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The Brazen Locked Room
Isaac Asimov
COME, COME," said Shapur quite politely, considering that he was a demon.
"You are wasting my time. And your own, too, I might add, since you have
only half an hour left." And his tail twitched.
"It's not dematerialization?" asked Isidore Wellby thoughtfully.
"I have already said it is not," said Shapur.
For the hundredth time, Wellby looked at the unbroken bronze that
surrounded him on all sides. The demon had taken unholy pleasure (what
other kind indeed?) in pointing out that the floor, ceiling and four walls were
featureless, two - foot - thick slabs of bronze, welded seamlessly together.
It was the ultimate locked room and Wellby had but another half hour to get
out, while the demon watched with an expression of gathering anticipation.
It had been ten years previously (to the day, naturally) that Isidore Wellby
had signed up.
"We pay you in advance," said Shapur persuasively. "Ten years of anything
you want, within reason, and then you're a demon. You're one of us, with a
new name of demonic potency, and many privileges beside. You'll hardly
know you're damned. And if you don't sign, you may end up in the fire,
anyway, just in the ordinary course of things. You never know. . . . Here, look
at me. I'm not doing too badly. I signed up, had my ten years and here I am.
Not bad."
"Why so anxious for me to sign then, if I might be damned anyway?" asked
Wellby.
"It's not so easy to recruit hell's cadre," said the demon, with a frank shrug
that made the faint odor of sulfur dioxide in the air a trifle stronger.
"Everyone wishes to gamble on ending in Heaven. It's a poor gamble, but
there it is. I think you're too sensible for that. But meanwhile we have more
damned souls than we know what to do with and a growing shortage at the
administrative end."
Wellby, having just left the army and finding himself with nothing much to
show for it but a limp and a farewell letter from a girl he somehow still loved,
pricked his finger, and signed.
Of course, he read the small print first. A certain amount of demonic power
would be deposited to his account upon signature in blood. He would not
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know in detail how one manipulated those powers, or even the nature of all of
them, but he would nevertheless find his wishes fulfilled in such a way that
they would seem to have come about through perfectly normal mechanisms.
Naturally, no wish might be fulfilled which would interfere with the higher
aims and purposes of human history. Wellby had raised his eyebrows at that.
Shapur coughed. "A precaution imposed upon us by- uh - Above. You are
reasonable. The limitation won't interfere with you."
Wellby said. "There seems to be a catch clause, too."
"A kind of one, yes. After all, we have to check your aptitude for the position.
It states, as you see, that you will be required to perform a task for us at the
conclusion of your ten years, one your demonic powers will make it quite
possible for you to do. We can't tell you the nature of the task now, but you
will have ten years to study the nature of your powers. Look upon the whole
thing as an entrance qualification."
"And if I don't pass the test, what then?"
"In that case," said the demon, "you will be only an ordinary damned soul
after all." And because he was a demon, his eyes glowed smokily at the
thought and his clawed fingers twitched as though he felt them already deep
in the other's vitals. But he added suavely. "Come, now, the test will be a
simple one. We would rather have you as a cadre than as just another chore
on our hands."
Wellby, with sad thoughts of his unattainable loved one, cared little enough at
the moment for what would happen after ten years and he signed.
Yet the ten years passed quickly enough. Isidore Wellby was always
reasonable, as the demon had predicted, and things worked well. Wellby
accepted a position and because he was always at the right spot at the right
time and always said the right thing to the right man, he was quickly
promoted to a position of great authority.
Investments he made invariably paid off and, what was more gratifying still,
his girl came back to him most sincerely repentant and most satisfactorily
adoring.
His marriage was a happy one and was blessed with four children, two boys
and two girls, all bright and reasonably well behaved. At the end of ten years,
he was at the height of his authority, reputation and wealth, while his wife, if
anything, had grown more beautiful as she had matured.
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And ten years (to the day, naturally) after the making of the compact, he woke
to find himself, not in his bedroom, but in a horrible bronze chamber of the
most appalling solidity, with no company other than an eager demon.
"You have only to get out, and you will be one of us," said Shapur. "It can be
done fairly and logically by using your demonic powers, provided you know
exactly what it is you're doing. You should, by now."
"My wife and children will be very disturbed at my disappearance," said
Wellby, with the beginning of regrets.
"They will find your dead body," said the demon consolingly. "You will seem
to have died of a heart attack and you will have a beautiful funeral. The
minister will consign you to Heaven and we will not disillusion him or those
who listen to him. Now, come, Wellby, you have till noon."
Wellby, having unconsciously steeled himself for this moment for ten years,
was less panic - stricken than he might have been. He looked about
speculatively. "Is this room perfectly enclosed? No trick openings?"
"No openings anywhere in the walls, floor or ceiling," said the demon, with a
professional delight in his handiwork. "Or at the boundaries of any of those
surfaces, for that matter. Are you giving up?"
"No, no. Just give me time."
Wellby thought very hard. There seemed no sign of closeness in the room.
There was even a feeling of moving air. The air might be entering the room by
dematerializing across the walls. Perhaps the demon had entered by
dematerialization and perhaps Wellby himself might leave in that manner.
He asked.
