b555 Posted July 23, 2013 Posted July 23, 2013 Post a interesting short story here, it may be one you have written or one that you have come across over the internet we can all have a read in little time and be done and stories are always good, aren't they?
Prakat Posted July 23, 2013 Posted July 23, 2013 Guts by Chuck Palahniuk Printed in Playboy magazine March 2004 Inhale. Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can. A friend of mine, when he was thirteen years old he heard about "pegging." This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac. He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket checkstand, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned. So, my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline. Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt. At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts. Then, this kid, his mom yells it's suppertime. She says to come down, right now. He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed. After dinner, he goes to find the carrot and it's gone. All his dirty clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry. No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky. This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now he's grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents' grandkids, that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them. That something too awful to name. People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: Esprit de l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party… As you start down the stairway, then -- magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do. Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about. Looking back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off. Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around the kid's neck, the towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on their kid. They made it look… better. Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad, teen suicide. Another friend of mine, a kid from school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you'd see on a sword. This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More intense. It's this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips. After this, the little brother, one day he doesn't show up at school. That night, he calls to ask if I'll pick up his homework for the next couple weeks. Because he's in the hospital. He's got to share a room with old people getting their guts worked on. He says how they all have to share the same television. All he's got for privacy is a curtain. His folks don't come and visit. On the phone, he says how right now his folks could just kill his big brother in the Navy. On the phone, the kid says how -- the day before -- he was just a little stoned. At home in his bedroom, he was flopped on the bed. He was lighting a candle and flipping through some old porno magazines, getting ready to beat off. This is after he's heard from his Navy brother. That helpful hint about how Arabs beat off. The kid looks around for something that might do the job. A ball-point pen's too big. A pencil's too big and rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there's a thin, smooth ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger, this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin. Stoned and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the top, he gets to work. Even now, he says those Arab guys are pretty damn smart. They've totally re-invented jacking off. Flat on his back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can't keep track of the wax. He's one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn't sticking out anymore. The thin wax rod, it's slipped inside. All the way inside. So deep inside he can't even feel the lump of it inside his piss tube. From downstairs, his mom shouts it's suppertime. She says to come down, right now. This wax kid and the carrot kid are different people, but we all live pretty much the same life. It's after dinner when the kid's guts start to hurt. It's wax so he figured it would just melt inside him and he'd pee it out. Now his back hurts. His kidneys. He can't stand straight. This kid talking on the phone from his hospital bed, in the background you can hear bells ding, people screaming. Game shows. The X-rays show the truth, something long and thin, bent double inside his bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it's collecting all the minerals in his piss. It's getting bigger and more rough, coated with crystals of calcium, it's bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up. What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood. This kid and his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth. The way Arabs get off. What his big brother wrote him from the Navy. On the phone, right now, he starts to cry. They paid for the bladder operation with his college fund. One stupid mistake, and now he'll never be a lawyer. Sticking stuff inside yourself. Sticking yourself inside stuff. A candle in your dick or your head in a noose, we knew it was going to be big trouble. What got me in trouble, I called it Pearl Diving. This meant whacking off underwater, sitting on the bottom at the deep end of my parents' swimming pool. With one deep breath, I'd kick my way to the bottom and slip off my swim trucks. I'd sit down there for two, three, four minutes. Just from jacking off, I had huge lung capacity. If I had the house to myself, I'd do this all afternoon. After I'd finally pump out my stuff, my sperm, it would hang there in big, fat, milky gobs. After that was more diving, to catch it all. To collect it and wipe each handful in a towel. That's why it was called Pearl Diving. Even with chlorine, there was my sister to worry about. Or, Christ almighty, my Mom. That used to be my worst fear in the world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she's just getting fat, then giving birth to a two-headed retard baby. Both heads looking just like me. Me, the father AND the uncle. In the end, it's never what you worry about that gets you. The best part of Pearl Diving was the inlet port for the swimming pool filter and the circulation pump. The best part was getting naked and sitting on it. As the French would say: Who doesn't like getting their butt sucked? Still, one minute you're just a kid getting off, and the next minute you'll never be a lawyer. One minute, I'm settling on the pool bottom, and the sky is wavy, light blue through eight feet of water above my head. The world is silent except for the heartbeat in my ears. My yellow-striped swim trunks are looped around my neck for safe keeping, just in case a friend, a neighbor, anybody shows up to ask why I skipped football practice. The steady suck of the pool inlet hole is lapping at me and I'm grinding my skinny white ass around on that feeling. One minute, I've got enough air, and my dick's in my hand. My folks are gone at their work and my sister's got ballet. Nobody's supposed to be home for hours. My hand brings me right to getting off, and I stop. I swim up to catch another big breath. I dive down and settle on the bottom. I do this again and again. This must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out, the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in the water. And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls. It's then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can't. I can't get my feet under me. My ass is stuck. Emergency paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or your ass, and you're going to drown. Every year, tons of people do. Most of them in Florida. People just don't talk about it. Not even French people talk about EVERYTHING. Getting one knee up, getting one foot tucked under me, I get to half standing when I feel the tug against my butt. Getting my other foot under me, I kick off against the bottom. I'm kicking free, not touching the concrete, but not getting to the air, either. Still kicking water, thrashing with both arms, I'm maybe halfway to the surface but not going higher. The heartbeat inside my head getting loud and fast. The bright sparks of light crossing and criss-crossing my eyes, I turn and look back… but it doesn't make sense. This thick rope, some kind of snake, blue-white and braided with veins has come up out of the pool drain and it's holding onto my butt. Some of the veins are leaking blood, red blood that looks black underwater and drifts away from little rips in the pale skin of the snake. The blood trails away, disappearing in the water, and inside the snake's thin, blue-white skin you can see lumps of some half-digested meal. That's the only way this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something that's never seen the light of day, it's been hiding in the dark bottom of the pool drain, waiting to eat me. So… I kick at it, at the slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to pull out of the pool drain. It's maybe as long as my leg now, but still holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I'm an inch closer to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I'm an inch closer to my escape. Knotted inside the snake, you can see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It's the kind of horse-pill vitamin my Dad makes me take, to help put on weight. To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omega-three fatty acids. It's seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life. It's not a snake. It's my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What doctors call, prolapsed. It's my guts sucked into the drain. Paramedics will tell you a swimming pool pump pulls 80 gallons of water every minute. That's about 400 pounds of pressure. The big problem is we're all connected together inside. Your ass is just the far end of your mouth. If I let go, the pump keeps working - unraveling my insides -- until it's got my tongue. Imagine taking a 400-pound ****, and you can see how this might turn you inside out. What I can tell you is your guts don't feel much pain. Not the way your skin feels pain. The stuff you're digesting, doctor's call it fecal matter. Higher up is chyme, pockets of a thin runny mess studded with corn and peanuts and round green peas. That's all this soup of blood and corn, **** and sperm and peanuts floating around me. Even with my guts unraveling out my ass, me holding onto what's left, even then my first want is to somehow get my swimsuit back on. God forbid my folks see my dick. My one hand holding a fist around my ass, my other hand snags my yellow-striped swim trunks and pulls them from around my neck. Still, getting into them is impossible. You want to feel your intestines, go buy a pack of those lamb-skin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly and hold it under water. Then, try to tear it. Try to pull it in half. It's too tough and rubbery. It's so slimy you can't hold on. A lamb-skin condom, that's just plain old intestine. You can see what I'm up against. You let go for a second, and you're gutted. You swim for the surface, for a breath, and you're gutted. You don't swim, and you drown. It's a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now. What my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby they brought home from the hospital thirteen years ago. Here's the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who'd care for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm. Either that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellow-striped swim trunks. What even the French won't talk about. That big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian phrase. The way we say: "I need that like I need a hole in my head…" Russian people say: "I need that like I need teeth in my *******…" Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse Those stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead. Hell… even if you're Russian, some day you just might want those teeth. Otherwise, what you have to do is -- you have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air, and you will chew through anything to get that next breath. It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night. If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari. It's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my Mom said, "You didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock." And she learned how to cook poached eggs. All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me… I need that like I need teeth in my *******. Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked. Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my guts for longer than a couple hours, it comes out still food. Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find it still sitting there in the toilet. After you have a radical bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So I never got a football scholarship. Never got an MBA. Both my friends, the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen. Another big problem was my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming pool. In the end my Dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill still inside, even then, my Dad just said, "That dog was ****ing nuts." Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my Dad say, "We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second…" Then my sister missed her period. Even after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks never mentioned it again. Ever. That is our invisible carrot. You. Now you can take a good, deep breath. I still have not. End
Sachin=GOD Posted July 23, 2013 Posted July 23, 2013 The Invisible Man by G. K. Chesterton In the cool blue twilight of two steep streets in Camden Town, the shop at the corner, a confectioner’s, glowed like the butt of a cigar. One should rather say, perhaps, like the butt of a firework, for the light was of many colours and some complexity, broken up by many mirrors and dancing on many gilt and gaily-coloured cakes and sweetmeats. Against this one fiery glass were glued the noses of many gutter-snipes, for the chocolates were all wrapped in those red and gold and green metallic colours which are almost better than chocolate itself; and the huge white wedding-cake in the window was somehow at once remote and satisfying, just as if the whole North Pole were good to eat. Such rainbow provocations could naturally collect the youth of the neighbourhood up to the ages of ten or twelve. But this corner was also attractive to youth at a later stage; and a young man, not less than twenty-four, was staring into the same shop window. To him, also, the shop was of fiery charm, but this attraction was not wholly to be explained by chocolates; which, however, he was far from despising. He was a tall, burly, red-haired young man, with a resolute face but a listless manner. He carried under his arm a flat, grey portfolio of black-and-white sketches, which he had sold with more or less success to publishers ever since his uncle (who was an admiral) had disinherited him for Socialism, because of a lecture which he had delivered against that economic theory. His name was John Turnbull Angus. Entering at last, he walked through the confectioner’s shop to the back room, which was a sort of pastry-cook restaurant, merely raising his hat to the young lady who was serving there. She was a dark, elegant, alert girl in black, with a high colour and very quick, dark eyes; and after the ordinary interval she followed him into the inner room to take his order. His order was evidently a usual one. “I want, please,†he said with precision, “one halfpenny bun and a small cup of black coffee.†An instant before the girl could turn away he added, “Also, I want you to marry me.†The young lady of the shop stiffened suddenly and said, “Those are jokes I don’t allow.†The red-haired young man lifted grey eyes of an unexpected gravity. “Really and truly,†he said, “it’s as serious — as serious as the halfpenny bun. It is expensive, like the bun; one pays for it. It is indigestible, like the bun. It hurts.