Sometimes I called him Charlemagne, sometimes just Charley. Or Cheeps, or Jags, or Jaggers, or anything, as the mood took me. He seemed to forgive me. Perhaps he even liked it—I don’t know. Personal magnetism takes you a long way; it has taken me so far I don’t even have to remember names.

  They stopped a passing taxi and we all climbed in. It was a tumbrel, they tell me. You know, French? Circa seventeen-eighty-something. Husband sat one side, Wife the other, each holding one of my arms, as if they thought I might get violent. I let them do it, although the idea amused me.

  “Hallo, friends!” I said ironically. Sometimes I called them “parents,” or “disciples,” or sometimes “patients.” Anything.

  The wonderful woman was crying slightly.

  “Look at her!” I said to Husband. “She’s lovely when she cries, that I swear. I could have married her, you know, if I had not been dedicated. Tell him, you wonderful creature, tell him how I turned you down!”

  Through her sobbing, she said, “Alex said he had more important things to do than sex.”

  “So you’ve got me to thank for Perdita!” I told him. “It was a big sacrifice, but I’m happy to see you happy.” Often now I called her Perdita. It seemed to fit her. He laughed at what I had said, and then we were all laughing. Yes, it was good to be alive; I knew I made them feel good to be alive. They were loyal. I had to give them something—I had no gold and silver.

  The tumbrel stopped outside Charley’s place—the Husband residence, I’d better say. Oh, the things I’ve called that place! Someone should have recorded them all. It was one of those inverted beehive houses: just room for a door and an elevator on the ground floor, but the fifth floor could hold a ballroom. Topply, topply. Up we went to the fifth. There was no sixth floor; had there been, I should have gone up there, the way I felt. I asked for it anyhow, just to see the wonderful woman brighten up. She liked me to joke, even when I wasn’t in a joking mood. I could tell she still loved me so much it hurt her.

  “Now for a miracle, ye pampered jades,” I said, stepping forth, clumping into the living room.

  I seized an empty vase from a low shelf and spat into it. Ah, the old cunning was still there! It filled at once with wine, sweet and bloody-looking. I sipped and found it good.

  “Go on and taste it, Perdy!” I told her.

  Wonderful w. turned her head sadly away. She would not touch that vase. I could have eaten every single strand of hair on her head, but she seemed unable to see the wine. I really believe she could not see that wine.

  “Please don’t go through all that again, Alex,” she implored me wearily. Little faith, you see—the old, old story. (Remind me to tell you a new one I heard the other day.) I put my behind on one chair and my bad foot on another and sulked.

  They came and stood by me... not too close.

  “Come nearer,” I coaxed, looking up under my eyebrows and pretending to growl at them. “I won’t hurt you. I only murder Parowen Scryban, remember?”

  “We’ve got to talk to you about that,” Husband said desperately. I thought he looked as if he had aged.

  “I think you look as if you have aged, Perdita,” I said. Often I called him Perdita, too; why, man, they sometimes looked so worried you couldn’t tell them apart.

  “I cannot live forever, Alex,” he replied. “Now try and concentrate about this killing, will you?”

  I waved a hand and tried to belch. At times I can belch like a sinking ship.

  “We do all we can to help you, Alex,” he said. I heard him although my eyes were shut; can you do that? “But we can only keep you out of trouble if you cooperate. It’s the dancing that does it; nothing else betrays you like dancing. You’ve got to promise you’ll stay away from it. In fact, we want you to promise that you’ll let us restrain you. To keep you away from the dancing. Something about that dancing...”

  He was going on and on, and I could still hear him. But other things were happening. That word “dancing” got in the way of all his other words. It started a sort of flutter under my eyelids. I crept my hand out and took the wonderful woman’s hand, so soft and lovely, and listened to that word “dancing” dancing. It brought its own rhythm, bouncing about like an eyeball inside my head. The rhythm grew louder. He was shouting.

  I sat up suddenly, opening my eyes.

