A Feast of Demons Page 2

"Except in money, ofcourse. But what's the use of money?"

  * * * * *

  There wasn't anything to say to _that_. I said, probing delicately, "Ifigured you were loaded. If you can use your demons to separate U-235from U-238, you can use them for separating gold from sea water. Youcan use them for damn near anything."

  "Damn near," he concurred. "Virgie, you may be of some help to me.Obviously you've been reading up on Maxwell."

  "Obviously."

  It was the simple truth. I had got a lot of use out of the prisonlibrary--even to the point of learning all there was to learn aboutClerk Maxwell, one of the greatest of physicists, and his littledemons. I had rehearsed it thoroughly for El Greco.

  "Suppose," I said, "that you had a little compartment inside a pipe offlowing gas or liquid. That's what Maxwell said. Suppose thecompartment had a little door that allowed molecules to enter orleave. You station a demon--that's what Maxie called them himself--atthe door. The demon sees a hot molecule coming, he opens the door. Hesees a cold one, he closes it. By and by, just like that, all the hotmolecules are on one side of the door, all the cold ones--the slowones, that is--on the other. Steam on one side, ice on the other,that's what it comes down to."

  "That was what you saw with your own eyes," Theobald Greco remindedme.

  "I admit it," I said. "And I admit I didn't understand. But I do now."

  I understood plenty. Separate isotopes--separate elements, for thatmatter. Let your demon open the door to platinum, close it to lead. Hecould make you rich in no time.

  He had, in fact, done just that for Greco.

  * * * * *

  Greco said, "Here. First installment." He pulled something out of hispocket and handed it to me. It was metallic--about the size of apenny slot-machine bar of chocolate, if you remember back that far. Itgleamed and it glittered. And it was ruddy yellow in color.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Gold," he said. "Keep it, Virgie. It came out of sea water, like yousaid. Call it the down payment on your salary."

  I hefted it. I bit it. I said, "By the way, speaking of salary...."

  "Whatever you like," he said wearily. "A million dollars a year? Whynot?"

  "Why not?" I echoed, a little dazed.

  And then I just sat there listening, while he talked. What else wasthere to do? I won't even say that I was listening, at least not withthe very fullest of attention, because that thought of a milliondollars a year kept coming between me and his words. But I got thepicture. The possibilities were endless. And how well I knew it!

  Gold from the sea, sure. But energy--free energy--it was there for thetaking. From the molecules of the air, for instance. Refrigeratorscould be cooled, boilers could get up steam, homes could be heated,forges could be fired--and all without fuel. Planes could fly throughthe air without a drop of gasoline in their tanks. Anything.

  A million dollars a year....

  And it was only the beginning.

  I came to. "What?"

  He was looking at me. He repeated patiently, "The police are lookingfor me."

  I stared. "_You?_"

  "Did you hear about Grand Rapids?"

  I thought. "Oh--Wait. A fire. A big one. And that was you?"

  "Not me. My demons. Maxwell demons--or Greco demons, they should becalled. He talked about them; I use them. When they're not using me.This time, they burned down half the city."

  "I remember now," I said. The papers had been full of it.

  "They got loose," he said grimly. "But that's not the worst. You'llhave to earn your million a year, Virgie."

  "What do you mean, they got loose?"

  He shrugged. "Controls aren't perfect. Sometimes the demons escape. Ican't help it."

  "How do you control them in the first place?"

  He sighed. "It isn't really what you would call controls," he said."It's just the best I can do to keep them from spreading."

  "But--you said sometimes you separate metals, sometimes you getenergy. How do the demons know which you want them to do, if you sayyou can't control them?"

  "How do you make an apple tree understand whether you want it to growBaldwins or Macintoshes?"

  * * * * *

  I gawked at him. "Why--but you don't, Greek! I mean it's either one orthe other!"

