“Like I was saying,” Hirt squeezed his hands together in anguish, “there isn’t anything you can do for me, unless you can get me out of here. Otherwise I go to the gas chamber tomorrow morning.”
Skidoop shook his head, and looked ceilingward. “No skin, man. I can do almost anything, but not that. It involves your destiny, and that’s His bailiwick.” He pointed at the ceiling. “Got the whole damned market on destinies cornered. Got there first. “
“Well, then what good are you?”
Skidoop looked pained. “Man, I’m beginning to feel you are very unhip. Come to think of it, you dig Camus, Goethe, Kerouac, Rexroth, the rest of the boppers’!”
“Uh…” Hirt began.
“I figured. You’re so far out you’d have to masquerade to get back in. But like my uncle Moishe keeps tellin’ me, biz is biz. So what can I do for you, right?”
“Yes. What can you do for me’!”
“Well, we can always introduce an extenuating circumstance, that’s cool. No rules against that; I introduce the e.c. and you change your own destiny. How’s that swing’!”
“Fine, but how can you do it’!”
Skidoop fingered his beard, muttered something about getting a bellows and trimming it with a pair of wire cutters, and jubilantly replied, “There! You’re writing down your last meal. So okay, so I give you the ability to eat. To eat and eat and eat, just keep feeding your face, without any debilitating physical side-effects, and they never gas you.”
“They never gas me’! Why not’!”
“Who ever heard of killing a guy when he’s eating his last meal’! It can’t be done. It’s barbaric. A cincheroonie.”
Maxim Hirt’s commercially handsome face sloughed into an expression connoting thought. A look of guile overcame his features. “You guarantee it’ll work? I can keep eating indefinitely and it won’t hurt me at all?” The bearded one waved a negligent palm. “Not a bit.”
“I’ve heard about deals with you people,” Hirt noted. “I’d have to have immortality along with it. You might fix it so I’d eat myself to death. Can you give me immortality with it?”
Skidoop thought for a moment, then said thoughtfully, “Well, we’d have to put in a clause about that.
Contingent on whether or not they avoid frying you. If they don’t, you get the immortality. But if they do, why should I waste valuable life-force on you, since His destiny ruling would come first, anyhow, and they’d gas you anyway.”
“I get immortality if this extenuating circumstance works, right?”
“Correct-o-roony,” said Skidoop, snapping his fingers in contrapuntal variation.
Hirt again looked wary. “What do you get? I’ve heard about how you guys always gyp a client.”
“The vicissitudes of a bad press, man. Nothin’ but a hard sell from Him. We wouldn’t stay in business long if we didn’t give good service.”
“What do you get, then?”
“Your soul, man, the standard kick.”
Hirt went white, and shook his head from side-to-side with frantic intensity. “Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh!” he voted the motion down.
Skidoop spread his hands. “Oh, man, will you like please cool it. I mean, fade blade. You know what your soul is?”
Hirt waggled his head again.
“It’s only your imagination. That’s all. I mean, they jabber about this and that and the soul kick and the life force kick, and all of it, when the straight poop is that it’s only your imagination.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, daddy-cool. And let’s face it, if I wasn’t bound by the Fair Trade Union, I wouldn’t even have come on this summons. I mean, let’s face it, dad, you haven’t got much imagination to begin with. “
“And nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Honest Injun?”
“Tear out my heart and hope to burn!”
“Okay, it’s a deal. But let’s get it straight once more…”
“I’ll run through it, from the top: I give you the ability to keep eating, as long as you live, and if they don’t gas you, then you get immortality on top of it. In exchange for which all I take is your imagination.”
“Where’s the pen to sign the paper?” Hirt asked, now anxious.
“Paper, pen? Oh, man, all them modern fantasy writers been corrupting the legend again. We do it in blood; good old legal tender. No contract, just a mix of the haemoglobin, tom.”
Hirt was surprised.
“What type are you, man, so I’ll know if I have to ring in a notary with all-purpose corpuscles? CP A, Corpuscle Public Accountant.”
Hirt tried to remember, then said, “I’m type ‘O’.”
“Nutsville,” Skidoop caroled, and bit a hole in his wrist. The blood began spurting. He offered a finger to Hirt, and the condemned man used the sharp fingernail to start a scratch on his own forearm. They mixed. “Done!” Skidoop chortled, grabbed the imagination in both hands, wrenched it loose, and split the scene. Maxim Hirt sat on the bunk, and knew an would be well. He had it knocked.
Which was true. Because when they brought him his meal, he ate and ate and ate and ate.
And did not stop eating; so they commuted his sentence to life, because you can’t strap a man in the gas chamber who hasn’t finished his last meal.
Which would not have been such a bad way to finish out a life, sitting there eating an day and night, except that when Skidoop took Hirt’s imagination, he took Hirt’s ability to think of anything else but baked beans to eat. So the last meal consisted of baked beans, plate by plate by plate by…
Obviously, it was a deal from the bottom.
In many ways, it was a fate worse than death.
Since I was thirteen, to greater or lesser degree, I have been a rootless person. Oh, there have been homes and residences and all the trappings of being settled, but aside from my days in New York, which always seem to me to be the best days, I’ve wandered. Up and down and back across the United States, wherever the vagaries of life have carried me with my writing, military service, marriage, job opportunities or just plain chance. And from these peregrinations has come the belief that not only is home where the heart is, but the heart is undeniably where the home is. I was also prompted by this obscure notion, to write
The Wind Beyond the Mountains
It is down in the Book of the Ancestors with truth. The Ruskind know but one home. Ruska is home, for home shall be where the heart is. The stars are not for the Ruskind, for they know, too, that the heart is where the home is.
Wummel saw the shining thing come down. He watched it from the stand of gnarl-bushes as the pointed thing flamed across the sky, streaking toward the red sun. It flashed brightly above the land, and disappeared quickly. Wummel found himself shaking.