  W. woman was on the floor, very pale.

  “You squeezed too hard,” she whispered.

  I could see that her little hand was the only red thing she had.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really wonder you two don’t throw me out for good!” I couldn’t help it, I just started laughing.

  I like laughing. I can laugh even when nothing’s funny. Even when I saw their faces, I still kept laughing like mad.

  “Stop it!” Husband said. For a moment he looked as if he would have hit me. But I was laughing so much I did not recognize him. It must have done them good to see me enjoying myself; they both needed a fillip, I could tell.

  “If you stop laughing, I’ll take you down to the club,” he said, greasily bribing.

  I stopped. I always know when to stop. With all humility, it is a great natural gift.

  “The club’s the place for me,” I said. “I’ve already got a clubfoot—I’m halfway there!”

  I stood up.

  “Lead on, my loyal supporters, my liege lords,” I ordered.

  “You and I will go alone, Alex,” Husband said. “The wonderful woman will stay here. She really ought to go to bed.”

  “What’s in it for her?” I joked. Then I followed him to the elevator. He knows I don’t like staying in any one place for long.

  When I got to the club, I knew, I would want to be somewhere else. That’s the worst of having a mission: it makes you terribly restless. Sometimes I am so restless I could die. Ordinary people just don’t know what the word means. I could have married her if I had been ordinary. They call it destiny.

  But the club was good.

  We walked there. I limped there. I made sure I limped badly.

  The club had a timescreen. That, I must admit, was my only interest in the club. I don’t care for women. Or men. Not living women or men. I only enjoy them when they are back in time.

  This night—I nearly said “this particular night,” but there was nothing particularly particular about it—the timescreen had only been turned roughly three centuries back into the past. At least, I guessed it was twenty-first-century stuff by the women’s dresses and a shot of a power station. A large crowd of people was looking in as Perdita Caesar and I entered, so I started to pretend he had never seen one of the wall-screens before.

  “The tele-eyes which are projected back over history consume a fabulous amount of power every second,” I told him loudly in a voice which suggested I had swallowed a poker. “It makes them very expensive. It means private citizens cannot afford screens and tele-eyes, just as once they could not afford their own private motion pictures. This club is fortunately very rich. Its members sleep in gold leaf at night.” Several people were glancing around at me already. Caesar was shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

  “The tele-eyes cannot get a picture further than twenty-seven centuries back,” I told him, “owing to the limitations of science. Science, as you know, is a system for taking away with one hand while giving with the other.”

  He could not answer cleverly. I went on: “It has also proved impossible, due to the aforesaid limitations, to send human beings further back in time than one week. And that costs so much that only governments can do it. As you may have heard, nothing can be sent ahead into time—there’s no future in it!”

  I had to laugh at that. It was funny, and quite spontaneous.

  Many people were calling out to me, and Caesar Borgia was dragging at my arm, trying to make me be quiet.

  “I wouldn’t spoil anyone’s fun!” I shouted. “You people get on with your watching; I’ll get on with my speech.”

  But I did not want to talk to a lot of feather-bedders like them. So I sat down without saying another word, Boy Borgia collapsing beside me with a sigh of relief. Suddenly I felt very, very sad. Life just is not what is was; once upon a time, I could have married this husband’s wife.

  “Physically, you can go back one week,” I whispered, “optically, twenty-seven centuries. It’s very sad.”

  It was very sad. The people on the screen were also sad. They lived in the Entertainment Era, and appeared to be getting little pleasure from it. I tried to weep for them but failed because at the moment they seemed just animated history. I saw them as period pieces, stuck there a couple of generations before reading and writing had died out altogether and the fetters of literacy fell forever from the world. Little any of them cared for the patterns of history.

  “I’ve had an idea I want to tell you about, Cheezer,” I said. It was a good idea.

  “Can’t it wait?” he asked. “I’d like to see this scan. It’s all about the European Allegiance.”

  “I must tell you before I forget.”

