Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  “I know you can’t help walking around inside my head. You’d stop if you could.”

  “You ‘know’ that because I told you.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Good point.” After a moment, I lowered the eyebrow. “You’re right, I must trust you. Hell, we lived together once. Yeah, I do trust you.”

  “Everybody is at least a tiny bit telepathic. In your heart of hearts, you know I mean you no harm.”

  I looked around for my heart of hearts, but couldn’t locate it. So I thought, instead. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  He took a long drink from his water bottle and twisted the cap back onto it. “All right. You trust me to wander around inside your head. Next step: do you trust me to make a few small changes, while I’m in there? The equivalent of—” He glanced down. “—straightening up a desk just a little? Before everything on it lands on the floor?”

  I stared. “Zudie, you think you can really do that? Like, instant Prozac—by Vulcan mind-meld?”

  “More like one of the tricyclics,” he said. “But yes.”

  I couldn’t decide how I felt about it. Which I realized was weird. All my life, the very idea of this kind of mental invasion, someone else making alterations in my personal mind, had been a special horror of mine, featuring some of my worst nightmares. Tonight I was so apathetic, so burned out, I couldn’t seem to give a shit anymore. There was just enough of me left to realize intellectually how alarming that ought to be. But my intellect got hung up on the absurdity of doing something that should frighten and revolt me, in order to regain the power to be frightened and revolted again. I would know it was working if I found myself starting to freak out.

  “It won’t be like that,” he said. Not arguing, just furnishing information.

  “Will—?”

  “No. It won’t hurt.” A promise.

  “Will I—”

  He looked mildly exasperated. “How can I know that—before the fact? There’s no telling what people will decide to regret, after the fact.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “Well…have y—?”

  “Yes, I have. A total of six times, so far.”

  After enough time had passed I said gently, “You know my next question.”

  He sighed and nodded. “Of course. Three of the six were reasonably happy with the changes I made. Another was wildly happy. But one was angry, and over time learned how to undo everything I’d done.”

  “Huh. How l—?”

  “It took him about a month.”

  More silence. I didn’t prompt him, this time.

  “The sixth killed herself,” he said when he was ready.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, and sighed heavily.

  I thought about it. “So if I let you do this, the spectrum of possible reactions runs from, I get really high to I kill myself?”

  “Well, on the plus side I suppose it’s possible you could achieve true enlightenment and become the next Buddha, but basically that’s it, yes.”

  “Whip it out,” I heard myself say.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Bring it. Either of those is way better than where I’m at now.”

  He got up, wheeled my chair out from behind my desk and into the center of the room, and made me sit in it. He turned out the desk lamp, leaving my Mac the only significant light source in the room. He moused around that until he located iTunes, opened it, and activated its visual display. The screen exploded into psychedelic lunacy, whose nature, colors and speed changed constantly. My eyes were drawn to it, and found it hypnotic. He pulled his chair beside mine, sat facing me. I offered him my hands, palms up, but he waved them away.

  “Is there anything special I should be thinking?” I asked. “Or thinking about?”

  “Ideally,” he said, “you should not be thinking at all. Not even thinking about not thinking.”

  “Terrific. How long does that take to learn?”

  He spread his hands. “It varies. Some Buddhists spend their lives working on it, very hard, and never achieve it.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Just watch the screen.”

  “Okay.”

  And then—without thinking about it—I stopped thinking. About anything at all.

  2.

  “It didn’t work,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Hell, no. I still have my grief. All of it. I mean, it hurts just as much as it did an hour ago. God still sucks. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t feel any different at all.” I opened up my eyes, and there he was beside me, looking at me with no expression. The screen display on my computer had been shut down. I snorted. “Look who I’m telling. You probably know it better than I do.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I tried.”

  “Now what about this family? Where are they? How many? And who wants to kill them? What are you smiling about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why can’t we just go to the police?”

  “Maybe we can. I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He frowned. “Russell, I’ve known you for a long time. I always liked you, and I still do. You have an unusually tolerant and sensitive mind, a kind heart, and a gentle disposition. You can stand next to someone you know is reading your mind, and not want to kill him. After all this time, you remembered I like Oreos. I can’t think of anybody I’m more comfortable with.” His frown deepened to the point of becoming a grimace. “And I can barely stand to be this close to you. I’ll have to go, soon.”

  “Oh.”

  “You were only part right before. Reading minds doesn’t just hurt. It…it degrades. It forces you to know things that you know you’re not supposed to know. I came here in the dead of night…and even then I almost didn’t make it. You have no idea how loud some people can dream, Russell. But in daylight, forget it: I’d have been catatonic before I got halfway here. And this is a sparsely populated island of peaceful rural people. If I were to try and make it to a city police station, let alone walk inside it…or even get within a few hundred meters of a single beat cop—” He shuddered. “Some kinds of mind, it hurts me even to think about. Cops are high on the list.”

  “You could call them. I’m sure you don’t have a phone out there on Coveney, but you’re welcome to use mine.”

  “Think that through.”

  Okay.