The demon grinned. "Dematerialization is not one of your powers. Nor did I
myself use it in entering."
"You're sure now?"
"The room is my own creation," said the demon smugly, "and especially
constructed for you."
"And you entered from outside?"
"I did."
"With reasonable demonic powers which I possess, too?"
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"Exactly. Come, let us be precise. You cannot move through matter but you
can move in any dimension by a mere effort of will. You can move up, down,
right, left, obliquely and so on, but you cannot move through matter in any
way."
Wellby kept on thinking, and Shapur kept on pointing out the utter
immovable solidity of the bronze walls, floor and ceiling; their unbroken
ultimacy.
It seemed obvious to Wellby that Shapur, however much he might believe in
the necessity for recruiting cadre, was barely restraining his demonic delight
at possibly having an ordinary damned soul to amuse himself with.
"At least," said Wellby, with a sorrowful attempt at philosophy, "I'll have ten
happy years to look back on. Surely that's a consolation, even for a damned
soul in hell."
"Not at all," said the demon. "Hell would not be hell, if you were allowed
consolations. Everything anyone gains on Earth by pacts with the devil, as in
your case (or my own, for that matter), is exactly what one might have gained
without such a pact if one had worked industriously and in full trust in - uh -
Above. That is what makes all such bargains so truly demonic." And the
demon laughed with a kind of cheerful howl.
Wellby said indignantly. "You mean my wife would have returned to me even
if I had never signed your contract."
"She might have," said Shapur. "Whatever happens is the will of - uh - Above,
you know. We ourselves can do nothing to alter that."
The chagrin of that moment must have sharpened Wellby's wits for it was
then that he vanished, leaving the room empty, except for a surprised demon.
And surprise turned to absolute fury when the demon looked at the contract
with Wellby which he had, until that moment, been holding in his hand for
final action, one way or the other.
It was ten years (to the day, naturally) after Isidore Wellby had signed his
pact with Shapur, that the demon entered Wellby's office and said, most
angrily, "Look here -"
Wellby looked up from his work, astonished. "Who are you?"
"You know very well who I am," said Shapur.
"Not at all," said Wellby.
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The demon looked sharply at the man. "I see you are telling the truth, but I
can't make out the details." He promptly flooded Wellby's mind with the
events of the last ten years.
Wellby said. "Oh, yes I can explain, of course, but are you sure we will not be
interrupted?"
"We won't be," said the demon grimly.
"I sat in that closed bronze room," said Wellby, "and -"
"Never mind that," said the demon hastily. "I want to know -"
"Please. Let me tell this my way."
The demon clamped his jaws and fairly exuded sulfur dioxide till Wellby
coughed and looked pained.
Wellby said, "If you'll move off a bit. Thank you. . . . Now I sat in that closed
bronze room and remembered how you kept stressing the absolute
unbrokenness of the four walls, the floor and the ceiling. I wondered: why did
you specify? What else was there beside walls, floor and ceiling. You had
defined a completely enclosed three - dimensional space.
"And that was it: three - dimensional. The room was not closed in the fourth
dimension. It did not exist indefinitely in the past. You said you had created it
for me. So if one traveled into the past, one would find oneself at a point in
time, eventually when the room did not exist and then one would be out of the
room.
"What's more, you had said I could move in any dimension, and time may
certainly be viewed as a dimension. In any case, as soon as I decided to move
toward the past, I found myself living backward at a tremendous rate and
suddenly there was no bronze around me anywhere."
Shapur cried in anguish, "I can guess all that. You couldn't have escaped any
other way. It's this contract of yours that I'm concerned about. If you're not
an ordinary damned soul, very well, it's part of the game. But you must be at
least one of us, one of the cadre: it's what you were paid for, and if I don't
deliver you down below, I will be in enormous trouble."
Wellby shrugged his shoulders. "I'm sorry for you, of course, but I can't help
you. You must have created the bronze room immediately after I placed my
signature on the paper, for when I burst out of the room, I found myself just
at the point in time at which I was making the bargain with you. There you
were again: there I was; you were pushing the contract toward me, together
with a stylus with which I might prick my finger. To be sure, as I had moved
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back in time, my memory of what was becoming the future faded out, but not,
apparently, quite entirely. As you pushed the contract at me, I felt uneasy. I
didn't quite remember the future, but I felt uneasy. So I didn't sign. I turned
you down flat."
Shapur ground his teeth. "I might have known. If probability patterns
affected demons, I would have shifted with you into this new if - world. As it
is, all I can say is that you have lost the ten happy years we paid you with. That
is one consolation. And we'll get you in the end. That is another."
"Well, now," said Wellby, "are there consolations in hell? Through the ten
years I have now lived, I knew nothing of what I might have obtained. But
now that you've put the memory of the ten - years - that - might - have - been
into my mind, I recall that, in the bronze room, you told me that demonic
agreements could give nothing that could not be obtained by industry and
trust in Above. I have been industrious and I have trusted."
Wellby's eyes fell upon the photograph of his beautiful wife and four beautiful
children, then traveled about the tasteful luxuriance of his office. "And I may
even escape hell altogether. That, too, is beyond your power to decide."
And the demon, with a horrible shriek, vanished forever.
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