  “Come on,” he said resignedly, getting up.

  “You are too loyal to me,” I complained. “You spoil me. I’ll speak to St. Peter about it.”

  As meek as you like, I followed him into an anteroom. He drew himself a drink from an automatic man in one corner. He was trembling. I did not tremble, although at the back of my mind lurked many things to tremble about.

  “Go on then, say whatever in hell you want to say,” he told me, shading his eyes with his hand. I have seen him use that trick before; he did it after I killed Parowen Scryban the first time, I remember. There’s nothing wrong with my memory, except in patches.

  “I had this idea,” I said, trying to recall it. “This idea—oh, yes. History. I got the idea looking at those twenty-first-century people. Mythology is the key to everything, isn’t it? I mean, a man builds his life on a set of myths, doesn’t he? Well, in our world, the so-called Western World, those accepted myths were religious until about mid-nineteenth century. By then, a majority of Europeans were literate, or within reach of it, and for a couple of centuries the myths became literary ones: tragedy was no longer the difference between grace and nature, but between art and reality.” Julius had dropped his hand. He was interested. I could see he wondered what was coming next. I hardly knew myself.

  “Then mechanical aids—television, computers, scanners of every type—abolished literacy,” I said. “Into the vacuum came the timescreens. Our mythologies are now historical: tragedy has become simply a failure to see the future.”

  I beamed at him and bowed, not letting him know I was beyond tragedy. He just sat there. He said nothing. Sometimes such terrible boredom descends on me that I can hardly fight against it.

  “Is my reasoning sound?” I asked. (Two women looked into the room, saw me, and left again hurriedly. They must have sensed I did not want them, otherwise they would have come to me; I am young and handsome—I am not thirty-three yet.)

  “You could always reason well,” Marcus Aurelius Marconi said, “but it just never leads anywhere. God, I’m so tired.”

  “This bit of reasoning leads somewhere. I beg you to believe it, Holy Roman,” I said, flopping on my knees before him. “It’s the state philosophy I’ve really been telling you about. That’s why, although they keep the death penalty for serious crimes—like murdering a bastard called Parowen Scryban—they go back in time the next day and call off the execution. They believe you should die for your crime, you see? But more deeply they believe every man should face his true future. They’ve—we’ve all seen too many premature deaths on the timescreens. Romans, Normans, Celts, Goths, English, Israelis. Every race. Individuals—all dying too soon, failing to fulfil—”

  Oh, I admit it, I was crying on his knees by then, although bravely disguising it by barking like a dog: a Great Dane. Hamlet. Not in our stars but in our selves. (I’ve watched W.S. write that bit.)

  I was crying at last to think the police would come without fail within the next week to snuff me out, and then resurrect me again, according to my sentence. I was remembering what it was like last time. They took so long about it.

  They took so long. Though I struggled, I could not move; those police know how to hold a man. My windpipe was blocked, as sentence of court demanded.

  And then, it seemed, the boxes sailed in. Starting with small ones, they grew bigger. They were black boxes, all of them. Faster they came, and faster, inside me and out. I’m telling you how it felt, my God! And they blocked the whole, whole universe, black and red. With my lungs really crammed tight with boxes, out of the world I went. Dead!

  Into limbo I went.

  I don’t say nothing happened, but I could not grasp what was happening there, and I was unable to participate. Then I was alive again.

  It was abruptly the day before the strangulation once more, and the government agent had come back in time and rescued me, so that from one point of view I was not strangled. But I still remembered it happening, and the boxes, and limbo. Don’t talk to me about paradoxes. The government expended several billion megavolts sending that man back for me, and those megavolts account for all paradoxes. I was dead and then alive again.

  Now I had to undergo it all once more. No wonder there was little crime nowadays; the threat of that horrible experience held many a likely criminal back. But I had to kill Parowen Scryban; just so long as they went back and resurrected him after I had finished with him, I had to go and do it again. Call it a moral obligation. No one understands. It is as if I were living in a world of my own.