†The dark young lady had never taken her dark eyes off him, but seemed to be studying him with almost tragic exactitude. At the end of her scrutiny she had something like the shadow of a smile, and she sat down in a chair. “Don’t you think,†observed Angus, absently, “that it’s rather cruel to eat these halfpenny buns? They might grow up into penny buns. I shall give up these brutal sports when we are married.†The dark young lady rose from her chair and walked to the window, evidently in a state of strong but not unsympathetic cogitation. When at last she swung round again with an air of resolution she was bewildered to observe that the young man was carefully laying out on the table various objects from the shop-window. They included a pyramid of highly coloured sweets, several plates of sandwiches, and the two decanters containing that mysterious port and sherry which are peculiar to pastry-cooks. In the middle of this neat arrangement he had carefully let down the enormous load of white sugared cake which had been the huge ornament of the window. “What on earth are you doing?†she asked. “Duty, my dear Laura,†he began. “Oh, for the Lord’s sake, stop a minute,†she cried, “and don’t talk to me in that way. I mean, what is all that?†“A ceremonial meal, Miss Hope.†“And what is that?†she asked impatiently, pointing to the mountain of sugar. “The wedding-cake, Mrs. Angus,†he said. The girl marched to that article, removed it with some clatter, and put it back in the shop window; she then returned, and, putting her elegant elbows on the table, regarded the young man not unfavourably but with considerable exasperation. “You don’t give me any time to think,†she said. “I’m not such a fool,†he answered; “that’s my Christian humility.†She was still looking at him; but she had grown considerably graver behind the smile. “Mr. Angus,†she said steadily, “before there is a minute more of this nonsense I must tell you something about myself as shortly as I can.’†“Delighted,†replied Angus gravely. “You might tell me something about myself, too, while you are about it.†“Oh, do hold your tongue and listen,†she said. “It’s nothing that I’m ashamed of, and it isn’t even anything that I’m specially sorry about. But what would you say if there were something that is no business of mine and yet is my nightmare?†“In that case,†said the man seriously, “I should suggest that you bring back the cake.†“Well, you must listen to the story first,†said Laura, persistently. “To begin with, I must tell you that my father owned the inn called the ‘Red Fish’ at Ludbury, and I used to serve people in the bar.†“I have often wondered,†he said, “why there was a kind of a Christian air about this one confectioner’s shop.†“Ludbury is a sleepy, grassy little hole in the Eastern Counties, and the only kind of people who ever came to the ‘Red Fish’ were occasional commercial travellers, and for the rest, the most awful people you can see, only you’ve never seen them. I mean little, loungy men, who had just enough to live on and had nothing to do but lean about in bar-rooms and bet on horses, in bad clothes that were just too good for them. Even these wretched young rotters were not very common at our house; but there were two of them that were a lot too common — common in every sort of way. They both lived on money of their own, and were wearisomely idle and over-dressed. But yet I was a bit sorry for them, because I half believe they slunk into our little empty bar because each of them had a slight deformity; the sort of thing that some yokels laugh at. It wasn’t exactly a deformity either; it was more an oddity. One of them was a surprisingly small man, something like a dwarf, or at least like a jockey. He was not at all jockeyish to look at, though; he had a round black head and a well-trimmed black beard, bright eyes like a bird’s; he jingled money in his pockets; he jangled a great gold watch chain; and he never turned up except dressed just too much like a gentleman to be one. He was no fool though, though a futile idler; he was curiously clever at all kinds of things that couldn’t be the slightest use; a sort of impromptu conjuring; making fifteen matches set fire to each other like a regular firework; or cutting a banana or some such thing into a dancing doll. His name was Isidore Smythe; and I can see him still, with his little dark face, just coming up to the counter, making a jumping kangaroo out of five cigars. “The other fellow was more silent and more ordinary; but somehow he alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might almost have been handsome in a spectral sort of way; but he had one of the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked straight at you, you didn’t know where you were yourself, let alone what he was looking at. I fancy this sort of disfigurement embittered the poor chap a little; for while Smythe was ready to show off his monkey tricks anywhere, James Welkin (that was the squinting man’s name) never did anything except soak in our bar parlour, and go for great walks by himself in the flat, grey country all round. All the same, I think Smythe, too, was a little sensitive about being so small, though he carried it off more smartly. And so it was that I was really puzzled, as well as startled, and very sorry, when they both offered to marry me in the same week. “Well, I did what I’ve since thought was perhaps a silly thing. But, after all, these freaks were my friends in a way; and I had a horror of their thinking I refused them for the real reason, which was that they were so impossibly ugly. So I made up some gas of another sort, about never meaning to marry anyone who hadn’t carved his way in the world. I said it was a point of principle with me not to live on money that was just inherited like theirs. Two days after I had talked in this well-meaning sort of way, the whole trouble began. The first thing I heard was that both of them had gone off to seek their fortunes, as if they were in some silly fairy tale. “Well, I’ve never seen either of them from that day to this. But I’ve had two letters from the little man called Smythe, and really they were rather exciting.†“Ever heard of the other man?†asked Angus. “No, he never wrote,†said the girl, after an instant’s hesitation. “Smythe’s first letter was simply to say that he had started out walking with Welkin to London; but Welkin was such a good walker that the little man dropped out of it, and took a rest by the roadside. He happened to be picked up by some travelling show, and, partly because he was nearly a dwarf, and partly because he was really a clever little wretch, he got on quite well in the show business, and was soon sent up to the Aquarium, to do some tricks that I forget. That was his first letter. His second was much more of a startler, and I only got it last week.†The man called Angus emptied his coffee-cup and regarded her with mild and patient eyes. Her own mouth took a slight twist of laughter as she resumed, “I suppose you’ve seen on the hoardings all about this ‘Smythe’s Silent Service’? Or you must be the only person that hasn’t. Oh, I don’t know much about it, it’s some clockwork invention for doing all the housework by machinery. You know the sort of thing: ‘Press a Button — A Butler who Never Drinks.’ ‘Turn a Handle — Ten Housemaids who Never Flirt.’ You must have seen the advertisements. Well, whatever these machines are, they are making pots of money; and they are making it all for that little imp whom I knew down in Ludbury. I can’t help feeling pleased the poor little chap has fallen on his feet; but the plain fact is, I’m in terror of his turning up any minute and telling me he’s carved his way in the world — as he certainly has.†“And the other man?†repeated Angus with a sort of obstinate quietude. Laura Hope got to her feet suddenly. “My friend,†she said, “I think you are a witch. Yes, you are quite right. I have not seen a line of the other man’s writing; and I have no more notion than the dead of what or where he is. But it is of him that I am frightened. It is he who is all about my path. It is he who has half driven me mad. Indeed, I think he has driven me mad; for I have felt him where he could not have been, and I have heard his voice when he could not have spoken.†“Well, my dear,†said the young man, cheerfully, “if he were Satan himself, he is done for now you have told somebody. One goes mad all alone, old girl. But when was it you fancied you felt and heard our squinting friend?†“I heard James Welkin laugh as plainly as I hear you speak,†said the girl, steadily. “There was nobody there, for I stood just outside the shop at the corner, and could see down both streets at once. I had forgotten how he laughed, though his laugh was as odd as his squint. I had not thought of him for nearly a year. But it’s a solemn truth that a few seconds later the first letter came from his rival.†“Did you ever make the spectre speak or squeak, or anything?†asked Angus, with some interest. Laura suddenly shuddered, and then said, with an unshaken voice, “Yes. Just when I had finished reading the second letter from Isidore Smythe announcing his success. Just then, I heard Welkin say, ‘He shan’t have you, though.’ It was quite plain, as if he were in the room. It is awful, I think I must be mad.†“If you really were mad,†said the young man, “you would think you must be sane. But certainly there seems to me to be something a little rum about this unseen gentleman. Two heads are better than one — I spare you allusions to any other organs and really, if you would allow me, as a sturdy, practical man, to bring back the wedding-cake out of the window — †Even as he spoke, there was a sort of steely shriek in the street outside, and a small motor, driven at devilish speed, shot up to the door of the shop and stuck there. In the same flash of time a small man in a shiny top hat stood stamping in the outer room. Angus, who had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental hygiene, revealed the strain of his soul by striding abruptly out of the inner room and confronting the new-comer. A glance at him was quite sufficient to confirm the savage guesswork of a man in love. This very dapper but dwarfish figure, with the spike of black beard carried insolently forward, the clever unrestful eyes, the neat but very nervous fingers, could be none other than the man just described to him: Isidore Smythe, who made dolls out of banana skins and match-boxes; Isidore Smythe, who made millions out of undrinking butlers and unflirting housemaids of metal. For a moment the two men, instinctively understanding each other’s air of possession, looked at each other with that curious cold generosity which is the soul of rivalry. Mr. Smythe, however, made no allusion to the ultimate ground of their antagonism, but said simply and explosively, “Has Miss Hope seen that thing on the window?†“On the window?†repeated the staring Angus. “There’s no time to explain other things,†said the small millionaire shortly. “There’s some tomfoolery going on here that has to be investigated.†He pointed his polished walking-stick at the window, recently depleted by the bridal preparations of Mr. Angus; and that gentleman was astonished to see along the front of the glass a long strip of paper pasted, which had certainly not been on the window when he looked through it some time before. Following the energetic Smythe outside into the street, he found that some yard and a half of stamp paper had been carefully gummed along the glass outside, and on this was written in straggly characters, “If you marry Smythe, he will die.†“Laura,†said Angus, putting his big red head into the shop, “you’re not mad.†“It’s the writing of that fellow Welkin,†said Smythe gruffly. “I haven’t seen him for years, but he’s always bothering me. Five times in the last fortnight he’s had threatening letters left at my flat, and I can’t even find out who leaves them, let alone if it is Welkin himself. The porter of the flats swears that no suspicious characters have been seen, and here he has pasted up a sort of dado on a public shop window, while the people in the shop — †“Quite so,†said Angus modestly, “while the people in the shop were having tea. Well, sir, I can assure you I appreciate your common sense in dealing so directly with the matter. We can talk about other things afterwards. The fellow cannot be very far off yet, for I swear there was no paper there when I went last to the window, ten or fifteen minutes ago. On the other hand, he’s too far off to be chased, as we don’t even know the direction. If you’ll take my advice, Mr. Smythe, you’ll put this at once in the hands of some energetic inquiry man, private rather than public. I know an extremely clever fellow, who has set up in business five minutes from here in your car. His name’s Flambeau, and though his youth was a bit stormy, he’s a strictly honest man now, and his brains are worth money. He lives in Lucknow Mansions, Hampstead.†“That is odd,†said the little man, arching his black eyebrows. “I live, myself, in Himylaya Mansions, round the corner. Perhaps you might care to come with me; I can go to my rooms and sort out these queer Welkin documents, while you run round and get your friend the detective.†“You are very good,†said Angus politely. “Well, the sooner we act the better.†Both men, with a queer kind of impromptu fairness, took the same sort of formal farewell of the lady, and both jumped into the brisk little car. As Smythe took the handles and they turned the great corner of the street, Angus was amused to see a gigantesque poster of “Smythe’s Silent Service,†with a picture of a huge headless iron doll, carrying a saucepan with the legend, “A Cook Who is Never Cross.†“I use them in my own flat,†said the little black-bearded man, laughing, “partly for advertisements, and partly for real convenience. Honestly, and all above board, those big clockwork dolls of mine do bring your coals or claret or a timetable quicker than any live servants I’ve ever known, if you know which knob to press. But I’ll never deny, between ourselves, that such servants have their disadvantages, too. “Indeed?†said Angus; “is there something they can’t do?†“Yes,†replied Smythe coolly; “they can’t tell me who left those threatening letters at my flat.†The man’s motor was small and swift like himself; in fact, like his domestic service, it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising quack, he was one who believed in his own wares. The sense of something tiny and flying was accentuated as they swept up long white curves of road in the dead but open daylight of evening. Soon the white curves came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending spirals, as they say in the modern religions. For, indeed, they were cresting a corner of London which is almost as precipitous as Edinburgh, if not quite so picturesque. Terrace rose above terrace, and the special tower of flats they sought, rose above them all to almost Egyptian height, gilt by the level sunset. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the crescent known as Himylaya Mansions, was as abrupt as the opening of a window; for they found that pile of flats sitting above London as above a green sea of slate. Opposite to the mansions, on the other side of the gravel crescent, was a bushy enclosure more like a steep hedge or dyke than a garden, and some way below that ran a strip of artificial water, a sort of canal, like the moat of that embowered fortress. As the car swept round the crescent it passed, at one corner, the stray stall of a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the curve, Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational sense that they expressed the speechless poetry of London. He felt as if they were figures in a story. The little car shot up to the right house like a bullet, and shot out its owner like a bomb shell. He was immediately inquiring of a tall commissionaire in shining braid, and a short porter in shirt sleeves, whether anybody or anything had been seeking his apartments. He was assured that nobody and nothing had passed these officials since his last inquiries; whereupon he and the slightly bewildered Angus were shot up in the lift like a rocket, till they reached the top floor. “Just come in for a minute,†said the breathless Smythe. “I want to show you those Welkin letters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch your friend.