L sprague de camp, p.16
L Sprague De Camp, page 16
Hale swallowed. Johnson went on, as if Hale had interrupted with a protest of modesty: "Yes, you probably don't consider yourself worthy. But you have tormented an entire hemisphere more efficiently than I have done in centuries; and soon the whole world will be involved, tortured more by their incomprehensible difficulties than even a war could have tormented them. Ah, William, you have done a beautiful job indeed! If I couldn't match it with a comparable accomplishment of my own — quite an old one, I confess; roughly five thousand years old — I should be inclined to envy you."
"Oh, cut it out!" snapped Hale. "I've defeated you, and you know it. Don't try to wiggle out of it."
"I try to wiggle out of it?" Johnson looked shocked. "Why, William, that's the last thing in the world I want to do. In a sense you have defeated me. Actually, though, you have shown yourself capable of succeeding me ... as Lucifer!"
"What's the gag?" Hale fought to keep his temper.
"Now, boys," said Gloria, "don't quarrel!"
Johnson tapped the ash off his cigar with irritating composure. "Nothing of the sort, my dear.
"You see, William, my predecessor invented the instinct of self-preservation, thereby showing his ability. My own accomplishment was the discovery of hope. Both of these have increased the misery of Hell.
"But with your invention-blind, senseless confidence — there is almost no torment imaginable that can further augment man's suffering.
"He will continue producing to the limit of his endurance, regardless of the mounting surplus. He counts on extending credit to plundered nations, when you and I know that the Pan-American Credit Corporation hasn't a penny to lend them —"
"What? Don't be an ass! It has all the future to draw on. There's no limit to its credit!"
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JOHNSON BOBBED his white head admiringly. "Sinister, William, most sinister indeed! You showed far greater ingenuity than mine when you planted that insane confidence in their minds. They will believe in the limitless credit of the future, and never admit that the future has already been exhausted. There is no more credit, and we know why, eh, William? Though we'll never convince your subjects."
"Yeah? Why?"
Johnson wagged a finger. "Don't pretend innocence! Everybody owes everybody else, and in turn is owed by everybody. Consequently it will be impossible to collect, which erases the possibility of credit. Incidentally, money will, I fear, be destroyed as a medium of exchange. That I regret, for I had an inordinate fondness for the pretty stuff; but as I shall go on to my reward soon, that is your concern. When money debts become uncollectible, money will have to be abandoned; and my opinion is that a highly industrialized, more impractical form of barter will complicate matters for the damned even further."
Hale sat quietly, chilled. "They can slow down production —"
"Ah, but they can't!" Johnson gazed at Hale with frank respect. "There you showed your astounding artfulness. They will never, never believe that their system of anarchic, geometrically increasing production is unworkable! Furthermore, you have adroitly removed all the natural checks on such insensate production. Formerly an employer could reduce his expenses and wait for his inventory to diminish. But now every man is his own employer. He can't very well throw himself out of work, can he?"
"He can stop producing for a while and live on his savings."
"He has no savings. At any rate he won't when the system collapses under the weight of its surpluses, which should be some time this week. I'm glad I shall be here to see the crash; it will make the Battle of Troyes look like a back-yard squabble."
Hale opened his mouth to protest some more. But what could he say? Johnson's statements appeared to add up. And then he went on: "By proving yourself a worthy successor, William, you allow me to go on to my next existence. What it will be I don't know. But it can't help being more pleasant than this one, since this is Hell.
"Evidently we — those of us who are doomed, from time to time, to the supreme torment of indeterminate immortality as manager of Hell — committed the most unspeakable crimes in some other existence. While Hell would no doubt supply plenty of torment without our help, a manager is evidently required to assure the most efficient and economical distribution of misery. So this is our punishment. We must redeem ourselves with infinitely greater pain than any of the other damned souls.
"I have done so, at the cost of five thousand years of the most intense anguish; monotony, boredom, loneliness. You have escaped loneliness by your spell, but I greatly fear the cure will prove worse than the disease, if you will excuse the trite expression. I am unutterably tired and anxious for an end to my torment.
"However, I must warn you not to count on redemption within five millennia. Before you leave this place, you will be required to find and train a successor, one who deserves what eventually seems like eternal damnation. You will seize and discard any number before you strike one who is cursed as we are, for unspeakable crimes in those other planes are damnably rare, it seems. You will live in a perpetual agony of hope that each generation will deliver up your successor. And you will never know, until almost the last moment, when your successor is at hand, except by the most intensive search for him ... or her! That could as easily be a million years —"
Hale's nerves had gone completely limp. There was no more rebellion in him. You get what you want, if you try hard enough — and then wish you hadn't. You can't escape first principles.
Victory was defeat. Why? Because: "By grasping the principle that anything you do, irrespective of your intentions, will increase the misery and torments of the people, you have confirmed my belief that you were to be my successor, for you understand that that is how Hell is constructed. If you didn't know it before, you do now, most emphatically!"
One hope had been smashed, the solitary hope that he might, by defeating Lucifer, escape relatively eternal torment. He had succeeded. What was the result of his victory? It bound him forever to his defeat. So far from defeating Lucifer, he had become Lucifer.
"I don't want —" he said. "I didn't intend —"
Johnson patted his arm sympathetically. "I know, my boy. That's the way it was with me, when I invented hope. That's the way it is with all of us. It's part of our fate." He sat back, puffing his cigar. "Yes, William, I can never express my relief that I have not put my trust in you to no purpose. You were my last hope, and for a while I feared you were too nervous and temperamental for the job. If you had failed me, I don't know what I should have done.
"Ah, my boy, what gratification it gives me! Developing you, watching you, guiding you, to take my place as the supremely damned manager of Hell. In training you as my successor, I have not wasted thirty years!"
Hale was shocked erect. "Thirty years! You mean you planned all this ... Gloria and everything —"
"I'm sorry," Johnson reached across Hale's lap and took something from Gloria. "I see your eternal helpmate has unwrapped your birthday present." He put the second ankh in Hale's limp grasp. "I mean thirty-two!"
"Isn't it cute, Billie-willie?" cried Gloria.
Hale stared at the object. Billie-willie ... .Cute ... The ankh, immortality, cute!
He sat, numbed and dumbly cold, staring at the bright, hard gold that symbolized his inescapable eternity of doom.
The End
Jack, L Sprague De Camp
