ya go to?”
“To tell the truth,” said Joseph diffidently, “I haven’t been in one for years. I suppose you could call me a nominal agnostic.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Hold the phone. . . . Hey, Mac, what’s the book price on a thirty-seven agnostic?”
Joseph strained his ears to catch the reply but all he got was an indistinct mumble.
“The boss says your model is a drug on the market,” said the voice at the other end. “He wants to know if maybe you’d like to make a swap. What you got would make a good down payment on a one-owner job that came in this morning. It belonged to a retired minister and never received anything but the best of care.”
“Listen,” said Joseph plaintively, “you do buy souls, don’t you?”
The man at the other end sounded surprised. “Why, sure . . . If the price is right, that is,” he added hastily. “But you’re in a buyer’s market and you might as well face it. What’s your asking price?”
Joseph took a deep breath, hesitated, and then took the plunge. “Three wishes. I believe that’s the usual limit, isn’t it?”
There was a snort and then a side comment that Joseph couldn’t help overhearing. “Hey, Mac, guess what? Another threesie!”
“I beg your pardon?” said Joseph. “What for? Come on over. The boss says it’s a deal.”
Joseph jotted down the building and office number on the back of a match folder and set off to meet his destiny.
The beetle-browed man didn’t bother to introduce himself but the name on the door said J CUTLER. He pulled a thick sheaf of forms out, of his desk drawer and tossed it over to Joseph.
“The usual contract,” he said. “You might as well start filling in the blanks.”
Joseph, who had expected a single sheet of hand-illuminated parchment, was momentarily appalled at the multiplicity of divers colored forms. He leafed through them timidly. There were eleven green ones, eight white ones, twelve blue ones, and three of pale magenta.
“I have to fill out all of these, Mr. Cutler?”
The other nodded.
“In my own blood?” asked Joseph apprehensively. After making a quick estimate of the number of blanks to be filled he doubted whether he had that much.
“Naw, we got rid of all that nonsense during the last re-organization. It wasn’t our idea to begin with. Back in the middle ages unless they had a lot of fuss and flurry they didn’t feel they were getting their money’s worth. Then once the tradition got established it sort of hung on. But when you look at it from a common-sense point of view, what do coagulated red corpuscles have to do with whether a deal’s a deal?”
“I don’t know . . .” said joseph. “Sometimes I wonder what filling out forms in thirty-four-plicate has to do with it.”
The big man looked at him shrewdly. “Maybe you’re the type we used to get didn’t think so much of the blood either. But you gotta satisfy the average customer. When he thinks blood works magic, he gets blood. When he thinks forms . . .” He took out a cheap ballpoint pen and-tossed it on the table. “You can use that desk over there,” he said. “Let me know when you’re finished.”
Joseph obediently carried the stack of printed forms to the other side of the office, sat down, and began busily filling in the indicated blanks. An hour went by, and then another.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The big man looked up from his racing form. “Yeah?” he grunted.
“Question ninety-seven has me sort of confused.”
“Why?”
“When it asks for the date and place of my grandfather’s marriage, it doesn’t say which one it’s referring to.”
“Which what? Marriage or grandfather?”
“Grandfather.”
“Is that on the blue sheet?” Joseph checked and then nodded. “Then it’s asking about your father’s father. The other side of the family is covered on the green sheets.”
Joseph made a quick estimate of the forms that were as yet unfilled and ventured a timid objection.
“Those questions about when I first decided to kill my father and marry my mother—are they really necessary? I mean, after all, I’ve got somet
hing you want and you’ve got something I want. Couldn’t we make a simple exchange and call it a day?”
“Look,” said Cutler sternly. “You’re in a business this big, the home office has to keep in touch, see? It’s got to be able to get the big picture. To get the big picture you’ve got to have reports to consolidate, lots of reports.” He frowned sternly at Joseph. “If you don’t Want to cooperate, beat it. Losing your crumby little soul ain’t going to bankrupt us.”
Joseph was filled with sudden alarm and held up his hands placatingly. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t criticizing, I was just curious, that’s all.” Bending back over the forms he began to scribble hurriedly.
