Read Online The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories by Rod Serling - Free Book Online Page A

so imposing. Let’s call it—the two of us—let’s call it some additional free time! After all what are a few hundred years or a few thousand years?”
    Bedeker swallowed. “A few... thousand ?”
    “Or five thousand or ten thousand—” Cadwallader threw the numbers into the breach like a used car salesman bringing up his heavy artillery. “The world will go on ad infinitum, so what’s a few thousand years more or less, give or take, add or subtract.”
    Bedeker rose warily from the bed and studied the fat man. “This little item, Mr. Cadwallader, that I am to give you in exchange—what do you call that?”
    Cadwallader gave him a little Santa Claus wink. “What do we call that?” he asked. “Let’s see! We can call it a little piece of your make-up. A little crumb off the crust of your structure. A fragment of an atom from your being.” His smile persisted, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Or, we might call it a—”
    “Or a soul!” Bedeker shrieked at him triumphantly.
    The smile on Cadwallader’s face was positively beatific. “Or that,” he said softly. “After all, what is it? And when you’re gone, thousands of years hence—what do you need it for?”
    Walter Bedeker stood up and pointed a wavering finger in the direction of Mr. Cadwallader. “You’re the Devil,” he announced.
    Cadwallader bowed slightly from the giant equator that was his waist and said modestly, “I’m at your service. How about it, Mr. Bedeker? Why not? A partnership of a sort. You deed me over your so-called soul and I give you immortality. Life everlasting—or as long as you want it to be everlasting. And indestructibility, Mr. Bedeker. Think of it! Complete indestructibility. Nothing can ever hurt you!”
    Bedeker looked off dreamily. “Nothing can hurt me? And I can live forever?”
    Cadwallader smiled and said, “Why not? Certainly forever. Again, Mr. Bedeker, just terms. And everything’s relative. For you, it’s forever. For me, it’s just a walk around the block. But we’re both satisfied.”
    Bedeker stood there lost in thought and Mr. Cadwallader walked over to his elbow. His voice was soft and gentle, but also rich with promise. “Think of it,” Cadwallader said, “to be without fear of dying. To be indestructible. Invincible. Not to have to worry about disease. Accidents. Pestilence. War. Famine. Anything. Governments and institutions disintegrate. People die. But Walter Bedeker goes on and on!”
    Bedeker, his head tilted, a smile playing on his puckish, gnome-like face, walked over to the mirror and studied his reflection. “Walter Bedeker goes on and on,” he said thoughtfully.
    Mr. Cadwallader stepped up behind him so that his reflection joined Bedeker’s.
    “Mr. Cadwallader,” Bedeker said, “about this soul. You say I won’t miss it?”
    “Why, you’ll never know it’s gone.”
    “And I’ll go on and on quite unable to die, you say?”
    “Quite.”
    “No tricks?” Bedeker asked. “No hidden clauses? I’ll just live as long as I want to live, is that it!”
    Cadwallader chuckled at him. “That’s it. That’s precisely it.”
    Mr. Cadwallader went back over to his chair and sat down again. Bedeker remained at the mirror studying his face, running a questioning finger over it.
    “How about my appearance?” he asked.
    “I’m afraid I can’t do much about that,” Cadwallader said thoughtlessly, but he glided over the slip. “What I mean is—you should look pretty much the same.”
    “But in five hundred years,” Bedeker insisted, “I don’t want to look like any dried up old prune.”
    Cadwallader looked up toward the ceiling, and shook his head at the enormity of the competition. “Oh, Mr. Bedeker,” he said, “you drive a mean bargain. A most difficult bargain. But,” he made a gesture of resignation, “You’ll find me a cooperative”—he smiled apologetically while he searched for the right word—“man?—And we’ll throw this into the bargain.