†He pressed a button concealed in the wall, and the door opened of itself. It opened on a long, commodious ante-room, of which the only arresting features, ordinarily speaking, were the rows of tall half-human mechanical figures that stood up on both sides like tailors’ dummies. Like tailors’ dummies they were headless; and like tailors’ dummies they had a handsome unnecessary humpiness in the shoulders, and a pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they were not much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for carrying trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or black for convenience of distinction; in every other way they were only automatic machines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On this occasion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows of these domestic dummies lay something more interesting than most of the mechanics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of paper scrawled with red ink; and the agile inventor had snatched it up almost as soon as the door flew open. He handed it to Angus without a word. The red ink on it actually was not dry, and the message ran, “If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you.†There was a short silence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly, “Would you like a little whiskey? I rather feel as if I should.†“Thank you; I should like a little Flambeau,†said Angus, gloomily. “This business seems to me to be getting rather grave. I’m going round at once to fetch him.†“Right you are,†said the other, with admirable cheerfulness. “Bring him round here as quick as you can.†But as Angus closed the front door behind him he saw Smythe push back a button, and one of the clockwork images glided from its place and slid along a groove in the floor carrying a tray with syphon and decanter. There did seem something a trifle weird about leaving the little man alone among those dead servants, who were coming to life as the door closed. Six steps down from Smythe’s landing the man in shirt sleeves was doing something with a pail. Angus stopped to extract a promise, fortified with a prospective bribe, that he would remain in that place until the return with the detective, and would keep count of any kind of stranger coming up those stairs. Dashing down to the front hall he then laid similar charges of vigilance on the commissionaire at the front door, from whom he learned the simplifying circumstances that there was no back door. Not content with this, he captured the floating policeman and induced him to stand opposite the entrance and watch it; and finally paused an instant for a pennyworth of chestnuts, and an inquiry as to the probable length of the merchant’s stay in the neighbourhood. The chestnut seller, turning up the collar of his coat, told him he should probably be moving shortly, as he thought it was going to snow. Indeed, the evening was growing grey and bitter, but Angus, with all his eloquence, proceeded to nail the chestnut man to his post. “Keep yourself warm on your own chestnuts,†he said earnestly. “Eat up your whole stock; I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you a sovereign if you’ll wait here till I come back, and then tell me whether any man, woman, or child has gone into that house where the commissionaire is standing.†He then walked away smartly, with a last look at the besieged tower. “I’ve made a ring round that room, anyhow,†he said. “They can’t all four of them be Mr. Welkin’s accomplices.†Lucknow Mansions were, so to speak, on a lower platform of that hill of houses, of which Himylaya Mansions might be called the peak. Mr. Flambeau’s semi-official flat was on the ground floor, and presented in every way a marked contrast to the American machinery and cold hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service. Flambeau, who was a friend of Angus, received him in a rococo artistic den behind his office, of which the ornaments were sabres, harquebuses, Eastern curiosities, flasks of Italian wine, savage cooking-pots, a plumy Persian cat, and a small dusty-looking Roman Catholic priest, who looked particularly out of place. “This is my friend Father Brown,†said Flambeau. “I’ve often wanted you to meet him. Splendid weather, this; a little cold for Southerners like me.†“Yes, I think it will keep clear,†said Angus, sitting down on a violet-striped Eastern ottoman. “No,†said the priest quietly, “it has begun to snow.†And, indeed, as he spoke, the first few flakes, foreseen by the man of chestnuts, began to drift across the darkening windowpane. “Well,†said Angus heavily. “I’m afraid I’ve come on business, and rather jumpy business at that. The fact is, Flambeau, within a stone’s throw of your house is a fellow who badly wants your help; he’s perpetually being haunted and threatened by an invisible enemy — a scoundrel whom nobody has even seen.†As Angus proceeded to tell the whole tale of Smythe and Welkin, beginning with Laura’s story, and going on with his own, the supernatural laugh at the corner of two empty streets, the strange distinct words spoken in an empty room, Flambeau grew more and more vividly concerned, and the little priest seemed to be left out of it, like a piece of furniture. When it came to the scribbled stamp-paper pasted on the window, Flambeau rose, seeming to fill the room with his huge shoulders. “If you don’t mind,†he said, “I think you had better tell me the rest on the nearest road to this man’s house. It strikes me, somehow, that there is no time to be lost.†“Delighted,†said Angus, rising also, “though he’s safe enough for the present, for I’ve set four men to watch the only hole to his burrow.†They turned out into the street, the small priest trundling after them with the docility of a small dog. He merely said, in a cheerful way, like one making conversation, “How quick the snow gets thick on the ground.†As they threaded the steep side streets already powdered with silver, Angus finished his story; and by the time they reached the crescent with the towering flats, he had leisure to turn his attention to the four sentinels. The chestnut seller, both before and after receiving a sovereign, swore stubbornly that he had watched the door and seen no visitor enter. The policeman was even more emphatic. He said he had had experience of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags; he wasn’t so green as to expect suspicious characters to look suspicious; he looked out for anybody, and, so help him, there had been nobody. And when all three men gathered round the gilded commissionaire, who still stood smiling astride of the porch, the verdict was more final still. “I’ve got a right to ask any man, duke or dustman, what he wants in these flats,†said the genial and gold-laced giant, “and I’ll swear there’s been nobody to ask since this gentleman went away.†The unimportant Father Brown, who stood back, looking modestly at the pavement, here ventured to say meekly, “Has nobody been up and down stairs, then, since the snow began to fall? It began while we were all round at Flambeau’s.†“Nobody’s been in here, sir, you can take it from me,†said the official, with beaming authority. “Then I wonder what that is?†said the priest, and stared at the ground blankly like a fish. The others all looked down also; and Flambeau used a fierce exclamation and a French gesture. For it was unquestionably true that down the middle of the entrance guarded by the man in gold lace, actually between the arrogant, stretched legs of that colossus, ran a stringy pattern of grey footprints stamped upon the white snow. “God!†cried Angus involuntarily, “the Invisible Man!†Without another word he turned and dashed up the stairs, with Flambeau following; but Father Brown still stood looking about him in the snow-clad street as if he had lost interest in his query. Flambeau was plainly in a mood to break down the door with his big shoulders; but the Scotchman, with more reason, if less intuition, fumbled about on the frame of the door till he found the invisible button; and the door swung slowly open. It showed substantially the same serried interior; the hall had grown darker, though it was still struck here and there with the last crimson shafts of sunset, and one or two of the headless machines had been moved from their places for this or that purpose, and stood here and there about the twilit place. The green and red of their coats were all darkened in the dusk; and their likeness to human shapes slightly increased by their very shapelessness. But in the middle of them all, exactly where the paper with the red ink had lain, there lay something that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle. But it was not red ink. With a French combination of reason and violence Flambeau simply said “Murder!†and, plunging into the flat, had explored, every corner and cupboard of it in five minutes. But if he expected to find a corpse he found none. Isidore Smythe was not in the place, either dead or alive. After the most tearing search the two men met each other in the outer hall, with streaming faces and staring eyes. “My friend,†said Flambeau, talking French in his excitement, “not only is your murderer invisible, but he makes invisible also the murdered man.†Angus looked round at the dim room full of dummies, and in some Celtic corner of his Scotch soul a shudder started. One of the life-size dolls stood immediately overshadowing the blood stain, summoned, perhaps, by the slain man an instant before he fell. One of the high-shouldered hooks that served the thing for arms, was a little lifted, and Angus had suddenly the horrid fancy that poor Smythe’s own iron child had struck him down. Matter had rebelled, and these machines had killed their master. But even so, what had they done with him? “Eaten him?†said the nightmare at his ear; and he sickened for an instant at the idea of rent, human remains absorbed and crushed into all that acephalous clockwork. He recovered his mental health by an emphatic effort, and said to Flambeau, “Well, there it is. The poor fellow has evaporated like a cloud and left a red streak on the floor. The tale does not belong to this world.†“There is only one thing to be done,†said Flambeau, “whether it belongs to this world or the other. I must go down and talk to my friend.†They descended, passing the man with the pail, who again asseverated that he had let no intruder pass, down to the commissionaire and the hovering chestnut man, who rigidly reasserted their own watchfulness. But when Angus looked round for his fourth confirmation he could not see it, and called out with some nervousness, “Where is the policeman?†“I beg your pardon,†said Father Brown; “that is my fault. I just sent him down the road to investigate something — that I just thought worth investigating.†“Well, we want him back pretty soon,†said Angus abruptly, “for the wretched man upstairs has not only been murdered, but wiped out.†“How?†asked the priest. “Father,†said Flambeau, after a pause, “upon my soul I believe it is more in your department than mine. No friend or foe has entered the house, but Smythe is gone, as if stolen by the fairies. If that is not supernatural, I— †As he spoke they were all checked by an unusual sight; the big blue policeman came round the corner of the crescent, running. He came straight up to Brown. “You’re right, sir,†he panted, “they’ve just found poor Mr. Smythe’s body in the canal down below.†Angus put his hand wildly to his head. “Did he run down and drown himself?†he asked. “He never came down, I’ll swear,†said the constable, “and he wasn’t drowned either, for he died of a great stab over the heart.†“And yet you saw no one enter?†said Flambeau in a grave voice. “Let us walk down the road a little,†said the priest. As they reached the other end of the crescent he observed abruptly, “Stupid of me! I forgot to ask the policeman something. I wonder if they found a light brown sack.†“Why a light brown sack?†asked Angus, astonished. “Because if it was any other coloured sack, the case must begin over again,†said Father Brown; “but if it was a light brown sack, why, the case is finished.†“I am pleased to hear it,†said Angus with hearty irony. “It hasn’t begun, so far as I am concerned.†“You must tell us all about it,†said Flambeau with a strange heavy simplicity, like a child. Unconsciously they were walking with quickening steps down the long sweep of road on the other side of the high crescent, Father Brown leading briskly, though in silence. At last he said with an almost touching vagueness, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll think it so prosy. We always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can’t begin this story anywhere else. “Have you ever noticed this — that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean — or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn’t answer ‘Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,’ though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says ‘There is nobody staying with us,’ meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, ‘Who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly. When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them. They meant no man whom they could suspect of being your man. A man did go into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him.†“An invisible man?†inquired Angus, raising his red eyebrows. “A mentally invisible man,†said Father Brown. A minute or two after he resumed in the same unassuming voice, like a man thinking his way. “Of course you can’t think of such a man, until you do think of him. That’s where his cleverness comes in. But I came to think of him through two or three little things in the tale Mr. Angus told us. First, there was the fact that this Welkin went for long walks. And then there was the vast lot of stamp paper on the window. And then, most of all, there were the two things the young lady said — things that couldn’t be true. Don’t get annoyed,†he added hastily, noting a sudden movement of the Scotchman’s head; “she thought they were true. A person can’t be quite alone in a street a second before she receives a letter. She can’t be quite alone in a street when she starts reading a letter just received. There must be somebody pretty near her; he must be mentally invisible.†“Why must there be somebody near her?†asked Angus. “Because,†said Father Brown, “barring carrier-pigeons, somebody must have brought her the letter.†“Do you really mean to say,†asked Flambeau, with energy, “that Welkin carried his rival’s letters to his lady?†“Yes,†said the priest. “Welkin carried his rival’s letters to his lady. You see, he had to.†“Oh, I can’t stand much more of this,†exploded Flambeau. “Who is this fellow? What does he look like? What is the usual get-up of a mentally invisible man?†“He is dressed rather handsomely in red, blue and gold,†replied the priest promptly with precision, “and in this striking, and even showy, costume he entered Himylaya Mansions under eight human eyes; he killed Smythe in cold blood, and came down into the street again carrying the dead body in his arms — †“Reverend sir,†cried Angus, standing still, “are you raving mad, or am I?†“You are not mad,†said Brown, “only a little unobservant. You have not noticed such a man as this, for example.†He took three quick strides forward, and put his hand on the shoulder of an ordinary passing postman who had bustled by them unnoticed under the shade of the trees. “Nobody ever notices postmen somehow,†he said thoughtfully; “yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.†The postman, instead of turning naturally, had ducked and tumbled against the garden fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very ordinary appearance, but as he turned an alarmed face over his shoulder, all three men were fixed with an almost fiendish squint. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Flambeau went back to his sabres, purple rugs and Persian cat, having many things to attend to. John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at the shop, with whom that imprudent young man contrives to be extremely comfortable. But Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other will never be known.