An hour and a half later he stumbled across the room to Cutler’s desk with every single blank completed and his name written neatly at the bottom of each. The fingers of his right hand were gnarled and twisted with writer’s cramp, but he didn’t care. It was done. At last it was done.
“I hadn’t realized this would be such a complicated business,” he said as he laid down the pile of paper with a sigh. “None of the old books made any mention of this sort of thing.”
“It was simpler in the old days,” admitted the beetle-browed man. “But terribly inefficient,” he added hastily as he began a quick check to see that all the question blanks were filled in. “We’ve got a big statistical analysis section now and all the central records sections have been converted to IBM. Like the Old Man says, we gotta keep up with the times.”
Joseph stole a surreptitious look at the big electric clock on the wall, but he couldn’t make any sense out of it. There was an infinity sign at the top where the 12 should have been and the spacing suggested some sort of a geometrical progression.
“It must be getting rather late,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if—”
The big man obviously didn’t like being interrupted. “Like I was saying,” he said severely, “we gotta keep up with the times. About the only job we haven’t been able to mechanize is de-souling. That’s such a tricky job it still has to be handled in the old way.”
“De-what?” said Joseph. “De-souling. You sold us your soul. Now it’s up to us to get it out of you.”
“How?”
“Stick around. You’ll find out,” said the other with a nasty grin.
Joseph found himself filled with a sudden sense of malaise. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?” he asked apprehensively.
Three was no answer.
Joseph let out a nervous smile and started to edge toward the door. “I’m a little tired from all that name signing. Suppose I drop back tomorrow to finish up the rest?”
The big man jumped up with an ugly growl. “Oh, no, you don’t! It’s the collection station for you!” Before Joseph could escape—or even protest, for that matter—he was seized by the scruff of the neck and propelled toward a small door that had suddenly opened in the opposite wall. As they approached it, a little gnome-like figure popped out and stood rubbing his hands. He wore a pair of blood-stained coveralls, and over his shoulder Joseph saw a long wooden table with rusty arm and leg clamps attached to it. Above the table was a rack containing an extensive array of both blunt and pointed objects. He tried to twist out of the big man’s grip, but he couldn’t. So he did the next best thing: he fainted.
When he came to, there was the sharp sting of smelling salts in his nose and he found himself securely strapped to the table. The attendant in the once-white jacket was testing the point of a particularly ugly knife on his thumb. A little drop of emerald blood oozed forth and he grunted his satisfaction.
“Just relax,” he said in a conversational tone. “This won’t take more than a couple of hours. A soul’s a mighty hard thing to get out—it’s all mixed up with blood and bone and muscle—but in me you’ve got the best de-souler in the business. There’s some as need five hundred incisions to get the job done. Me, I usually don’t run over three hundred and fifty.”
The little man must have had an off day. He ran considerably over par before he finally obtained what had to be obtained, smeared Joseph with an evil-smelling salve that healed all his cuts the minute it touched them, and shoved him out the little door into the office.
“My wishes!” croaked Joseph to the beetle-browed man when he was finally able to talk again.
“Go ahead and make them. I ain’t got all day.”
Joseph’s head whirled and there was a sudden weakness that made it difficult for him to stand up. It was finally past. If he had had any inkling of the horror that waited for him in the de-souling room when he first got the idea of selling his soul, he would never have had the courage to go through with it. But that was all over now. The pain was behind him. Now it was his turn.
“First, wealth!” he snapped.
Mr. Cutler reached in his desk drawer, took a bank book off the top of a large pile, and handed it over.
“Is a million bucks enough to start with?”
Joseph’s eyes bugged slightly but he attempted a nonchalant gesture as he tucked the little book away in his breast pocket.
“Next, immortality.”
This time instead of a book he received a pill. He gulped it down, ignoring a slightly bitter taste as he did so. A moment later he felt a slight tingling sensation, but that was all.
“When does it start to work?” he asked anxiously.
“It already has,” said Cutler. “You’re immortal. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Joseph nodded mutely.
“All right then, what’s your third? Like you said, it’s getting late; and there ain’t no overtime paid on this job.”
This was Joseph’s moment of triumph; He drew himself up to his full five feet four and said slowly, “My third wish is for three more wishes.”