  "Just so with demons! You're not so stupid after all, are you? It'slike improving the breed of dogs. You take a common ancestral mutt,and generations later you can develop an Airedale, a dachshund or aSpitz. How? By selection. My demon entities grow, they split, the newentities adapt themselves to new conditions. There's a process ofevolution. I help it along, that's all."

  He took the little slab of gold from me, brooding.

  Abruptly he hurled it at the wall. "Gold!" he cried wildly. "But whowants it? I need _help_, Virgie! If gold will buy it from you, I'llpay! But I'm desperate. You'd be desperate too, with nothing ahead buta sordid, demeaning death from young age and a--"

  I interrupted him. "What's that?"

  It was a nearby raucous hooting, loud and mournful.

  Greco stopped in mid-sentence, listening like a hunted creature. "Myroom," he whispered. "All my equipment--on the floor above--"

  I stepped back, a little worried. He was a strange man, skinny andtall and wild-eyed. I was glad he was so thin; if he'd been builtsolidly in proportion to his height, just then he would have worriedme, with those staring, frightened eyes and that crazy way of talking.But I didn't have time to worry, in any case. Footsteps werethundering in the halls. Distant voices shouted to each other.

  The hoot came again.

  "The fire whistle!" Greco bayed. "The hotel's on fire!"

  He leaped out of my room into the corridor.

  I followed. There was a smell of burning--not autumn leaves or paper;it was a chemical-burning smell, a leather-burning smell, ahenyard-on-fire smell. It reeked of an assortment of things, gunpowderand charred feathers, the choking soot of burning oil, the crisp tangof a wood fire. It was, I thought for a second, perhaps the typicalsmell of a hotel on fire, but in that I was wrong.

  "Demons!" yelled Greco, and a bellhop, hurrying by, paused to look atus queerly. Greco sped for the stairs and up them.

  I followed.

  It was Greco's room that was ablaze--he made that clear, trying to getinto it. But he couldn't. Black smoke billowed out of it, and orangeflame. The night manager's water bucket was going to make no headwayagainst _that_.

  I retreated. But Greco plunged ahead, his face white and scary.

  I stopped at the head of the stairs. The flames drove Greco off, buthe tried again. They drove him off again, and this time for good.

  He stumbled toward me. "Out! It's hopeless!" He turned, stared blindlyat the hotel employees with their chain of buckets. "You! What do youthink you're doing? That's--" He stopped, wetting his lips. "That's agasoline fire," he lied, "and there's dynamite in my luggage. Clearthe hotel, you hear me?"

  It was, as I say, a lie. But it got the hotel cleared out.

  And then--

  It might as well have been gasoline and dynamite. There was a purplishflash and a muttering boom, and the whole roof of the four-storybuilding lifted off.

  I caught his arm.

  "Let's get out of here," I said.

  He looked at me blindly. I'd swear he didn't know me. His eyes weretortured.

  "Too late!" he croaked. "Too late! They're free again!"

  III

  So I went to work for Theobald Greco--in his laboratory in SouthernCalifornia, where we replaced some of the things that had beendestroyed.

  And one morning I woke up and found my hair was white.

  I cried, "Greek!"

  Minnie came running in. I don't believe I told you about Minnie. Shewas Greco's idea of the perfect laboratory assistant--stupid, old,worthless to the world and without visible kin. She came in and staredand set up a cackling that would wake the dead.

&n
bsp; "Mister Hampstead!" she chortled. "My, but ain't you a sight!"

  "Where's Greco?" I demanded, and pushed her out of my way.

  In pajamas and bathrobe, I stalked down the stairs and into the roomthat had once been a kitchen and now was Greco's laboratory.

  "Look!" I yelled. "What about _this_?"

  He turned to look at me.

  After a long moment, he shook his head.

  "I was afraid of that," he mumbled. "You were a towhead as a kid,weren't you? And now you're a towhead again."

  "But my hair, Greek! It's turned _white_."