b555 Posted July 24, 2013 Author Posted July 24, 2013 Anton Chekhov The Bet It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life. "I don't agree with you," said their host the banker. "I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?" "Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "for they both have the same object - to take away life. The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to." Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty. When he was asked his opinion, he said: "The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at all." A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man: "It's not true! I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years." "If you mean that in earnest," said the young man, "I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years." "Fifteen? Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two million!" "Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!" said the young man. And this wild, senseless bet was carried out! The banker, spoilt and frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet. At supper he made fun of the young man, and said: "Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two million is a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four, because you won't stay longer. Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison. I am sorry for you." And now the banker, walking to and fro, remembered all this, and asked himself: "What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless. On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man, and on his part simple greed for money ..." Then he remembered what followed that evening. It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden. It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke. By the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object. He might have anything he wanted - books, music, wine, and so on - in any quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them through the window. The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary, and bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years, beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o'clock of November 14, 1885. The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, if only two minutes before the end, released the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million. For the first year of his confinement, as far as one could judge from his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression. The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote, excites the desires, and desires are the worst foes of the prisoner; and besides, nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one. And tobacco spoilt the air of his room. In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on. In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner asked only for the classics. In the fifth year music was audible again, and the prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed, frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself. He did not read books. Sometimes at night he would sit down to write; he would spend hours writing, and in the morning tear up all that he had written. More than once he could be heard crying. In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages, philosophy, and history. He threw himself eagerly into these studies - so much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered. In the course of four years some six hundred volumes were procured at his request. It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from his prisoner: "My dear Jailer, I write you these lines in six languages. Show them to people who know the languages. Let them read them. If they find not one mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden. That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away. The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them!" The prisoner's desire was fulfilled. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden. Then after the tenth year, the prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the Gospel. It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension. Theology and histories of religion followed the Gospels. In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately. At one time he was busy with the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare. There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another. The old banker remembered all this, and thought: "To-morrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom. By our agreement I ought to pay him two million. If I do pay him, it is all over with me: I shall be utterly ruined." Fifteen years before, his millions had been beyond his reckoning; now he was afraid to ask himself which were greater, his debts or his assets. Desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange, wild speculation and the excitability whic h he could not get over even in advancing years, had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud, fearless, self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank, trembling at every rise and fall in his investments. "Cursed bet!" muttered the old man, clutching his head in despair "Why didn't the man die? He is only forty now. He will take my last penny from me, he will marry, will enjoy life, will gamble on the Exchange; while I shall look at him with envy like a beggar, and hear from him every day the same sentence: 'I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life, let me help you!' No, it is too much! The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man!" It struck three o'clock, the banker listened; everyone was asleep in the house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees. Trying to make no noise, he took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on his overcoat, and went out of the house. It was dark and cold in the garden. Rain was falling. A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden, howling and giving the trees no rest. The banker strained his eyes, but could see neither the earth nor the white statues, nor the lodge, nor the trees. Going to the spot where the lodge stood, he twice called the watchman. No answer followed. Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather, and was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse. "If I had the pluck to carry out my intention," thought the old man, "Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman." He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door, and went into the entry of the lodge. Then he groped his way into a little passage and lighted a match. There was not a soul there. There was a bedstead with no bedding on it, and in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove. The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's rooms were intact. When the match went out the old man, trembling with emotion, peeped through the little window. A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room. He was sitting at the table. Nothing could be seen but his back, the hair on his head, and his hands. Open books were lying on the table, on the two easy-chairs, and on the carpet near the table. Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir. Fifteen years' imprisonment had taught him to sit still. The banker tapped at the window with his finger, and the prisoner made no movement whatever in response. Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put the key in the keyhole. The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the door creaked. The banker expected to hear at once footsteps and a cry of astonishment, but three minutes passed and it was as quiet as ever in the room. He made up his mind to go in. At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless. He was a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones, with long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard. His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it, his cheeks were hollow, his back long and narrow, and the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at it. His hair was already streaked with silver, and seeing his emaciated, aged-looking face, no one would have believed that he was only forty. He was asleep ... In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting. "Poor creature!" thought the banker, "he is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions. And I have only to take this half-dead man, throw him on the bed, stifle him a little with the pillow, and the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death. But let us first read what he has written here ... " The banker took the page from the table and read as follows: "To-morrow at twelve o'clock I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men, but before I leave this room and see the sunshine, I think it necessary to say a few words to you. With a clear conscience I tell you, as before God, who beholds me, that I despise freedom and life and health, and all that in your books is called the good things of the world. "For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women ... Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God ... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms ... "Your books have given me wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. "And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe. "You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you. "To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by, I renounce the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise. To deprive myself of the right to the money I shall go out from here five hours before the time fixed, and so break the compact ..." When the banker had read this he laid the page on the table, kissed the strange man on the head, and went out of the lodge, weeping. At no other time, even when he had lost heavily on the Stock Exchange, had he felt so great a contempt for himself. When he got home he lay on his bed, but his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping. Next morning the watchmen ran in with pale faces, and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden, go to the gate, and disappear. The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner. To avoid arousing unnecessary talk, he took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced, and when he got home locked it up in the fireproof safe.