  I’m a police desk sergeant. Someone calls up and wants to report a whole bunch of murders that haven’t happened yet. He won’t say how he knows about them. He has no hard evidence. He won’t come in and be interviewed. He won’t say why not. He’d rather not give out his address. He says his name is Zandor Zudenigo. And he sounds like Marvin the Martian.

  Click.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s start over. Who—” I stopped, thought for moment. “No, let’s start at the beginning. If we can locate it. When did you first become aware something was wrong?”

  He nodded. “That’s the right way to approach it, I think.”

  “I’m a columnist. I know where the lead belongs.”

  He paused a moment to collect his thoughts, or perhaps to consult his memories. “Okay. I selected my home for privacy—for obvious reasons—and it usually works pretty good. Strangers almost never get near enough to come to my attention. And when they do, there’s always plenty of warning, because they have to come slowly, by boat, picking their way through the shallows. A seaplane won’t take off or land near Coveney, because the water’s too treacherous there. So if a plane does pass overhead, it’s high up enough to be way out of my range.

  “All of which is just to explain why I was taken so completely aback, when suddenly there was a monster in my head, one night. For a horrid second I almost believed I had invented him. Which would make me one sick fuck.”

  I stared. I had never heard Zandor use the word “fuck.” Not even in the worst of the Sixties.

  “But a second later I realized what
was going on. See, maybe that’s a clue: in that first instant of contact, who he was was more important to him, more prominent in his thoughts, than what was happening to him. Which is amazing because, as far as he knew, he was dying. His seaplane was going down, fast and shallow. Some mechanical defect I understood perfectly just then, and can no longer remember how to explain. As I became aware of him, he was already passing over my head, about thirty meters up.

  “And I agreed with him. Who he was was a lot more interesting than his imminent death. Certainly way, way more horrifying. He was…monstrous.”

  Zandor caught himself, and paused.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not saying it right. You’re picturing a combination of Ted Bundy, Bela Lugosi and Arnold Schwarzenegger. This guy is a thousand times worse. What makes him terrifying isn’t even so much what he wants to do. It’s how small a thing it is to him.”

  As I thought of opening my mouth he said:

  “You’re right, I’m rambling. Sorry. Okay, if I’m going to convey it, I’m going to have to confront it. God, I hate this.”

  He closed his eyes, let his features go slack. In repose his face looked like that of a pouting, remarkably ugly baby. After a moment he took a deep breath, and continued.

  “A guy is in your head. Has no idea you exist. He’s about to die. He knows that. He’s been dealing with that for over a minute already, and it’s coming up on showtime. Is he making his peace? Gibbering in fear? Trying to bargain with God?

  “No. Not this guy. He’s laughing. Contemptuously. He’s thinking, You think you can scare me into believing in you again? Screw you. I would have killed a thousand, if I’d had more time. Worse deaths than anything even you’ve ever dreamed of. I’d do it now if I could—I had a terrific one planned for next week. Do your worst, Yahweh old boy: you’ll vanish the instant I do.”

  He opened his eyes and sought out mine.

  “You see? What he’s got left is measured in seconds, and he’s using them to congratulate himself on remaining atheist. On not selling out his intellectual integrity for even a few seconds’ final comfort at the end of a life of psychotic savagery. And how does he do that? By telling an imaginary God to go chase himself, and throwing mortal sins in His face. That’s funny to him.”

  He broke eye contact, looked down at the floor.

  “And then whatever it was—a plugged fuel line, that was it—just fixed itself, at the last possible moment. He got enough control back to get the nose up, hit the water hard, skipped back into the air like a flat rock…and a few seconds later he was out of my range. I’ve been trying ever since to come to terms with what I learned during those twenty or thirty seconds I was connected to him.”

  He swiveled his chair, turning his back to me, and gripped his upper arms as if he were hugging himself. “All right!” he said, responding to what I had been thinking of saying. “I still haven’t gotten to it—I know, okay?”

  “If you like,” I said, “I can go take a nap, and you can tell me later how this conversation came out.”

  He turned back around to face me, still clutching his biceps. “His first name is Allen. I don’t know any others. He wrote a piece of software only programmers have ever heard of that made him roughly as wealthy as Alberta. He never has to work again and never will. His hobby takes up all his time these days. His hobby—” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out. “His hobby is suffering.”

  “Sounds like me,” I said.

  His eyes snapped open and captured mine. “Not experiencing suffering. Causing it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Studying it. Cultivating it. Learning how to maximize it, refine it, enhance it. Prolong it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What kind of suffering?”

  “All kinds,” he said. “Every kind. Physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, philosophical. I really don’t think he discriminates.”

  “But how—”

  “If you were to meet him, within two minutes’ conversation Allen would know what you fear the most. Within four, he’d know who you love most, and what it is they most fear. Within five minutes he could make you burst into tears by speaking a single sentence. And probably would, for the pleasure of your embarrassment.

  “But the moment he laid eyes on you, he would already know just about everything there is to know about how to make your particular body experience maximum physical agony. That’s a given.”

  “What th—”

  “He could, for example, dig the second joint of his index finger into a certain spot on your body—not hard, certainly not hard enough to break a shortbread cookie—and make you beg him to kill you.”