  “Get up, get up! You’re biting my ankles.”

  Where had I heard that voice before? At last I could no longer ignore it Whenever I try to think, voices interrupt. I stopped chewing whatever I was chewing, unblocked my eyes, and sat up. This was just a room; I had been in rooms before. A man was standing over me; I did not recognize him. He was just a man.

  “You look as if you have aged,” I told him.

  “I can’t live forever, thank God,” he said. “Now get up and let’s get you home. You’re going to bed.”

  “What home?” I asked. “What bed? Who in the gentle name of anyone may you be?”

  “Just call me Adam,” he said sickly.

  I recognized him then and went with him. We had been in some sort of a club; he never told my why. I still don’t know why we went to that club.

  The house he took me to was shaped like a beehive upside down, and I walked there like a drunk. A clubfooted drunk.

  This wonderful stranger took me up in an elevator to a soft bed. He undressed me and put me in that soft bed as gently as if I had been his son. I am really impressed by the kindness strangers show me; personal magnetism, I suppose.

  For as long as I could after he had left me, I lay in the bed in the inverted beehive. Then the darkness grew thick and sticky, and I could imagine all the fat, furry bodies, chitinously winged, of the bees on the ceiling. A minute more and I should fall headfirst into them. Stubbornly, I fought to sweat it out but a man can stand only so much.

  On hands and knees I crawled out of bed and out of the room. Quickly, softly, I clicked the door shut behind me; not a bee escaped.

  People were talking in a lighted room along the corridor. I crawled to the doorway, looking and listening. The wonderful stranger talked to the wonderful woman; she was in night attire, with a hand bandaged.

  She was saying: “You will have to see the authorities in the morning and petition them.”

  He was saying: “It’ll do no good. I can’t get the law changed. You know that. It’s hopeless.”

  I merely listened.

  Sinking onto the bed, he buried his face in his hands, finally looking up to say: “The law insists on personal responsibility. We’ve got to take care of Alex. It’s a reflection of the time we live in; because of the timescreens, we’ve got—whether we like it or not—historical perspectives. We can see that the whole folly of the past was due to failures in individual liability. Our laws are naturally framed to correct that, which they do; it just happens to be tough on us.”

  He sighed and said, “The sad thing is, even Alex realizes that. He talked quite sensibly to me at the club about not evading the future.”

  “It hurts me most when he talks sensibly,” the wonderful double-you said. “It makes you realize he is still capable of suffering.”

  He took her bandaged hand, almost as if they had a pain they hoped to alleviate by sharing it between them.

  “I’ll go and see the authorities in the morning,” he promised, “and ask them to let the execution be final—no reprieve afterwards.”

  Even that did not seem to satisfy her.

  Perhaps, like me, she could not tell what either of them was talking about. She shook her head miserably from side to side.

  “If only it hadn’t been for his clubfoot,” she said. “If only it hadn’t been for that, he could have danced the sickness out of himself.”

  Her face was growing more and more twisted.

  It was enough. More.

  “Laugh and grow fat,” I suggested. I croaked because my throat was dry. My glands are always like bullets. It reminded me of a frog, so I hopped spontaneously into the room. They did not move; I sat on the bed with them.

  “All together again,” I said.

  They did not move.

  “Go back to bed, Alex,” she of the wonderfulness said in a low voice.

  They were looking at me; goodness knows what they wanted me to say or do. I stayed where I was. A little green clock on a green shelf said nine o’clock.

  “Oh, holy heavens!” the double-you said. “What does the future hold?”

  “Double chins for you, double-yous for me,” I joked. That green clock said a minute past nine. I felt as if its little hand were slowly, slowly disemboweling me.

  If I waited long enough, I knew I should think of something. They talked to me while I thought and waited; what good they imagined they were doing is beyond me, but I would not harm them. They mean well. They’re the best people in the world. That doesn’t mean to say I have to listen to them.