b555 Posted July 24, 2013 Author Posted July 24, 2013 The Last Question By Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov was the most prolific science fiction author of all time. In fifty years he averaged a new magazine article, short story, or book every two weeks, and most of that on a manual typewriter. Asimov thought that The Last Question, first copyrighted in 1956, was his best short story ever. Even if you do not have the background in science to be familiar with all of the concepts presented here, the ending packs more impact than any other book that I've ever read. Don't read the end of the story first! This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written. After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you. It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way: Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole. Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough. So Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share in the glory that was Multivac's. For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both. But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact. The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower. Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed to escape from the public functions, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the mighty buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. They had no intention, originally, of disturbing it. They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax in the company of each other and the bottle. "It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever." Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. "Not forever," he said. "Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert." "That's not forever." "All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Ten billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?" Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. "Ten billion years isn't forever." "Well, it will last our time, won't it?" "So would the coal and uranium." "All right, but now we can hook up each individual spaceship to the Solar Station, and it can go to Pluto and back a million times without ever worrying about fuel. You can't do that on coal and uranium. Ask Multivac, if you don't believe me. "I don't have to ask Multivac. I know that." "Then stop running down what Multivac's done for us," said Adell, blazing up, "It did all right." "Who says it didn't? What I say is that a sun won't last forever. That's all I'm saying. We're safe for ten billion years, but then what?" Lupow pointed a slightly shaky finger at the other. "And don't say we'll switch to another sun." There was silence for a while. Adell put his glass to his lips only occasionally, and Lupov's eyes slowly closed. They rested. Then Lupov's eyes snapped open. "You're thinking we'll switch to another sun when ours is done, aren't you?" "I'm not thinking." "Sure you are. You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one." "I get it," said Adell. "Don't shout. When the sun is done, the other stars will be gone, too." "Darn right they will," muttered Lupov. "It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it'll all have an end when all the stars run down. Some run down faster than others. Hell, the giants won't last a hundred million years. The sun will last ten billion years and maybe the dwarfs will last two hundred billion for all the good they are. But just give us a trillion years and everything will be dark. Entropy has to increase to maximum, that's all." "I know all about entropy," said Adell, standing on his dignity. "The hell you do." "I know as much as you do." "Then you know everything's got to run down someday." "All right. Who says they won't?" "You did, you poor sap. You said we had all the energy we needed, forever. You said 'forever.' It was Adell's turn to be contrary. "Maybe we can build things up again someday," he said. "Never." "Why not? Someday." "Never." "Ask Multivac." "You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dollars says it can't be done." Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this: Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age? Or maybe it could be put more simply like this: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased? Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of lights ceased, the distant sounds of clicking relays ended. Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. "No bet," whispered Lupov. They left hurriedly. By next morning, the two, plagued with throbbing head and cottony mouth, had forgotten the incident. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jerrodd, Jerrodine, and Jerrodette I and II watched the starry picture in the visiplate change as the passage through hyperspace was completed in its non-time lapse. At once, the even powdering of stars gave way to the predominance of a single bright shining disk, the size of a marble, centered on the viewing-screen. "That's X-23," said Jerrodd confidently. His thin hands clamped tightly behind his back and the knuckles whitened. The little Jerrodettes, both girls, had experienced the hyperspace passage for the first time in their lives and were self-conscious over the momentary sensation of insideoutness. They buried their giggles and chased one another wildly about their mother, screaming, "We've reached X-23 -- we've reached X-23 -- we've --" "Quiet, children." said Jerrodine sharply. "Are you sure, Jerrodd?" "What is there to be but sure?" asked Jerrodd, glancing up at the bulge of featureless metal just under the ceiling. It ran the length of the room, disappearing through the wall at either end. It was as long as the ship. Jerrodd scarcely knew a thing about the thick rod of metal except that it was called a Microvac, that one asked it questions if one wished; that if one did not it still had its task of guiding the ship to a preordered destination; of feeding on energies from the various Sub-galactic Power Stations; of computing the equations for the hyperspatial jumps. Jerrodd and his family had only to wait and live in the comfortable residence quarters of the ship. Someone had once told Jerrodd that the "ac" at the end of "Microvac" stood for ''automatic computer" in ancient English, but he was on the edge of forgetting even that. Jerrodine's eyes were moist as she watched the visiplate. "I can't help it. I feel funny about leaving Earth." "Why, for Pete's sake?" demanded Jerrodd. "We had nothing there. We'll have everything on X-23. You won't be alone. You won't be a pioneer. There are over a million people on the planet already. Good Lord, our great-grandchildren will be looking for new worlds because X-23 will be overcrowded." Then, after a reflective pause, "I tell you, it's a lucky thing the computers worked out interstellar travel the way the race is growing." "I know, I know," said Jerrodine miserably. Jerrodette I said promptly, "Our Microvac is the best Microvac in the world." "I think so, too," said Jerrodd, tousling her hair. It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors, had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship. Jerrodd felt uplifted, as he always did when he thought that his own personal Microvac was many times more complicated than the ancient and primitive Multivac that had first tamed the Sun, and almost as complicated as Earth's Planetarv AC (the largest) that had first solved the problem of hyperspatial travel and had made trips to the stars possible. "So many stars, so many planets," sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. "I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now." "Not forever," said Jerrodd, with a smile. "It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase. "What's entropy, daddy?" shrilled Jerrodette II. "Entropy, little sweet, is just a word which means the amount of running-down of the universe. Everything runs down, you know, like your little walkie-talkie robot, remember?" "Can't you just put in a new power-unit, like with my robot?" "The stars are the power-units. dear. Once they're gone, there are no more power-units." Jerrodette I at once set up a howl. "Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down." "Now look what you've done," whispered Jerrodine, exasperated. "How was I to know it would frighten them?" Jerrodd whispered back, "Ask the Microvac," wailed Jerrodette I. "Ask him how to turn the stars on again." "Go ahead," said Jerrodine. "It will quiet them down." (Jerrodette II was beginning to cry, also.) Jerrodd shrugged. "Now, now, honeys. I'll ask Microvac. Don't worry, he'll tell us." He asked the Microvac, adding quickly, "Print the answer." Jerrodd cupped the strip or thin cellufilm and said cheerfully, "See now, the Microvac says it will take care of everything when the time comes so don't worry." Jerrodine said, "And now, children, it's time for bed. We'll be in our new home soon." Jerrodd read the words on the cellufilm again before destroying it: INSUFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. He shrugged and looked at the visiplate. X-23 was just ahead. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VJ-23X of Lameth stared into the black depths of the three-dimensional, small-scale map of the Galaxy and said, "Are we ridiculous, I wonder in being so concerned about the matter?" MQ-17J of Nicron shook his head. "I think not. You know the Galaxy will be filled in five years at the present rate of expansion." Both seemed in their early twenties, both were tall and perfectly formed. "Still," said VJ-23X, "I hesitate to submit a pessimistic report to the Galactic Council." "I wouldn't consider any other kind of report. Stir them up a bit. We've got to stir them up." VJ-23X sighed. "Space is infinite. A hundred billion Galaxies are there for the taking. More." "A hundred billion is not infinite and it's getting less infinite all the time. Consider! Twenty thousand years ago, mankind first solved the problem of utilizing stellar energy, and a few centuries later, interstellar travel became possible. It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy. Now the population doubles every ten years -- VJ-23X interrupted. "We can thank immortality for that." "Very well. Immortality exists and we have to take it into account. I admit it has its seamy side, this immortality. The Galactic AC has solved many problems for us, but in solving the problem of preventing old age and death, it has undone all its other solutions." "Yet you wouldn't want to abandon life, I suppose." "Not at all," snapped MQ-17J, softening it at once to, "Not yet. I'm by no means old enough. How old are you?" "Two hundred twenty-three. And you?" "I'm still under two hundred. --But to get back to my point. Population doubles every ten years. Once this GaIaxy is filled, we'll have filled another in ten years. Another ten years and we'll have filled two more. Another decade, four more. In a hundred years, we'll have filled a thousand Galaxies. In a thousand years, a million Galaxies. In ten thousand years, the entire known universe. Then what?" VJ-23X said, "As a side issue, there's a problem of transportation. I wonder how many sunpower units it will take to move Galaxies of individuals from one Galaxy to the next." "A very good point. Already, mankind consumes two sunpower units per year." "Most of it's wasted. After all, our own Galaxy alone pours out a thousand sunpower units a year and we only use two of those." "Granted, but even with a hundred per cent efficiency, we only stave off the end. Our energy requirements are going up in a geometric progression even faster than our population. We'll run out of energy even sooner than we run out of Galaxies. A good point. A very good point." "We'll just have to build new stars out of interstellar gas." "Or out of dissipated heat?" asked MQ-17J, sarcastically. "There may be some way to reverse entropy. We ought to ask the Galactic AC." VJ-23X was not really serious, but MQ-17J pulled out his AC-contact from his pocket and placed it on the table before him. "I've half a mind to," he said. "It's something the human race will have to face someday." He stared somberly at his small AC-contact. It was only two inches cubed and nothing in itself, but it was connected through hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind. Hyperspace considered, it was an integral part of the Galactic AC. MQ-17J paused to wonder if someday in his immortal life he would get to see the Galactic AC. It was on a little world of its own, a spider webbing of force-beams holding the matter within which surges of submesons took the place of the old clumsy molecular valves. Yet despite its sub-etheric workings, the Galactic AC was known to be a full thousand feet across. MQ-17J asked suddenly of his AC-contact, "Can entropy ever be reversed?" VJ-23X looked startled and said at once, "Oh, say, I didn't really mean to have you ask that." "Why not?" "We both know entropy can't be reversed. You can't turn smoke and ash back into a tree." "Do you have trees on your world?" asked MQ-17J. The sound of the Galactic AC startled them into silence. Its voice came thin and beautiful out of the small AC-contact on the desk. It said: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. VJ-23X said, "See!" The two men thereupon returned to the question of the report they were to make to the Galactic Council. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zee Prime's mind spanned the new Galaxy with a faint interest in the countless twists of stars that powdered it. He had never seen this one before. Would he ever see them all? So many of them, each with its load of humanity. --But a load that was almost a dead weight. More and more, the real essence of men was to be found out here, in space. Minds, not bodies! The immortal bodies remained back on the planets, in suspension over the eons. Sometimes they roused for material activity but that was growing rarer. Few new individuals were coming into existence to join the incredibly mighty throng, but what matter? There was little room in the Universe for new individuals. Zee Prime was roused out of his reverie upon coming across the wispy tendrils of another mind. "I am Zee Prime," said Zee Prime. "And you?" "I am Dee Sub Wun. Your Galaxy?" "We call it only the Galaxy. And you?" "We call ours the same. All men call their Galaxy their Galaxy and nothing more. Why not?" "True. Since all Galaxies are the same." "Not all Galaxies. On one particular Galaxy the race of man must have originated. That makes it different." Zee Prime said, "On which one?" "I cannot say. The Universal AC would know." "Shall we ask him? I am suddenly curious." Zee Prime's perceptions broadened until the Galaxies themselves shrank and became a new, more diffuse powdering on a much larger background. So many hundreds of billions of them, all with their immortal beings, all carrying their load of intelligences with minds that drifted freely through space. And yet one of them was unique among them all in being the original Galaxy. One of them had, in its vague and distant past, a period when it was the only Galaxy populated by man. Zee Prime was consumed with curiosity to see this Galaxy and he called out: "Universal AC! On which Galaxy did mankind originate?" The Universal AC heard, for on every world and throughout space, it had its receptors ready, and each receptor led through hyperspace to some unknown point where the Universal AC kept itself aloof. Zee Prime knew of only one man whose thoughts had penetrated within sensing distance of Universal AC, and he reported only a shining globe, two feet across, difficult to see. "But how can that be all of Universal AC?" Zee Prime had asked. "Most of it," had been the answer, "is in hyperspace. In what form it is there I cannot imagine." Nor could anyone, for the day had long since passed, Zee Prime knew, when any man had any part of the making of a Universal AC. Each Universal AC designed and constructed its successor. Each, during its existence of a million years or more accumulated the necessary data to build a better and more intricate, more capable successor in which its own store of data and individuality would be submerged. The Universal AC interrupted Zee Prime's wandering thoughts, not with words, but with guidance. Zee Prime's mentality was guided into the dim sea of Galaxies and one in particular enlarged into stars. A thought came, infinitely distant, but infinitely clear. "THIS IS THE ORIGINAL GALAXY OF MAN." But it was the same after all, the same as any other, and Lee Prime stifled his disappointment. Dee Sub Wun, whose mind had accompanied the other, said suddenly, "And is one of these stars the original star of Man?" The Universal AC said, "MAN'S ORIGINAL STAR HAS GONE NOVA. IT IS A WHITE DWARF" "Did the men upon it die?" asked Lee Prime, startled and without thinking. The Universal AC said, "A NEW WORLD, AS IN SUCH CASES WAS CONSTRUCTED FOR THEIR PHYSICAL BODIES IN TlME." "Yes, of course," said Zee Prime, but a sense of loss overwhelmed him even so. His mind released its hold on the original Galaxy of Man, let it spring back and lose itself among the blurred pin points. He never wanted to see it again. Dee Sub Wun said, "What is wrong?" "The stars are dying. The original star is dead." "They must all die. Why not?" "But when all energy is gone, our bodies will finally die, and you and I with them." "It will take billions of years." "I do not wish it to happen even after billions of years. Universal AC! How may stars be kept from dying?" Dee Sub Wun said in amusement, "You're asking how entropy might be reversed in direction." And the Universal AC answered: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." Zee Prime's thoughts fled back to his own Galaxy. He gave no further thought to Dee Sub Wun, whose body might be waiting on a Galaxy a trillion light-years away, or on the star next to Zee Prime's own. It didn't matter. Unhappily, Zee Prime began collecting interstellar hydrogen out of which to build a small star of his own. If the stars must someday die, at least some could yet be built. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable. Man said, "The Universe is dying." Man looked about at the dimming Galaxies. The giant stars, spendthrifts, were gone long ago, back in the dimmest of the dim far past. Almost all stars were white dwarfs, fading to the end. New stars had been built of the dust between the stars, some by natural processes, some by Man himself, and those were going, too. White dwarfs might yet be crashed together and of the mighty forces so released, new stars built, but only one star for every thousand white dwarfs destroyed, and those would come to an end, too. Man said, "Carefully husbanded, as directed by the Cosmic AC, the energy that is even yet left in all the Universe will last for billions of years." "But even so," said Man, "eventually it will all come to an end. However it may be husbanded, however stretched out, the energy once expended is gone and cannot be restored. Entropy must increase forever to the maximum." Man said, "Can entropy not be reversed? Let us ask the Cosmic AC." The Cosmic AC surrounded them but not in space. Not a fragment of it was in space. It was in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy. The question of its size and nature no longer had meaning in any terms that Man could comprehend. "Cosmic AC," said Man, "how may entropy be reversed?" The Cosmic AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." Man said, "Collect additional data." The Cosmic AC said, 'I WILL DO S0. I HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A HUNDRED BILLION YEARS. MY PREDECESORS AND I HAVE BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION MANY TlMES. ALL THE DATA I HAVE REMAINS INSUFFICIENT. "Will there come a time," said Man, 'when data will be sufficient or is the problem insoluble in all conceivable circumstances?" The Cosmic AC said, "NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES." Man said, "When will you have enough data to answer the question?" The Cosmic AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." "Will you keep working on it?" asked Man. The Cosmic AC said, "I WILL." Man said, "We shall wait." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down. One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain. Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero. Man said, "AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?" AC said, "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." Man's last mind fused and only AC existed -- and that in hyperspace. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer [technician] ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man. All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness. All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected. But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent in doing that. And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light --
akshayxyz Posted July 24, 2013 Posted July 24, 2013 I like this one better than "The Last Question" THE LAST ANSWER by Isaac Asimov Murray Templeton was forty-five years old, in the prime of life, and with all parts of his body in perfect working order except for certain key portions of his coronary arteries, but that was enough. The pain had come suddenly, had mounted to an unbearable peak, and had then ebbed steadily. He could feel his breath slowing and a kind of gathering peace washing over him. There is no pleasure like the absence of pain - immediately after pain. Murray felt an almost giddy lightness as though he were lifting in the air and hovering. He opened his eyes and noted with distant amusement that the others in the room were still agitated. He had been in the laboratory when the pain had struck, quite without warning, and when he had staggered, he had heard surprised outcries from the others before everything vanished into overwhelming agony. Now, with the pain gone, the others were still hovering, still anxious, still gathered about his fallen body - - Which, he suddenly realised, he was looking down on. He was down there, sprawled, face contorted. He was up here, at peace and watching. He thought: Miracle of miracles! The life-after-life nuts were right. And although that was a humiliating way for an atheistic physicist to die, he felt only the mildest surprise, and no alteration of the peace in which he was immersed. He thought: There should be some angel - or something - coming for me. The Earthly scene was fading. Darkness was invading his consciousness and off in a distance, as a last glimmer of sight, there was a figure of light, vaguely human in form, and radiating warmth. Murray thought: What a joke on me. I'm going to Heaven. Even as he thought that, the light faded, but the warmth remained. There was no lessening of the peace even though in all the Universe only he remained - and the Voice. The Voice said, "I have done this so often and yet I still have the capacity to be pleased at success." It was in Murray's mind to say something, but he was not conscious of possessing a mouth, tongue, or vocal chords. Nevertheless, tried to make a sound. He tried, mouthlessly, to hum words or breathe them or just push them out by a contraction of - something. And they came out. He heard his own voice, quite recognisable, and his own words, infinitely clear. Murray said, "Is this Heaven?" The Voice said, "This is no place as you understand place." Murray was embarrassed, but the next question had to be asked. "Pardon me if I sound like a jackass. Are you God?" Without changing intonation or in any way marring the perfection of the sound, the Voice managed to sound amused. "It is strange that I am always asked that in, of course, an infinite number of ways. There is no answer I can give that you would comprehend. I am - which is all that I can say significantly and you may cover that with any word or concept you please." Murray said, "And what am I? A soul? Or am I only personified existence too?" He tried not to sound sarcastic, but it seemed to him that he had failed. He thought then, fleetingly, of adding a 'Your Grace' or 'Holy One' or something to counteract the sarcasm, and could not bring himself to do so even though for the first time in his existence he speculated on the possibility of being punished for his insolence - or sin? - with Hell, and what that might be like. The Voice did not sound offended. "You are easy to explain - even to you. You may call yourself a soul if that pleases you, but what you are is a nexus of electromagnetic forces, so arranged that all the interconnections and interrelationships are exactly imitative of those of your brain in your Universe-existence - down to the smallest detail. Therefore you have your capacity for thought, your memories, your personality. It still seems to you that you are you." Murray found himself incredulous. "You mean the essence of my brain was permanent?" "Not at all. There is nothing about you that is permanent except what I choose to make so. I formed the nexus. I constructed it while you had physical existence and adjusted it to the moment when the existence failed." The Voice seemed distinctly pleased with itself, and went on after a moment's pause. "An intricate but entirely precise construction. I could, of course, do it for every human being on your world but I am pleased that I do not. There is pleasure in the selection." "You choose very few then?" "Very few." "And what happens to the rest?" "Oblivion! - Oh, of course, you imagine a Hell." Murray would have flushed if he had the capacity to do so. He said, "I do not. It is spoken of. Still, I would scarcely have thought I was virtuous enough to have attracted your attention as one of the Elect." "Virtuous? - Ah, I see what you mean. It is troublesome to have to force my thinking small enough to permeate yours. No, I have chosen you for your capacity for thought, as I choose others, in quadrillions, from all the intelligent species of the Universe." Murray found himself suddenly curious, the habit of a lifetime. He said, "Do you choose them all yourself or are there others like you?" For a fleeting moment, Murray thought there was an impatient reaction to that, but when the Voice came, it was unmoved. "Whether or not there are others is irrelevant to you. This Universe is mine, and mine alone. It is my invention, my construction, intended for my purpose alone." "And yet with quadrillions of nexi you have formed, you spend time with me? Am I that important?" The Voice said, "You are not important at all. I am also with others in a way which, to your perception, would seem simultaneous." "And yet you are one?" Again amusement. The Voice said, "You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?" Murray said dryly, "I'll think about it. It may become comprehensible." "Exactly. That is your function. You will think." "To what end? You already know everything, I suppose." The Voice said, "Even if I knew everything, I could not know that I know everything." Murray said, "That sounds like a bit of Eastern philosophy - something that sounds profound precisely because it has no meaning." The Voice said, "You have promise. You answer my paradox with a paradox - except that mine is not a paradox. Consider. I have existed eternally, but what does that mean? It means I cannot remember having come into existence. If I could, I would not have existed eternally. If I cannot remember having come into existence, then there is at least one thing - the nature of my coming into existence - that I do not know. "Then, too, although what I know is infinite, it is also true that what there is to know is infinite, and how can I be sure that both infinities are equal? The infinity of potential knowledge may be infinitely greater than the infinity of my actual knowledge. Here is a simple example: If I knew every one of the even integers, I would know an infinite number of items, and yet I would still not know a single odd integer." Murray said, "But the odd integers can be derived. If you divide every even integer in the entire infinite series by two, you will get another infinite series which will contain within it the infinite series of odd integers." The Voice said, "You have the idea. I am pleased. It will be your task to find other such ways, far more difficult ones, from the known to the not-yet-known. You have your memories. You will remember all the data you have ever collected or learned, or that you have or will deduce from that data. If necessary, you will be allowed to learn what additional data you will consider relevant to the problems you set yourself." "Could you not do all that for yourself?" The Voice said, "I can, but it is more interesting this way. I constructed the Universe in order to have more facts to deal with. I inserted the uncertainty principle, entropy, and other randomisation factors to make the whole not instantly obvious. It has worked well for it has amused me throughout its entire existence. "I then allowed complexities that produced first life and then intelligence, and use it as a source for a research team, not because I need the aid, but because it would introduce a new random factor. I found I could not predict the next interesting piece of knowledge gained, where it would come from, by what means derived." Murray said, "Does that ever happen?" "Certainly. A century doesn't pass in which some interesting item doesn't appear somewhere." "Something that you could have thought of yourself, but had not done so yet?" "Yes." Murray said, "Do you actually think there's a chance of my obliging you in this manner?" "In the next century? Virtually none. In the long run, though, your success is certain, since you will be engaged eternally." Murray said, "I will be thinking through eternity? Forever?" "Yes." "To what end?" "I have told you. To find new knowledge." "But beyond that. For what purpose am I to find new knowledge?" "It was what you did in your Universe-bound life. What was its purpose then?" Murray said, "To gain new knowledge that only I could gain. To receive the praise of my fellows. To feel the satisfaction of accomplishment knowing that I had only a short time allotted me for the purpose. - Now I would gain only what you could gain yourself if you wished to take a small bit of trouble. You cannot praise me; you can only be amused. And there is no credit or satisfaction in accomplishment when I have all eternity to do it in." The Voice said, "And you do not find thought and discovery worthwhile in itself? You do not find it requiring no further purpose?" "For a finite time, yes. Not for all eternity." "I see your point. Nevertheless, you have no choice." "You say I am to think. You cannot make me do so." The Voice said, "I do not wish to constrain you directly. I will not need to. Since you can do nothing but think, you will think. You do not know how not to think." "Then I will give myself a goal. I will invent a purpose." The Voice said tolerantly, "That you can certainly do." "I have already found a purpose." "May I know what it is?" "You know already. I know we are not speaking in the ordinary fashion. You adjust my nexus is such a way that I believe I hear you and I believe I speak, but you transfer thoughts to me and from me directly. And when my nexus changes with my thoughts you are at once aware of them and do not need my voluntary transmission." The Voice said, "You are surprisingly correct. I am pleased. - But it also pleases me to have you tell me your thoughts voluntarily." "Then I will tell you. The purpose of my thinking will be to discover a way to disrupt this nexus of me that you have created. I do not want to think for no purpose but to amuse you. I do not want to think forever to amuse you. I do not want to exist forever to amuse you. All my thinking will be directed toward ending the nexus. That would amuse me." The Voice said, "I have no objection to that. Even concentrated thought on ending your own existence may, in spite of you, come up with something new and interesting. And, of course, if you succeed in this suicide attempt you will have accomplished nothing, for I would instantly reconstruct you and in such a way as to make your method of suicide impossible. And if you found another and still more subtle fashion of disrupting yourself, I would reconstruct you with that possibility eliminated, and so on. It could be an interesting game, but you will nevertheless exist eternally. It is my will." Murray felt a quaver but the words came out with a perfect calm. "Am I in Hell then, after all? You have implied there is none, but if this were Hell you would lie to us as part of the game of Hell." The Voice said, "In that case, of what use is it to assure you that you are not in Hell? Nevertheless, I assure you. There is here neither Heaven nor Hell. There is only myself." Murray said, "Consider, then, that my thoughts may be useless to you. If I come up with nothing useful, will it not be worth your while to - disassemble me and take no further trouble with me?" "As a reward? You want Nirvana as the prize of failure and you intend to assure me failure? There is no bargain there. You will not fail. With all eternity before you, you cannot avoid having at least one interesting thought, however you try against it." "Then I will create another purpose for myself. I will not try to destroy myself. I will set as my goal the humiliation of you. I will think of something you have not only never thought of but never could think of. I will think of the last answer, beyond which there is no knowledge further." The Voice said, "You do not understand the nature of the infinite. There may be things I have not yet troubled to know. There cannot be anything I cannot know." Murray said thoughtfully, "You cannot know your beginning. You have said so. Therefore you cannot know your end. Very well, then. That will be my purpose and that will be the last answer. I will not destroy myself. I will destroy you - if you do not destroy me first." The Voice said, "Ah! You come to that in rather less than average time. I would have thought it would have taken you longer. There is not one of those I have with me in this existence of perfect and eternal thought that does not have the ambition of destroying me. It cannot be done." Murray said, "I have all eternity to think of a way of destroying you." The Voice said, equably, "Then try to think of it." And it was gone. But Murray had his purpose now and was content. For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want - but an end? For what else had the Voice been searching for countless billions of years? And for what other reason had intelligence been created and certain specimens salvaged and put to work, but to aid in that great search? And Murray intended that it would be he, and he alone, who would succeed. Carefully, and with the thrill of purpose, Murray began to think. He had plenty of time.
