20 Years

This story became a mystery. As I set up to write this introduction, I checked for the story's history: When did I write it, where was it published or rejected, what have I had to say about it before? But I couldn't find it in my records. I remember writing it, and I remember it getting rejected, but my records didn't. What was going on, here?

The answer seems to be that I wrote this story when my literary agent was handling my marketing, and he didn't give me reports on it, so it never got entered in my records. Had it sold, there would have been a monetary record. But it didn't. So it was lost. Perhaps for up to twenty years. Until this moment.

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The Dragon reared up on its hind four legs, beat at its armor-plated belly with steel claws, snarled horrendously and snorted fire. The Nymph screamed and yanked pitifully at the silver chain that fastened her nude body to the boulder.

Once Wife had looked almost like that in her splendid nubility. But she had grown obese after marriage despite regular hunger-satiety shots, and finally applied for early euthanasia for relief. The autopsy showed diabetes, undiagnosed in life and actually aggravated by the shots. She had skipped her health appointments for a decade, because of an unreasonable fear of hospitals.

Hero drew his shining sword and challenged the Dragon as it made ready to gulp the luscious Nymph. "It annoys me to see any animal grow rambunctious," he said.

The Dragon paused, assimilating the implications. It decided the insult would do. It turned at bay. Its eyes were small for its size, and protected by sturdy nylon eyelashes, but its tempered teeth were large. Fire was its main weapon; it would burn him down before he could strike its impervious iron hide with the sword.

A business competitor had reacted like that once. The man had founded a rival company to market a product whose attributes infringed the Clofiver patent, and Hero had sued. But the competitor made a private payoff to a developing-world politician and obtained a non-Earth product sanction that was technically immune to interworld prosecution. Hero had not slain that Dragon; he had in fact taken a beating. He had lost a third of his preferred customers and suffered a stockholder revolt that almost unseated him. He still felt fury at the memory.

The Dragon's flame shot out in two thin streams: pseudonapalm, that activated the pain receptors without actually harming the skin. Hero hurdled one, came down in the yard-wide space between them, and charged. The Dragon could not swipe at him without singeing its own claws. Dragons, contrary to folklore, were not immune to their own heat.

He swung the sword with all his might at the great nose. But at the height of his stroke he paused, realizing the futility. That nose was soft copper—but the skull and skeletal structure of the creature were high-grade steel. His sword's diamond edge would shatter against that. He could only infuriate the Dragon this way, not slay it.

He had learned caution the hard way. The Dragons of galactic industry were ruthless exploiters, consuming the small independent operators without qualm. They had monetary and legal resources that no little outfit could match. But they tended to be bureaucratic, their reactions slowed by red tape, and alert policy combined with luck could wrest small concessions from them. So his Clofiver—clover-flavored fiber—business had survived, but never truly prospered. He would have saved himself much financial grief if he had enlisted as an officer in one of the giants at the outset.

No, the nose-swipe was useless. Instead he rammed the sword point-first up the Dragon's left nostril as the jet of fire abated. The inner membrane was ceramic, and the diamond point and edge sliced through it. At the end of the thrust the weapon intercepted the printed circuits of the complexly wired brain, shorting out key synapses. The Dragon collapsed, twitching.

"Sir, you have saved me!" the lovely Nymph exclaimed, rearranging her copper tresses to course more aesthetically around her golden breasts. "It might interest you to know that the last six Heroes have failed. In fact, only two of the past thirty-one—" She stopped, perceiving his lack of interest. "Well, of course I shall grant you one wish, the thing you desire most in all life."

Hero laughed, somewhat bitterly. "Be at peace, damsel! I saved you only because of the challenge. Obviously the Dragon never eats you, delectable as you surely are, or you could not talk so glibly of all those past failures."

She was not disconcerted. "Naturally there is a certain amount of showmanship involved,"

she admitted. "The Dragon does eat me, but after that the repair crew releases me through an emergency exit in its posterior. But when you play the game and win, as you just did, we do pay off. You have just won my kiss, which will make you up to twenty years younger than you are now."

