“I’m underdeveloped. I run errands. I’m named Snulbug. It isn’t enough—now I should be a testimonial!”
Mr. Choatsby stared rapt at the furious little demon raging in his ash tray. He watched reverently as Bill held out the pipe for its inmate, filled it with tobacco, and lit it. He listened awe-struck as Snulbug moaned with delight at the flame.
“No more questions,” he said. “What terms?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars.” Bill was ready for bargaining.
“Don’t put it too high,” Snulbug warned. “You better hurry.”
But Mr. Choatsby had pulled out his checkbook and was scribbling hastily. He blotted the check and handed it over. “It’s a deal.” He grabbed up the paper. “You’re a fool, young man. Fifteen thousand! Hmf!” He had it open already at the financial page. “With what I make on the market tomorrow, never notice $15,000. Pennies.”
“Hurry up,” Snulbug urged.
“Goodbye, sir,” Bill began politely, “and thank you for—” But Reuben Choatsby wasn’t even listening.
“What’s all this hurry?” Bill demanded as he reached the elevator.
“People!” Snulbug sighed. “Never you mind what’s the hurry. You get to your bank and deposit that check.”
So Bill, with Snulbug’s incessant prodding, made a dash to the bank worthy of his descents on the city hall and on the Choatsby Laboratories. He just made it, by stop-watch fractions of a second. The door was already closing as he shoved his way through at three o’clock sharp.
He made his deposit, watched the teller’s eyes bug out at the size of the check, and delayed long enough to enjoy the incomparable thrill of changing the account from William Hitchens to The Hitchens Research Laboratory.
Then he climbed once more into his car, where he could talk with his pipe in peace. “Now,” he asked as he drove home, “what was the rush?”
“He’d stop payment.”
“You mean when he found out about the merry-go-round? But I didn’t promise him anything. I just sold him tomorrow’s paper. I didn’t guarantee he’d make a fortune off it.”
“That’s all right. But—”
“Sure, you warned me. But where’s the hitch? R. C.’s a bandit, but he’s honest. He wouldn’t stop payment.”
“Wouldn’t he?”
The car was waiting for a stop signal. The newsboy in the intersection was yelling “Uxtruh!” Bill glanced casually at the headline, did a double take, and instantly thrust out a nickel and seized a paper.
He turned into a side street, stopped the car, and went through this paper. Front page: MAYOR ASSASSINATED. Sports page: Alhazred at twenty to one. Obituaries: The same list he’d read at noon. He turned back to the date line. August 22. Tomorrow.
“I warned you,” Snulbug was explaining. “I tolci you I wasn’t strong enough to go far into the future. I’m not a well demon, I’m not. And an itch in the memory is something fierce. I just went far enough ahead to get a paper with tomorrow’s date on it. And any dope knows that a Tuesday paper comes out Monday afternoon.” For a moment Bill was dazed. His magic paper, his fifteen-thousand-dollar paper, was being hawked by newsies on every corner. Small wonder R. C. might have stopped payment! And then he saw the other side. He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. “Look out!” Snulbug shrilled. “You’ll drop my pipe. And what’s so funny?”
Bill wiped tears from his eyes. “I was right. Don’t you see, Snulbug? Man can’t be licked. My magic was lousy. All it could call up was you. You brought me what was practically a fake, and I got caught on the merry-go-round of time trying to use it. You were right enough there; no good could come of that magic.
“But without the magic, just using human psychology, knowing a man’s weaknesses, playing on them, I made a syrup-voiced old bandit endow the very research he’d tabooed, and do more good for humanity than he’s done in all the rest of his life. I was right, Snulbug. You can’t lick Man.”
Snulbug’s snakes writhed into knots of scorn. “People!” he snorted. “You’ll find out.” And he shook his head with dismal satisfaction.
Sanctuary
So there I was at dinner with a Gestapo chief.
It wouldn’t be wise nor politic, not right now, to say where this took place. It wouldn’t be wise nor possible, as you’ll see later, to say when it took place. Temporally speaking, the events rambled. As to place, it should be enough to say that it was near the coast of quote unoccupied quote France, and I won’t even say which coast. There’s no point in tipping them off on where the new secret weapon is operating.
I’m afraid the names aren’t true either, but that won’t matter to you. One Gestapo chief is much the same as another to you, and you wouldn’t know my Colonel von Schwarzenau from the Major Helm that they got in Zagreb the other day or the Erich Guttart who met up with his near Lublin. And you probably wouldn’t have heard of Dr. Norton Palgrave under his real name either. Your grandchildren will, though, whether they’re majoring in science or history.
I’m giving you my name straight, out of egotism, I suppose. You may have heard it—Jonathan Holding. No? Well, most of my stuff was privately printed in Paris. One volume in this country with new directions, “Apollo Mammosus.” I was one of that crowd in Paris. The aesthetic Expatriate, that was me. I visited with Gertrude and Alice; I talked bullfighting with Ernest; I got drunk with Elliot; I sneered at everything American except the checks—you get the picture?
I wasn’t in any hurry to get out of Paris even after the war started and the embassy began making noises about neutrals clearing out to where they belonged. What the hell, we had the Maginot Line between them and us, didn’t we? And Paris could never be captured. Even in 1870 she held out, and from all I’d read of that siege it sounded like interesting raw material. She’d stick it out, and I’d stick it out with her.
And then came May,