Sachin=GOD Posted July 24, 2013 Posted July 24, 2013 The Day of the Execution by Henry Slesar When the jury foreman stood up and read the verdict, Warren Selvey, the prosecuting attorney, listened to the pronouncement of guilt as if the words were a personal citation of merit. He heard in the foreman’s somber tones, not a condemnation of the accused man who shriveled like a burnt match on the courtroom chair, but a tribute to Selvey’s own brilliance. “Guilty as charged …†No, Warren Selvey thought triumphantly, guilty as I’ve proved … For a moment, the judge’s melancholy eye caught Selvey’s and the old man on the bench showed shock at the light of rejoicing that he saw there. But Selvey couldn’t conceal his flush of happiness, his satisfaction with his own efforts, with his first major conviction. He gathered up his documents briskly, fighting to keep his mouth appropriately grim, though it ached to smile all over his thin, brown face. He put his briefcase beneath his arm, and when he turned, faced the buzzing spectators. “Excuse me,†he said soberly, and pushed his way through to the exit doors, thinking now only of Doreen. He tried to visualize her face, tried to see the red mouth that could be hard or meltingly soft, depending on which one of her many moods happened to be dominant. He tried to imagine how she would look when she heard his good news, how her warm body would feel against his, how her arms would encompass him. But this imagined foretaste of Doreen’s delights was interrupted. There were men’s eyes seeking his now, and men’s hands reaching toward him to grip his hand in congratulation. Garson, the district attorney, smiling heavily and nodding his lion’s head in approval of his cub’s behavior. Vance, the assistant DA, grinning with half a mouth, not altogether pleased to see his junior in the spotlight. Reporters, too, and photographers, asking for statements, requesting poses. Once, all this would have been enough for Warren Selvey. This moment, and these admiring men. But now there was Doreen, too, and the thought of her made him eager to leave the arena of his victory for a quieter, more satisfying reward. But he didn’t make good his escape. Garson caught his arm and steered him into the gray car that waited at the curb. “How’s it feel?†Garson grinned, thumping Selvey’s knee as they drove off. “Feels pretty good,†Selvey said mildly, trying for the appearance of modesty. “But, hell, I can’t take all the glory, Gar. Your boys made the conviction.†“You don’t really mean that.†Garson’s eyes twinkled. “I watched you through the trial, Warren. You were tasting blood. You were an avenging sword. You put him on the waiting list for the chair, not me.†“Don’t say that!†Selvey said sharply. “He was guilty as sin, and you know it. Why, the evidence was clear-cut. The jury did the only thing it could.†“That’s right. The way you handled things, they did the only thing they could. But let’s face it, Warren. With another prosecutor, maybe they would have done something else. Credit where credit’s due, Warren.†Selvey couldn’t hold back the smile any longer. It illumined his long, sharp-chinned face, and he felt the relief of having it relax his features. He leaned back against the thick cushion of the car. “Maybe so,†he said. “But I thought he was guilty, and I tried to convince everybody else. It’s not just A-B-C evidence that counts, Gar. That’s law school sophistry, you know that. Sometimes you just feel …†“Sure.†The DA looked out of the window. “How’s the bride, Warren?†“Oh, Doreen’s fine.†“Glad to hear it. Lovely woman, Doreen.†SHE WAS LYING on the couch when he entered the apartment. He hadn’t imagined this detail of his triumphant homecoming. He came over to her and shifted slightly on the couch to let his arms surround her. He said: “Did you hear, Doreen? Did you hear what happened?†“I heard it on the radio.†“Well? Don’t you know what it means? I’ve got my conviction. My first conviction, and a big one. I’m no junior anymore, Doreen.†“What will they do to that man?†He blinked at her, tried to determine what her mood might be. “I asked for the death penalty,†he said. “He killed his wife in cold blood. Why should he get anything else?†“I just asked, Warren.†She put her cheek against his shoulder. “Death is part of the job,†he said. “You know that as well as I do, Doreen. You’re not holding that against me?†She pushed him away for a moment, appeared to be deciding whether to be angry or not. Then she drew him quickly to her, her breath hot and rapid in his ear. They embarked on a week of celebration. Quiet, intimate celebration, in dim supper clubs and with close acquaintances. It wouldn’t do for Selvey to appear publicly gay under the circumstances. On the evening of the day the convicted Murray Rodman was sentenced to death, they stayed at home and drank hand-warmed brandy from big glasses. Doreen got drunk and playfully passionate, and Selvey thought he could never be happier. He had parlayed a mediocre law school record and an appointment as a third-class member of the state legal department into a position of importance and respect. He had married a beautiful, pampered woman and could make her whimper in his arms. He was proud of himself. He was grateful for the opportunity Murray Rodman had given him. It was on the day of Rodman’s scheduled execution that Selvey was approached by the stooped, gray-haired man with the grease-spotted hat. He stepped out of the doorway of a drug store, his hands shoved into the pockets of his dirty tweed overcoat, his hat low over his eyes. He had white stubble on his face. “Please,†he said, “Can I talk to you a minute?†Selvey looked him over and put a hand in his pocket for change. “No,†the man said quickly. “I don’t want a handout. I just want to talk to you, Mr. Selvey.†“You know who I am?†“Yeah, sure, Mr. Selvey. I read all about you.†Selvey’s hard glance softened. “Well, I’m kind of rushed right now. Got an appointment.†“This is important, Mr. Selvey. Honest to God. Can’t we go someplace? Have coffee maybe? Five minutes is all.†“Why don’t you drop me a letter, or come down to the office? We’re on Chambers Street—†“It’s about that man, Mr. Selvey. The one they’re executing tonight.†The attorney examined the man’s eyes. He saw how intent and penetrating they were. “All right,†he said. “There’s a coffee shop down the street. But only five minutes, mind you.†It was almost two-thirty; the lunchtime rush at the coffee shop was over. They found a booth in the rear and sat silently while a waiter cleared the remnants of a hasty meal from the table. Finally, the old man leaned forward and said: “My name’s Arlington, Phil Arlington. I’ve been out of town, in Florida, else I wouldn’t have let things go this far. I didn’t see a paper, hear a radio, nothing like that.†“I don’t get you, Mr. Arlington. Are you talking about the Rodman trial?†“Yeah, the Rodman business. When I came back and heard what happened, I didn’t know what to do. You can see that, can’t you? It hurt me, hurt me bad to read what was happening to that poor man. But I was afraid. You can understand that. I was afraid.†“Afraid of what?†The man talked to his coffee. “I had an awful time with myself, trying to decide what to do. But then I figured—hell, this Rodman is a young man. What is he, thirty-eight? I’m sixty-four, Mr. Selvey. Which is better?†“Better for what?†Selvey was getting annoyed; he shot a look at his watch. “Talk sense, Mr. Arlington. I’m a busy man.†“I thought I’d ask your advice.†The gray-haired man licked his lips. “I was afraid to go to the police right off, I thought I should ask you. Should I tell them what I did, Mr. Selvey? Should I tell them I killed that woman? Tell me. Should I?†The world suddenly shifted on its axis. Warren Selvey’s hands grew cold around the coffee cup. He stared at the man across from him. “What are you talking about?†he said. “Rodman killed his wife. We proved that.†“No, no, that’s the point. I was hitchhiking east. I got a lift into Wilford. I was walking around town, trying to figure out where to get food, a job, anything. I knocked on this door. This nice lady answered. She didn’t have no job, but she gave me a sandwich. It was a ham sandwich.†“What house? How do you know it was Mrs. Rodman’s house?†“I know it was. I seen her picture, in the newspapers. She was a nice lady. If she hadn’t walked into that kitchen after, it would have been okay.†“What, what?†Selvey snapped. “I shouldn’t have done it. I mean, she was real nice to me, but I was so broke. I was looking around the jars in the cupboard. You know how women are; they’re always hiding dough in the jars, house money they call it. She caught me at it and got mad. She didn’t yell or anything, but I could see she meant trouble. That’s when I did it, Mr. Selvey. I went off my head.†“I don’t believe you,†Selvey said. “Nobody saw any—anybody in the neighborhood. Rodman and his wife quarreled all the time—†The gray-haired man shrugged. “I wouldn’t know anything about that, Mr. Selvey. I don’t know anything about those people. But that’s what happened, and that’s why I want your advice.†He rubbed his forehead. “I mean, if I confess now, what would they do to me?†“Burn you,†Selvey said coldly. “Burn you instead of Rodman. Is that what you want?†Arlington paled. “No. Prison, okay. But not that.†“Then just forget about it. Understand me, Mr. Arlington? I think you dreamed the whole thing, don’t you? Just think of it that way. A bad dream. Now get back on the road and forget it.†“But that man. They’re killing him tonight—†“Because he’s guilty.†Selvey’s palm hit the table. “I proved him guilty. Understand?†The man’s lip trembled. “Yes sir,†he said. Selvey got up and tossed a five on the table. “Pay the bill,†he said curtly. “Keep the change.†THAT NIGHT, DOREEN asked him the hour for the fourth time. “Eleven,†he said sullenly. “Just another hour.†She sank deep into the sofa cushions. “I wonder how he feels right now …†“Cut it out!†“My, we’re jumpy tonight.†“My part’s done with, Doreen. I told you that again and again. Now the state’s doing its job.†She held the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth, thoughtfully. “But you put him where he is, Warren. You can’t deny that.†“The jury put him there!†“You don’t have to shout at me, attorney.†“Oh, Doreen …†He leaned across to make some apologetic gesture, but the telephone rang. He picked it up angrily. “Mr. Selvey? This is Arlington.†All over Selvey’s body, a pulse throbbed. “What do you want?†“Mr. Selvey, I been thinking it over. What you told me today. Only I don’t think it would be right, just forgetting about it. I mean—†“Arlington, listen to me. I’d like to see you at my apartment. I’d like to see you right now.†From the sofa, Doreen said: “Hey!†“Did you hear me, Arlington? Before you do anything rash, I want to talk to you, tell you where you stand legally. I think you owe that to yourself.†There was a pause at the other end. “Guess maybe you’re right, Mr. Selvey. Only I’m way downtown, and by the time I get there—†“You can make it. Take the IRT subway, it’s quickest. Get off at 86th Street.†When he hung up, Doreen was standing. “Doreen, wait. I’m sorry about this. This man is—an important witness in a case I’m handling. The only time I can see him is now.†“Have fun,†she said airily and went to the bedroom. “Doreen—†The door closed behind her. For a moment, there was silence. Then she clicked the lock. Selvey cursed his wife’s moods beneath his breath and stalked over to the bar. By the time Arlington sounded the door chimes, Selvey had downed six inches of bourbon. Arlington’s grease-spotted hat and dirty coat looked worse than ever in the plush apartment. He took them off and looked around timidly. “We’ve only got three-quarters of an hour,†he said. “I’ve just got to do something, Mr. Selvey.†“I know what you can do,†the attorney smiled. “You can have a drink and talk things over.†“I don’t think I should—†But the man’s eyes were already fixed on the bottle in Selvey’s hands. The lawyer’s smile widened. By eleven-thirty, Arlington’s voice was thick and blurred, his eyes no longer so intense, his concern over Rodman no longer so compelling. Selvey kept his visitor’s glass filled. The old man began to mutter. He muttered about his childhood, about some past respectability, and inveighed a string of strangers who had done him dirt. After a while, his shaggy head began to roll on his shoulders, and his heavy-lidded eyes began to close. He was jarred out of his doze by the mantel clock’s chiming. “Whazzat?†“Only the clock,†Selvey grinned. “Clock? What time? What time?†“Twelve, Mr. Arlington. Your worries are over. Mr. Rodman’s already paid for his crime.†“No!†The old man stood up, circling wildly. “No, that’s not true. I killed that woman. Not him! They can’t kill him for something he—†“Relax, Mr. Arlington. Nothing you can do about it now.†“Yes, yes! Must tell them—the police—†“But why? Rodman’s been executed. As soon as that clock struck, he was dead. What good can you do him now?†“Have to!