"So the ticket says. But my rejuvenations have served me well several times before, so that now I am eighty—with the body of a man twenty-five. With euthanasia close at hand I do not need another rejuvenation."

"Sir, you don't understand," she protested. "This is not rejuvenation; it is a chance actually to live over up to twenty years of your life—with your present abilities."

Hero considered, leaning on his solder-stained sword. "May I ask a technical question, in that case?"

"Certainly! We have no desire to deceive a Hero!"

"You are, of course, a human girl about twenty years of age, employed here on planet Heroic Fantasy for decorative purpose."

"I am. And you are a retired Citizen of Earth, exercising your privilege to spend a month at this galactically popular resort before reporting for mandatory euthanasia. So?"

"So how can you rejuvenate my legal status? No exceptions to the eighty-year life-limit are permitted. This is why I took your advertising as carnival froth. A paradoxical promise."

"There is really no problem, sir. There is no paradox. Our reduction is achieved by excising an actual segment of your prior life—a simple matter of focusing a selective time-fix, cutting out that span of your existence, and suturing the extreme ends together. The computer handles that; the kiss is merely for fantasy verisimilitude, you understand."

"That was a bit more technical than I required," Hero said, grimacing. "But still, legally—"

"Legally, you never lived that span. Your lifeline has literally been shortened. So your deadline for euthanasia is extended accordingly. In effect, you have only lived sixty of the past eighty years, with twenty skipped in the middle—"

"I understand all that, now!" he said, obviously not understanding it. "But the expense—it must cost a billion dollars to operate on past time like that. The ramifications, the effects on other lives—how could you possibly afford to—"

She shrugged with a practiced but impressive motion of shoulders and breasts. "It is expensive—but this is a money-making challenge. You can't beat the oddsmakers!"

"But all it costs is a dollar to enter! And you said two of your last thirty-one clients won! I'm a businessman; you can't tell me that a billion-dollar payoff for an average fifteen-dollar investment is—"

"Actually, the average is one success in twelve tries," she said. "That's governed by law. If we had too few winners, we would have to slow down the Dragon. And I assure you we do pay off to the customer's satisfaction. Every game on Fantasy Planet is honest. It all works out."

Hero shook his head. "Must be a loss leader! Well, I'll take your kiss! I can certainly use twenty more years!"

"Excellent!" she said. "Remember, you are limited to one span; you can't break it up into several excisions. The suturing is too complicated to permit—"

"Yes, certainly! So I can lose a span of one day—or of twenty years—or any length in between."

"That's right! Normally there is much good along with the bad, so unless you had an extremely bad twenty-year run—"

"My whole life has been a bad run!" Hero said. "Let me consider a moment..."

"Would the timescan help?" she inquired after more than a moment. "Once we excise, that segment of your life is gone forever, so—"

"Yes, I'd appreciate that."

She took hold of the stem of a tall magic sunflower and tilted the big disk toward him. On its myriad seeds were printed numbers: one through one hundred, plus fractional intervals dividing each year into days and hours and minutes. He touched a combination more or less randomly.

The buttons faded and the sunflower face became lens-like. He saw through it into a picture of—dirt.

It was as though the camera were scanning the ground from a height of six inches. Hands came down and patted the dirt, shaping it into ridges.

Perplexed, Hero watched. "You pushed four years, five months," the Nymph said. "Of course you do not appear in the scan yourself, unless you happen to see your reflection. It is your view of the universe..."

"Age four..." he said, marveling. "I was playing in dirt! That was before magnetic plastisand came on the market, before the sanitary laws forbade..." He continued to stare, morbidly fascinated. "It's been sixty years since children played in genuine dirty dirt! I had forgotten..."

"The timescan is more accurate than memory," the Nymph reminded him. "This is no mockup. You really did play—"

"No, no, I understand, forget it!" he said irritably. "The unique experience of dirt! Germs, refuse, bugs and all!"

The picture faded and the sunflower buttons manifested again. "Of course," she agreed, humoring him.