  "Not white," he corrected despondently. "Yellow. It's reverted toyouth--overnight, the way it happens sometimes. I warned you, Virgie.I told you there were dangers. Now you know. Because--"

  He hesitated, looked at me, then looked away.

  "Because," he said, "you're getting younger, just like me. If we don'tget this thing straightened out, you're going to die of young ageyourself."

  I stared at him. "You said that before, about yourself. I thoughtyou'd just tongue-twisted. But you really mean--"

  "Sit down," he ordered. "Virgie, I told you that you were lookingyounger. It wasn't just looks. It's the demons--and not just you andme, but a lot of people. First Grand Rapids. Then when the hotelburned. Plenty have been exposed--you more than most, I guess, eversince the day you walked into my lab and I was trying to recapturesome that had got away. Well, I don't guess I recaptured them all."

  "You mean _I_--"

  He nodded. "Some of the demons make people younger. And you've got acolony of them in you."

  * * * * *

  I swallowed and sat down. "You mean I'm going to get younger andyounger, until finally I become a baby? And then--what then, Greek?"

  He shrugged. "How do I know? Ask me in another ten years. _Look at me,Virgie!_" he cried, suddenly loud. "How old do I look to you?Eighteen? Twenty?"

  It was the plain truth. He looked no more than that. Seeing him day byday, I wasn't conscious of change; remembering him from when we hadgone to school, I thought of him as younger anyway. But he was forty,at the very least, and he didn't look old enough to vote.

  He said, "I've had demons inside of me for six years. It seems they'rea bit choosy about where they'll live. They don't inhabit the wholebody, just parts of it--heart, lungs, liver. Maybe bones. Maybe someof the glands--perhaps that' s why I feel so chipper physically. Butnot my brain, or not yet. Fortunately."

  "Fortunately? But that's wrong, Greek! If your brain grew youngertoo--"

  "Fool! If I had a young brain, I'd forget everything I learned, likeunrolling a tape backwards! That's the danger, Virgie, the immediatedanger that's pressing me--that's why I needed help! Because if I everforget, that's the end. Not just for me--for everybody; becausethere's no one else in the world who knows how to control these thingsat all. Except me--and you, if I can train you."

  "They're loose?" I felt my hair wonderingly. Still, it was not exactlya surprise. "How many?"

  He shrugged. "I have no idea. When they let the first batch of rabbitsloose in Australia, did they have any idea how many there would be acouple of dozen generations later?"

  I whistled. Minnie popped her head in the door and giggled. I wavedher away.

  "She could use some of your demons," I remarked. "Sometimes I thinkshe has awfully young ideas, for a woman who's sixty if she's a day."

  Greco laughed crazily. "Minnie? She's been working for me for a year.And she was eighty-five when I hired her!"

  "I can't believe you!"

  "Then you'll have to start practicing right now," he said.

  It was tough, and no fooling; but I became convinced. It wasn't themillion dollars a year any more.

  It was the thought of ending my days as a drooling, mewling infant--orworse! To avert that, I was willing to work my brain to a shred.

  * * * * *

  First it was a matter of learning--learning about the "strangeparticles." Ever hear of them? That's not my term--that's what thephysicists call them. Positrons. The neutrino. Pions and muons, plusand minus; the lambda and the antilambda. K particles, positive andnegative, and anti-protons and anti-neutrons and sigmas, positive,negative and neutral, and--

  Well, that's enough; but physics had come a long way since the classesI cut at Old Ugly, and there was a lot to catch up on.

  The thing was, some of the "strange particles" were stranger than evenmost physicists knew. Some--in combination--were in fact Greco'sdemons.

  We bought animals--mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, even dogs. We infectedthe young with some of our own demons--that was simple enough,frighteningly simple; all we had to do was handle them a bit. And wewatched what happened.

  They died--of young age.