†the old man sobbed. “Don’t you see? Couldn’t live with myself, Mr. Selvey. Please—†He tottered over to the telephone. Swiftly, the attorney put his hand on the receiver. “Don’t,†he said. Their hands fought for the instrument, and the younger man’s won easily. “You won’t stop me, Mr. Selvey. I’ll go down there myself. I’ll tell them all about it. And I’ll tell them about you—†He staggered toward the door. Selvey’s arm went out and spun him around. “You crazy old tramp! You’re just asking for trouble. Rodman’s dead—†“I don’t care!†Selvey’s arm lashed out and his hand cracked across the sagging, white-whiskered face. The old man sobbed at the blow, but persisted in his attempt to reach the door. Selvey’s anger increased and he struck out again, and after the blow, his hands dropped to the old man’s scrawny neck. The next idea came naturally. There wasn’t much life throbbing in the old throat. A little pressure, and Selvey could stop the frantic breathing, the hoarse, scratchy voice, the damning words … Selvey squeezed, harder and harder. And then his hands let him go. The old man swayed and slid against Selvey’s body to the floor. In the doorway, rigid, icy-eyed: Doreen. “Doreen, listen—†“You choked him,†she said. “Self-defense!†Selvey shouted. “He broke in here, tried to rob the apartment.†She slammed the door shut, twisted the inside lock. Selvey raced across the carpet and pounded desperately on the door. He rattled the knob and called her name, but there was no answer. Then he heard the sound of a spinning telephone dial. IT WAS BAD enough, without having Vance in the crowd that jammed the apartment. Vance, the assistant DA, who hated his guts anyway. Vance, who was smart enough to break down his burglar story without any trouble, who had learned that Selvey’s visitor had been expected. Vance, who would delight in his predicament. But Vance didn’t seem delighted. He looked puzzled. He stared down at the dead body on the floor of Selvey’s apartment and said: “I don’t get it, Warren. I just don’t get it. What did you want to kill a harmless old guy like that for?†“Harmless? Harmless?†“Sure. Harmless. That’s old Arlington, I’d know him any place.†“You know him?†Selvey was stunned. “Sure, I met up with him when I was working out of Bellaire County. Crazy old guy goes around confessing to murders. But why kill him, Warren? What for?â€
Sachin=GOD Posted July 24, 2013 Posted July 24, 2013 BC' date='these are short stories!![/quote'] these are indeed "short" stories :giggle:
b555 Posted August 7, 2013 Author Posted August 7, 2013 I thought I would share with whoever reads this the story of the most terrifying experience of my life. First, some background on me. I'm in high school, therefor from the moment I turned sixteen my parents wouldn't shut up about me needing to get a job. I didn't want to work as a waitress, or work at a fast food joint, so I settled for babysitting. My experiences for the most part have always been good while babysitting. The kids are usually good, there's free food involved, etc. About two months ago (probably not even that long ago,) my mom got a call from an old friend of hers asking if I still babysat. They were going out to a benefit and they fired their original sitter due to finding out that she had been stealing small things throughout their house. I accepted of course and finally the day came and I drove over there. I hadn't been to their house before that night so I had no idea where I was going. When I say they lived far from town, I mean they lived ****ing far from town. It felt like I had been driving for so long that I was already in the next state over. No matter though, soon enough I see the only house for miles in the distance. I walked up to the front door, did my introductions, etc. She gave me a tour of the house and it was phenomenal. Allow me to give you a run down of this house. It was two stories (don't forget the attic and basement,) beautifully decorated, each room was ten times bigger than they needed to be, just a grand house overall. Also by the time I got there it was going on 6pm and they were going to be gone until around 2am. From the get go small but still creepy things start happening. I would be downstairs watching tv and would hear footsteps coming from upstairs. I would explore the house and would swear I was in a stupid scary movie due to all the jump scares that were happening to me. The kids fell asleep around 8pm (they were six and eight so it was understandable) so I was ready to spend the next six to seven hours alone. At exactly 8:44pm the house phone started ringing. I can remember the exact time because I remember checking the clock thinking to myself why would somebody be calling, I'm sure they know that these people went to a benefit. It wasn't that big of a deal though so I answered it. I must've asked "Hello?" around five times in a row before finally hanging up. About ten minutes later the phone rings again. "Hello? Hello is anyone there?" No answer, so I hang up. Throughout the course of an hour the phone had rang two more times but I decided not to answer because I just assumed they were prank calls. Finally though, the phone rings again. I decide I'm going to answer it and tell whoever it is to stop ****ing calling. Before I even have the chance to say anything the person on the other end asks why I didn't pick up the last two times. I ask who it is and I get no response. I sat there waiting for whoever it was to say something for at least thirty seconds before finally asking them to stop calling. "But I like the sound of your voice." I got freaked out instantly and hung up. Immediately after I hung up I started closing the curtains. You know feeling you get when you think someone's watching you? Yeah I had that feeling to the fullest extent. I think I started playing temple run or angry birds or some stupid game on my phone by that point. I hear someone walking down the stairs and it's the six year old telling me that she's scared of the monster hiding in her closet. I try to comfort her and laugh telling her that if she just imagines things that she likes then she won't think about monsters. I walk her back to her room, tuck her in, and close the door behind me. As I'm walking down the stairs the phone rings again. By now I'm not only creeped out but annoyed by whoever keeps calling. I answer and just flat out ask them what they want and yup you guessed it I get no answer. After I hang up someone starts knocking on the front door. Am I that big of an idiot to answer the door in the middle of nowhere at going on 10 something at night? Hell no. I try to look through the peephole but it was being covered. I call the benefit and ask to speak with the (lets call them the M's.) I speak with Mrs. M and just ask if they think they'll be coming home sooner. I tried not to seem like anything was wrong but I think she could hear it in my voice. I told her everything was fine, that I was just getting weird phone calls, and that someone had knocked on the door. She asked if I wanted them to come home early and I felt rude saying yes so I settled with no. The house phone rings three times within twenty minutes at most and I ignore all three calls. Reeeaaallllyy started to wish I had said yes to them coming home early. I tried to disract myself in so many ways possible but nothing was really helping. Phone rings for the millionth time and I decide to answer it, don't ask me why. I ask the same questions. Why do you keep calling, why won't you say anything, etc. etc. etc. He then starts to say that he's in the house and that he's watching the kids and myself. I try to play it off cool and laugh asking him sarcastically, "Oh yeah then where are you?" He replies telling me he's in a closet. Instantly I remember the six year old daughter telling me she was afraid of the monster hiding in her closet. Before running upstairs I called the police and told them that I thought someone was in the house. I was almost too afraid to go upstairs but I somehow did it. I wake the kids up and race downstairs and we get in the car. I turn it on and pull out, waiting outside the driveway but not turning the car off. I was told to wait for the police which was the only thing stopping me from leaving. The police got there and searched the house. They found that all of the knives from the knife holder had been removed and were found in the daughter's closet. Whoever had been there was long gone by the time the police got there. How he got in and out without me noticing? I have no ****ing clue. After that experience I have never babysat again. Can you blame me? The reason I no longer babysit
Detonator Posted August 7, 2013 Posted August 7, 2013 A chilling and scary short story The Outsider by H. P. Lovecraft Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me - to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other. I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun outdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower. There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone. I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything alive but the noiseless rats and bats and spiders. I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of somebody mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled, and decaying like the castle. To me there was nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that strewed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations. I fantastically associated these things with everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I know. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years - not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud. My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth because I remembered so little. Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went farther from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear; so that I ran frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of nighted silence. So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day. In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose wings made no noise. But more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of haunted and venerable mould assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I had once attained. All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless, crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trapdoor of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. I crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into place, but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the eerie echoes of its fall, hoped when necessary to pry it up again. Believing I was now at prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. More and more I reflected, and wondered what hoary secrets might abide in this high apartment so many aeons cut off from the castle below. Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a portal of stone, rough with strange chiselling. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through an ornate grating of iron, and down a short stone passageway of steps that ascended from the newly found doorway, was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories. Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to rush up the few steps beyond the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was still very dark when I reached the grating - which I tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon came out. Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight. Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel path that stretched away in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be; though as I continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road. Once I swam across a swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long vanished. Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a venerable ivied castle in a thickly wooded park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the moat was filled in, and that some of the well-known towers were demolished, whilst new wings existed to confuse the beholder. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows - gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. Advancing to one of these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien. I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realization. The nightmare was quick to come, for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape, overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors. The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved towards one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there - a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered - a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause - I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives. I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world - or no longer of this world - yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more. I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred, and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch. I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own. But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
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