He punched another combination, more carefully this time. Now he saw through the eyes of his twenty-first birthday. He remembered being disappointed in his achievement of majority. It had ushered in the responsibilities of adulthood in a phenomenally complex universe; the searching for suitable employment in a chronically depressed economy; the awareness of the crushing inevitability of taxes and inflation, the threat of enforced space service; possibly even subjection to the colony lottery. Surely he could well spare those migraine years!

He saw a glass door—they still had those then, before the threat of planetary vibro-bombing outlawed glass construction—and a flash of display window with quaint bottles lined within. A liquor store—a seeming anachronism, for beam hallucinogens soon crowded out most of the cruder brain distortants.

The gaze picture continued down a street, with wheeled vehicles moving along, gusting pollutant gases from their pipes. Even the police cars! What a lawless age!

Now he remembered the specific scene. On his birthday he had gone to buy liquor, for there had been an age limit on the purchase of the brands above 200 proof. Armed with his certificate-of-majority, ready to trot it out triumphantly, he had taken a bottle of Saturn 500, capable of providing complete intoxication two-and-a-half times as rapidly as could pure alcohol, and with no hangover—and the stupid clerk had never challenged him! What a disappointment! He knew what had happened: the store had checked his age-record the moment he entered, so needed no other proof. It seemed that birthday splurges were common then. And the Saturn 500 had tasted awful—but he didn't even have the satisfaction of feeling miserable afterward.

He looked up, shaking his head. What a rich tapestry of experience, even in his minor frustrations! There was tremendous detail in the least of life's endeavors.

He skimmed through the later years—conventional, rather dull ones, incorporating his unhappy marriage, mediocre family, and mundane business projects. He had bought the patent on a technical process for refining clover-essence fibers for aromatic bindings on quality books—at a time when reading was going out of fashion. But Clofiver had caught on, thanks to his dreary perseverance. It had been used in the bindings of the ledgers of the first Neptune tourister ship—fortuitous publicity there!—and later for the prestige edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica. That had given it reputation among the developing worlds, and many small orders had come in—until that competitor interfered. Regardless, Clofiver had prospered moderately, and now his hard-nosed grandson had eased out the founder and put him on early pension—another damned indignity, considering his rejuvenation!—and the company was still expanding.

Success did not equate to satisfaction. How many hurts he would have avoided, had he anticipated them. How many things would he have done more effectively. Only through his ignorance and misfortune had he been relegated to his hell of mediocrity. He had progressed from dirt to indifference, and nobody cared.

"Have you decided which period to excise?" the Nymph inquired, delicately hinting that he was wasting her time. She thought no more of him than the rest did; she was merely playing her polite part.

"Yes, I have."

"Excellent!" she exclaimed with false enthusiasm. "Which part of your life—?"

"None of it," he said with a surge of victory. "I refuse to kiss off any of my experience, not even one minute, good, bad or indifferent. I just wouldn't be me without that body of hopes and hurts and frustrations."

"But sir," she protested. "We can't let you go to euthanasia unrewarded! You slew the Dragon and won—"

"You have rewarded me sufficiently already," he said. "You have made me realize how very precious my own unaltered life is! Experience is far more meaningful than bliss!"

She sighed, her eyes wandering to a new customer just purchasing a Slay-the-Dragon ticket. Her hand went automatically to her hair, which had strayed from her bosom. "If that's your decision—"

"You've never had this happen before, have you!" he said, watching the repair robots clamber over the Dragon. Other robots were checking the Nymph's chain. "Your prior winners—"

She smiled brilliantly. "You're wrong, Hero! That's why this is a profit-making game. Not one of my winners has accepted the prize!"

I remember one of the rejections of this story: Harry Harrison, saying that he would have accepted the kiss and loss of twenty years. Well, perhaps. But maybe he hadn't thought it through sufficiently.

I finally found my original story folder—I keep a folder for every piece I do—with the first and second drafts. I wrote it in Mayhem 1972. So it was lost for nigh twenty years.