  “Oh bullshit.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “And that’s first-grade stuff. He’s a Ph.D. He’s been studying the subject for a long time. As long as he can remember, really. Suffering is, to Allen, what art or music or literature are to others. And he is a gifted artist, a once-in-a-generation talent.”

  “So what are you saying, he’s like, a serial killer? Hannibal Lecter?”

  His shoulders slumped. “Killing is about the kindest thing he does. He puts it off as long as possible.”

  “How many has he—”

  “I don’t know exactly. Enough that he’s lost count. Many dozens. Somewhere in the general neighborhood of a hundred and fifty.”

  I heard a loud buzzing sound. I could feel a headache coming on, and my stomach was cramping. “Dear Jesus God.”

  “Russell, you have to help me stop him.”

  “Me?” I felt my jaw drop. “What the hell can I—”

  He overrode me—hard to do with that voice. “Listen to me! Let me give you just one single small example of why this man has to be erased from the planet at once. Allen buys gas masks by the crate.”

  “Gas masks?”

  “Vintage WWI and WWII gas masks. He especially likes the ones that cover the whole face, if he can get them.”

  “I don’t—”

  “That way, when he sets someone on fire, they don’t get to have a nice quick merciful death from smoke inhalation or scorched lungs. They remain conscious long enough to feel themselves c—”

  “Jesus Christ, that’s enough!”

  A short silence ensued, in which I tried to wrap my mind around what he’d just said.

  “What is it you’re asking me to do?” I said finally.

  “Did you ever read a Larry Niven novel called Ringworld?”

  I shook my head.

  “Mistake. Well, in Niven’s universe there’s an alien race, giant cats, very vicious and aggressive—so aggressive that in their wars with humanity they always lose, because they always attack too soon. Anyway, they’re so xenophobic they refuse to concede that any other race is truly sentient, so the title they give to their ambassador to the human race translates literally as ‘Speaker-to-Animals.’”

  I smiled. “Nice phrase. I like it. You’re saying he’s that ferocious and alien?”

  “No. I’m saying I want you to be Speaker-to-Cops.”

  My smile went away. I retrieved the mental movie I had created earlier of Zudie calling the cops, and replayed it—this time with myself in the starring role. It actually got less funny. “Uh…”

  “You are the closest I can get to a cop. Even if I did find someone closer, I’d never convince them of what you already know. Certainly not in a week, which is the most we’ve got.” He got up out of his chair and came to me. To my surprise, he touched me with his hands, put them on my shoulders. “There is nobody else, Russell. I’m very sorry, but you’re elected. By random chance, the same way I was. Your two choices now are to help me, or to go to your grave knowing that you could have saved the lives of a blameless harmless couple and their two sweet children, and declined. It is not necessary to know you as well as I do, to know that the second alternative is simply not in you.” He let go of my shoulders. “The decision is already made, man. Catch up with reality, okay? We really don’t have much t
ime.”

  I was beginning to realize that he was right. One of my favorite Charles Addams cartoons depicts an elderly portly man in black tie and tails, wearing a monocle. He is on skis, in midair, hundreds of feet above the ground, descending, and the expression on his face says clear as print, “How the bloody hell did this happen?”

  I wished I knew.

  “How much time do we have? Exactly.”

  He frowned ferociously. “I can’t be sure. His plane went down Monday—two days ago. The words he used in his head were ‘next week.’ But that’s not very specific. He could have meant first thing next Monday morning…or any time before a week from this Friday. I got the sense that there was something preventing him from doing it any sooner than…whenever it is next week, something he couldn’t help, but I have no idea what it was, or how firm it was. What I’m saying is, we could have anywhere from five to nine days…or, he could have been inspired by his near-death experience to clear his calendar and get cracking: for all I know, he’s out there now, doing—” He stopped speaking and shuddered.

  “Doing what?”

  He folded his arms atop his head, like a prisoner of war. “Are you sure you want to know the specifics?”

  “I’m sure the cops will want to know. Better if I don’t make them up.”

  He lifted his hands straight in the air, then let them fall. “Yes.” He took a deep breath, let it out. “But are you sure you want to know?”

  No. “Yes.”

  He nodded and turned away so we wouldn’t have to see one another’s eyes.

  “It’s a rather ambitious scenario. His requirements are fairly specific, but he’s already located what he considers the perfect victims in Point Grey. A family of four, son pubescent, daughter not quite, all four of them beautiful and kind and decent—the most picture-perfect, Hallmark card, Norman Rockwell sort of family he can possibly find.

  “The mother is most important of all to him: to fit his fantasy she has to be June Cleaver, Ma Walton, whatever the hell the name of Timmy’s mom on Lassie was…God, I just now realized I can’t think of a single warm loving sexy married mother figure in all of contemporary television, I have to go back to the Stone Age.” I started to argue, and squelched myself. “Never mind, I’m stalling. The point is, he wanted a happy homemaker who respects her husband and adores her kids and cares about her community and has never had a mean impulse in her life. And has big breasts. And a strong but kind and loving husband who deserves her, and two sweet kids they’ve done a great job of raising together, who haven’t yet been driven completely insane by the hormone storms of puberty.”