Mr. Cutler’s reaction was all that Joseph could have asked for. He swore, he beat with both fists on his desk, he stamped up and down the office. When that didn’t work, he recaptured control of himself with an effort and said in a panicky voice, “I don’t think you realize what you’re asking!”
“I am perfectly aware of what I’m asking,” said Joseph coldly.
“But one soul—especially one in the condition yours is in—just isn’t worth the energy expenditure required. We’d have to go way in the red on the deal. Suppose we settle on making you the handsomest man in the world and call it square.” Joseph was adamant. “I’ve got a contract. It’s down in black and white that I can ask for anything I want to. So I’m asking.”
“But look at it from our point of view,” said Cutler in a plaintive voice. “On three wishes we just about break even. And if we didn’t have a volume business we wouldn’t even do that. What you’re asking is an infinite number of free throws, because every time you use up two wishes, you’ll use your third to get three more.”
Joseph was beginning to enjoy himself. For the first time in his life he found himself really in command of an important situation. “Admitted,” he said smugly. “The next time you sign something, I suggest you read all the fine print.” His voice sharpened and he slapped his hand down on Cutler’s desk.
“Either you pay off—now!—or I’m going to take this up with higher authorities.”
Cutler winced. “But to adjust your probability path to infinite reduplication would require a terrific wrenching of the continuum—”
“You refuse to honor this contract?” interrupted Joseph.
The beetle-browed man stuttered to a stop, glared wildly at the other, and then finally threw up his hands in defeat. “All right,” he muttered. “Three more wishes you want, three more wishes you’ll get. But the front office ain’t going to like it when they see this month’s cost sheet.” He pushed a button on the intercom on his desk and spoke into it. “Yeah?” creaked a rusty voice. “Trouble, Mac.”
“What kind?”
“I got a threesie who insists on using his last wish to get three more. What’ll I do?”
“The contract signed
already?”
“Yeah. And he’s holding us to it.” There was a groan from the other end. “And just when it looked like we were going to end up in the black.”
“What’ll we do?” asked Cutler. There was silence at the other end, and then finally: “Guess he’s got us over a barrel. There’s nothing the competition would like better than to catch us welshing on a contract. When does he want delivery?”
“Now!” broke in Joseph.
“Well, if we got to, we got to. Here goes!”
Joseph waited triumphantly—a song in his heart, a chip on his shoulder, and the world at his feet.
When it happened there was a sudden twisting all around him and he went spinning down into darkness. When the lights went on again, he—or at least a conscious immaterial part of him—was sitting in a murky place, feeling but not felt, and looking out through a familiar pair of male eyes and listening to a familiar bored female voice.
Technically the terms of his contract had not been violated. To satisfy his last demand, his particular path through the space-time continuum had been turned back on itself until a perfect Mobius strip was formed and Joseph found himself suddenly tossed back a week in time. His third wish had been granted; he was getting three more.
Ahead of him was the waiting, and then the agony of the de-souling room, and then finally the insistence on the third wish that would throw him back to begin the whole horrible cycle again as the bored voice said, “Ya got something to sell, it ain’t real estate, automotive . . .”
He wanted to scream but he heard himself say anxiously, “You’re sure that it will be in tomorrow’s paper?”
IMPACT WITH THE DEVIL
To conclude the history of this triptych; Both Asimov and deFord felt that their stories should be cleared with Cogswell, who has a clear priority on this gimmick-trinity. But Cogswell had vanished. Even his agent had only a long-outdated address: and for a while Asimov, deFord and I began to worry about the possible intrusion of fantasy into the real life of fantasy writers. When Cogswell was rediscovered (in the Department of English of the University of Denver), he gave his blessings to both stories, with that generous camaraderie so characteristic of writers in our field. But, I mused editorially, it was his idea to start withy and that was a fine new pact-twist he came up with in Threesie, and maybe . . . So I suggested that Cogswell turn his devious creative mind to making this a triune trinity, a set of Gimmicks Three-Squared. He did not disappoint me. Indeed, you may find this third story the most (as is only fitting) devilishly inventive and unexpected of the lot [And Mr. Cogswell can now “die happy” . . . but not, I trust, until—oh, say roughly around the period of Martian colonization, after a long career of brightening these pages with his deft deceptions.]
Collected Fiction Page 41