  Some vital organ or another regressed to embryonic condition, and theydied--as Greco and I would die, if we didn't find the answer. As thewhole world might die. Was it better than reverting past the embryo tothe simple lifeless zygote? I couldn't decide. It was dying, all thesame. When an embryonic heart or liver is called on to do a job for amature organism, there is only one way out. Death.

  And after death--the demons went on; the dog we fed on the remains ofthe guinea pigs followed them to extinction in a matter of weeks.

  Minnie was an interesting case.

  She was going about her work with more energy every day, and I'll beblasted if I didn't catch her casting a lingering Marilyn Monroe sortof look at me when Greco's back was turned.

  "Shall we fire her?" I asked El Greco when I told him about it.

  "What for?"

  "She's disrupting the work!"

  "The work isn't worth a damn anyhow," he said moodily. "We're notgetting anywhere, Virgie. If it was only a matter of smooth,predictable rates--But look at her. She's picking up speed! She'sdropped five years in the past couple weeks."

  "She can stand to drop a lot more," I said, annoyed.

  * * * * *

  He shrugged. "It depends on where. Her nose? It's shortened to about afifteen-year-old level now. Facial hair? That's mostly gone. Skintexture? Well, I suppose there's no such thing as a too-immature skin,I mean short of the embryonic capsule, but--Wait a minute."

  He was staring at the doorway.

  Minnie was standing there, simpering.

  "Come here!" he ordered in a voice like thunder. "Come here, you!Virgie, look at her nose!"

  I looked. "Ugh," I said, but more or less under my breath.

  "No, no!" cried Greco. "Virgie, don't you see her _nose_?" Foolish; ofcourse I did. It was long, beaked--

  Then I saw.

  "It's growing longer," I whispered.

  "Right, my boy! Right! One curve at least has reversed itself. Do yousee, Virgie?"

  I nodded. "She's--she's beginning to age again."

  "Better than that!" he crowed. "It's faster than normal aging, Virgie!_There are aging demons loose too!_"

  A breath of hope!

  But hope died. Sure, he was right--as far as it went.

  There _were_ aging demons. We isolated them in some of ourexperimental animals. First we had to lure Minnie into standing stillwhile Greco, swearing horribly, took a tissue sample; she didn't likethat, but a hundred-dollar bonus converted her. Solid CO_{2} froze theskin; _snip_, and a tiny flake of flesh came out of her nose at thepoint of Greco's scalpel; he put the sample of flesh through a fewtricks and, at the end of the day, we tried it on some of our mice.

  They died.

  Well, it was gratifying, in a way--they died of old age. But die theydid. It took three days to show an effect, but when it came, it wasdramatic. These were young adult mice, in the full flush of theirmousehood, but when these new demons got to work on them, theysuddenly developed a frowsy, decrepit appearance that made them looklike Bowery bums over whom Cinderella's good fairy had waved her wandin reverse. And two days later they were dead.

  "I think we've got something," said Greco thoug
htfully; but I didn'tthink so, and I was right. Dead was dead. We could kill the animalsby making them too young. We could kill the animals by making them tooold. But keep them alive, once the demons were in them, we could not.

  Greco evolved a plan: Mix the two breeds of demons! Take an animalwith the young-age demons already in it, then add a batch that workedin the other direction!

  * * * * *

  For a while, it seemed to work--but only for a while. After a coupleof weeks, one breed or the other would gain the upper hand. And theanimals died.

  It was fast in mice, slow in humans. Minnie stayed alive. But the nosegrew longer and facial hair reappeared; simultaneously her complexioncleared, her posture straightened.

  And then, for the first time, we began to read the papers.

  STRANGE PLAGUESTRIKES ELGIN

  bawled the Chicago _Tribune_, and went on to tell how the suburbsaround Elgin, Illinois, were heavily infested with a curious newmalady, the symptoms of which were--youth.

  OAKLAND "BABY-SKIN"TOLL PASSES 10,000

  blared the